It was the coffee pot that finally did Suzy Cilbrith in. Later she would claim it was simply an attack of conscience, but in reality it was the abject refusal of any of the male engineers to start a new pot of coffee that really made her lose her shit. It was bad enough that these Lawrence Livermore rejects couldn’t get the calculus right on a damage assessment for a medium-sized American city, but it was simply unacceptable that they would take the last cup from the pot and not make a new one. It was a matter of basic human decency.
In the back of her insufficiently caffeinated brain, various moral and ethical qualms had been trying for some time to get some traction, but it was the coffee issue that finally brought things to a head. Suzy began to wonder what sort of monsters she was working with, who would deliberately empty the coffee pot and not make a new one. Occasionally she would confront one of the engineers, holding a pot that was empty save for a quarter inch of foul brown liquid swirling about the bottom, like a prosecutor dangling a revolver in front of a suspect, but the guilty party would just sit and stare at her, like she was the crazy one.
After the third such unproductive confrontation, she started to get philosophical about the problem. How was it possible for them to be so completely unaware of their own crime, even when presented with incontrovertible evidence? This line of thought led her to wonder whether she possessed similar blind spots about her own foibles. She spent her lunch breaks for several weeks cataloging her own day-to-day behavior, but was unable to pinpoint any particular activity that could be considered a true offense against her fellow engineers. She arrived on time, did what was expected of her, was cordial and professional (if not particularly warm) in her exchanges with co-workers, and respectful of her superiors. But then maybe her own biases had skewed her selection of criteria for acceptable behavior. She considered asking one of her co-workers to assess her criteria, but (for obvious reasons) she didn’t trust their judgment. And perhaps such a request itself could be considered a violation of some workplace norm. How could she know? It was an ethical quandary.
Eventually she became so obsessed with this philosophical conundrum that it began to affect her work. She started to make mistakes in her calculations and miss deadlines. She justified these lapses by reasoning that determining whether she was committing any horrible ethical breaches in her interactions with her co-workers was at least as important as doing her actual job. This line of reasoning led her to reflect on the value of her job, which led her to the realization that she was working on an illegal program to produce an insanely dangerous weapon whose only conceivable purpose was to kill thousands of innocent civilians. Not only that, but the ultimate rationale for building the bomb was old-fashioned political ass-covering: the government had to produce a bomb so that it could claim that the bomb produced by the previous illegal nuclear weapons program hadn’t been misplaced. The people she was working for weren’t just evil; they were complete fucking assholes.
And that’s how Suzy Cilbrith found her ethical blind spot.
She wasn’t sure how her job had morphed from low-level quality assurance engineer into accomplice to mass murder (or at least mass deception). Her job had originally been to help assess the damage that would be caused by a Wormwood-style bomb to an American city. Specifically, she ran tests on the software that simulated a ten kiloton blast to make sure the software was working properly. The data from the simulations would be given to Homeland Security, who would theoretically use it to train first responders, like firefighters, police and paramedics. The program—called Brimstone—was created by Congress after the Wormwood scandal, to make sure first responders were as prepared as possible in case the missing bomb were ever used in an American city. Congress was so concerned about the possibility of the Wormwood bomb being used on American soil that it approved a budget for Brimstone that was ten times that of the Wormwood project. All the scientists and engineers who had been fired from the Wormwood project were rehired for Brimstone, and many more were added. Suzy had been in college during Wormwood, but she was swept up in the Brimstone hiring spree, given top secret clearance, and put to work testing software.
All of this was kept secret, of course. Congress never explicitly authorized Brimstone; the funding was hidden in a vague bill aimed at “nuclear non-proliferation.” It wouldn’t do to let the public know that the government was terrified one of its own bombs would be used against it. The truly ironic part of all this was that the senior personnel on the Brimstone project (who were also the senior personnel on the Wormwood project) knew very well that Brimstone was completely unnecessary, because the bomb hadn’t been stolen; it had been commandeered by agents working for President Babcock. They didn’t know what Babcock had done with the bomb, but they knew it was unlikely to turn up anywhere in the United States. So these bomb-makers, who had been given a pointless task by bureaucrats who were in no position to judge whether the task were being properly carried out, went back to the President, who was in hot water over a lost bomb, and asked him whether their efforts might be better spent “finding” the missing bomb. Babcock met with the president-elect, Danton Prowse, and they agreed (with some prodding from a certain angelic advisor) that “finding” the bomb would indeed be Good for the Country. And just like that, the program designed to deal with the fallout of the Wormwood bomb became a program to build another Wormwood bomb.
None of the lower-level engineers—like Suzy—knew about any of this, of course. Suzy’s first hint came when she tried to explain to the Homeland Security liaison how data in her simulation report could be of use to paramedics, and was met with a blank stare. He tried to cover it up, but it was clear to Suzy that the man had never actually talked to any first responders. Which was absurd, unless her superiors were misleading her about the whole purpose of Brimstone. She tried dealing with the problem the way she normally did: by getting a pedicure and changing her hair color—purple, this time—but this cure-all failed to soothe her conscience. Three months and twenty-eight empty coffee pots later, she finally snapped.
