“No couple of things… but no. Look. I’m not alone.” He looked to the right and nodded. A woman’s faint voice said, “I won’t tell anyone,” and he watched, evidently until the door shut.

O’Hara pulled a brush through her hair with more force than was necessary.

“All right,” Dan said. “There’s two things. That labor organizer Barrett, she told Mitrione yesterday that she could pull off a general strike in the GPs.”

“Of course she could. I could do that. Half of them act like they’re on strike while they’re on the job. What else?”

“Well, there’s the rice shortage. Talk about rationing if they can’t get up to quota. But I thought that wasn’t for another month.”

“Yeah. Look, I’ll try a standard overall sys-check down through all the engineering departments; I do that most mornings anyhow. If I spot any anomalies I’ll call you back.”

“Okay.” He signed off and John pushed a button and said, “Sys-check.” The screen filled with acronyms and numbers.

O’Hara finished washing and stepped into a rumpled lavender jumpsuit. “Looks like no breakfast. I’m going down to 202; you want a roll?”

“Please, chocolate. Use my card; I’ll get the water going in a minute.”

“I’ll do it. You keep checking those old systems.”

“Love it when you talk dirty,” he said, without looking up or smiling.

She came back in five minutes with a couple of rolls and a box of orange juice. He was going through the data a second time. “Haven’t caught anything. It’s nothing obvious. Only this.” He stabbed a button five or six times, the data paging backward.

“They didn’t have chocolate. You can have cherry or apple filling.”

“Either one.” He took the roll and pointed at the screen with it. “The yeast farms asked for a fifty percent increase in both water and power allotment. That’s not really an anomaly, since we know there’s been a rice shortfall.”

“Oh goody. More fake tofu.”

“Rather have that than rice, myself.” He accepted a glass of juice. “If I’d known they were going to force-feed us rice for a century I would’ve stayed behind. Or eaten steak until I died of cholesterol poisoning.”

While John washed up, O’Hara went down to the laundry to get them fresh clothes. Half the Cabinet was waiting in line; so much for secrecy.

• • •

The year 2103 was the beginning of a two-year “Japanese takeover”; the Coordinators were Ito Nagasaki (Criminal Law) and Takashi Sato (Propulsion). They came into Room 4004 together, late, serious, and silent, looking tired. When the last Cabinet member had entered and found a seat, and the door hissed shut, Sato began without preamble: