“And what about Control? How do we stop the Fist?”
Against her will, the clip invaded her memory again: silver hair, a flash of steel, pools of blood in a deep, undoctored red. True, when it shouldn’t, couldn’t be true. Lumi, how could you? That’s not what we do.
Nausea warred with a deeper, fiercer anger born of betrayal. She swallowed hard.
“Keep up what you’ve been doing to turn the consumers against them,” Alia said. “It’s working.”
Bex hung back as her teammates shuffled out of the meeting room, waiting for Alia to finish a conversation with another ideator. She snagged an extra Danish while she waited, wrapped it in a napkin, and licked the jelly off her fingers. If she scored enough free food, she could save part of today’s ration bar and trade it to one of her roommates for a few days off chores.
The conversation ended, and the analyst headed for the door. “Um, Alia?” Bex called.
Alia jumped, startled. “Bex! Sorry, I didn’t realize you were waiting for me.”
“Are you okay?”
All through the meeting, Alia had kept tripping over her words, deviating from the narrative in subtle ways that made Bex uncomfortable. Now she was jumping at nothing. People slipped all the time, but Alia never did. Alia was brilliant, always precise, always articulate. Sometimes, in meetings, Bex made notes about the things Alia did that made her seem so together because maybe some were things Bex could learn to do, too. But today, Alia was all jittery.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine.” Alia flashed a strained smile. “Just distracted, that’s all, like everyone is today. What’s up?”
Bex took a deep breath. “So, I’m guessing you probably don’t have time to meet today?” Alia had promised to walk through the metrics on Bex’s last couple newstories with her, to help her understand how infoflow analysis worked. It had been on their calendars for two weeks.
“Oh, no, is that today?” Alia’s gaze went distant as she checked her calendar on her headset, and she grimaced. “What bad timing. You’re right, we’ll have to reschedule. Can you send me a new invite? I’m sorry, I know you’ve been waiting for this.”
“It’s all right.” Bex thought angry thoughts at Control for picking today to release this particular newstory. “I really appreciate you taking the time for it.”
“Of course. And in the meantime, we’ve both got work to do. Russhel will be looking for your best work today.”
She was right, and Bex tried to console herself with that. Prosperity needed brilliant ideas to reverse the mindshare loss. Why shouldn’t one of them be hers?
Back at her workstation, Bex summoned a list of projects in progress. All the obvious responses were already underway: calming statements by celebrities with high trust quotients, interviews with factory workers proclaiming their support for Prosperity, clips showing Prosperity’s good deeds in Bethesda and here in their headquarters-city of Prospera.
That was all damage control. To get their mindshare back above Guardian’s before the rebalancing, they’d need a big surge, a counter-attack. That was where the Ideation team came in. Bex dove into generating the best ideas she could, and for most of the day, she forgot about her suspicions.
But by day’s end, with the storyboards for her top concepts sent off to Russhel, she found herself sitting near Alia in a cross-department review of a batch of response newstories. An intern’s job in meetings like this was to be quiet and pay attention—and that meant she could watch Alia, too.
“That’s great work,” Russhel said in his obnoxious, I’m-an-expert voice. This newstory showed a food delivery drop right here in Prospera, part of Prosperity’s massive new campaign to counteract food shortages in its territories. They were past the point of talking about food being plentiful—they’d lost that narrative battle because you could only push consumers’ beliefs so far, even among Prosperity’s own loyalists. Instead, they’d pivoted, showing their generous response to the crisis while pinning the blame on Guardian’s interference with open trade. “See there? Just a touch of tears, suggesting the depth of her relief. Nice.”
“And it does double duty, narratively,” said Alia. “For anyone who remembers when Prosperity released that over-engineered pesticide and caused massive crop failures, it makes them look good to be providing food for so many.”
“Yes, that story was a nasty narrative move by Control,” Russhel said with a frown.