Suzy downloaded every incriminating document she could find about the program (there were a surprising number of them, now that she actually looked) to a thumb drive, slipped the drive into her pocket, and walked out the door.
It had been an impulse decision; she hadn’t thought through what she was going to do. But she knew that she didn’t want to be part of what Brimstone had become, and she suspected that she wouldn’t be allowed to just walk out on her job. If she had been thinking clearly, she would have put in her notice and quit in a more acceptable fashion, but she couldn’t imagine spending two more weeks in that facility. She was already ridden with anxiety; two more weeks would surely push her over the edge. Copying the files had been more an act of reflexive self-preservation than an outright act of defiance; she wanted to be sure she had some leverage in case her superiors tried to keep her from quitting or blackball with other potential employers.
But sitting home alone in her apartment the day after she walked out, she began to feel even more agitated than she had at work. She had the feeling that at any moment, somebody from Homeland Security was going to break down her door, ransack her apartment, and throw her in prison. She tried to imagine where they would look for the thumb drive, and then tried to imagine places where they wouldn’t look. First she hid it in a potted plant, then inside one of the couch cushions, then taped it onto one of the blades of her bedroom ceiling fan. But all of these seemed like obvious places to look for contraband. Finally she hit on the idea of microwaving a tub of margarine just long enough for it to get soft, and then pushing the thumb drive (wrapped in cellophane) into the viscous goo. She smoothed out the surface of the margarine, put the cover on, and put it back in the refrigerator. If somebody knew of the existence of the thumb drive, they would undoubtedly still find it eventually, but she highly doubted anyone would dig through her margarine on a purely speculative basis.
With the thumb drive ensconced in its buttery home, Suzy sh
ould have felt some relief, but she didn’t. She felt at loose ends, and not just because she had quit her job and had no way of making next month’s rent. She felt like she had started something that needed to be finished.
She sat down at her computer and did an Internet search for “Wormwood scandal.” She was familiar with the basics of the scandal, of course, but she’d been working part time and taking a full load of upper level computer science classes at Cal Poly when the scandal broke, so she hadn’t had the time (or the interest, truth be told) to look into it very thoroughly. At the time she had no idea she would soon be working on the project that would succeed Wormwood.
The story was originally broken by a reporter named Gary Rosenfeld, who had been working for the Washington Post at the time. Rosenfeld’s reporting was based largely on information gleaned from an unnamed source who had managed to get a hold of a lot of details about the Wormwood project. It didn’t sound to Suzy like the source actually worked for Wormwood, but rather was a third party who had somehow found out about it—perhaps a foreign intelligence agent. Rosenfeld’s initial reporting was borne out by admissions by the Babcock administration and an official investigation, but as the months wore on, Rosenfeld’s articles and op-eds became more bizarre and speculative. In his final piece for the Post, he claimed that the U.S. government had been infiltrated by beings from another dimension, and that President Babcock had sent the bomb through an inter-dimensional portal in a pre-emptive attack on these beings’ home dimension. That was a bit much to swallow, even for readers of the Washington Post, and Rosenfeld was canned.
Further research revealed that Rosenfeld was still at it: he was now writing for a fringe website known as BitterAngels.net. A quick perusal of the site indicated that Rosenfeld hadn’t backed down from his bizarre claims, and had actually gotten even more outlandish. Now working out of San Francisco, Rosenfeld claimed that the “beings from another dimension” were in fact angels. Suzy had to read several of his articles to be sure that Rosenfeld wasn’t using the term as a figure of speech; he really did mean that the U.S. government had been infiltrated by supernatural beings who had originally come down to Earth from Heaven. Many of these angels were technically demons, as they were in rebellion against Heaven. In any case, supposedly the gateway to Heaven had been cut off (by the detonation of the Wormwood bomb!), and now the angels/demons were running amok on Earth, causing all sorts of problems. Other than the fact that it featured angels instead of some more prosaic class of villain, most of it read like standard conspiracy theory drivel. In fact, if you replaced all the instances of “angel” with “Jew,” the site could pass for anti-Semitic propaganda.
Suzy pondered her options. The more she thought about it, the more she realized she had to tell someone. Quitting in protest was all well and good, but it’s not like the loss of a single software tester was really going to throw a wrench into the Brimstone bomb-works. If she was serious about her objections to the program, she needed to do more than quit. And while she feared retribution from those running the program, it occurred to her that she would be much easier to get rid of if she hadn’t yet gone public about Brimstone. If she disappeared now, she’d be just another young woman gone missing. If she disappeared after releasing damning information about a secret government program, it would look very suspicious.
Was she being paranoid? Maybe. But she reminded herself that she was dealing with a government that had reacted to a scandal about an illegal weapons program by creating a bigger, more illegal weapons program. The Wormwood bomb—which was still missing—was capable of killing tens of thousands of people in a split second. And now the government was well on its way toward building another one just like it. Was it paranoid to think the people who created it would “disappear” one lowly software tester to keep it secret? She thought not.
