Project Reunion (30 page)

“This may break the records of Tom’s broadcast –
Christ!
”

“What now?” Emmett sighed. Cam stuck his head back in to check on me. He wandered in, curious, when he saw what I was talking about. The conference display was still set to echo Tom’s monitor. Dwayne and Tom followed him in.

“Pennsylvania just lit up! Emmett – we’re finally reaching Pennsylvania!” I cried in triumph. “Solid borders on the west and southwest... Starting to glow on the northern border with New York state... Wow, the whole New Jersey border just lit up solid. I don’t know what these blue things are.”

“Radio broadcasts, maybe,” Cam suggested.

“Should be some radio broadcasts around the periphery of Pennsylvania,” Emmett said.

“That’s what Cam just said.” I zoomed in on a blank area. “Huh, there’s this dead spot in the middle of the southern border.”

“Raven Rock Mountain?” Emmett suggested.

“Raven Rock Mountain,” Cam said.

Irritably, I punched Emmett on speaker so they could hear each other.

“You’re right. Aw... They’re not going to let the President see it? We’re not getting traffic inside the Penn border,” I sighed.

“No power or Internet inside Penn,” Emmett and Cam said, in more or less the same words at the same time.

“How’s traffic outside the Northeast?” Emmett added.

“Zooming out... Holy. Cow. Still rising
everywhere
in North America. If they have Internet, they’re hearing about this tonight.”

“How about Europe?” Emmett asked.

“It’s after midnight in the UK, Emmett... I take that back. I guess a few people stayed up, huh?”

“A lot more than a few,” Cam said, for Emmett’s benefit. “Not much outside the UK in Europe, Emmett. It’s later there.”

“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.”

-o-

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?”

-o-

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 whole 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.”

-o-

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.”

Chapter 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.