May 30, 2440 6:45 PM CST
Matt’s phone buzzed against the table again. It had been doing that all afternoon, migrating slowly across the wood grain like it was trying to escape.
“Answer it,” T’mari said, hunched over her tablet. “Or turn it off. It is… distracting.”
“If I turn it off, Angelina will materialize in the doorway by sheer force of will,” Matt said. “And if I answer, we will never get this finished.”
He pushed the phone closer to the center of the table with two fingers and went back to the document floating on the wall screen. Lines of text, highlighted and commented to death, waited for him.
Working Title: From Soybeans to Stars: A Working Tour of the World
“That title is not surviving,” T’mari said without looking up. “I am vetoing it as your Director of Strategic Communications, your wife in training, and someone with functioning taste.”
“It is much better without a title,” Matt said. “We don’t need bullshit.”
Her fingers flicked. The header changed.
Bridges and Barns: A Working Tour with Matt Marmaduke
Matt just sighed and shook his head. His comms team was going to be stubborn. He wondered how much work giving them a win was going to cost him and decided it would be a teaching moment.
Underneath, a single line in blue:
A month of work, talks, and field visits across four continents, focused on food, power, and what comes next.
“It sounds like a book,” he said. “Y’all are overthinking this. We will announce that the High Lord is still the Freeholder and has multiple sets of duties to multiple sets of people and that I will be away from my Missouri office while I attend global summits and thanks to my position as High Lord of the V’ren I am traveling by V’ren Air & Space Inc.”
“There is no such company,” T’mari sighed.
“Wanna bet?”
“Not against you,” she said eyeing the pizza crust and her empty beer.
Matt caught her gaze, and turned the dumb phone back on. “Alexa, order pizzas eleven through fourteen, no make that fifteen from Carlisle Pizza. Add six growlers of Dukes Best Bitters.”
“Alexa, add a double order of mozz sticks and marinara and a double-double order of steak fries with Jufran,” T’mari added.
“Order placed,” Alexa said going back to being quiet, and then back to being off just like the phone.
“You really don’t trust those things.”
“You do remember what I did for Amazon most of my first four years?” he asked looking up. “Denver is going to be a fight.”
“You are the one who decided to start in Denver,” she reminded him.
“I decided not to start in Chicago for two reasons,” he corrected. “Starting in Chicago would mean spending the entire first week being haunted by Amazon board members. Denver is neutral turf. Mostly. They won’t like the fact I am not making it a state visit. The second reason for not starting in Chicago is I want to end things there, and watch the Cubs. Your sister would understand that,” Matt said. “Sorry.”
“No, don’t be. She told me how much she enjoyed the game and thought there might have been something. Like me, she really didn’t understand you weren’t failing to react to our pheromones just being obstinately honorable. I honestly believe had you known that was what I had been subtly hinting at you wouldn’t have let me leave the planet.”
“You are damned right I wouldn’t have. We would have spent a week in bed together and I would have told W’ren to come down once I had thoroughly gotten you pregnant. We could still…” he said moving in closer.
“We have work to do,” she laughed pushing him away. “Now kiss me and absolve your guilt. We are both aristocrats and aristocracy doesn’t do this guilt thing. It is tacky as all of your people enjoy saying,” she said sliding her hands down his flanks and around him.
Minutes later, when she felt thoroughly kissed and ready to get thoroughly pregnant she had to ask. “I do want to know how you managed to get her jeans and underwear individually stuck to the ceiling fan though. They were still there when I came in to check on you. I believe Angelina called it some impressive fucking for that to happen.”
T’mari zoomed the map out as she stepped away. The wall shifted to a world view, routes traced in thin light from Missouri outward like someone had drawn with a sparkler.
“You still need language for the announcement,” she said. “Something that sets expectations. You will work, you will be accessible, but you are not going to fix everything in person.”
“Say ‘no’ for me,” he said. “You are better at it.”
She took a breath, then dictated in a clipped, precise cadence that his tablet caught and the wall screen translated into text.
