by Ginger Booth
Freshly toweled off, with all 5’4” of me draped in sweats sized for a tall man, I settled down with him at the kitchen table. A picture window offered a great view of tossing trees, and the electric exhilaration of a thunderstorm.
“I love watching storms,” I said. “Thank you so much for letting me in. And the tea. This is good! I haven’t had sassafras in years.” The tea was deep orange and fruity, not quite similar to an unsweetened root beer flavor. The table offered sugar and honey, but we both drank it straight.
Zack smiled at me in pleasant surprise. “You know sassafras?”
“Mm. Used to make it out of sassafras saplings when I was a kid. Did you buy it?”
“Nope. Used saplings. Who does that, anymore?”
“Us two?” I grinned. “I don’t know who else. They sold sassafras shavings at an antique store down by the reservoir when I was a kid. The store’s not there anymore. I’ve never seen it for sale anywhere else.”
“Huh! I’ve never seen it for sale.” We contemplated the hail for a few moments and savored our tea. Some of those hailstones were worthy of Oklahoma, not New England. Then. “Do we have tornado sirens here?” he wondered.
I shrugged. “With the power out?” We both shrugged. I was glad to contemplate this with an attractive stranger over a good cup of tea, rather than alone.
“So do you know wild mushrooms too, Dee Baker?”
“No. My mother took me on a hike once with an expert, when I was kid, up on Sleeping Giant, to learn edible mushrooms.” Sleeping Giant is a large ridge in the area, running alongside I-91, one of many north-south ridges left when the glaciers receded 10,000 years ago. We were sitting and talking on another such ridge. “But we took the mushrooms over to a friend of hers, and the friend was afraid to eat them. Maybe I learned to be afraid of them instead of how to tell which to eat.” I laughed. “More of a plant person.”
“That’s a shame. There should be good mushrooms up on Sleeping Giant in a couple days, after this.”
I nodded. I vaguely remembered something like that from my long-ago mushroom lesson. “So what do you do for a living, Zack? When you’re not rescuing damsels in distress. If you don’t mind my asking.” Thinking of the debris in the living room, I hoped he wouldn’t say ‘political organizer.’ I couldn’t escape just yet.
“I have an organic landscaping business,” he said.
“Wow,” I nodded, impressed. He had quite a nice house for that line of work. I honored the organic part. I’d had condos before my current house, and never felt good about the way they tossed chemicals around. Landscaping seemed to fit him.
“You?” he prompted.
“Web developer, for one of the Fortune 100 media companies down in Stamford. I telecommute.”
He frowned slightly. Maybe programming didn’t fit me as well as landscaping fit him. Maybe he knew exactly which Fortune 100 company I meant and didn’t approve.
“I love to garden, though,” I added, possibly to redeem myself with my host. “I’ve got flowers and vegetables spilling out of the house and down the driveway in season. Plenty indoors this time of year, too. Not so good with the lawn and shrubbery.”
He chuckled. “Yeah, I know that house on Blatcheley. The azaleas and lilacs look good.”
Eep. He knows where I live. Only fair. I knew where he lived, after all.
We chatted for an hour until the storm blew off to the east and deep blue skies returned. The temperature fell to near-freezing, though, and all my clothes were sopping wet. Zack drove me home, dodging a downed tree and a large bough with downed power line along the way. I was still wearing his sweats, so I invited him in to try my own fresh lemon balm tea while I changed out of his clothes. Lemon balm isn’t nearly as good as sassafras.
It would have been surly, after all that, not to accept his invitation to teach me edible mushrooms again on Sleeping Giant on Sunday. Maybe his Nordic blue-eyed good looks had something to do with it, too. But much as we seemed to have in common, and rare as those things were, I still felt he was judging me about something. At any rate, I accepted. You can never have too many friends, right?
How would I know? I worked home alone. Outside of Mangal and Dan in Stamford, I didn’t have a lot of friends. And I wasn’t sure that my boss Dan counted as a friend.
