by Ginger Booth
Chapter 1
Interesting fact: The First Amendment to the United States Constitution said: “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” The U.S. had no Constitutional right to privacy, though it was arguably implied by the Fourth Amendment against unreasonable search and seizure. By this time, the United States had been systematically spying on its citizens for years.
“That’s really insulting,” I murmured to Mangal, my best friend and co-worker. We were both section heads, supervising web development teams with UNC, the Fortune 100 news and infotainment conglomerate in Stamford, Connecticut. Back then, I actually had to commute to work, on the train several hours a day, living my life in a mirrored-glass high-rise cubbyhole farm. I so don’t miss that. Especially not the quarterly meetings for management, like this one.
“Sh,” Mangal hissed back at me. He had a point. Our boss Dan was frowning at us. I smiled back at Dan vaguely and toyed with my scarf, as though nothing the C-level idiot said was as important as getting my cloth stripes to line up across the European slipknot. Dan and Mangal could probably tell I was seething, but the rest of management didn’t need to know.
The trick is no trick at all. I really am bothered by failed pattern matches. Bathroom floors with those randomly strewn tiny black and white tiles, drive me nuts. So I looked completely absorbed with adjusting my scarf stripes.
“So as part of the new loyalty requirement,” the C-level droned on, “all employees are barred from participating in political demonstrations.” He chuckled. “You wouldn’t want to be mistaken for a terrorist.” No one chuckled with him.
Drat. I found a pulled metallic thread in my scarf, and my employer revoked my Constitutional right to assembly. Not that I’d ever wanted to attend a huge political rally before. I didn’t even like live concerts. Too much traffic. But now I felt a sudden urgent need to take up civil disobedience.
“We will be monitoring compliance,” the C-level assured us. “I realize some of your employees may object.” That he assumed we managers wouldn’t object, confirmed that the man was an idiot. “But really, it’s for their safety as well as the corporation’s. If one of our people gets tangled in a mess like Boston last week, we’ll be able to alert the police and get our people out of there. Though of course, Boston was a planned demonstration. And UNC employees are no longer permitted to attend those.”
Oh good, I’d wondered about that. How exactly UNC intended to ensure our safety at the demonstrations we were now forbidden to attend. But fortunately I found a way to scrunch the scarf fabric and tease the gold thread back into place, at least partway.
Mercifully, the corporate Chief Fascism Officer completed his spiel. The quarterly meeting returned to more pedestrian topics with the updated quarterly progress on TLA targets – three letter acronyms. Possibly of some interest to managers who owned over $100k in stock options, but I’d never yet heard anything worth hearing in this segment of the quarterly bore. Now onto safer topics, I simply snipped off the last of the pulled thread with a scissors from the mending kit in my purse. I was now free to take notes.
“Phones,” I wrote at the top of my virgin note-taking legal pad. We weren’t allowed to use our phones to take notes during meetings, due to the inevitability that we’d check email, send text messages, and play video games instead of paying attention. UNC issued us our phones with their spyware already installed. I was suggesting that our phones were the primary mechanism for ‘monitoring compliance’ yet again.
“Mortgage,” Mangal helpfully wrote back. As in, we both owed a lot of money, and this new violation of our liberties wasn’t worth arguing over.
“Food prices,” I suggested in return, an ambivalent answer to make him think. On the one hand, food prices were skyrocketing. That made the mortgage and salary issue even more compelling. On the other hand, I was sure that panic over food prices was driving the anger of these demonstrations. The cost of living kept spiraling up, while real wages fell.
Wages fell for most people, that is. Mangal and I were paid very well. We even expected an extra mid-year raise this year to meet the food-fueled cost of living. Our employees wouldn’t receive that bonus raise, though, which irked me. I felt guilty in advance for accepting a benefit my people wouldn’t get, when they needed it more than I did. Mangal knew how much this bothered me.
“Train,” Mangal replied on his notepad, with finality. We could talk on the train, on our commute home from work.
