Audrey, fifty-eight and stocky, stepped out of an electric shuttle into the furnace of wavering summer sunshine outside the Garcia Inn. As much as America and the rest of the world had done to turn around climate change, and that was a lot, it was going to be a very long time before summers in the Southwest were bearable.
The electric shuttle rolled away with the quiet rasp of tires on pavement. Audrey went inside and followed the signs for “American Legacy Society.” They led across a bland, cool lobby decorated with tall photos of cacti, canyons, and desert sunsets and down a thickly-carpeted side hallway to the Mesquite Room.
Audrey knew she could still back out. She could stay in America, continue pretending to work for the Agency of Job Creation, keep dancing tango at the Tucson Social Club on Friday evenings ... and let the war come. That was something she could do, if her courage failed her.
She used a key card to enter the Mesquite Room, where half a dozen men sat around a long table, debating. None looked up. She took a seat in one of the burgundy chairs and waited.
A few minutes later, Audrey’s supervisor, Dora Marquez, arrived. She caught Audrey’s eye and gave her a confined smile.
“Looks like we’re all here,” said Director Carrico, a tall, balding man. “Dora, would you lock us in?”
“Before we start,” Audrey said, “why are we meeting in a hotel?”
Carrico grimaced. “You must be Audrey Adams? Well, Ms. Adams, we could’ve met up at a government building. Then Cascadian agents would probably get some terrific video footage of you entering the building. They’d have you identified and flagged by their counter-intelligence AIs before you got to the elevators. Then, when you crossed the border, they’d be very attentive. Right now, they know we’re likely to try something, but they don’t know what it will be or who specifically will do it. Speaking just for myself, I’d sure like it if they didn’t figure those details out until it’s too late.”
Carrico hadn’t really answered the question, Audrey reflected. She understood the security risks of using an official building. The question was why a hotel. However, she had a policy of not asking a question twice. An evasion was its own kind of answer.
Carrico settled into his chair at the head of the table. “Any other stupid questions before we get this thing started?”
A young man next to Audrey, whippet-thin, with enormous eyebrows, leaned over and whispered, “If you’re worried about security, don’t be. We’ve been working with this chain for years. We scanned the whole grounds forty minutes ago.”
“Thank you,” Audrey said. She surveyed the rest of the room as Carrico’s Deputy Director, Lange, a man with the look of a football player gone to seed, started the meeting. Several men shifted in their chairs. Audrey brought up the keyboard on her smart lenses. While she couldn’t see any cameras, she knew some must be in the room, and she put her projected keyboard into secure mode. This cycled it irregularly through five different typing layouts Audrey had learned, each of which she’d generated randomly. People tended to assume that since their keyboards were only visible in their own lenses, cameras watching their hands couldn’t identify what they were typing, but the technology of inferring what someone was typing had been around for decades—it just didn’t work well when the keyboard layout was unknown. Every analyst, Audrey included, was required to use arbitrary, cycling keyboard layouts. A few, like Audrey, even did it.
She began by establishing a network connection with the secure line provided for the meeting. Now it would be recorded that she was using that line. Then she opened a second connection via a private Canadian satellite. Using that, she initiated a search for public records pertaining to the Tucson Garcia Inn.
They spent thirty-five minutes reviewing the outline of the operation, going once again over her contacts—a high-level official at the Agency of Resilience and Disaster Recovery, or ARDR; an Economics professor at UC Berkeley; and three functionaries at various levels in the Citizen Dividend Office. Lange ponderously summarized the protocols and contingency plans, but Audrey had been through that material a dozen times. Instead of listening, she watched faces, shoulders, hands. She knew who she had to watch out for after a minute and a half: a thick-necked man with a fringe of blond hair. He was leaning back, his fingers steepled. Audrey had no idea who he was, but she noticed him sizing her up, and he didn’t bother to mask it. She knew she did not look impressive, with her outdated chestnut bob, her thickened waist, her blunt nose and bland expression. As far as she was concerned, her forgettable appearance was an essential asset—but men, she had found, did not always think that way.
