Calm Act Box Set (Books 1-3)

by Ginger Booth

  The three of us, including Shelley, shared a single video chat screen in my office. We had our feet up, and munched popcorn. Mangal and I had long since figured out how to record a video loop to run on automatic, to hide behind during dull video conferences. My box on the screen showed a loop of me looking up, smiling a private smile, looking down, looking straight at the camera, pursing my lips, and making a note. This automaton represented all three of us. If anyone asked one of us a question, we could freeze the video, experience technical difficulties, and come back on live.

  “…I’m happy to report the UNC ark is well ahead of schedule, and coming online soon…”

  “Asshole,” commented Shelley, tossing popcorn at my screen. Yes, she’d come far under my tutelage.

  “…present a virtual tour of the UNC ark…”

  “Oh, cool,” I said, and full-screened the presentation. We got a helicopter-eye view of the rolling wooded Tennessee landscape, approaching a geodesic complex shining like Camelot in the distance. Before we could see any detailed environs of the ark, the video cut inside to the ‘welcome center.’ This area reminded me of the Totoket high school cafeteria – a two-story big open space with tables and no side windows, but natural light overhead. I even caught a brief glimpse off to the side of a cafeteria serving line. By comparison to the familiar high school cafeteria, I guessed the space could serve food to about 300 people at a seating.

  The view jumped to an ‘efficient and comfortable’ berth. The narrator didn’t mention how many people shared this private space, about 12 x 16 feet. It looked like two bunks and two sleeper sofas, a small table, and a steel mesh storage loft, all crammed into a small windowless children’s bedroom. They dressed it up with cheery fabrics and flowers on the table, and didn’t clutter the ambiance with actual belongings up in the storage loft.

  Neglecting to show the sanitary facilities, we zoomed on along into the state of the art hydroponics facility.

  “That footage is from Epcot,” I commented, frowning. “And the hydroponics aren’t state of the art.” I’d loved the hydroponic gardens exhibit at Epcot Center in Orlando, and visited them several times. It wasn’t that this looked like Epcot. It was Epcot, complete with the little river-running-through track that the guided tour boats ran on.

  The video moved on to the ‘oxygen forest.’ “And that footage is from Moody Gardens, in Galveston, the rainforest pyramid,” I said. I’d only been there once. It was part of an awesome theme park on the Texas Gulf coast, about an hour from Houston.

  “Does this UNC ark even exist?” wondered Mangal.

  The video went on to showcase world-class athletic facilities, footage they could have shot at a fancy athletic club anywhere. I loved the whirlpool bath and the compact swim-in-place lap pools. I’d always wanted to try one of those. But I doubted the video was taken at the UNC ark in Tennessee.

  The camera panned over a cubicle maze, still empty of people or chairs or work screens, while the narrator uttered platitudes about arkinauts pursuing their life work in safety and comfort. Cut to the UNC logo and mission statement. And back to Dan.

  “A beautiful facility, as you can see,” Dan commented, looking deflated. “Well… welcome back to work. We’ll, um, continue telecommuting for the foreseeable future. I’ll be speaking with the supervisors today, and no doubt they’ll speak with the rest of you in section meetings or one on one within the next day or so. Happy New Year.” He attempted a smile, and logged off quickly.

  “That son-of-a–” Shelley began.

  “Shelley, Dan’s a good man,” I interrupted her. “Now Mangal and I have to do supervisor stuff. Go work at your own house, OK?”

  “What work?”

  I shrugged, with a smile. “Feel free to wander off and do something useful. But I’ll shoot for a section meeting by phone before the end of the day. Four-ish, maybe.”

  Shelley left, disillusioned not only with the UNC ark, but seeing the man behind the curtain in her managerial chain as well. Mangal and I checked our assorted electronic communications for contacts from our staff, while waiting for the door to close on Shelley.

  “Do you need privacy to talk to people?” Mangal offered.

