“God, Buffy, I’m sorry,” I whispered. My words dropped into the silence that followed her plea like rocks into a wishing well, with as little effect.
On the screen, Buffy took a deep breath and held it before letting it slowly out. “You’re going to see this,” she said, lips tugging up into a small and bitter smile. “You have to see it. Or you’ll never know the truth. By triggering this file, you’ve mailed a video to my parents telling them how sorry I am, and how much I loved what I did. When it closes, you’ll have access to my private directory, including a file named ‘Confession.’ It’s locked and time stamped. If you don’t open it, it’ll be admissible in court. I didn’t trust everything to the servers. I think I know better than anyone else right now just how dangerous it is to trust people. You have something of mine that no one else has. Look there. You’ll find everything I’ve got, including the access codes for all those listening devices. Good luck. Avenge me if you can. And I’m sorry.”
Buffy paused, smiling for real this time, and added, “This—being here, with you, following this campaign—really was what I wanted. Not all of it, maybe, but I’m glad I came. So thank you. And good luck.” The picture winked out.
The three of us stayed frozen in our silent tableau for several minutes. A sniffle from behind my left shoulder told me Rick was crying. Not for the first time, I damned Kellis-Amberlee for taking that simple human comfort away from me.
“What did she mean, something we have that no one else does?” Shaun asked, putting his hand on my right shoulder. “All her luggage was in the truck.”
“But we have her laptop,” I said. Pushing my chair back from the desk, I rose, turning to face them. “Get me a tool kit and her computer.”
Never steal another reporter’s story; never take the last of another reporter’s ammo; never mess with another reporter’s computer. Those are the rules, unless you work for a tabloid, where they replace “never” with “always”… but once you’re dead, you’re meat, and all bets are off. I had to keep telling myself that as I used a screwdriver to work the bottom panel off Buffy’s laptop. Shaun and Rick stood nearby, watching. We’d already scanned the machine itself and found nothing—literally nothing. She wiped the drives at some point, probably before we left on the drive that killed her. When it came to paranoia, Buffy was world class. She’d had good reason to be, after Eakly.
It was somehow anticlimactic when the laptop’s bottom panel came free, tearing the tape stretched between it and the battery case and dropping a data stick into my hand. I held it up, showing it to the two of them. “The plot thickens,” I said. “Shaun, Becks used to be a Newsie. How’s she with computers?”
“Not as good as Buffy—”
“No one’s as good as Buffy.”
“But she’s good.”
“Good enough?”
“Only one way to find out.” He held out his hand. I gave him the data stick without a moment’s hesitation. The day I couldn’t trust Shaun, it was over. Simple as that.
“Get her online and get her going through these files. Buffy said there were time stamps and IPs. We need to see what they can give us.” I stood. “Rick, get back on that report.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Rouse Mahir,” I said, moving back to my machine. The chair was still warm; things were moving faster than they seemed. “I don’t care what it takes. We need to get a copy of whatever’s on that disk stored off-site, and I think ‘London’ qualifies.”
“Georgia?” Rick’s tone was soft. I glanced toward him. He hadn’t moved back to his own machine; he was just standing there, looking at me.
“What?”
“Are we going to survive this?”
“Probably not. You want out?”
“No.” He shook his head. “I just wanted to know whether you realized that.”
“I do,” I said. “Now get to work.”
Both nodding, Rick and Shaun did exactly that.
For all that Mahir seemed to be out, or asleep—or, God forbid, if this was somehow even bigger than it looked, already dead—his machine address still registered on the network. I tapped it in along with my priority code, activating a personalized screamer. If he did anything online he’d start getting loud, intrusive pings demanding that he contact me immediately. Screamers are generally viewed as extremely poor form outside of emergencies. As far as I was concerned, this qualified as an emergency.
Satisfied that I’d done everything I could be reasonably expected to do in order to find my second, I bowed my head, set my fingers to the keys, and went to work.
There’s something deeply reassuring about doing a factual report. You have every bit of information you need at your fingertips waiting to be smoothed out and turned into something that makes sense. Take the facts, take the faces, take the facets of the truth, polish them until they gleam, and put them on paper—or, in my case, put them in pixels—as an exercise for the reader. I set my feed for a live page-by-page, with a license confirmation on the upload. Anyone who really thought this was some sort of cover-up for my death could report the site to the licensing committee for abuse of my number, and that would cancel the rumors faster than anything else I could do. It’d make good news, too.
The e-mail started coming in as soon as my first page was uploaded. Most of it was positive, congratulating me on my survival and assuring me that my readers had known all along that I’d get out alive. A few letters were less friendly, including one I tagged for upload with the op-ed piece I was planning to write; it said Shaun and I deserved to die at the hands of the living dead, since sinners like us were about as ethically advanced. It would fit perfectly with the reality of how Buffy had been bought.
Page six had just gone up when Shaun called, “Becks says she’s cross-checking the IPs now. Most of them look to be scrambled.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning she can’t follow them.”
Damn. “How about the time stamps?”
“They prove it wasn’t any of us, or the senator, but not too much other than that. Just going by the times, it could even be Mrs. Ryman.”
