by Ginger Booth
So when Emmett headed out for his morning run, I escaped to the top floor grow room alone with computer, phone, and notepad. I deposited them on the utility table, breathed out hostessing, and breathed in peace.
The grow room was an oasis of white noise, gurgling and humming from two banks of vegetable and flower projects, stacked to just above my height for easy access. Bright daylight-color lighting flooded the plants. Scraps of mirrored emergency blanket kept the brilliant glare out of my eyes. It was like stepping from dreary February straight into a sunny spring day. The air smelled moist and green from crop transpiration and hydroponics. The humidity started to work on my packed sinuses, opening up my breathing passages. We kept that room warm, too, nearly 60 degrees. I plucked a succulent romaine leaf and enjoyed its slight crunch and refreshing sweetness, while I wandered to gaze out the window.
Slightly overcast, with a bitter wind. Not much blew around in the Apple anymore. Our isolated backyard maple was the only tree available to drop leaves this past autumn. The new saplings installed in the fall quivered on the giant green, still in morning shadow cast by the buildings. Livestock huddled inside their shelters. Minimum-skilled apples swept the streets free of litter in return for minimum rations. The few people outdoors kept their heads down, hunched forward, tacking into the wind.
The wind and groundhogs, Dee, I scolded myself. Don’t forget the vanishing marshes and beaches I’d loved all my life. Aren’t there more important things for you to worry about?
I sighed and sat down to work. I made a list of things more important than groundhogs. The map app, but Alixandria had that project running smoothly. My concerns with the political situation. Public morale in Hudson and New England. Thank God Virginia and Carolina weren’t my problem. Or at least, I hoped they wouldn’t become my problem. I considered the Carolina Raj blameless for its nuclear meltdown and lives lost to the tsunami. Carolina had prepared well. The catastrophe was simply beyond the engineering tolerance of the nuclear plant and Resco plans. With the land low, flat, and swampy like coastal Carolina, there was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Virginia had less excuse.
Not my problem. Not yet, at least. PR News was my problem, and its beat was Hudson and New England. Which had their own political and social challenges today. I made some progress back home in Totoket, shoring up the Amenac–PR alliance against its centripetal forces, but it was still badly frayed over…
Censorship.
I’d listened to everyone else, including Emmett and my boss. Pete Hoffman might be a commanding officer to his officers, but I was a civilian. To me, Pete was my boss. Meaning, he had the power to hinder or put considerable clout behind my plans. Of course, that assumed I had a plan.
But what did I want?
I wanted the world safe for groundhogs, marshes, and beaches, and screw all these pesky people. I’m just irritated with my house-guests.
No, you’re not. Emmett and I had talked a long time last night about Canber again, the man we thought safely buried until he was outed again on national news. Now it felt like Canber was at the table having this conversation with me. The people are still too many, Canber’s point of view insisted. And you know it. Why not defend the marshes, the ground-hogs, the planet? Without the biosphere, you’re doomed.
I firmly brought another dead to the table, my late lover Zack, Emmett’s best friend. What would you think, Zack?
The ends can’t justify the means. Killing people is not OK.
Well, that was irrelevant. My business wasn’t killing people. It was… Herding them, I realized uncomfortably. Controlling the public flow of information, spinning the news to uphold the Raj in power, censoring the Amenac forums…
Hell, yeah, I was herding them. In fact, I founded Amenac with the explicit intent of herding them. I wanted a world where people could grow and trade crops safely. More food, more people survive, less war. Peace for people who wanted to cooperate, rather than a downward spiral of brutality, where bullies stole from people who worked hard to create value.
And it worked. Amenac grew to facilitate more realms of collaboration, free of censorship inside their closed little clubs. And those private groups didn’t need to be opened. Amenac was carefully channeled communication, not a free-for-all. I liked it that way. It was useful.
Demagogues and fools also babbled on Amenac. I was OK with cutting them off, limiting their audience, frustrating their aims.