  I waggled a hand yes-and-no. Two of my people hadn’t shown up for the video conference, nor responded to phone or email hails. The others appeared to be waiting for me to make the first move. Mangal had three missing. I scrubbed my face with my hands. “Yeah. Dan will probably talk to us together, but –”

  The phone rang. I took one glance, and pressed a button to put the call on speaker. “Hey, Dan! Happy New Year! Shelley left. You’re speaking to Dee and Mangal.” I smiled pleasantly. They taught us about that in boss school, that people could hear your smile or frown on a phone call.

  “Happy New Year, Dan,” Mangal chimed in, smiling confidently back at me. “Good Christmas break?”

  “Christ, no,” Dan bit out. “What’s the situation there?” He made it sound like a frontline sitrep request, from a combat unit about to be overrun.

  “We’re good,” I replied. “Shelley’s settling in next door. Lost power in the ice storm, and then in the hurricane, but nothing we couldn’t handle. The neighborhood has armed barricades against looters. They’re holding so far. How’re things down in your area?”

  “It’s a nightmare,” Dan gasped. “Laura and I have guns. The children sleep in the basement while we guard against looters. My tennis partner at the yacht club, his wife and kids were murdered by looters while he was out buying gas. He shot himself to death on New Year’s Eve. Our families are in the city. I can’t reach them.” He gave a huge shuddering sigh. Dan was a true New Yorker. ‘The city’ could only mean New York.

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Dan,” Mangal said. We attended boss school together, of course. I could almost taste the donuts we ate during that fun workshop day on ‘how to deal with emotional employees.’ We’d taken turns role playing hysterical staff.

  Mangal continued to ‘mirror back the speaker’s upset, to validate his feelings, but defuse the tone.’ “It sounds like you’ve had an upsetting time, Dan. But you’re safe now, right?”

  “Laura’s guarding the door. I can’t talk long. She needs sleep.”

  “Sleep is good,” I ventured. “Have you gotten any sleep, Dan?”

  “Christ, no. Look, there aren’t any assignments, just… make something up, OK? You’ll need to do a RIF, lay off one person each, you pick. Tell them they’ll get two weeks’ severance pay and back sick days and vacation. They probably won’t, but I don’t know. There is no fucking ark, not for us, not for them. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  In case of emergency, secure your own oxygen mask before attempting to help others.

  “Alright, Dan,” I said, pursing my lips at Mangal. “We’ve got it. Just make sure we’ve got all the passwords we need to cover for you, OK? Or did you want to leave someone else acting manager for you?”

  “Acting manager – yes! That’s what I need. Yeah, I can’t deal with this.” Dan muttered some things to himself we couldn’t catch. “God bless,” he concluded, and hung up.

  To my surprise, Dan did send us the passwords, private files, everything we needed to take over his job indefinitely. We’d taken turns acting for him while he was away on vacation before. But that was nothing compared to the access he gave us now. And it wasn’t just Dan’s own access. Dan, in turn, was acting for his boss, Chet Marley. The day the Ebola epidemic went public, Marley was in Manhattan for a nooner with his mistress. He missed the last train out of the Big Apple, and hadn’t been heard from since.

  We sat contemplating the keys to the kingdom for a few minutes. I was the first to act.

  “What did you do?” Mangal asked.

  “Changed all of Dan’s passwords. He’s gone zombie. That’s contagious. We need to protect UNC from him. Of course, we care about Dan and don’t want to embarrass him. So we handled this quietly.”

  Mangal nodded thoughtfully. We both
sat back to contemplate our new options, until Mangal acted.

  “Amen1 Dave reminds me of Toby,” he said. Toby was one of Mangal’s three missing employees. “I think I’ll just update Toby’s address. We don’t want to be short-handed. So Dave can replace him.” It didn’t take long to arrange for our hacker contact to take over Toby’s UNC accounts, including his paycheck. Maybe Toby was dead, maybe he was alive. But he wasn’t earning his paycheck, and we couldn’t reach him. And Dave could make good use of his UNC logins.

  We laid off our weakest two of the five employees we couldn’t reach. For the remaining two missing staff, we also submitted change of address requests. Effective immediately, they lived with us. Salaries were redirected to pile up in a newly-created second checking account at my bank. We wanted to use that to fund the civic association ‘credit line’ with the hardware store.

