by A. Bernette
The SEP Agents’s suits were so enhanced that she was never certain how much the agents might hear or if the park might have microphones planted around it.
Delia and Lyn stood up to leave the eerily empty park. Lyn’s body was still tingling even though there was no shaking or tremor that anyone else seemed to feel.
Chapter Six
Pressure
Capital City, Northern Liberty Region
Representative Gregor Magiro slammed the tablet down on his desk. He looked at the screen thankful he hadn’t cracked another one. The small tablet had taken the brunt of his passion after skimming over the latest report from the emissions pumping field program while his assistant stood there waiting. His assistant was spared any further deluge.
“Leave.”
His assistant turned and practically ran out of the room, just before Magiro was on his heels, slamming the door. It was becoming redundant. Each quarter, the reports and updates held the same news and it was never good news. He always read every report, every quarter, and eventually his electronic versions found their way into the deleted file.
This was his project and he would be damned if he watched it fail. He’d committed the past twenty years of his life to this one thing. As a businessman and politician, he had too much riding on it and couldn’t let it fail. The reports told him it was failing though he didn’t want it to be true. He’d drug his feet along with everyone else supporting a system that was good enough.
Gregor tapped his watch until he had Harold Fumar’s contact information. Harold Fumar had been his contractor over the ground pumps for nearly a decade. The bastards were messing up his legacy. Harold Fumar’s projection appeared in his room and Magiro immediately began talking.
“Harold, what the hell is this report? Is there a reason we can’t monitor and catch these leaks sooner? Why the hell do I have to deal with another emissions pumping error? You are making me look bad Harold and I don’t like to look bad. Fix it and fast!”
“If we can’t make sure these pumps are secure we are going to have to deal with the public and you know UniCorps doesn’t like that. Stocks will crap out and when stocks crap out that is bad for all of us Harold. You got that?! All of us. Yes, Harold, that means you too. I need an update ASAP of how you are going to fix this, Harold. That’s all.” He hung up while Harold still stood there without even opening his mouth.
The light on Magiro’s watch blinked. It was Harold calling back after Magiro had ended the call so abruptly. Magiro’s looked at the time before taking Harold’s call. His next meeting, which he dreaded even more, was happening soon.
“Magiro, I think we got disconnected,” Harold said smartly. “Look, I just need to make sure we are all on the same page. I’m getting two different messages. One from you and your team at the World Consensus, and one from UniCorps. I don’t want to get in the middle of anything, but before you call yelling at me, maybe you both should get your priorities straight so you are both saying the same thing. That’s all,” Harold said curtly before ending the call the same way Magiro did.
Magiro pounded his desk and then thought of calling Dr. Zura Bello at the Antarctic Research Center. He changed his mind, realizing she wouldn’t be able to make him feel any calmer about what was going on. In fact, she might send his blood pressure up even more. He’d wait for her report that would come at the end of their Summer. He hoped it wouldn’t be like the others.
Magiro was frustrated. The promises he’d made and reputation he’d built as a younger representative of the World Consensus were at risk. His frustration at everything had grown over the years but he would not be made a fool.
A knock at the door brought him back from his thoughts as he picked up the tablet with the report again and sat it down at the oval conference table in his office. He put it in front of his seat, closest to the window.
“Come in,” Magiro spoke up, sounding more confident than he actually felt at that moment.
The door opened with a bang, nearly hitting the wall behind it and a man whose head grazed the top of the door frame while his shoulders touched either side walked in. Behind him were five others, a mix of his contacts from the Science Division of World Consensus and the Science Division of UniCorps. The fifth person was a man from the Environmental and Ecological Preservation and Protection Agency (EEPP).
They were all usually pretty friendly or cordial at the least, having all at one time or another been employed by partner organizations of UniCorps. Today, there was already tension in the air. The large brash man who’d filled the doorway was now sitting down, right in Magiro’s seat, at the far end of the glass oval table, nearest the window. He pushed the tablet in front of him to the side to make room for his own.
There was no mistake; he planned to be in charge of this meeting, even though Gregor Magiro had called it. Magiro calmly sat down next to The Stache. Mirkal Dempstead had been nicknamed ‘The Stache’ when he was much younger because of his thick bushy mustache, something very noticeable on an already very noticeable man. The Stache started to speak before the others even had a chance to sit.
“We cannot continue like this. If our numbers don’t change, we are all going to be out of a job. Our stockholders, the people out there, the people I report to, the people you all report to, are demanding something be done to increase profits. We are bleeding from all the exploratory projects we are doing and all of the environmental requirements. If we don’t start cutting expenses, people employed at our partner organizations and by the World Consensus are going to be out of work. All this environmental hullabaloo isn’t going to amount to a hill of beans if no one can afford to eat, clothe themselves, or pay their rent.”