“Happy hour @ Public,” I overruled him. He shrugged and nodded agreement.
The TLA graphs were over, and we received our final exhortation to do…something. Our jobs, perhaps. Mangal and I rose with the rest of the crowd, and shook hands and small-talked our way out of the auditorium. I had high hopes of escaping all the way to my managerial class, higher-walled, one-woman cubicle. But our boss Dan caught us in the hallway. He snagged the other two managers beneath him as well, Trevor and Cheng. He led us all into his even more managerially deluxe office – Dan had walls up to the ceiling, and a real window – to ‘strategize on how to to break the news to the troops.’
I let the guys brainstorm first. There were plenty of women in tech, but when it was down to just the lead geeks, I was often the only woman in the room. The guys, my fellow section heads, told Dan everything there was to say. Of course we were personally offended by UNC’s new depths of intrusiveness, telling us we couldn’t exert our political will in public. Further, we expected the programmers, graphic designers, copywriters, and systems types who worked for us to scream bloody murder. My colleagues reviewed how just last quarter UNC added nicotine and alcohol to the random drug screenings, despite the fact they were legal. The drug screenings now seemed to occur at least once a month. Weekly if someone came back positive for nicotine. I thought my fellow section managers did a great job covering the bases of our employees’ objections, and our own.
“Dee Baker?” my boss Dan said. “You’ve been quiet.” He smiled at me hopefully. “Do you have any ideas on how to sell the troops?”
“I do, Dan,” I shared. “I was thinking that I really, really would rather telecommute.”
“Uh?” said Dan, perplexed. He half-smiled, and offered, “I tried to warn you about buying a place out past New Haven, Dee.”
“You did,” I agreed. “That’s not my point, Dan. My point is, that when my employer does something that really – really – pisses me off? It makes me think. You know? What does Dee want in return for putting up with this new…crud. I want to telecommute, Dan. I bet my people want to telecommute, too.”
Dan shook his head. He splayed his hands on his immaculate desk blotter, his standard laying-down-the-law pose. “Dee, that’s against corporate policy.”
“Just brainstorming, Dan,” I assured him. “I mean, your question was, how can we make this new…crap…acceptable to our people. Your people. Including us.” I felt that was worth stressing, that he was asking me to foist something on my people that I wasn’t willing to take lying down myself. “This is my suggestion, Dan. Offset the next incremental unit of ‘you-can-take-this-job-and-shove-it,’ with a compensating perk. I like telecommuting, for that compensating perk.”
“I’d like to telecommute,” Mangal agreed, and led the other two section heads to nod energetically.
“Gentlemen, Dee, that has nothing to do with the problem at hand!” Dan attempted.
“But it does, Dan,” I assured him. “I can sell this unit of crap to my people, in exchange for telecommuting.
Without the compensating bribe…” I shrugged rather than complete the thought. Leaving the threat vague kept my options open.
“Yeah, I could sell that,” Mangal backed me up, leading a chorus from the other two.
Dan’s hands splayed aggressively on the blotter again. His face began to settle into his more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger act.
So I preempted him. “Let’s all sleep on it, Dan,” I encouraged. “Tempers are high. None of us wants to say something rash.”
Trevor, one of the other section heads, piped up to warn us, “Our people will hear about it from the other branches.” Trevor’s section was system administrators, not creatives like my section and Mangal’s.
“Tell them we’re still discussing it,” Mangal said smoothly. “They’ll like that. Makes them feel better about the situation. Because there’s some wiggle room. Because we’re still talking.” He smiled at Dan.
That’s what I love about Mangal. Not only did my best friend understand my off-the-wall suggestion, but he caught the ball and helped me sell it, with no advance warning whatsoever.
-oOo-
Happy hour at Public, the new corner bar, was far from packed. Mangal and I had been joking for weeks that we should check the place out before they went out of business.