  Redirecting the salaries made me feel acutely queasy. We weren’t stealing the money for ourselves, but to fund our community and Amenac project. But we were still stealing from our employer. Once upon a time, I couldn’t have done this. Mangal wouldn’t have done this.

  “Mangal… maybe we’ve gone too far. This is outright theft. If they catch us…”

  “Do we regret it? Other than fear of getting caught? UNC will never know the difference. These salaries are nothing to UNC. There’s no one left above us with a soul.”

  With a soul? “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you this angry.”

  “That video, that bald-faced lie, was a betrayal of our entire careers! We were good employees, Dee. We were trustworthy.” Mangal spat the terms out like swear words. “They stole our honor. They made us lie to the American people about the borders and the weather. Now they can damn well pay the tab while we take our honor back.”

  “Welcome back! And I’ve got great news, guys and gals!” I beamed with enthusiasm at my 4 o’clock section video meeting. We held it jointly with Mangal’s section. “We’ve got an awesome assignment for the new year. You all know the trouble we had with the censors on that little weather website… debacle. Now we’re going to take another approach!”

  Mangal leaned in and swiveled the camera his way. “We’re going to incorporate some of our up-to-the-minute map data, as well. Our new theme is ‘news you can use.’ On the mapping side, we’re going to focus on safe travel routes and marketplaces. Accurate state of the borders, too. The truth and nothing but the truth.”

  I swiveled the camera back to me. “All truth on the weather side as well. We’re going to supply raw weather data by location. We’re going to empower local meteorologists to make best-of-class weather forecasts.”

  Several flags were raised by people who wanted to break in. “Let’s hold off on the questions for a bit,” Mangal put in. “I will add this, though – Dee and I are taking over for Dan temporarily, while he handles some personal matters. Our combined sections will focus on the presentation layer, as always. But we’ll have support from the data analysis and site admin teams, as much as we need. Dee and I are their bosses, for the moment.” He smiled confidently.

  I swiveled the camera, beamed appreciation of Mangal’s points, and resumed talking fast. “Because UNC has its own ‘official’ website voice, we’re going to try something a bit different this time. We’re going to host this new project off-site from UNC’s servers, and focus on a particular demographic – farmers, fisherman, lumber, and other outdoor workers. Think ‘New Farmer’s Almanac’, with a touch of the ‘Prairie Home Companion.’ We’re going to call it ‘Amenac.’”

  Mangal swiveled the camera to show both of us. “This is going to be great, Dee!”

  “It really is, Mangal!”

  They bought it. We built a website carefully pitched to spread like wildfire among good people trying to make the best of a bad situation. Meteorologists yearning to tell the truth, based on true data. Fishermen who needed to know if it was safe to go out. Farmers who needed to know when a frost was expected. The website came together at lightning speed, using familiar software architectures we ported wholesale from UNC.

  The Amen1 hacker team was good, no question of that. What we published would never have passed the censors. We had social features, people chatting up a storm, and crowd-sourced map overlays of hostilities and safety zones, with not a Google Censor plugin anywhere. Homeland Security went berserk trying to shut us down. But they couldn’t. Amen1 saw to that.

  Yet Amenac was almost unknown in the general population, because it was so thoroughly farmer-oriented. The average looter, hoodlum, and hostile survivalist never knew the Amenac existed. But I made sure that the good folk of Minnesota, who burned out Montagro Corp. and took their own damned state back, were up and running with best of breed weather forecasts within a couple weeks. Though of course, Connecticut got there first.

  The team was deeply into the project by the time anyone noticed that the UNC websites still didn’t link to the Amenac. I just shrugged it off. I told them we were still going back and forth with the censors, and appealing some judgments through other federal agencies. But not to worry, Amenac was a go.