Alia flinched, as if she’d caught herself in a mistake. “Yeah, it was. Really nasty,” she said, but she didn’t sound appropriately bitter. She sounded, Bex thought, like someone who’d been listening to oppositional narratives.
A spy? It can’t be, not Alia. It was a horrible thing to accuse someone of, but every staffer was trained to look for the signs. Alia sat there so stiffly, looking so unhappy, and she’d been slipping up a lot. A chill ran through Bex. Please don’t be.
“It’s more impressive how they cleaned up Jubilation Square,” said one of the junior staff, and everyone chuckled. Production had done an amazing job of showing smiling locals picnicking on actual green grass in front of the iconic, gleaming monument.
Bex let the video draw her attention back, the way it was designed to. Smiling workers in Consumer Services uniforms sharper and newer than anything the real Consumer Services department could afford. Boxes of food so large that families worked together to carry them off to groundcars or the train. A close-up of a five-year-old boy, sneaking a tomato out of a box and taking a big bite, at which his mother laughed instead of scolding him as juice dripped down his chin. The boy looked like Bex’s niece, same wispy, black baby hair, same grin. Same love of tomatoes.
This was good work from a top faction. Bex was lucky to be here, today, in this office, where someday she might get good enough to make newstories like that.
She owed a lot to Prosperity for this internship. If someone in the mid-ranks might be a spy against her faction, she couldn’t ignore that. And if that person had been friendly to Bex, taught her, even mentored her, and had been a traitor this whole time, then Bex wanted to be the one to turn her in.
But she had to be sure. So, when Alia peeled away at the meeting’s end and disappeared into the bathroom, Bex kept an eye on the door, waiting to see her come out. And waited. And waited. The longer she waited, the uglier her suspicions got.
At last, impatient, she headed for the bathroom herself. As she reached it, the door swung open, slamming into her. She leapt back with a startled cry.
“Excuse me!” Alia said as she came out and saw Bex. “They should put a sensor on this door, huh?” It was the right thing to say, the same quip other women in the office made whenever they had a near-collision, but Alia didn’t make eye contact, and she headed, not back to her desk, but toward the elevator, tapping out a message to her headset with agitated jabs of her fingers.
Bex grabbed her coat and followed.
The message had come in the middle of a meeting, leaving Alia distracted and miserable anew: “We need to talk. Now.”
Lumi knew better than to contact Alia during her shift. And Alia did not want to talk to Lumi right now. Didn’t think she could manage it politely.
I know what you did. I saw the video, and it was true, true, true. If it was fake, she’d have known.
She ignored her messages for the rest of the meeting, like a good, obedient mid-level Prosperity staffer, and when the meeting ended, she ducked into the bathroom, the only place in the office with real privacy. A follow-up was waiting for her.
“Not kidding, Ali,” the message read. “You’ve been compromised. I’ll meet you at the usual place.”
Alia pressed her head back against the cool wall tiles, raised her eyes to the harsh overhead lights. She’d thought she would have more time before she had to confront Lumi about the things she’d seen. She could go home to her closet apartment and sleep on what to do, or at least, she could lie awake on her lumpy bed, refusing to shut her eyes, trying not to see the blood …
/> No. When Lumi called, Alia came. It was why she’d gotten into this hellish position in the first place. That wouldn’t change, not until she got some answers.
Leaving the bathroom, she ran headlong into an intern, which startled her so badly it could only confirm her decision. She had to get out of here.
“On my way,” she sent, and with a swelling dread, she headed for their meeting spot.
The elevator carried them down through the glowing clouds, into the gloom of the city below. Bex merged with the crowds of workers heading home, sticking close enough not to lose Alia amid the masses of protesters that always waited outside the newservice entrance. A mass of Prosperity loyalists chanted their demands for greater action against Guardian to end the food shortage, while scattered pockets from other factions shouted at the departing Prosperity workers, accusing them of made-up wrongs from their own factions’ attack stories. It was a relief to descend into the quiet of the rail station. She slipped into a train right behind Alia and stood with her face toward the door. She shouldn’t have worried. No one ever noticed the intern.