Over the next six weeks, my team and I will be traveling to listen, learn, and share what we have learned so far. We will talk about food, power, water, and dignity, not party politics. I cannot solve every problem with a visit, and I will not promise what I cannot deliver. But I will show up, answer hard questions, and offer concrete ways to work together where that is possible.
“Too much?” she asked.
Matt read it twice, lips moving very slightly on the words he did not like and then coming back to rest.
“It sounds like me on a good day,” he said, highlighting the text. “Leave it,” and hit the record button again. “I also want to remind the world this is also a chance for me to visit old friends and introduce my new ones to places that are special to me personally. We will be bringing a youth delegation of both V’ren and humans as well.”
She smiled at that, quick and small, and moved on to the next section.
“Schedule bullet points,” she said. “Denver Free Zone, Sovereign Chicago, New England Alliance, SoCal, NorCal. You need to put Memphis in here somewhere as a non-stop, or people will notice you are avoiding it.”
“I am avoiding it,” he said. “And the order is all wrong, because I am taking you to Estes Park. I am taking you to see snow in June. This is why we are starting in the DFZ. Then we are going to Mexico. I was already going to see friends and speak at a conference. The first has been on my schedule for two years and the second for six months.”
“Still,” she said. “You should say you will address Memphis later. A line is enough for now.”
Her stylus touched the tablet screen and whisked it up to the wall with a flick of her wrist.
“I will not be visiting the Port of Memphis on this tour, probably ever, unless I am doing it by planting my flag on it as a conquered territory. I will speak to it in full when we have the partners and the manpower to act to against them one day.”
They worked in silence for a while, the kind that comes when both people know their piece. Matt adjusted phrasing around the parts that sounded too formal. T’mari quietly polished the bits where he drifted into profanity or rural proverb.
At one point he tried to slip in a line about “kicking over the rotten stumps, and killing the vipers underneath” and she deleted it without comment.
“Coward,” he said.
“Strategist,” she replied. “Not that I don’t agree with you.”
The screen flickered and the AI generated door opened and Angelina’s avatar walked into the room.
“You two have eaten nothing in six hours,” she said. “I am invoking House Rule… I forget the number, but it is the one where you are not allowed to starve yourselves while working. I ordered you food. It should arrive in the next ten minutes.”
“Fifty-six,” Matt said. “Food before stupid. We actually just ordered pizza and beer.”
“While we have you, we need to decide whether to mention the youth team yet.”
Angelina’s eyebrows rose. “You want to announce that already?”
“Not names,” he said. “Concept. People have been asking if this is just me flying around giving speeches, or if we are actually bringing anyone else into the table. I can’t be all there is or I would be done in Mexico City.”
“Then do it,” Angelina said. “Promise the world teenagers and the internet will eat out of your hand.”
The avatar pointed a blaster at the screen highlighting a sentence. “Drop in a line about youth observers from Missouri, plus pilot trainees. I already spoke to W’ren on this. That gives you cover for Maja and whoever else you pick up later.”
Matt nodded, and clicked in the comms team to hear the pronouncement.
“Put it under the ‘who is coming with me’ section,” he said. “We can formalize the roster after tomorrow.”
Tomorrow. Tomorrow was going to be a busy day. Marshall in the morning and then back to the Maggie to get ready for the ball.
T’mari wrote while he thought.
A small youth team will join us on select legs of this tour, to observe, ask questions, and report home through their own channels. They are not props. They are part of the future we are negotiating.
“Those last two sentences,” Matt said. “Keep it,” he said striking the rest.
“It is almost as if you know what you are doing,” Angelina chuckled reading the document on her own tablet in a rare moment of working from home on her own couch in sweatpants with a bottle of his wine close at hand with ten left in the case she had brought home at noon after calling it a day. She threw a wave to Mall and Eliot leading the other kids out the back door. “Do you want to roll this out quiet first, or go loud?”
“Quiet,” Matt said.
“The press needs to find it,” Shelly said from the small speaker on the coffee table.
“The press has no problem finding my feeds. Post it on our channels, send it to the consulates, slot time with Doug to talk it on air when we get to Denver. If Chicago wants to scream about being last, they can scream. Half of them will understand, that the main reason for us going is to see my Cubbies smite the Sox.”
