Deadline

“Hey, Mahir.” I took a swig of Coke before saluting him with the can. “The embassy get you a connection?”

“No.” He scowled. “All international lines are locked down until the cause of this incident can be determined. The damned government’s thinking terrorist action, naturally. I’ve just had an offer of extraction back to Britain. As if the United States could hold an Indian citizen against his will.”

“If this is declared an act of terrorism, I think they can,” said Alaric.

Mahir paused. “You may be right,” he said finally. “I’ll try to avoid thinking about that for the moment. Now, does someone want to tell me what that thing is supposed to be?”

The wireless booster beeped, louder this time, and the lights along the top turned a bright sunshine yellow. I pushed away from the counter. “Hey, Alaric, check your connection.”

“On it, boss.” He tapped his keyboard. Then he punched the air, thrusting his arms up in a victory salute. “We have Internet!”

“Girl was a genuine genius.” I finished my Coke and tossed the empty can into the sink. “That ‘thing’ is the original Georgette Meissonier wireless Internet booster and satellite access device. I have no clue how it works. I don’t care how it works. All I know is that you have no signal, you plug it in, you get it to turn on, and then it finds you a signal. It—”

None of them were listening to me anymore. Alaric was typing furiously, while Becks and Mahir were in the process of hauling out their own laptops and setting to work. I looked around and shook my head.

“Thank you, Shaun. We really appreciate your getting us back into contact with the rest of the world, Shaun. You’re awesome, Shaun,” I said dryly.

Becks flipped me off.

“You’re welcome,” I said, and walked out of the kitchen.

My laptop bag was on the couch next to Maggie, who was still staring, transfixed, at the television. Her lap was full of bulldogs. I hadn’t noticed that before. I touched her shoulder. She didn’t react. “Hey. Maggie?” Still no response. “Maggie, hey, come on. You need to stop looking at that now. It’s not doing you any good, and I think it’s probably doing you a lot of bad.” She still didn’t react. “George…”

Just do it.

“Gotcha.” The remote was on the arm of the couch. I picked it up and switched off the television before stuffing the remote into my pocket, where no one would be able to get it without my knowledge.

Maggie’s protest was immediate. “Hey!” she exclaimed, looking blindly around for the missing remote control. “I was watching that!”

“And now you’re not,” I replied. “We have Internet again.”

“We do?” Brief hope suffused her face. “Are things… did we…?”

“I dug Buffy’s semilegal wireless booster out of storage. We’re probably tapped into a Department of Defense satellite or something, but I think there’s a good chance your parents own the satellite, so I don’t give a shit. If they get pissed, you can bat your eyelashes at them and say we’re sorry. Alaric’s already online, Becks and Mahir are in a footrace to join him, and I figured you might want to log in and check your Fictionals. Make sure they’re okay.” Or as close as anyone was likely to be, under the circumstances.

Maggie isn’t the sort of person who falls apart often, or for long. Her eyes cleared when I mentioned her Fictionals, and she nodded. “I’m not sure how many of them will have connectivity, but the ones who do will be worried sick.” She lifted the bulldogs from her lap and set them on the couch. Two jumped down to the floor and went trotting off on unknowable bulldog errands. The third one made a fussy grunting noise, curled up, and went back to sleep.

I’ve never envied a dog before.

“The cities must still be online,” I said. “If they knocked San Francisco off the network, they’d have riots to go with their zombies. I figure we lost connection because we’re too far out in the boonies for anyone to give a shit about what happens to us.”

These cold equations, said George, with a sigh.

“Exactly,” I said.

Maggie pretended not to notice as she stood, brushed the dog hair from her legs, and said, “If we have Internet, we have VOIP again,” she said. “I’m going to go call my parents.”

I blinked. Maggie was generally happy to spend her family’s money, but I’d never heard her say she was going to contact them. That was a part of her life that the rest of us really weren’t invited into. “Really?”

“Really.” She gave me a wry look. “Unless you want a private army descending to extract me.”

“Go call your parents.”

Half the dogs followed Maggie out of the living room, leaving the other half sprawled around in various stages of repose. I sat down on the couch, bracing my elbows on my knees and dropping my head into my hands as I tried to figure out our next move. No pressure or anything. It was just the end of the world.

I went through a science fiction phase when I was in my teens, around the time George was having her American history and angry beat poetry phase. We always shared the best stuff, so she learned a lot about ray guns, and I learned a lot about revolutions. There was this one story—I don’t remember who the author was—about a dude who was flying a bunch of vaccine to a sick planet. The fuel was really precisely calculated, because fuel was expensive and the ship was pretty small. And this teenage girl who didn’t understand stowed away on his ship. She wanted to get to her brother. Only there wasn’t enough fuel to get them both to the sick planet, and she didn’t know how to land the ship or deliver the vaccine. If she lived, everybody died. That was the cold equation. How many lives is one person, even a totally innocent person, going to be worth? We used to argue about that, more for fun than anything else, but we never managed to get that equation to equal anything but death.