Civilly Disobedient (Calm Act Genesis Book 1) (5 page)

“To telecommuting,” I saluted him, raising my water glass again in challenge. He pursed his lips. “To seeing your son grow up, instead of spending three hours a day commuting,” I urged.

He relented at that, and clinked glasses with me. “Let’s do it.”

“I’ll talk to Trevor,” I offered. “You’ve got Cheng?” This was our standard division of labor. The systems manager Trevor had a knack for getting on Mangal’s nerves, by implying white superiority over the immigrants Mangal and Cheng. Cheng didn’t respect women much, in my experience.

“Deal.”

-oOo-

“Alright, gang,” Dan said, convening the section head weekly meeting in his office. We’d already compared long weekends and completed the social bonding segment of the get-together. I wondered idly if anyone besides me was lying about what they’d done over the weekend. And if so, why.

At any rate, it was time to get down to business.

“So I’ve spoken to Human Resources,” Dan reported back to us. “There is no wiggle room in the new rule. Our people are not allowed to attend political rallies. First offense, stern reprimand. Second offense termination. They’re serious!”

That really was serious. Offhand, I couldn’t think of another corporate infraction that merited getting fired after one warning.

“Effective last week, actually,” Dan continued. “Good thing, too. You didn’t hear it from me, but Philadelphia was a blood bath.” He lowered his voice and looked meaningfully at us. “Sixty-three dead civilians, four cops, and a National Guardsman. Hundreds hospitalized. Millions in riot damage. It’s getting ugly out there.”

I blinked, and narrowed my eyes. I did not know for a fact that this wasn’t true. There were shots fired in Fairmount Park while I was there, and plenty of stories among the demonstrators. And the streets outside the park had certainly seen violence. But stories from aggravated people tended to exaggerate, not understate.

“Why wasn’t that on the news, Dan?” I challenged him.

Dan didn’t meet my eye. “UNC is cooperating with federal requests to help defuse the public disorders. Without press coverage, there’s no point in disruptive mass demonstrations. Like Boston and Philadelphia. Voluntary cooperation.”

Mangal attempted, “Don’t journalists have an obligation to –”

Dan cut him off. “Are you a journalist? Mangal? This branch is computing support. We do websites. UNC News doesn’t ask us for input on the national news.” He frowned and let that sink in a moment. “Anyway. Back to the new policy.”

Trevor jumped in. “Dan, I researched tooling over the weekend. For telecommuting. I have a great remote collaboration platform spec’d out. Could have it live by Monday.”

“So we can all start telecommuting Monday?” I said. “Outstanding, Trevor!” No, I wasn’t sincere. What Trevor meant was that he had a spyware suite all picked out, to make sure we were actually working at home. Call me old-fashioned, but as a supervisor I relied on communication and results, not spy software. Any real collaboration tools, we used in our offices in Stamford. And nights and weekends, when we already worked overtime remotely.

“Not all of us,” Trevor equivocated. “I’ll have on-site support coverage, as well. Probably two people, each taking three days a week in person.”

“One day, all here for meetings,” Cheng chimed in. “Wednesday?”

“Tuesday, I think,” Mangal supplied. “Does Tuesday work for everybody?” We all agreed.

Dan scowled. “Telecommuting is against corporate policy,” he reminded us.

“But as a forward-thinking, environmentally conscious company,” I jumped in, “UNC embraces a telecommuting pilot program. Since we have the expertise in the software tools, we’re the perfect branch to prove out the new work model.”

My fellow section managers promptly trotted out their flim flam to back this assertion.

“I said no telecommuting,” Dan reiterated, glaring at me.

“It’ll be awesome, Dan,” I assured him.

The others started up again, and Dan made a neck-slicing gesture to shut us up. “No telecommuting! But personnel has a new benefit in the works. Early days yet, and I probably shouldn’t be telling you this. This is big.”

Yes, twice in one meeting. If UNC had any real secrets to keep, they were unwise to tell my boss Dan. He glanced around with dramatic flair, as though to make sure we were alone. My colleagues and I traded blank glances, forcibly tamping down any incipient smiles.

“UNC is building its own ark,” Dan confided to us softly. “So when climate change really hits the fan, we’re safe, as UNC employees.”

“What is ark?” Cheng demanded of me. He sat wedged between me and the wall.