PR News was an even more blatant creation for the purpose of herding people. We never even changed the name from our original joke, Public Relations for Project Reunion. It was in fact the propaganda mouthpiece of the Resco Raj. My vision for PRN was that it sing that song, loud and clear and true, for the same people I built Amenac to serve. People who wanted to work hard, contribute, and make a life for themselves in this more challenging world. People who wanted protection from thieves and bullies and were willing to pay taxes for that. People who were willing to cooperate. I truly believed that most of our citizens were those people. And because they produced worthwhile food and products, they deserved protection. No one would survive unless the producers thrived.
In some parts of America, they followed a different road. Producers, farmers, fell into serfdom. The bullies called the tune, and the middle class was falling into slavery, raped and beaten at will, their crops stolen, leaving them barely enough to survive.
Maybe I was kidding myself, and Hudson and New England would inexorably slide into that as well. But I thought we could beat back the darkness, maintain the middle class values of order, fairness, earning your way, and even education and other public goods.
We needed our own orderly tax-collecting bullies to protect us from the stealing raping kind of bullies. That was the Resco Raj.
PR News didn’t prevent anyone else from broadcasting and disseminating a competing vision of our present and future. Indie News did it all the time. We even collaborated with them, when our visions didn’t clash too badly.
So in what way had I become discontent with PR News? The voices of Canber and Zack vanished as my clarity and conviction grew. But here Emmett’s voice in my head chimed in, Pray on it.
I pursed my lips in irritation. Emmett and I could, and hopefully would, grow to a ripe old age together, and still not really understand what each other meant by praying. No matter. We both did it, and it worked for us, even if our conceptions of God and universe were mutually untranslatable.
I felt out, into the plants surrounding me, breathing and carrying air and fluid through their bodies, in their own way. The calm purpose of the lights and pumps and heater. The Internet surrounding and connecting me, still worldwide though the net was growing attenuated. I felt into the ocean. That stuck for a moment, because I’d been thinking of it as angry and dangerous. Of course it wasn’t. It was liquid, slightly deeper and more powerful, one more frozen ice sheet freed and flowing again in Earth’s vast circulatory system, through the oceans and the sky.
Whoa. I blinked out of that and looked at my paper. Power is, I thought. It doesn’t have to be evil. But it acts. I frowned.
My problem with PR News wasn’t that we were censoring the news. It was that I felt our power, our influence, was slipping. By the standards of my partners on Amenac–PR, that didn’t make me a very nice person. But I felt the power of the deadbeats and demagogues, haters and blamers growing. We’d done an incredible job getting Hudson to pull together, see ourselves as one people, all in this together. So much so that in the face of this new crisis, New England’s government had fallen, completely peaceably, in favor of Hudson’s.
I imagined Virginia’s Raj was in for a sticky time, if they could hold their little rump-U.S. act together at all. They liked to pretend they still maintained true American traditions and institutions, and lord it over Hudson on that basis. Well, they were due for a sharp and pointy learning curve.
Of course, not all Hudsons were happy campers. Jersey was not on the beam. I wondered if that was what Pete wanted to
talk to me about.
Put that aside. Censorship. Versus true investigative journalism. If I admitted my true agenda was a propaganda machine – and if I didn’t admit it, that was basically because ‘nice girls don’t’ – then what was bugging me about censorship? And about having reporters poke sticks into the Raj? Was it just that I’d lose useful allies? People that I cared about, even loved, sure. But in this context, they were also useful. The enterprise was weakened if its principals were not aligned to the mission.
Well, I wanted to know the truth. So did everyone in Amenac–PR. My fingers itched to get hold of a safe darknet browser, to ooh and ah over criminals and nut jobs at their play. I thought Dave’s ideas were awesome, and I bet it would be a phenomenal draw on Amenac. I expected video posts galore, evidence in support of conspiracy theories, and the same kind of footage of soldiers herding civilians that I vetoed on PR News. We could put an orange-and-white cautionary frame around it. Don’t trust what you see! A darknet portal would be catnip for people like us, and journalists.
Yes, I was sure I wanted that. And I wanted it for Dave and Popeye and Amen1 as a plaything. The Rescos would find it useful, too, especially in enforcement.
