Chapter Text
Chapter 1 - The Road
“It seems the path I've chosen only left me broken and alone
But even at my best, I felt the rest of the world prove me wrong
It's hard enough every single day, I sell my time for a livable wage
You see really can't find a reason to stay where I don't belong”
The Road by Poor Man’s Poison
Another hurricane added to the list, with another name that hardly matters. I released a heavy sigh, the soreness in my upper shoulders lingering, despite the eight painkillers I'd taken earlier.
What are we on? Alegra? No thats an allergy pill…Baphomet?
I shrugged my shoulders, still trying to roll them loose in vain. I heard the hum of the overworked generator kicking in, rattling the lights above. Sneezy dust fell like snow from above, from the huge, long LED lights illuminating the rec center. It probably used to be a basketball court of some kind. Hoops tilted up and away so people would not hit their heads against them. But now it was a home away from home for most. People sitting on cots, talking and mourning the loss of what they used to have, and praying and thanking God for what they still have.
If God were merciful, he would have stopped drowning us in angry Gulf water.
I sighed as I stared at the orange, angry cluster of errors on my evaluation routing display. Most of them are near Lafourche Parish; others are scattered along from Assumption to St. James and even to Jefferson Parish. Seeing that many errors and that many orange ones can only mean a few things.
Death by human error.
- Server Lag
Never good to have at this point, but what can you do?
- Duplicate Refugee Registration
With so many people flooding these stations and everything and everyone frazzled, someone might have recorded themselves twice without even thinking.
Or 3. Several thousand people were about to be stranded either underwater or on roofs.
And knowing how stubborn people in Louisiana are, they usually choose the third option.
Even though we've repeatedly shown the importance of evacuating when instructed, some still refuse to do so.
I wiggled in my seat, trying to focus on removing the errors one by one.
First Error:
WARNING: ROUTING LATENCY EXCEEDS SAFE THRESHOLD
Current Delay: 14.8 Seconds
Affected Regions: Lafourche, Terrebonne
I worked on rerouting traffic through our backup servers via other parishes and on disabling non-essential visual layers.
These operators aren’t gonna like having their pretty visuals taken away, but what can you do?
I was halfway through problem two, a shelter seemingly beyond capacity up in St. James Parish, when I heard my name.
“Ren.”
I held up a single finger toward Stormy; the pun isn’t lost on me, without looking away from the monitor. “If this is another parish asking for their visuals back or resources we don’t have, I am legally allowed to fake my death at this point,” I murmured, finishing up the email I had already drafted to the head operator, Sue, asking for a cross-reference check-in count to make sure they were at capacity and hit send.
I felt terrible, a little shaky in my hands and fingers, and my eyes felt icky in my skull. Like they wanted to look anywhere but the monitor at this point. I marched on, moving on to the next error, a manual override conflict from St. Tammy Parish.
Dummy A and Dummy B walk into a bar. Naw, that's rude, and you know it.
I chuckled but stopped cold when I heard Stormy’s line of, “Unfortunately, this one is looking for you, babes.” I stopped typing and glanced up and around the crowded rec center. Kids were sleeping on cots, the smell of rich coffee thick in the rain air. Most people were talking in Cajun French here and there when I spotted her. It was hard not to. A woman stood near the entrance, a dark coat soaked with rainwater, blonde hair in a ponytail, and a hat. She seemed calm despite the chaos. Put together in a way that wasn’t fully like a native.
It was honestly my mistake for looking up. Or having eyes. Cause as soon as she made eye contact, she approached. In a brisk pace that left no room for error or doubt, she was coming my way. To my own little slice of heaven, which I called my work station.
A white plastic table dragged up from somebody's shed, a tiny dingy laptop with stickers covering it. One sketchbook lying off to the side, sticky notes all over on top. A single pen with a chewed cap and my phone. My poor, beat-up phone. I felt the need to tidy it up. To make it look decent before she came over, I shuffled things closer to me, moving my laptop more centered with me when I heard her.