The news said the Clipper front killed nearly a hundred people in the Midwest. It blew across from the Canadian Rockies, a couple thousand miles. I don’t think I’d ever heard of an Alberta Clipper before. But the meteorologist on TV seemed to say they were a normal weather pattern, nothing new.
-o-
Dan asked me to come into Stamford early that Tuesday, to meet with him and Mangal before the usual telecommuter’s meeting. I wondered if I could have run into Adam again if I took the robo-car at the normal time instead. But I decided that road led to madness. Adam had my phone number and email address on my card. He could reach me. And I fully expected to never see him again. Adam was consigned to the daydreams-only file.
Of course, I’d just spent an hour daydreaming all the way down from New Haven.
“So what’s up, Dan?” I asked, to get the real agenda rolling. Dan and Mangal and I all had our coffee. We’d each shared at least one personal anecdote, standing around in the blue and mustard break room, suspended between the plate glass panorama and the cubicle maze. Enough with the bonding.
“Right…” said Dan. He glanced furtively right and left along the hallway by the windows. Mangal and I looked, too. Dan gazed out over the cubicles. Someone joking with a neighbor popped his head up, caught Dan’s eye, and popped back down. The neighbor popped up, and down. They looked like cartoon prairie dogs. “We’d better use my office,” Dan murmured. Mangal and I shared a look behind his back as he headed off. Good – only our eyes were laughing.
Once we were settled, Dan solemnly leaned toward us, elbows on his desk. “We have some new assignments. This… isn’t our usual.” He leafed through some notes, and handed each of us an actual physical manila folder, with paper pages in it.
We programmers tend to favor electronic files. The last time I’d handled a manila folder was employee orientation at UNC, straight out of college. The media, news, cable, sports, and infotainment behemoth wasn’t even called UNC yet back then. Intrigued, Mangal and I both immediately flipped our folders open to page one.
“Wait!” cried Dan, hand out in warning.
Mangal and I obediently closed our manila folders. I noted that mine said ‘Mangal’ on the tab, and glanced over. Mangal flipped up his tab labelled ‘Dee’ with a finger so I could see it. I decided to follow his lead and not swap them just now. I’d never seen Dan this flustered.
Our job in this infotainment conglomerate, was to build little explore-more interactives for the assorted news channel websites, build custom web pages that didn’t quite work on the standard templates, create new standard templates, code up interactive video overlays, and things like that. I don’t belittle the work – it was creative, technically leading-edge, and on tight deadlines due to the daily and weekly cycles of news broadcasts. The websites frequently won awards, and the brass seemed confident ours were the best news-program-support sites in the business. It was also a lot of fun.
But by its nature – national broadcast and cable media – it wasn’t secretive. Until today.
“You two know that you’re my most trusted section leaders,” Dan confided in us. “And you’ve got the most tech-savvy teams. I want to pull you off the news merry-go-round for a couple new ongoing features.
“Marketing says the focus groups say we’re losing viewer confidence in a couple key areas. And support says viewer queries and complaints are going through the roof. I bet you can guess what areas.”
“Weather,” I suggested.
“Closing borders,” said Mangal.
Dan nodded gravely.
“Tracking politician’s votes…” hazarded Mangal.
That got a knee-jerk reaction. “No! That’s not our
job!” denied Dan. “We… don’t go there. We’re still the infotainment division, not… political news. But you can see, these are… a lot more controversial issues than we usually deal with. They require media self-censorship. There’s a lot of sensitive information here, and… Well. Our usual sixty-forty rule applies.”
“Censorship,” I echoed faintly.
“Sixty-forty rule,” Mangal echoed in disbelief.
The UNC news editorial guideline was that 60% of our presentations had to be feel-good, positive, pro-American, and 40% negative, critical, or ‘concerning.’ Balancing an entire news broadcast seemed to be accomplished by substituting dog stories for hard news. But these were single subjects. Adding gratuitous puppies into a model of an Alberta Clipper weather system wasn’t going to work. An upbeat treatment of barricading the borders was also hard to imagine. The heartwarming home life of a border attack dog?
