[To Beginning of Story]
Tina
I pulled out of the Starbucks lot, practically yelling at the car’s heater system to kick on before I caught my death from the cold and wet. The sports coup was sealed against the weather, thanks to some mods I purchased earlier this year to fight the persistant rain from the spring, but it took the pleasure out of having a convertible.
I thought again about Kira and her gloomy prognosis about the weather. I had met her first a few years ago, when she and I were both in a class for presenting Weather on TV. For each of us it was an odd course – it was one of those odd courses that any news anchor needed to have on the off chance that the weatherman took sick that day and someone else had to take over.
For Kira, it was the opposite: the one PR course that a serious weather professional needed to have when forced to be in front of a camera. She’s one of the smartest people I have ever met – her entrance scores were scary high – but like a lot of academic types she absolutely hated dealing with the camera.
In all honesty, we should have hated one another on sight, but somehow something clicked. She helped me through the hard math parts of the course, I coached her through the stage fright and how to act so that you don’t appear like a total dork when the camera’s running, and we managed to both get through the course with an A. Not too much after that, we had a shared apartment and tended to share a single bed.
I think even then we knew it couldn’t last … she was a Gemini, I’m a Taurus. Not a good combination. But it was passionate while it lasted, I managed to get her out of her shell, and even after it was over we managed to remain pretty decent friends.
We went our respective ways afterwards, of course. She went on to an assistant professorship at the University of Washington, I took a job as the obligatory blonde news anchor for KERV in Seattle. Spare me the jokes, I’ve heard them all. My goal had once been to get on with one of the internationals – CNN, Reuters, Associated – but a summer internship with CNN opened my eyes to how cutthroat it was there. Maybe one day I’ll go back, but Seattle was the more sane position to take at the time, and one I have yet to regret.
'It was raining'. In Seattle, especially lately, that one phrase could mean anything from there was 'a light mist in the air' to 'sheets of water descended from the sky'. As I drove across the new 520 bridge (the old one had succumbed to the increasingly heavy waves of the Puget Sound several years before), I reflected that lately "it was raining" now shaded into "It’s probably a good idea to invest heavily in scuba diving gear," and the gusts coming down from the north made driving especially treacherous. I said a quiet prayer as my car headed back up the hill to the Eastside.
Kira’s predictions coursed down my spine, a chill that the heaters of my sports car could do nothing about. Things had been bad throughout much of the twenty-first century. The Colorado had dried up, the Midwest was an arid dust-bowl, and New Orleans was now a lake, a combination one-two punch of hurricane and tidal wave turning Bourbon street into marshlands. New York was involved in a desperate race against time - trying to raise the "floor" of the city above the rising tides, though this wasn't common knowledge.
Not much was, anymore. National security was the name of the game, had been essentially since the 2001 and then the coup a few years later. Seattle, like most of the West Coast, is practically another country any more. After the currency collapsed, the country exists pretty much in name only. Washington state and British Columbia use pretty much the same currency, electronic but backed with gold, and we have reciprocal currency agreements with California and Oregon as well.
The closer you get to the East Coast and DC (currently located in Atlanta, like a travelling preacher show) the greater the control on news, and the less ability you have to report it. The other reason I decided not to take the offer from CNN was that realization … I would have been another talking head parroting the official line, and that line was about as repressive as anything from Nazi Germany.
Yet I had to wonder if this was a case of Nero fiddling while Rome became so much firewood. For all the problems (and the damn rain) Seattle was still in better shape than most of the rest of the country (or the rest of the world, for that matter).
There was much to think about as I pulled into the KERV parking lot. I just hoped I could snag a hair-dresser for forty five minutes before I had to go on the air. The rain was murder on hair.
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