“Ren Boudreaux,” she said, pronouncing my name clearly. Her thick, obvious European accent stood out. I glanced at her, noting her bright blue eyes that held something back. Something that was weighing on her. Her shoulders looked relaxed at a glance, but being around humans as much as I have, I could see it. The tension was evident; hell, the hiding of her hands deep within her coat pockets wasn’t helping her case.
“You're far from home. What brings you here? Geneva isn't sinking.”
I recognized her instantly, once she spoke: Eva Stratt. Head of the International Astrophage Taskforce, famed for unraveling bureaucracies and being a professional challenge for world governments. She was one of the most powerful unelected people on Earth. Yet, here she stood. Calmly, not appearing to be a threat, despite adding another issue to my already full plate. Her eyes shifted between my workspace and me, and I felt uneasy as she looked at my latest error.
RESOURCE CONFLICT
Available Buses: 42
Requested: 117
Someone in Jefferson requested more buses than we had available. I had to double-check the population density, the flooding probability, the elderly population, and whether they would be hit as hard as the other parishes.
It's a mess, but Stratt looks like she can actually understand all this.
I glanced at her, her eyes steady as she looked at me as if to say ‘Go On’. I huffed and moved to start typing and getting the data I needed from my system.
Luc would hate this woman instantly.
Which, honestly, should be a warning sign.
“You designed and then redesigned FEMA’s emergency cognitive-routing architecture, the redesign only taking you forty-eight hours.”
That stopped me cold in my tracks.
The hell is she-
I turned towards her, my body half turned towards her, half towards my laptop.
“Kinda late on the-”
“The original system you had built with your brother helped overloaded operators during high-density displacement events. But people still got displaced and stressed. So seeing this, you reduced the response latency by nineteen percent.”
I blinked, chest tightening with a strange mix of honor and horror at how thoroughly she'd known me, how exposed I suddenly felt. My hands trembled in my lap. It was one thing to do good work; it was another to have it dissected by someone legendary.
“Okay, scary that you memorized the metric.”
Wait…she didn’t just memorize the metric. She knew who Luc was. That we designed it. I redesigned it.
That sent a small chill down my spine at the thought. Eva Stratt is really creepy. Through, she did her homework. But creepy nonetheless.
“I get that often,” she stated simply, almost a little happy with it.
“But that still doesn't answer the first initial question.” Her body moved as she stepped into my space, reading over the data that my system had pulled. The numbers and data that I needed from before, and now, I could safely say that whoever was running Jefferson Parish Evac Zone was overly dramatic. A small hmm escaped her as she stepped back, the breath I was unintentionally holding releasing as she moved back.
“You prioritized visual cognition over data fidelity.”
“Yeah, well, I'm a very visual learner.” I huffed, throwing up my arms, “Plus,” I started again, “You would be the only one to notice and like it. The national and federal government officials who saw this didn’t really like that I did that.” I huffed and crossed my arms, childish antics be damned, in front of a legend.
“Yes,” she stated again. “Which is why I am here instead of them.”
I swallowed, dropped my arms and my gaze, fists gripping my sweats. Chaos surrounded us—phones ringing, voices rising, generators humming—but it all felt distant now. I stared at her again. “You could've sent an email.”
“I did,” she conceded, voice flat.
Error. Error. We messed up.
My face flushed. “Oh…my bad.” I twirled my hair and looked away at the old tile on the floor. “I'm up to twelve thousand unread emails, mostly car insurance offers for a car probably underwater in the Gulf.” I trailed off.
“Well, that is certainly not a defense; that is a cry for help,” she huffed back.
Stormy snorted, and a loud HA came from somewhere in the distance.
Fuckin’ Traitor.
My monitor turned red as another alert flashed, the laptop whirring.
DATA BLACKOUT DETECTED
Population Estimate: 4,327
Last Contact: 7h 18m Ago
I glanced up at the other two operators near me, one swearing as he started typing and gathering a phone in his hand at the ready. Stratt was watching all silently, a calm amongst the storm, quite literally.
“You build systems for people during emergencies.”
“Actually-”
“No,” she cut me off, her calm voice thick with something I couldn’t point at the time. “You build systems that function because people fail during emergencies.”
Well, someone has to account for the human part.