I was arrested by a realization. We needed that relief valve, that critical view of the Raj. We needed to see them screw up. Our viewers needed to be able to tell when PR News or anyone else was spinning fairy tales too far from the truth. I knew Hudson’s Raj was a good one, a superlative one. But PR News wasn’t giving the citizens enough information for them to understand that. Our failure to ask the Raj to justify itself, and stand up to scrutiny and comparison to the Raj in other super states, made us weaker.
New England knew Hudson was better run, because we were so intertwined. But how did Virginia know that? How did even Jersey know that, or Penn? We needed to spell it out for them.
Clarity was achieved. I knew what I wanted and why, rock solid. Once I really believed in something, I could sell it.
I considered checking in on Eddie York and Pam Niedermeyer and the editorial contest. Today I was giving Pam her shot at the brass ring. But I didn’t have time before the meeting with Pete, and he might add vector to what I wanted to do there, anyway.
Instead I headed for my own room and got dressed for business. Nice-enough turtleneck? No, ‘nice enough’ wasn’t good enough. Red satin blouse. Ditto on the good-enough chinos. I shoved them back into the closet and picked out a pencil skirt to match my navy blazer. Navy stockings with that, and pearls, and hair done up in a smooth bun. The usual approach to a black eye and a fat cut lip was cover-up and base makeup. Screw that. I drew on heavy eyeliner and my reddest lipstick.
I smirked in the mirror. Maybe after I was done with Pete, I’d face off with Pam and Eddie York on a video call too.
Pete Hoffman’s eyebrows flickered up as our video conference connected, in brief surprise at my playing dress-up I beamed him a confident smile. He grinned crookedly and relaxed into it. Carlos joined us on the call from the Gladys’ lower-level apartment. If he had any reaction, he didn’t show it. Pete was a lot more fun to work for that way.
“Hi, Pete! Would you like a status report on what I’ve been up to?” I offered.
“Briefly,” Pete agreed, holding up fingers to indicate one inch.
I rattled off my tsunami adventure, elevation and tsunami risk maps, Mangal and Mel’s misadventure, and tryouts for a new editor for PR News.
“Why?” Pete frowned. “And why now?”
“Let’s get back to that,” I said. “You wanted the short version. You said you had a special project for me?”
Pete pursed his lips and made a note. I had no doubt we would indeed get back to that. Pete might look laid back, especially dressed for Sunday morning in an old Rutgers sweatshirt, but he was a superb manager. “Yes. I currently have Jersey offline. The citizenry is pissed off. But they need to come back online. Ideas?”
Carlos and I prodded to get a better idea of Pete’s current status. Basically Jersey was under firm lockdown everywhere. North of the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan, we didn’t call Jersey anymore. Those suburban and rural areas had been absorbed into Upstate instead of Jersey, as the armed epidemic control borders shifted inward toward the Apple. These days what we meant by ‘North Jersey’ was the problematic urban corridor from Newark to Trenton, that Emmett had been assigned to pacify. Lockdown in North Jersey was extreme. Sean Cullen had ordered in the regular army to disarm and control the population. All movement out of immediate neighborhoods was forbidden, the streets blockaded, heavily armed and patrolled. It sounded like a giant concentration camp.
South of that, the community lockdown kept coastal refugees from swamping inland communities. Relocation was being planned and executed in a highly controlled fashion. Citizens could keep their guns in their own homes. But no one was allowed to carry arms into another community, except the martial law forces.
“OK,” I said. “Pete, are you proud of this arrangement?”
“Proud?” he echoed. “No. It’s necessary. People are pissed off. Can’t say I blame them. But martial law requires order. The inland agricultural areas deserve protection. The coastal refugees require resettlement. It isn’t ideal. But we have thousands, tens of thousands, of criminals and insurgents in Jersey. My charter is to enforce law and order.”
I held up a hand in surrender. “That’s not where I was going, Pete. What I’m asking is, would you be willing to explain, on a PR News interview, why you did what you did. As I see it, there’s that half. Explain to the rest of Hudson that the Raj hasn’t run amok in Jersey. You’ve done what is necessary and sufficient. Or, close enough. In a messy situation.”
