There was no other place in the Federation of Free Peoples worthy of you, mi vida.
And there was no way you’d experience this world as I did, alone, without family, foster home after foster home after juvenile detention center. IMBALANCE was almost a blessing. It’s the thing that unlocked all the cages I’d been placed in, sweet babe. None of that would ever touch you.
You would have love. And pie, lots of delicious pie.
So we ran; I’d run forever with your mother, Mala. My first family, first love, first moment where I felt rooted to the earth, my body.
And all I remember next is Mala holding my left hand and Devi in position to welcome you. Between my thighs a galaxy was reborn. Didn’t even know bodies could be that magnificent. Know that I’ve always loved it, this body, my non-binary everything; it’s like floating free above the chaos of performance.
You flourished inside me, sweetest babe. You were born from every brushstroke of wrapped in the rays and each drop of lavender oil your momma placed on my wrists to keep us calm.
With the force and energy of a lightning bolt announcing itself to the sky, you claimed your place in the world.
And right as Deviana caught you and Mala’s tears of joy fell onto my shoulder, the doors slammed open.
All three of our Federation agents stormed in, ready to detain us.
We froze, all of us, staring at what was about to happen. Each of our faces set to endure whatever battle lay before us. No one spoke. The scene was a little too much, see, cuz you were in it.
The living breathing beating you.
No longer Baby Free or O.1.
But you.
And you screamed, sweet babe, and it freed us all.
Agent Key dropped to one knee. Ayima and Trent knelt alongside him. They put their hands on his shoulders as his chest heaved from weeping. All he kept saying was, They’re alive, Momma. They’re alive.
Devi tilted your face to them. Their soft gasps filled the room, and then you were in my arms and nothing else has mattered since. Not like you, not like our family, the Lafayette-Santanas.
The room belonged to Devi. She recited the Free Mothers’ Prayer as she worked. Key and the twins and Mala joined in. The hum of their voices a meditation on survival. You stopped crying, started gurgling. Devi held you firm and secure.
The rest of the Federation was still on the move to secure Baby Free. Key jumped on the Federation frequency to call off the hunt. Other Federation leaders pushed, threatened to overthrow him. Key finally shut off his phone and stomped it under his boot.
Mala drafted a plan for how we could continue dodging the Federation. Together. Ayima hopped up and offered to sketch out the best escape route. Devi wiped you clean, weighed you, and took your footprints.
Trent signed and asked if it was okay to just sit with me. I signed back, Of course.
Trent’s mobile buzzed again and again on the table. Finally, she checked it. It buzzed again in her hands. She picked up and her eyes went wide with tears.
She put the phone on speaker.
That’s when we got the word.
The word.
That you were the first.
But you wouldn’t be the last.
INFANTS.X
2091–03–001
55::50
LUZ
I was born during the snowstorm of 2076 in the Free State of Philadelphia.
I was the first of the Free Infants, but I wasn’t the last. Now I’m fifteen. I shaved most of my head yesterday, dyed the rest pink. I said I don’t give a fuck out loud in front of both my parents, and they laughed because it was about the Federation.
And I still got the look. The you’re lucky that was funny cuz you still shouldn’t be cursing in front of us look. But my momma, Mala, still hugged me. And my bapa, Orion, laughed while offering me the first slice of my Born Day blueberry-peach pie.
My godmom, Deviana, gave me her ancient boombox, and I’m like in love with it. The twins, Ayima and Trent, brought bags of peaches and blueberries, just in case. And my main best dude, Key, he gave me my file. The whole thing, like, the official Federation copy. And now all the pieces of my birth and me fit.
All of them were there the day I was born. And we’re our own family, a new family full of Free People.
IMBALANCE is the reason my folks got pregnant. You should know that part. The sentient bacterium, birthed of Mother Earth, evolved enough times to affect reproduction forever. As it sought out greed and excess, the bacterium learned to affect life and only allow it to bloom where there was compassion, empathy, and real love between peoples.
Thousands upon thousands of us blossomed into existence.
Momma and Bapa were the first parents.
But they were not the last.
And after we finished my B-Day pie, I gathered my supplies and wandered over to the mural on the side of our house. Bapa made it when they were pregs with me: wrapped in the rays. I’ve sat in front of it daydreaming about the future since before I was born. So honored and geeked they agreed to me adding some hot pink and the Free Mothers’ Prayer to it:
Protect life.
Offer it gentle entry into the chaos of the universe.
Honor mothers. Honor birth.
Bless all families in spirit and reality. For all deserve to be fed, cared for, raised to thrive. Provided with housing and education, embraced as full and free people.
May the infants be the light and the joy
And the doula be the guide.
