by Ginger Booth
We shut the door and took an entire day to ourselves. It was wonderful.
Yeah, more than one day of that, and Emmett and I would have imploded. By the second day the sun was shining, but the temperature plummeted well below zero, and the plows hadn’t caught up. We went out snow-shoeing for a little while, swam and played in the indoor pool, and got nicely worn out enough to laze in the jacuzzi again.
The next day, the temperature rose 70 degrees, and we drove off into the slush.
By then, I was feeling 100% again. In Montpelier and Burlington and Brattleboro, I accompanied Emmett to all the meetings, adding my own perspective to the conversations.
Seeing Burlington again was an eye-opener. I went to college there, and visited not long before the borders closed with Adam Lacey, the Coast Guard ark-itect I was dating at the time. Back then, the tension was palpable, everyone on edge, terrified of what came next, store shelves nearly bare.
Now the stores were either closed or fully stocked. Craft beers flowed liberally in the pubs downtown, accompanied by local cheeses. Our first night, Emmett sprang for one massive cheeseburger apiece, with fries and one pint of beer, for Sump and his troops, to great cheering.
That night, Emmett finally admitted to me his guilt offerings to Sump’s company. The plan Sean Cullen chose to execute in North Jersey had a fatal flaw. Emmett estimated the company in Sump’s assigned position would take 40% casualties. Unfortunately, he was right. As the days wore on, the company seemed to forgive and forget. Sump himself understood all along. But he appreciated Emmett’s acknowledgment of their sacrifice.
My burger was half venison, enriched with butter, and the hothouse lettuce and tomato were excellent, as was the Vermont cheddar. There was even a wheat bread bun. Vermont and New Hampshire traded liberally with Canada, and had wheat bread galore. Emmett chose a fried egg on his burger, and reported it was as fresh as his own hens at home. High praise, from Emmett.
In general, the Burlington folk we talked to enjoyed being not quite at the end of the earth. Canada was north of a closed border. But both sides opened it whenever convenient. Upstate was west across Lake Champlain, and theoretically also closed, but they winked at that, too. That corner of Upstate and Vermont got along famously.
Gran caravans passed through from time to time. Northern Vermont had train service into the rest of New England, mostly used for freight. We asked after the refugees settled from the Apple. They pointed around the bar – maybe that one, and that one, too, oh no, maybe he was from Boston. Problems? From the refugees? Why would there be problems? Drink another beer.
The ark on North Hero was still there in mid-lake. The local Coco, a congressman before the Calm, had negotiated right of passage, so people drove through the ark fiefdom regularly. They didn’t trade much.
Burlington was completely self-sufficient in power generation, and had more than enough bio-gas from the dairy industry. Vermont was thriving. By all accounts Upstate, across the long lake, wasn’t much different. Even before the tsunami, they were far better off than urban southern New Hampshire.
Western Massachusetts, when we reached it, was intermediate, as expected. Western Mass had some small cities, like Connecticut, which struggled to find a new identity. It had plenty of the old growth forest and hills and picturesque small farms New England was known for.
Resco Major Dooley in Springfield did indeed hate Ivan Link, as Carlos told us back in January.
Emmett decided to swing back east to Worcester, Mass. for further discussions. Another modest city, Worcester had its issues, familiar from New Haven and Hartford’s adjustment pains to the Calm, though with less of a racial component. More to the point for us, the Raj was considering slicing Massachusetts again, just east of Worcester, into two parts, as it was while the Boston-Providence borders were in force. Three parts, really, since the part of Massachusetts east of old Rhode Island was folded into Narragansett.
The good news in Worcester was that they were trying to revive the UMass medical school.
We didn’t talk much to the disgruntled and angry on our travels. Emmett’s perspective was that talking to people about why they were angry, just made them angrier and self-righteous about it. We weren’t there to validate discontent. I think Sump’s troops were under strict instructions to keep malcontents away from us. Which was fine by me. I had more than enough of them in Cambridge, and felt I’d learned what little the lesson had to offer.