And of course self-censorship implied lying to the public in our role as journalists. Well, UNC’s role as journalists, anyway. I was employed as a programmer and graphics designer, not a journalist, as I was sure Dan would remind me if I got difficult about this.
Dan nodded somberly, “It’s a real design challenge. But the projections show these’ll be top features. You’ll get a lot of eyeballs on your work. And I know you’re up to it. Anyway, in those folders you’ve got background research from investigative reporters… Well, you’ll have to suppress most of that. And privileged logins to the real info, and the rules about what can’t be said. Federal security and UNC policy.”
I opened my folder again, or rather Mangal’s. I glanced at a few pages, then closed it slowly. My mind moved like molasses. Some experiences seem to draw me in, like a beautiful sunset, or diving into clear water. Other experiences, like this one, seem to kick me out, as though I held that bedamned folder with mile-long waldos. I swallowed.
Mangal rose abruptly and said the exact opposite of anything I expected. “Thanks, Dan. We’ll get right on it. You can count on us!”
I rose in slow motion as Mangal enthusiastically pumped Dan’s hand across the desk.
No. We did not ordinarily shake hands with Dan. We never shook hands with Dan. Mangal never laid hands on me, either, but now he put his arm around me, and grinned, confiding, “This is going to be great.” And dragged me out of Dan’s office.
I should point out that Mangal and I started within a couple months of each other at UNC. We’d been best friends ever since. Not romantically – he had an arranged marriage set up before he came to the U.S. Though the actual bride and wedding were delayed a couple years. The point is, I trusted him, at least ten times more than I trusted our boss Dan. I trusted Mangal enough to follow his lead, smile wanly at Dan, and be dragged out before I could say anything.
“What the hell?” I hissed at him once we were out of Dan’s earshot.
“You are not going to quit over this, or make a scene, or argue,” he whispered back, with a pleasant smile for anyone who might look our way. “We need to talk about this sub rosa. Wuthering Heights, 8 p.m.”
I gazed at him like he’d grown three heads. Slowly I replied, “Gulliver’s Travels, 7:52 p.m.”
“Great!” said Mangal. He flicked my folder playfully. “Better put that away before you lose it.” I started to hand it over to him, to swap back to my own assigned folder, but he waved that off. “Later. Ah, the gang’s all here for the weekly meeting.”
He avoided me the rest of the afternoon. We really weren’t going to talk about it until 7:52 p.m. Encoded and decoded with two public domain manuscripts from Project Gutenberg as code keys, no less, plus the 3-digit combos 800 and 752. I thoughtfully used the office copier on the contents of his folder as a keepsake. I saw him in the copy room soon after me doing the same.
After the big group meeting, everyone under Dan, I got together with my own team. I didn’t tell them anything beyond ‘big new feature project coming up.’ We plotted out how to wrap up our current projects.
Shelley wore a beige and fuzzy lavender ensemble, I was happy to see. We’d had our little chat by video when she was assigned to my team. Today’s outfit complemented her straight blond hair, but looked a decade too old for her. I gave her lots of positive reinforcement anyway, on the grounds that it wasn’t my navy blue. Dan was smart – and I didn’t often accuse him of that – to make me responsible for her. She was so desperately anxious to please, to be acknowledged. Now that she was my problem, I’d make a hero of her if I could. I sat and code-read her latest work with her, found two clever bits to praise her on, taught her two new tricks, and made sure she knew what to do for the next few days. “Thanks for the good work, Shelley. Keep it up!”
The rest of the guys didn’t need petting. We wrapped it up and headed home.
-o-
“Wuthering Heights, eh?” I ribbed Mangal, once we got the extremely secure voice-over-Internet connection up, at 7:52 p.m., on the nose. “Do Brits actually read things like that in school?” A true international, Mangal was a Jain, born to Indian parents in South Africa, graduated from Edinburgh, and held E.U. citizenship. ‘Brit’ was an oversimplification.
