Project Reunion (26 page)

What arrived was estimated at 40,000. That wasn’t a last-minute surprise, of course. The setup crew had notified Captain Flores, the Thanksgiving coordinator, when the crowd just kept growing. He’d sent along reinforcements of both troops and food from the operation’s reserve. That consumed a fair bit of Emmett’s attention, but not mine.

My attention was focused on three more leaders at the table. “There is no separate turf here in Midtown,” Becca Saltzman told me. She was a tough entrepreneur, once in the restaurant business, a crew-cut blonde in her forties. The other two Midtown leaders seemed to defer to her. “The three of us just have different focus. Chet here runs our trade expeditions into Jersey. Juba is our food distribution czar. Paul Mullen heads law enforcement for this neighborhood, but he stayed outside to control the crowd.”

Saltzman was interrupted by her phone buzzing. She took it out to check messages, riveting my attention as well as Guzman and Valcourt’s. Scowling at the message, she demanded, “We need your people to back off on the Javits Center side, south of the terminal. Who can make that happen on your end?”

“I don’t know,” I confessed. I summoned the next waiting rating. “Could you get Colonel MacLaren for me, please? We have a crowd control request from the local authorities.”

“I’ll tell Major Fairweather,” she assured me, and hurried off.

“Ms. Saltzman, do you have cell phone service here?” I inquired.

She waved dismissively. “We run a meshnet.”

“A meshnet would be an ad hoc peer-to-peer message-forwarding network, built from near-field communications between cell phones,” I courteously supplied for Guzman and Valcourt’s benefit. Well, and to tell Saltzman she wasn’t speaking to an idiot. “Think Napster, for phone text messages.” I turned back to Saltzman. “What meshnet software do you use? And how many nodes do you have on it?”

“I have people for that,” she replied sourly, eyes narrowed. “What will you give me for it?”

“What are we bargaining for?” asked Emmett, breezing back into the dining room with a Marine officer alongside. This was likely Captain Fairweather, suffering from a temporary social promotion to major due to Navy sensibilities.

“A meshnet. Ms. Saltzman is using it to communicate with her enforcement people outside the terminal,” I supplied. “The request was to ‘back off on the Javits Center side’, was that right, Ms. Saltzman?”

Emmett spun the tablet in the center of the table for his and Fairweather’s viewing convenience. They studied this a moment.

Fairweather offered, “There are a lot of hostiles down there. My people are regrouping for a push here, Colonel.”

“Well, they wouldn’t be hostiles, if you’d just back up and let my people do their jobs!” Saltzman shrilled. Sitting next to her, Juba the food czar rolled her eyes toward me. Significantly thicker in body than the others, I suspect Juba started out the epidemic rather obese. She was dressed in an African explosion of neon colors, feathers and beads, but her accent suggested another native New Yorker. Juba didn’t seem to like Saltzman much more than I did.

Emmett narrowed his eyes at Saltzman, but spoke to Fairweather. “Well, assuming her people can do crowd control, where do you want them to back off?”

“Definitely behind the Javits Center – east, Colonel,” said Fairweather. “I’ve got snipers on the roof, and naval personnel on the ground.”

“Alright,” said Emmett. “Ms. Saltzman, we need your people to back off. Could they supply someone to coordinate? Here at the corner.”

“I
said
, you need to get away from the Javits Center!” Saltzman demanded.

Emmett stared her down. “This is not a debate, Ms. Saltzman. We considered your request. It is not compatible with our requirements. Anyone you have in that area who accosts another civilian, will be fired upon.
So back them off.
Now. And have them send someone forward to coordinate.”

“I can coordinate from here!” she claimed.

“Uh-huh. I said, have your people send someone forward to coordinate on the ground,” Emmett repeated. “Before I order this party to shut down.”

“She said Paul Mullen was leading their enforcement outside,” I offered. Saltzman still wasn’t moving to cooperate.

“Thank you, Ms. Baker,” replied Emmett. He plucked Saltzman’s phone out of her grasp. It wasn’t much of a struggle. He rapidly entered a quick message into Saltzman’s text stream with the outside, then handed it off to Fairweather to take it from there.

“What did I miss?” Emmett asked me brightly, resuming his seat at the table.

“Chet leads trade expeditions into New Jersey. Juba has centralized food distribution. And Becca Saltzman has a meshnet,” I recapped for him. “Remember I was telling you that Major Cameron commissioned a meshnet? For you and him.”

“That would be handy,” Emmett agreed. But after taking a memo on his phone, he turned to Chet instead. “So you trade for food with Jersey?”

The next rating in line brought phone solar chargers to tuck into Guzman and Valcourt’s goody bags, to heart-felt nods of gratitude. They got three sets apiece.

Emmett played Saltzman like a fish on a line, for half an hour, usually talking to Juba and Chet instead. At one of the many low points in their brief relationship, Saltzman demanded to talk to Emmett’s commanding officer. Emmett supplied his name – General Ivan Link – and told her to feel free. He waved over another rating from our service line, whispered instructions, and sent him out. After about 10 minutes, the rating came back and rejoined the end of the line.

“Where is General Link?” Saltzman boomed in demand.

“Not here, ma’am,” supplied the rating. “Maybe Massachusetts.”

“It’s not your concern where General Link is,” Emmett clarified mildly. Chet, a grey-haired veteran, winced.

“But I want to talk to him!” Saltzman said.

Emmett shrugged. “Perhaps you’d prefer to go ashore, since dining with me isn’t good enough for you.”

“Juba and I are delighted to stay,” Chet hastened to interject. “As long as possible. And get to know Detective Guzman and Mr. Valcourt better.” Unlike Saltzman, Chet and Juba had actually listened when it was explained that Emmett was the supreme commander of Project Reunion. And it was just dumb luck that he was visiting their dinner. And it hadn’t escaped Chet or Juba’s attention that more things landed in Guzman and Valcourt’s goody bags than in their own. Although Emmett seemed to be considering the very real possibility of offering powered transport for a supply excursion into northwest Jersey.

