Feed n-1

by Mira Grant

  We were left with less than half of our original connections when the disconnections stopped, and the only windows not outlined in white were those belonging to Magdalene and Mahir. I looked to the window that held my anxious, former second-in-command and said, “I’ll call you when this is over,” before tapping out the code to close the connection. “Magdalene, you can stay, if you understand that you’re not currently employed by this site.”

  “I’m assuming you’re about to go over the current risk situation, and that you’re not hiring me right away because my contract needs review, since you want me to do Buffy’s job,” said Magdalene, matter-of-factly. “Sound right?”

  “Sounds exactly right,” said Rick.

  “I’ll stay. It’s my problem as much as it is yours, and my department’s going to need me to know what’s going on.”

  “Thank you,” I said. I meant it. She’d never really replace Buffy, but her response told me that she was willing to try. “Rick, transmit the files.”

  “Done.”

  “Everyone, please check your mail. You’ll find an attachment detailing what we currently know, including that whoever ordered Buffy’s death was highly placed in the current government. Tate is involved. This information isn’t just sensitive; it’s potentially enough to get any one of us killed. Read it, transfer it to off-line storage, and wipe your mail. Whether you’re involved with our ongoing efforts to find out what’s going on is going to be up to you, but if we’re convicted of, say, treason against the United States government, all of you have just placed your asses on the line. Welcome to our party.” I stood. “Shaun and Rick will be remaining to answer any questions you may have; Shaun speaks for the Irwins, and Rick, as my new second, will be speaking for the Newsies. Thank you for coming. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to make a phone call.” Ignoring their protests, I walked into the bathroom, turning off the interior lights before closing the door behind me.

  While Dave and Alaric were cobbling together a new conference room, Shaun and I had been isolating the bathroom in its own frequency screen, creating an envelope that could only be broken by transmissions made on a very specific set of bandwidths. Most of my equipment was as good as dead on the other side of that door, which was exactly how I wanted it to be. If I had that much trouble dialing out, the rest of the world was going to have one hell of a time dialing in.

  Even with the screen’s keys coded into my PDA, it took almost five minutes to establish a connection with Mahir’s phone. His first words were delivered in a sharp, wounded tone: “What the hell was that about? Have I given you some reason to doubt my dedication to this site? Have I ever done anything other than precisely what you asked of me? Because I’m not feeling terribly valued at the moment, Miss Mason.”

  “Hello to you, too, Mahir,” I said, leaning against the bathroom sink and removing my sunglasses. The glow from my PDA was enough for me to see by. It wasn’t enough to relieve my headache, but it was a start. “You are terribly valued. That’s why I fired you.”

  There was a long pause as he tried to sort through that sentence. Finally, he admitted, “I’m afraid I’m not following you.”

  “Look. There’s every chance in the world that things are going to go wrong.” I wished that I was lying to him. I’ve never wanted to be a liar so badly in my life. “We’re playing in an arena we’re not equipped for, and there’s nobody we can call who has the tools we need to get equipped for it. We’re either going to find what we’re looking for, or we’re going to go down in flames.”

  “What does that have to do with firing me? You seem happy to take everyone else down with you. What robs me of my right to a seat on the Titanic?”

  “The fact that I need you to be receiving the signals in the Coast Guard tower.”

  There was a pause. Then: “I’m listening.”

  “If this goes as badly as it has the potential to go—if it goes all the way wrong—we could wind up dead, and everyone who works for the site could wind up charged with treason against the United States government. If whoever’s behind all this can somehow turn it from their plot into our plot, that means every employee of After the End Times is in a position to be charged with terrorist involvement in the use of live-state Kellis-Amberlee to bring about human viral amplification.”

  “… oh, my God,” said Mahir, sounding horrified. “I hadn’t considered that.”

  “I didn’t think you had,” I said, grimly.

