“Ah, but remember, conservation laws,” said Jack.
“We could’ve shot it if it was a wombat,” said Olivia. “They’re endangered as all get-out, but they’re still legal to kill, because they’re too damn dangerous for even the most hard-nosed conservationists to worry about.”
“What makes them worse than anything else around here?” I asked. I was picturing a monster, something the size of a bear but with the venomous fangs that every other creature in Australia seemed to come equipped with. “How big are they?”
“Barely over the amplification limit, but they’re built like concrete wrapped in fur—even an uninfected wombat can be dangerous as hell, if you hit one with your car. They have incredibly slow metabolisms. That makes them ambush hunters. They’ll kill and eat a man, and then just sit there for a month or more, digesting, not setting off any alarms.” Olivia shook her head. “They’re a menace. It’s a pity, too; they’re quite cute, when they’re not trying to chew your face off.”
“If we were anywhere else on the bloody planet, I would think that you were having me on right now,” I said, peering out the window as I scanned the side of the road for signs of the dreaded wombat. I thought I saw something about the size of a small dog, but it was mostly obscured by the brush, and before I could point it out, we were past it and barreling onward down the highway.
“Welcome to Australia,” said Jack, with altogether too much good cheer.
“Yes, I feel a little more welcome every time you remind me how likely it is that I’m going to die here,” I grumbled, and sank lower in my seat, reaching for my laptop.
It took only a few minutes for me to locate a strong local wireless signal—a little odd, given that we were apparently in the middle of nowhere, but Australia had made great strides in connectivity since the Rising cut them off from the rest of the world. It was a very “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me” ideology, and I approved, especially when it allowed me to establish an Internet connection.
Checking in on the forums and downloading the latest batch of pictures that Nandini had sent of Sanjukta helped my mood a little. Toddlers are remarkable creatures, unaware of the dangers that the world will hold for them as they grow, utterly convinced of their own immortality. They’re like tiny Irwins, and every morning I woke up glad that Sanjukta was so effortlessly fearless, even as I worried that this would be the day when she finally learned to be afraid. Judging by her latest exploits, which included clonking the cat with a toy truck and attempting to roll off her mother’s lap onto the floor, she was nowhere near that transition.
Olivia and Jack seemed content to be quiet and watch the road unfold. I twisted around until I found a position which allowed me to comfortably rest my laptop on my legs and opened the interface to my personal blog. It was time to update my followers on my impressions of Australia.
It can be difficult sometimes, juggling the formats demanded by a personal, or “op-ed” blog, and a formal, factual blog. Not everyone manages it, and we don’t require it from the Newsies anymore; we haven’t since Georgia Mason was running the site. She believed that the only way to keep spin out of the news was by putting it in a bucket of its own, clearly labeled to prevent confusion. Not that it ever worked as well as she wanted it to, but then, no one saw the world in black and white like Georgia Mason did. She was unique. That’s probably a good thing. Humanity thrives on shades of gray, and if you stripped us all back to black and white, I doubt most of us would be as well meaning and idealistic as Georgia Carolyn Mason. May she rest in peace and live happily ever after at the same time.
It’s a bit ironic that someone who was so dedicated to black and white had an ending that was so distinctly gray—but then, irony has always gone hand in hand with the news.
I summarized my flight in as few words as I could manage without slandering the airline that would be conveying me home and then began describing Australia, allowing myself all the “I felt” and “I thought” qualifiers that the more formal reports would eventually deny me. It was pleasant, soothing, and almost entirely automatic. I even found myself waxing a little romantic about the pleasures of a continent where there were still open spaces, where birds replaced klaxons as an early-warning system, and people understood that perhaps humanity was not the end-all and be-all of life on this planet.
It took perhaps an hour to compose the post and another twenty minutes to edit it down to my satisfaction, trimming anything that read as overly romanticizing the nation. Finally, I hit the key to submit and leaned back against the seat, rubbing my hands together as I tried to get the tension out of my fingers.
“Feel better?” asked Olivia. I raised my head to find her watching me over the back of the seat, a surprising degree of understanding in her round, friendly face.
I nodded. “I do, yes. Sometimes, a little time with my thoughts is all I need to center myself.”
