by Ginger Booth
I was part of the other side of Mangal’s life.
“Where is Mangal?” I asked Shanti firmly, closing the front door behind me, with me inside.
She gazed at me a moment, then turned and walked back to her kitchen. I glanced in after her. He wasn’t there. Shanti was simply practicing nonresistance on me. Great. I cased out the main floor, ducked briefly into the half-basement level, then went ahead upstairs to the bedrooms. The children weren’t home. Apparently someone else had the Indian enclave’s daycare today.
That left Mangal and Shanti’s bedroom. I knocked on the door first. “Mangal, it’s Dee. I’m coming in.” I opened the door halfway, and froze for an instant. He lay fully dressed on the floor-level bed, gauze-swathed hands gently clasped on his stomach. His face looked like someone worked him over with brass knuckles.
I swallowed and continued in. There were no chairs in this inner sanctum. I just plopped down on a giant pillow beside him.
“I’ll kill him,” I said. “Mel. He’s dead meat walking.”
Mangal chuckled in spite of himself. “You remember the part where I’m a pacifist, right?”
“Doesn’t mean I have to be,” I replied. “Hell, Mangal. I am so, so sorry this happened to you. I should have gotten you out faster. I never dreamed they’d do…this. What complete and utter fools.”
“You look pretty banged up yourself,” he offered. “You were busy. Glad you survived, by the way. The tsunami thing.”
I laughed. “If you weren’t so bruised, I’d hit you.”
“Used to have you trained better,” he complained, his smile growing pained. “Not to talk about killing and hitting all the time.”
“Sorry, old friend,” I said. “But I think I was faking it for your sake. When someone hurts someone I love, first I want to hurt them back. Then I get sneaky. Shanti tried to stop me from seeing you.”
Mangal shrugged that off. “Shanti can be protective.”
I chuckled. It amused me how aggressive Shanti’s form of nonviolence was. “I need you back, Mangal. On Amenac and PR News.” I pulled out my phone and navigated to an interesting spot on our new app-in-progress.
“I don’t think so,” Mangal returned.
I handed him the phone. “It’s a neighborhood in Nassau County,” I explained.
“It’s a Google map with elevation overlay?” Mangal asked. “And is that the tsunami high-water line?”
“Yeah, that’s our first demo,” I agreed. “That’s one of my projects. The other one is public morale. Which is spiraling downhill by the hour. The PR News mission. I can’t do both of our jobs, Mangal. Speaking of which,” I added, aggrieved, “are there email filters to go with your work mailbox? Automated spam-filers? Why you let your people pester like that is beyond me.”
We both laughed. Yeah, we’d been arguing that one for a long, long time.
Along the way, tears started leaking from his eyes. “I was afraid they’d kill me.”
“Looks like they tried. Idiots.” I took his hand, very gently for fear of what lay beneath the bandages. “Next time, talk to me. Please.”
“I need to know,” Mangal said. “Or I can’t continue to call this news.”
“I know,” I replied. “I know some of what they’re hiding, from the public. And I know why. Mangal, the prognosis… It’s not good. But we have to keep trying, to maximize whatever chance we’ve got. We’ve already improved our chances three-fold, from where we started.” One in four was three times as good as one in ten, if you rounded up.
“Our chances of what, Dee?” he asked. “Precisely.”
“We heard all this before the Calm Act went into effect, Mangal,” I hedged. “The climate is changing. The scenario might not be survivable. It could be the end of the world.”
“You quoted numbers, Dee,” Mangal insisted. “What exactly were those numbers?”
I paused to debate with myself just how much trouble I’d be in, to tell him something it took Emmett two years to admit in my hearing. He weakly yanked his hand away from mine. Rightly or wrongly, that decided me. We were in this together, before I’d ever heard of Emmett, before Amenac was a barely-whispered dream of ours.
“The risk is the planet heating to the point the oceans evaporate,” I whispered to him. “The Venus Effect, they call it. An upward spiral of greenhouse warming. Emmett figures our chances of stopping that are three times better than they were. Well, two and half times, anyway. The numbers aren’t precise.”
