“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.
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 yellow. “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.”
There was a long silence, broken when Andrea asked, “Can you tell us why you’re doing this?”
“Buffy’s dead, and now we’re fired,” interjected Alaric. “You don’t think these things might be connected?”
“I just—”
“Not very well, you didn’t.”
“Do me a favor, dears, and shut up so our former boss can speak?” Magdalene sighed. “You’re giving me a headache.”
“Thank you, Maggie.” I looked around my screen, studying each video window in turn. “Andrea, the answer to why we’re doing this is a simple one: We don’t want any of you to feel obligated to stay with this site any longer than you already have. I’m sure you’ve all heard about the call the CDC received, reporting our deaths?” Murmurs of agreement. “It was received before we placed the call to tell them we were still alive. Someone shot out our tires, there was no one else on the road, and yet somebody told the CDC that we’d been killed.”