I hoped we were done after Worcester, having visited all of Hudson’s new turf. But Emmett felt that Connecticut’s experience transferring to Hudson was the most instructive of all. And of course we were insiders in Connecticut, which helped people be more forthcoming.
We spent a day in Cam’s old turf, visiting economists at UConn. Hudson dollars, backed by perishable food shares, were fundamentally different from New England clams, a more traditional all-purpose floating currency. The economists’ general consensus was that we didn’t have a long enough time-line to judge how well it worked, converting Connecticut clams to dollars. Most citizens hedged their bets, anyway. They converted part of their currency to hudson dollars for food transactions, and kept a reserve of New England clams for industrial transactions and consumer goods.
Emmett’s conclusion was that we might be stuck with two currencies used for different purposes, with significant overlap. I reserved judgment, wanting to hear input from Upstate industrialists, about whether they found the hudson dollar limiting when it came to their needs for private sector capital. I felt neither of us was really familiar enough with big industry to form a valid opinion. And neither were the economists.
Connecticut seemed to like the Hudson Constitution, in practice. People were tired of the bickering over a New England Constitution, with the government hamstrung in limbo in the meantime. They felt Sean Cullen made the right call, declaring himself the civilian ruler and commander-in-chief. Ivan Link had respected the democratic process more, but in practice, left a leadership vacuum. Link’s choice played better to a northern New England audience than it did in pragmatic Connecticut. Voter testing made for more productive democratic town meetings. Religious leaders enjoyed the licensing seminars, and the increased scope of operations available to them. For instance, Hudson supplied food to church soup kitchens, and visiting nurses to church clinics.
This led to another thorny discussion with poor Pam. As the Great Pumpkin, she’d been one of the leading lights for the New England Constitution. But PR News needed to do a special, I thought, describing Connecticut’s positive Hudson transfer experience for the rest of New England. Pam took it with good grace.
Our basic take-home message for the Raj was that New England seemed to be well-managed, and thriving. The communities we visited were performing at or above what Emmett felt was reasonable, given what they started with. Their solutions were locally appropriate. That verdict included coastal Massachusetts and Narragansett. Ivan Link positioned himself there for the same reason Pete Hoffman was focused on Jersey. The top man stayed close to the top problems.
Only in New England’s case, Ivan couldn’t delegate that to a top Resco, because his top Resco was Coast Guard, not Army. Urban populations were a land problem. In the next tier down, he’d lost his two most adventurous Rescos to Hudson – Emmett and Cam.
The best part of the trip was working again with Emmett as partners. We’d both missed that, and came home comfortable with each other anew.
34
Interesting fact: Through the deepest of Calm Act censorship, Homeland Security was no more interested in pornography than cat videos. If anything, Internet porn and cyber sex got raunchier as civilian law enforcement disintegrated. Martial law officers were aware that their own troops, especially those of atypical sexual appetites, or constrained by ship-board duty, were heavy consumers of the medium.
“Hey, hey! Our silent partner is here! Good to see you again, Emmett!” Genghis greeted him from the monitor.
Of course we stopped of
f in Totoket before going home to Brooklyn. Dave convened an Amenac–PR steering committee meeting at the lair while we were available.
“He’s not silent,” I said. Emmett threw an arm around me on our couch perch and grinned. “Believe me, he has input all the time.”
We did the rounds of our usual progress reports, letting Pam Niedermeyer go last since this was her first official meeting as a steering director. Besides, she didn’t have much left to say after Emmett and Carlos and I were done. Most of her upcoming big specials awaited decisions from the Raj, and we covered that ground.
We did give her a standing ovation, though. Our graphics designer Will, too. The week-long Hudson Loves Navy hug-a-thon was not only artistically excellent, but made a measurable dent in bad public morale, at least as expressed on Amenac. Even bloggers felt compelled to write something in tune with the military appreciation campaign surrounding their essays on the screen. Mangal, who continued his effort to quantify and track disgruntlement, reported major improvement.
