Altered Seasons_MONSOONRISE

by Paul Briggs

  “And it isn’t just the damage itself—it’s the secondary effects. Like the inflation.” They had long since had the conversation on the different parts of the money supply, the upshot of which was that it was indeed possible for a country to suffer from inflation even while trillions of dollars in equity were disappearing.

  “The people trying to get their houses back in shape,” Terry said, “aren’t spending any money on anything they don’t urgently need right now, so they’re not going out to eat at the restaurants which are having to raise their prices to cover the rising cost of food, so those restaurants are going out of business. They aren’t going out and buying a new screen, or if they are they find the stores don’t have any new ones because the roads are still out and they can’t get resupplied. They’re putting off that plastic surgery until next year, patching up their old clothes, scaling back their wedding plans, not going out to the movies… basically, if you don’t happen to be in the building trades or selling something people need every day, you’re more and more likely to be out of work. So we get unemployment.”

  Pratt closed his eyes. This was exactly the sort of problem he was afraid of. Every instinct he had said if the economy is going to have a downturn, let it have a downturn. Trying to command it not to do that will only make things worse in the long run. He knew, of course, that if he didn’t do something, he would be voted out of office and replaced by someone who would. The support he’d been given after Anchorage was already starting to fade.

  “Then there’s the foreclosures. A lot of homeowners, a lot of small businesses are going into debt trying to rebuild. More debt than they can handle, in many cases. We’re starting to see the first bankruptcies, and I expect to see a lot more.

  “There’s a bill in Congress to make it harder to declare bankruptcy. I think you should try to support it if you can do so without drawing any attention to it.”

  “It doesn’t sound like a popular measure.”

  “It isn’t. But… this is going to sound very cold, but banks and lenders are the heart of the economy. They direct the flow of money, get it to where it needs to be. If times get hard enough, and the heart has to cannibalize fat and muscle in order to sustain itself… well, it’s better than dying.”

  “Except that in this case, the fat and muscle vote, and they have the heart outnumbered,” said Pratt.

  “That’s why I’m glad I’m just a public servant,” said Terry. “I just have to recommend policy. You’re the one who has to make it sound good. By the way, have you talked with Helen lately?”

  “She’s been preoccupied with her work,” said Pratt. “I was planning to touch base with her soon.”

  “When you do that, ask her if she’s keeping track of Group 77, and the situation in New York.”

  Pratt wasn’t one for vague hints, even from friends, and especially from subordinates. “Tell me what you know about Group 77,” he said.

  Terry sat on the arm of a sofa, facing the president. “The truth is, nobody knows much of anything about Group 77,” he said. “That’s just the name they use in transactions. It’s a group of investors with an enormous amount of money. They’ve been buying up the whole biofuel industry, or the patents on the technology it depends on, and shutting it all down. Now the SEC is investigating them. Suspicion of criminal conspiracy, they say, but damned if I can see what they’re doing that isn’t legal.

  “Speaking of things that might or might not be legal, Morgan declared eminent domain over the biodiesel plants in New York State and compensated Group 77 for the value of the lots, but not the plants. The theory being that the plants were worthless if they weren’t in business.”

  “That sounds dubious.”

  “They might just be trying to get the group to promise in court that they’re going to start the plants back up again,” said Terry. “And speaking of court, something strange is happening with the lawyers. One week after Group 77’s law firm—Mekaelian, Murphy, and Pilkington—filed a legal injunction, NYPD searched their offices… allegedly because they were looking for evidence in the SEC investigation. I don’t know if they found anything, but a few days after that, the law firm was hacked by a group called INB4. All sorts of information about their clients got spilled to the general public. And since nobody working for Group 77 is very popular in New York, or much of anywhere else, their clients are under a lot of public pressure to find some other lawyers.

  “And here’s the thing. Hacking is a lot harder than it used to be, especially if the target can afford good security. A law firm like Mekaelian, Murphy, and Pilkington—you can’t get into their system without a copy of their runes. Which are not easy to get. But which the police would have had.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Pratt. “Are you suggesting that the NYPD are in collusion with this INB4 group?”

  “I don’t know,” said Terry, “but it wouldn’t be the first time INB4 has gone after somebody who pissed off Morgan.”

  “My impression of hacker groups is that they pride themselves on not working for anyone, least of all any sort of government.”

  “That’s what’s strange,” said Terry. “And there’s something else you might want to think about. I can’t prove this is happening… but New York State’s GDP is about as big as Russia’s—well, Russia’s before the oil market started going crazy. If Moscow can afford a cyberwarfare division, so can Albany.”

  As soon as Terry had left, Pratt made a call to Arioc Kaplan. The director of the SEC said he was “keeping an open mind” until the Group 77 investigation was complete, and didn’t seem to think there was anything sinister about the Mekaelian, Murphy, and Pilkington hacking.