GABBY RIVERA is a queer Latinx writer living in Brooklyn, New York. She is currently writing America, America Chavez’s solo series, for Marvel. America is Marvel’s first Latina lesbian superhero. Rivera’s critically acclaimed debut novel, Juliet Takes a Breath, was listed by Mic as one of the twenty-five essential books to read for women’s history month, and it was called the “dopest LGBTQA YA book ever” by Latina. Put simply by Roxane Gay, it’s “f***ing outstanding.”
THE BLINDFOLD
TOBIAS S. BUCKELL
I’ve got a mother that wants to get in on a long-term financing agreement to change her son’s race for a trial, Ecstasy pings you. His court date is coming up; the hearing for the random race generator is next Thursday.
Thursday. That doesn’t leave a lot of time. But, then, that’s why E is pinging you.
They’re paying in cryptocurrency, Ecstasy says. My commission is the usual 10 percent. They’ve already set up the chain; you just need to agree to be on the other side.
Local judicial computer systems have shit security. It’s always been the case. The nature of trials and the mysterious workings of the law aren’t usually of strong interest to a hacker (though you think of yourself more like a fiddler and digital spelunker than hacker) other than in a more abstract, philosophical sense. In the past, someone like you would pay enough attention to judicial security so that you could delete yourself from a jury-duty pool, but you never spent a lot of time worrying about the actual sausage-making until scooped up by police for doing something illegal.
But that has changed lately with the equal-representation laws.
Math, statistics, and algorithms for fairness became important after the turn of the century. Before then, those things just reported the inherent unfairnesses. Run an analysis of the number of cases where similar crimes happened. Sort them by race. Compare the results.
What do you get?
Judges give different sentences. The data is there. Undeniable.
But the more important question became not whether human beings were flawed but what could we do about it?
Consider this: Analyzing the prison sentences judges handed down based on how long it had been since they had something to eat shows a pattern of longer sentences given the longer it has b
een since they ate.
Is it fair for one person who smoked some weed to get one sentence in the morning just after breakfast and for someone close to lunch to get a longer sentence just because Judge So-and-So’s blood sugar is dropping?
People started jockeying for times, suing about being given pre-lunch hearings, and then finally someone passed a law requiring judges to use one of those diabetic pill monitors you swallowed to test blood sugar and beam the results out to a phone. Later, judges were mandated to have IV drips when on the bench in order to keep blood-sugar levels even.
There. Everyone has an equal chance at sentencing.
Well, sort of. There are still the differing race results. You can’t IV-drip your way around structural and implicit racism.
Then came the smartphone filters. Phones getting so good they could put face paint on live video of your digital face. It had once taken movie studios big money to create that effect.
So some lawyer had the bright idea of mandating that a client of his be tried as a white man because the jury had been selected of only white people. Not really a “group of his peers.” If the jury, who had not seen any details of the defendant ahead of time, wore tamper-proof helmets running software repainting their client’s skin tone, then this could be a fair trial.
Again, lawyers clamored that everyone be tried as a white male.
Instead, after a lot of legal wrangling, jurors had to wear the helmets and the sex and race of the defendant was randomized.
There were a lot of other details hammered out about what lawyers and prosecutors could and couldn’t say about the physical details of the defendants. There was a lot of fighting about whether the filter could be applied.
But, in this case, it had been. And Mom wanted to make sure her son was going to be perceived as white.
Your services wouldn’t be cheap. She’d be paying that loan for ten years. But you would make sure the randomized software wasn’t so random.
You order pizza and set in for a few long days of poking at the state-level security systems.
In movies, the edgy cool music starts up now. The clock on the wall starts spinning hands to show time flying by. You tap at the keyboard and lines of code stream across any of your three screens. There are usually cables running fat with wire draped across the background.
You’re a minimalist, don’t like cables, and work off a fifteen-inch laptop on your couch. Most of your software uses graphic interfaces, though you’re happy to dip into the command line when needed.
A lot of what you’re doing is watching programs crunch away, trying to log in randomly to weak spots while you binge-watch a new season on the TV.
That is, until alerts start popping up all over your screen.
Someone is tracing you right back to your location.
And they’ve shut down all the security weaknesses you’ve found.
For a moment you just stare as it gets worse. These people are burrowing back down into your shit. Deep. Like, find-your-real-name deep.
* * *
—
Bug-out time.
You’ve planned for this. Someone doing the things you do has to have a plan for what happens when the tables get turned. You shut the laptop down and place it on top of a large electromagnet plugged in next to your coffeemaker.
The lights dim as it kicks on.
Hard drive toast—the only gadget you keep in the apartment—you wrap the laptop in a plastic bag and walk out to the porch while wearing a ski mask. Lake Erie glitters with Cleveland lakefront lights as you inflate the helium weather balloon and let it go, laptop dangling underneath.
Within a minute it’s a bright speck heading up into the clouds.