I turned back to her, meeting her blue eyes. Unfortunately, she was exactly right. If my brother was anything to go by, engineers and scientists tend to believe operators and regular people remain calm and rational under pressure. But that's not how real people operate.
Real humans forgot steps, missed information, panicked, fixated, froze, fought, and overloaded. You name it, they did it. The brain was hardly ever rational. It narrowed and tended to freeze under stress. My system accounted for that. I wanted to help exhausted people whose hands shook so much they couldn't type. To design interfaces for operators making evacuation decisions while sleep-deprived and grieving. For humans.
And somehow, this European woman understood it the moment she saw my work. I looked back at my monitors, hands hovering over the keys. "You came all this way just to compliment my interface design?"
“No.”
A thin tablet appeared at the edge of my vision, just as my phone next to my laptop buzzed. I glanced at her, then turned the phone over,
LUC-Y
Probably checking to make sure I ate or somethin’.
I sighed as I declined, and immediately felt the pang of guilt well up in my stomach.
He’s gonna be mad. Or worried. Probably both.
My older brother Luc had started this annoying habit of checking whether I was sleeping and or eating. And to be honest, it was sweet but annoying. Stratt raised a single eyebrow at me as I waved her off and thought of it as a fly. Then, opening the tablet, the screen lit up with what she wanted to show me. The air felt thinner, the room more confined and quiet.
Numbers. Solar projections, thermal decline curves, and agricultural collapse models. My breath caught, eyes roaming over the data. I knew what I was looking at; everyone on earth recognized it now. The little space microbe is currently eating the sun.
Astophage.
I licked my lips, eyes darting between the data on the tablet and my own monitor.
Why is she showing me this? I am the last person she needs to be showing this to.
“I'm not a biologist.”
“I know.”
“I'm not an astrophysicist or engineer. Didn't get my degree before Louisiana started dissolving.”
“I know that too.”
I sighed, folding my arms over my chest.
And Luc said I was hard-headed.
“Look, with all due respect, Mrs. Stratt. This data is for people who deal with space; I'm not one of them. This is for people way smarter than me. I do,” I paused, glanced at her, then back at my laptop. “I do hurricanes. Flood systems. Exhausted people. Human panic not - not.”
"People are drowning in information, Mrs. Boudreaux,” she cut me off, “You make impossible situations cognitively survivable."
Rain hammered the roof. Generators hummed. Operators talked quietly as Eva Stratt studied me, as if she'd already decided who I was.
Even though I haven’t decided what I'm gonna eat. Or hell eat at all.
“You are going to help me save the world, Ren Boudreaux.”
Not "Would you like to?" or "I have a proposal." Too simple for her; she spoke in certainties, like dictating supper plans.
I laughed once, short and sweet, more of a snort if I had to say anything.
“You know, most people buy me dinner first.”
"Yes," she said dryly, a small smirk appearing. "I was told you use humor when uncomfortable."
I winced, eyes closing before peeking at Eva. "Wow. Don't like that someone studied me enough to know that."
“Well, I study everyone,” she stated, looking back towards the flood maps still blinking orange across the southern part of Louisiana.
I find that somehow less reassuring than you think, Stratt.
I glanced at her side, her eyes still holding that weight from earlier, just unguarded now. “The world is ending, Ren.”
It wasn’t said dramatically; there wasn’t even emotion in her tone. Just that. The world is ending. A fact. Which made everything so much worse. I felt that pressure, the tightness in the chest, with the start of panic. Outside, the rain bettered the rec center roof, the old beams holding strong.
I sucked in a deep breath before releasing it slowly, eyes never leaving my monitor. “I know,” I said just as quietly. I just didn’t want to come to terms with it.
Why does this have to happen now?
I thought about everything that Louisiana had brought me. That I had lived with my whole life. The old gas station run by the Harrisons that sold Hog Head Cheese. That somehow, every time, it survived every storm that Louisiana threw at it. I wasn’t sure that it was gonna survive this one. Harsh rain, people gathering and holding strong, the smell of gasoline and stormwater, with the added bonus of rattling generators. I blankly stared for a moment, realizing that, for the first time in my life, the world felt temporary. That the world was ending, and my little bubble of a world was going to go along with it. That I was going to potentially lose everyone and everything I hold dear here to something that I couldn’t control. That I couldn’t fix.
