Day 5 (Recycling)

CITY GOES DARK

On Sunday at approximately 4:15pm, the Mason Nuclear Power Plant
shut down, leaving an estimated 150,000 people without power.
Within an hour, local police were directing traffic at major
intersections. There were very few major accidents, though minor
collisions occurred in a number of incidents.

``This isn't the worst I've seen it.'' Captain Mitchell was one
of the many off-duty police officers who were either called into
action or volunteered their help. ``It's only most of the city,
after all. Still, not many people willing to come out on a night
like this.''

Representatives from Mason Power confirmed the outage, as well as
noting that they had restarted the plant by 9pm that evening, but
refused to comment on the cause for the sudden shutdown.

One source, who wished to remain anonymous, did attempt to give
some clarity to the situation. ``The safety systems to shut
everything off will do so if they think there's the slightest
chance something could go wrong. Really, it's probably better to
have it turn off for no reason than not turn off when it needs
to.''

Power has been restored to most areas of the city, with only a
few outliers remaining.

3 Recycling

By the time Grant woke up on Monday, the Gazette had already made
its way to his doorstep. He frowned as he read the story on the
outage. He hadn't written it, naturally. Anders hadn't even
called him. He was nearly certain that the quote from the police
captain had been aimed at him and his fellow overeager writers,
in fact. That answered the question as to whether dashing to work
during an outage had been a good thing. He'd have to remember, as
he'd so often learned in the past, that being a journalist was
not braving danger to get the story. The true meaning of
reporting was writing about teacups.

This reminded him about a number of things. Firstly, he needed a
new computer. Secondly, he needed to write that damn story.
Finally, and even mentally he'd saved the best for last, he
needed to drop by a certain recycling plant.

He called up the office on his cellphone - fully charged,
thankfully, he'd left it on the charger in the hopes power would
come back to it overnight.

``Gazette front desk, Morgan speaking.'' For the past decade, the
Gazette had employed their secretaries via a temp agency, and so
Grant never felt bad about forgetting their names, their faces,
or their gender. Last week it had been a black-haired woman who
had been almost certainly just out of college if not in it. The
week before it had been an elderly man who was deaf in one ear.
Grant had long ago chalked it up to a somewhat extreme example of
diversity in the workplace.

``I need to talk to Anders or William'' Blake William was the
assistant editor and likely to be far more busy, but on the off
chance that his role and that of his boss had somehow become
reversed, he included them both.

``One moment sir.'' There was a click and the Gazette's
intolerable hold music, bought in bulk - Grant suspected - from
Intolerable Hold Music Industries ltd, began playing softly.

Grant hummed along with a song that had been horribly butchered
in order to fit in with the rest of the butchered on-hold songs
as he waited.

``Grant! I see you're calling today instead of diving in from a
helicopter.'' Anders was indeed available.

``I saw the front page. Got any leftovers for me?''

``There's plenty on this power outage to go around. When are you
going to be in today?''

Grant considered - it was a good question, after all. ``Around
noon or so, unless you need me earlier.''

``Sounds good to me.'' Anders concluded. ``I've got the perfect
story lined up for you, too, so no need to rush.''

That didn't sound good, now that Grant had a moment to consider.
Before he had a chance to ask for clarification, though, his boss
had hung up.

Maybe, Grant thought as he left the house and entered his car, I
should come in sooner than that. He glanced thoughtfully at the
broken computer he'd loaded into the passenger seat before he
began backing out of the driveway.

It took approximately the same amount of time it took the car to
reach the end of the street for him to remember why, exactly, he
was going to work so late. To hell with work! He was having an
adventure, dammit. He drove toward the city.

The commute, paradoxically, was worse than it had been during the
power outage. It seemed as though the poor drivers were driving
twice as fast and half as well to make up for lost time. As Grant
got closer to the city, he began getting increasingly nervous;
not about talking to Rosetta again - his nervous energies for
that particular event had peaked long ago - but that he'd get
lost.

There is a secret held by many medium-term residents of any city,
and that secret is that they do not, in fact, know how to
navigate said city. Certainly, they can get to work. Some of them
can even get to stores near where they work. They can
successfully drive back home from these locales. If pressed, they
can locate a gas station. However, ask them to find a new
location, and they'll get lost.

