The Weed Agency by Jim Geraghty

Florida families talked about the Dolphins or Hurricanes at the dinner table, Jamie’s family discussions were heavily weighted toward the deployment of Peacekeepermissiles in Western Europe, the Strategic Defense Initiative, Soviet aggression in Afghanistan, the shooting down of KAL 007, and all other minute movements in the Doomsday Clock.
    She grew up with her father glued to the television and radio during the big summits—Geneva, Reykjavik, Moscow, Washington. Her father was elated at the fall of the Berlin Wall, and at the University of Miami, Jamie studied international affairs. She relished the romance and grandeur of international diplomacy, and believed that history was made at summits like Malta.
    She had thought about getting a master’s degree and interning at the United Nations, but the AIS job gave her a chance for some quick experience in government, a steady income, health insurance, and, she hoped, a chance to make some connections in Washington. While she knew little about agriculture, she knew invasive species could be an international issue and figured she might, someday, organize some worldwide summit on locusts for the UN.
    The third young woman creating a stir in the Department of Agriculture hallways was Ava Summers. She quickly became known as “Fishnets” for her stockings, fairly out of place within the staid federal workplace.
    Early in her tenure, one short-lived boyfriend urged her to not wear them to work.
    “You look like a hooker.”
    “I majored in computer science. I’m a girl who can quote
Star Trek
. I work for a federal agency that studies weeds. I did it with you up against a wall the night we met when everybody told me you were a standard-issue preppie. When do you think I started caring what other people think?” she asked.
    And that was the end of that boyfriend.
    Like many in Washington, Ava was smart, and also like many, restless and eager to leave a mark on the world. If youwere young and wanted to make a lot of money, you majored in finance and set your sights on Wall Street. If you craved fame, you set out for Hollywood; rumor had it they were handing out sitcoms to stand-up comedians at LAX. If you wanted to invent some amazing new gadget or tool, you went to Redmond, Washington, or to Silicon Valley. But if you came to D.C., you were driven by something bigger.
    The focus of that drive could be almost anything—abortion, foreign policy, the environment, economics. Young people in Washington tended to know a bit, or even a lot, about something beyond themselves and the pop culture of the moment. The twentysomethings of the nation’s capital tended to be a little more interesting to talk to than their flannel-wearing peers elsewhere, who had dreams of fame and fortune but little sense of how to get them.
    To the rest of the country, Washington was boring and stuffy; to the young people inside the Beltway, it was Nerdvana, an endangered-species preserve for geeks. It was a national dumping ground for all the folks who cared a lot about things that most people didn’t care about much at all—the rights of women in Afghanistan, or the habitat of the snail darter, or aggressive Chinese naval maneuvers off Taiwan, or suburban sprawl, or early childhood foreign language education, or the homeless.
    It wasn’t merely the fishnets that made Ava stand out when she walked to work; she had a tongue ring, liked to add pink streaks to her straight black hair, and for all her reflexive dismissal of “girly” interests, her wardrobe seemed to be always changing. She grew bored easily, and her caffeine intake ensured that her mind tended to move in frenetic spasms of creativity.
    Yet in between her effortless flirtation and voracious appetite for complicated ideas and topics that intimidated all butthe übergeeks, she had a big vision: Ava believed that with the Cold War ending and this mysterious “Internet” coming down the pike, a few millennia’s worth of top-down