Double damn. “Got any good news for me?”
Shaun looked up from his screen, grinning. “How does access codes on all Buffy’s bugs sound?”
“Like good news,” I said. I would have said more, but my computer beeped, flashing an urgent message light at the bottom of the screen. I double-clicked the prompt.
Mahir’s face appeared in a video window, his hair unkempt and his eyes wild as he demanded, “What’s going on? What’s wrong?”
“You weren’t answering your phone!” I said, embarrassed even as the words left my mouth. He was on the other side of the world; there was no way this situation could hold the same urgency for him.
“The local Fictionals were holding a wake and poetry reading in Buffy’s honor.” He brushed his hair out of his face. “I attended to report on it, and I’m afraid I had a bit too much to drink.” Now he sounded sheepish. “I fell asleep as soon as I got home.”
“That explains how you slept through the screamer,” I said. Twisting in my seat, I asked, “Shaun, we have a local copy of those files?”
“In the local group directory,” he confirmed.
“Good.” I turned back to my computer. “Mahir, I’m going to upload some files to your directory. I want you to save them locally. Make at least two physical copies. I recommend storing one of them off-site.”
“Should I delete them from the server once I’ve finished reading?”
His tone was light, attempting to joke with me. Mine wasn’t light at all. “Yes. That would be a good idea. If you can pull the rest of your files long enough to reformat your sector, that wouldn’t be a bad idea, either.”
“Georgia…” He hesitated. “Is there something I should be aware of?”
I bit back the urge to start laughing. Buffy w
as dead; we’d been reported dead to the CDC; someone had tried to use us to undermine the United States government. There was a lot going on that he needed to be aware of. “Please,” I said, “download the files, read them, and give me your honest opinion.”
“You want my honest opinion?” His expression was filled with naked concern. “Get out of that country, Georgia. Come here before something happens that you can’t bounce back from.”
“England wouldn’t want me.”
“We’d find a way.”
“Entertaining as political exile might be, Shaun would go crazy if I forced him to move, and I wouldn’t go without him.” Impulsively, I removed my sunglasses and offered Mahir’s image a smile. “I’m sorry I may never get to meet you.”
Mahir looked alarmed. “Don’t talk that way.”
“Just read the files. Tell me how to talk after you do that.”
“All right,” he said. “Be safe.”
“I’ll try.” I tapped the keys to start the upload and his image winked out, replaced by a status bar.
“Georgia?”
Shaun’s voice; the wrong name. I turned toward him, a cold spot forming in my stomach as I registered the fact that he hadn’t called me “George.” “What?”
“Becks has one of the bugs online.”
“And?”
“And I think you ought to hear this.” Reaching over, he pulled his headset jack out of the speakers. The crackle and hiss of a live transmission promptly blared into the room, seeming all the louder in the sudden silence. Even Lois, crouched next to Rick’s monitor, was silent and still, her ears slicked back and her eyes stretched wide.
“—hear me?” Tate’s voice was almost impossibly loud, amplified by the bug’s internal pickups and Shaun’s speakers. “We are going to solve this problem, and we’re going to solve it now, before things get any worse.”
Another voice, this one indistinguishable. Shaun caught my eye and nodded. He’d have Becks running it through a filter as soon as we finished listening, trying to clean it up enough to determine the speaker. That was all we could really do.
“And I’m telling you, they’re getting too close. With the Meissonier girl gone, we can’t steer them anymore. There’s no telling how many of those damn bugs she planted around the offices. I told you we couldn’t trust a spook.”
I caught my breath as Rick started swearing under his. Only Shaun was completely silent, his lips pressed into a tight line. Unaware that he was being listened to, Tate continued: “I’m in her little boyfriend’s portable office. If there was any spot she wouldn’t bug, it’d be the one where she was doing her own share of the sinning.”
“He really didn’t know her very well,” Rick said, in a bitter, distant tone.
“Neither did we,” Shaun replied.
“I don’t care how you take the rest of them out,” Tate barked. “Just do it. If the CDC couldn’t finish them off, we’ll find another way. Understand me? Do it!” There was a slam, as if a receiver was being thrust rudely into its cradle, followed by the sound of footsteps. The hiss continued for a few more seconds, then cut off as suddenly as it had started.
“They only cut and save when there’s sound being received,” said Shaun needlessly. We all knew how Buffy’s saver bugs worked. Plant them and they’d press anything they heard to file, going dormant to save their batteries when the space around them was silent. She must not have been listening to her files. Just saving and transmitting them, serene in her own certainty that her side was the right one.
“Tate,” snarled Rick. “That fuck.”
“Tate,” I said. My eyes were burning. Finally sliding my sunglasses back into place, I looked from one to the other. “We have to see the senator.”
“Can we trust him not to be a part of this?” Shaun asked.
I hesitated. “How good is Becks?”
“Not that good.”
“Fine.” I swiveled back to my screen. “Screamers on everyone. Get the whole team online. I don’t care where they are, I want them here.”
“Georgia…?” said Rick, uncertainly.
I shook my head, already beginning to type. “Shut up, sit down, and get started. We have work to do.”