“What were our chances before?” Mangal asked, also in a whisper.
“One in ten, or thereabouts.”
He sighed, and squeezed his eyes closed in grief. A few more tears squeezed out.
I wondered if I’d ever really taken the time to grieve for planet Earth, and all its billions. Probably not. The sheer scale of it all inspired me to step back, as though from the precipice of a bottomless cliff. Don’t go there. What’s the next right step, Dee-sized. Do that. That was my strategy to handle the overwhelming. I admired Mangal and Emmett for their ability to face things so vast and scary. I’m not sure I’d ever seen them before as being alike in any way. But it stood to reason that the two most important men in my life did share a common strength. A number of them, actually, once I started to see it. Intellectually, all three of us were techno-wizards of analysis and the computing arts.
“Should I have told you that?” I asked softly. “I don’t know.”
Mangal nodded, and sighed. “I won’t tell anyone. Not even Shanti. They were right.”
“Really?” I said in surprise.
“Yeah. Really.” He paused and read in my face that I wasn’t sure. “Our chances are too low, Dee. People are too discouraged. Closer to giving up than rising to the challenge. Their whole lives and livelihoods yanked out from under their feet. They can’t even count on the air to breathe, the tides to flow, the seasons to follow their courses. Their courage is sapped.”
“I hope I didn’t sap yours,” I murmured sadly. “I didn’t mean to discourage you. I meant to get you back in the saddle. Help me do this thing, Mangal. Amenac and PR News need us. We built them for a reason. That reason still stands.”
He sighed and blew out sourly. “HomeSec broke my fingers.”
“All of them?”
“No, no, I could still type,” he grumbled. “Slowly.”
“Oh.” An uncontrollable giggle bubbled up in me, then a hysterical little laugh. “I’m sorry. It’s just… In West Virginia. He threatened to cut off my hands. I was so stoned,” I told him, the unhinged laugh turning to tears. “I tried to figure out how I’d do everything with voice interfaces. I’ve got the whole house rigged for voice command now in Brooklyn.”
Mangal stared at me in horror. Awkwardly, he pried himself up and put his arms around me for a brief hug.
“I’m alright,” I claimed, wiping my eyes and pulling myself together. “Thanks.”
“You’ve been through this,” Mangal said sadly. “More than once. You know.”
“Yeah, well, as a learning experience, I can’t recommend it,” I quipped. “Mangal, screw Amenac. I need you back as my friend. I don’t know… Maybe I’ve sold out too much to the martial law government. I’m surrounded by them. And I love them, as people. Emmett, Cam, Carlos, Sean Cullen. DJ here. I admire them. I believe in them. And I need them. I crave their protection, to keep me safe. Maybe I’m losing sight of the other side. The value of speaking independent truth. Keeping them honest. Or whatever. Help me with that. I trust your conscience more than mine. Even if you don’t come back to Amenac. But dammit, come back to Amenac. Please. Both. Help me.”
“That was just pathetic, Baker,” he pointed out. “That argument deserves to fail.” Mangal scowled at me for a moment. “Alright. I will consult with my wife. Talk to me tomorrow.”
“Thank you,” I breathed, and took my leave. Shanti shook her head at me in dismay on the way out.
15
Interesting fact: American nuclear power plan
ts were water-cooled, with the serious design flaw of requiring external power to pump water after the reactor is shut off. This is not inherent to nuclear power – we had safer designs. But the U.S. Department of Defense selected water-cooled reactors to power its nuclear submarines. Which makes perfect sense. Then, because the R&D expense was already paid for, commercial reactors scaled up the water-cooled design rather than spend money to develop the alternatives.
“Ooh, bribe me any time, Dee,” Dave encouraged, admiring the snacks. I’d picked up dried cranberries, a table cheese, and cornbread molded into little corn cobs, at the West Totoket trading post we’d set up at the beginning of the Calm, on the way to Amenac HQ. The old dollar store did brisk business these days, a thriving community center.
“Help yourself. That’s for everybody,” I encouraged.