The secrets to their un-success were legion, starting with the choice to open an after-work bar in downtown Stamford in May. For a brief couple of months, replete with vacation days, we commuters stood a prayer of getting home before twilight. Happy hour is for the dark months. The decor was all-over chrome and beige, with bright fluorescent lighting of a bilious cast, that reflected off the chrome to spotlight everyone’s jowls from below. The average overweight American was not flattered by that lighting. Mangal and I were slender enough, and just looked greenish. But I could readily see myself in the convex mirrored pillars surrounding me, showing me how I would look three times wider. Hard to imagine what the interior designer thought he was doing.
Mangal and I easily secured a corner booth, three tables away from any other patrons. We loaded small plates with over forty bucks apiece in free happy hour appetizers, and ordered a couple soft drinks. That waiter wouldn’t be back to check on us any time soon, no matter how little else she had to do.
I took out my phone pouch and reached a hand below table level, to request Mangal’s phone. I stowed both phones away in my purse-borne Faraday cage. If you block all signals, it doesn’t matter what spyware is installed on a phone. No one can locate you, listen to your microphone, run software, or turn on the camera. Of course, we couldn’t receive any calls while the phones were shielded, either.
Mangal sighed. “We should just fix our phones.”
“Can’t,” I said. “I put mine in a pouch for a week, and bought another to use. Personnel informed me that I was required to use the UNC phone. Even on weekends. Because managers often receive work emails on weekends.”
“Too often,” he agreed. “Alright. What did we need to talk about?” He teased a vegetarian nacho out of his heaped plate. Mangal was Jain, not Hindu, but Jains are even more fervently vegetarian.
“Well, I think the telecommute ploy will work,” I mused. “But I want to go to Philadelphia.”
“Since when?”
Mangal knew full well I wouldn’t have gone to the Philadelphia demonstrations until forbidden to go. “Since this afternoon, of course,” I replied. “This quarterly meeting wasn’t due for another two weeks, Mangal. Interesting timing.”
Mangal shrugged. “C-levels take vacation in summer, too, Dee. Scheduling conflict. Could be coincidence.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so. Upper management takes vacation after the fiscal year closes on July first. But this weekend is the big protest march in Philadelphia. They specifically don’t want us there. They expect something big to happen in Philadelphia, and they don’t want us to see. I want to know what.”
Mangal shrugged. “I was planning to enjoy the long weekend. Hang out by the pool, visit the beach. The forecast calls for a record-breaking heat wave through Memorial Day.”
The man had family now, a wife and baby. I could see that. We couldn’t pal around all the time like we used to. “OK. I’ll go alone then.”
Mangal fidgeted in discomfort. “I was talking to Deanna Jo…” Deanna Jo was one of the fact-checkers for the UNC evening news. “Dee, people got hurt in Boston last week.”
I frowned. “That wasn’t on the news.”
“No, it wasn’t,” he agreed. “But several people died. Maybe a couple dozen taken to the hospital. Police got awfully rough on the protesters. Deanna Jo was pretty mad that got edited out. ‘For length.’”
“Gotta leave room for those puppy segments,” I muttered. Dan’s group, us, provided the websites that supported UNC’s market-leading evening newscast. One of my pet peeves was just how much national and world news UNC omitted in favor of dog stories.
“I don’t like it,” Mangal warned. “You should buy a burner phone, keep in touch. Or not go. The Philadelphia rally is expected to be way bigger than Boston, Dee. This could get ugly.”
“OK,” I agreed. “Thanks.”
Mangal nodded off-handedly. “No problem. Telecommuting,” he added with a crooked grin. “That was brilliant.” My commute was only an hour each way on the train. He had all that, plus a much longer drive to the station. “You’ll have time for a relationship again,” he teased, with a grin.
“What for,” I said quellingly. I hadn’t dated since I bought the house and started the long commute. But my last few relationships were nothing to miss. There’s so much social pressure for a woman to believe she ‘needs’ a relationship and children. I didn’t ‘need’ any such thing. I disliked needy men, and didn’t see why they’d like me being needy, either. Mangal had a point, though. Telecommuting, at least I’d have time for such things if an interesting guy happened along.
