“Alice” was right: Gene woke the next morning, a Monday, still thinking about their conversation. There were a few possibilities.
First, Alice might be lying, or at least exaggerating wildly, about someone being out to get him. The “information” she was offering might be some kind of trap. They might not care about the optional favor they claimed to want from Gene and instead might be setting him up to act on what they told him about somebody “gunning for” him. It would be hard not to, if what they shared seemed truly dangerous to him, and if he couldn’t confirm whether or not it was true.
So they might be trying to trick him into doing some specific thing—maybe even a seemingly innocuous thing—that would play right into their hands. The idea was even more disconcerting considering they’d clearly spent some time delving into Gene’s personality profile. Everything Alice had said about him had been spot on.
As plausible as that seemed, Gene’s gut told him there really was something there. True, he’d only seen an animation of Alice, one that may well have been altered or even generated by an AI to appear as honest as possible, but he didn’t think so. He had a very good track record of judging whether someone could be relied on, and for all the concerns strange circumstances, Alice had seemed to him like a genuine person who was genuinely trying to trade information for his help. He even thought she might have given him her real name. Also, not insignificantly, Samantha had chosen to be part of that group, and while it was always possible she was also a mark, or that including her had all been part of a strategy for getting to Gene, Samantha was generally a good judge of people—with the exception, based on what Gene had read so far of her diary, of boyfriends.
A second possibility was that the information was made-up but that there was no trap. Maybe the Louvre was needed Gene’s help but didn’t have anything else they could bargain with. Yet they did have his daughter. What better bargaining chip could they have? The fact that they weren’t offering to put him in touch with her or even pass along his messages was, weirdly, a point in favor of trusting them.
In theory, a third possibility was that they had real information about a real threat to him, or at least thought they did. The problem with believing that was that it struck Gene as unconvincingly convenient that they had come across that information just as he was contacting them about Samantha. Together with the fact that they were technically a criminal vigilante group, this made trusting them very difficult, if not impossible.
Even so, coincidences did happen—and Alice had said the danger originated with the American government, which would have been a strange thing to make up and which made some sense considering the current threat of war. If what they were claiming was true—that someone was about to cause havoc for Gene and they knew who—then Gene getting through to them when he did could be just a case of him being very lucky.
On the other hand, it was hard to imagine what the point could possibly be of an American intelligence operation against him. Blackmail didn’t seem likely. Apart from stealing a pack of gum when he was ten, something he’d regretted disproportionately ever since, Gene was kind of a straight arrow. Edison used to tease him about it. Threatening him physically didn’t seem likely, either. It was hard to imagine what the Americans could get from anything like that.
Although ... maybe he wasn’t the target per se. Maybe this person, if they existed in the first place, was going to threaten someone close to Gene to try to force Gene to do ... something. Share state secrets? He didn’t have much in the way of that kind of information. Gain access to someone, or something?
Was Mark safe because he was in France, or was he in greater danger away from Cascadia than in it? Was Samantha safer with the Louvre than she would have been at home? Or was the Louvre part of the threat? Alice had claimed Samantha was there of her own free will and in no danger, and Gene was inclined to believe her, but there was no guarantee that was true.
And what about Kiara and Vi and Will? What about Zora itself? Gene loved too many people and cared about too many things to avoid being an easy target.
He grunted with frustration. There was no point in endlessly speculating about unnamed dangers, and there was no chance Gene was going to guess what was going on, if anything was going on, without further clues.
The first question was whether Samantha really was with the Louvre of her own free will and perfectly safe, but there was very little he could do to learn more about that. He could hire a private investigator, either an AI or a human/AI partnership, but that hardly seemed like a smart move. His daughter, apparently, was part of a criminal organization, which is something he couldn’t risk anyone else finding out about at this point. That organization itself would be much too dangerous for most PIs anyway.