Pete scratched his jaw, considering. “In principle. Maybe not me. Cam’s better on camera. Maybe Sean.”
“Good point,” I agreed. “Then the other half is explaining the same to the people of Jersey. And explaining to them what’s happened in the rest of Hudson, and beyond, while they’ve been offline. I think we should lead with that. Status of Jersey. News summary of context. Give that a day or two to sink in. Then bring Jersey back online. Possibly work outward from inland Jersey to the coast and North Jersey.”
“I think that’s brilliant, Dee,” Carlos said.
Pete thought it over and concurred. “But get someone else on camera.”
“Would you be open to a press conference, or town hall type format?” I pressed. “Where we take questions? Not live,” I clarified for Carlos’ sake. His censors needed time to edit things out. I’d prefer these statements edited, anyway. “Perhaps invite IndieNews, Amiri Baz and Pam Niedermeyer on PR News’ behalf, a couple Rescos, community leaders. Take some hard questions, and answer them.”
“What are you up to, Dee?” Pete asked.
“I think I’ve been making a mistake,” I said. “By not subjecting our Raj, and other super-states, to some journalistic scrutiny. I think PR News has done Hudson a disservice. If we paint all pictures rosy, it doesn’t stand out as well, that Hudson did a much better job of handling this crisis. Compared to New England, Virginia, Carolina. God knows what Florida is up to. And the Gulf states – the tsunami didn’t hammer them, but continued sea level rise surely will.”
“So you want to take gloves off on the neighbors, too?”
“Yeah. Gently. Fairly. Lessons learned. Pete, I think it’s important for all of us that the Raj can look our people in the eye, via a camera, and say, ‘Yes, this was the best I could do.’ And be proud of that, in public. And on the downside, know that they will have to answer for it if they do something raw, without adequate reason.”
“Dee, I’m not answerable to the public,” Pete quibbled. “I answer to Sean Cullen. To a lesser extent, Tony Nasser and John Niedermeyer. General Houston within the scope of joint operations.”
Tony and John were Pete’s equals in the Hudson Resco Service, at least on paper. Pete was first among those equals. Terrance Houston commanded Hudson’s regular army – all armed forces
except the Resco militia, really. Army and National Guard units were seconded and directed by a Resco when used in civilian areas. But their command chain went through General Houston.
“Understood,” I agreed. “But Pete, I think this is for the Raj’s own good, and credibility. Like you were telling me last night. Get real with people. They’ll believe you. And that risk and reward of public scrutiny will keep your Rescos honest.”
“She says, married to the least honest Resco I’ve got,” Pete commented.
“Meaning, sir?” Carlos asked.
“Never mind. Alright, Dee, let’s try it your way,” Pete agreed. “But with Sean or Cam as spokes-goat. Not Emmett. Questions about Emmett will be awkward. You know that?”
“I know that,” I agreed. “Emmett has a deep supply of public goodwill. He can take it.”
“Deep, but not inexhaustible,” Pete cautioned. “I do need a rush on this, to get Jersey back on the Internet ASAP. OK? Good. Alright, back to your new schemes for Amenac–PR. What’s your goal?”
“Our quality is slipping. We need higher quality news reporting. Part of that is covering the hard stories, as you said last night. Increasing our credibility. Reducing censorship. I’m not criticizing Carlos and his people – they do an excellent job. But some of the guidelines should be relaxed.”
“Such as?”
“Climate change. Right now, Pete, it is not OK that we are not discussing climate change. Not after the events of the past week.”
Carlos said, “I tend to agree, Pete. If everyone’s talking about it, and they are. We need to be one of the voices.”
“A calm one. Pardon pun,” Pete said sourly. “Alright, if you tread very softly, I’ll sign off on it. By treading softly, I mean there are places we don’t go. What Emmett told us last month? That when Congress voted for the Calm Act, it was because they faced a one in ten chance of escaping the Venus Effect? Even with a crash halt on all fossil fuels? I don’t think that helps anyone. Stick to current events.”