Briefing

The Auditor and the Conductor sat together, side by side, at a red oak table, looking out over a snow clad mountainscape, a fire crackling in the stone slab fireplace to their right, coffee cups steaming before them.

Matt: “Pink or yellow, what is your choice?

…You never ate any? How long have you been handing them out?”

Ted: “Dave Billy said the giver don’t get, like a shell casing don’t hit the target, just the bullet.”

Matt: “Quiet on that—don’t even mention firearms. The solar array is still intact for a long time to come. The APM will dispatch drones. They haven’t all gone crazy.

Ted: “Coffee is good—view is great. I’ll miss this place, miss it already.”

Matt: “Pink and yellow—there was a problem once with kids in war zones grabbing what they thought were rations and having their hands blown off. The packages are easily visible. The bag, if opened properly across the top, can be used to transport water. You never advised on usage?”

Ted: “Oh, we mostly did drops and caches in the zones we worked. Dave Billy took a bullet to the brain for helping fix a well. Once people got droned up in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah especially, and Nevada—Eastern Oregon the same, we just did drops from early on. Dave never could get on with the Uplift and had me trained up in that—too gadgety for him, he said.”

The men sat at the table, looking down over the high meadows to the distant cone-shaped mountains, mountains that seemed to steam like as their coffee cups. Ted, short, lean too wizened, bearded red with thick white hair, seemed like a weird sprite going fey before the window. Matt wondered what kind of house guest he would be, not wanting any compatibility trouble. He had been lonely these past four years since full APM and the loss of his station chief and district manager, gone to the high colonies to ride out what was thought to be coming from deep space. Ted was admiring the enameled tin cup without saying so, pinging it with a nail, touching it to feel its warmth, observing the small remnant of a once great civilization like a man who had spent too much time alone.

Matt: “That cup is pure Colorado. As strange as it is, considering the wars, ships, spacecraft—the dam that used to hold back the river down in the hallow, forming a lake that watered Denver, a city of millions, this pink bag and its contents are destined to be the last trace of the earthly oligarchs that have fled this planet to reside like gods among the planets.”

Ted looked on as Matt spilled out the contents…

Matt: “The two meals in the body bag tone pouches are described on this card, published by Ameriqual Packaging, Evansville, Indiana, as if the place still existed—a ghost in printed words. Bean salad, not bad 450 calories, and beans with potatoes, better—with the little cubed hash style spuds at 500 calories. To be eaten with this petrol spoon, that is designed unlike much of the disposable utensils of the time not to cut the lips. This spoon can be shaved into fire starting material. The whole packages comes in at about two pounds, the two meals making up one of those measures.”

Ted was now organizing the small packets as Matt continued…

“Two banana and sweet potato based smoothies. Think about it, it has to feed elderly, children, people with bad teeth or no teeth. This is well thought out, a logistical triumph in microcosm. Yet, with all of that, between the yellow pouch and the pink, the only difference is that one of the smoothies is sweetened with apple juice and the other with grape. There is no animal protein, based on the obviously averse religious populations formerly targeted for mass murder for transgressions against the petrodollar.”

“Salt and pepper packets are standard and lame, branded by King packaging. Interesting how this ration is largely a packaging affair. I think the meals are actually—where rather—made in Georgia. The hand towelette is a joke. How is a person supposed to clean up with this mouse sized thing?”

“This, the cracker is indestructible, doesn’t weigh a thing, and is surprisingly good. The best item in here is the sunflower butter, good quality spread for the cracker. What is the crown of this enterprise, is an item I am going to suggest to you for a breakfast with your coffee. I know your profile said you only eat dinner. But, this, in this ironically Space Age looking vacuum-sealed foil, is a good oatmeal cookie—in a world, I might add, that is lit again only by fire, and by the lights from heaven. My propane has been depleted and the solar deactivates at week’s end before the APM demo. There will be no more cookies.”

With a mild, clinical enthusiasm, Matt, a much bigger man than his wind-burned guest, held up the cookie and declared, in an easy tone, “In a world where another cookie will never be baked, this is money.”

Ted took the cookie as his Auditor, noted, with a stale shrug, “The briefing is over. Whatever you need here is yours. We have enough wood split in the basement to keep the fireplace going all week. Would you like to work far to near, near to far, clockwise, counterclockwise?”

Ted yawned, a man even more weary than his leathery skin, a complexion that reminded Matt of the museum exhibit at the Audition Academy, with the many life-sized wall photos of the drug addicts called “tweakers.” the hordes of tweakers had been the result of technological civilization that was cited in Uplift doctrine as a cautionary tale and cause for the Earth Cleanse and the dawning Fallow Earth Age.

Matt mused, ‘This rugged old waif and this tool curator and collector are the last little angels assigned with abandoning the Adams and Eves of a fallen world to its ruined wake?’

Ted was gazing to the limits of sight to a glinting of metal three valleys over before the first of the line of conical mountains marching westward. His words were keen, yet hallow, “That one is busy, and there is a whackado for certain droning above him.”

Matt caught himself, careful not to think out loud after all this time alone, in the last structure of its kind, “He’s got something going on over there—a nice meadow.”

Ted squinted and placed a rotary optic to his right eye and confirmed, “The final fence line. Briefing on the subject?”

Matt sighed, “We will get to that after your debriefing. Life is not certain, and, if you don’t come back, I’d like to be able to say at Uplift, a few words. It is a wonderful view up here—aptly named—and I’ve done well. But, and I hope our Solar Oligarchs come to learn this in the right way, having only your own council, surrounded by beauty, hurts in its own overthought way.”

Ted, holstered his optic next to his dumdum, seeming too right-handed to be deceitful, slugged back the coffee that still steamed in his left hand, and stood, looking vacantly into an unwelcoming past, the empty cup abandoned on the table.

Matt felt sad as the little man paced, seemingly afraid to recollect from a chair.

Audition briefings had never been easy for Matt, nor the conduction debriefings—being decidedly worse. But it was his job, his commitment, to inform and then curate the actions of his conductors, and here was an actor on the brink of extinction…