But who should she release the information to? Her first thought had been Gary Rosenfeld, but if he had degenerated into some third-rate conspiracy theory hack, what was the point? On the other hand, at least Rosenfeld would probably take her seriously. She wasn’t sure how damning the information on the thumb drive was. What if she went to a respectable news outlet and they rejected her? Then what? What if the Brimstone people found out she’d been approaching journalists? That would be the worst possible scenario: she’d get disappeared and nobody would ever know why.
Maybe the best bet was to go to Rosenfeld first and let him go through the contents of the thumb drive. Then at least somebody would have the information, so she wouldn’t have to worry about being abducted by secret agents while waiting for a callback from the Post. If there were any bombshells (so to speak) on the thumb drive, the more respectable media organizations could always pick it up later. She was pretty sure that happened sometimes.
She found an address for the BitterAngels.net office in San Francisco and plugged it into her phone. It was less than an hour from Milpitas, so if the drive ended up being pointless, at least it wasn’t long. She grabbed the tub of margarine from the refrigerator, got in her Toyota Tercel, and made her way to the address. It turned out to be a somewhat dilapidated tenement building in a rather seedy area. She left the Tercel on the street, unlocked. Anyone who wanted her shitty old stereo could take it without breaking a window, at least. She debated how to transport the thumb drive, finally deciding to keep it in the margarine tub, but not put the tub in her purse. She assumed that if she were mugged, the mugger would opt for the mystery prize inside her purse (a dollar forty-seven in change, Chapstick, eyeliner, and several used Kleenexes) over a guaranteed score of fifteen ounces of congealed vegetable oil.
But she made it to the building unscathed, and walked the three flights of stairs to the apartment in question. Taking a deep breath, she knocked on the door. After a moment of furious scurrying about inside the apartment, the knob turned and the door shot open a crack. An unassuming man with a three-day beard and tufts of brown hair sticking out from his scalp at various angles peered out at her. He didn’t look much like the pictures of Gary Rosenfeld she had seen online.
“How much?” the man asked anxiously.
“Huh?” replied Suzy.
“Come on, come on,” said the man. “For the butter. How much?”
“I don’t… it’s margarine,” Suzy managed to bluster after a moment.
The man made a sort of retching sound and slammed the door. Suzy stood in the hallway staring at the plastic tub in her hand. After a moment, she raised her hand to knock again.
The door flew open and a fist shot out.
“I’m not…” she started again.
“Take it or leave it,” said the man’s voice from inside, wagging his fist at her. She held out her palm and the man dropped a fistful of change into it. It was mostly nickels.
“I’m not selling the margarine,” she said. “I—”
“Free samples?” said the man.
“What?”
“Are you giving out free samples then?”
“I wasn’t planning to…”
“Oh, I see!” shouted the man in sudden consternation. “Going around the neighborhood waving margarine in front of people’s faces and then not even giving out samples. You’re a margarine tease, that’s what you are.”
“It’s just that…”
“Margarine tease!” the man screamed. “Margarine tease!”
Down the hall a door opened a crack and an old woman yelled back, “What’s all the racket down there?”
“Margarine tease!” shrieked the man again.
“All right, all right, you can have as much as you want!” said Suzy. “Just quiet down!”
“Gimme my change back.”
She handed him back the nickels and the door slammed again.
“Keep it down!” shouted the woman down the hall.
Suzy was just about to raise her hand to knock again when the door flew open once more. The fist shot out again, this time holding a butter knife. “Sample!” cried the man.
Suzy
sighed and removed the lid. “I’m really not here to give out margarine samples,” she said, as the man dug into the stuff with the knife. He pulled the knife back inside.
“Oh?” said the man, “then why did you bring it?”
“Well,” replied Suzy, uncertainly, “there’s something in it.”
There was a spitting sound, followed by chunks of something that looked like half chewed bread flying through the crack in the door.
“Gyeeychhhh,” groaned the man. “What do you mean? What’s in it?”
“Are you giving away margarine samples down there?” shouted the woman down the hall.
“Yes, but it’s got something in it!” shouted the man.
“What? Like jam?” asked the woman.
“Is it jam?” asked the man.
“No, it’s… I’d rather not say. I’m looking for Gary—”
“It’s not jam!” shouted the man.
“Is it sprinkles?” shouted the woman.
“Is it— ”
“Please!” cried Suzy. “Stop yelling! I’m not here to give out samples!”
“Margarine tease!” shouted the woman.
“Margarine tease!” shouted the man.
“Margarine tease!” shouted the woman.
Soon they were chanting in unison. Halfway down the hall another door opened and a small Filipino woman stepped out in the hall. She seemed momentarily confused, but shortly was overcome by the spirit of the occasion. “Mar-jar-een-tees! Mar-jar-een-tees!” she shouted, and began to clap her hands. Two other residents opened their doors and joined in as well.
Suzy began to think she had made a terrible mistake. She put the lid on the tub, slipped it into her purse, and began to trudge back down the hall toward the stairs, the deafening chant ringing in her ears. As she opened the door to the stairwell, the chant broke off, turning into boos. By the time she made it to the first landing, it was quiet again, the building’s occupants apparently having found something else to entertain them.
Mercury Revolts: (Book Four of the Mercury Series) Page 5