  The Raskin-Watts ruling of 2026 didn’t impact just America. How could any country, however opposed to the United States government it might be, afford to look like it was soft on the matter of the infected? It couldn’t. Every industrialized nation in the world with an extradition treaty had stepped forward by the end of 2027 to state that any individual found guilty of using or conspiring to use Kellis-Amberlee as a weapon would be turned over to the government of the affected nation or nations in order to stand trial. Being outside the boundaries of a country no longer protected you from that country’s laws, if you were foolish enough to cross the one line everyone had agreed to draw in the sand.

  The United States doesn’t apply the death penalty to many crimes these days. Terrorism remains an exception to this particular rule. Use Kellis-Amberlee as a weapon and die. That plain. That simple. That universal.

  “Georgia, I appreciate the thought, I truly do, but I don’t think sparing me is going to save the rest of you.”

  “It’s not intended to,” I said.

  “Well, then, what is it intended to do?”

  “It’s intended to give you time to download everything off the server, burn it to disk, and run for Ireland,” I said. Ireland has never had an extradition treaty with the United States. It still doesn’t. “If you can get across the border, you can probably lie low for years.”

  “And do what? Hope they forget that I’m an international terrorist?”

  “Make sure the world finds out the truth.”

  The pause this time was even longer. When Mahir spoke again, his voice was quiet and very distant. “I’m not sure whether I should be flattered that you trust me this much, or disturbed that you’ve just informed me that my life is your contingency plan.”

  “Does that mean you won’t do it?”

  “Are you mad? Of course I’ll do it. I’d have done it if you’d asked me upfront, and if you’d asked me in a month. It’s the only way.” He hesitated before adding, wistfully, “I just wish I were better with the notion of you doing this unsupported. Rick’s a good fellow, but I’ve not worked with him long enough to feel like I’m leaving you in competent hands.”

  “What he can’t manage, Shaun will,” I said. “I’m going to cut off your official server access at midnight. I’ll be mirroring all our findings on the old server address. You remember the old server?” The “old server” was a box we rented from Talking Points when we were all part of Bridge Supporters. We’d used it to back up our files when we were on the road, since Bridge Supporters wouldn’t post anything that hadn’t been through full validation and didn’t store anything uploaded by a beta blogger for more than twenty-four hours. We hadn’t used it since well before the campaign trail began, and almost no one outside the clerical staff at Talking Points knew I still had the lease. It wasn’t entirely secure, but it wasn’t ours, either. Mahir could access it without leaving a trail that would prove he was still a part of our group.

  “I do,” he said. “I suppose I shouldn’t call you after this.”

  “Not a good idea. I’ll contact you when I can.”

  “Right.” He chuckled. “Cloak and dagger, that’s us.”

  “Welcome to journalism.”

  “Indeed. I do wish I’d met you in the flesh, Georgia Mason. I truly do. It’s been an honor and a privilege working with you.”

  “You may still get the chance, Mahir; I’m not ready to count us out yet.” I slid my sunglasses back on. “Be good, be careful, and be alert. Your name is still connected to After the End Times
. I can’t change that.”

  “I wouldn’t want you to. You do the same, won’t you?”

  “I’ll try. Good night, Mahir.”

  “Good night, Georgia… and good luck.”

  The click of the call disconnecting sounded more final than it had any right to. Snapping my phone closed, I straightened, sighed, and reached for the door. It was time to get back to my team.

  We had an awful lot of work to do.

  * * *

  It is with regret but without shame that I must announce my resignation from this site. We part, not over differences of politics or religion, but merely over a desire to explore different things. I wish the Masons the best in their future projects, and I look forward to seeing what they will accomplish.

  I am sure it will be something spectacular.

  —From Fish and Clips, the blog of Mahir Gowda, April 9, 2040

  Twenty-three

  Six weeks is a long time in the news, even when you’re not working on a big project. Following a political campaign is a big project, one that’s capable of taking up the resources of an entire team of dedicated bloggers. Training a new division head is also a big project. The Fictionals tend to require the least amount of hand-holding, being largely content to sit around, tell each other stories, and look surprised when other people want to read them, but the person in charge of keeping them on-task needs to be more focused than the rest of the breed. There were contracts to sign and review, permissions to change, files to transfer, and a thousand little administrative things to handle that none of us wanted to deal with. Not with Buffy’s blood still fresh in our minds.