“Jubilation Square,” the train announced a few minutes later in its ever-cheerful voice, and the taste of tomatoes flooded her mouth. Jubilation Square. It was awfully tempting to go see the food drop in person. If she was lucky, Alia would get off here. Or if her chase ended up revealing nothing, she could come back before they closed and get a tomato or two. She wanted to see her niece with juice dripping down her chin like that grinning boy in the vid.
A few people got off, but not many. They must not have seen the newstory. She started searching for the story to share it to the train’s local feed, until someone nudged her aside with a mumbled, “Excuse me.”
It was Alia. Luck was with her; Bex could actually see the drop without losing her quarry, and could swing back to pick up a box afterward.
Drawing breath in anticipation, she climbed the stairs out of the underground and faced the dismal scene of Jubilation Square.
The bleak familiarity bludgeoned her. She stopped where she stood, disoriented, while passengers shouldered her aside from the station exit. The dissonance was too much: in place of the shining monuments and green turf that stuck in her head from the video, she faced dingy gray streets and a pigeon-stained obelisk rising from a circle of churned brown muck.
And there were no boxes. No delivery center, temporary or otherwise. No sign of any drop-off at all.
“Where is it?” she whispered.
“Where’s what?” asked an old man who was taking shelter from the rain in the station entrance.
“The food drop.”
Even as the words passed her lips, the answer clicked into place in her brain. Disappointment gripped her, a deeper, sicker feeling than the hunger in her gut: disappointment, not in the feed, but in herself.
That creative team should get a prize. Like Russhel said, damn good work. Really believable.
The newstory was so well done that she’d let herself get swept up in it. She’d forgotten it was a newstory. And that was the whole point, they were designed to get into your head, seep into your memories, to make you believe in the narrative with your whole being. That was how narratives lived and grew, carried by their stories. The more a faction’s narrative stuck with consumers, the more mindshare they gained, and this was a Prosperity narrative. She should be glad it had worked so well. She should be messaging back to the office, a rueful joke about how this newstory was so good she’d forgotten it was one of theirs.
She shouldn’t feel betrayed by her own faction’s narrative.
“No food drop here today. You should check your feed,” the old man said helpfully. “The last one was a few weeks back. Real good one, I heard.”
Of course, he wouldn’t have seen the newstory; it was targeted at non-local markets, outside Prospera, where no one would suffer the same cognitive dissonance she had. In a couple days, they’d release a new, local version, vague on the details of when the drop took place, so locals could share the video around and commiserate about how they’d missed it. It would be distant enough by then that everyone could let themselves believe it was real. The “last one” this man thought he remembered wasn’t any more real than this one.
“I’m sure it was great,” she muttered.
“Maybe you’ll catch the next one,” he said.
With a jolt, she remembered the actual reason she was here. Where had Alia gone? Damn it, if her moping over a too-good newstory had cost her the best chance to catch a spy in the act…
Feeling wretched, she stepped out into the rain, ignoring its sting against her cheeks as she scanned the crowd.
There! A woman, head bowed under a gray rain-suit indistinguishable from all the others, but there was a familiar tightness in her gait. Bex deployed her own rain-suit, a cracked and plasticky old model that was nevertheless better than the rain’s burning, and dashed across the square, soaking her shoes in murky puddles in her haste to catch up. At the corner of an adjoining street, her quarry paused and looked around. Bex ducked, pretending to adjust her rain-suit settings. It was definitely Alia. Making sure no one’s following you? Now why would you need to do that?
Bex ghosted down the street after Alia, who slipped into an abandoned bar off a narrow, trash-filled alley. It was a good place for a covert meeting: far enough from downtown that there were few cameras, and far enough from the really bad neighborhoods that Safety didn’t keep much presence here. Avoiding the smelliest puddles, Bex knelt in a spot just outside the bar, sheltered behind the half-wall where she could watch through a broken window without being seen, and waited.
