Ranger Michael Praeco hated Sending Authority conference rooms. He especially hated the In-Station One, third level conference rooms. They were just slightly too small for the tables and chairs wedged into them, so no one could move around without bumping into things. Their enhancements were old and somehow looked threadbare in Mana Sight – or as Flo described them, “thin and watery.” The tables were chipped and scratched, the chairs scuffed, and the seat cushions unevenly thinned with age and use. There were no windows whatsoever, and if there had been, they’d only look out on the dim, grey, stone walls of the cavern city. Insiders would be offended if he complained about the dreary atmosphere. They were used to living in caves; they’d basically spent their whole lives in caves. Many of them were frankly afraid of the real sky. It was sad, and their conference rooms were depressing.
Most of them were probably less depressing than the ones in Sending Authority In-Station One, though. It was a low bar to clear.
They were here to talk about the Sending, of course. What else did a Ranger ever get dragged Inside to talk about? It was either a medical emergency in the protected campgrounds (in which case it would be a hospital conference room) or something with a Sending. In this case, it was a post-mortem of the epidemic response for the unusually young Sending’s first mana-disease epidemic. He’d been through these before – most recently about five years ago, for the Sending still active on layer 8. Their first epidemic had been the speeds, rather than mana pox, but the SA and Ranger response procedures weren’t much different.
Of course, with this Sending, everything was different. They’d had a whole extra Ranger-led town meeting only two weeks in, not to mention those ‘care packages,’ and of course half the Sending’s leaders and go-getters had managed to go out and get themselves infected with mana pox just in time to infect the entire rest of the Sending more or less simultaneously, during the extra town-politics meeting. They’d infected a substantial number of the care package delivery volunteers while they were at it. Even poor Bernard had caught a light case while leading the first town council meeting. Flo managed to get him laughing about it, joking about updating his ‘vaccination’ and making sure he was immune to the latest strains; but it was still tiring and itchy and generally unpleasant, even if he was back on his feet rather faster than the Sent who gave it to him.
Bernard (Ranger Piper to the Insiders, of course) was sitting down the table a few seats to the left, now. He was well recovered and not a danger to the Insiders, and thus free to attend the meeting, to his own half-joking dismay. Both of Michael’s fellow healers were seated between them, which was questionable procedure to say the least, and the reason why the meeting was taking place so late at night (not that it made much difference in a windowless conference room). Commander Hardine was here too, anchoring the Ranger contingent from the left-most seat on their side of the table. On Michael’s right, three more Rangers sat – every one of them there to break the rules on information isolation between Sending zones and Insiders, frustratingly enough. There wasn’t much to be done about it; you had to throw a metaphorical bone or two to the wealthy and powerful when their children got Sent. Bending a little was the price of not being broken, when it came to the non-communication rules and people who were used to taking rules as suggestions.
Across from Commander Hardine, Agent Apira headed up the Sending Authority side for Outstation One, with her people lined up down the table across from the Rangers; they also numbered eight in total. The table was sized for 25 people (including a speaker seated at the head of the table) so that left 4 seats on each side to be filled by Insiders. If you didn’t already know who was stationed at SA Outstation One, it would be hard to tell where the Outside crew ended and the Insiders began; it was just three more people in Sending Authority uniforms and then the commissioner. (It probably said something about the current state of the SA that the Station Manager had positioned herself as far as possible from her department’s top man, instead of pressing to be at his right hand.)
Michael hadn’t been back at the layer 1 base long enough to learn all their names, but he at least knew the faces now. It probably wouldn’t take long to fill in the blanks; everyone wanted to be on good terms with the local Healers. He knew at least some of them by their position in the station, as well – for example, across from him and one seat right, as close as she could reasonably get to the center of the table, was Outstation One’s senior “remote sensing expert” – more commonly referred to as a scryer. Next to Agent Apira was her senior logistics officer. Closest to the Insider contingent and already wearing a rather practiced-looking pleasantly bland expression was the Outstation’s official “station liaison.” As best as Michael could tell, her job was mostly to tell people they weren’t cleared for information about the Sending. There were also a few unspecialized agents, and Michael wasn’t positive, but he thought one guy from accounting.
Sitting between the Outstation One contingent and the commissioner, the three Inside-dwelling SA agents logically had to be the head of the SA logistics department, the Authority’s senior records officer, and the head of their public relations department (an even more thankless version of the station liaison job, which Michael would not do for all the money in the world). On the Ranger side of the table, the last four seats were taken by representatives of other government agencies: ORAP in uniform green and white, BoP and TaIR representatives in fashionable skirt-suits, and of course, the president’s own public relations expert. Michael really should have been able to remember the formal name of his office, but it had been a long time since he’d called it anything but “the president’s propaganda flakes.” It was a bit unfair to them, perhaps, but it was a lot easier to remember.