“I understand that but good. I got the bug when I was still in school. The other kids would tease me for this or that, and I’d go sit in the library and write these long, angst-ridden blog posts about how no one would ever understand me, and how Australia was a benighted hellhole filled with barbarians and bastards.” Olivia’s grin was sudden, and broad enough for me to see that one of her incisors was slightly chipped. “It’s all still out there, although I was posting under a closed pseudonym back then, thank God. Australia’s very strict about preserving the Internet anonymity of minors, and I was never one of those girls who felt the need to drop clues about who she really was. I went online to get away from who I really was, not encourage the horrible kids at my school to track me down and give me hell.”
“So what made you get into the news?” I asked. “Forgive me if this seems overly personal, but that’s the sort of background I expect from a Fictional, not a Newsie.”
“I know, right? Trouble is, I can’t make shit up to save my life. I’m the worst liar you’ll ever meet. But telling the truth, see, that’s something I’m pretty good at. I was just finishing college when After the End Times went online, with this head Newsie who everyone agreed was just mad as a cut snake about the truth. If it even smelled of a lie, she didn’t want it anywhere near her. I looked at her and said that’s it. That’s who I want to grow up to be. All I had to do from there was sort myself out so’s I’d be good enough to get the shot.” Olivia smiled again, more subdued this time. “I really do wish I’d had the chance to meet her. Georgia Mason, God. What was she like?”
I hesitated. There were a lot of easy answers to that question. I knew them all; I’d written most of them, one resentfully given interview at a time. It can be hard to see one of your closest friends go from person to icon to ideal over the course of your lifetime—not to mention her own. She became an icon when she died for the news. She became a strange platonic ideal of herself when she came back, whether or not she had anything to do with that eventual return. But Olivia was a member of the team, even if she’d joined up after Georgia, and she deserved something better than an easy answer.
She deserved the truth.
“Georgia Mason was the single most headstrong person I ever met in my entire life,” I said seriously. “Once she got an idea in her head, she wasn’t going to be happy until she’d run it to ground and, if necessary, beaten it to death. I once had to talk her out of doing a six-week series on irregularities in the manufacturing standards for energy drinks. Not because they were dangerous, not because they were going to get anyone killed. Just because they didn’t match up to the rules. She mellowed out about that somewhat once she got her teeth into some real stories, but when she didn’t have something to be focused on, she’d try to focus on the entire world, all at once, and she was always astonished when it didn’t work.”
“Was she a good friend?”
“The best,” I said, without thinking about it. “We never met face-to-face—I never met the original, anyway, and the clone that the United States government created, while perfectly pleasant in her own right, was never the same person. Chalk it up to the trauma of dying, if you’re one of those people who believe that clones share the souls of the people that they’re cloned from. Both versions of her were passionate in their defense of the people that they allowed to get close to them, and they’d stop at nothing to help a friend. Having Georgia on your side was like…it was like knowing that you were somehow privileged to be on a first-name basis with a natural disaster. You knew that one day it was going to rage out of control and destroy everything in its path, and until that day arrived, you didn’t have to worry about a damn thing. You were the one with the tornado in your corner.”
“I’ve heard you talk about her before,” said Jack casually. “I think everyone has, if they’ve listened to more than one of your interviews. But I’ve never heard you talk about her like that. I think Australia’s getting to you, mate. You’re starting to look out the window and tell yourself stories.”
“If I can’t tell myself stories here, where can I?” I shrugged. “Besides, Georgia would have wanted me to be straight with you. You’re part of the site. That means you’re family, even if you’re distant cousins. Family deserves the truth whenever possible.”
“You always talk about her in the past tense,” said Jack. “Isn’t she alive right now? It’s confusing. Dead people are supposed to stay dead.”
“Georgia Mason had too much indignation for a single lifetime,” I said. “She had to come back, if only so she could correct the accounts of her death. I refer to her in the past tense because she died. My friend died. That she came back was a miracle. She did not come back the same person, and in a way, that’s a very good thing.”
“Why’s that?” asked Olivia.
“Because the original Georgia Mason could never have gone quietly off to live a life that no one was ever going to write down,” I said. “The woman that the CDC made with her face…she’s a friend, too, and a good one, and I miss her, but I don’t begrudge her the life she’s chosen, even as I am fully aware that it is a life that would have driven the original Georgia summarily insane.”