He could try to get Mi to connect him by telling him who her contact was, but Mi had clearly been very uncomfortable even contacting that person herself. Gene might need to ask her to get him in touch with the group again, and if he alienated her by pushing too hard, that option might go away.
That left him with very little he could do about Samantha or the supposed threat until Alice contacted him again, and he had no intention of promising an unnamed favor, regardless of the conditions, which meant even that wouldn’t offer much in the way of new options.
The only other connection he could think of was the boy Samantha had mentioned, Lan, whom he didn’t know and had no way of finding—except that Samantha’s diary had mentioned he was the friend of a school friend. He brought up the page where she first mentioned him: he was a friend of someone named Naya. This was not a lot of help, since “Naya” was the name of a character from a wildly popular streaming series around the time Samantha was born. When Samantha first went to school outside Zora, it seemed as though every other girl in her class plus a good number of the nonbinary kids were named Naya. Gene didn’t know of any particular Naya in Samantha’s circle, and she hadn’t come up elsewhere yet in the diaries. Still, it was a lead.
“Ollie, I need your help with something,” he said. “I’m trying to find out who ‘Lan’ is in Samantha’s diaries.”
“I haven’t read the diaries,” Ollie said. “I don’t have permission.”
“Can I give you permission?” Gene said.
“Yes, Samantha left it open for you to share.” Gene was stopped for a moment, realizing how much trust his daughter actually seemed to have in him—enough that she would let him share her diary. He was beginning to realize that there was a lot he was missing about their relationship, and about Sammi herself.
“I am granting you permission,” Gene said. “So she mentions Lan, and she mentions that Lan is a friend of her friend Naya, but I don’t know who exactly either of them is. Can you search public records, especially school records, to try to identify either one? I don’t know if ‘Lan’ is a regular name or a nickname or what.”
“It could also be made up by Samantha,” Ollie said. “She might prefer to keep him private.”
“This is a matter of Samantha’s safety,” Gene said.
“Oh, don’t worry: I do what I’m told,” Ollie said. “But I did want to be sure you had taken that possibility into account.”
“Maybe ‘Lan’ is short for something. Lance? Landon? Even Alan or Orlando?
“I’ll try all of those, and any other name with ‘lan’ in it.”
“And can you cross-reference those with any public records or Zora records of places Samantha has been? Maybe they were at a coffee shop together? Maybe she’s had him to the house?”
“I’ll do what I can,” Ollie said. “The records we have legal access to are limited.”
Gene hesitated, unsure whether Ollie was implying that there were more records they might be able to reference that weren’t legal. Then he shook it off. There was no point going down that road. Criminal behavior was exactly what he was trying to save Samantha from.
“That’s all right,” Gene said. “Do what you can.”
The only other thing Gene could do that might be useful was reading the diary itself. Ollie would have read it instantly after receiving permission, and he’d be using anything he’d found to aid in his search, but maybe there were clues in there that wouldn’t be obvious to an AI, or that would only be visible only to someone who knew Sammi well—though Gene questioned now whether he still fit that description.
He checked the time on his lenses. He’d slept poorly and gotten up early, and now it was just before six a.m. He set himself a timer, allowing one hour to read more of Sammi’s diary and see what he could find. With luck, Ollie would break in with something useful, or Gene would find a lead he could give Ollie to pursue.
He tried to skim, at first. Sammi said little about the Louvre, though it was clear that she’d shown Lan her skills and that he’d gotten her some kind of try-out. Gene found himself slowing down and reading carefully, though, as he read about her feelings about Lan, about herself, about Gene and Will and Edison. She was as romantic as Edison had been, something Gene wouldn’t have guessed from how she spoke about her life to him. Mark was the one with the romantic flights of imagination. Sammi seemed to keep her passions quiet, but they ran deep. She was particularly upset about the many millions of disenfranchised, permanently unemployed people in America.
