At first there was a show every night. A musician singing a few acoustic tunes, a stand-up comedian performing, an actor, author, or activist giving a quick speech. Haydukai rolled back through for a set. A former vice president, an ex-senator, and a few other former lawmakers arrived to show their encouragement. Tracy Aamanzaihou planned to speak, but then the White House called. After careful consideration, ashamed of her cowardice, she decided against it. There were dances in which people conscripted large parts of the lawn to shake out their tension and wring out some joy. Someone had erected a pink and purple bouncy castle for the kids. This was right beside the fencing and razor wire D.C. Police used to garrison the Capitol Building, and the images zipped across the planet: All these children slamming into pillowed walls with militarized police watching behind barbed wire. They tried to keep booze and hard drugs out, but obviously people did what people do. There was a lot of hooking up in tents and tipis. In the middle of each and every night, somewhere in the huge swath of territory they’d annexed, there would be the grunts of fresh sex, stifled (or not so stifled) cries of orgasms. Human beings and all.
Sitting beside his former boss on foldout chairs, a homemade stew cooking over a little campfire she’d built, Tom Levine admitted that he’d never believed any of this could work.
Kate Morris licked tomato paste from her fingers. “So what changed your mind?”
“When I heard Matt wasn’t going.” Tom didn’t look at her to see how this landed. His intention wasn’t to hurt her, it was just a fact. “Because if he split, it meant he really thought you’d figured it out. When I told Rekia what you were planning—it’s like both of them knew you and Liza were for real with this. That’s what scared them.”
Kate nodded and tried to think of something to say. “Sorry if this caused problems at home.”
Tom laughed. “That almost sounded human, Kate.”
She batted her eyes. “I try.”
Tom let out a slow sigh. “Why did you want me and not Rek? Or Coral, for that matter?”
Kate gave a funny little shrug and fart of her lips. “I trust you, Tom. Hell, I trust you more than I did Matt. And in the end, he did what I thought he would do ten years ago.”
“Yeah, but why not Coral?”
Kate smiled weakly and tossed another log onto her fire. A local tree farm had donated them by the pallet. Though burning trees wasn’t exactly on message, she’d never denied herself the pleasure of a good campfire.
“Fierce Blue Fire, my friend—it was infested from the start. Corporate spies and FBI informants. From the rank and file to leadership. And this whole bazingo”—she gestured to their wild festival—“would never have worked without the old-fashioned element of surprise.”
Tom scratched his messy black locks, his expression pained. He’d put on a lot of weight since she’d seen him last, all his muscle turning into pudding around his torso and under his chin. She waited for him to figure it out.
“Stanton told me you were paranoid, but—you don’t know that, Kate.”
“I do know it.”
“Who?”
“Who do you think?” When he continued to wait, perplexed, she told him. Through a careful and partially illegal investigation, she’d learned that her second-in-command, their friend Coral Sloane, was an undercover FBI agent. The Harvard Kennedy background had been true, but they’d never gone into activism. They’d been recruited. Once that piece fell into place, there were so many moments, arguments, fuckups, and missed opportunities that never directly pointed back to Coral but suddenly in hindsight made absolute sense. After the events of 2030, in which not only did their legislation get gutted and reanimated but her personal life became the subject of a coordinated campaign of character assassination, Kate hired a firm to investigate their organization. They quietly looked into everyone in the D.C. and New York offices, even Matthew Stanton. That was how she’d discovered he was sleeping with the reporter who’d written an article about her years ago. For some reason, that knowledge was more irritating than she would have anticipated. Then her investigators told her about Coral. There were also bugs: in her office, in her and Matt’s apartment, even on her bike. She left them all in place.
“You can’t tell Rekia.”
Tom sat in stunned silence staring at the side of the trailer that had once been designated for Jack White. “I feel like I’m going to fucking throw up,” he said finally.
Morris stared at her fire for a long time because she knew what he was feeling. She’d gone through it herself. “At least it wasn’t Matt,” she said.
The next day the executive committee delivered a document to every major media organization. They declared the siege of the United States capital would come to an end when lawmakers agreed to enact a Climate X agenda, amnesty for everyone involved in the occupation, a repeal of PRIRA, the release of all political prisoners, and an investigation of all companies involved in obfuscating the science of, and delaying action on, climate change. Otherwise, they would slowly but surely bring the American government and economy to a halt. A few weeks earlier, this may have sounded fantastical, but now there were an estimated 123,000 people clogging the center of the city, with more flooding in every day.
However, it was not just supporters who were coming. Militiamen, skinheads, neo-Nazis, and the American Patriot League began to hike over the Potomac as well, assault rifles shouldered, body armor strapped tight, camo fatigues and their own symbols, slogans, and armbands: swastikas, the Týr rune, HATE, the South African apartheid flag, the APL’s menacing Cerberus, or the “Baby Breivik” meme, which featured Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik as a toddler mischievously urinating. They stood watch on the perimeter of the city, shadowed by police, waiting for an excuse. The previous fall, a powerful new recruitment tool had exploded onto the internet, an AI of unknown origins. It camped out in chat rooms and VR worldes, found young white men, and went to work on them. Like Yudong’s app, it sifted through their behavioral surplus to understand why they were sad or upset or furious, and in the guise of a gorgeous young woman or older mentor, inked a portrait of a world in which they were in danger. They had to act before it was too late. The member rolls of white nationalist groups abruptly skyrocketed. The League alone was adding nearly two thousand members a month. Fox News, bludgeoned in the ratings by Rory Baumgart’s radical network, Renaissance, had no choice but to try to scream louder for the preservation of white heritage. Many local law enforcement agencies had long-lasting relationships with citizen militias, funneling them arms and money through “community grant” programs. Military contractors, including the president’s former company, Xuritas, used shell companies to enhance training and recruitment in the American Patriot League. Attorney General Greenstreet had suggested this marriage of convenience, convinced that the DOJ could appropriate these folks to root out 6Degrees. Private contractors would embed undercovers to keep the League in check while using them to gather intelligence. The D.C. mayor, who knew nothing of this program, directed a contingent of his force to shadow the right-wing paramilitaries everywhere they went. “If they so much as jay-walk, arrest them and confiscate their weapons,” he ordered. He would not let the new civil war everyone had been predicting for so long break out in his city. Andrea Sanchez, glad to train her sights on someone she recognized as an enemy, began showing up to her post at the Jefferson Memorial where many of these elements had gathered. She couldn’t help but despair at how much more firepower these faux soldiers had while the executive branch remained eerily silent on the matter.