I advised Emmett that ideally I’d like the meshnet developers, not just the software.

Eventually Emmett brought Saltzman to heel. She coughed up a trio of software developers from her meshnet team, to go into quarantine and then out to Cam on Long Island. In exchange, Emmett offered to take the same proportion of evacuees from her Midtown turf as he’d already suggested to Guzman and Valcourt – about 20%. Saltzman seemed much happier and more cooperative once she was sure she’d driven a hard bargain.

Emmett smiled at her. “Perhaps you could go down to the dock, to identify the programmer team? No need for Ms. Saltzman to come back,” he instructed the rating who grasped her wheelchair. He continued smiling at her back until she was gone.

He turned back to Chet and Juba. “Interesting choice of leader,” he commented.

Juba shrugged. “She’s a potent threat. Most people will do anything just to avoid dealing with her.”

Chet nodded, and added, “She doesn’t dare order us around. The neighborhood enforcement teams, like Mullen, seem to be on her wavelength.”

Valcourt hazarded meekly, “Colonel, is there any way we could get a copy of that meshnet? I don’t know what we’d pay for it...”

“Free,” Emmett assured him. “Dee was working to provide meshnet communications for the whole Apple. Now she found one.”

The dinner was actually festive after that. Our guests bonded and cross-fertilized ideas as well as we could have hoped, though we only had a half hour left together. The sailors pressed other non-food treats upon them for their goody bags, such as multivitamins and painkiller tablets, garden seeds and hand-cranked radio receivers.

Emmett demonstrated that there were actually four radio stations they could tune in, one of them Project Reunion Radio, broadcast from Staten Island, with weather reports on the hour, every hour, followed by announcements. They filled in the rest of the hour with music, alternating with news from around the nation selected from Amenac. The Navy comms tech announcer sounded like he truly loved his job. Emmett promised our guests that they hoped to leave the radio transmitter and news operational, in the hands of the Staten Island borough council, when Project Reunion left.

The leaders also got the same food gifts that the Thanksgiving guests outside received, to bring home. Their eyes widened at the huge chunks of cheese, their attention nearly swallowed again, following the cheese path into their bags.

“No more than one slice of cheese a day,” the medic cautioned them. “That’s very rich food. Too much will make you ill.” I doubt the community leaders were capable of listening right then.

Word came that my programmers were safely aboard with computers and source code, and being processed through the spa treatment. So we waved our guests away with big smiles, Chet and Juba to walk home, Guzman and Valcourt to be taken by boat back to their own docks.

“Where did you get so much cheese?” I asked Emmett. “Vermont and New York gave all that?”

“Need to know,” he answered.

“Completely off the record,” I wheedled.

“Wisconsin,” he admitted. To my agog reaction, he shrugged. “They still have their cows. They still make enough cheese for half the country. They can’t eat all that. Their Rescos offered it for Project Reunion, as much as we could take. Arranging transport was tricky.”

“This isn’t the end of the cheese?”

“Nowhere near it.”

The medics had to scold us to break it up again when I tried to hug him.

-o-

I adored my new meshnet programmers. I went to meet them while Emmett caught up on his work, and our ferry waited its turn offshore to unload and decontaminate at the Staten Island base. They’d never sent so many people ashore before to mingle with the natives, so decontamination was a major traffic jam.

I don’t know who Saltzman intended to give us, but we got their top three, Connecticut and Long Island transplants who’d been working in the city when the borders went up. All three brought along significant others, and one had an adorable three-year-old daughter in tow as well. This troop of seven was far better fed than the New York norm these days, lean but still healthy, minds clear and sharp.

Chas had started perfecting his open-source copy of the meshnet while volunteering in Middle East refugee camps. The software carefully sipped power, and they’d had plenty of time to wring every last foot of communications range out of a wide variety of phone types. Chas’ expertise, down at the protocol and hardware level, was over my head for the most part. But I knew a tech guru when I met one. This guy and Amen1’s Popeye would fall in love at first sight, and never shut up.

Carmen was their user interface wizard. The software was a snap to set up, and for most phones you could simply push a button to install the app phone-to-phone. In addition to text messaging, the main purpose of the meshnet, there was also a crowd-sourced mark-this-map interface that made it a breeze to add warnings and key information.

Carmen showed me the last map captured before she boarded the ferry. Thanksgiving guests were walking home by that point. Along the way, they added geocoded icons to show incidents of violence or gunshots, with optional comments, that faded over time. I imagined that alone would be a godsend to anyone living on Manhattan these days. Enforcers could monitor this in real time and pounce on looters within minutes. There was even a view on the map that tracked numbers of people, to help you find a more or less crowded route. Water, charging stations, and nearest open food distribution center were also marked.

Vikram managed the administration software. The meshnet would function purely peer-to-peer to pass messages, but computer nodes could be inserted to monitor and tweak the network. He demonstrated how he could check for bottlenecks and thin coverage where more participating phones were needed. From his software, bulletin board announcements could be posted, and reverse-911 type warnings by area. He could track any particular phone on the network, providing a spy-eye view of a community. He could also push software updates through the meshnet.

I suspect it was those last two features that inspired Saltzman to limit the spread of their meshnet much beyond her Midtown turf. We were just starting to brainstorm a new sticky trust system for establishing more secure sub-networks who couldn’t spy on each other, when Emmett came to tell me it was finally our turn to get processed through decontamination.

“We need to talk more,” I told the programmers, to answering grins. “
Lots
more! Emmett, I’m staying, to work with them another day or so.”