by Ginger Booth
“May also need a pause for translation,” I suggested. I panned. “Australia and New Zealand are paying attention. Russia’s asleep. Japan is offline, maybe a cyclone.” There were flickers of traffic across the Asian landmass as well, but that region was a war-torn train wreck. Likewise Africa. Internet access was rare. They could wish for America’s problems.
I sighed. “Not bad. Pity about the President,” I added, vexed.
“Oh, he’ll see tonight’s broadcast,” Emmett assured me.
Cam chuckled in dark glee.
“Am I missing something?” I inquired.
“You show her, Cam,” Emmett invited.
“Got it. Dee, every border has two sides,” Cam explained, pointing to the display. “But not two commanders. What we think of as ‘Pennsylvania’ is really the northern and eastern borders, and the interior. But west and southwest – those borders are controlled by General Schwabacher. Ohio, West Virginia, and this western panhandle of Maryland as well – that’s all under Schwabacher as military governor. This south-east border with Maryland is also garrisoned by General Tolliver as Penn’s military governor. Across that border is Virginia–Maryland–Delaware, under its military governor. They probably couldn’t do anything, because they don’t keep troops up there. But Schwabacher’s turf ends here. Just 15 miles west of Raven Rock.”
“Used to end there,” Emmett commented through the phone.
“Did you talk to Schwabacher today, Emmett?” Cam asked, with a grin.
“Above my pay grade,” Emmett claimed. “Well, I said hi. He says hi to you, too, Cam.”
“Sweet of him to remember,” Cam said, pleased. To me, he explained, “Schwabacher was commandant of the Army Command School at Fort Leavenworth. Emmett and I got our masters degrees in military science under him. Different years, of course. Emmett is senior to me.” Dwayne flashed him a look. There was a lie in there somewhere, but I couldn’t tell where.
“So,” Dwayne cut in, “you’re saying Schwabacher is stealing the President back from Penn?”
“No comment,” Emmett said.
“No comment today,” I suggested.
“Today,” Emmett agreed. “Duty calls, gotta go. Bye.”
I handed Cam’s phone back to him, reluctantly. My own phone was shielded so no one could track me. And it would stay that way until I was safe at home in Totoket. A special voicemail message advised people that I was off-planet when my phone went dark.
“Have a good chat?” Cam inquired brightly.
I frowned. “Um, we didn’t get around to that.”
“What was with all the honey, honey, bananas and honey?” Dwayne inquired. Cam shot him a quelling glare. “Inquiring minds want to know, sweetie!”
Cam sighed. “We should go. Thanks for sharing this with us, Tom! You looked great.”
I was beginning to think Emmett was the only Resco who wasn’t a control freak. Granted, he was emphatically dominant, if not outright domineering. But he didn’t control anything he didn’t have to. Too much effort. He preferred to control key elements. He laid down the rules, and then let people do their thing within his framework. Cam, on the other hand...
“So are you saying it isn’t technically feasible?” Cam demanded. “To make meshnet users untraceable, except within their own community subnet?”
I’d hoped to inflict my own opinion on all this, working directly with the meshnet team on Staten Island. And just stick Cam and Emmett with my preference. Which was that there was only one meshnet. All users were trackable unless they stuffed their phones into a shielded pouch, like I did. And there were only trusted message-senders, not trusted sub-communities within a sea of messages. Trust whoever you want. Doubt the rest.
My preference had the distinct advantages of being foolproof and quick to deliver. Foolproof in the sense that there can be no security breaches, if there was never any delusion of security in the first place. Perhaps I was closer to the anarchist Amenoids than I cared to admit. Then again, perhaps I was an even bigger control freak than Cam, since I’d been perfectly happy to inflict my preference on everyone without consulting him.
“Technically feasible. That’s a good razor,” proclaimed Genghis, to move things along. Several of the Amen1 crew were consulting with us today by video, since my first-day specification negotiations with Cam and the meshnet crew had bogged down. They were talking by video, anyway. Cam was adamant that his body language gave him greater presence in the meeting. Sitting 10 feet from him, I hid behind an avatar. My encrypted audio was spoofed to originate in upstate New York. I was still pretending not to be on Long Island.
