Shane made her voice small and contrite.
“Lo siento, Ramón. My phone ran out of battery. No batería. Lo siento.”
“Is been you this whole time!” he cried. “¿Usas mis datos para gorilas?”
Browsing a bit on his phone, she’d come across a news segment about the search for the last mountain gorillas. No researcher had seen one in over a year, and biologists were prepared to declare the subspecies extinct.
“Lo siento,” she repeated. Her eyes shifted to their coworkers. “But respetame por favor. Todos estan mirando.”
“Why?” he said. “You no respect me.”
He shoved aside the swinging kitchen doors and stormed to the back of the house before she could say anything more.
She fell into the trap of pointlessly spinning her mind in worry about seeing Ramón when she next went to work, which metastasized into worrying about every aspect of life in the hilly college town she called home. Chosen only for its geographic utility to their operations, how lonesome she was there. She tried to drag her mind away from all this, but paranoia and loneliness—one always felt like the answer to the other. She was so caught up that when she stopped at a gas station somewhere outside Parkersburg, West Virginia, for a snack and a coffee, she made a mistake. While standing in line, her eyes landed on an electronic advertisement for chewing tobacco. Abruptly, the screen changed to an ad for Subway, and she almost sprinted out the door. She had on the wig but no mask and no hat with its disruptive infrared lights hidden in the bill. The strands of fake blond didn’t fool the ad’s facial recognition software. She forced herself to stand and wait, even as she broke into a sweat and her stomach revolted in queasy cramps. After making her purchase, she went to the side of the building and vomited.
Then she drove on, crossing the Ohio River as night fell.
By the time she followed the handwritten directions to the address (all GPS, including the theft recovery system, neutered), she was exhausted. Their op had parked the van behind an abandoned shotgun house, and Shane hauled her gear from the trunk of the old Camry Kai had set her up with to the van’s passenger seat. She’d get a ride back to the car in the morning. She drove the speed limit, used her turn signals. When a police cruiser pulled behind her, she tightened her grip on the wheel and nearly stomped the gas pedal. Feedback loops of panic washed over her as she sat waiting for the light to change. Most police departments now had at least one X-ray device that allowed them to peer through walls or into vehicles. It was unlikely this car was equipped with one, but it surely had cameras.
She turned into a gas station rather than drive another second in front of the cruiser. Shane took a breath, closed her eyes. Years ago, in a secluded cabin in Wisconsin, they’d asked each other: How could they disappear?
Caught between the vicious crosswinds of surveillance capitalism and the surveillance state, between a beast demanding profit and a beast demanding law, order, and lethality, most people had given up, accepted this as the natural state and buried their heads in as much sand as they could find. No need to stand over all 346 million US residents with weapons twenty-four hours a day. The algorithms could classify you as part of a “community of interest” for law enforcement if you sat by the wrong stranger in a restaurant as easily as they could determine your favorite soda brand. For the average Jane pecking at her phone, the world became more confusing and assaulting, while the dark data cycle mined her psychology and watchers of all stripes bartered for its value.
THAT CRUISER The dash cam recorded her. The body cam as well. That data then downloaded to a server for a corporate surveillance company that would use AI to filter and analyze every face it came across. Along with the Subway sandwich ad, there were now at least these two data points of her journey. No matter how careful she’d been in her weeklong trip up the plains, along the Great Lakes, across eleven states and dozens of law enforcement jurisdictions, she left a trail. Quinn Worthington, her feet up on a desk out in the new Master’s house of Silicon Valley, would go after this trail later, scrubbing and polluting until Shane vanished from digital sight. At this point, complex data still awaited a tool capable of narrative organization.
She waited half an hour before pulling back onto the street.
On the northeast side of Memphis, ten miles from the city, there was a road called Cowtown Way that dead-ended in a grove of battered blue ash trees. An unmarked dirt driveway led to a padlocked gate with a NO TRESPASSING sign. Shane had the lock’s combination memorized and glanced into the trees where hidden cameras surely tracked her arrival. She drove the van a mile more into the woods until she came to a long, low aluminum shed. An anonymous gray sedan with Mississippi plates sat outside. Shouldering her pack, she knocked on the heavy door. Kellan Murdock, half a smile on his face and purple bags beneath his eyes, swung the door wide.
“You make a pretty blonde,” he said. “Or do gals not like being called pretty anymore on account of the MeToo?”
She embraced him. “How long have you been waiting to use that one?” And for a moment she forgot about the sky’s drone and satellite denizens.
Murdock had built the shed into a survivalist fantasy redoubt, cruddy but cozy, with a bed, kitchenette, and bathroom separated by a curtain that ran on metal rings suspended from the ceiling. Solar panels and a battery storage unit supplied the energy off-grid. The wood-burning stove was unlit but had a pile of dry wood waiting nearby. On a tablet, two UFC fighters swung fists at each other’s bleeding, busted faces, and a VR set hung in its dock, charging. On the walls: a poster of President Hogan, stout, enormous, crazed, and snarling, doing a leg drop off a pylon as the warriors from 300 awaited her undercarriage with shields and spears; a bumper sticker, RUSSELL MACK 2028; a black American flag with a red assault rifle and the words COME AND TAKE IT; and a photo of Mary Randall, eyes popping wide in a rare moment of looking frightened and insecure, NO MORE PUSSIES IN THE WHITE HOUSE.
“When did you get in?” she asked.
“Yesterday. Drove through a goddamn monster of a storm for most of it.”
Her eyes ran over the rifle propped in the corner, the shelves stocked with cans of food, dry pasta, cereal, and an inordinate number of hot sauces. Murdock reached behind a box of Cap’n Crunch for some unseen switch. The mantel on which the stove sat abruptly popped upward. He dragged it aside, the chimney flute detaching with a metallic twang, revealing a cramped flight of stairs leading down to the hidden room.
MURDOCK’S STRAW BUYERS Mostly underemployed men across the South and Midwest, guys recently laid off or perpetually out of work, family men with much to lose. Quite a few churchgoers. Blighted by decades of deindustrialization, deunionization, offshoring, and finally a pandemic, the heartland was now being hammered by drought and flood, polar storms, and heat waves that crippled the economy in fun new ways each time. Murdock sent Allen to approach these men with a script, and the bald prof would strike up a conversation at a bar or a Mickey D’s at lunch hour. Allen would claim he worked for a landscaping company, and man, they were just getting killed by taxes and healthcare costs. They were a small business, you know? They happened to be looking for a few off-the-books employees to run a few bullshit errands. But: “Nah, it wouldn’t work out for you, man, sorry. Company’s based in Indiana/Illinois/Florida/Kentucky/Mississippi. They were just down/up/over in these parts for a job that was about done. Shame, though. Company could use a guy like you. Here, let me get your number just in case.”