“Of course. Haven’t you read it?”
“No. Ick.” I’d graduated from UVM in Vermont, where I successfully dodged all literature courses. “Back to the topic – what the hell?” I demanded.
We really weren’t in the habit of stealing secrets and having evil hacker conversations. We weren’t. We’d had too much time on our hands under a certain supervisor years before, and set this up on a lark. The political climate was really ugly then, and government spying a commonplace. So we had secure conversations sometimes. Because we could. Anyone monitoring our Internet traffic would see video files going back and forth between graphic developers. Even if anyone realized it was encoded audio, there was zero chance of them decoding it. But it was really quite innocent, I thought.
“You were about this close to quitting over this assignment,” Mangal accused.
“…True. It’s unethical.”
“Because it’s censored? It will be censored. You can’t stop that and neither can I.”
“It shouldn’t be censored.”
“…Have you looked at this stuff yet? It’s censored under the Calm Act, and the Calm Act certainly applies.”
“You know what I think of the Calm Act,” I said. But I had to concede the point. Congress had voted itself the right to control all public information to ‘preserve public order’ in the face of the weather crisis. UNC, along with all the other major U.S. ‘news’ media, had agreed to the censorship.
Mangal was the voice of reason. “We can do whatever we can do, tell the public everything we can, and not lose our jobs, or our spots in the ark.”
“…What price is too high?”
“I don’t know,” allowed Mangal. “But this isn’t it. Look, Dee – at least we have access, and finally really know what’s going on. I want that. I want to keep that. You?”
I was silent. He made sense. But I felt dirty, knowing things every American ought to have the right to know, and yet censoring it. And if I told people… Some hotheads at UNC had vanished. Questions were not encouraged.
Mangal was relentless. “The background researcher gave us access to way more than she should have, in those files. We have access to all the stories that got squelched. Dee – we have access to raw satellite feeds, Al Jazeera coverage of what’s really going on in the Middle East since the embargo –”
“And the folders, Mangal? Why the game with swapping folders?”
“So we both have access to everything. Neither of us has to pick and choose what to risk telling each other. We don’t have to tell each other anything. We just share our access. So that we can cover for each other’s sections, whenever.”
“Oh, that’ll hold up in a court of law.”
“What court of law. Dee, the background researcher who put together these packets was Deanna Jo. Have you seen Deanna Jo lately? I haven’t.”
“Christ.”
“She passed us this. And that may have been the last thing she managed to do.”
“Mangal, I am not this person.”
“The kind of person who goes along with what the company orders? No, Dee. You just look like you are.”
“Screw you!”
“Cheerful, dressed in fun fashions, trying out the latest robo-cars, dabbling in her garden. You’re the last person anyone would suspect of being subversive.”
“That’s because I’m not subversive. I’m honest to a fault. Love me love my steampunk.”
“…I absolve you,” Mangal eventually replied.
Dammit, Mangal had my number. I screwed my eyes up to stop the tearing up. “You absolve me of lying to the American people? While the government clamps down the borders, so that them that has, keeps? Takes away their freedom to travel? Refuses to tell them that the weather will kill them, that this is the end?”
“Yes,” he replied quietly. “I absolve you.”
“Are you going to absolve me of going into an ark while billions die, too?”
“I absolve you, and everyone else who seeks to survive.” His voice changed over to ribbing. “That is, assuming you ever make it into an ark. I’d lay long odds against it.”
I laughed. And I wiped off the tears. “Well, yeah, there’s that. I can always salve my conscience by dying.”
“And hey,” he joked, “that option remains open.”
“True.”
“Deal? No hopeless stands on principle? We learn all we can for ourselves, and tell the American people only what we’re allowed to.”
It’s not like we had a choice. We did websites, not live broadcasts. We couldn’t leak unapproved truth by accident. Too many people had to approve the work before it went live on the Internet. By then there were no live broadcasts anymore on the big networks, either. Close, but UNC used a five minute delay. They only said it was ‘live.’