“We are only in this position because no one ever wanted to sacrifice their precious lubles so that people would even have a planet that food could be grown on, where materials could be grown to make clothes, and where you could even live so paying your rent would even matter. Greed, by you and your cronies, from as far back as the World Consensus has existed and even further back, is why we still haven’t dug ourselves out of the environmental mess of the twentieth and twenty-first century. So why don’t you and your ridiculous Stache and the rest of your spineless, mindless, suck the life out of the world zombies jump back into the holes you dug, cuz clearly that’s where you came from!” Magiro blinked his eyes.
In his head Magiro had given The Stache a withering look and shot all this back at him. In reality, when it came to taking on UniCorps he had long ago learned that silence was key to political and economic survival and that some might think him spineless too, when it came to them.
“What do you propose we do?” Magiro asked instead of giving his tirade.
“Well to start with, our partner corporations haven’t been able to produce at their target levels. They have been forced to withhold production even in the face of consumer demand. While this helps our short term prices because of supply and demand, we could be earning a great deal more in general and also give the people lower prices if we could just produce more. We have had a dozen pump holes for years and we’ve since doubled that and things are going fine. Why can’t we operate all of them at full capacity? Heck, why can’t we operate all of them? We’ve got some decommissioned just because of a little leak or gas coming back out. It happens but the pumps have been doing their job for almost twenty years, right Gregor?” The Stache looked at Gregor, awaiting his confirmation.
“Well, that’s something we need to talk about,” said Magiro sheepishly. He looked around the table hoping for support from the other representatives in the room, but was only met with silence.
“What do you mean? Never mind. The point is, nothing is going ‘that’ wrong and we have great minds already working on a long term solution, so why hold back our production? Manufacturing cannot stop. Besides, the current holes aren’t even at capacity. Even if they were, we can just do what we did several years back and add a few more holes.”
“Just add more hol
es?” Magiro asked skeptically.
“Sure. We have some of our partner corporations willing to personally support the funding of pump holes so they can grow their businesses. More holes would spread out the risk of any single pump hole. How about that? Yeah, how about that?” The Stache nodded his head and smiled triumphantly.
Magiro glanced over at Representative Litana Silver, his strongest ally when it came to this. She was silent as she listened to The Stache’s argument. They were trying to do it again. They’d convinced the people and the Representatives that more pump holes were good for everyone and even the environment.
A temporary solution to deal with man-made pollutants had turned into a permanent one for many of the corporations and elected officials. They’d bought into the story, the same one The Stache repeated, in some variation, ad nauseam. Everything was okay and there weren’t very many problems.
They’d managed to instill enough fear over changing to a long-term system that no resources had been committed to make a long-term system happen. Anyone working in those pump sites, and the town around them were also opposed to any ideas that might take away their jobs.
They had now convinced them that spreading the emissions and pollutants into more holes would prevent some areas having heavier use than others, thus making the risk and benefits of the program fairer for all people in the six producing regions. They promised that people could get more affordable products and businesses could make more money and hire more people.
Unfortunately, not much of that really happened. Except, of course, the businesses producing more and people buying more but the prices for what people paid barely budged more than a fraction of a luble. The corporations made out like bandits and Magiro had been forced to justify everything to the World Consensus and the constituents he represented.
“We should wait to see what the next quarterly report from the Antarctic Research Center says. We just got the last one in from our science division here this week and there were things in it that give me a great deal of concern. We are having trouble with leaks and seepage. They are small so they wouldn’t necessarily be seen by someone monitoring at a high level but for the people who are actually working at these sites, they are seeing them and they are being reported more now than they were even just a few years ago. It’s something we need to talk about.” Magiro commanded.
“Haha Gregor! You worry about things you don’t need to worry about. They told us years ago, a few leaks and a little seeping would be a normal thing to see. You remember, right? And they said as long as it is caught early and contained, it wouldn’t do damage. You remember that too, now don’t you Gregor? I was there. I listened.” The Stache said smugly, smoothing his thick dark mustache.
Ignorant, thoughtless jerk, Magiro couldn’t help but think. Mirkal Dempstead was one of those people that UniCorps paid to promote their interest, and it seemed there wasn’t any maximum costs. Magiro wondered if he had a conscience hidden somewhere deep deep deep down inside. With his sheer size it could hide pretty deep down.
“Perhaps we should wait until the report to talk about what our options are for moving forward,” Representative Silver, who sat opposite Magiro, finally spoke. Like him, Representative Silver was an elected representative and they would have to answer to millions of people, no matter what choice they made. Through many years and past mistakes, they’d both learned the hard way that it was better to wait and be right, than to rush into wrong. Silver didn’t plan to have to justify another money driven move to her constituents like she and Magiro had done many times before. Not if a matter of weeks could yield better and more complete information.