The current “propaganda flake” was a tall man in a suit that would double as environmental camouflage in any business headquarters or government office. Michael didn’t think he’d seen this guy before, but the president didn’t send people to every meeting. His “Hi, my name is:” sticker read “Granite” in bold handwriting. He was equipped with a pocket datapad, work-tablet datapad, wireless keyboard, and recording microphone, making no bones about the fact he intended to take down every word. The Bureau of Personnel representative was making do with just one datapad, laid flat with a virtual keyboard already visible. To be fair, she really shouldn’t have a lot of notes to take or input to give at this stage, but she had undoubtedly been assigned to follow this Sending from pre-announcement planning to final Returns, so she had to be here regardless. She would at least be interested in the Skill reports. The Trade and Internal Resources rep had a pocket data-pad set to record and already looked bored with the proceedings; like her BoP counterpart, she was doubtless assigned to the Sending start-to-finish, and would have important input in a year or so – just not yet. She would start really caring when the Sent started bringing interesting products to sell at the seasonal fairs.
Michael’s friend Blanche Dunning was representing the Office of Rare Ability Preservation; bad luck for him, he was apparently ORAP’s officer of record for this Sending. It would be his privilege and his headache to be the Inside’s contact person with the under-educated, paranoid, legal adults who were functionally children, that made up this Sending. He would end up with a nice feather in his cap if the new Skill Sharer made it back Inside with a positive view of the state, but given the current sentiment in the Sending, that was going to be a challenging goal. Michael kind of hoped he would have the privilege of being the one to introduce Blanche to Danielle this fall; it was bound to be an interesting meeting. Hopefully, there would be others who needed Blanche’s attention as well, by then. There were a few other early indicators showing up here and there; with any luck, they’d have opportunity to bring some of them up in the meeting.
At the head of the table, the meeting was being called to order by the current head of the senate committee on Public Health, Mana Control, and Population. Michael tried to look attentive while the man blustered. Blah, blah, this was far too soon to be having this meeting; blah, blah, the Outsiders were all irresponsible layabouts – not that he put it in exactly those terms, but this year’s head of committee seemed to be unable to remember, despite frequent reminders, that neither the Rangers nor the Sending Authority had much real control over a Sending once the Sent got past the portal. Well, there was no portal for this group; for them, it was just when they got past the gate. How long had it been since they’d actually housed Sent in the layer 1 Sending base? Michael didn’t know, but he didn’t think it had been within his adult lifetime, and he was older than he looked.
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Agent Apira and Commander Hardine defended their respective base personnel as best they could while remaining polite and respectful to the state’s senate and its aggressively disrespectful representative. No, they had not neglected any of the usual precautions provided to any Sending. No, there had not been unusual numbers of deaths due to the epidemic – not as a percentage of the total size of the Sending. Their personnel had gone above and beyond to provide excellent service to all members of the Sending who were willing to consent to such care. The Sent were legal adults, they had the right to refuse medical care, and it was hardly unique to this Sending that a few people did.
“If the senator permits?” Michael said with a subtle wave of one hand. The glowering senator nodded to him. “The early appearance of the usual mana pox epidemic is actually of long-term benefit to a Sending,” he explained. “Mana pox is more dangerous to people with higher base levels, so it’s measurably more survivable right now, when most of the Sent are still level 1, than it would be if they avoided it until next year and it hit them at an average base level of 4. Level 5 and 6 Sent often require specialty medical care, and in such a big Sending, the required care for the number of mid-level Sent we can expect to find around summer of year 2 would stress our Outside medical resources to extreme levels.
“As it was, we only had two cases serious enough to merit transfer to specialized facilities; everyone else that required clinic care was handled at the Base One clinic. It also gave us an excuse to deliver extra food to the Sent early, while they’re still struggling enough to need it, and to evaluate how the Sending overall made use of the mana provided in the care packages.” Michael held out his hands as if offering something to the senator – the gift of a good public relations spin, he supposed. “Speaking both as a Healer and as one of the Sending’s front-line System evaluators, I advise the committee to look at this as a serendipity, not a disaster.” Those numbers only counted people who had allowed someone to check on them, of course; the deaths had been in rooms that didn’t want to admit Healers for checkups and failed to call for help when they evidently needed it.
The senator stared at him a long moment, eyes hooded, political poker face settling into place. “You seriously expect me to go back and tell the committee that it’s a good thing the kids all got sick in their first month Outside?”
Ranger Michael nodded firmly. “For mana pox and the speeds, sooner is better. Medically speaking, that’s all there is to it.” Of course, it wasn’t great for morale, but it would be better for everyone (Inside and Out) to focus on the beneficial aspects instead of acting like the mountain was falling and wasting meeting time trying to assign blame for things that were out of everyone’s control.