* * *
Every life has a watershed moment, an instant when you realize you’re about to make a choice that will define everything else you ever do, and that if you choose wrong, there may not be that many things left to choose. Sometimes the wrong choice is the only one that lets you face the end with dignity, grace, and the awareness that you’re doing the right thing.
I’m not sure we can recognize those moments until they’ve passed us. Was mine the day I decided to become a reporter? The day my brother and I logged onto a job fair and met a girl who called herself “Buffy”? The day we decided to try for the “plum assignment” of staff bloggers to the Ryman campaign?
Or was it the day we realized this might be the last thing we ever did… and decided not to care?
My name is Georgia Mason. My brother calls me George.
Welcome to my watershed.
—From Images May Disturb You, the blog of Georgia Mason, April 8, 2040
Twenty-two
It took two hours and seventeen minutes to gather every blogger, associate blogger, administrative employee, system administrator, and facilities coordinator employed by After the End Times together in one hastily opened virtual conference room. Our conferencing system has eleven rooms, and the eleventh had never been successfully hacked, but Buffy “built” them all. The code was hers, and I didn’t feel like we could trust it anymore. We would have invited the volunteer moderators—leaving them out didn’t seem right—but we didn’t have a way of contacting them without using unsecured channels. And that was the last thing I was willing to do just now.
With Becks, Alaric, and Dave—who was finally back from Alaska, having acquired several hundred hours of footage, and a minor case of frostbite—working in tandem, we almost had a functional replacement for Buffy. Alaric and Dave did most of the heavy lifting of setting up the room, freeing Becks to keep trying to sift through Buffy’s data. There was a lot to sort through.
The atmosphere started out jovial, if tinged with unavoidable melancholy. Buffy was dead; we weren’t, and every person who logged on seemed to feel the need to comment on both facts, congratulating us on our survival even as they mourned for her. The Fictionals were taking it the hardest. No surprise there, although I was pleased to see Magdalene stepping up to comfort the ones who seemed the most distraught. No fewer than four of the network connections we were getting off the Fictionals were coming from her house—Fictionals tend to be the most social and the most paranoid of the bloggers you’re likely to encounter, but Maggie, with her sprawling old farmhouse with the military-grade security system, has a talent for getting them to set the second aside in favor of the first. She could’ve been an alpha at her own site, if she’d wanted it, but what she’d wanted was to work with Buffy. That wasn’t an option anymore. I tapped an IM to Rick, reminding him to ask her about taking the department; if she was handling the mourning period this well, she’d definitely be an asset.
The grumbling started about an hour in, when the congratulatory celebration of our survival died down and it became apparent both that there were people online but working on some sort of secret project, and that we weren’t planning to tell anyone what was going on until everyone arrived. No exceptions, no allowances. Not this time.
The last person to log on was a Canadian Fictional named Andrea, mumbling something about hockey games and cold-weather romances as her connection finished rolling and her picture stabilized. I wasn’t really paying attention by that point. That wasn’t why we were here.
“Is everyone’s connection stable and secure?” I asked. Tapping out a predetermined sequence of characters on my keyboard caused the borders of the dozens of tiny video windows to flash yello
w. “If the answer is yes, please input the security code now appearing at the bottom of your screen. If the answer is no, hit Enter. We will be terminating this conference immediately if we can’t confirm security.”
The grumbling slowed. People had been relieved to see us when we first called them, confused as I refused to let them off the line, and finally annoyed by our group refusal to tell them what was going on. Add draconian security measures and it became clear that something was up. One by one, the borders of the video windows representing our staff flashed white and then green as their security status was confirmed. Shaun’s window was the last to change states; we’d agreed on that beforehand. He would close the loop.
“Excellent.” I picked up my PDA, which had been cued to my e-mail client since the conference began, and tapped Send. “Please check your e-mail. You’ll find your termination notice, along with a receipt confirming that your final paycheck has been deposited to your bank account. Due to California’s at-will status and the fact that you’re all employed under hazard restrictions, I’m afraid we’re not required to give you any notice. Sorry about that.”
The conference exploded as everyone started talking at once, voices overlapping into a senseless barrage of sound. Almost everyone. Mahir, Becks, Alaric, and Dave stayed silent, all of them having ascertained from the process of getting the conference online that something huge was going on.
Shaun, Rick, and I sat quietly, waiting for the furor to die down. It took a while. The Irwins shouted the loudest, while the Newsies shouted the least; they knew me well enough to know that if I was supporting a grand gesture—and this was a grand gesture—there had to be a reason. They trusted me enough to wait and see what it was. Good team. I hired well.
I set my PDA aside when the shouting began to quiet, saying, “None of you work for us. None of you have any legal ties to keep you here. If you choose to log off at any point during the next five minutes, I’ll see to it that you have a letter of recommendation stating that your value as a journalist is entirely beyond measure. You’ll never have this easy a time finding another job in your life because I’ll pull strings to get you hired, I’ll make sure you’re settled, and then I’ll write you off. This is the all-or-nothing moment, folks: Walk away now if you want to walk, but if you do, you’re walking for keeps.”