“Chicago always screams,” Angelina said. “They will understand and they will mourn with us when it doesn’t happen. Just don’t make too much of a bet with Doug on air. Remember last year.”
Angelina shot the speaker and turning it off before she left them.
The wall screen now showed the finished announcement, complete with the idiotic fucking title, tour dates, rough topics, and a note that details would follow. He longed for the day T’mari would be ready to take over as the true Director of Strategic Communications. She understood what he was trying to do and understood it in a way few humans could. Even the most cosmopolitan of them still hadn’t grasped how provincial they were in terms of the galaxy at large.
T’mari add a bit to the end:
Questions, ideas, invitations:
Send them to the Freehold consulates and embassies worldwide or use the official channels listed here. We will not respond to everything, but we will read more than you think.
“You are inviting chaos,” Matt said.
“I am inviting data,” T’mari said. “Calvas will love it. The translators can scrape for themes.”
She unmuted the speaker mic.
“I want this tied to the translator announcement.”
He refreshed the screen and read through the new announcement and threw the social media dashboard across the room to the worktable screen.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s commit the crime.”
He reached up and suggestively fingered the send icon. It pulsed and vanished, the document sliding off to the Freehold servers, the consular feeds, and then out to the wider world through channels they did not completely control. “Into the thick of it, into ether,” he shrugged.
“Into the great wide open,” she told him into V’ren. She would always treasure those words. They were the lyrics that spoke to every merchant spacer far from home.
T’mari’s tablet chimed almost immediately as notifications began to stack.
“Congratulations,” she said. “You are now doing a world tour.”
“My patience is already being tried,” he said.
Her eyes stayed on the screen a moment longer, watching the flood begin.
“There is the pizza or whatever she ordered us. I am almost hoping she thought of my health and ordered us a salad to go with everything.”
“Do you think she knows she appears as a stormtrooper when she is in avatar form?”
“No, but as our 501st commander she would love it. Food then we work on your armor.”
Forty minutes later, two of four pizzas gone. The first of which was excellent, the second not bad, both demolished. The boxes lay open one atop the other on the old steel government issued desk, which sat to an equally old filing cabinet that held files between 1952 and 1987. Matt had always wondered what caused them to use the pair. They had been right where they were standing now since he had inherited this place, nearly thirty years ago. He suspected that they might have been right there since 1987. He poured the last of the beer into the tankard. They could eat pizza out of the box and not seem uncivilized, but drinking beer out of two-liter bottle just made you look like a drunk. He dreaded the next pizza, but would man up and try it, but not until he had topped up the tankard while she peed away the last one.
Matt took his first bite of pizza number three, or number fourteen, on the list they had gone through in two days. He decided that letting AI create fifty new pizza combos was actually a bad idea. He put the slice of Kerala Catch down. One did not order fish curry from a place run by white guys and then let them put it on pizza. At least you didn’t if you expected it to be good. Maybe they would stop by Shishupreet Pizza on the way home tomorrow.
“How does the helmet fit?”
“I understand why so many stormtroopers die,” she said pulling over her head and set it on the table snagging his pizza not realizing she was about to make the same face he did. “We won’t be getting that again,” she said kissing him and ran the box down the stairs and handed it to the guard.
“Here are the first five. All easy.” He threw them at the wall projection which appropriately showed the Death Star’s blast doors on the background. He pulled his own blaster shaped laser pointer and rid them of the three in the middle. Some people just were just less creative in their choices of pointing devices he thought as the appropriate pew pew sounds registered for everyone.
@ArrowRockNeighbor: World tour or not, still feels wild seeing our local Freeholder talking about barns and bridges to the whole planet, proud of our scruffy little corner right now #FromMissouriToTheWorld
@GlasgowEngineer: A leader who thinks in roads, grids, and reservoirs is exactly the kind of boring grownup I am happy to see doing a world tour #BridgesAndBarns
“I told all of you that slapping a name on it was a horrible idea. Two out of the first five responses. AI projections says eighty-three percent in the first one thousand. People are now going to ramble on about the bullshit,” Matt announced to the team as they listened in. “Does anyone want to disagree with that statement?”
