After the Fall Ch. 02

She leaned up to kiss him. "Thank you for being so thoughtful," she said, in contravention of everything she had just reminded herself. He smiled, but he didn't look entirely convinced. She needed to change the subject.

"I think I'd better take a shower. I won't be long."

"I'll join you."

Internally, she sighed. No boundaries. A minute later, though, he was massaging shampoo into her scalp and she was thoroughly enjoying it. After he rubbed conditioner into her hair, she grew so relaxed that she let him soap her up.

"That feels nice." She nuzzled his chest, but caught herself before she went completely mushy.

"Your turn," she announced.

He raised an eyebrow. "I don't think you can put your hands on me without starting something you're a little too sore to finish."

Abashed, she turned away. She wasn't trying to start anything. Michael wasn't sure how to interpret her expression, but he could see that his offhand comment had shut her down. "I'm sorry. I was just teasing you."

"It's okay," she shrugged. Michael was beginning to recognize "it's okay" as her standard response when she just did not want to talk about it. They would have to work on that, but right now, he wanted to fix his blunder. He thought about it as he shampooed his own hair.

Finally, mercifully, he realized he was overthinking it. He held the soap out to Mariah. "Please? I promise I'll behave."

Mariah took the soap. She really did not want to do it anymore, but she began lathering her hands and rubbing them over his skin. He was so still and quiet that she forgot her discomfort with the situation as she focused on her hands sliding over the planes of his body. She loved the way his muscles seemed to flow beneath his skin. She thought he was beautiful. Then she realized how ridiculous the thought was. She didn't even like pretty men.

She huffed when she reached his groin. He was hard again. "You said you'd behave!"

"I am being behaving. I'm not dead, though, and there's a beautiful woman running her soapy hands all over me." He wrapped her in a hug. "Baby, every erection I get is not a demand. If you want to wash my cock, I'll enjoy it very much, but then we'll rinse off and get out of the shower and go on with our day. If you don't want to, that's fine, too, okay?"

"Okay. Thank you for telling me that." Mariah's gratitude was genuine. It wasn't as reassuring as he probably intended it to be, since he could make a demand any time he wanted, and all he had to do was call her "kitten" to make it mandatory. It helped, though. It was good to know that her world didn't have to revolve around satisfying his every sexual impulse. Especially since he seemed to have a sexual impulse about every two minutes.

She gently washed him. The weight of his balls cupped in her hand was nice, and she did enjoy her hand sliding over his cock without consequences. She liked the texture of it and the way it fit against her palm. She finished up without lingering unnecessarily, but she thought she might enjoy doing it again some time, with plenty of unnecessary lingering.

After they dried off, Michael returned to his own room to get dressed. Mariah was still drying her hair when he returned. When she finished, she found him in the closet. To her dismay, he was fishing around in the lingerie drawers. He found the dress she originally chose that morning and offered it to her, along with the bra and panties he picked out. She was surprised when he left her alone in the closet to get dressed. She was even more surprised when she put on the bra and panties he had chosen. She had given up hope that the lingerie drawers contained anything comfortable, but the soft fabric and stretchy lace felt wonderful.

When she was dressed, she found Michael sitting on her bed rubbing Julia's chin. Julia had her neck stretched out and her eyes squeezed. Her purr was audible from several feet away. "Nicely done," she told him. "Julia doesn't usually warm up to people so quickly, and she's already showing you one of her favorite ways to be pet."

"Is it weird that I feel honored?"

"Yes, but it would be weirder if you didn't."

Once Julia was satisfied with the state of her chin, she curled up for a nap. Michael eased off the bed to avoid upsetting her. It was amazing how quickly Julia had wrapped him around her little paw. Henry was suspiciously quiet, but when Mariah called him, he came running. She put him on the leash. She was taking Henry along when Michael showed her the rest of the house and introduced her to everyone.

