Gene Ajou worked in Sacramento every day, but normally he went to the nondescript downtown headquarters of the Agency of Resilience and Disaster Relief, or ARDR, of which he was director.
Today was different: today, he’d received a notice just after four in the morning to meet with President Graciela Muñoz at the Capitol Complex, a set of tiered buildings built of golden-brown stone over and around a stream and small waterfall in northeast Sacramento.
President Muñoz, a grandmotherly woman who barely came up to his shoulder, met him in her outer office, which overlooked the vast working gardens of the complex. She didn’t stop, but motioned for him to join her as she strode to the corridor, trailing assistants and security personnel.
“I’m sorry we can’t meet properly,” she said. “I wanted to talk today, and there was nothing I could move. Do you want coffee? You prefer espresso, don’t you?”
“Sure--more efficient,” Gene said.
Muñoz laughed. The president wasn’t one to wait around for results, either. It was one reason they got along.
“Jared, could you get Dr. Ajou an espresso?” Muñoz called over her shoulder. One of the assistants left the procession.
Gene was tall and had a naturally long stride, but he had to push himself to keep up with Muñoz’s brisk pace. The pale gold, stone walls around them were mosaicked with photographs and paintings of every size and variety, all by Cascadians, all depicting Cascadian locations and history.
They turned a corner where a white-mustached man intercepted the president, holding out a document on a hand-held screen. Muñoz greeted him with a nod as she stopped and took it. “John,” she said affably. She skimmed the document, scrolling, her lenses most likely highlighting key phrases as she went. When she was done, she laid her hand on the screen. It bleeped in confirmation, she handed it back to John, and then they were walking again. She still hadn’t told him why he was there.
“You’re expecting something to go wrong,” he said.
Muñoz looked Gene over with a moment’s full attention. Gene imagined how easily the full appraisal of those eyes could cow someone with anything to hide. He gazed back and waited.
“Not expecting,” Muñoz said, finally. “But it’s a strong possibility.”
“Enough of a possibility that you need the ARDR to start preparing now.”
“I like how I don’t need to introduce topics to you, Gene,” she said. “We always seem to start halfway through the conversation.”
A trio of severe-looking women caught up with them from a connecting corridor. “President Muñoz, a moment please?” said one. At the same time, a young man arrived with a gray stoneware cup of espresso on a tray. Gene smiled at him and took the cup, but he waved away the sugar and milk options.
“I can spare about thirty seconds, Huiyin,” Muñoz said.
Huiyin glanced at Gene.
“Don’t worry, he has clearance,” said the president. “It’s the hackers?”
Huiyin nodded. “The Louvre.” She glanced at Gene. “Not the museum.”
“I’ve heard of them,” Gene said.
“They doxxed Terence Palmer this time,” Huiyin continued. “He’s the majority shareholder--”
“I know, another one of the American economic elite. As if we don’t have enough trouble with the Americans as it is. You know for sure it’s the Louvre?”
“We’re fairly confident. It’s clearly some group of Cascadian hackers, and as far as we know, only the Louvre has the resources for something like this. They seem to have acquired whole libraries of back doors over the years. There’s no telling what they can access.”
“The more I hear about those people, the more concerned I get,” said Muñoz.
Huiyin nodded. “We’d like to elevate this to a first-tier investigation, but we need your authorization.”
“Why aren’t we doing this in a staff meeting?”
“I couldn’t get on the agenda for two weeks.”
“So you resort to stopping me in the hallway?”
“Yes. Did it work?”
Muñoz shook her head, but she said, “Go ahead and prepare the proposal. Send it to Rosie. Rosie, you’re taking care of this?”
Muñoz looked back at a white woman behind them, presumably Rosie, who said “Yes, ma’am.” Muñoz started walking again, leaving Huiyin and her people behind. Gene waited. Muñoz hadn’t told him what they were dealing with yet. Her hesitancy worried him.
“Gene, we don’t have time to talk about this in detail, especially with these interruptions,” Muñoz said, “but I’m having a report sent to you. It’s going to need your full attention. We need to develop plans as quickly as possible.”
“To meet what threat?” Gene said, but at that moment they arrived at the conference room.
“Wait outside for a moment, please,” Muñoz told her entourage. She gestured Gene into the conference room with her and closed the door after them.
“War,” she said.
“War?”
“With the Americans. Nothing is happening yet, but there are hints we can’t ignore. Follow up with Rosie, please.”
Before Gene could ask for details, the door reopened, letting officials and staff rush in like the tide. Muñoz smiled at Gene as though they had been talking about something minor, waved, and turned her attention to the next matter at hand.