She did a face search on the man with the steepled fingers, and his name came up immediately, sourced from social media and news outlets: Tyler Godbout, a New Hampshirite and a trade adviser to the President. He’d inherited a shipping company headquartered in Portsmouth and built up a larger fortune investing in water rights. He also owned nineteen Garcia Inns—for instance, the one in Tucson.
“And that’s about it,” Lange said finally, looking to Carrico. Carrico in turn looked over at Godbout, and only then did Godbout lean forward and speak.
“It’s a fine plan,” he said, “if all we want to do is disrupt their economy.” He held up a hand as the whippet-like man started to say something. “Oh, now, I know the point is to shut our own damn protesters up. They think these Californians are all giddy as pigs over there in their made-up country, with money falling out of the sky and everybody singing kumbaya after supper, and I sure would like them to see what it looks like when that tower of blocks comes tumbling down. The only problem with this thing is the timing. It’s too late. Years too late. We are going to get those states back in the Union, just like we did Vermont and Maine and my own beloved New Hampshire, but we can’t leave this problem to get worse for years while bureaucrat spies—no offense, Ms. Adams—chip away at making the Cascadians look bad. One economic embarrassment, even a big one, isn’t going to send the Cascadians running home to Mama America.”
What was interesting about Godbout’s financial records, Audrey was finding, was that the numbers added up, but not so much the stories. Godbout’s U.S. tax returns weren’t available for public scrutiny, of course, but the Mountain Republic of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, while it existed, had mandated public release of tax records of all individuals with a net worth of sixty million dollars or more as part of their wealth gap legislation. The United States had eradicated those records after the Mountain Republic was reintegrated, but once anything worth seeing was on the Internet, you could often find it, if you knew where to look.
Godbout had companies that seemed to lose money in years that should have been lucrative and private assets mentioned in corrections and reclassifications. There was nothing at this stage that looked explicitly illegal, and even if there had been, the country in which the transactions had taken place no longer existed, but Audrey stored her back-of-a-napkin analysis to come back to later and gestured her keyboard away.
“I appreciate your point of view, Mr. Godbout,” Carrico was saying, “but we’re committed to keeping all our options open.”
“You don’t win a bet by backing all the horses,” Godbout said. He raised both his hands. “No, it’s all right, I’m not here to knock over the china. But I will say that when we were bringing the Mountain Republic back into the fold, we didn’t waste our time trying to make their government look bad.”
“Cascadia is not New England,” Dora said. Godbout smiled indulgently.
“No, it’s not,” Godbout said. “New Englanders are hard-nosed, practical people who just got a wrong idea in their heads. Californians and Oregonians and Washingtonians—is that even the word? Doesn’t matter, let’s say it is—these are a bunch of random people from all over the map who think they’re better than the rest of us and are hell-bent on living like they are, even if they have to ruin their own country to do it. When push came to shove, New Englanders saw the reality and accepted it, even if they didn’t like it. Cascadians, well, I’m not so sure they’re going to see the light without somebody shining it in their eyes.”
Carrico pointed at Godbout. “Mr. Godbout, I was told that your people, and you specifically, had given the green light—”
“Oh we did, and we do,” said Godbout. “I just couldn’t in good conscience let you go ahead with this without pointing out what I think has to be obvious to everyone in this room, that this project is a drain of resources better used to other ends.”
“We’re hoping to stop a war,” said Carrico.
“Well,” Godbout said, “hope away.”
“Look on the bright side,” Dora was saying two days later, as she walked Audrey to the electric station wagon, an Anbar Compass, that would take her to her new home. “You’re going to Cascadia, so you’ll probably get a nice break from sitting in rooms full of self-important white men.”
It was true: Cascadia might not be a Utopia where everyone sang kumbaya after supper, but they were far ahead of the U.S. in racial and gender balance. She’d have to see if women over forty were as invisible there as they were in America. For her sake, she hoped they were.
All of that said, she wasn’t thrilled about leaving the U.S. Even if the current administration and its recent predecessors were focused mainly on protecting the people who already had money and privilege, there were millions of Americans who were actively working to make things better. The Progressive party had been out of power for more than ten years years now, but they were making some headway in individual states, and unlike President Jimenez’s Constitutionalist party, they weren’t afraid to learn from Cascadian innovations, nor to come up with their own ways to support those who were worst off.
Most of Audrey’s possessions had already been packed into an automated truck that would cross the border separately. For herself, she’d rented the self-driving Anbar instead of taking a train because she didn’t trust the mover robots with a few particular things.
As common as robots had become, Audrey had never felt completely comfortable with them. Life was made easier every decade in terms of the little things, while climate change authored a steady stream of natural disasters, which were easy for no one. The trend of catastrophes would reverse some generations down the line, and it would have been much worse if there hadn’t been such a sea change in how people used energy back in the 2020s, but for the time being, life for financially stable people in the industrial world was part being waited on hand and foot by robots and part fleeing hurricanes, wildfires, and floods.
The Anbar was packed with grandmother Jennifer’s china, a collection of glass globes Audrey’s friend Jordan had given her over a series of Christmases, various other keepsakes, and especially—
“Is that your cat?” Dora said. “You can’t bring her with you!”
“I’m giving up my country, my tango group, my friends, my home, and my personal safety,” Audrey said. “I don’t see any reason I can’t keep my cat.”
“You’ll draw attention at the border, Audrey.”
“So? What’s going to happen, in a couple of months they notice something’s wrong with their basic income system, and an intrepid border guard will rush in and says ‘I bet it was that cat lady!’?”
“You don’t want to be memorable,” Dora said.
“It’s between me taking her and you smuggling her across the border in your shirt.”
Dora’s lips twitched, but she didn’t crack a smile. “It’s a terrible idea, Audrey,” she said. “Mark my words.”
Dora was not wrong. During the two hour drive, Matilda, Audrey’s black-and-gray American Shorthair, spent about an hour and fifty-two minutes yowling to get out of her carrier and the other eight minutes throwing up. The vomiting involved a two-minute incident about an hour in, followed later by a more spectacular six-minute event. Afterward, even having stopped in the parking lot of a Taco Bell to clean both messes up and with the ventilation going full blast, the car reeked of partly-digested cat food. The smell was nasty enough for its own sake, but it would be more of a problem if Audrey ended up speaking with a human border agent. Regardless of her bravado with Dora, the last thing she wanted at the border was to be memorable.
While the car drove itself, Audrey spent her time thinking about what could go wrong. This was not like her former visits. She had been to Cascadia eight or ten times, most often to conferences for job placement professionals. Her cover job (which she sometimes actually performed) was heading a group at the Tucson Office of Retraining and Job Creation. Those trips, however, had been brief and safe, and they’d left her emotions largely untouched. This trip was different not only because of the risks of the mission but because she was moving back to stay for the foreseeable future. That meant that there was a chance, now, that she’d have the opportunity to find out where her mother and sister had gone.
When Audrey was seven, her family had moved to Ohio from Oregon so that Audrey’s father could take a job a relative had offered him. The job lasted for only three months, though, and the reprieve from trouble between Audrey’s parents was even shorter. One morning when Audrey was nine, she woke up to find she and her father were alone. Some of Audrey’s mother’s and seven-year-old sister Carrie’s things were gone, with only a short note in their place. It didn’t give much information other than that the two had gone “back to Oregon.” Audrey’s father had never been able to find them, and neither had Audrey.
No one had ever given Audrey a good explanation for why her mother had left, or why she hadn’t taken Audrey with her—no one except the cold, jagged voice inside that urged her to accept the obvious: her mother didn’t want her. There was probably something else, Audrey had always told herself, but without knowing what that might be, it was impossible to shut that voice up.
