“So you stopped them?” asked Allen.
“For a while. We pretended we were getting lucky. Like every once in a while, Ta’amu’d even send a robot through a door just so it could get blown up, but pretty soon the insurgents figured out we’d figured it out. They moved on.”
He wetted dry lips so that they shone in the last of the light. “Those motherfuckers, AQI and the Mahdi Army, they were clever and barbaric and romantic. The civilians they’d killed—their families would be rooting for them anyway. That code? It became insurgent lore. Folk tales are inspiration. Reminds your people why you fight. Sometimes I think of us in that sense. If we’re not giving people a story, there ain’t no point. Might as well chuck our tears at the sky.”
He met Shane’s gaze when he said this, and she stepped away, to the shoreline’s nearest pine.
“Some narratives are better than others, though, Murdock,” Allen said.
“Oh sure, Professor.”
“What about Slade?” Shane asked, running her fingers over cold bark. “He’s dead, I take it. Got blown up going through a door after they switched the system.”
“Nah. He’s fine. Hates my guts for going antiwar, never spoke to me again, but he made it just fine.”
To Shane it sounded like there was way more to that story, but it was almost dark. She said as much to her friends. The three of them turned and headed back up the hill where a bitter dark swallowed the cabin.
That night, unable to sleep, Shane left Lali in bed and crept down to the living room where she found Quinn awake, indulging in a twenty-four-hour news network and the copy of a print newspaper left on the end table. Volume hushed, her attention flitted between the newsprint and screen where a young Dan Rather, CBS’s granite-faced star of the late twentieth century, held forth.
“Should you be watching that?” she said.
“Jesus!” Quinn clapped a hand to her chest.
“You scared the shit out of me, Shane.”
“Sorry, I couldn’t sleep.”
Digital resurrection was a nifty trick, and on the TV, CGI Dan Rather sent it off to a correspondent reporting from CPAC where that woman Braden was the headliner. At every sight of her, Shane felt a darkness creep into her periphery, something she was sure every person of color felt from time to time, this unsettling understanding that you are a part of a place where you don’t belong and have never belonged, where at any moment, the violence that made this world possible might erupt anew.
THE MIDTERMS The Republican Party had shattered its chains. Gone were the Obama-era Tea Partiers, careful to disguise their racism behind a veneer of concern for the deficit. Vanquished were the squishy Trumpist apparatchiks trying to remain obsequious under shifting sands of presidential whims. This new crop were honest-to-God Klansman, theocrats, and outspoken fascists. Top priorities included bringing the death penalty for abortion doctors and any woman who sought the procedure, an end to birthright citizenship, and a Muslim registry, once and for all.
THE WEATHERMEN, WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE Read a sign above Jennifer Braden’s worlde set.
CHINA Had its hands full. The Communist Party was arresting people by the thousands in an attempt to contain the Minyun democracy movement, which had cracked open the Great Firewall with multiple cyberattacks. The weather was also savaging the country: images of floods shredding whole towns to splinters and inundating cities to the second floors of office towers in Guangxi Province, while wildfires in Sichuan had killed 134 people in the past month.
AUSTRALIA Terrifying images of Perth. Dan Rather narrated over images of glowing orange hills, the city choking in smoke from wildfires. Protestors were lying down in front of the Carmichael Mine, but policy refused to acknowledge the obvious links, and the coal kept flowing.
MACKOWSKI AND BRADEN Mackowski had declared his intent to challenge President Randall for the nomination but was being taunted by the Right’s vicious Barbie pit bull. Braden advocated that land mines be planted in the desert along the US-Mexico border. Mackowski, backed into a corner, promised to introduce a land mine bill in the next Congress. Rumor had it she had her own presidential aspirations. Announcement forthcoming.
MISCELLANEOUS TERRORS Hindus massacring Muslims in India. A mutated strain of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis blazing through the Russian prison system, killing an average of nearly eight hundred prisoners a day. The island nation of Tuvalu preparing to abandon its land as seawater crippled the last of its infrastructure. Quinn ran her fingers along a faint scar on her left wrist: a teenage suicide effort. She’d undergone treatments of electroconvulsive therapy, and the induced seizures brought her peace like nothing else had. Now, she preferred ketamine treatments.
HORROR DRONES The combat footprint of the US now stretched from Kyrgyzstan to Angola. The latest imperial weapon was a hovering machine gun the size of a large dog that could buzz through doorways, caves, or sewers, fire its M4, launch grenades, or perform crowd control with high-decibel speakers and rubber bullets. The Northrup XR-32 earned its name from the pilots who tended to adorn the faceless sensor panel with the war paint of such iconic pop culture images as the hockey mask of serial killer Jason Voorhees or the metalloid-skeletal grin of the Terminator. In CBS’s slavish story on the new sci-fi nightmare, one pilot petted his drone and said, “We chase terrorists through their holes flashing the strobe [lights] and blaring death metal. I can’t imagine how terrifying that would be.”
THE PASTOR This B-list actor turned jolly preacher-guru had erupted into mainstream stardom and now his fellow Evangelicals were having buyer’s remorse. He misquoted the Bible or made up new passages, they moaned, yet his book God Has a Plan for You had sold 1.3 million copies in 2030. He claimed he’d prophesied Covid-19 as well as the “great storm coming to wash away the sinful” just before Hurricane Alberto hit Virginia Beach. Now he was declaring that the “vipers’ nest of sin known as Hollywood” would “suffer in hellfire for shutting out Christianity.” While Los Angeles County would certainly experience its standard round of wildfires every summer, one poll found an astonishing 39 percent of the country believed this idiot to be a prophet of God, according to Gallup. He was coming out with his own branded Bible.
“Join the club,” said Quinn, and she muted the television. Shane moved to sit beside her.
“I thought we agreed to keep this unplugged,” she said.
“Fine.” Quinn got up and janked the plug from the wall, short-circuiting Braden’s wet, red-lipsticked mouth as she joyfully inflamed the crowd. “I just couldn’t think of anything else to do.” Quinn tapped the newspaper on the end table. “They have a story about Kroll. Civil rights and enviro folks are trying to get him out of solitary confinement.”
“And I hope they succeed.”
“You think you could handle that? Twenty-three-hour lockdown?”
“I will if I have to.”
Quinn nodded but this clearly did not satisfy her. She’d been Kai’s recruit, their activist pasts overlapping somewhere that neither of them spoke of. She did her job well, but she also flaunted simple rules, like turning on the TV when she thought she was alone. Shane knew Quinn had grown up rich, attended an Ivy, and only toyed with hacktivism before moving on to one of the top cybersecurity firms in the Valley. All that blond arrogance made Shane deeply distrustful.
FREE MILES KROLL Obnoxious that he’d become their public face. Stuck in prison, he had do-gooders raising money for his defense. But Miles was a gutless coward, who’d tried to sell their operation out for a few years off his sentence. After his capture, they’d put more safeguards in place and Quinn had doxxed, manipulated, and harassed his family into deep space, adding child pornography to his father’s computer, ruining his mother’s credit, and serving Kroll’s whole sad life on a platter to the Feds to keep him in there permanently. She showed this example to operatives now, like a head on a pike.