Day 6 (Recycling)

The Vervicom GPS device managed to do its job, somehow, and
guided him back to his workplace without even a hiccup. Wynn
found himself almost wishing that it had misdirected him again,
just so he'd know there was something wrong with it and not him.
Of course, the crazy old man had indicated that there'd been
others by that day as well, so chances were good it was a
systemwide glitch. Still, it seemed somewhat ominous that it'd
directed all those people who were going to just one specific
place to the same other place and yet didn't have problems
telling him how to get from there to his office.

He didn't know that, he reflected. There might be GPS problems
all over the city. The story about sunspots he'd done wouldn't
leave his mind, the problem with that was he'd start blaming
sunspots for everything if he looked hard enough. He'd had enough
trouble writing the story itself without thinking he was going to
be called out for making the blemishes seem like harbingers of
doom, even if it was true.

He parked in the same familiar garage he had the day before, this
time taking a fair amount more time to find a spot. Nobody was
waiting at the door to tell him off. When he went inside he waved
to Morgan, who appeared to be busily routing calls to the
classifieds department and ignored him.

``You're late'' Anders remarked as he walked by. The editor had a
long-standing policy of not holding most of his employees to
rigid work hours, so the statement was somewhat of a joke. Once,
simply as an experiment, Grant had telecommuted for a week. The
novelty had grown old by the third day and by Friday he'd
returned to the office simply to have someone to talk to.

The downside of the policy was that none of the faces at the
desks he passed were that meaningful to him. Oh sure, he knew who
they were for the most part, but in a casual sort of way. Some,
such as Anders, held to schedules that more or less matched when
he was in the office. Others like Stephen, the young but
unfortunately balding man sitting at the desk across from
Grant's, he rarely saw at all. Stephen was a morning person,
after all. In short, he wasn't particularly feeling like sharing
the strange events of his day.

Instead, with a cursory ``Afternoon, Stephen'', he sat down at
his desk and fired up his computer. He could at least get some
work done, he figured. After he deleted all the new messages in
his in-box (all-personnel bulletins from people so high up in the
ownership chain and so filled with buzzwords and other such
drivel as to be meaningless) he set down to write the dreaded
teacup story.

Only a few minutes passed and there was the noise of a thin file
being dropped on his desk meaningfully. Grant looked up to see
Anders with a grin on his face that meant the young reporter was
about to be the target of something. Probably a lecture.

``Remember,'' Anders began, ``yesterday when you braved snow,
rain, heat, gloom of night, etc. to come in and personally write
the story of the outage?''

Grant nodded, which seemed a safe enough reply.

``Remember how I said I'd give you your due? I'd remember you
risked your neck? Well, here you go'' he pushed the file over
Grant's desktop toward him, which was no trivial feat considering
the desk's constant state of dishevelment.

Grant picked up the file and opened it. ``Doctor James Caster,
64.'' he read aloud, ``Senior research consultant for Vervicom...
what's all this about?''

``Read the police report, second page.'' Anders said
nonchalantly.

He glanced at it. Auto accident. Grant frowned. ``Let me guess.
He's driving too fast in the outage, gets himself into an
accident. That's my due? Write a story on what could have
happened to me?'' he hated Anders' sense of irony right now,
though he had to admit it was a good find. He just hoped all the
other partycrashers who'd stopped by yesterday were getting
assignments just as choice.

``Obituary, actually,'' the editor replied, ``he got hit by a
streetcar.''

Grant considered. ``Like a trolley? That is news.''

``More like an electric bus.'' Anders corrected him ``But pretty
much the same concept. The police report says its brakes locked
up and the antilock wasn't working right, and our doctor was in
the wrong place at the wrong time. Of course, you'd know that if
you'd have actually read it just now instead of skimming it.''

Grant shrugged. ``If this is my comeuppance, I'll take it.''

``Good man. Now, get to work.''

Wynn's first act was not to jump back out to his car and drive
off in search of leads - unlike many popular depictions, rushing
out and interviewing people was a not what he tended to end up
doing first. For one, it was hard to interview people if you
didn't know who you'd be talking to. For another, there was
hardly ever a rush. Finally, it looked really unprofessional - as
Grant himself had discovered to his pain in his earlier days - to
ask questions the answers to which could already be found in the
official police report. This was doubly true if he was talking to
police. Thus, he was doing his homework.