Driving to Cascadia to live, Audrey realized something that should have been obvious for years: it was her mother’s disappearance that had made Audrey obsessed with electronic records. She’d made her own search for her mother and sister once she began to learn Internet research skills, back when they still called it “the Internet,” but she hadn’t gotten far. Those skills got recognized in school, though, which led her to take electronic forensics and other electives, which led her to her college major and eventually her job as an intelligence analyst. It all fed on this gnawing compulsion to find things that were lost.
Well, if she wanted to find things lost in Cascadia, this was her golden opportunity. As set as she was on her mission, she would still have time to do a little personal research. Maybe she could still that nagging voice once and for all.
As the car queued itself in one of the long lines at the border crossing, Audrey sat in back, looking out at the flat August sky, her fingers poking through the wire wall of the cat carrier to touch Matilda’s fur as the car nosed forward.
The Cascadian border patrol robots were bright blue and gawky. Their design looked like a pair of binoculars balanced on pogo stick that had been stuck to the center of a skateboard. The robots threaded their way through the stopped cars, turning their attention to each in turn. When one of them reached Audrey, the audio system chimed with an incoming call from Cascadian Border Services so it could talk to her.
“Accept call,” Audrey said.
“Hi.” The robot’s voice resonated from the speakers around her. “Could you please state your legal name and put your hand against the window for biometrics?” The sound was more melodious than the robots and AIs she was used to, but also less pure, like an amateur tenor after a rough night. Audrey was used to American robots with exaggeratedly charismatic voices.
“Audrey Jennifer Adams,” Audrey said, putting her hand against the window. The robot stared at her unblinkingly. It must have photographed her and run her fingerprints by now.
“Thank you. We have a biometrics match for that name. What’s the purpose of your trip?”
“I’m taking early retirement to Cascadia. I have a pension from my American job. I have dual citizenship.”
“Thank you. I can confirm we have you on record as a Cascadian citizen by virtue of having been born in Oregon, though I see you haven’t lived here since before Cascadia was founded. I can also confirm that we received your relocation paperwork. According to the information I have, you’re waiving the right to a Citizen Dividend—is that correct?”
“That’s right.”
“Are you transporting any controlled substances, firearms, or explosives?”
“No.”
“Any weapons of any kind?”
“No, none.”
“Do you have any plants or fresh produce with you?”
“No produce, but I have four houseplants.”
“I believe I see a jade plant, two spider plants, and a Christmas Cactus. Is that the correct inventory?”
“It is.”
“It looks like you may be overwatering your Christmas Cactus. I’d recommend watering it only when the top inch of soil is dry.”
Audrey was surprised enough by this that she couldn’t come up with a coherent response. The robot continued on, unperturbed.
“Are you transporting any marijuana, alcohol, or tobacco?”
“No.”
“Are you bringing any items to be left as gifts or to be sold?”
“No.”
“You appear to have a live cat with you. Is that correct?”
“That’s right. Her name is Matilda.”
“After the Roald Dahl character?” it asked.
“Yes ... ?” Audrey said. Were border control robots supposed to be making conversation?
“I can confirm that we have received veterinary records for Matilda. Do you consent for your vehicle to be scanned?”
“Yes, go ahead.”
The robot was quiet for a moment as, presumably, it scanned the car. It blinked little metal shutters over its binocular eyes every few moments, which made it feel less officious. Seconds passed, then minutes. There was no sound except the muted clicks of the robot blinking. Other cars were released and drove around. Several times Audrey was on the verge of saying something, but each time she stopped herself. She hadn’t been through the border in over a decade but ... wasn’t this taking a lot longer than it should?
Abruptly, it spoke again. “Thank you, Ms. Adams. You are free to pass through as soon as the vehicles in front of you have cleared. Have a nice day, and welcome to Cascadia.”
It was only minutes before the cars in front of her, freed or redirected by their own border robots, cleared the way. Audrey’s Anbar followed close on the heels of a tiny electric Volkswagen under a set of great arches, up a highway entry ramp, and out into a nation that she’d be working her hardest to undermine.