Looking around the exposed brick loft space, replete with sunny windows, I only recognized about a third of the fifteen people camped in their choice of seats. Dave set up this hacker haven lair in the center of town. We had high barstool desks, slouchy couches, triple monitor workstations for graphics, a picnic table, power outlets and Ethernet cables galore. Anything but fabric-covered modular cubicles, really. Any coder or digital artist could find their perfect corner here.
Well, almost anyone. A number of us preferred to only visit for meetings, and do real work in private at home. I was anti-social when I was coding these days. I’d valued the water cooler consults of a communal workspace earlier in my career. But I found it harder to get that benefit as a manager. Will, for instance, in the corner with three huge monitors, kept glancing at us from the corner of his eye. Me standing there was distracting him from his work.
“Let’s talk in private,” I invited Dave. “One on one,” I clarified, shaking my head slightly at Mel. Dave led the way into his office, and closed its glass French doors behind us. Egalitarianism only went so far. Managers had to talk about staffing, and you just can’t do that in an open bull-pit office area. Human nature requires eavesdropping.
“What are you trying to accomplish here, Dee?” Dave asked. “I thought we agreed I was running the circus.”
“You are absolutely master of ceremonies,” I agreed. “And if I step on your toes in any way, please tell me.”
He nodded and waved a hand circularly to bid me get on with it.
“I want Mangal back on board,” I said, “and to make sure you, and Amen1, are on board. As ringmaster, you’re not free to bitch much. So, you’re welcome to bitch at me. And maybe with all this upset, part of clearing the air is that we need to re-focus, maybe make some adjustments.”
Dave rose, and re-buttoned his gorgeous bespoke cashmere jacket. “I see. Let’s walk.”
I shrugged and followed him outdoors to stroll the town green, affixing scarves and hats along the way. The wind had added another ten knots since dawn, and long thin clouds hid the sun in staccato bursts of light. Not my idea of a great day for a stroll.
“My office is bugged, of course,” Dave explained apologetically. He pulled out an electronic noise generator to balk any attempts to eavesdrop on us out here on the town green, presently rather brown and dejected looking. He didn’t need to show the device to me. He could have just engaged it in his pocket.
I nodded in appreciation, and resumed the discussion. “So is Dave really on board?”
“No,” Dave replied. “I want Mel out of here. Or me and Amen1.” He shrugged. “We signed up to get you around HomeSec, Dee, not to be their pawns. You’ve got official backing from On High now, powerful patrons. So why are we here? Aside from the pay. The pay is good, mind you.”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” I returned. “That you’re just marking time until this crisis is past. Then planning a divorce.”
“Pretty much,” Dave agreed affably.
“What do you think of the darknet these days?” I asked. At his raised eyebrow, I expanded on this. “My teen Alex says he follows New England news, pictures out of Narragansett, on the darknet. That everybody knows Amenac can’t be trusted in New England. Too heavily censored.”
“You’re good,” Dave allowed. “Shame you’re not a white hat hacker.”
“Just no talent for being secretive,” I said. “Besides, being married to a lead Resco makes it awkward. Too many lies. I can’t lie worth a damn. So. Are you powering the darknet?”
“No comment,” Dave said cordially. “If I was? Or Amen1 was. You know I’m more of an ambassador. Manager. Whatever.”
“As I see it, we’ve got two official missions,” I replied. “Amenac as a safe place to communicate and collaborate. Getting a bit high on censorship, but that’s OK with me. We really set it up as a vehicle to do business safely. Then we’ve got PR News, a pro-government mouthpiece. On the side, I’ve got a hand in on IndieNews out of Upstate. Also censored – everything is – but with a more jaundiced take on the Resco Raj. I think that’s important. I mean, it’s annoying to have them attack me and Emmett on a personal level. And they get a bit lurid. But, that appeals to people.”
“It surely does,” Dave agreed.
“I think most people are served by those offerings,” I continued. “But some people need to know, you know? The darker secrets. What’s being suppressed. I guess what I’m saying, Dave, is that not everyone is in that camp. The world’s a scary place right now. More people like being reassured than like horror stories. You know?”
“You’re not ashamed of PR News, is what you’re saying,” Dave echoed.
