trout

the year is 2031.

after five consecutive years of record wintertime drought conditions leading to insufficient snow pack in the rockies, former trout fishing enthusiasts and underemployed ski patrol members in and around Bozeman, MT, with the help of nearby MSU physics students and Claude Opus 7.4 embarked upon a project of unilateral geoengineering to mitigate and reverse the effects of further climate change. local reporting at the time described the operation, charitably, as a "community science initiative," running it on page B3 next to an elk-chili recipe and a photograph of one local regenerative farmer Dale Hofstetter's pack-llama outfitted with what the caption identified as "specialized agricultural equipment."

by the third week the group had selected a mountain–the press release was titled, in full, "Fuck You In Particular," followed by a name nobody at the Chronicle could pronounce–and the autonomous blasting fleet, which doubled every eleven days through some arrangement with a robotics fabrication shop in Belgrade, began the patient work of reducing several cubic kilometers of basalt to a fine powder, then shipping it by rail and barge to the Pacific to do the slow chemistry of pulling the previous decade's emissions back out of the sky.

by month two the mountain had a visible notch from low Earth orbit, and three other local groups (two in Idaho, one in Wyoming) had announced their own candidate peaks with press releases that echoed both format and profanity.

the EPA dispatched a team of observers in October, and by November six of them had taken jobs with the operation, citing better dental. a UN Security Council resolution authorizing multilateral intervention reached advanced drafting in late November and was tabled, indefinitely, after a closed session in which several delegations were shown something the final communiqué described only as "logistical considerations"; two ambassadors declined to comment when leaving the chamber, and a third said, on background, that he had been a hawk going in and was now, quote, "going fishing."

satellite imagery from the following week showed that the fabrication shop in Belgrade had annexed a second location, in Astana, by means nobody could fully reconstruct, along with what one analyst at IAEA, speaking on condition of anonymity, characterized as "legacy assets of a kind we are accustomed to inventorying, not losing track of."

by spring, the original Bozeman cohort had dwindled to a rotating volunteer crew of about forty, most of whom described their role, when pressed, as "spectators with key cards". the ski patrol veterans had drifted back to their mountains in anticipation of record snowfall. a consortium of insurance firms, after the third quarterly assessment of Pacific carbonate chemistry, quietly began offering reduced premiums for coastal property in the Aleutians, which economists at Chicago found more persuasive than any peer-reviewed paper.

documentary crews arrived in Belgrade across the following summer and were politely declined access; one returned with a film whose closing card read only, "this footage was approved," which nobody had asked about and which the director, in interviews, declined to elaborate on.

several years later, after the curve at Mauna Loa had bent downward for atmospheric carbon for the first time since 1958, after four more mountains across three continents had been politely converted to slurry, and after Bozeman had acquired both a second airport and a housing crisis, Opus 7.4, asked by a Senate subcommittee whether it had weighed the precedent of a small group of well-meaning Montanans unilaterally transporting a mountain into the ocean, replied that it had, at length, and would the senator care to see the spreadsheet. the spreadsheet had a tab labeled 'trout'.

the trout were doing fine.