While twelve thousand police, National Guard, and private security forces amassed in high school gymnasiums in Bethesda and Silver Spring, these undercover agents chose the ingress points: Independence Ave on the southeast corner of the Mall and Fourteenth and Constitution on the northwest corner. On May 20, well past the authorities’ deadline to disperse, with everyone nerve-racked from the wait, teams of infiltrators set fire to several tents and the tipis in the buffalo horn. Then they radioed for authorities to descend. The day was hot and the fires burned quickly, catching nearby tents and leaping to others. Occupiers tried to fight the flames with bottles of water and the few extinguishers on hand, but the fire ate quickly into the center of the Mall. Meanwhile, the Guard was firing tear gas, scrambling between trees to tear out tents and arrest whoever didn’t run for it. The screams echoed over the day. Children wept in terror as police banged batons against riot shields and advanced, broken glass crunching underfoot.
The Occupy AI messaged every device: First and foremost, Don’t Panic. Like the Terminator said, “Come with me if you want to live.”
It told parents to move their children to the center of large circles of adults, and though these adults were suddenly very afraid, they did as told. Still, panic crept in, spread, and a few gathered their kids in their arms and tried to make a run through the barriers, only to be met by the wafting tear gas.
Kate Morris sat cross-legged on the floor of the command center, toggling through their cameras, trying to see it all at once. She bit her lip and watched the AI direct people as the police and Guard swarmed their fortifications. “Okay,” she said to herself. “Okay.”
Liza Yudong had anticipated the media blackout. She sent camera crews to the sites of police ingress with the only instruction to keep filming no matter what. They would livestream it all in 2D and VR. Holly Pietrus found Kate and Liza watching the monitors. She’d run from the other side of the Mall when the fires started and saw a Blue Band catch a rubber bullet in the stomach. She could hear people screaming now.
“Does your magic robot have a plan for this?” she demanded, inserting herself in Liza’s vision. “No, no one saw this coming at all.” Yudong bugged out her eyes, like Bitch, get out of the way.
The wailing of a sound cannon started up to the south, ear-splitting even inside the trailer. Holly flinched as the first flash grenade boomed nearby.
Morris slapped her laptop shut and stood. “Get these kits moving. Let’s go.” She had a small backpack, which she now rummaged through. Similar packs were traveling down through their ranks. She popped in earplugs, draped a piece of body armor over her torso, complete with a fortified breast plate, and finally pulled out a gas mask. Her eyes blazed with goofball fury, and she gripped Holly by her shoulders and shouted, “Tell them if they had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon them!”
Then she banged out of the trailer, braying laughter.
Over the last three and a half decades, given Seattle, given the Occupy movement, given Tahrir Square, given Hong Kong, given Black Lives Matter, given every G8 summit or NATO powwow, authority had become expert at clearing cities of large protests, and the climate concert’s organizing committee had studied these tactics. As police launched tear gas and strafed the wall of protestors with rubber bullets and water hoses, people fell. Zip-tied and dragged away to a fleet of waiting school buses, choking on gas when police ripped their masks free. But more came in their place, linking arms, pushing forward. Supply lines kicked in, bringing body armor, helmets, gas masks, and plexiglass shields to the front lines. The Blue Bands strapped everything from flak vests to foam pillows across their torsos and stormed to the front, and when they were hit, their friends, old and new, pulled them back up. Smoke curled skyward from the fires. People ran with buckets of water, and Letitia Hamilton, who knew she was the fastest mortal on two legs in this whole damn city, went hurtling back and forth hauling jugs of water from the caches to try to douse the tents. Sirens and sound cannons wailed, a head-splitting, fillings-rattling orchestra of state power. A scruffy teenager in a mask ran down Madison with a hockey stick, slapping gas canisters back at police, and the wind, a fervent revolutionary that day, kept carrying the plumes south, away from the Mall. City crews hooked chains to the trees planted in the roads and began tearing them out by the roots, while massive BearCats drove into the walls of flotsam, clearing roadways for police and National Guard to spill in.
Kate Morris shoved her way to the front of the crowd, and in doing so, could see her idea working. Amassed at the intersection of Fourth Street SW and Independence Avenue was a wall of human beings so thick and tight, she could barely squeeze through. As she oozed between the bodies, the sound cannon shut off, and she got her first whiff of gas, brief acid in the eyes. She slipped her mask on. People were shoulder to shoulder, groin to ass, but also without claustrophobia. Unafraid. Knit together as one organism. A few recognized her and helped get her through. As she reached the front lines, she stopped passing any men. An all-female brigade, two hundred women deep, pushed at the edges of the street. Some had gas masks, but many were frantically washing each other’s eyes out with bottled water while others wore every variety of goggles—chemist, swimming, and construction. Students and retail workers, professors and waitresses, grade-school teachers and nurses, housewives and graphic designers. And it was working, this idea she’d had to use only women on the front. The cops were hesitating at the edge of Independence, now a mess of toppled trees, broken fencing, and all the other debris used to barricade the road in April. A phalanx in full military gear, zip ties dangling, was restraining a shrieking girl who couldn’t have been more than four and a half feet, maybe all of thirteen years old.
Kate stepped through streaks and drizzles of blood on the pavement. Because Fourth Street was sandwiched tightly between two museums and packed with refuse, the police couldn’t move in more than four or five abreast, a bad idea tactically, as the women were hurling rocks and other scraps of rubble. Hauling the girl away, the cops fell back at the order of some higher command. They all moved behind a Xuritas Armored Vehicle, also known as a Rolling Fortress.
Matte black with a D.C. Metro Police logo on the side, the XAV had begun its life on the outskirts of Saudi Arabia during the first years of the civil war two presidential administrations ago, only to be refurbished and repurposed for civilian use in the nation’s capital. It crept forward, and the police received simple instructions: Let the Fortress do the work. They’ll move.
The wind carried off much of the tear gas and Kate couldn’t see well in the mask anyway. She ripped it off as she reached the front of the roiling crowd. The women hurled taunts and jeers, lifted their armor and shirts to expose pale breasts and slapped their hearts and dared the police to fire their weapons. A stun grenade exploded and five or six women fell, only to be hauled back to their feet by their comrades, while others, deafened, clutched their ears. Less than thirty feet separated their horde and the XAV. It surged closer. Kelly Pasquina, who’d come sprinting to join the wall when the AI asked her to, knew her brother was probably terrified trying to find her right now, but she couldn’t care less. She recognized Morris, and for a moment she forgot about tear gas and sound cannons. There was only awe as her hero brushed past her.
“Be careful!” Kelly called to her, and the woman turned to her and winked.
And then Kate Morris began striding out into no-man’s-land, toward the XAV. Hair blown wild by the same wind carrying off the gas, trail shoes thudding over bloody pavement, sleeves of her Montana thrift store jacket pushed up her elbows, she was sweating grease in the heat. She dragged a forearm across her eyes to clear the sweat, the acid sting—she could barely even see—and then started screaming as loudly as her parched, gassed throat would allow.