  “I suspect runesnapping software may have been involved,” he said. “Someone sneaks a program into the computer that infects the rune reader and sends copies of the runes. Nasty business. Leaves everyone wondering if they’ve been betrayed. There are software patches you can use to guard against it, but if somebody doesn’t install one in time…”

  Pratt nodded. Ari Kaplan had a reputation for honesty—which was good, because he also happened to be somebody the president couldn’t fire. And now that Pratt thought of it, the NYPD answered to the mayor, not the governor… to the extent that they answered to anyone at all.

  It seemed he was hearing more and more about Governor Morgan these days, and liking less and less of it. But he wasn’t ready to assume the worst just yet. Especially not when he had so much else on his plate.

  And who are you to judge her, sitting here thinking of ways to help the banks ruin people’s lives? The Aztecs told their victims they were sacrificing them to save the universe. The most you can tell people is that you’re letting them be sacrificed to save the economy.

  This is the dark side of “treat it like a war.” Times like this bring out the worst in governments on every level. If you don’t like it, get busy bringing about better times. If you can’t do it, who can?

  * * *

  Normally, Pop would have gone to Mr. Roberts’ office in Easton, but neither he nor Mom could take a single day off work now. So Mr. Roberts had taken the unusual step of driving out to the island to visit Mom-mom and Pop-pop and discuss their legal options.

  Which were not great. They were now seven people, including a small child and a teenager, living in a house that was getting less and less habitable every day. They couldn’t afford to have it cleaned properly because they had to spend all their money keeping Pop-pop going despite the illness he’d contracted from… living in this house. The state was almost certainly going to condemn the building—they’d take any excuse to have one less waterfront house to worry about. Which would have been okay at this point, except that the only other place the Bradshaws had to go was Mom-mom and Pop-pop Horton’s on Smith Island, a house on even lower ground. The last king tide had come within a few feet of their back door.

  Mr. Roberts was a small, light-skinned African-American with a rather diffident manner. He looked about the same age as Chelse
y, but in terms of legal help he was what they had. Isabel approached him while he was talking to Mom-mom.

  “Hey, when you have a moment,” she said, “I’ve got something I’d like your advice on.”

  “This is likely to take most of my day,” he said.

  “I don’t know if you’ve had much to do with Isabel,” said Mom-mom, “but if she says she’s got something she’d like your advice on, what she means is she’s neck-deep in angry pit bulls. You should help her.”

  “If you charge by the hour,” said Isabel, “I can—” Mr. Roberts waved for her to stop.

  “I’ll make this a part of today’s visit,” he said. “No extra charge. Now, what can I do for you?”

  “I’ve got this problem with the student loan company,” she said. “I’ve been paying them twenty-five percent of my earnings, which right now is more than I can really afford. That was the deal. Now they’re raising it to thirty-five percent. Can they do that?”

  “I’d have to look at the paperwork,” he said. “They might be able to, or they might be betting on you not wanting to fight it. Even if they can, there might be some recourse.”

  “I thought you might say that.” Isabel handed him the file. “Why are they altering the deal?”

  “Same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks,” he said. “You have money. They want it. And there’s a lot of other people who owe them money that they can’t get it back from. People out in the Midwest who’re going bankrupt, for instance. They tried to get a bill through Congress to make bankruptcy harder, but some congressman—I think his name was Darling or something—started making a lot of noise against it and got it stopped.

  “Then there’s the tarpies. There are about eighteen or nineteen million people still living in FEMA camps, and those places… if you walk into one of those places trying to collect on a credit card debt or a student loan debt, you’re not likely to find whoever you’re looking for. Or if you go in with no backup, you have some kind of tragic accident. Like you accidentally strangle yourself to death putting on your necktie or something.”

  Isabel considered this.

  “So what I hear you saying,” she said, “is if I can’t pay the rent and I get kicked out of my apartment, I can move into one of these camps and they can’t come after me without turning up dead in a dumpster?” Her conscience screamed at her for even suggesting as a joke that she might do such a thing, but it had already been screaming at her as loud as it could for owing people money and not having paid it back yet, so no harm done.

  Roberts just sat there staring at her for a moment. Then he said, “Let’s file that under ‘best alternative to a negotiated agreement.’”

  * * *

  Her gym membership was one of the few extraneous expenses Isabel allowed herself, and she kept it for days like today—days when she not only needed some hard exercise to make up for the days spent sitting in front of a computer, but also really needed to work off some steam.

  Last night had come the bad news from Mr. Roberts. Yes, her loan company was entitled to raise its rates. No, there was nothing she could do about it. Yes, at some point this year her family was probably going to lose its home, although Mr. Roberts was going to drag it out as long as possible. No, there was nothing she could do about that either.

  And it was once again her turn to support Hunter. School had been let out last week—earlier than Isabel had ever heard of it happening, but that was yet another thing that could be blamed on budget cuts. His meager paychecks were gone. Which meant he was likely to start going down into a spiral of self-loathing again.

  Luckily, there was any amount of work for an engineer willing to look over plans for rebuilt overpasses and airports and shopping centers and assess how to make them Monsoon-proof, or just rebuild them. The problem was that they were outsourcing a lot of this work to Chinese and Indian engineers, who were willing to work for one to two thousand dollars each… which meant Americans got the same awesome deal. For something that could easily take two weeks if you did it properly. She felt like saying If you want people voting for fascists, just say so! Don’t incentivize it! But nice girls didn’t say things like that.