On the way home from the train, I grabbed us a couple GPS-free cheap burner phones, paying in cash to keep them untraceable, and purchased a pre-paid credit card while I was at it. I could slip Mangal the phone at work on Friday before my little adventure.
Chapter 2
Interesting fact: It is unclear what ignited the riots in Boston. The event was planned as a peaceful demonstration of about 50,000 people, to protest growing income inequality and skyrocketing food prices. Boston was one of the best-off metropolitan areas in the country at the time.
“So you’re the fresh meat!” the guy greeted me with a grin, hunkering down in the aisle next to my seat on the bus. “Hogan, one of the organizers. You?”
I should have been prepared for that question. But his leer and ‘fresh meat’ comment threw me. “Um…Bea. Nice to meet you, Hogan. Oh, here, I wanted to contribute for gas. Will eighty dollars do?” I rummaged and handed him a little sheaf of twenties.
“Absolutely!” he crooned happily. He folded the bills and tucked them into his pocket. “I’ll get you a T-shirt in a minute.”
Hogan looked a few years younger than me, probably mid-twenties. His head was clipped almost military short, his arms rich in tribal tattoos. He wore a tasteful silver cuff on one ear, plus tiny studs. His build was strong and rangy, with erect posture. His light brown beard was a neatly trimmed quarter inch long. He was a fashionable guy compared to the other organizer up front kibitzing with the bus driver, a frumpy fifty-something woman dressed as a hippie wannabee, adrift in anachronism. The vivid kelly green T-shirts proclaimed them both members of Weather Vane, one of the movements sponsoring the event in Philadelphia.
“Mind if I sit with you a bit, Bea?” He gestured, and I scooted to the window seat. He sat and leaned toward me to ask, “You’re the Bea Smith who signed up Wednesday night, right?”
“Ah, yes,” I agreed. “I have a little employer problem, you see. They don’t think I should go to the rally in Philly. I hope I’m not taking a seat from someone else?”
Of course I wasn’t. The bus had half a dozen empty seats.
And eighty bucks was more than generous for gas money.
“Really? What employer is that?” We both laughed. “You’d probably rather not say.”
“Yeah. No,” I agreed. “But, my real name is Dee, not Bea.”
“Alright. What draws you to Weather Vane, Dee? Philadelphia, anyway.”
“I’m not very political,” I replied, feeling foolish. “I guess free speech and surveillance are hot buttons with me. The velvet fascism thing. I mean, even this. I couldn’t take a train to Philadelphia because of my job spying on me. Can’t use public transportation without ID. I appreciate the ride. I’m also very concerned about climate change.”
He nodded, looking amused. “Kind of a political tourist, huh?”
Hogan launched into telling me about Weather Vane and its agenda. Philadelphia wasn’t a one-issue rally. About a dozen activist groups were spear-heading the thing, that just seemed to keep mushrooming. They now hoped for over a quarter million demonstrators this weekend, complaining about everything from free speech, to the cost of living, getting rid of the strangle-hold of the two-party system, racism, and a half-dozen other perennial American discontents that just seemed to get worse every year, never better.
Weather Vane’s angle was climate change and the risk of irrevocable environmental damage. Hogan laid out his case. The drought in the high plains, now in its third year and getting scary. He claimed it was developing into another full-blown Dust Bowl, and the aquifers were running dry. The desert southwest and California had been in severe drought even longer, with fires raging out of control. That was what drove our food prices soaring, even before the new GMO blight.
Here in the rainy zones, storms kept getting worse. The cost of storm damage was mounting exponentially, while Federal and state disaster relief budgets groaned under the onslaught. Overseas, the Middle Eastern wars were getting worse all the time. The news and political rhetoric focused on terrorism. But underneath was a dire drought in a severely overpopulated region.
Civilly Disobedient (Calm Act Genesis Book 1) Page 1