“Is the protocol layer fully encapsulated?” I asked wanly. “Is it even possible to force all message traffic through the same API?”
“Yeah… Well, I mean it’s possible,” allowed Chas, the original programmer of this meshnet. “It isn’t that way now.”
“This meshnet is already out there,” I pointed out. “So even if our new meshnet were locked up tight, it meets the old one out in the wild and – what happens?”
“Oh, we’ll just overwrite the old version virally,” said Carmen. “That’s how we do releases.”
My mouth was hanging open. “So, this is sort of an attack meshnet?”
“Well, we’d ask permission from Midtown first,” Chas offered doubtfully.
Amen1’s nasty Popeye weighed in. “Fucking secure it anyway you want, moron…” Further expletives deleted. His point was that Chas didn’t have a prayer of writing a hacker-proof protocol layer. Popeye would easily hack through anything he came up with, and prove it to him.
Cam looked perfectly ready to dismiss anything Popeye said out of hand, just because of how badly he said it. So I jumped in and said, “I afraid I agree with Popeye.”
“I don’t,” said Genghis. “I think if Chas wrote it, and Popeye’s team bullet-proofed it, it could work. The ‘attack meshnet’ scheme means that we can plug any vulnerabilities we miss.”
I attempted, “Does anyone besides me have a problem with the ‘attack meshnet’ concept?”
“Not really, Dee,” Genghis replied with a shrug. “Viral is viral.”
“What I want,” Cam said firmly, seizing control of the controversy back, “is no spam. No denial of service attacks. No trolls. Bad actors are shut down. Reverse-911 type messages get priority delivery. Local traffic before long-distance. I want good traffic. I want to kill bad traffic. The Internet sucked that way. The meshnet doesn’t have the throughput to suck that way.”
“Actually,” allowed Chas apologetically, “without that kind of control, it would be kinda hard to scale up from a few thousand users, to a few million. Each phone would be too bogged down. Conveying messages of no interest to that phone owner.”
“So is it technically feasible?” Cam repeated doggedly.
A long silence.
“Fuck!” Popeye eventually exploded. “Yeah…”
“Yes,” Genghis confirmed. “We can make that happen. Is that all we need for today?”
Once everyone had disbanded to pursue their technical dreams and visions, Cam perched on the desk beside me, ankles crossed casually, doing his best to look open, vulnerable and friendly. The man had that sensitive boyish look down pat.
I wasn’t buying it anymore. I frowned back at him.
“Why are you so opposed to control on this meshnet, Dee?” he asked.
“I wanted to get the meshnet into people’s hands – helping people help themselves – as fast as possible,” I said mulishly.
Cam nodded thoughtfully. “So why wait?”
“You just –” I stopped, and reconsidered. Under this plan, the new software would just overwrite any previous version of the meshnet encountered out there. Which meant we didn’t have to wait on any new features to be implemented. We didn’t have to wait on anything. “Duh…” I said, wincing.
“Dee?” Cam said, with a boyish smile, eyes dancing, “you did a phenomenal job getting us this meshnet. For the who
le Apple. I can’t thank you enough. Do you think the rest of us could take it from here now? Let you get back to Project Reunion?”
I sighed, and gave him a sheepish smile. “This isn’t my fight, is it. I’m just in the way.”
“I didn’t say that,” said Cam. “And I don’t believe that. Seems to me, you found me a perfectly operational meshnet, ideally suited to my circumstances. But also, you brought me the best meshnet development team possible, to make it even better. But they weren’t good enough at security. So then you got me the best hackers to ensure security. That’s a triumph all around, Dee.”
I nodded. “You’ve got a good team in place now. It’ll work.” Cam was laughing softly at me. “What?”
He shook his head in amusement. “Any advice you’ve got for me, any time, girlfriend. I’m all ears. You ought to learn to take a compliment, though. You done good!” He rapped his knuckles on the desk. “C’mon, let’s leave the techno-elves to their work. We need to get back to our own.”