Most of the diary had to do with friends, school, romantic relationships, and economic justice. The Louvre seemed to come up from time to time, but Sammi spoke about it in such general terms that it was hard to be sure, and not once did Gene read any details that might help him locate Lan or anyone else from the organization.
He was near the end of the diary when the hour ran out.
“Ollie, any luck with that search for Lan?”
“I’m sorry. I still have a few inquiries out, but so far nothing promising has come through,” Ollie said.
“All right,” said Gene. “Have the kitchen make me a cup of coffee. I need to head in to work.”
As soon as Gene let himself focus on work, a hundred thoughts crowded in. Based on what Tom Sato had shared about American bug drones, it seemed possible war might break out at any minute, and Gene needed to help Cascadia prepare.
If a war resulted in refugees and catastrophes, the organization Gene’s ran, the Agency of Resilience and Disaster Recovery, would activate an emergency operations center. In any disaster, up to nine national agencies, aided by many local agencies, would connect and become part of the effort as coordinated by the ARDR. These were the National Housing Agency, the Cascadian Transportation Agency, the Reemployment Initiatives Bureau (for emergency workers and volunteers), the Bureau of Cultural Affairs (for historic preservation), the Bureau of Economic Development, the Department of Agriculture (when food production was threatened), the Department of Human Services, and the Agency of Information and Communications.
During normal times, counties around Cascadia were responsible for submitting proposals and writing grants to, say, create rain gardens to help handle excessive stormwater or to build sea walls. The ARDR reviewed the requests and packaged many of them into funding requests to submit to the legislature. In the case of something as disruptive as war, local disaster management efforts would be led by local emergency management officials or fire chiefs, all of whom would coordinate through Gene’s office, and there wouldn’t be time for proposals and grant applications. Instead, Gene needed to ensure that his organization had the funds, personnel, and AI resources they would need to respond to wartime catastrophes without delays. That meant preparing financial materials, getting funding, hiring and training personnel, and preparing for greatly increased AI use, which in turn meant coordinating with human and AI workers within the agency to get all of that planning and all of those projections completed as soon as possible, which in turn meant pulling personnel off some of the less urgent matters the ARDR was dealing with, such as longer-term resilience projects around the country. Unfortunately, disrupting those efforts also meant having to handle the outcry from officials in counties around Cascadia who would wonder why their projects and requests were suddenly stopped dead in their tracks. Gene had to make sure that was done without it being obvious that war preparations were in progress. Gene’s instructions so far were all wrapped in confidentiality.
All of this meant an endless procession of messages and meetings, with Ollie mediating to allow Gene to focus on whatever priority was the most important at any given moment. Gene spent his first couple of hours in the office untangling those priorities in constant dialog with Ollie, who organized the information he gathered into massive task lists that he and Gene then dove into, item by item.
By mid-morning the meetings began. Gene and Ollie, with some help from Bennet, briefed one group after another, sidelined and prioritized projects, and handed out requirements and directives. Unfortunately, most of this time was spent trying to find answers to questions like “Where are we getting the personnel for this?” and “Where do I take funds from to follow through?” or statements like “That’s impossible. We don’t have the resources.”
Lunchtime went by unnoticed, and it was past three when Gene was interrupted in the middle of hurried preparations for yet another meeting by a blinking icon in his lenses: a black arc on a splash of red. His first thought was irritation that someone was trying to get around normal channels to contact him, and his second was more irritation that for some reason his lenses weren’t displaying who exactly was calling. Then he realized what the icon must meant.
“Ollie, hold everything off for a little bit; I have something I have to do, and I don’t know how long I’ll be.”
“And the meeting?”
“Push it back, please,” Gene said. Then he gave the icon a long gaze and opened the call.
Suddenly, he was back in the black sphere with drawing-style Alice standing across from him. He wondered if he also appeared to her as a sophisticated cartoon.
“Is it Samantha?” he said. “Is she all right?”
“She’s still fine,” said Alice. “She still doesn’t want to talk to you. I called because our situation change.”
