Five years later Malorie was at the Bridgeport mill checking her part drawing for the proper tolerance, carefully aligning the cutter for tapping a through hole on a structural flange mount, when she heard her name being called from the front office. “Malorie, phone is for you.”
“Phone? Whoever calls me at work?” Malorie asked herself.
It was Megan on the other end. “Malorie, Eric divorced me. J’ai besoin de toi! En ce moment.”
“Okay, I will pack up tonight and be there late tomorrow evening.”
10
VOLUNTARY DISPLACEMENT
Slap some bacon on a biscuit and let’s go! We’re burnin’ daylight!
Joshua watched the news while having breakfast in OPS1 cafeteria, but in the spirit of fairness the powers that be had decided to put Fox News on only one day per week and to give more time to MSNBC and CNN. This morning the CNN headlines were all bad.
“If it wasn’t for the fact that they make you watch CNN in an airport, who would voluntarily watch the Communist News Network, anyway?” Joshua mumbled to himself. The ticker rolled by with the following text:
Joshua took in the news and methodically processed it as he finished his oatmeal. His mind was already racing from his conversation with Dustin over the phone last night, and the onslaught of bad news was only briefly interrupted by the camera crew going on location to a Humane Society rally in Lansing, Michigan. After a few commercials, the cheery news anchor was back to cover the president’s meeting this morning with a joint session of Congress.
“The president is in an emergency session of Congress and pleaded with them to pass the Omnibus Patriot Safety and Security Act this morning. [Audio cuts to president.] ‘I have asked Congress to pull together and do the right thing for America. The debate has been robust, and we have heard from both sides of the aisle. I have listened to all the concerns and now is the time to act to secure America in this new age of multifaceted threats.’ Watchdog groups on Capitol Hill are saying that this is an overreach, and while no comment has come from the president himself, his press secretary had this to say last Tuesday: ‘This is only a temporary measure granting certain powers to the president—it has a thirty-day sunset clause—unless we are unable to resolve the present crisis.’ The eighteen-hundred-page bill is likely to see a vote before the close of business today.”
“Yeah, right, that ‘unless’ is a pretty big gamble to take with the Constitution! We’ve all seen their record on not reading two-thousand-page-long bills. Don’t these clowns work for us?” Joshua asked himself.
On his way to the office, Joshua walked past the murals of law enforcement personnel doing their mission on the NSA campus adorned with the words, “Train, Defend, Protect, Deter, Authenticate and Respond.” He was on his way to the Security Operations Control Center (SOCC) to check in to his shift, fifteen minutes early, as always. Joshua drew his weapon and attended the shift change brief. Afterward he logged on to a high-side terminal to quickly check e-mail, and he was glad to see among the usual all-users “no reply” e-mail that there was actually a message from Megan waiting for him:
Subject: Parler Affairs
Unclassified: FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
Joshua,
Please stop by when you are able.
C’est avoir de très l’importance.
Unclassified: FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
The day was far from business as usual, the buzz in the news feeds translated into heightened national security posture. As an implementation of additional security measures, NSA-W was conducting random vehicle checks even for blue- and green-badge personnel and 100 percent vehicle checks for all visitors. This effort required extra officers to be dispatched to the VCPs, and Joshua found himself assigned for the late-morning shift. Around 1300 he was able to come to Megan’s office, but only for a brief moment.
Almost as soon as Joshua knocked on the door, Megan was ready for him and suggested they go down the hall to speak in private.
“Joshua, I’m really worried,” Megan began.
“About?”
“Where have you been? You haven’t heard?”
“Let’s just say that I got your e-mail this morning, then responded to a ‘hey you’ tasking to go and acquaint myself with the greater central Maryland area’s glove compartment contents.”
“Fair enough. Well, you know how they recently blocked DrudgeReport .com from the NSA unclass web servers. Well, I checked a personal e-mail account late this morning. It was a message from Malorie about what we had discussed last night.”
“Which was what? Megan, I can’t stay very long here.”
“The president dismissed four conservative Supreme Court justices this morning.”
“What? How?” Joshua was truly perplexed.
“By executive order. Evidently, that new Omnibus Patriot Safety and Security Act gives the president the power to do pretty much whatever he wants—and they haven’t even passed it yet. Those judges were all that stood in the way of a judicial challenge to these emergency presidential powers. Did you see that they’re recalling all close-air-support aircraft from Saudi and ‘redeploying’ them to CONUS? Officially the secretary of the Air Force is just calling it a ‘contingency.’ I read that in a SADCOM report this morning.”
“That is likely classified and we can’t speak that way out here. Besides, this whole situation is nuts! Have you seen the financial reports? ‘Whither do we go?’”
Megan, quick on the uptake, said, “Yes, I know. Nietzsche would have been very proud of our positive-law-strewn, failed Republic.”
Joshua replied, “This morning I asked a colleague about having to take all that extra online training for security of classified information. He didn’t seem the least bit put out by having to change all of the passwords to every account we have access to. It just didn’t faze him that the same people that dole out our paychecks don’t seem to be spying on the North Koreans, but are monitoring my SMS traffic instead!”
Joshua continued, “How far down the rabbit hole does this go anyway? Data can always be historically analyzed and made to say anything.”
Megan smoothed the wrinkles on her skirt and said, “It would seem that there are a lot less libertarian patriots and a lot more sheeple collecting a paycheck from Uncle Sam in this big glass house. If they couldn’t see the shackles forming around the feet of their fellow citizens now, when would they ever notice?”
Joshua let out a breath loudly, almost whistling, and then said: “I don’t know. Four justices? Who knows what other powers were granted to the president in the new law? Outlaw homeschooling? Ban firearms? Make us a one-world-government subject to the UN?”