“Posting this:
@MattMarmaduke: sorry for the confusion. Comms seems to think everything needs a fancy title. I will be addressing the same conferences I have been scheduled to address for months now. So quit the #BridgesAndBarns nonsense.
Flag anything with #BridgesAndBarns as low-priority. Do not boost, do not quote-tweet, do not start arguments. Let it die a natural death.”
Matt waited. He cut a new strap and riveted a new snap before looking at the timer. Two minutes and nothing. He waited for someone to say something as he watched the interactions climb.
“Jesus fucking Christ quit acting like I shot your puppy. You were told it would end badly and you didn’t want to listen. Now speak.”
“You were right and all of us were wrong. We wanted something reporters could run with,” Shelly said for the team, knowing everyone in the room with her did actually look like he’d shot their puppy.
“And?”
“And you said the social feeds would run with anything we said distorting the ever-living fuck out of it. Which took about three minutes. If you want my resignation, you have it,” she sighed.
“I don’t. You are all very good at what you do, but you had to fail in order to see this is not the same job you are used to doing for me. You are managing ‘The Aliens Came to Earth’, and all wanted to jump the bones of Missouri’s Freeholder,” Matt said taking a bite of pizza T’mari held to his mouth. “This isn’t a new policy or publicity outreach. This is me and the V’ren as the product and I am the only person who can act as brand manager.”
“How do we fix it?”
“Strip the phrase from headers, chyrons, and lower thirds. Leave the tour dates and topics, kill the branding. It’s my honeymoon with a side of public relations, not a book tour.”
He took another bite. “Virginia ham, apples, and onions can stay on the list,” he told T’mari, who had also gave the order a thumbs up.
He swallowed some beer and unmuted.
“From now on, flag everything that I should answer either in my name, Ffreeholder or High Lord to the priority bucket. All press releases go to T’mari with your notes and a draft. If it is political, flag it as such and ticket it.”
“You are going to have a lot more message traffic than normal. Twenty-nine thousand interactions in just a few minutes. We’re gonna need a bigger boat,” Sam Sheppard chimed in feeling like he should have pushed back against Shelly when she demanded they use the title. He thought it was a mistake but kept quiet for the sake of peace on the team. He would apologize later.
“That’s my girl.” He laughed wondering how the V’ren would take to Shark Week and if he should schedule extra showings of Jaws to increase their cultural awareness.
“You are very good at this. I want to hire you,” Shelly said with a chuckle.
“Been there done that you were about six when I started Marmaduke Media and maybe twelve when I sold it to the trust. You will need to expand the team, but I want to meet with anyone from outside you are thinking of bringing on. It won’t be long before one of you has to step in and lead the @LadyTmari team. She will have more traffic than me.” Matt told the team.
“I want some V’ren on my team. Even if they are just interns, we are training to this business. Other than this one misstep I have been watching your work for a while now and you are very good at it. I want them to learn from you. He should have some too, and not just for the optics,” T’mari said. Finally she could add her voice now that he has brought them around to what both of them knew would happen.
“Agreed. We will be sending you a list of people for you to interview and Angelina will set it up. Continue sending the trolls to the chum bucket and she and her team will continue with her usual care.”
“We also need to upgrade our AI filtering process. We just hit 100k interactions across the net,” Matt said watching his dashboard. “I have faith you will continue take care of what needs to be done, so we will let you get to it.”
Matt looked at T’mari who shook her head and disconnected the connection.
“How did you get to be so good at this? They are trained professionals and so am I even if they are on different planetary platforms. While I agreed with you during the earlier call you still were well beyond me. You are a farmer,” T’mari laughed poking him in the chest before taking the bite of pizza he was feeding her.
“There is no money in being a sociologist, but there is in thinking like one. The V’ren showing up has shifted humanity’s paradigm so far that it is all most people are thinking about. We have known for my entire lifetime that we weren’t alone in the universe. The beacons made that clear, but you showing up was different. The beacons were a wrinkle in the fabric of our reality. The V’ren just pulled the thread that unraveled it all.”