Well, that would change. We hadn’t said anything yet on the news, but those of us who grew food already knew. The weather was worrisome.
There were probably more sporadic protests. But none so large HomeSec couldn’t quash all mention of them from media and Internet. Boston, of course, was thoroughly muzzled and chastised after the Cambridge incident. They learned the hard way not to demonstrate without permission under martial law.
“Kudos all around!” I said, to close that segment. “Dave. Darknet.”
“Yes?”
“No,” I said, regretfully. “Not in public. But you have it implemented. Right?” I looked to Popeye with a conspiratorial grin. “Where’s my alpha access?”
To general cheers, Dave took over half the monitor to show off our new darknet browser, Soot. It was beautiful! I mean, from a technical standpoint it was beautiful. Will styled it in grungy industrial metal, with zebra-orange warning edge ribbons, perfect in context. They had an Internet spider system that tracked favorite rogue sites as they migrated through shifting no-name IP addresses, then cached and cleaned the content of malware.
I suspect Emmett and Pam and Carlos got powerfully bored while the rest of us gleefully geeked out on the how of it all.
But even they were intrigued by the queries Soot supported, even at this early stage. Illicit items, services, and persons for sale. (The data was cleaned of any contact info or opportunity to carry out a transaction.) Conspiracy theory tracking. (Separate threads tracked Florida, Texas, Russia, Canada, Brazil, Colorado, Virginia, Penn, and Hudson as the ‘known’ South Pole Bomber.) Bootleg suppressed video. (Emmett wanted to watch the shoulder-launched missile attack in Cambridge from all available angles.) Climate projections galore. (Including plenty on the Venus Effect, parallels with the Younger Dryas, and an Illuminati plot to return the planet to the dinosaurs.)
“Wait, let me see the global wind patterns,” I said, prompting Dave to back up to a pair of globes. They sported wind vectors showing magnitude and direction, sometimes tinged orange for danger. The globe on the left was historical. A slider allowed you to select a day to display, ranging from the beginning of the Calm, back a decade. The globe on the right showed the same, starting from the outset of the Calm Act to today. The default settings showed today versus the same date ten years ago. There were an awful lot of arrows to take in, but the wind patterns sure looked different.
“NCAR in Boulder,” Emmett pointed out, in the fine print. “Is that legit?”
“National Center for Atmospheric Research,” I said. I remembered from touring around Colorado with my brother Jay. Naturally my physicist brother and I took in the geek attractions like Boulder. “Sure looks legit, and nicely displayed. Can you email me some kind of URL for this page, Dave? I’d like to share it with Cam Cameron, and he’ll want to discuss with other people.”
“You want to violate the censorship sandbox already, Dee,” Dave pointed out happily.
Carlos sighed. “Could you make a copy, securely accessible on Amenac?”
“Of course, Carlos,” Dave agreed. “I’ll get you that URL, Dee. I think we need a button to automate that operation, Popeye.”
Popeye agreed, in dark joy.
“Thank you. I love Soot,” I assured them. “I could play with this all day! And completely safe? Even for Emmett and me to access from Resco Manor? Really?”
Dave crossed his heart, scout’s-honor. “Safe as watching the news.” He chuckled. “So long as your brain is turned on.”
“There’s the rub,” I agreed. “So…this closed alpha. How many people have access?”
“All PR News reporters,” Pam told me softly. “Jennifer may have mentioned it to Brandy O’Keefe, over at IndieNews.”
“All of Amenac–PR, really,” Mangal said. “It’s addictive. Oh, and the meshnet team on LI, of course.”
Chas’ meshnet development team was remote, but over half our people worked offsite. I was probably overdue to add young Chas to the steering committee. But he hadn’t asked yet.
“Probably HomeSec, too,” Carlos said. “And Leland, of course.”
I read that as ‘definitely HomeSec.’ Plus Canadian Intelligence, via Leland. And if I understood the way the world worked correctly, Leland fed the good stuff to the American gran caravans. That was pretty wide distribution.