“What do you mean? You mean your situation with Samantha?”
“Samantha is fine,” Alice said, clearly irritated. “But one of our people was killed.”
“I’m truly sorry to hear that,” Gene said. “But what’s it got to do with me?”
“It’s the person who found out the Americans were out to get you,” Alice said. “Apparently the Americans didn’t like being noticed. We hadn’t counted on physical violence. That’s not our area.”
Gene shifted in his chair, his anxiety about the ARDR’s preparations spilling into his anxiety about communicating with a criminal hacker organization like two rivers joining in rough terrain. “That’s not my area, either,” he said finally.
“Of course not,” said Alice. “Look ... you really need to know what’s going on. Can we meet?”
“Meet?” Gene said. He thought they were meeting. They were meeting as cartoons in a globe of darkness, but it was still a meeting.
“In person,” Alice said.
Gene couldn’t make any sense of that. Why would a secret hacker organization want to meet in person? That sounded difficult—and dangerous. Gene still didn’t know if he believed there was any real threat to him, though it was true it would be easier to tell if he saw Alice in person. He could read a person much better than a cartoon. But why would she want to meet in person? Wasn’t meeting this way much safer for her?
“Why do you want to meet in person?” Gene said.
“Because that way, we can talk like human beings,” Alice said.
“And having researched me, you think that will make me more inclined to help you,” Gene said.
Alice shrugged. “Maybe? That’s not why, though. There are terrible things beginning. I know you probably have access to some information because of your position, but I don’t think you really understand what’s coming, and we do. I mean, part of it. You’re worried about a war starting, but we just found out we’re already in one.”
Gene hesitated, but he didn’t know why. He just had to tell her no, because there was no way he could safely meet with her. He doubted the real reason for an in-person meeting was that Alice preferred talking face to face. People had done some of that when Gene was young, but Alice appeared to be young enough that connecting virtually should be second nature, the most comfortable form of communication possible.
It hit him suddenly what his hesitation was about.
“I want to see Samantha,” he said.
“We’ve been over this,” said Alice. “She doesn’t want to see you.”
“If you want to meet in person, let’s have the meeting wherever Samantha is. I need to know that she’s OK, and I don’t mean to be inconsiderate, but I don’t know you. She doesn’t have to talk to me. She doesn’t even have to acknowledge I’m there. I just want to see her in person. That’s the one thing that would get me to meet with you in person.”
“Not threats to Cascadia? Not the end of your career, public humiliation ... ?”
Gene felt a finger of cold push down his spine. What did she mean by that?
“Just Samantha. If you don’t understand why I’m more worried about Samantha than about these threats you’re telling me I should care about, go back and read my profile again.”
“All right,” Alice said brusquely. “Wait. I’ll see if anything like that is possible.”
She vanished, and Gene was alone in the bubble. Some light music started: a flute, guitar, bass ... It took a moment, but he realized he recognized the tune, “The Girl from Ipanema.” He had a sudden and surprisingly vivid memory of standing in an elevator next to his mom in an office building somewhere. There had been a smell, like burnt electronics—
Alice reappeared. “Samantha says OK. She’ll come to the meeting, but she won’t stay, and she says don’t get your hopes up for a conversation.”
“I won’t,” Gene said. “Where and when?”
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Alice said. “Do you have any paper? You need to write this down. You don’t want it recorded electronically.”
Alice wanted to meet that afternoon at the Delia Rhodes Sports Arena in Antioch. Gene had pictured a sporting event, and the idea of having so many people around was reassuring, but he realized on the way that it was a Tuesday afternoon. It seemed unlikely any sporting event would be going on in that time frame unless it was some kind of practice. He wanted to check the arena’s schedule on his lenses, but Alice had advised strongly against leaving a digital trail. As it was, it would still be recorded that he’d taken the train to the arena stop, but that information wouldn’t be accessible through any easy means, and it wouldn’t be a definite indication he was going to the arena itself. There were home, restaurants, and businesses in that area as well.
