Feed

I grabbed my robe from the back of the door and shrugged it on as I walked to the main desk. The monitor detected my proximity and switched on, displaying the default menu screen. Our main system never goes off-line. That’s where group mail is routed, sorted according to which byline and category it’s meant for—news to me, action to Shaun, or fiction, which goes straight to Buffy—and delivered to the appropriate in-boxes. I get the administrative junk that Shaun’s too much of a jerk and Buffy’s too much of a flake to deal with. Technically, we’re a collective, but functionally? It’s all me.

Not that I object to the responsibility, except when it fills my in-box to the point of inspiring nightmares. It’s nice to know that our licenses are paid up, we’re in good with the umbrella network that supports our accreditation, and nobody’s suing us for libel. We make pretty consistent ratings, with Shaun and Buffy hitting top ten percent for the Bay Area at least twice a month and me holding steady in the thirteen to seventeen percent bracket, which isn’t bad for a strict Newsie. I could increase my numbers if I went multimedia and started giving my reports naked, but unlike some people, I’m still in this for the news.

Shaun, Buffy, and I all publish under our own blogs and bylines, which is why I get so damn much mail, but those blogs are published under the umbrella of Bridge Supporters, the second-largest aggregator site in Northern California. We get readers and click-through traffic by dint of being listed on their front page, and they get a cut of our profits from all secondary-market and merchandise sales. We’ve been trying to strike out on our own for a while now, to go from being beta bloggers in an alpha world to baby alphas with a domain to defend. It’s not easy. You need some story or feature that’s big enough and unique enough to guarantee you’ll take your readership with you, and our numbers haven’t been sustainably high enough to interest any sponsors.

My in-box finished loading. I began picking through the messages, moving with a speed that was half long practice and half the desire to get downstairs to dinner. Spam; misrouted critique of Buffy’s latest poem cycle, “Decay of the Human Soul: I through XII”; a threatened lawsuit if we didn’t stop uploading a picture of someone’s infected and shambling uncle—all the usual crap. I reached for my mouse, intending to minimize the program and get up, when a message toward the bottom of the screen caught my eye.

URGENT—PLEASE REPLY—YOU HAVE BEEN SELECTED.

I would have dismissed that as spam, except for the first word: urgent. People stopped flinging that word around like confetti after the Rising. Somehow, the potential for missing the message that zombies just ate your mom made offering to give people a bigger dick seem less important. Intrigued, I clicked the title.

I was still sitting there staring at the screen five minutes later when Shaun opened the door to my room and casually stepped inside. A flood of white light accompanied him, stinging my eyes. I barely flinched. “George, Mom says if you don’t get downstairs, she’ll George?” There was a note of real concern in his voice as he took in my posture, my missing sunglasses, and the fact that I wasn’t dressed. “Is everything okay? Buffy’s okay, isn’t she?”

Wordless, I gestured to the screen. He stepped up behind me and fell silent, reading over my shoulder. Another five minutes passed before he said, in a careful, subdued tone, “Georgia, is that what I think it is?”

“Uh-huh.”

“They really It’s not a joke?”

“That’s the federal seal. The registered letter should be here in the morning.” I turned to face him, grinning so broadly that it felt like I was going to pull something. “They picked our application. They picked us. We’re going to do it.

“We’re going to cover the presidential campaign.”

My profession owes a lot to Dr. Alexander Kellis, inventor of the misnamed “Kellis flu,” and Amanda Amberlee, the first individual successfully infected with the modified filovirus that researchers dubbed “Marburg Amberlee.” Before them, blogging was something people thought should be done by bored teenagers talking about how depressed they were. Some folks used it to report on politics and the news, but that application was widely viewed as reserved for conspiracy nuts and people whose opinions were too vitriolic for the mainstream. The blogosphere wasn’t threatening the traditional news media, not even as it started having a real place on the world stage. They thought of us as “quaint.” Then the zombies came, and everything changed.

The “real” media was bound by rules and regulations, while the bloggers were bound by nothing more than the speed of their typing. We were the first to report that people who’d been pronounced dead were getting up and noshing on their relatives. We were the ones who stood up and said “yes, there are zombies, and yes, they’re killing people” while the rest of the world was still buzzing about the amazing act of ecoterrorism that released a half-tested “cure for the common cold” into the atmosphere. We were giving tips on self-defense when everybody else was barely beginning to admit that there might be a problem.

The early network reports are preserved online, over the protests of the media conglomerates. They sue from time to time and get the reports taken down, but someone always puts them up again. We’re never going to forget how badly we were betrayed. People died in the streets while news anchors made jokes about people taking their zombie movies too seriously and showed footage they claimed depicted teenagers “horsing around” in latex and bad stage makeup. According to the time stamps on those reports, the first one aired the day Dr. Matras from the CDC violated national security to post details on the infection on his eleven-year-old daughter’s blog. Twenty-five years after the fact his words—simple, bleak, and unforgiving against their background of happy teddy bears—still send shivers down my spine. There was a war on, and the ones whose responsibility it was to inform us wouldn’t even admit that we were fighting it.