Gene began reading some of the briefings on the way to the ARDR. When he arrived, he was still wrestling with dread. War. Relations with the Americans weren’t good, but the problems didn’t seem serious enough to warrant violence being the next step. Yet the report was clear and convincing, describing a hum of unusual activity at American military and manufacturing facilities, while American politicians strugled with massive unrest among the citizenry. With the American wealth gap widening every year and the unemployment rate above sixty percent, it was no wonder. The economic security of the average Cascadian family, compared to Americans, was practically a taunt. The AI assessments were grim.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Constitutionalist Party, which had held the upper hand for more than a decade, was beginning to regret the deal their predecessors had made in agreeing to let some of the richest and most productive states secede to form Cascadia. The Constitutionalists had quietly supported the secession, to permanently rid the country of large numbers of West Coast voters who supported the Progressive party. At first, this had given the Constitutionalists a crushing political advantage, but that had since dwindled to a thin margin. Apparently, the Consititutionalists were now regretting the deal.
None of this seemed to signal immediate danger, but the threat of military action seemed likely to increase steadily unless something significant changed. What could change and how, Gene had no idea.
Gene was accustomed to worrying. The things that gave him the most anxiety, normally, were the hardest to prepare for, though they were also usually the least likely to happen. What if someone set off a dirty bomb in San Francisco? What if an asteroid hit? What if another pandemic broke out, but this time it was something that that spread easily through the air and could survive for days on surfaces? His agency spent all day, every day preparing for these possibilities while handling the ongoing climate disasters. Planning was the key.
War, though ... He could plan for that for a decade and still be unprepared.
Success, to Gene, was when nothing happened. Any crisis that could be averted or kept to such a minor impact that no one cared about it was a victory. Keeping problems from happening didn’t earn him much glory, but for Gene, recognition was nothing compared to the sense that people were, at least for the moment, safe.
He wouldn’t enjoy that feeling again any time soon.
Gene’s lenses were starting to make his head ache. It was probably more of a sign of stress than of eyestrain, but he switched to his desk screen. There, he viewed the animations of projected invasion routes at least half a dozen times each. Most of these theoretical options showed troops massing in Reno and Carson City, pushing West into Cascadia in two places: in the north, through Truckee and the Donner Pass, and in the south, through the Eldorado Forest south of Lake Tahoe. Neither route was very accommodating, but both provided a direct path to Sacramento.
The northern route was emphasized in the report, but it was the southern one that worried Gene. That went directly through Zora, the community where Gene had lived for more than twenty years. Zora was where he’d been married, where his children had grown up, and where his husband had suffered through two years of pancreatic cancer and finally died. Their daughter, Samantha, still lived with Gene there, along with many friends and supportive neighbors. Their son, Mark, was studying art in Europe, and Gene would insist he stay there if things got ugly between Cascadia and the U.S. Zora was a haven, founded in the 2020s by five Black families, situated at the edge of a forest of pines and grown over decades into a thriving and vibrant community of about three hundred. Many of its residents who had jobs worked at businesses founded and headquartered in Zora.
If the Americans came by the southern route ... The visions of what might happen to Zora were unbearable.
“How was Rivendell?”
Gene looked up, startled. The man who’d spoken stood in the open doorway: Bennet Culkin, his acting Chief of Staff. “Rivendell” was Bennet’s joking name for the Capitol Complex.
“Bennet?” Gene said. “We have bad news. Please have a seat. Ollie,”--he was speaking to the office computer now--”get Barbara Mackenzie and Thomas Sato in here.” Mackenzie was his Deputy Administrator of Resilience, and Sato ran the Office of Response and Recovery.
“OK,” Ollie said. “I’m contacting Barbara and Thomas to invite them to your office.”
Bennet took a seat against the wall. “I don’t think you’ll get Tom right now. The whole department is tied up with the new wildfire.”
“What wildfire?”
Bennet glanced at Gene’s desk. “You didn’t hear yet? I can’t remember where it was ... maybe in Bryants?”
“Bryants?” Gene said. That was only a few miles from Zora. He ran without speaking, out of his office, down two levels of stairs, to the Office of Response and Recovery. Tom Sato was standing with many of his top staffers around a tilted projection of the endangered area, but Gene immediately recognized the shaky H-shape of Lake McClure. The fire seemed to have started near Barrett, not Bryants. Gene was guiltily relieved at Bennet’s mistake.
One of Tom Sato’s people noted Gene and nudged Sato, who looked up. “Gene!” Sato said. “I got your notice, but--”
Gene shook his head. “It can wait,” he said. He walked back up the stairs to his office, where Bennet and Mackenzie waited, both looking at lens displays visible only to them and both typing on privately projected keyboards. Bennet had changed seats, from the one against the wall to the one next to Gene’s desk, and Gene realized he hadn’t locked his screen. He would be filling these two in, along with Sato, on the general information from the war briefing, but none of them had clearance to read all of the supporting materials.
Reaching his desk, he was relieved to see that he had locked the screen after all. He unlocked it by putting his palm down on the reader, but the document displayed on top was of cyber warfare projections. He thought the last thing he’d looked at had been about potential invasion routes. He must have reflexively closed the one he’d been looking at when Bennet walked in. Bennet was a scrupulously reliable worker, but Gene felt an instinct for caution around him.
Culkin and Mackenzie both made wave gestures to close what they were working on, and then they turned their full attention to Gene.
“You look worried,” Mackenzie said. “This is something serious?”
Gene nodded and closed the door.