The arena was smaller than he’d pictured, a squat, cylindrical building partly surrounded by a park. When Gene was very young, sports venues were always provided with vast parking lots, but parking in most places had been turned into better-used space as people turned to mass transit, on-demand shuttles, and on-demand autonomous electric cars to get from place to place. By the time Gene graduated from college, few people owned cars of their own. Gene himself had never owned one, although Edison had for a little while when he was young, living for a time on an isolated farm in eastern Oregon.
Per Alice’s instructions, Gene walked around the building to a service entrance, where a robotic vehicle was in the process of loading recyclables. He walked up stained concrete steps to a steel door. It was locked, and he stood there, uncertain whether to knock or try another entrance, when the door clicked and swung open by itself. He walked in, and the door clunked shut behind him.
He found himself in a trash room that opened onto a service corridor. The air smelled of stale beer, mildew, and pretzels. When Gene stepped into the corridor to get his bearings, he saw he wasn’t far from a room-sized opening into the main arena, through which he could hear children yelling. The corridor was empty, and Gene took the few steps to the opening to look in. Two groups of schoolchildren were playing some kind of volleyball with trampolines. The sight was bittersweet and painful, children at play with no worries about war, America, secret dangers.
“Gene,” someone said. He turned, and there was Alice. Her voice sounded different than in had in the calls—it must have been masked during those. Standing behind her was Samantha, and standing close to Samantha was a lean, bristly-haired, bronze-skinned boy with a prominent nose. Man, not boy, Gene corrected himself. Samantha wasn’t a child anymore. Never had that been more painfully clear to him than at that moment. He couldn’t compel her to do anything, not even to come home, which he realized on some level he’d meant to insist on.
She looked well. She was dressed in jeans and a dandelion-yellow top he didn’t recognize. She seemed healthy, alert, even relaxed. She was certainly more relaxed than he was.
“Samantha!” Gene said. “Are you all right? Do you want to come home?”
Samantha breathed in, frowning, and glanced at the young man next to her. Gene realized belatedly who it must be.
“Are you Lan?” Gene said.
The young man looked puzzled. “Lan?” he said.
“You’ve been reading my diary,” Samantha said.
Gene nodded.
“I’m surprised,” she said. “But it’s good. Come on.” This last part was directed at her boyfriend—if that’s what that person was? Gene realized that “Lan” must be an alias, but that didn’t clarify whether or not this was “Lan.” Then Samantha was turning away, and they were leaving. Gene wanted to shout after them, but what would he shout, and what good would it do? Caution won out over desperation. He watched Samantha until she and her companion turned the corner, and then he shifted his attention back to Alice.
“What did you want to tell me?” he said.
“You’re being—” she began, but an icon for an urgent bulletin appeared in his lenses, and he gestured to cut her off.
“Just a minute,” he said.
“You’re taking a call?” she said, glaring.
“It’s an urgent bulletin from my office. It would be suspicious if I didn’t open it right away.” That wasn’t strictly true, but it was true that someone might take note, and it was also true that now that he’d seen Samantha and confirmed as well as he could that she was all right, his work was the highest priority.
He tapped the bulletin with two fingers to get the summary description. He thought he’d been prepared for the worst, but the message made his stomach twist as though someone had reached into it and grabbed it with both hands.
A flotilla of American warships left Juneau 18 minutes ago and is traveling south at full speed, just skirting Canadian waters. AI assessments rate it very likely to extremely likely that they intend to enter Cascadian territory. At the current speed, they could reach the Salish Sea within 51 minutes or the Columbia River in one hour and 14 minutes. Tap here for maps.
Alice must have read the expression on his face.
“What?” she said. “Is it the Americans?”
Gene dismissed the bulletin and focused on Alice. “I think you’d better give me the quickest version of what you’ve got to say,” he said. “All Hell’s about to break loose.”