Chương 87: CDM 2, Chapter 23: Corporate Sabotage

Neither Beth nor I felt much like talking, so we spent most of the dark winter drive back to the city in silence. When we entered the outskirts of Pittsburgh, Beth tapped her forehead on the passenger-side window.

"That. Was. So. Dumb."

"It's over now." Beth turned to me.

"How many times did you tell yourself that?" Chuckling, I answered, "A few hundred."

"How many times were you right?"

"Never."

"I'm sorry you were alone for so long," Beth said.

"I don't think I would have made it if I had gone first."

"You're stronger than you think."

"Have you thought about their funerals? I mean, even before the New Eden stuff." I nodded.

"What will you do when they die?"

"Senior year of college, I decided if one of them died that I wouldn't go to the funeral. I've said everything I've needed to say while they were alive, and me showing up would just ruin it for the people who actually want to be there."

"I see."

"That's your own decision to make, you know. Just because I chose that doesn't mean you have to also."

"I know," Beth replied, "but thank you for saying that." She watched the dim orange lights on the walls of the Fort Pitt tunnel whiz by.

"How hard will Christmas be?" she asked.

"Nathan still goes to see family sometimes. He has aunts and uncles who are still alive. I tried going with him before his mom passed, and they meant well, but I hated it. A whole other family looking at you like you're a stray cat at the door. Couldn't do it."

"What do you do now?"

"I turn off my phone, put on some dumb movies, and drink until I pass out. If it's still Christmas when I wake up, I drink some more."

"How early do you start?"

"8 a. m. or so."

"Do I get to join that tradition?" I thought.

"Yes, but we could start a new tradition if you wanted."

"Like what, exactly?" Shrugging, I said, "Maybe we cook something or go out for dinner at one of the places that stays open. I don't know. We can do whatever we want, really. Nathan's going to Megan's parents this year, I think, so it will just be us."

"We should eat something that's awesome but very much not Christmasy."

"Okay. Tell me more."

"Like lobster mac & cheese. Or tacos. I've always wanted to try real barbecue. Is there a place like that in Pittsburgh?"

"Pittsburgh has barbecue." As soon as I said that, I wondered if Cortez would agree with that.

"It all sounds good right now. I don't know what I'd actually pick."

"We can get a bunch of different stuff. That could be fun."

"Yeah," Beth replied, nodding.

"It could be fun. Can we keep the super drunk part of the tradition for this year at least, though?" I laughed.

"Yeah, sure."

"Do birthdays suck as much as Christmases?" I shook my head.

"Not as bad, but they still blow a big one."

"We should make a pact."

"If you tell me what it is first."

"No birthdays. We don't bring them up. We don't do gifts or whatever. Just let them go by."

"I like that," I said.

"You got a deal."

"Good," she replied.

"Hey. I'm really grateful to have you back in my life. I want you to know that."

"I do." The collective lawsuit brought by a number of church communities around the country was withdrawn. Now that New Eden was on the horizon and Rick Young was there to lead the way, suing the CDM didn't make sense anymore. Clearly the doomers negotiated the leveling help in exchange for dropping the suit. Everyone knew it even if it was never explicitly stated. Leveling slots reserved for CDM like me were traded to appease the churches. Simple as that.

When Enforcer Chapman called us into the conference room for an all-hands meeting, she said she had an update on the suit brought by crawlers. I expected a similar sort of announcement, that the CDM had reached an agreement with the crawlers somehow, and the suit was going away. The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

"We've received word that the crawler suit is being amended," Chapman began.

"The complaints now include RAID, so the microscope is on its way. This is not the time to miss an active monitoring check or to get sloppy on logs.

"For private property blackouts, err on the conservative side for the indefinite future. Assume that everything you do is subject to scrutiny. If you wouldn't want it read out loud in a courtroom, don't put it in writing. And that means in your social lives as well.

"Please actively check your emails. We may need to amend procedures unexpectedly as the suit progresses, and it's very important that we keep up on the latest standards, as unreasonable as they might sound sometimes. Now, I can try to answer any questions you have, but what I've been told is limited."

"Is this because of the drone crash?" Megan asked.

"Ostensibly. The argument is that the drones ultimately make harvest sites more dangerous for workers and therefore should have their use discontinued." Cortez raised his hand.

"Should we be worried about our jobs?"

"I wouldn't jump to that conclusion. Nothing has actually happened yet, and our orders are the same. We are proactively being more attentive. No one has mentioned shuttering RAID. With the budget invested in these pilot programs, I don't see the CDM ending the program willingly. That's my personal opinion and not the view of the CDM. Yes, Osheski, you can ask another question."

"Has there been any word on what brought the drones down?"

"All of our crashes have been deer rifles or shotguns. In Seattle, only one of their downed drones was shot. The other crashes there were from a signal interruption. Essentially, the drone is forced to accept new GPS data as fact, and that data tricks them into nosediving."

"Weaponized tech bros," Cortez joked. He dropped his eyes when he caught Chapman's glare.

"That's all I have for you. Dismissed." We knew better than to gossip about the future of RAID in the middle of the day when Chapman was around, so other than a few text messages, little was said. There wasn't much to say, really. Nothing of significance had actually rolled down from the top of the hill to hit us. Not yet. An investigative piece published in a major New York newspaper that morning reached the RAID room a few hours after Chapman's meeting.

This particular journalist had a track record for interviewing unlikely subjects, so his word was enough for most to believe that his unnamed crawler source was legitimate. Supposedly, the source was in the top 1% of crawlers in the United States and part of a major guild. The title of the article was "Top Tier Crawler Argues that CKing is an Important Tradition." A few select quotes received the majority of the attention. For example:"My grandfather went right from killing nazis to killing monsters.

His leadership locked down gate patrols for our town and made sure they got closed. It was one of the first places in the country to do it, and that became the blueprint.

"Nobody wants to talk about this, but doomers crashed gates all the time back then because they wanted them to surge. They wanted the rapture to move forward, and they were willing to kill crawlers if that's what it took. In a dungeon gate, you have to protect your party over everything else. If it's in the dungeon, it's not your friend." And this soundbite especially generated conversation: "Killing crashers has been a necessity from the beginning, and that has never changed."

"How can they be so casual about killing people?" Beth texted me.

"I'm sorry."

"Will this affect the Baker Bill at all?"

"I don't think so. That's probably why the source came forward at all."

"I hate them."

"Me too." Next to me in the RAID room, Cortez laughed incredulously.

"This is crazy.

'My grandfather went right from killing nazis to killing monsters.' Goddamn white saviors. You know what my great-granddad did during the war? He sat in an internment camp because he looked Japanese even though he was one hundred percent Mexican.

"The people in the camps and a bunch of convicts were the first sent into the gates. They were expendable. That's who the early crashers killed. Not war heroes. Then everyone figured out how big of a deal earning levels was, and the script flipped. They weren't allowed in gates anymore. Can't let the negroes or the wetbacks get too powerful, you know?"

"Sorry, man," I offered. I didn't know what else to say.

"He talked about the gates the way soldiers in documentaries talk about Normandy. Back then, jumping into a gate was like getting dropped on a battlefield. He saw a bunch of friends die, and monsters weren't the only killers, you got me?" I nodded.

"Fuck. I need to go for a walk." Cortez pushed out his chair and ventured toward the elevators.

"Think he'll be okay?" Megan asked with a whisper.

"I didn't know any of that about his family," I said.

"This is shitty to say, but it sounded like he had been angry about all that for a long time. Today just salted the wound."

"So he's got a lot of practice dealing with this?"

"Yeah."

"Why is that shitty to say?"

"Because it makes it seem like old anger is less important or less dangerous because it's old. That's not how I mean it, but I can see someone taking it that way." Megan nodded and scooted back into her cube. Truthfully, I wanted to think about anything but the events happening around me. I didn't sleep when I got back from my parents' house, and I was still sore from having my puppet strings yanked again after so long. To occupy my mind, I checked in on my monster sighting project.

Only one additional troll had been logged, and the EPA was already aware of it. The other dozen or so sightings were goblins, but only about half of those had an obvious SOC nearby. At the start of this effort, the goblin appearances seemed random, but for one batch of them, an epicenter seemed to emerge. I discounted it at first because the Youghiogheny River flowed close by. Goblins couldn't cross the river, so my epicenter was based on half of a circle rather than a full circumference.

I kicked myself for not recognizing that before. Whitsett was the nearest town. The EPA demolished it a few years back, so it technically no longer existed, but knowing the town name would help with researching the area. Technically, this investigation was drifting away from CDM work and into Dungeon Divas hunt prep, but if Enforcer Chapman got on my case, I could argue that I was investigating data we collected. At any rate, Whitsett was an old coal mining town. No surprise there.

The town used to have a "sky ferry" that allowed miners from across the river to come to the Whitsett side to work. Six miners at a time could rise in what I gathered was something akin to a ski lift. That was an interesting factoid, but it wouldn't help me find a goblin nest. The Darr Mines were the most famous coal mines in the region. Open lanterns ignited coal dust and caused an explosion, killing 249, but that location didn't match my epicenter. The Banning #1 Mine was close to Darr, but still not it…

The Banning #2 Mine. That mine was closest to Whitsett, but I couldn't find an exact location. The operation was substantial at one time, so even if the town was flattened, there was a chance pieces of Banning #2 Mine remained. I dumped my research into a group chat with Megan and Nathan.

"do we have another SOC picked out yet?" Nathan asked in reply.

"Slim pickings right now."

"maybe that's the hunt for this trip. we head out to that area and send kimmy out to look around. all the leaves are down at least." Megan popped over my cube wall and gave me a thumbs-up before disappearing again.

"Megan's in. I am too."

"once again, kimmy is the real mvp."