Grant had been concealing his secret longer than most, with the
help of his job. It wasn't journalistic endeavor that got him to
the right place, it was the Gazette's bought-and-paid-for Vervicom
[(0x0240) Sunday's mis-routings served in later runs to introduce
Grant to those he would need to interact with. Though in all but
one respect not instrumental to success, Grant's actions had an
enormous effect on others.] Global Positioning System.
He pulled into a gas station briefly
to set its address and set forth once more.

The GPS had originally been purchased so that reporters could
interview sources anywhere they needed to. He could recall
perhaps a half-dozen times he'd used it for this purpose. Every
other time, it had been to prevent him from getting lost while he
went somewhere entirely non-work related.

16th was downtown, and so at first when the GPS directed him
along the same route he took to work, he wasn't worried. Then it
took him directly past the Gazette offices, which seemed somewhat
odd, and then it directed him into an industrial area of town he
didn't visit for good reason. Reporters were supposed to go to
real war zones with a small chance of getting hurt, not the other
way around.

``Turn left,'' the synthesized voice of the GPS instructed, even
though the neighborhood appeared to fall into even greater
disrepair in that region. Still, Grant reasoned. It was a
recycling plant, where actual recycling got done, so it was
likely to involve much heavy machinery and really, when you
thought about it, why wasn't an industrial zone a good place to
put your recycling plant?

``Turn right'' The GPS directed him to a parking lot surrounding
a large, squat warehouse. There was only one other vehicle there.
Grant checked his watch to see that it was, indeed, 10:30 in the
morning. Not exactly the most reassuring sight; he'd have
expected more people. Still, maybe the recycling plant had
shipments and was automated and didn't need much in the way of
personnel. Or perhaps Rose kept a stash of fake business cards,
and couldn't resist giving him one. He wanted to reject that idea
outright, but he found that, knowing the sort of jokes Rosetta
enjoyed playing, he couldn't quite put it past her.

In for a penny, he reasoned, in for a pound. He exited his car,
opened up the passenger door, and heaved his computer out. In
this case, it was quite a few pounds. He carried it awkwardly to
the small door he'd spotted in the warehouse that he then
attempted to even more awkwardly open. Eventually he gave up, put
the computer down, and opened the door before picking the machine
up again and carrying it inside.

Darkness greeted him. After the sunny day outside, the inside of
the warehouse seemingly almost entirely dark. Bright spears of
light shot out of the windows lining the top - at least, they
shot out of where the windows hadn't been covered with black
tarp. Someone disliked the light.

A few moments of adjusting to the new conditions proved his
initial impression wrong - there were a few pools of light
provided by cheap torchiere lights, including one by the door he
was standing in front of. There was also a floodlight on the
other end of the long, low room which looked better suited to
nighttime construction work.

``Just put it over there.'' a tired voice told him. Grant managed
to look around his tower to see a man vanish from one pool of
light to appear momentarily in another.

For a brief moment Grant had the idea that the man he'd seen was
the half-deaf secretary, but another appearance in a pool of
light dispelled that notion.

``Right over here, next to where everyone else's dropped off
their junk today.'' the man said, appearing again suddenly, next
to shelving that looked like it was older than the warehouse
itself. The shelves were littered with computers, monitors,
half-disassembled radios, and less identifiable electronics.

Unwilling to ask questions while his breathing capacity was
hampered by carrying a heavy but inert machine, Grant moved to
where the gentleman indicated and tried without much success to
put it in an uncluttered area.

``Sorry to bother you,'' Grant began, ``But I'm looking for a
Rosetta Sandys?''

The man nodded gruffly. ``You and everyone else. I'm VonCannon.
Probably not the person you're looking for.''

``So this isn't Sandys Recycling?'' Grant already knew the
answer, but felt a need to find out what was going on.

``Unless there's suddenly a sign out front.'' VonCannon replied
wearily, having obviously had this conversation multiple times in
the past few hours. ``Though I plan to call her and let her pick
up what I can't use.''

``Hey now,'' Grant replied, feeling somewhat absurd at his
objection even before he made it, ``That computer's supposed to
be recycled.''

The doctor looked at him askew. ``Didn't I just say I was going
to use some of it? If it's that important to you I'll put a
sticker on yours, so I'll know not to take it apart.'' he added,
muttering, ``Probably won't be of much use to me anyway, the lot
of this junk.''

``Sorry.'' Grant managed. Suddenly work seemed a great deal more
interesting a place to be than here, next to an apparently
unbalanced old man with an eye for broken machinery.

VonCannon waved dismissively and made some noncommittal noise.
Grant took this as an indication to leave, and promptly did so,
all memory of why he'd come in the first place gone.

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