“A sealed biosphere, I think,” I said. “You live and work and grow food inside.” On a technical level, I thought this sounded unbelievably cool.

“No commute, live in ark?” Cheng asked dubiously.

“Cheng,” Dan said, still trying valiantly to wrest leadership of this meeting, “the danger isn’t just the storms. The refugees are getting out of hand. Wars cropping up all over. The Middle East is already a war zone from Libya to Pakistan. And now American refugees, from the droughts out west and Central America. But we’ll be protected from the storms and the fighting, inside an ark. With our own secure food supply.”

“Nuclear fallout,” I elaborated for Cheng’s benefit, feeling queasy.

“Huh-uh,” Cheng said. From long association, I readily translated this to, ‘Wow, that’s stupid.’ Cheng’s spoken English was none too fluent, but he was a brilliant guy.

I wasn’t so sure the ark was stupid. Just how bad did they expect our situation to get? “Dan?” I asked. “That sounds like an enormous outlay. Why would UNC build this ‘ark’ thing?”

“Well, we’re keeping it quiet for now,” Dan replied, “but it’ll get out soon. The latest forecast models are…bad.”

“How bad?” Mangal demanded.

“I’m no meteorologist,” Dan qualified. “But the models say the weather is about to get a whole lot worse. The agricultural shortfall last year was enough to feed a billion people. Or not feed them. This year they expect the same or worse. Stockpiles are running out.”

“And UNC isn’t reporting this,” Mangal demanded, irate, “to help ‘defuse public disorders’?”

“Scared people do bad things, Mangal,” Dan replied.

I was still trying to wrap my head around what a billion starving people would do to take food from those who still had it. Not to mention enough water to drink, which was usually the first thing that propelled drought refugees onto the hoof. You could starve for a long time, years if need be. Water was more urgent. In the Northeast, we had food, and water. Even the GMO blight didn’t affect us directly. Agriculture here focused on truck farms. We grew fruit and vegetables for the table, not the industrial-scale cereal and oil and livestock feed ravaged by the blight. We got plenty of rain. Too much rain, in fact, with the increased storms lately.

We were the haves in this scenario. Most of the have-nots were far away. Or, perhaps not so far away anymore. The drought out west was serious. Millions of Americans were among the have-nots now. ‘Public disorder’ didn’t begin to cover what this could turn into. That was probably the first time I began to understand just how much trouble were were in. But like everyone else, I was easily distracted by more immediate concerns.

I asked, “Dan, just how much is UNC suppressing? From the news.”

“Not suppressing, exactly,” Dan hedged. “Understating maybe. There are plans in the works. Pretty drastic plans. At the Federal level. I don’t know the details.

“But back to the business at hand,” he said firmly. “So there is a new benefit coming, to offset hurt feelings over the no-rallies rule –”

“Hurt feelings?” I burst out. “Dan, UNC is trying to strip us of our civil rights. Inch by inch. Privacy. Spyware on our phones. Drug tests all the time. No right of assembly. How dare you dismiss my outrage as ‘hurt feelings’?”

Mangal patted my hand to remind me not to lose it on the winning stretch. He said, “Dan, we can’t tell our people about this ‘ark.’ It’s a secret. So that’s off the table. We need to do telecommuting.”

“Right,” I agreed, schooling my temper with difficulty. “That’s a real benefit we can hand them to offset the insult. And most important, to me, it does something about the real problem. Less commuting, less carbon dioxide. Less contribution to climate change.”

“And it turns ‘spyware’ into ‘virtual presence,’” Trevor chimed in. “I can sell that.”

“Real benefit. Not bogus ‘ark,’” Cheng agreed. “Who want live in ark? Like jail.”

“Mark my words, Cheng,” Dan argued. “
Everyone
is going to want an ark berth!”

“But we can’t tell them about it,” Mangal repeated. “So it’s a moot point. Telecommuting is the way to go.”

“As I said,” Dan replied, growing annoyed, “telecommuting is off the table.”

“Then I’m out,” I said. “Dan, after what you’ve just told me, I cannot in good conscience commute another day. You have my two weeks notice.”

“Dee, you can’t be serious!” Dan attempted.

“And mine,” Mangal said.

“I resign, too,” agreed Trevor.

“Me too,” Cheng said in solidarity, and added, “Ark stupid.”