When they reached the third-floor sitting room, Michael told her that the west wing through the opposite door and the west wing on the second floor held the staff's quarters. The security team's rooms were on the second floor, and everyone else's rooms were on the third. Michael didn't feel comfortable invading their private space, so he just described the layout.

Each person's quarters included a living room, bedroom, bathroom, and small kitchen. At the very end of the west wing, there was a recreation room and large kitchen. Since his father's death, Michael had encouraged the staff to make use of the common areas of the house, but in the evenings, people still gravitated toward their own quarters.

Michael continued the tour on the second floor. On this floor, the west wing housed the quarters for the security team. A large conference room faced the stairs and extended into the east wing. Past the conference room, Michael showed her a communications room with telephone and videoconferencing equipment.

"It's all still plugged in," Mariah observed. "What can you use it for? Who could you talk to?"

"You already know that people with the means were able to isolate themselves from the consequences of The Fall."

"People like you," she reminded him.

"People like my father. At least that's how I've always thought of it. I suppose I should include myself in that category. Anyway, those people were able to maintain limited satellite communications."

Mariah's jaw dropped. "Do you mean there are people still communicating in real time?"

Michael nodded.

"You can talk on the phone?"

"Yes. It's not quite like when we used to call each other on cell phones, though. There aren't operational cell towers or repeaters or anything like that. You need an unobscured line of sight to the satellite to send or receive the signal. If you have that, you can call anyone else who has access to the interface with the satellite that you're using."

"Do you have internet?"

"Not exactly. But we have a copy of huge portions of the internet before it went down. Do you remember the Wayback Machine online?"

"Yes. You could use it to see older versions of web pages. It was useful if you wanted to see information that had been taken down, and it was a good way to catch organizations changing their stories."

Michael nodded. "Exactly. That archive had hundreds of billions of web pages stored on it, and we have a copy of all of it. That's not all, either. We have lots of government archives, including intelligence agency archives. Those contain all sorts of information that was public, all gathered in one place. We've been able to add copies of the data from libraries, universities, and private companies, too.

"Instead of browsing an internet that takes you to servers hosting information all over the world, now there's a huge central database. Since there aren't that many people with access, it's possible for the servers to keep up with the demand. If more people were accessing it, there would be serious logjams."

"Who has the database? Is it safe? Are there backups?"

"Slow down, sweetheart. I'm going to try to answer all your questions, but you are getting into areas that take a whole lot more explanation. All the data that has been copied is on a huge network of servers in an old NSA facility in Bluffdale, Utah, near Salt Lake City. It's controlled by a man named Gregory Quinland. There is no single backup of the data, but there are backups of parts of it that are held by different people across the country. In most cases, the original data is still out there, too. The Wayback Machine's data is still on the original servers in San Francisco. We only copied it.

"The people who have access to the data are the people I've been talking about who had the means to isolate themselves during The Fall. They formed an organization. Gregory Quinland built a huge meeting center in Bluffdale, with lodging and shops and a medical center. The organization uses that meeting center. I've been trying to avoid it, but I suppose I might as well tell you what they call themselves and the organization. I can already imagine what you're going to say."

"So, what is the name?"

"The Elites."

Mariah looked at him for a moment and then burst out laughing. "The Elites? Seriously?"

Michael shrugged. "I know. It's ridiculous."

"That sounds like the name of some snobby prep school's fencing team."

"I'm just glad we aren't calling ourselves "The Spartans."

Mariah smirked at him. "So. you're one of 'The Elites.'" She used air quotes.

"Hey, I didn't make it up."

"Okay, setting aside the ridiculousness of the concept you Elites have of yourselves—"

"I wish you wouldn't include me in it like that," Michael interrupted.

"Setting that aside, why is this a big secret? Why doesn't everybody have a chance to access these communication abilities?"

"That is where we get into a much bigger discussion for later, about the organization's goals and its internal politics."