“In that case, can we move on to discussing what we learned from these early System evaluations?” Blanche asked hopefully.
The senator snorted. “We will undoubtedly spend more time on that minutia than any other topic in this meeting,” he said dryly. “Let’s get the other questions out of the way first. Like this cost overrun in the Outstation One budget!”
The ORAP, BoP, and TaIR representatives all slumped back in their seats with mostly-subtle sighs or quiet groans, as did the rank-and-file Rangers and SA agents. That “minutia” was the entire reason they were here. It wasn’t so bad getting everything else out of the way first, but it wasn’t very diplomatic of the senator to imply that it was because his budget complaints were more important. Even the president’s man glanced down the table and gave Michael a grateful nod. He wasn’t sure what to think of that – thankful for trying to end the blame-shifting? Thankful for a hopeful spin to put on it? It was probably the second one; this man’s job was to represent the president to the general citizenry, so he would be looking for anything generally positive he could say about the Sending to all the parents and other relatives who had kids Outside right now.
Michael zoned out a little while the senator grilled the Sending Authority side of the table on the “mystery” of why their department, and especially Outstation One, were so over-budget during the resource-intensive startup month of a Sending four times bigger than the biggest of the other Sendings currently in progress. Surely, Michael thought sarcastically, it couldn’t be the fact that seven simultaneous Sendings, the current number, was also the highest number in the last hundred, probably hundred-and-twenty years. The fact that the Sending Authority didn’t normally stock supplies for a Sending camp with over a thousand residents couldn’t be at all related, right?
In their zeal to pass off this Sending as “perfectly normal,” the senate hadn’t added anything to their budget to account for the need to increase supplies on hand to match those numbers. There was nothing for additional personnel to handle the added wildlife control patrols around the layer-1 Sending zone, nothing for rapidly replacing the supplies used in such unusual volumes, nothing for the all-hands overtime resulting from trying to put 1200 people through only four Access Point chambers in a single day, or delivering 1200 packages from the Inside followed a day later by 1200 epidemic supply crates.
The senator made the mistake of bringing up the Skill tokens, and set off a full-fledged rant from Agent Apira on the behavior of the state Skill Sharers in response to the request to bring their epidemic response token supplies up to standard for the size of the new Sending. To hear the station master tell it, people could have died from their delays. Michael thought that was a bit of an exaggeration, but then, there were a surprising number of kids in this Sending with Trait: Mana Improvement, and they probably would’ve had a harder time without Boost Recovery. A similar surprisingly large contingent with pre-Advancement elemental attunements had similar risk factors, and were therefore similarly benefitted by having plenty of Boost Recovery tokens available.
A shouting match was going on between the ends of the table now; it was Agent Apira blaming the woes of the world on Karen and Sharon for their obstructionism and the senator trying to blame the Sending Authority for not having what they needed already, in spite of their lack of budget. The SA commissioner, caught in between, was actually trying to be diplomatic; but he was a politician, here today, gone tomorrow (or anyway, gone in six years or less). Agent Apira was a Returned Citizen working in an Outside Services job, and as far as she was concerned, anybody who had been working with Sendings for less than two full decades was hardly better than a child playing with their parents’ tools. Michael tuned it all out, though of course he tried to look merely uninvolved, not asleep or buried in his datapad. He could be diplomatic when he had to be, but a politician he was not.
Blanche was still trying to make ORAP look good by pretending to care about the argument, but the BoP woman was obviously typing in an email app now, not a regular word processor or note-taking app. The TaIR woman had actually opened a simple game on her phone and started playing it – nothing loud or flashy, something with sliding squares that merged if they were the same color. Still, she was leaving the device flat on the table for the sake of the recording, so anyone who glanced her way could see that if she went left again before going up, she was going to lose – ah, there it went. She flicked the reset button indifferently and started a new game.
Juliette from the beast patrols whispered, almost subvocalizing, “You gotta go up more lady, you’re letting it pack your top lines.”
The TaIR woman didn’t respond, either because she didn’t care to engage with criticism of her meeting-boredom-relief gameplay or because she didn’t have Improved Hearing. The BoP woman opened a QuickyNote on the corner of her screen and typed, “She’s giving up score to avoid getting sliding-phone noises on her recording.”
Meanwhile, the senator shouted, “If you Outside disservice personnel would get your equipment requests in more than three days before it became an emergency, maybe you wouldn’t have to beg Karen Impera for special accommodations!”
“If you government buck-passers would just reign in the dreadful duo, maybe we wouldn’t have had to beg the new Skill Sharer to make tokens for us while she was sick!” Agent Apira yelled back.
? BoP - Bureau of Personnel
? TAIR - Trade and Internal Resources