  Buffy caused her share of problems during those six weeks. Maybe she was gone, but she was still very much a part of the team—and not a productive one. Becks spent the bulk of her time hunting through our code and communications feeds looking for bugs and back doors. I’d clearly never realized how paranoid Buffy really was, because the number of confirmed recording devices hidden internally was over three digits, and Becks was still finding feeds for wireless listening devices hidden in just about every office, public gathering place, and conference center we’d been to since this whole thing started. “If she’d wanted to go CIA, she could have owned the place,” Shaun muttered on the day Becks confirmed that there were still bugs running in Eakly.

  “But would they have put up with her fixation on sappy purple poetry?”

  “Guess not.”

  Alaric and Dave followed Becks through our systems, rebuilding the mess she made as she rooted out Buffy’s worms. Together they were almost up to the task of remaking the things Buffy had built alone, although it was starting to wear on them; they’d signed on as journalists, not computer technicians. “Hire new field systems maintainer” was near the top of my to-do list, right under “uncover massive political conspiracy,” “avenge Buffy’s death,” and “don’t die.”

  And even with all of this going on, we still had a job to do. Multiple jobs, really. Not only did we need to keep following the Ryman-Tate Campaign—which continued to gather steam, now buoyed by not one, not two, but three major tragedies, earning us a lot of extra news cycles in the traditional media outlets, as well as online—we needed to keep our beta bloggers on-task and updating the rest of the site. The news marches on, whether you’re walking wounded or not. That’s one of the beautiful things about the news. It’s also one of the most frustrating.

  Two weeks in Houston. Two weeks of sending Rick on every assignment we could get away with sending him on, while Shaun and I locked ourselves in our hotel room and planned for a war we’d never signed up for, against an adversary we’d never volunteered to fight. Whose side was Ryman on? I was guessing he wasn’t a part of Tate’s plan; no sane man would sacrifice his daughter like that. Then again, Shaun and I were adopted to satisfy the Masons’ desire to prove the zombie war had been won by the living, and they’ve never stopped us from walking into the jaws of death—if anything, they’ve encouraged it, living for the ratings, because when they lost Phil, the ratings were all they had. So who are we to judge the sanity of parents? We sat up until almost dawn every night, working through the darkness, making plans, making contingencies for those plans, looking for a way out of a maze we didn’t see before we were already lost inside it.

  Shaun pretended he didn’t know I wasn’t sleeping, and I pretended not to hear him punching the bathroom walls. Caffeine pills and surgical tape; that’s what I’ll always think of when I think of Houston. Caffeine pills and surgical tape.

  I tried to talk to Ryman twice; he tried to talk to me three times. None of our attempts synchronized. I couldn’t trust him when I didn’t know whether or not he was working with Tate; he couldn’t understand why we’d pulled away, or why we were overworked and snarly with exhaustion. Even Shaun was visibly withdrawn. He’d stopped going out in the field with Steve and the boys when he didn’t need to file reports, and while he was still meeting his contracted duties, he wasn’t doing it with anything like the flair and enthusiasm Ryman had come to expect from him. From all of us. There wasn’t anything we could do about it. Until we knew if we could trust him, we couldn’t tell him what was going on—what we suspected, what we knew, anything. And until we told him what was going on, we couldn’t be sure we could trust him. It was a Möbius strip of a problem, endlessly twisting back on itself, and I couldn’t see a way out of it. So we pushed him away and hoped he’d understand the reasons when things were over.