You’ve always followed protocol going in and out of the apartment, zipping up a dinosaur-face hoodie. You pull that old friend back on and get out.
Ditch the hoodie a few blocks away and then you are zigzagging through the streets, running it all through your mind. The reverse attack on your device had been fast, as if backed by some heavy machinery.
That wasn’t state. Federal counter-intrusion?
Something worse?
NSA.
It had the speed and power of high-level government or military programming.
Taking on this job has put you in some sort of bull’s-eye, and you’ve lost the nicest apartment you’ve ever paid cash for. It’s burned; you can’t go back.
“Fuck!”
You can hoof it down to a nice bar in Shaker Heights. Maybe go find a book to read somewhere while you quiet your racing mind. Don’t make hasty decisions. Be calm and deliberative.
There’s a retirement fund in cryptocurrency tied to a string that you spent four months memorizing before you destroyed the only printout of it when you converted your savings over. Is it time?
But…you keep thinking about what you saw happen on the laptop’s screen. How aggressive it was.
It’s like scratching an itch. You can’t help yourself. You have pride. And you’re pissed about losing the apartment.
After some asking around, you find a public library. An hour later you’re in a virtual window to some heavy shared computing in a blockchain farm in Ghana. You’re using the equivalent of a city block’s worth of computing power, paying out the ass per second, to brute-force a look-see at the defenses around Cleveland’s municipal servers.
This time you’re using a virtualized supercomputer, something with neural-net learning, to hide the location of your attack.
It ain’t the city of Cleveland putting up a virtual Hadrian’s Wall around its systems. It’s a moat that’s getting triggered by anyone sniffing around this particular case.
“Russians,” you grumble, tracing back a few calls.
* * *
—
“Hey, E,” you say over the cheap prepaid cellphone you picked up from one of your bank boxes later in the afternoon. “Why did I just get burned by Russians?”
“Burned? How bad?”
“I lost my apartment.”
“You launched from within—”
“Don’t lecture me. I thought this was a municipal job,” you snap. “Why is military-grade counter-intrusion software made by Russians protecting Cleveland municipal servers?”
You could have spent time figuring this out at the public library, but after time spent dueling Russian cryptography, you figure less time logged in is best. Easier to ask the person who had a good view of the situation.
Ecstasy sighs. “This is bad.”
“You think? Why is this happening?”
“I think we just stepped into the middle of an info-sec war,” Ecstasy says. “You know, way back in the original Cold War, the old USSR used to recruit black intellectuals by pointing out how horrific capitalism had been. Enslavement. Jim Crow. Segregation. Major inequality between races all the way. And the best propaganda is that which lands closest to the truth. Muddies everything up. I think our case lands in the middle of that.”
“How?”
“Mrs. Mandi wants us to change her son’s race to help his chances of not getting indicted. The jury is all white. She knows that, even today, it’s an uphill battle in a Midwest state.”
“What did the son do?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yeah,” I say, surprised. Ecstasy has never really been any kind of social activist, so the question catches me off guard. “I want to make sure I’m fighting on the right side, you know?”
“Well, in that case, are you with the Russians who want to destabilize us or against that?”
“Against.” You say that quickly and firmly. “But I don’t want to help a murderer or something.”
“You weren’t worrying about that when you took the job just for money,” Ecstasy pointed out.
“No,” you protest. “Le
veling the field so that, no matter what he did, like any other person, he got the same consideration. That’s all.”
“Fair enough. What you want to be fighting for is the integrity of the system, right? Making our kid white in the eyes of the jurors only means we’re leveling the field, I agree. Even if Russians are meddling, whether with elections or not, making sure systems stay in place means civilization continues.”
“But they’re meddling for a reason.”
Ecstasy sighs again. “It’s another moment of very public injustice in Cleveland, when an all-white jury convicts a black kid. The Russians are already creating Facebook protest groups on both sides of the issue. They’re telling people to show up outside the courthouse to protest, and then they’re calling for armed Midwesterners to counter-protest them. They’re hoping that if they throw enough gasoline on the small fires, a big fire will break out. Then they rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. If we dig deep enough, we may even find out they stacked the jury pool white.”
“E, I think they might have my true name.”
She’s quiet for a while. “Shit.”
“I can’t help that mother. But if it’s fire they want, I can burn them right back.”
“Be careful. And I should tell you never to call me again, but…”
You’ve been working together two years now.
“I’ll let you know how it turns out,” you say. “Are you okay? I think I hear sniffling.”
“The damn flu,” Ecstasy says. “It’s going around.”
Hmmm, you think. It is going around.
* * *
—
In the old days you blew the lid off a secret by sending the documents to a reporter. They check sources, do some footwork, then publish the shocking story. Everyone reads it, the information is out. Public opinion turns nasty.
A People's Future of the United States Page 25