Greta’s postindustrial action was a highly unorthodox “strike,” because the strikers were not refusing to do their work. They were refusing to do anything except their work. The general tenor of the Strike strategy was highly public noncooperation, combined with pas-sive-aggressive cost-cutting.

The scientists were continuing their investigations, but they were refusing to fill out the federal paperwork. They refused to ask for grants, refused to pay rent on their barracks rooms, refused to pay for their food, refused to pay their power bills. They were refusing every-thing except for new instrumentation, a deeply embedded vice that simply could not be denied to scientists.

All the Strike Committee’s central members were also refusing their salaries. This was a deeply polarizing maneuver. Reasonable peo-ple simply couldn’t bring themselves to hold their breath and leap into the unknown in this way. Most of the lab’s “reasonable people” had long since made their peace with the Collaboratory’s institutional cor-ruption. Therefore, they were all on the take. It followed that they were personally compromised, at war with themselves, riddled with guilt. Greta’s stalwart core of dissidents were made of sterner stuff.

So, through this swift and unpredictable seizure of the tactical initiative, the Strike won a series of heartening little moral victories. Oscar had arranged this situation deliberately, in order to build com-munity self-confidence. The rent strike seemed very dramatic, but a rent strike was an unbeatable gambit. There was no internal competi-tion for the rents in the Collaboratory. If the strikers were somehow thrown out of their lodgings, the buildings would simply stay empty.

The power strike succeeded in a very similar way, because there was no effective method to shut off the electricity for nonpayment. By its very nature as a sealed environment, the Collaboratory dome al-ways required uninterrupted power, supplied by its own internal gen-erators. There simply wasn’t any way to shut it off. It had never occurred to the original designers that the dome’s inhabitants might someday rebel and refuse to pay.

Each successful step away from the status quo won Greta more adherents. The long-oppressed scientists had always had many galling problems. But since they lacked a political awareness of their plight, they had never had any burning issues — they’d simply endured a bad scene. Now, organization and action had shattered their apathy. Aches and pains they’d long accepted as parts of the natural order were sear-ingly revealed to them as oppression by evil know-nothings. A new power structure was aborning, with new methods, new goals, brave new opportunities for change. The Hot Zone had become a beehive of militant activism.

Within a week, the dome’s internal atmosphere was charged like a Leyden jar; it crackled with political potential. Greta’s unflinching radicalism had whipped the place into a frenzy.

Having built up a manic pressure for change, Greta took action to shore up her official legal situation. The Directorship had never been a strong executive post, but Greta engineered the forced resigna-tions of all her fellow board members. The original board was, of course, deeply unwilling to leave power, but the sudden resignation and departure of Dr. Felzian had left them stunned. Outmaneuvered and discredited, they were soon replaced by Greta’s zealous fellow-travelers, who trusted her implicitly and granted her a free hand.

The Collaboratory’s party of the status quo had been decimated before they could organize any resistance. Years without serious chal-lenge or controversy had made them fat and slow. They’d been crushed before they could even recognize the threat. Greta still held the initiative. She had excellent operational intelligence, thanks to Os-car’s oppositional research and his plethora of demographic profiles. The forced confession of Dr. Skopelitis had also been very useful, since Skopelitis had spilled his guts in a torrent of email and fingered his fellow conspirators.

Behind these vibrant, stage-managed scenes of unleashed popular discontent, the transition of actual day-to-day power had gone re-markably smoothly. Felzian had always run the lab like a high school vice principal; the real power decisions in the Collaboratory had al-ways rested in the distant hands of Dougal and his Senate krewe.

Now Dougal and his cronies were finished. However, the power vacuum was brief Oscar’s own krewe was a group of political opera-tives who could easily have become a Senate staff. With a little bend-ing and jamming, they slotted very nicely into place, and quietly usurped the entire operation.

Oscar himself served as Greta’s (very unofficial) chief of staff. Pelicanos oversaw lab finances. Bob Argow and Audrey Avizienis were handling constituency services and counterintelligence. Lana Rama-chandran dealt with scheduling, office equipment, and press relations. “Corky” Shoeki, formerly in charge of the Bambakias campaign’s road camps and rallies, was handling the scramble for office space in-side the Hot Zone. Kevin Hamilton was doing bravura work on secu-rity.

Greta was acting as her own press spokeswoman. That would have to change eventually, but it made excellent sense during the Strike crisis. Greta became the only official source of Strike news, and her solo public role made her seem to be handling matters all by herself This gave her heroic charisma.

In point of fact, Greta and her zealous idealists had no real idea how to run a modern executive staff They’d never held power before, so they were anxious to have glamorous jobs with titles and prestige, rather than the gruntwork jobs by which the acts of government were actually accomplished. This charade suited Oscar perfectly. He knew now that if he could simply keep the lab alive, solvent, and out of Huey’s hands, he would have accomplished the greatest feat of his career.

So Oscar took a deeply shadowed backseat, well behind the throne. The new year ground on. Many scientists found the Strike to be an ideal opportunity to quietly resign and leave, but that left the remaining hard-core scientists saturated with revolutionary fervor. Like revolutionaries everywhere, they were discovering that every tri-fling matter was a moral and intellectual crisis. Every aspect of their former lives and careers seemed to require a radical reformulation. These formerly downtrodden wretches spent most of their free hours raising one another’s consciousnesses.

And it all suited Oscar very well. His political instincts had never been sharper and his krewe, frenetic neurotics to the last man and woman, always shone in a crisis.

At this particular moment — January 8, 2045-Greta and her kitchen cabinet were engaged in particularly intense debate. The scientists were anxiously weighing new candidates for the board: In-formation Genetics and Biomedicine. Oscar, accompanied by his ever-present bodyguard Kevin, lurked behind a tower of instrumental clutter. He planned to let them talk until they got very tired. Then he would ask a few pointed Socratic questions. After that, they would accept a solution that he had decided a week ago.

While Kevin munched a set of color-coded protein sticks, Oscar was enjoying a catered lunch. Since Oscar’s krewe had taken over the Collaboratory, they’d been forced to hire a new Texan krewe to run their hotel. Given the tepid economy in Buna, finding new staff hadn’t been difficult.

Kevin stopped tinkering with the microchipped innards of a phone, zipped its case shut, and passed the phone to Oscar. Oscar was soon chatting in blissful security to Leon Sosik in Washington.

“I need Russian Constructivist wall posters,” he told Sosik. “Have Alcott’s Boston krewe hit the art museums for me. I need everything they can get from the early Communist Period.”

“Oscar, I’m glad that you’re having fun at the lab, but forget the big glass snow globe. We need you here in DC, right away. Our anti-Huey campaign just crashed and burned.”