“Are we done?” I asked, rising to leave.

I could see the cogs turning in Dan’s head. He would love to say he could easily replace all of us. But he couldn’t. If all four of us walked out at once, at least one of our best people from each section would likely quit with us, and probably more. That would leave him way understaffed, with bad options for who to promote to replace us. Hiring from outside could take a year, if candidates could even be found with our skill sets. We commanded high salaries because our skills were in high demand and short supply. His branch would flounder, and he’d take the fall for it. He would likely lose his job, too. When it came to office politics, Dan was brighter than the rest of us combined. It didn’t take him long to figure out the score.

“Damn it!” Dan said, glaring at me. “Alright. Telecommute starting next Monday. Everyone’s back here on Tuesday!”

Civil disobedience can be very effective. If you have leverage.

-oOo-

I loved the new normal. Commuting had taken far more than just the train time, and left me drained for the couple hours of downtime left over in the day. Work, chores, sleep, repeat. That first summer without the commute, I felt like I’d quadrupled my free time, and felt alive to enjoy it.

I fell in love all over again with the Connecticut shoreline. Long walks every day, drinking in the season’s progression of flowers and wild berries and trees. I picked my own at the local fruit orchards, June through October, as we cycled through the fruit seasons – strawberries, blueberries, peaches, pears, raspberries, apples. I harvested my own vegetables at home, and plenty of them. Gardening and cooking and preserving food expanded to devour my free time, but I loved it.

As Long Island Sound warmed up, I walked or played down the beach often. Swimming. Kayaking. Sailing. And my perennial favorite, just staring out to sea, letting the waves wash every concern away.

The shoreline had changed since I last had time to pay attention, though. Years light on rainfall but heavy on storms left fallen trees everywhere. A short and scrappy new understory duked it out for ascendance, with unfamiliar new species. Insects followed new patterns, their rise and fall out of sync with the seasons. The bluefish and jellyfish in the Sound came in at new times. Days baked to record highs, followed by thunderstorms with record-breaking rainfalls. We had not one, but two hurricanes make it up the coast to hit us that summer.

The soaring heat and demand for air conditioning caused rolling brown-outs all the time, not to mention the widespread power outages from the storms. I gave up air conditioning as a matter of principle. Dan threatened to reverse our right to telecommute unless we could stay online through the work day despite the brown-outs. I bought a backup generator, a sheaf of replacement batteries for my laptop computer, and added an alternate Internet provider. If both of my Internet technologies were down, generally the streets were impassable with downed trees, and I couldn’t be expected to commute to work anyway.

After the second hurricane, I was the first in the whole branch back at work, from home. We had to cancel our Stamford Tuesdays for two weeks running after that storm. The power was out on the commuter railroad. The gas stations couldn’t pump gas. I didn’t mind a bit. Without power for the refrigerators, everyone broke out their defrosting meat and shared. We ran a non-stop neighborhood barbecue for days.

I bought another battery for the house, to keep my new heavy-duty food freezer online during power outages, or to run the furnace in winter. I worked hard to grow and preserve this food. I didn’t want to lose it to a power glitch. I developed a battery hoarding fetish, to tell the truth.

The news was bad. And working for a news conglomerate, I could hardly ignore the news. Especially the part where UNC was softening it. Things were much worse than we let on to the public. The spreading riots in the cities. The drought deepening into a Dust Bowl of historic proportions. California and the southwest were on fire. Large tracts of New Orleans and Baton Rouge were condemned after repeated flooding. Economic meltdown in the U.S., and worse overseas.

But what UNC chose to broadcast wasn’t up to me. I managed web pages that supported our news programs. More in depth, sure, but I wasn’t the editor, nor a journalist. Other professionals determined the content. My team played Internet midwife to deliver the message. Cutting-edge technical excellence and visual appeal were my responsibility, not the news stories. In my work, I colored inside the lines and ensured that my team did the same. That was my job, and I did it well, and had an awful lot of fun doing it.

I really enjoyed that first summer telecommuting. Life in Connecticut was still good, then. Too bad the new normal couldn’t last.

Dee’s story continues in
End Game
, Calm Act Book 1. The brewing environmental crisis comes to a head while the United States disintegrates. This is no accidental chaos, but rather a carefully laid plan ratified by Congress – the top-secret Calm Act.