This was bound to be a big, messy, uncomfortable meeting-before-the-meeting. As Chief of Staff, Allison Sok Banh was one of the few people in the Department of the Future who could make Heather jump on command. She had “invited” Heather to an “early breakfast” to “talk things over” at the Angkor Coffee Shop, which happened to be owned by Allie’s Uncle Sam, and had a convenient back eating area that wasn’t open during the mornings. Translated from bureaucratese, Allie had summoned Heather to an urgent emergency meeting, and whatever was up, Allie really didn’t want it to leak.
Sam, in his seventies, stooped, face deeply lined, had to be a foot and a half shorter than Heather’s six feet. He greeted her with a bow and a grin. “You’re here to assess my cooking?”
“Only if it’s a threat.” It was their inside joke, ever since Allie had explained that Heather headed up the Office of Future Threat Assessment.
“Allison is already here, in back. Your usual order?”
“Yes, Sam, thanks.”
The food here is so good I even eat here when we’re not skulking around on some piece of intrigue and politics, Heather thought. I guess that enhances the cover for days like today. The thought seemed slightly paranoid, but Remember, paranoia is one of the leading signs of having secret, all-powerful enemies.
She found Allie at the sunny table by the window; the curtains were drawn. Arnie Yang was with her, and that was more bad news. First of all, Arnie was Heather’s senior analyst in OFTA’s communications-monitoring program, and Heather should have been the one to bring him if he were needed. But coincidentally, he was also Allie’s boyfriend, and maybe her spy. And worse yet, his area of investigation was the last thing Heather wanted to talk about.
Allie and Arnie were eating already. Heather had barely sat down when Sam served her a Cambodian Breakfast Number One—chili-flavored pork, rice, and pickles, plus a big mug of chicory coffee with condensed milk. He vanished, carefully closing the door before Heather quite finished saying “Thank you,” and in the outer, public room, the music was abruptly much louder.
Heather relished her first swallow of the sweet, thick coffee. “You’re gonna make me fat with these meetings here.”
Arnie smirked. “I know you’re mostly muscle, boss. Bet your dad had to buy a tractor when you left the potato farm.”
“Do they farm potatoes with tractors? I’m an LA city chickie.” She sipped again at the rich brown coffee and then dug into the pork and rice; once Allie started into business, Heather knew from past experience, there wouldn’t be much time to eat.
When they had all finished wolfing down the food, Allie put her iScribe on the table.
“You’re recording this?” Heather said, shocked.
“Thought I’d better. CYA for all of us.”
“So, as soon as I saw you here, Arnie, I knew it had to be about Daybreak.”
“Heather,” Arnie said, “I haven’t said one word to Allie about—”
“You don’t have a leak in your organization,” Allie said, smoothly, heading off accusations and arguments. “But we do need to do something, soon. This comes down from Secretary Weisbrod, Heather, he says we’ve got to crack this open and let everyone else into the playpen.”
“Damn,” Heather said. Hunh, Secretary Weisbrod, not “Graham,” like Allie and I always call him. A little reminder that he’s the boss. Better give up before I get stomped. “I just hadn’t wanted to share it around the department because it sounds so crazy—”
“Too crazy for DoF? That’s got to be crazy.”
Heather returned the lopsided smile. The Department of the Future had a rep for madness; it had come into existence because Roger Pendano, who was about to be re-elected president, had once been a student of Graham Weisbrod, and some people—Heather and Allie were two—just never recovered from that experience, remaining “Weisbrodites” for decades no matter what else they did. As America’s most public futurologist, Weisbrod had made his slogan, We can’t afford just any old future, the title of a best-selling book, and now national policy.
DoF was the smallest, newest, and least significant department, but with Weisbrod at the helm, the Department of the Future had bombarded the public, the media, the Congress, and every government department with an endless stream of reports, studies, and scenarios. When a columnist at NYTBlog described them as “useful, sometimes necessary, lunatics,” Weisbrod threatened to make that the Department motto.
“Yeah, I think it’s crazy even for us,” Heather said.
Allie said, “You’ve been stalling on reporting this out of your office for months, Heather. Are you just afraid you’ll sound like Chicken Little?”
“Kind of. Look, every time I’ve ever made the news, it was because something blew up or went south. Daybreak might be nothing, and then I’ll look like a fool. It’s sort of like an asteroid strike; so highly unlikely that it seems irresponsible to waste time talking about it, but… but it could be so serious that… has Arnie told you anything?”
“Nothing,” Arnie said, flatly, obviously annoyed. “I said that already. I don’t game you behind your back, boss.”
Heather looked into his eyes and nodded; his lips tensed, barely acknowledging that they understood each other.
Allie had been watching them as if she expected one of them to pull a knife. “It’s not a security breach, Heather,” she said. “As far as we can know, Daybreak is still dark, tight, and close in your office. It’s just that you’ve been watching this for months, it hasn’t gone away, it keeps getting scarier, and it’s time to involve the rest of the government, that’s all. I haven’t gotten a word out of Arnie on the subject.”
If there’s a subject you can’t get a word out of Arnie about, Heather thought, that would be a first. But she said, “Well, maybe he should give you some words. It’s been his research baby.”
Allie said, “However you want to do it. But the Secretary wants us to roll this out, first to the other branches of the Department of the Future, then immediately to other Federal agencies. He’s assuming full responsibility if it turns out we’re crying wolf. Now, lay it out. In two hours we’re meeting with Browder and Crittenden—”
“Christ, Allie, they’ll tear us apart!”
“Not with me sitting in the room and Graham nodding along with you—and especially not if you practice first. Now tell me about Daybreak, just as if I didn’t know anything at all. What it is and why it’s important. And then after we rehearse you, we rehearse Arnie, because when you bring him in, your two asshat colleagues will be ten times as hard on him.”
Heather drew a deep breath and began an impromptu revision of the speech she’d been making to her bathroom mirror three or four times a day for many weeks:
“Daybreak looks sort of like the formation of an international terrorist movement, sort of like a philosophic discussion, sort of like an artists’ movement, sort of like a college fad, and sort of like a shared-world online game. It’s a complex of closely related ideas that strongly attract maybe five million people worldwide, with a hard core of about a hundred thousand, of which maybe thirty thousand are in this country. Daybreak people identify with Daybreak the way communists identify with the Revolution, funjadelicals identify with the Rapture, or technogeeks identify with the Singularity. But Daybreak seems to involve many thousands of people doing widespread sabotage and wrecking all at once—it could change overnight to self-organizing, spontaneous, widespread terrorism, maybe.”