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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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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