“C’mon, man! Let’s do it!” Twenty feet, fifteen, ten, she kept walking at the XAV as it rolled forward. “You want to do it? So fucking do it! Fucking do it, motherfucker, c’mon!” And then she reached the hood and slapped a palm on the black nose of the vehicle. The driver let off the gas, slowing but still moving. Kate stumbled back a step. “Fucking do it, asshole! Don’t tease me!” She balled her hands into fists and beat the hood again and again and again. “Do it! Hit the gas, you fucking coward!”
How selfishly alive she felt, shot through with adrenaline and endorphins and fury like she’d free-soloed an undiscovered mountain. All thoughts of her family, her friends, her lovers vanquished and forgotten by this glory, and she screamed until her voice cracked and tears ran down her cheeks, until she could hear generations of her ancestors screaming with her.
“Do it, you fucking coward! Do it! Do it! Do it!!!”
Dwight Shweiger, twenty-five, originally of Warwick, Rhode Island, had joined the District of Columbia National Guard to pay for college. It was hot inside the XAV, inside his gear, and the voice of his commander was in his earpiece calmly telling him, “If she won’t get out of the way, mow her the fuck down. We got a whole day of this shit left.”
Shweiger had mostly slept through history class. He’d never heard of Tiananmen Square. Nor how during that protest, pork and grain prices were also incredibly high. He had no frame of reference at all for what he was a part of. He knew only two things: This lady in front of him had clearly lost her mind. She was screaming and weeping, and spit was flying from her mouth, and she was beating her fists into the vehicle like she could actually destroy it with her bare hands. The other thing he knew was that he could never press the accelerator. His superior barked at him to floor it, to flatten the first twenty people if he had to, and he thought of his childhood bedroom and the sound of the ships going up and down Providence River, and how when a blizzard came and school was called off, his mom would let him and his two sisters sleep in and then bring them minestrone soup and let them cook marshmallows over the gas stove, thereby compounding the wonderous nature of a snow day. Because he could not bear the thought of his mom learning of this if he did it, if he murdered this unarmed human being, he took his foot off the accelerator, and the woman nearly fell over when he threw the vehicle in reverse.
When the XAV began to back up, the police and Guard behind it had to quickly backpedal as well. Most of them figured an order had come down to abort. The women behind Kate Morris couldn’t believe it at first. Then Kelly Pasquina let out a sound somewhere between a gasp of surprise and a war whoop. She ran for Morris, practically tackling her in an embrace, and behind her the crowd surged forward, and it was like they’d all experienced the blood in their veins for the very first time. They shrieked at the retreating vehicle, eyes swollen with lachrymator and the most glorious tears they’d ever cried. The incident had hardly passed, the video had barely been captured, before it was erupting all around the world. All these women, gassed and bloodied, many of them shirtless, beating their breasts, and then this one lunatic bitch steps in front of an armored vehicle, loses her damn mind, and the XAV, an emblem of the most powerful military force on the planet, slinks away in wounded disbelief. On screens and VR sets in every corner of the planet, civilization watched, and this moment slipped into its shared pool of myth and dream.
In the hours that followed, even after law enforcement had arrested ten thousand people, the siege exploded, coming to life the way we imagine fire to be alive. Consuming, incinerating, surrendering, only to then steal across roads, structures, and trees to find new life. Following the showdown at Independence, occupiers and authorities clashed near the Ellipse on the Mall’s opposite corner, and the northwest front wasn’t as much the feel-good story. They punched and kicked and hurled tear gas canisters back and tore the masks from the cops’ faces; they were beaten, zip-tied, and hauled to makeshift prison islands; they caught rubber bullets in the throat and lay gasping for air; they tore truncheons from the hands of the National Guard and hit back; they surged up Twelfth Street to Pennsylvania Avenue to get behind the invading army, to attack their vehicles with rocks and bats, to flip them, burn them, drive them through boarded-up windows. They got control of a vehicle with a water cannon and turned it on the reinforcements trying to come down Twelfth. Every person hauled off bucked and thrashed and fought, so that it could take seven officers to get one scrawny woman into a zip tie. Without the help of the AI, Bridget Zeckhauser figured out that if they backed one of the septic trucks to Independence, they could open the vacuum hoses on the enemy. A jet of hot human waste sprayed across their plexiglass shields, splattering helmets, getting into their mouths and eyes. Liza Yudong watched from the trailer as the cops dropped everything and ran, and she fed this to her program so that the tactic could be copied at other intersections where authorities had broken through the tree and debris fields. More so than by hoses of human feces, police were simply overwhelmed by the sheer numbers. Up and down the ranks, their comms had stopped working and they experienced the chaos of disconnection from a command structure. One panicked Guardsman hit the accelerator instead of the brake, crashing into the fence protecting the Capitol, toppling twenty yards of the barrier, until the tires tangled and blew on the razor wire. A gang of women pulled him from the vehicle and tore at his equipment until they’d stripped him naked. The AI disseminated these tactics, made complex decisions, and reacted more quickly than the police could, so they staggered away, covered in piss and shit, only to hear their incursion had activated chaos in other sections of the city.
Certain solar systems within the wider galaxy of the siege had been agitating for destruction. These folks were not the nonviolent, organized monks of the first five thousand: they had their own ideas, and seized with the holy spirit of revolution, they launched into K Street, the metonym of the lobby shops that chopped, divided, and stapled together the legislation that undergirded American life. They found the lobbyist offices, law firms, and think tanks and smashed their way through plate-glass windows, past frightened security guards radioing for police backup that wasn’t coming, hopped over security barricades, and then they were into the guts of the system, throwing computers at walls, pushing desks out windows, smashing servers and setting fires until the sprinkler systems came on and alarms blared. They poured gasoline and lit cubicles on fire. They wreaked havoc for hours until police and the Guard, having been beaten back at the Mall, rerouted to chase and corner these anarchists, who seemed only to fructify with each and every arrest. The city burned and firefighters and paramedics descended, and there would be five dead civilians, one dead cop, and hundreds more wounded.
Finally, as authorities retreated, protestors found their way over the toppled fence separating their territory from the Capitol. A few sheets of plywood on the fallen razor wire and they had an unobstructed path. The shadow of the 2021 insurrection had loomed over the city for years. Even when authorities thought Morris and her ilk really were only planning a dopey little concert, the Capitol was surrounded and fortified like it was 1814 and this time they’d be prepared for the British. Those fortifications may well have stood had that Guardsman not driven through the fence. Metro Police fired tear gas and rubber bullets. Invaders were hit and fell, but the leak quickly turned into a spigot as the occupiers tore a wider hole in the fencing. Seeing the writing on the wall, the last line of defense crumbled, and the police began to retreat. It took Logan Dougall only three minutes to skirt around the reflecting pool, past the Grant Memorial and Peace Monument, make it up the Capitol steps, and smash his way through the first door he came to. He’d been just seven the last time the Capitol was breached, and nothing about those hairy Trump monkeys had impressed him. That was not revolution. Dougall had an axe, purchased at a Lowe’s in Virginia on his way to D.C., smuggled in his gear past the Blue Bands when he arrived. He burst into the Rotunda along with hundreds more and ran for the first painting he saw: Embarkation of the Pilgrims. In four fells of the axe, he shredded this piece of colonial propaganda and moved to the next while the shouts and cries of other looters chased each other through the halls like unruly apparitions of destructions past.