Mariah frowned and leaned back against the wall. "You know I'm going to ask again later, right? I'm not just going to forget about it."

He raised his hands defensively, "I promise I'm going to tell you everything I know. I just can't possibly tell you everything at the same time. We'll talk about why the organization is so exclusive and secretive later. Right now, I'm still trying to answer your question about why everybody can't access the data independently. How much do you know about the communications collapse during The Fall?"

"Not very much. It started with the electricity, and without electricity the communications equipment worthless. The electrical grid started going down, even in places where it was not damaged by storms. People told all sorts of stories about why it happened -- domestic terrorists, computer viruses, environmental activists, the government, aliens, you name it.

"Not all of it went down at once. The President said it was the states' problem. Some of the states tried to fix things, but each state had a patchwork of utility companies. Maybe it was just incompetence. There were some places that got the power up again, but it went right back down and nobody knew why, at least not that I heard of."

"I can add a little about the electricity," Michael volunteered. "The grid was hacked. It didn't get a lot of attention, but the government issued a report in 2018 about Russian hacking inside the U.S. electrical grid. It was not only Russia, but they were the worst offender. It had been going on a long time before the 2018 report, but by then it was very widespread. There was no single "grid" in the U.S. Like you said, it was a patchwork. Hackers got into some parts of it before others.

"The consensus, at least publicly, was that the hacking had only been designed to collect information. The report stated that the hackers never took control of the systems in a way that would allow them to influence the way power was distributed. That was the official story. The truth was that the hackers left behind backdoors and different kinds of vulnerabilities to allow them re-entry into the systems, and they left code in place that could accept new instructions. I'm not a computer guy, so I'm probably not getting that quite right, but it's the general idea.

"The government knew at the time what the hackers left behind, but the only way to fix it completely would have been to reinitialize everything. All the networks running the grid would have to be taken down one region at a time and restarted with new programming and new security measures. They couldn't do that without disrupting people's lives and admitting the extent to which they'd been asleep at the switch. The Administration had no interest in exposing it, and Congress was still trying to figure out how to use Facebook. So, nothing got done. When the Russian GRU went rogue, they introduced the viruses that shut everything down."

Mariah shook her head. "I wish I could say I was surprised, but it all seems sadly predictable. I don't know how aware you are of the evolution of political attitudes since The Fall, but this is a perfect example of why people feel the way they do."

"Actually, I don't know a whole lot about it. From what I could see on the video feeds, people just stopped talking about politics."

"People stopped talking about politics because they were disgusted and embarrassed that they let the politicians get so far out of control. Democrats blamed Republican politicians for causing the problems, and Democratic politicians for letting it happen. Republicans blamed Democratic politicians for causing everything and Republican politicians for letting it happen. Most of the time when there's a huge governmental failure, people talk about it afterwards because they're either still arguing about what happened, or they're saying, 'I told you so.' This time, there's nothing to argue about. There's no dispute that both parties destroyed the country. Nobody I know calls themselves a Democrat or Republican anymore."

Michael nodded. "Honestly, that's pretty reasonable. But what about independents and third-party politicians?"

"People recognized that most independents were just partisans with their fingers in the air to see which way the wind was blowing. Third party candidates had been viewed as election spoilers for a long time. None of them did anything to warn people what was going on. The bottom line is that a politician of any stripe is about as welcome as a skunk at a lawn party."

"It wasn't the sort of thing that came up at the dinner table at our house," Michael said, "but I can understand why people feel that way. If people knew the rest of the reason the grid stayed down, they would be even angrier. Most of the equipment just needed new programming, but the federal government was not communicating with or assisting state and local governments.

"It was about the same time that the storms got so bad that it wasn't practical in most places to have power lines and other components above ground. Local governments did not have the resources to move things underground. Ashland still has power when the power plant is operating because the software got reprogrammed. The plant's limited operation is only due to maintenance problems and lack of fuel.

