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Maria alone to stew over another trip to the park, and that was not a good situation. It seemed that, as much as Erin loved spending weekends and overnights in the Verdant parks, Maria seemed to be developing a growing loathing for it. It had become a constant battle with her, even to get her to come… the parks were simply not good enough for her.
    “Not as good as Earth,” she would say.
    “
What
Earth?
Where
on Earth?” would be his inevitable retort. There simply were no more pristine or virgin forests, no places where the air wasn’t noticeably less than clear and blue, the temperature wasn’t a bit too hot to make even a forest’s shade comfortable, no coastlines that were fit to swim in. Unless, of course, you counted the pathetically few still-clean places that were now under governmental lock and key, to prevent wherever possible further damage being done to them by humans.
    “Find us a nice place to go,” he would say, “and we’ll go.” Anything to make her happy,
translation
, to stop her going on and on about it. And to her credit, Maria did look. But whatever she found always turned out, upon even a cursory inspection, to be restricted, submerged, fetid, or just plain gone. It had been decades since most of those places were habitable or even open… Calvin doubted even Maria had actually been to such a place in her childhood, though she always insisted that she had,
no
, I don’t remember the name, it was
somewhere
near Raleigh, or near the
Ozarks
, you know,
that place
…
    It was making their time together more and more difficult, and that was making Calvin more and more short-tempered by the day. And for a media personality, being short-tempered was decidedly
not
an asset. Even now, as he rushed up the stairs to the CnC floor and found a moving sidewalk to speed his progress, he could not stop thinking about what this crisis, this worldwide crisis he was being summoned to discuss with the leaders of Verdant and the United States, would ultimately do to his marriage…
    “Dr. Rios?”
    The voice of one of the CnC’s interns interrupted his reverie as he approached the CnC offices. “Oh, hi, Red. Have they started?”
    “Not yet, sir,” the intern replied, turning her body to the left. Her bright red pony-tailed hair invited him to follow. “They wanted me to bring you to conference room four when you arrived.”
    “Four?” That was one of the larger conference rooms. “Are we meeting with all of Congress, too?”
    The intern grinned slightly. “I don’t think it’s a large group, Doctor. It’s a security thing, I think.”
    Of course, Calvin mused: The President needed his security, and room four was best equipped with room for guards, cameras, and emergency exits. Dismissing that thought, then, his mind turned back to his own issues for a moment, and a new idea occurred to him. “Did anyone call Dr. Silver? I’d think she’d be more qualified than I to talk to the President about Verdant.”
    “I heard they couldn’t reach her… or she couldn’t get away in time, or something.” Red looked back at him apologetically.
I’m just taking you where they told me to take you.
She looked like she was considering offering to find out for him, though he knew that it was not really in her job description to cater to him.
    “S’okay,” he said simply, and shrugged it off.
    They arrived at the entrance to conference room four, where two healthy-looking men in black suits stood at either side of the double-door. When they saw him, one of them stepped forward with a hand scanner. “Dr. Rios?” Calvin nodded, extending his hand and placing his thumb upon the silvered oval of the scanner. After a second’s pause, a friendly-sounding series of beeps sounded, and the security man nodded. “Go on in.”
    Calvin was only partially surprised that the President was not already there when he opened the door. Inside, Ceo Julian Lenz, Eo Reya Luis and Coo Aaron Hardy were already seated at