That was easier said than done. I was stuck on Long Island until mid-Monday by the continuing nor’easter that had me so seasick the day after Thanksgiving. The storm got a whole lot worse before it got better. My phone stayed resolutely in its shielding pouch, my email unchecked, for security. I hate security. Being incommunicado left me climbing the walls in frustration. An Internet addict cut off from her drug of choice is a terrible thing.
And to think, once upon a time I used to enjoy travel. Nowadays it always went horribly wrong somehow.
That night, Sunday, we were back at Camp Suffolk, Tom’s quarantine. At long last, the PR web team broadcast the documentary of Project Reunion investing Staten Island a month ago. Like the Thanksgiving coverage, everyone in Camp Suffolk was tuned in, enthralled.
Dwayne cried, in Cam’s arms. Tom cried in mine. The raw footage had held me spellbound, even with all the mechanics and boring bits, fast forwarding and rewinding. The final video was devastatingly good.
Amiri Baz and Emmett did a face-to-face update at the end, where Emmett admitted that this all happened a month ago. Pennsylvania had been led to believe Project Reunion would launch at Thanksgiving. But the first quarantine graduates were released from Camp Yankee that very Sunday. A few clips of those refugees showed in a box on the screen while they talked.
As the credits rolled, a much healthier Ty Jefferson, now a free man, sat down in a restaurant in downtown Greenwich Connecticut. He lunched with the Camp Yankee garrison commander – Bridget Merryweather – and Major Papadopoulos, Resco of Fairfield County, where Greenwich lay.
“We’ll miss your smiling face at Camp Yankee, Ty,” Merryweather assured him.
Jefferson laughed out loud. “I’m not going anywhere. Except back to Staten Island. Just as soon as we’re done with the evacuation.”
24
Interesting fact: Ohio’s offensive did capture the executive branch ark at Raven Rock Mountain, but not President O’Donnell. He and his family were extracted by Pennsylvania forces minutes after the end of his final address. Ark-mates claimed that his forbidden slip of their location was a cry for help. Virginia’s offensive was more decisive. The Speaker of the House, broadcasting in video from the Congressional Ark in Virginia, declared O’Donnell and his Vice President impeached by vote of the House and Senate. Next in the line of succession, she declined to claim the Presidency in advance of March and the final stage of the Calm Act. The Presidency was left vacant.
Among the six-day mountain of email awaiting my return to my keyboard – Cam had a point, about killing spam – I received a notice from the West Totoket Cocos, Jamal and Delilah, the militia head honchos in my little corner of Connecticut. Congratulations, I had placed in the top half of my community in agricultural production for the year. Not a very lofty accomplishment, given the general level of vegetable gardening skill in suburban America. But nice of them to acknowledge me.
I almost missed the second paragraph. Those ranking in the bottom half of agricultural production would lose their land, and be consolidated into condominium housing. I qualified for a subsistence lot increase, and was awarded both sides of my block. This was already a done deal, having been proposed, debated, and voted through while I was busy with Project Reunion. I’d missed a couple meetings of the West Totoket agricultural committee.
Nothing ever seems to happen when you show up for committee meetings. But God help you if you miss them.
I flew next door in a panic, to pound on Mangal and Shanti’s door. No answer. I peered through the now uncurtained window. Furniture gone, boxes everywhere. I turned away just as the door belatedly opened.
“Hi, Dee, welcome home!” Shanti cried, with a big smile and a quick hug. “We expected you back Friday, didn’t we?”
“Yeah!” I said. “Then someone bombed New York while I was there. And somehow I got stuck out on Long Island.”
“I’m amazed you still travel,” said Shanti. “You’re very brave.”
“Look, Shanti – I just got the email from the civic association, about my new land grant,” I said. “I… Gah! You don’t have to leave! If it’s my land, you’re certainly welcome to stay on it!”
She beamed, folded her arms, shook her head. From long exposure, I recognized Shanti-of-steel when I saw it. “No, it’s fine, Dee. We have our own building for the Indian community. In Maple Common condominiums. It’s much closer to town, for Mangal to work at Amenac. We’re already half-moved. And looking forward to it.”
My heart sank. “Shanti… You’ve got to believe me. I had nothing to do with this. I’ve been so busy…”
“It’s fine,” she insisted. “You’re in our hearts forever, Dee. No matter where we go. I hate to think what this past year would have been like, without you.” She hugged me again. And gently but firmly closed the door on me.
I gazed around the neighborhood from Shanti’s stoop, in the gathering dusk of early December. I saw no one, no lights coming on in the windows. I swallowed. That was my job last summer, to teach everyone on my block to grow vegetables. But then Zack had died, and I…dropped the ball.
Now I had an even bigger farm to drop the ball on. I’d have to hire laborers from the condos and supervise them half the year. And drat it, Zack’s old house with its livestock wasn’t on my block. I wondered who ended up with that land grant, and how much time I had to evacuate my livestock.
Welcome home, to the next new normal.
I dragged my feet in dread to the house on the other side, fearing that Alex’s household might have decamped, too. But no, thank God. It had never occurred to Alex and Shelley and Trey that any of that nonsense applied to them. We were family. We just didn’t quite fit under a single roof. I hugged them all, and received huge congratulations on the weekend’s blockbuster Project Reunion broadcasts. That made me feel much better. It was close enough to 6 p.m., so we all trooped back to my kitchen, and visited while I slapped dinner together.
And soon they were gone. I had the house all to myself again. Compared to the happy madhouse of Camp Cameron on Long Island, or Adam’s house-tugboat on Staten Island, or Emmett’s destroyer in New York Harbor, it sure was silent. Sure, Emmett ‘lived with me.’ Except, of course, that he didn’t. He’d lived here for a week, over a month ago. And now the whole block was mine. I tried to feel privileged.
I tried to feel anything at all, aside from alone and intimidated. I gave it up and worked in my office until I felt sleepy enough to give up for the night.
Emmett called just as I was snuggling in. “Missed you, darlin’!” he said. “You were offline a long time.”
“Oh, you would have been too busy to talk to me anyway,” I murmured.
“Uh-huh,” said Emmett. “You alright, Dee?”
I told him about how I now proudly owned my block. I’d graduated to a real subsistence farm. Sort of. “Was this your plan, Emmett? If you’d stayed? Kick everyone out of their homes –”
“Whoa, darlin’,” he said. “DJ carried through on my
plan, yes. But the plan was to let the Cocos lead. They were supposed to get together with their communities. Lay out the information, how agriculture was going, how we could improve. West Totoket has an agricultural committee to decide that stuff. Hell, you’re on that committee, aren’t you?”
“I’ve been busy,” I growled.
He sighed. “Darlin’, maybe you don’t agree with what they chose. But it was up to the community to decide. Then they run their new plan for a year. All the Cocos in greater New Haven, different plans. Then publish their results. Compare the results, with each other and with the non-Coco areas. Adjust. Repeat. No revolutions. Just social change, done gradually.”
New Haven County wasn’t wall-to-wall Coco districts. The Cocos had grown popular, their districts well-managed, and their ranks swelled to several dozen. But most of the area still got by with the old local governments, answerable directly to the Resco. West Totoket was the only corner of Totoket township with a Coco, for instance. Lucky us. Well, last winter Zack’s militia was shooting looters. The Army provisioning details barreled through non-Coco districts, taking whatever they wanted. We’d felt pretty lucky then.
“Well. I’m glad they didn’t try to kick me out of my house,” I whispered, with a catch in my voice.
“Uh-huh,” Emmett said softly. “Wish I could be more help with the farm, darlin’.”
“I was thinking about that,” I said. “That’s…not realistic, is it? You do Army. This summer was a fluke.”
“Yeah.”
I stroked the phone and begged myself to talk to him. Burble on. Be brave or funny or sexy or just gossip. There was no end to all we could talk about. I loved him. I was honestly fascinated with what he was doing in New York now, dying to know how Pennsylvania’s attack changed his plans. But my throat felt closed. I swallowed a couple times. It didn’t help.
“I love you, Dee,” Emmett said. “It was so good to see you. Bad enough Pennsylvania attacked. Wish they hadn’t stolen our last night together.” He waited. I didn’t speak. “I hope we can talk tomorrow, darlin’.”