“Hello, Alia.”
Bex startled along with Alia at the voice. Someone was standing behind the bar, which had been empty a moment before. They threw back their hood, and the dim light glowed off silver hair.
Bex stifled a cry of alarm. She would recognize that silver hair anywhere. She blinked-captured a few images and sent an urgent, private beacon to the nearest Prosperity Safety office, attaching the photos and her location.
This was the Fist. The ruthless leader of Control, who wanted to overturn the rule of narrative mindshare and tell people what content they could see.
And Alia—brilliant, shining Alia—was their spy.
“You came.” The familiar, smoky voice made Alia’s stomach twist harder. “I’m glad. I wasn’t sure you would.”
“I wasn’t sure, either, but you owe me answers.”
“For what?” Lumi cocked their head, leaning against the grimy surface of the pitted wooden bar, as if waiting to pour non-existent bourbon into the smashed remains of glass tumblers. The two of them used to drink old-fashioneds together, here, tucked into the smallest corner table. That was at the beginning, back when mingled chatter of anonymous after-work crowds was enough to give their conversations privacy. The meeting place had stuck, but now, only ghosts made of dust and cobwebs remained. Only dim, gray light reached inside, deepening Lumi’s brown skin into shadows, leaving nothing of their expression visible below their crown of short, spiky silver.
Body language spoke clearly enough, though. They were going to make Alia speak her accusations aloud.
This was the same Lumi she’d always known, and it was impossible to imagine them doing … that. But it was also the exact same Lumi from those videos, the Fist with their signature silver hair and custom-made, gunmetal smart-jacket. The pleased smile they’d given her when Alia agreed to go undercover, mirroring the smirk they wore in the video as they swung the axe.
“You … you killed those people. Why?” She could barely choke out the question. “That’s not what we do.”
A pained look crossed Lumi’s face, a deeper shadow in the gloom. “No, it’s not. It’s not. Ali, they got to you.”
“I saw the video, and it was true …”
“They fooled you. That’s why I’m pulling you out.” Lumi reached for her shoulders. Alia swatted their hands away, stumbled sideways into a stool. Broken g
lass ground under her heel, and Lumi stopped. “Those videos of me, they were fakes. Manufactured, like ninety-six percent of everything Prosperity puts out.”
“They were real. I should know.” That was why Choose Truth valued her so: Alia could sift the truth from the falseness in the factions’ narratives, tagging them so anyone who cared could avoid the false and stop their eyes from lying to their brains. She was the best curator Choose Truth had, and she was never wrong.
“I think I should know if I’d gruesomely murdered a bunch of innocents.” A smirk flashed, brief and bitter, then faded into grimness. “That’s what tipped us off. Prosperity has a new way of fabricating content that curators can’t detect, and we didn’t even know it until they started faking stories about us. I’d hoped you might see through it, but when you flagged that video today as true … I figured otherwise.”
She drew a deep, trembling breath, and trained all her attention, all her skill, on Lumi. “Say it. If you didn’t do it, say so straight out.”
Lumi’s gaze latched onto her, utterly serious. “I did not kill a citizen with an axe. I have never killed a person in my life.”
No hint of a lie. No falseness in the face, the voice, the eyes. It was one thing that made Lumi so good at spreading the truth: they’d always been a terrible liar.
The breath rushed out of her, and Alia fumbled for the stool. Lumi took her arm to help her, and this time, she didn’t pull away. Her skills, her training, useless. A newstory could lie to her as easily as anyone else. It was hard enough to keep narrative from taking over your world when you knew it was false, and now, if there was no certain way to tell …
This had to be how most people felt all the time. Adrift, deceived. Lumi came around the bar and slid onto a neighboring stool, waiting in supportive silence while she processed the news. Alia sighed. “We’ll have to find a way around it and update the trainings. The basic trainings should still be okay, but at the advanced levels … it’ll take months, and until then, we can’t approve anything the factions put out. Is it just Prosperity? Or other factions, too?”
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