What he found was a stranger story than even Anders had painted.
The unfortunate Dr. Caster had been driving in the same
industrial area Grant had found himself in today. At the same
time, a municipal bus, electrically powered, had been coasting
down a hill on a cross street. The outage hit at precisely the
right time for the bus to lose control and plow into the doctor's
car. The doctor had been rushed, severely wounded but still
lucid, to the hospital, where he had refused treatment for
reasons not specified. He'd died early the morning after.

It wasn't the official police report which had the note about the
brakes, it turned out. Another page in the file had what looked
like a photocopy of a hand-written rough draft accident forensics
report. Deciphering nearly inscrutable handwriting was,
unfortunately, an actual staple of reporting and while Grant had
gotten fairly skilled at doing exactly that it was no less
annoying. The fact that he knew what he was looking for in this
case helped somewhat, and so it didn't take him long to find the
note Anders had referred to.

``Probable cause of this accident was inability of the streetcar
to come to properly come to a halt due to a faulty braking
system.'' Grant muttered to himself. He had a tendency to speak
aloud when he was reading official reports or his own writing, as
more than once he'd found an error by reading something that
literally had sounded wrong. Another less flattering reason was
because people wandering by would occasionally correct him. ``
Skid marks and driver testimony indicate that, while the brakes
were indeed applied, they seemed to lock almost immediately.''

Grant glanced back at the police report to find the 'driver
testimony' the forensics had referenced.

``I swear,'' Grant quoted, ``I just jammed on those brakes and
did not let up, and the God damned anti-lock let me down.''

``Sounds like you've got a live one.'' Stephen was packing up for
the day. He'd long ago become accustomed to Grant's vocal reading
habits and had on more than a few occasions been the one to
correct him.

``Yeah, it's strange all right.'' Grant allowed, glancing over
some of the pictures from the scene.

``Good luck.'' with that, his co-worker was gone, and Wynn once
again buried himself in his work.

By the end of the ordinary working day several hours later, the
overall noise level in the office had dropped to the point that
he felt self-concious reading out loud and thus decided to start
placing phone calls. Fortunately, the first was to a different
floor in the same building.

``Gazette Classifieds, what section may I direct you to?''

``Hey Morgan,'' Grant began, hoping Morgan was indeed still
routing the calls and his replacement hadn't been scheduled for
today, `` it's Grant in Features, can you put me through to Sara?''

``One moment please.''

Wynn found himself almost hoping they would keep Morgan, as the
man seemed to work with both the efficiency and emotion of a
robot, thus making him a marked improvement over the many others
who'd had his job before.

``This better be good'' Sara, on the other hand, was someone who
was generally upbeat and fun to be around. The moment you
attempted to stop her from leaving work precisely on time, you
became marked for life. Grant was calling it close.

``Hey Sara, heard you stopped in yesterday?''

``Grant! Our glorious editor informed me you'd probably be
calling.'' She sounded somewhat more relaxed at this point, but
Wynn could still hear her mentally ticking off the seconds.

``I know it's probably a bit early, but have you heard from the
family of a Dr. James Caster? I'm writing an obit and I'll need
their notice or details from the funeral home.''

``Just a sec.'' The upside to calling Sara close to quitting time
was that she would work even faster than normal in an effort to
clear everything before she left. There was only a brief moment
of typing. ``Sorry, it looks like you're not likely to get
anything so nicely formatted,'' the implication, as it always was
when he made such a call to her, being that he simply copied the
details verbatim into the stories, ``I got a call from the
hospital earlier today telling us the only next of kin's a
brother in Columbus.''

``They called to tell you that?'' Grant's career was by
definition an active one, but he was used to other industries -
ones he depended on for information in particular - not
volunteering information until he went and dragged it out of
them.

``Yes, they know we wait on those details Grant, they don't want
us pestering them like the inconsiderate bunch we are.'' she
said, making it perfectly clear that she thought 'inconsiderate'
a word to encompass both those who harassed hospital staff and
those who kept other people at work late.

``Thanks for the help, Sara. I'll let you go now.''

She'd hung up halfway through ``let''.

Grant smiled. He knew he was going to get angry glares thrown his
way if he should happen to stop by the Classifieds department in
the next week or so, but given it was technically only 4:58 and
30 seconds, he felt pretty good about not being on Sara's hit
list. At least, not yet.

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