  I suppose you think you’re superior to all those Chinese and Indian engineers?

  No, I think I live in a place with a higher cost of living.

  And on top of everything else, there was what had happened this morning.

  It wasn’t your fault. There was nothing you could have done. He said so himself. Also, can we talk about the fact that we’re mourning the death of an imaginary beaver-man? And Hunter can create a new character and get back in the game any time he likes?

  But OnyxFan11 had been a little more than just an avatar in the world of Enginquest. The brave Castorid had captained the Unsung Hero for over a year now, and had been Hunter’s alter ego for as long as she’d known him. He was fearless, resourceful, and equipped with a broad assortment of useful skills. In short, he was everything Hunter had ever wanted to be in real life, assuming Hunter had wanted to be six inches shorter, bucktoothed, covered with fur and equipped with a paddle-shaped tail.

  And now he was gone—killed instantly in the explosion when an enemy fireball spell with +30 damage hit the Hero’s boiler. The surviving humans and wildkin had managed to land the Hero on the beaches of Macandal, where they disposed of the corpse avatar with great ceremony and… okay, they ate it, but respectfully. Besides, they needed the health points. And it wasn’t technically cannibalism, since he was the only Castorid in the group.

  Isabel, who had intended to spend one hour playing Enginquest and then get back to work, had spent forty minutes playing the game and two and a half hours trying to comfort Hunter. She’d never seen him so crushed.

  Now Hunter was fixing dinner—reheated vegetable soup and fried eggs, but cooking or fixing something was the only thing that seemed to brighten his mood at times like this. Isabel was at the gym. She’d used the treadmill, worked on her core, and now she had her hands wrapped in cotton and was using the punching bag, picturing the faces of the student loan officers, the idiots at Housing and Community Development, the assholes who didn’t seem to care about the fact that she and they were part of the same country, and most of all the face of her whiny bitch of a conscience that tried to make her feel guilty over everything and nothing.

  She hit the bag again and again, with force that a lot of men would be proud of. Later tonight, when she went back to the keyboard, she’d be sorry she’d used her hands as hammers like this, but right now she couldn’t make herself care. In a single fluid motion, she jumped up and forward, lashed out with a near-horizontal push kick that sent the bag halfway to the ceiling, fell on her butt, rolled to one side, got to her feet while the bag was swinging past her, stepped back into position, and blocked the bag with her shoulder.

  Now she felt better.

  * * *

  What Isabel really wanted to do was eat dinner as quickly as possible and then get back to work. She had two projects to design—both culvert crossings being replaced by bridges—and was behind on both. The plans for the bridge in upstate New York needed to be finished by Monday. The one in Minnesota didn’t need to be done for another two weeks, but she wanted to devote as much of next week as possible to the redesign of the St. Cloud stormwater system. She had a hard-earned reputation as somebody who turned work in on time, and she was determined to live up to it come hell or high water again.

  But there was Hunter. As he sat down next to her, she noticed for the first time how much weight he’d lost. He hadn’t shaved since school let out, either—his face was covered with scruff. At the moment, his expression was dull and flat.

  Complimenting him on dinner would sound kind of patronizing, but she had to do something. Isabel cut into one of the yolks with her fork.

  “I notice you always get the eggs done so the whites are cooked all the way through but the yolk’s still part runny,” she said conversationally. “How do you do that?”

&n
bsp; “I get the eggs cooked real good on one side, flip them over, and then I turn the gas off and wait a couple minutes. The residual heat does the rest.” He smiled a little. “I see what you’re trying to do.”

  “Well, yeah,” she said, resting a hand on his arm.

  “It’s just a game. You know that.”

  “It mattered to you. Your character mattered to you. That’s okay.”

  “I was playing it too much anyway. It was getting to be an addiction.” Hunter sighed.

  “Funny how your life can turn into this Jenga tower,” he said. “It just keeps getting worse and worse and worse and you can ignore it as long as you’ve got this one thing, if it’s going right you can forget that everything else is going wrong… and then that one thing goes and the whole thing just collapses all at once. Or maybe it collapsed a long time ago and you never noticed.” Isabel waited a moment for him to say something more, but he didn’t.

  “Times are hard,” she said at last. “They’re hard for everybody. If you’re going through a rough patch—”

  “It’s not that. It’s how useless I am. I was supposed to make something of my life. I wasn’t supposed to end up as a… part-time biology teacher.”

  “Hunter. There is no shame in being a teacher.”

  “They only hired me because they couldn’t get a real teacher at that salary,” he said. “I don’t know, I just… just… I don’t know what’s wrong with me! It’s like, I know I’m not stupid…”

  “Of course you’re not. You’re a smart guy.”

  “That’s just it! I’ve got all these brains and I can’t fucking use them!” Hunter’s voice caught. He put down his spoon and started pinching the skin between his thumb and index finger.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Trying to stop myself from crying.” Judging by the choking sound in his voice, it was almost working.