ravan

GWOT I - Audible

Working note: this is the first GWOT n which the author is using voice recognition to compose the story. Like Echo 18, the author is suspicious of new technology. Unlike Echo 18, the author does not go around breaking every law in the book.

This is relatively early in GWOT I.

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So gentle reader, the question is frequently asked: who the fuck am I, what the fuck do I think I'm doing, and why am I even here?

My answer to this question is always some variation of I'm Echo 18, I'm the contract security manager, I work for Mr Murphy and it's my job to keep everybody alive and safe. If you help me with that I'm your best friend and if you fuck with that I'm your worst nightmare.

So the way I met Mr Murphy is that he walked up to me with those three questions who the fuck are you what the fuck do you think I'm doing and why am I even here and I answered those three questions as above, minus his name of course.

He started to twitch a smile and said, "Well, my name is Mr Murphy I am the client Security contact. I was a little delayed getting here I had to deal with some issues and it'll be a pleasure working with you."

What he meant of course is that it would be a pleasure having me work for him and that's how it works in my world.

Sure enough the in-house employee directory showed him as client security with an office in a sensitive building, H in Henry, and even on the third floor of that which was reserved for managers so I believed him. Notice that I did check.

I found out later what he meant by issues. He had been caught in Sausalito - he had been wise enough not to try to go douth upon seeing a fucking mushroom cloud where the city of San Francisco used to be - and had made his way around the Bay. Which was a neat trick considering that the bridges were completely and utterly screwed up beyond all recognition. Via Napa, the Delta, Antioch, Contra Costa, Pleasanton and San Jose he had finally made it back to Site. Along the way he had collected for himself a convoy of company employees who decided that reporting to Site was better than waiting for disaster relief.

Speaking of disaster relief, you may be wondering why there hasn't been a sudden flood of massive relief to the devastated Bay Area and the answer is twofold. One: there has. Two: nowhere near enough. The basic problem is that when you decide to oh I don't know nuke San Francisco and Burlingame example not at random in a pre-war mindset such a disaster would have been what they call a type 1 incident or in this case overlapping multiple type 1 incidents. I had seen with my own eyes the nuclear ignited wildfire. I had not seen the hundreds of thousands of people who deprived of any other means of evacuation had walked south. Some of them have made it. I did see the desperate attempt to treat thousands of mass casualties at Stanford hospital. I did not see the desperate attempt to feed clothe and house everybody.

But there was another problem and the other problem was far more important than any local issue involving a sudden unplanned release of canned sunshine.

There's a war on you know. China attacked San Francisco. China killed all of these Americans so therefore we're going to go do it to China. We're going to do a very very good job of reminding China and the world that this stuff is not acceptable, is just not on. That meant that a huge chunk of what would otherwise be disaster relief was flowing through all the other West Coast ports to China. As an invasion force, to quote the propaganda finish the fucking job.

Yes we've had a significant change in how we talk in our public rhetoric. There's a lot of f-bombs and starting to show killings on video. Our propaganda machine has been turned up to 11 in terms of our new visceral hatred for everything China and Chinese.

And that my friends is a problem because as you may or may not know there has been a long history of Chinese people in America and Chinese-Americans. You may notice the tense I used.

For example, when the United States went to war with Japan in World War II.

Just before the war in 1939 that there were 33 Japantowns in California. After the internment and after the war there were three by 1950. One of them was partially demolished to make way for a police building - Little Tokyo and Parker Center in LA. The other two were San Jose and San Francisco. Now of course there are only two Japantowns. Can't have a Japantown if you don't have a city.

But you also can't have a Chinatown when there's no Chinese.

So if anybody finds this I'm probably not going to have a good day out if I'm lucky I'll probably get sent to China because I'm such a China lover.

If somebody even looks vaguely slant-eyed in the modern America they wear a flagpin or a suit or they dress up fancy or they do something to visually surround themselves with the idea that they are a loyal patriotic American citizen.

If you're Vietnamese or Korean, a Vietnamese or Korean flagpin by itself is not sufficient. People don't recognize flags. Athough people wear that too, you'll actually see three or four American flag pins and one little Korean or Vietnamese flagpan and it's always the old yellow ARVN flag not the modern rag.

There's been problems. There's been huge problems with us and one of the first was a little innocuous memo that came out from the Site Location Executive pretty much the moment he showed up and took over, saying the following employees are no longer employees of the corporation. With a list of names.

Every name on that list was Chinese and I have been very Catholic about applying the existing lists of personnel helped by Mr Murphy to everybody who showed up on site. Every now and again there's somebody who shows up on site who is on that termination list and we take their badge and show them to the gate and I don't know what happens to them after that.

But I do.

That's the problem. Large numbers of enraged people all over the Bay Area are literally lining the sides of the road under tarps sleeping in each other's front yards. Scared, in many cases injured and untreated, some are sick some of ordinary illness, entirely too many of radiation poisoning. To be among them and appear Chinese is to be sentenced to what you hope is a sudden death but all too often takes hours.

I suppose in theory I could have pushed back on the idea that there were people not being admitted to Site because they were Chinese but it didn't really occur to me at first. About the fourth time I took a convoy out and I saw somebody being tired I was like what am I sending these people out into and that I decided just to not think about it. I had enough problems trying to keep the people alive that I could keep alive.

Please don't ask me what being tired is.

Another reason not to push it: I had been given a direct order by my Employer - a contract security corporation - to come out here and help Company, a high technology corporation that owned and operated Site. I had my orders. Mr Murphy had asserted that he was my boss, the Site Location Executive and VP of Facilities both grudgingly agreed that I was supposed to be here because of that client relationship, but nobody had ever run a background check on me as far as I knew. I really didn't want to push it.

(Found out much later that Mr Murphy had done his due diligence and had a background check run on me. It came back and said yeah he was born in the US, yeah he's a security guy with a pre War license, and yeah there's no way to vet him against his friends or contacts because well half of them were in the City and ... yeah.)

Fortunately for what remains in my sanity, I am far too busy to think about existential questions

Unfortunately third parties keep wanting to drag epistemology back into this.

Their answer to the three questions is we don't care, bleeding out and not for long.

That's why we need a security force. That's why I am never outside arms length of a gun. That's why I'm having to train a lot of unqualified and grossly unqualified security personnel to carry guns while still maintaining the rudiments of physical security.