  So I was pretty busy with Amenac development in January. Outside of work, I had the civic association farm planning, and started my own seedlings for spring, and as many extras as I could for neighbors. I was pleased with how the agriculture plans were coming together. Grain production would be limited. But there were some big fields available here and there, for rotation planting with alfalfa and other things. None of us had ever grown grain in earnest before, so that took a lot of study. But we hoped to get nearly everyone growing potatoes and kitchen vegetables. There were a lot of gardening novices, but they’d have lots of support.

  The weather, of course, was a big wildcard. Crops planted out of season do not thrive. And the seasons had come unglued. The only thing we could do about that was to plant in waves, and hope that most plantings got close enough to the right conditions.

  My main contribution was drawing up the maps to communicate the plan. I used Amenac to publish the plans and promote Amenac. Word began to spread, and we got great feedback from professional farmers elsewhere to improve our planting scheme. More Connecticut planting plans were published all the time, and technical discussion blossomed. Once we got the state agricultural extension and master gardeners hooked in – and overjoyed to finally get to tell the truth online – the whole thing took off.

  Yes, it was dangerous for participants to bypass the censors like this. But the time had come that people just didn’t care. The Federal government had enjoyed rock-bottom public approval rates for years.

  “Dee,” Zack greeted me when I answered the doorbell. “We’ve come to collect for the cache.” Zack and the two men behind him were armed to the gills.

  “Why, how nice to see you, Zack. Come in,” I invited. Once he was through the door, I closed it on the other two. “They can wait outside. What the hell, Zack? And don’t you have captaining business to do or something?”

  Zack tilted his head to indicate his minions outside. “They need some help to finesse their approach.”

  “Here’s a hint. Three armed thugs showing up at my doorstep to steal my food? That’s not ‘finesse.’ That’s not on the same planet as ‘finesse.’ They’re going to get shot.”

  “Useful feedback,” he allowed. “You see the problem. We wanted to start with friendly faces, to help us work this out,” he explained with a wan smile.

  My arms were still folded over my chest, as unfriendly as I could manage. “So you started with me. I should feel honored?”

  “Actually, I started with Shanti and Mangal. At least they wouldn’t shoot at us.”

  I snorted amusement. “Bet you didn’t get any food from them, though.”

  Zack sighed. “They said to come back in an hour.”

  “Damn, Shanti’s good. So hey, Zack, how ’bout you come back in an hour?”

  “Cute. Look, Dee, we’ve already had three houses ripped off. It’s not that looters are get
ting past the barricades. We caught one middle-aged hunter from the other side of Totoket. His crew attacked an elderly couple down on Pentecost Street. The old guy shot this one in the leg on the way out. The rest of them got away with all the food. Another condo, ripped off by a bunch of teenagers, probably local. Last night, the third attack, we have no idea. Homeowners knifed to death, all the food gone. And the neighbors say they had a lot of food.”

  “My God. Who?”

  “Carruthers? Carmichaels? Something like that. On Shoreline. Did you know them?”

  “No. I’m sorry to hear that.” I sighed. “OK, yeah, it’s time to fill the caches. But wouldn’t it be better to have a central collection point? That way you wouldn’t be invading people’s homes with the Rambo routine.”

  Zack wobbled his head yes-and-no. “Food’s heavy. Most people don’t have transportation anymore. The idea was to send out teams that could carry for members, and protect the collections van. And to do the book-keeping. When you contribute, you’re buying shares of the cache. You did agree to this, you know.”

  “I believe my actual words were, ‘No way in hell.’ But yeah, eventually… Sort of.” The thing was, yes, rationally, I believed the caches were a good idea. Emotionally, the idea of letting them take my stash was well-nigh unbearable.

  “…A collection center, huh?” Zack asked.

  “I guess it is all pretty heavy,” I allowed. “You have freezers in this cache?”

  “No… We lose power all the time. How much of your food is frozen?”

  “Well, I’ve got a generator, and batteries, and a minus-40 freezer. It can stay frozen for days if I leave it closed,” I said defensively.

  “Show me,” said Zack. He raised his hands in surrender when I bridled. “I won’t take anything. Promise. Just show me. Dee, please, I’m here because we really need to work this out for the community.”