Before driving back to the motel, to make sure she wasn’t being followed, Shane took a drive through the streets of Pass Christian. She remembered one pink house in particular, still there all these years after her father found beach parking in front of it. He’d claimed the beaches west of Gulfport were less crowded. That had been their first summer in Mississippi after moving from California so her dad could follow the oil patch work, and he’d been eager to show his gals how wonderful it was. Her mom put on a brave face, but her unease was right at the surface. She’d left her family for California, married a bawdy roughneck who spoke no Spanish, and then followed him to the awful heat and hostile politics of the Deep South. Still, those Mississippi years had been good ones. They had a bigger house, Shane had her own bedroom, and their street had plenty of kids on it. A tight-knit blue-collar community where everyone had a parent working on a rig or at a refinery. She spent her time exploring the streams and fields of the town, on the hunt for turtles or herons or ants—whatever wildlife felt challenging to capture on a digital camera or in a glass jar or aquarium. It always smelled of rotting oyster shells, and the kids on her block were a mini UN: Vietnamese, Black, white, and her best friend for a while was a girl from something called the Jena Band of Choctaw Indians.
Gazing at that pink house, Shane could almost hear her father’s voice. Not particular words but the big, booming squall. The whole winds of the earth seemed to live in his lungs. Her dad suffered no bullshit, but he believed in chivalry. He kept a curving Wild West mustache that made his mouth look droopy. He always had grease stains on his clothes. Even after he showered, he would still smell of machine oil and the popcorn scent of sawdust. He loved Westerns and watched his favorite until the VHS didn’t work anymore. He only ever used Spanish for nicknames. Her mom was, of course, “Mamacita” or sometimes “Mamacita caliente” and Shane was “Ojitos.” Little eyes. He was, he said, “As old-school as a knuckle whack with a ruler.” He didn’t like excuses, complaining, whining, or feeling sorry for yourself. He thought people should work hard and treat everybody fairly. He’d been an unbearably decent man.
She followed on his hip. Every project, she would be his helper, whether it was picking out tools while he lay fiddling under their car or handing him nails while he redid the fence. She learned every kind of wrench and screwdriver because she was no help to him if she didn’t know the right one. His job was called a tool pusher. She loved the sound of that word.
He’d been gone on his hitch for only three days. Killed in an accident. The thought that arrived first: How was that even possible? It had never occurred to her that people you loved could go off to do something they always did and then just be gone with no warning. She’d screamed and wailed and covered herself in his dirty clothes from the hamper like she could summon him back to life with her anger. A wave of grief so black and violent ensued. It felt like a shroud over the world. But that had only been the beginning. She and her mom were alone on the Mississippi coast with only a small payout from her father’s death and her mom’s paycheck from a salon.
Her mom had been a clever woman and a vivid storyteller. When Shane was little, she hadn’t wanted to learn to read because she didn’t like kiddie stories. So her mom spun tales carried from another continent. She spoke of the warrior whom the gods turned into a dolphin and El Silbón, the whistling man. These stories were strange and terrifying. Finally, her mom wrote all her tales out longhand so Shane could practice her reading in Spanish and English. She’d loved watching her parents flirt, how her mom would come up behind her father and dance into his back, running her nails through his thick hair. Her mom would pull it, smell it, taste the sweat on his neck. She’d seen how intense her mother’s attraction had been, bone-deep and right on the surface of the flesh. And when he was gone, her mom’s devastation was just as bright. Shane never saw her drink more than a glass of wine, but after the accident her mom was drunk every night. And then every day and night.
Soon she found the bottles stashed everywhere, in drawers, under the sink, in the bathroom cabinet. Like her mom couldn’t be bothered to walk to a different room for vodka. She forgot about Shane. She vanished into her bottles, and then she vanished for good. Shane came home from school one day and her mom was just gone. Drawers empty. Suitcases missing. No note at all. She was thirteen years old.
THE CIPHER Perhaps she was better at creating a fog around herself than even she realized. The others, Murdock, Kai, Allen, and Quinn, they’d left enough clues littered across the global communications infrastructure that one could re-create their stories. Explicate their lives with a careful reconstruction of surveilled conversations, location data, purchases, archived social media, search histories, and access to every digital keystroke they’d ever produced, from old high school research papers and blogs they kept as teenagers, to anonymous tweets from fake accounts, to childhood diaries haphazardly left in old Microsoft Office files. And yet Shane had left so little evidence of herself, all of it having to be pieced together from the trails of the others, it was almost like her life didn’t truly begin until 2014 when she walked into a restaurant for breakfast. These snippets of an opaque working-class American childhood lack crucial detail. There are gaps. There is her rage and intelligence and a fevered sense of injustice, but her core story remains unknowable and maddeningly out of reach. Here following is what is known of the conclusion to her life as Shane Acosta. Past this point, the darkness thickens.
A shrink might tell her it was easy enough to draw a line between her dad’s death and her chosen way of life, but she didn’t start hating the oilmen until much later when she began dabbling with radical boyfriends and deep ecology. Then she looked around at her family’s cancer-alley lives, the sacrifice zone she’d called home, where the sun was a hazy red dragon breathing through the spires of refinery architecture, and she went hard for a few years at drinking and drugs herself. Maybe she just wanted to know what her mom had chosen over her.
Maybe she’d be dead if she hadn’t gone south. She saw the village where her mother came from. She met true revolutionaries. She stared at dark surf on beaches of the Southern Hemisphere and began to dream. She came home and found like minds. They schemed and plotted, and they laid the groundwork for a resistance unlike anything their empire had ever seen.
And in the summer of 2016, Shane read about a protest in North Dakota where thousands of people had gathered to stop an oil pipeline.
The next morning, Shane drove her truck up to one of the last open big-box stores and bought paper, an envelope, rubbing alcohol, latex gloves, and the cheapest VR set she could find. She thought long and hard about what to write without a code and keystone, though the odds of this letter being intercepted were small. Finally, she settled on: Leadership has steered us wrong. They may want more than we want. Proceed with caution at their requests. She signed it, A Friend of a Bald Friend, addressed it to Coshocton, Ohio, wiped it with alcohol, and dropped it in a USPS box, hoping the postal service wouldn’t collapse in the next few days.
Next, she drove out to a pleasant seaside overlook where an abandoned house sat, charming and unflooded. She set up her mobile hot spot, pulled the VR set out of its packaging, lowered it over her face, and secured the headphones. She dashed briefly into the Slapdish worlde of HBO’s Egyptian costume drama where avatars of the popular characters milled, fucked, and betrayed, and left a blue silk scarf with a bot playing a shopkeeper. Then she traveled over to her encrypted worlde. It was basically her father’s den from their house in Mississippi: a wood-paneled basement room with a TV casting light over movie posters adorning all four walls. A lot of Clint Eastwood and John Wayne, but of course Alan Ladd as well. She’d even included the cracked door to the laundry room with the familiar sound of both machines tumbling. She’d almost added her mother humming a song, and only then understood the seductive power of virtual reality. She waited half an hour for the figure to materialize across from her.