“No. Are you?”
“I suppose not,” he agreed. “It isn’t enough, though. And it isn’t…me. I agree with your kid. Hudson’s about the only place you can trust what’s on Amenac. Partly, anyway. An oxymoron, but Carlos isn’t a bad censor. If you like censors.” Clearly, Dave didn’t. That was a given. “Do you follow the darknet on New England, Dee?”
“Hadn’t really thought about it until Alex mentioned it,” I admitted. “Such a pain to keep the computer clean in that virus swamp. Not sure I’d dare access it from Emmett’s house. Too much cross-contamination risk.”
The darknet wasn’t easy to surf with your friendly garden-variety ‘secure’ web browser. Anti-viral software had never been made equal to protecting your operating system from the cesspool of worms, Trojans, viruses, malware, and everything else assailing your computer when you surfed the dark side. It was sort of like being a middle-class shopper in the safe well-lit downtown, versus heading into the worst slums on foot to cop illegal drugs. Too many side risks.
“Wise move,” Dave agreed. “What the black hat hackers wouldn’t give for Emmett’s access. Your squeeze has skeletons in his closet, Dee. Hope you know that?”
“I know that,” I allowed. “I trust his heart. He’s a good man, Dave. Not easy to be a good man in a bad world.”
“True enough.”
We walked a while, chatting obliquely about the darknet. Dave would trust me with what he was up to, or he wouldn’t. I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to know. If he was too far off the rails, it was better I didn’t know. On the Hudson Resco staff, that put me in a conflict of interest.
“What if we had a feature,” Dave eventually suggested. “Tales from the dark side. Put it on Amenac, safe for readers to surf without risk. But uncensored. Warnings all over it that we cannot confirm nor deny this content. Just found it entertaining.”
“I sure want to see those images out of Narragansett,” I admitted. “Illicit long-range blurry photos of the nuclear plants. What Seabrook looks like. What the eff is going on in ‘Floribama.’”
“Now you’re getting the spirit of it,” Dave said with a grin.
“There’s some dangerous stuff in there, Dave,” I cautioned. “Ugly truths.”
“Hiding in a pile of photos that might be photoshopped, for all we know,” he agreed cheerfully.
“Is that enough? To keep you on board?” I prodded. “For a month or two, at least.”
“Can you deliver it?”
“Alright. And so I pay the danegeld yet again,” Dave said.
“I try to be a good Dane,” I quipped.
“You make a great Dane,” he assured me. I grimaced at the pun. “Sorry, couldn’t resist.”
Good, that was two down, Mangal and Dave on board. “Do I still need to get rid of Mel?”
“Mel doesn’t have the social skills to carry this off,” Dave critiqued. “I’ll want to kill him myself within the week.”
I chuckled. “Yeah, he let his petty power go to his head. Sorry I lost it with him yesterday. We didn’t release this, but Emmett was MIA at that point. And with Mangal in jeopardy, too, I was just…not well hinged. Trying to make up for it today. Pull my weight. Help you out.”
Dave winced. “Ouch. Sorry. He’s OK?”
“Yeah, Emmett’s fine. Well, nothing that won’t brush off,” I said unconvincingly. “Mangal’s pretty banged up. I think he’ll be back tomorrow. You know, if we do get rid of Mel, we might get stuck with someone worse.”
“I’m eager for the change,” Dave assured me with a smile.
“I’ll see what I can do,” I promised. “Anything else you need from me? While I’m here.”
He considered. “You know, Dee, I’ve seen the darknet coverage. I expect one or more of these nuclear plants will go into meltdown. PR News content is your problem, you know? I just deliver the video.”
“Hell,” I agreed. “OK.”
From the wind, my ears were beginning to send a steady stream out my nose. We returned to the loft, dodging a plastic trashcan turned tumbleweed along the way. I politely asked Mel to give me an hour, then maybe we could find a late lunch. Then I got with editorial and our researchers and writers, and Will on graphics and animation, to start getting background and stories ready to roll for each of the threatened nuclear plants. Judging from their shocked reactions, we’d succeeded at soft-pedaling the risk.