“OK, so we need to bring some more people in,” I said. “IndieNews. IBIS, our new FBI. The Raj – all Hudson Rescos? DJ certainly, and Ash Margolis, our man on intelligence. Probably military intelligence, Emmett?”
Dave’s smile grew to a grin. “I thought you were going to shut us down.”
“Limited access,” Carlos said. “That means, you have the technical means to track all access, and cut any access. Understood?”
The Amen1 hackers nodded amused assurance. Yeah, I didn’t trust them out of my sight. But, “No problem, Carlos,” I told him with a smile.
“Dee, do not bring Ash Margolis and HomeSec down on my head,” Carlos warned.
Emmett said, “Ash would find Soot orgasmic. Bet the porn channels on that thing are phenomenal.”
Dave shrugged demurely. “I didn’t want to demo that feature in mixed company.”
Emmett laughed. Pam looked like I felt. I’d rather not have imagined porn so depraved that it had to go underground to the darknet.
Carlos shook his head in resignation. “Not. On. Amenac. Not public. Understood?”
So we didn’t lift censorship much, and didn’t get to add Soot to Amenac.
After the teleconference, I eddied out of the throng with Mangal and Dave for a private word in Dave’s office.
“Close enough?” I asked them. “We got some concessions on censorship, Mangal. We can discuss today’s climate changes. And Soot will thrive, Dave. And day-to-day PR News is handled. Pam’s doing great. You shouldn’t have to cover for me so often.”
“You done good, Dee,” Dave assured me. “Amen1 is on board to stay. Count on it. Sorry for doubting you. Anarchy doesn’t appeal to us as much as it used to.”
Greater Virginia’s continuing descent into hell would turn anyone off of anarchy’s dubious charms.
“No,” I agreed. “Amenac was never about anarchy, Dave. Especially not now that Winnepeg has the bomb.”
“No! The smart money’s on Ark–Lou–Sippi. They bombed the South Pole!”
“Be nice. My mother-in-law is Ark–Lou–Sippi Raj.”
Dave winced. “My condolences.”
Mangal shot him a quelling look. “Thank you, Dee. We understand the compromises better now. I can support that. And be proud of the work we’re doing.”
“Good.” I hugged them both. “Thank you, guys. Oh hey, how’s Mel?”
“The fistfights were a distraction,” Dave said. “A replacement was hired.”
I grinned crookedly. “No subjects were identified or harmed by these verbs.”
“No need,” he agreed, with a perish-the-thought wiggle of fingers.
&nb
sp; So my Amen1 hacker team-mates, and my idealistic partner Mangal, were appeased. The Amenac–PR coalition would survive.
I stood in my back yard garden in Totoket, sniffing the air unhappily. It was mid-March. Last year I was sprouting peas indoors by now, to give them a head start on the shoreline’s brief spring. Because the Sound grew cold in winter, the coast was slow to warm in spring. Inland was far colder in winter, hotter in summer, less idyllic in fall. But we paid for that with a short and clammy spring while inland they gloried in flowers and early vegetables.
In a sometimes vain attempt to get a good pea harvest, I developed a habit of sprouting and planting peas across the first three weeks of March. Even in a good year, getting the timing right was a blind-fold game of pin the tail on the donkey. Too early and the peas were cold and stunted, or drowned by the spring rains, and failed to thrive. Too late and the summer heat killed the plants before much of a harvest.
In the nearly four weeks since the tsunami, shoreline Connecticut had received no rain. The blizzard I met near the Vermont border, passed to the north. Instead, desiccating strong winds blew toward the ocean, most days. Other days, polar cold flashed through, or a sudden heat wave. Then the dry winds resumed. That was nearly the opposite of what ought to be happening in my garden in March, when strong clammy winds blew onshore from the cold Atlantic, laden with rain as often as not.
Winter wasn’t over yet, but cold and windy March had as much potential sun as the glorious end of Indian summer in October. We had enough light to grow crops. But no other stars were properly aligned yet. No, I wouldn’t attempt peas this year. The cold dry wind was unnerving. I wished it would break, but feared what it might break into.