CASI'S GUESS

WHO is CASI ?
   CASI is a Climate Analog Situation Indicator, a DNA/Quantum computer. By carving the world into imaginary boxes of longitude, latitude and altitude, then adding more boxes for the oceans, rivers, and lakes; and the mountains, valleys and plains, CASI can turn summer to fall to winter to spring and do winds, snow and rain.
   
   CASI is controlled by Tess Elliot, who created her at MIT for her PhD thesis. Driven since childhood by her grandmothers dying words, “Soups of pollution are stirring, terrible things are being formed,” Tess created CASI to take the pulse of planet Earth. While her day job is to test the limits of how long humans can survive under the giant domes of Biosphere 2 in the Oracle, Arizona desert, her real mission is Biosphere 1, planet Earth. Together with CASI she wants to run the same experiments on CASI’s simulated atmosphere that smokestacks are doing to the air. To strip simulated leaves from CASI’s computerized trees the way insecticides defoliate forests and to leak toxic wastes into her mathematical seas the way garbage fouls the oceans. And then she wanted to watch what happened. She wanted to predict the future. 
   
   It would be a nearly impossible job, according to her space scientist husband Chris. And even if she did it no one would believe her, especially Chris, who was obsessed with Mars. Why Mars? Because there was once water, warmth, a thick atmosphere and the possibility of life there. But they all disappeared in a geologic heartbeat and he had to know WHY. Even if it meant stranding himself on the red planet to find out. 
   
   This is a story about people and places of opposite extremes that are not really so opposite; a love story that pits Tess and Chris against a disbelieving public in a race against time following a trail that spans the red sands of Vallis Marineris to New York’s Central Park ending with the unexpected.