?Oh, thank God,? said Rick, looking up. ?Everyone wants to know what we?re doing next. The raw footage has been downloaded so many times I thought we were going to blow up one of the servers, Mahir won?t stop pinging me, and the message boards are??
I interrupted him with a wave of my hand. ?What are the numbers like, Rick??
?Ah?? He recovered quickly, glancing to the top of his screen. ?Up seven percent in all markets.?
Shaun whistled. ?Wow. We should uncover terrorist conspiracies more often.?
?We haven?t uncovered it yet; we?ve just found out that it existed,? I said, and sat down at my own terminal. ?Hit your boards and start pinging your people. We?re doing the debrief in thirty, and then we start to edit and recap for the evening reports.?
?On it.? Shaun grabbed a chair and looked to Rick, adding carelessly, ?You get to ping the Fictionals. Buffy isn?t coming.?
?Oh, great,? said Rick, wrinkling his nose. He was already pulling up his IM lists as he asked, ?Why do I get the honor??
?Because you kept the cat,? I said. ?Kick Magdalene. She?ll help you. Hush now. Mommy?s working.? He snorted but turned back to his computer. Shaun and I did the same.
It took thirty minutes to beat the message boards into something that looked less like a combination of a forest fire and a conspiracy theorist convention. No one had quite reached the point of linking the outbreak at the Ryman family ranch with the initial release of the Kellis cure and the death of JFK, but they?d have gotten there before much longer. As I?d expected, everyone in my department was already up, online, and doing their best to moderate the mess, and from the crossover threads, it looked like the same was mostly true for the Irwins and the Fictionals. Behold the power of the truth. When people see its shadow on the wall, they don?t want to take the time to look away.
?My boards are clear,? Shaun called. ?Ready when you are.?
?Same,? Rick said. ?The chat relay is humming nicely, and the volunteer mods have things under control.?
?Excellent.? Since the volunteers weren?t technically employees of After the End Times, they didn?t need to be included in the debriefing. I pulled up the employee chat and typed, Log on now. ?Turn on your conference functions, boys. We?re about to see the swarm.?
?Logged on.?
?Logged on.?
?Logging on now. Room eleven, maximum security.? Our conferencing system is half the standard Microsoft Windows VirtuParty setup?allowing people to share real-time socialization through web-cams and a common server?and half Buffy?s own homebrew. All eleven of our channels have varying degrees of security, from the base three, which clever readers can break into with relative ease, to eleven, which has never been successfully violated. Not even by the people we?ve paid to try.
Windows began spawning on my screen, each containing the small, pixelated face of one of our bloggers. Shaun, Rick, and I appeared first, followed almost immediately by Mahir, who looked like he hadn?t slept in several days, Alaric, and Suzy, the girl I?d hired to replace Becks after she jumped ship to the Irwins. Becks herself appeared a moment later, along with a trio of Irwins I only vaguely recognized. Five more faces followed them as the Fictionals logged in; three of them were sharing one screen, proving that Magdalene was hosting another of her infamous grindhouse parties.
When all was said and done, we were only missing Dave?one of Shaun?s Irwins, who was on a field trip in the wilds of Alaska and probably couldn?t get to a conferencing setup?and Buffy. I looked from face to face, studying their expressions while the initial quiet still held. They looked worried, confused, curious, even excited, but none of them looked like they had anything to hide. This was our team. This was what we had to work with. And we had a conspiracy to break.
?All right, everyone,? I said. ?This afternoon, we led an expedition onto the Ryman family ranch. You?ve seen the footage by now. If you haven?t, please log out, watch it, and come back. Here?s the topic at hand: ?What happens next?? ?
Following the campaign of Congresswoman Kirsten Wagman taught me one important fact about politics: Sometimes, style can matter more than substance. Let?s face it: We?re not talking about one of the great political minds of our age. We?re talking about a former stripper who got her seat in Congress by promising her constituency that for every thousand votes she got, she?d wear something else inappropriate to the floor. Judging by the landslide of that first win, we?ll be seeing congressional hearings graced by a lady in lingerie long after the end of her term in office.