  After Houston, it was time to get back on the road, rolling across the country like nothing had ever gone wrong. Not nothing; Chuck was gone, replaced by a pale-faced drone who scuttled around doing his job and avoiding anything that resembled socialization. Our security detail tripled while we were moving, and Shaun was no longer allowed to ride out unescorted. He took an almost malicious glee in forcing his babysitters to follow him into the nastiest, most dangerous terrain he could find, and some of the footage he got out of it has frankly been amazing. The Irwin community has been buzzing about putting him up for a Golden Steve-o award this year, and I’ll be surprised if he doesn’t win.

  We spent a month glad-handing our way across the western half of the country while the other candidates stayed in the air and the major cities, assuming major metro areas would have better anti-infection measures. Tell that to San Diego. The devil-may-care approach was winning Ryman big percentage points, enough to keep him in the news even as the media flurry kicked up by this latest tragedy died down. “Man of the People Keeps the World Grounded”—human interest gold. A few outlets made the requisite noises about how Ryman’s insistence on an old-fashioned campaign had dogged him with tragedy from the beginning, but the facts of Rebecca and Buffy’s deaths were enough to pretty much silence them. Maybe you could blame the senator for Eakly if you reached, but you couldn’t blame him for terrorist action or assassination attempts. America is the land of the free and the home of the paranoid, and yet, blessedly, we haven’t fallen that far. Yet.

  Six weeks after Memphis, we were overworked, overtired, and about to hit the crowds in one of the country’s toughest, most essential markets: Sacramento, California.

  You’d think Shaun and I would be excited about a stop in our state’s capital, being California kids bred and raised. You’d be wrong. California is essentially a bunch of smaller states held together by political connections, water rights, and the stubborn refusal of any segment to cede the cash-cow name “California” to any of the others. The California secessionist movement has been around since before the Rising—not the state quitting the country, but the various parts of the state quitting each other. Sacramento has no love for the Bay Area. We get the good weather, the good press, and the big tourism dollars, and they? They get the state government and a lot of hard to defend farmland. To say that there’s a little resentment there is to understate the case just a little. Whatever fellow-feeling Sacramento had for the rest of the state died when it stopped hosting the annual state fair and started hosting
the annual “everybody hide in their houses and pray they don’t die”-a-thon in its place.

  The air was hot and so dry it seemed to suck the moisture out of my throat as we stepped out of the Sacramento Airport and onto the partitioned-off loading zone where we’d be meeting the senator’s convoy. It was late afternoon, and the sun was bright enough to stab at my eyes through the lenses of my sunglasses. I staggered, catching myself on Rick’s shoulder. He shot me a questioning glance. Silent, I shook my head. We were all feeling the strain, Shaun as much as any of us, and if Rick said anything, Shaun would spend the rest of the afternoon fussing over me. There was too much to do for me to let him do that.

  Senator Ryman had flown in the day before, along with Governor Tate and most of the senior staff. We were supposed to be right behind them, flying commercial air rather than via private jet; unfortunately, a medical emergency grounded our plane in Denver, forcing us to wait on the tarmac with a hundred terrified passengers to see whether our aircraft was about to be declared a closed quarantine zone. I’ll admit, for a few guilty moments, I was almost hoping it would be. At least then we’d be able to get some sleep before heading back to our home state. I was really starting to worry about Shaun. It had gotten to where he only went to bed when I put him there.

  A familiar black car pulled up to the curb, and the door opened to reveal Steve, implacable and hulking as ever. “Miss Mason,” he said, with a nod in my direction.

  One corner of my mouth curled upward. “Nice to see you, too, Steve. What’s our plan for the afternoon?”

  “I’m your escort to the Assembly Center. The convoy leaves for the hall in ninety minutes.”

  “That doesn’t leave much time.” I grimaced, grabbing a suitcase in each hand as Steve got out of the car and moved to start hoisting our equipment. Senator Ryman was giving a keynote speech to the California Republicans, and it promised to be the sort of evening that resulted in lots of sound bites, accidental quotes, and competitive reporting. We all needed to be on our game. I’d been hoping to manage it with more rest and less caffeine, but you can’t always get what you want. “Thanks for coming to meet us.”