“All I’m hearing from you,” Shane said, “is why this won’t work. Why are you here if you’re this scared?”
An argument erupted. For days, they’d been close to concluding that they should all just melt away and pretend none of this had ever been on the table. Not for the last time, Shane took control of the conversation.
“We shouldn’t be afraid,” she said. “It’s a panopticon.”
“I know,” said Allen. “That’s what Quinn is saying.”
Shane took the problem into her hands, cupping it in front of these new comrades. “You misunderstand the panopticon. The point isn’t to watch everyone; it’s to give the illusion of total surveillance. For the actual watchers, they can only point their eyes in so many directions at once. The amount of data overwhelms and confounds. It helps us.”
QUINN Frequently wondered how Shane managed this. Quinn, who’d dealt with supposedly nonhierarchical consensus decision making in her hacktivist days, figured the dynamic out quickly. It was clear, Shane was their quiet internal compass, and she appeared not to have hesitation or indecision inside of her. Meanwhile, Quinn crawled into a new life of suffocating emotional isolation. She would be on dates in San Francisco sometimes and feel the urge to simply confess the entire operation to a boring programmer talking himself up. She often woke from nightmares of being caught while simultaneously wishing, sometimes, that it would just happen.
While Kai and Quinn wanted to recruit computer programmers and hi-tech savants to build them anonymizing software that would bounce their IP addresses all over the world, Shane told them: “No. We take it the other way. Like every good insurgency, we defeat hi-tech with low-tech.”
So they dispersed. They adopted normal lives. They stayed patient. They deactivated their activism. They encrypted nothing. They’d all be red-flagged for the rest of their lives with user scores utilizing logistic regression to estimate the likelihood they were involved in illegal activities, but so would an Everest-sized haystack of ordinary people. So they Googled. They Facebooked. And now they Slapdished. They bought face creams and eyeliners and power saws on Amazon. They polluted their data with tedium. They built profiles of themselves as average, boring, troubled, lonesome Americans who looked like anyone else enjoying the privileges and rewards of conformity.
Meanwhile, they sent messages via PO boxes and safe houses, which, like the old Camry, were owned by one of a few different limited liability companies in New Mexico. They coordinated mostly through junk-mail flyers: YOU COULD ALREADY BE A MILLIONAIRE! A delighted woman held a lotto ticket crammed with numbers, small enough that you needed a magnifying glass to read, which corresponded to pages, lines, words, and characters in the Signet mass-market paperback edition of Stephen King’s The Stand. If the FBI kicked down their doors, the flyers would be ashes and The Stand would sit unassuming on a bookshelf.
This was how she’d received Kai’s message in early November: We need you on the road.
Due to the firewalls, it had to be Shane to activate the Second Cell by delivering the contact info to Jansi, and if she was going to New Hampshire, she could also make a delivery to Tennessee. And if she was doing all that, she could run an errand of her own and check a mailbox in Tonganoxie on her way home.
“Randall says she’s gonna pass a New Green Dealy, first order of bidness,” Murdock said over a wagging cigarette. He stirred a powdered pesto sauce into water and olive oil. “What say you, Shane? Victory is ours?”
“Yeah, and more tax cuts for the oligarchs and more detention centers.” She sat on his bed, paging through a book he was reading. The Last of the Wild. Free of the wig, her scalp still itched. “And a fully militarized border.”
“She’s got Saudi Arabia and Nigeria on her plate, gas prices spiking, price of solar is cheap as ever, her party only controls one thingy in the Congress, so she needs Dems if she wants to do anything. Might could happen, as they say.”
“Wake me up when it does.”
She opened to his bookmark and read from an underlined paragraph: How did the creatures of the Pleistocene deal with these catastrophic temperature swings? They ran—migrating on immense, continental scales.
“To fight the empire, you fight the source of its power.” He dropped a handful of angel hair into the pot of boiling water, mashed it down with a wooden spoon. “You told me that in the Bob Evans, remember? Way before the ecology shit.”
“That’s what we’re doing.”
“Fighting? Are we? Or are we just horseflies? Biting at the murderer’s ankles while the shit goes down.”
“That’s why Kai pushed for this escalation. No more pipelines.”
He clucked his tongue. “Kai. The man with his hand in every pot, plot, and plan.”
Murdock was given to talking like this, good-naturedly testing his compatriots’ assumptions. When they first got together, he was eager to build bombs, even though he was skeptical of the “global heating hoopla.”
They ate in collapsible lawn chairs near the warmth of the stove, plates balanced on knees. Kel drank from a cup of whiskey while Shane stuck with water. The lamp cast a long shadow over a gruesome poster she hadn’t noticed before: HATE above a picture of militiamen bravely charging across the desert borderlands.
HATE Murdock loved his posters. This one popularized by the Jen Braden crowd. “It’s not offensive,” they insisted, and Kel Murdock found this deeply funny in that gallows way he most appreciated. It gave him a laugh, all these hard-core War on Terror vets following the panpipe of this rich, racist princess: Nothing to be offended about, these patriots swore. All it meant was HUNT ALL TRAITORS TO EXTINCTION.
He pulled out his phone to show her what she’d be driving into: video of Oklahoma in a dust storm so thick the shapes of roads and buildings looked like the infrastructure from a city of ghosts.
“Lawrence is far enough east you won’t be going right through it, but you’ll get a taste.”
She watched as a woman wearing swimming goggles and holding a scarf to her face guided a group of teenage students into one of those quickly erectable annex classrooms, the kind they threw up when schools got too crowded and didn’t have money for new construction.
“This is it,” she said, keeping all the dread she felt out of her voice. “The new Dust Bowl.” Shane set down her plate, her taste buds sore from all the salt of Kel’s recipe. “Is your apprentice ready?”
Murdock nodded as if satisfied by a child’s success on a soccer field. “He’s sharp. Even had some halfway good ideas for our next operation.” The new bomb maker had been the culmination of a two-year search, the screening process heightened and sensitive beyond their norms. They’d dropped contact with three other candidates before finding a student from the Georgia Institute of Technology. “Now that we’re cutting ties, and he’s going with your girl, Jansi, I realize I’m gonna miss the kid. He loved learning. Makes me think I should go into teaching.”
“They don’t have your kind of classroom at your average technical college.” Her eyes fell on the rifle in the corner, the smooth grain of the wood finish. “I’m thinking we should meet up. The Principals,” she said. “After this op.”
He scraped at pesto sauce and licked the tines of his fork. “If you insist.”
He finished his whiskey in one pull and set it on the floor. He put his hand on her knee and leaned over from his chair. She let herself be kissed but did not open her mouth to return it. He eased away from her. The pesto smell of his breath lingered.
“Probably a bad idea,” he admitted.
“Probably.”
Embarrassed, he snatched the plates up, took them to the small sink with the piping exposed and tangled like a toy model of a refinery. She wondered how he could possibly still feel this for her. The gray in her hair, the weight she kept adding. Before she’d left Kansas, she’d taken a picture of her face, and the image rocked her. She looked like she was melting.