“You two are acting like a pair of wussies! Ya’ scared your little people are gonna get upset and not vote for you again? Well, how the hell do you think they’ll feel when my people have to fire them because they can’t make their bottom line? You wanna know how mad your people’ll be then? Well, I can tell you one thing’s for sure, they won’t be blaming me!”
The Stache paused and picked up his tablet. “You call us back here when you’ve put together the rest of your sorry excuse for tanking the economy. The environment is going to be here. It’ll work itself out. However, your job may not be.” The Stache pushed his chair forcibly back and it smashed into the wall under the window. He smoothed his mustache again and marched out the door.
***
Silver leaned against the back of a chair and crossed her arms. She knew all too well how to play the politicians game, after giving thirty years to it, but when it came down to working, she was all business – and direct. These traits didn’t endear her to many of her fellow representatives but it was something Gregor Magiro had learned to respect over the years. It was also something that got her respect from her constituents. They kept reelecting her, despite the money and votes that UniCorps’s partner corporations and political funding pots would constantly throw up against her.
“Gregor, we need to talk,” Silver said looking at the few who lingered as if waiting for something else.
“You all are excused. We’ll give it another go after we get the report from the ARC in May.” Magiro dismissed the others from his office.
They would be off for the coming two weeks as part of the more engaged schedule implemented by the World Consensus. It allowed for a four week on and two week off schedule with special adjustments made for major holidays.
Since going year round they had found themselves with more time to prepare meaningful legislation and actually review it. He’d been a part of the group that had pushed for the year round schedule when he was just a second year Representative. He, however, had selfishly chosen not to vote for the term limits on his position. This was his career and he wasn’t going to self-sabotage it. That would be stupid.
Once the room was emptied and left to Magiro and Silver, they sat back down. Magiro pulled the report back up on his tablet and Silver pulled it up on her device. He always kept a paper copy until he was ready to recycle it. That was buried somewhere in a drawer at his desk. Magiro didn’t trust that the information wouldn’t disappear or change somehow with no record of what had really been there. It had happened before with a crucial part of the ARC program and was never recovered.
“Did you see this, Gregor?” Silver asked pointing to her projection of her device.
“Yes, I have Silver. It’s not good. I’m afraid all of this may blow up in our faces if we don’t do something. The one thing we cannot do is drill more pump holes,” Magiro stated emphatically.
“I know. Still, the question isn’t what can’t we do. I want to understand what we CAN do? There is always a solution. Magiro, even though The Stache says people are working hard on a solution, I guarantee that if they really were, we’d have seen something by now. The Stache and UniCorps are lying. Point blank. We are going to be stuck holding the muddy stick trying to pull our way out of the muck, when everyone else has gone home to lie in their piles of money. I will not be the patsy, Gregor. You hear me? I will not. I have plans and this is not part of them.” She was staring Magiro straight in the eyes.
“Silver, they aren’t the only ones who can work on the solution. We need to be committing money to that side of the work too. Right now we have a lot of money tied up in monitoring, evaluation, the outer space discovery and exploration, ARC, and the pump holes themselves. The people won’t want to put more money into this to solve a problem they don’t even realize is a problem. BUT we can’t tell them it IS a problem cuz then they’ll all freak out. It’s like the other thing. We know they are there but people will freak out, so we can’t say anything.” Magiro said waving his hand over his head and Silver nodded knowingly.
You know, when we ran for these offices decades ago we were young, naive. We foolishly thought that we could, just as one Representative, actually turn the course of a mammoth ship. We made promises to our constituents that things would get better and that we would continue to serve their interests. I personally promised to be hones
t and transparent and have done my best to keep those promises. Magiro, I don't want my life to be made into a lie. I don’t think I could live with that. The only thing I have is what I leave behind. That is my legacy. How do I do what they are asking without erasing everything I have put into this career, every sacrifice made? You understand don’t you, Gregor?” Silver asked as she began to walk back and forth in front of the window.
Gregor Magiro did understand. It was all he had thought about since The Stache visited him before the World Memorial Holiday. “Yes, Silver. I understand. I don’t have the answer for how you’re feeling right this minute since I am asking myself the same questions,” he admitted.
Silver nodded, “Neither of us has the answer to that question. In the meantime, we need to get people working on a solution without having it funded by the World Consensus or UniCorps or scaring the people. Is there a super-rich uncle you’ve never told me about?” Silver teased.
“Not exactly, but I do have an idea. I know a retired scientist with a conscience. Are you willing to trust me a little?” Magiro asked.
Chapter Seven
Guests
Science Camp, University of Southern Allegiance in Santoria, Southern Allegiance
Stella jumped up and down on the twin sized bed that lay to the side of the double window. She was busy losing herself while her roommate Alexis played music on her guitar. The sound of Alexis’s strings floated through the air, carried by ribbons of color that surrounded Stella. Alexis couldn’t see the color show, it was for Stella. With each jump off the bed that had seen enough college use, Stella tried to turn her body to get a different view of the campus outside their window.
