The crowd bloomed out into the core of the city, one day unfurling another petal into Fourteenth Street, engulfing the Department of Commerce, the next plunging down the throat of Twelfth Street and Independence until the Department of Agriculture was swamped by tents and tarps. The next day an estimated four thousand people arrived, colonizing most of the hill around the Washington Monument. The police had no capacity to push back. Their drones kept flying in the wrong directions, swamped by some sophisticated computer virus. Their cyber units understood they’d been hacked, their networks still disrupted by a relentless machine learning algorithm. FaceRec tech was getting its lunch eaten by masks, hats, and T-shirts designed to scramble the software and turn all face ID data to bunk.
DHS was furious at D.C. Metro’s incompetence and various turf battles ensued in the back rooms of city services. Meanwhile, the National Guard was called in, but they quickly found themselves busy elsewhere. Two weeks into the siege, as more and more resisters quit their semesters or left their jobs, micro-occupations were springing up in L’Enfant Plaza and Benjamin Banneker Park; in Dupont and Logan Circles; at Howard University and the Zoological Park; on the George Washington Memorial Parkway, as protestors tried to shut down traffic to Reagan National Airport with a snake march. Seven hundred people walking against traffic required the full attention of the Guard, who fired tear gas into the crowd, kettled the mass of people into manageable chunks, twisted arms, slammed bodies into hoods, arrested freely. Liza Yudong’s AI had nothing to do with this, but people took its lessons and ventured out into the city to snarl traffic, get themselves arrested, and keep the Guard busy and away from the main encampment. Early in their planning, Kate had explained to her old friend Liza what she wanted: “We clog the jails, overwhelm their capacity to arrest their way out of this. We don’t want chaos or destruction, we want befuddlement. Head-scratching.”
Now Yudong’s AI continued its dance with law enforcement, allocating bodies, swarming a given area of the city. Mass arrests were like swatting at a cloud of gnats: maybe you dizzied a few, but they recovered as quickly as they dispersed. Meanwhile, the executive committee threw up a digital map of the city on the wall of their command center and, after consulting the AI, ordered all new arrivals to find space on Upper Senate Park, just north of the Capitol. It was a risky annexation, but that afternoon they poured nearly fifteen hundred bodies across the streets, jamming all movement outside the Russell Senate Office Building. Most members of Congress had already left the city. The next day, the Secret Service erected a razor-wire fence around the White House and Capitol. President Love, back from Asia, was rerouted to Camp David.
“How the fuck did it get this out of hand?” he demanded. When his advisors began whimpering excuses, he knew they were not sufficiently fearful of him. He had experienced this kind of disrespect in the military. What he’d done about it was, the first time someone coughed “queer” at him, he put that guy on the ground and beat his ear until it was cauliflower with 70 percent hearing loss.
Huddled with his cabinet via a secure VR link, Love wondered why they couldn’t send a six-pack of horror drones down there firing tear gas and rubber bullets. Dallas was too fresh in everyone’s mind, his cabinet warned. There were children. “We should be forceful but careful,” Secretary of Defense Caperno warned. “Right now this is peaceful and contained. There is no predicting what would happen if we act rashly.”
“Is it contained?” Love scoffed. “Because when I first checked in, a few snowflakes were roasting marshmallows and now these animals have surrounded half the city.”
“We need a place to put the arrested following any action,” the secretary of defense went on, and she suggested RFK Stadium, a ghostly and dilapidated urban sore that Nixon had used to respond to the May Day Tribe protestors who’d attempted to shut down the district over the Vietnam War.
“That was less than eight thousand people,” Love’s chief of staff noted. “There are nearly ten times that many right now on the Mall alone. Maybe a quarter of a million in the city at large.”
Caperno suggested building a series of floating internment facilities off the shore of Annapolis, similar to what the Europeans had done to house refugees in the Mediterranean: Extrajudicial spaces where they could let the movement’s leadership rot for a year or so in legal limbo under PRIRA. DHS was already preparing floating prisons in the Caribbean as Haiti faced famine and its people tried to make a run for Florida. It wouldn’t be too difficult to redirect some of that budget and infrastructure toward the waters off Annapolis. Love, grinding a pen cap between his molars, eager to get a few vodka tonics in him, told them to go ahead. They added a short provision to the executive order allowing Xuritas units to join the peacekeeping forces.
And still they came.
From every state in the Union, from overseas, from disappearing islands in the Pacific most Americans hadn’t even heard of. A grocery store clerk from New Mexico, an electrician from Vermont, a prep school student from D.C. whose mother happened to be a Supreme Court justice.
“Why are you here?” a CNN reporter asked him.
“I don’t understand why everyone isn’t here,” he told her. A gas mask dangled from his hip and his shirt read FIGHT BACK. “I’m here because we have nothing left to lose. Win now or die.”
Letitia Hamilton was eleven years old and homeless. She’d been in foster care most of her life until she decided what was going on in the home where she was staying was “hazardous to my health,” as she told a white lady with butterfly tattoos on her arms. Living on the streets for two years with a subterranean class of children who inhabited the shadows in the capital of the richest, most powerful country in the world, Letitia learned many ways of getting by. Not just how to sleep and eat but how to be fleet of foot, to trust no one, and how to con people into doing things for her. For a few months, she’d been living in an empty condo, having figured out the code to the Realtor’s lockbox. She went in at night and came out in the morning before any potential showings. When she saw what was happening on the Mall, though, she packed up. It didn’t all make sense to her. The intricacies of climate, inequality, and geopolitics had not been in any of the TV shows, video games, or VR worldes she’d experienced in her brief interactions with those formats. What she did know was that people were pissed off, the world was mean and shitty, and now a bunch of them were getting together to do something about it. She told the woman at the intake that she and her mom wanted a tent. The white lady gave her the tent, but Bridget from Alaska with the butterfly tattoos knew what was up, because she kept coming by to check on her. Not that Letitia needed it. Unlike the adults, she could move anywhere she wanted, flow between worlds with ease. She slipped outside the borders of the occupation, overheard what the police were telling each other, and ran back to whisper it to somebody with a blue armband. She helped make the coffee every morning. (She loved coffee, had been drinking it since she was eight.) People got to know her in the camp. They thought they were looking out for her, but they had it wrong: She was looking out for them. It was funny, she’d always thought of the place she laid her head as somewhere she had to stay. Never permanent. Never to become attached to. And yet her little one-person tent in the dead center of the National Mall, boxed in at this point by seventy-five thousand other people, damn if this didn’t feel very much like home.