Eva Stratt studied me for a long moment. Assessing and calculating what she could get out of just me. Then I felt it, how much pressure seemed to be in the room. Like the world was holding its breath. Like it even knew how much this conversation mattered in the long run.
I felt it more than anything, a curse from the operator who handled the desync situation earlier, sucked in a breath. My eyes darted over to him before a shout crashed through the rec center. I glanced at my laptop, and the entire eastern part of Louisiana's map was giving the worst error known to man. Well, to me at least.
SEVERE LEVEE FAILURE RISK
Probability Increase: +18%
Expected Breach Window: 2h 14m
Affected Population: 18,432
“Ren! We have a problem over in Ascension Parish right now!”
“The rate increased by 18% we don’t have the time. ”
As soon as the colors appeared, the noise of the world faded away, and I was already moving my fingers as fast as they could across the keyboard. Recalculating evaluation routes, redirecting buses, and moving the population around.
“Shift emergency traffic through Livingston Parish and move every available bus to that EVC center now. ” I said towards the two slightly panicked operators, whose hands were also working overtime.
People moved instantly, no talking back or hesitating after I spoke. Just do. Because competence during a disaster was contagious.
That and I do know what I'm doing.
I quickly rerouted one through Livingston Parish myself while I quickly made a backup through East Baton Rouge Parish, even though that was a trek, then watched, holding my breath, as the system stabilized with a flicker across the map. After a few tense moments, it felt like the whole room exhaled in unison.
And I think I even heard a distant clap before someone shushed them, earning them a chuckle from me. I leaned back in my chair with a groan, my eyes feeling itchy and odd in my skull. I rubbed at them mindlessly.
Lord, it's been a minute, but please stop testing me. I am not a strong soldier right now.
“How long have you been awake?” Stratt spoke, no emotion in her voice. Flat. Like she was speaking another fact.
I blinked at her, clearing my eyes, “I'm gonna need you to define 'awake' for me.”
“That badly then.” I huffed and sighed again, hunching over to place my elbows on my knees. I glanced up at the tiny tablet, still on the corner of my little desk, right next to the phone, lighting up with 1 missed call. I thought about everything. Everyone. My brother mainly. How would this affect him?
He just got married…
“How long has it been since you ate as well? Took a shower?” her questions came again. I sighed and heard another Ha from one person with a pun for a name. I looked up in the direction of the laugh and threw up a bird at her. Before leaning back in my chair, my shoulders were still aching.
“Look, I really don't-”
“You rerouted evacuation traffic manually while you still haven’t taken care of your basic needs. Look, Mrs. Boudreaux, you redesign systems around human cognition. Have you ever considered what happens when those humans are isolated? ”
My mouth clamped shut at that, my body sagging in the chair, exhaustion, hunger, everything hitting me at once. Let alone that haunting question.
When are humans isolated? We are pack people. We don’t do isolation. At least not long and not without damage.
I closed my eyes really hard and stretched one good time, then I looked towards the offending object, the tablet. The thing that held the world's worst news.
“Those numbers,” I pointed at the tablet, words spoken carefully. “How bad are they really?” I licked my lips, looking up into Stratt’s eyes. Her face gave nothing away. Same stoic blank face. Piecing blues boring into my own.
Stratt didn’t even hesitate.
“We are running out of time.” flat. Certain. Completely without performance or empathy. And something about the way that she said it. It finally settled in me, nestled in my chest, and took root. I felt my chest tighten, the air becoming a bit thinner as I sucked in a breath, looking out into the rec center.
I was scared.
For real scared. Not of hurricanes or storms. Not of flooding, not of collapsing systems. But the data, the numbers. Her. Cause something in Eva Stratt, in that moment, looked like someone who had already seen the end of the world. And was trying to plan for the future anyway. For the first time, I wondered if the thing I built to solve Louisiana problems could work somewhere much bigger.