Mariah sank into one of the comm room's chairs. "Knowing how easily it could have been fixed is a pretty bitter pill to swallow. It's going to be hard to ever get anybody interested in civic engagement again."

Michael nodded. "Yeah."

"If electricity was restored, would people be able to communicate through the satellites?"

"Restoring electricity would only be the first step. There's also a question of the satellites' capacity. Also, it would not work for anyone without a direct line of sight to one of the satellites we are able to use. There aren't very many available to us anymore."

"What happened to the others?"

"Hostile countries, and later hostile factions, started hacking each other's satellites. You probably never heard anything about it because the electricity had already taken down communications by that time. National governments usually left the satellites intact but unresponsive to their programmers. The factions that started hacking satellites after national governments fell were much more destructive. They frequently altered the satellite's orbital trajectory to crash into another satellite. After they collided, they became space trash and took out other satellites."

Michael continued, "Not all the satellites that the national governments hacked were destroyed by the other satellites. Some of them were in higher orbit. Others just got lucky. We were left with a small number of satellites that would be functional if there was a way to communicate with their programming. Then, one day, a group of the remaining satellites started responding again.

"Nobody thinks it was spontaneous. Somebody figured out how to do it, but we don't know who it was or who they worked for. The other strange thing about it is that they left it accessible to anyone who knows enough to use the satellites, but they locked the programming down tightly enough that nobody's been able to make changes."

Mariah's forehead creased. "So basically, some unknown person reestablished communication with the satellites, made them usable for people to communicate, and prevented anyone else from blocking anyone, and nobody knows who or why?"

Michael nodded. "That sums it up."

"Do you know whether the power grids are still up in other countries?"

"I don't know definitively. Before we were completely cut off from the rest of the world, most countries had already gone dark, meaning that they weren't communicating with the outside world. It seems reasonable to assume that wouldn't have happened if their grids were still up, but there could be other reasons. We do know that the power grids of other major world powers were also hacked. If there are countries left with functioning power delivery networks, they are probably small countries that might not have been targeted."

"Are people besides "The Elites" using the satellites?"

"Almost certainly."

"Do you know who?"

"I've been told that we don't. But, besides not knowing a great deal about how these things work, I seriously doubt I'm being told everything. That's a conversation we should save for later, though, or we'll never get through the tour."

"But it's so intriguing!"

"It will still be intriguing later. Now, on with the tour!" He gave her a playful swat on the way out of the communications room.

The security office was across the hall from the conference room. The room held several desks, computers, a control station for remotely controlled gates and other equipment, and a wall of screens cycling between video feeds. Nate was monitoring the screens and Yvonne was busy on a computer. They looked up when Michael, Mariah and Henry came in.

"Mariah, this is Yvonne. She's a member of the security team. She also handles our information technology issues." Yvonne was a tall, thin woman of Persian descent with a pronounced New England accent. Mariah wondered how she had ended up in Colorado.

"I'm pleased to meet you, Yvonne. I'm looking forward to learning what IT is like since The Fall. Until today, I didn't know there was any IT left."

Yvonne's smile transformed her face. At rest, her features were severe, almost ascetic. Smiling, she looked like she had a wonderful secret that she couldn't wait to tell. She had an almost girlish habit of tossing her shiny black bob, as if she were used to longer hair.

"I'm looking forward to having someone who can help keep these boys in line," Yvonne said with a grin. "They're a handful for just Paula, Amy and I!"

Michael snorted. "You three tyrants are definitely not in need of reinforcements. I'd like to think Mariah will be a good influence, but I seriously doubt it."

"Mariah, I believe you already met Nate." Nate was one of the guards who came out to get Mariah after "mayor" Hawley took a swing at her. He looked exactly like Mr. Clean would look if Mr. Clean was a very dark-skinned black man. Mariah hadn't seen a lot of Nate. He was serious and taciturn, but she'd caught a glint in his eye that made her think he was hiding a wicked sense of humor.