During this time, Fiona and Manny grew close. Days would go by when neither would leave the campaign office, opting for a couple of cots in Fiona’s office. Manny’s commitment was no longer a question for Fiona, and his strategic thinking made a noticeable impact on the campaign. Fiona and Manny pushed each other to better articulate their positions in a jovial but passionate way. Manny, wearing a baseball hat pushed down low and shielding his face, would sometimes sneak on stage during Fiona’s talks and hand her notes to speak about. Some members of the team began to sense that there was a clandestine romance brewing between the two.
Until there wasn’t. One day, after the rest of the team left for the night, Manny and Fiona had a conversation. It started off businesslike.
“I think the current circumstances being what they are and the pressures we are both under, the best thing right now is to postpone any consideration of such an interlude,” Fiona said to Manny in a calm monotone.
“I concur with your position,” Manny said. “I suspect this would be a deleterious path to travel down.”
Awkward silence ensued. “Sooooooo…” Fiona’s voice trailed off.
“Soooo…” Manny’s voice trailed off.
“I guess that means…” Fiona said, twirling her finger through her shoulder length hair.
“I guess, well…” Manny started to stutter and tug on his lip as if he could pull the right words out. “You know, it’s just that, I think we both…ya know.”
“We’re on the same page. Let’s move on.”
“Yes, that settles it,” Manny said. “We should pack it in for the evening.”
“Yes, good idea.”
And that was the end of that conversation. They were both too pragmatic and focused to entertain such potentially disruptive notions.
Manny told himself it would have been a difficult romance. He was still keeping a low profile and was reluctant to be seen in public, and any kind of linkage between him and Fiona would be bad for the campaign.
To remain inconspicuous, Manny almost never appeared without a hat in places where he could potentially be seen. Almost. During a campaign stop in North Carolina, Manny, having forgotten his hat at the last campaign stop, showed his unobscured face at a small rally, handing some notes to Fiona on the makeshift stage before she began to speak. A student in the audience recognized him, and without even thinking twice, snapped a picture of Manny and uploaded it to his furtl personal page with the message: “FUrtl pERV @mannykahn issatthis #MOD rally im at! #GTFOOH nd SCK it YALL FYI @IlurvKitTies.”
5.10
The post was on one furtl personal page, then two pages, then sixteen pages, and then 16,000 pages within minutes. Manny’s involvement with the Mods was no longer a secret. DCS headquarters relayed the message to Susie, who paid a visit to Kurt’s office post haste. When Susie entered, Kurt’s glare shot straight through her. “How!?” he asked.
“It doesn’t make sense. The car tracking data told us he was in Newark, New Jersey,” Susie responded.
“Well, obviously he isn’t in fucking Newark, New Jersey!” Kurt said, starting off the sentence with a deep guttural growl and finishing it off with a high-pitched squeal.
“We’re gonna squash this, Kurt. Don’t worry.”
“Too late. I am worried.”
“Mathis isn’t even leading yet in any of our polls.”
“We don’t own the polls. Haven’t you seen this hard copy shit? We can’t continue to cook the results.”
“What about the voting machines?” Susie asked.
“What about them?”
“We can massage the election if necessary.”
“But we can’t completely falsify it. I’m old enough to remember the Arab Spring.”
“The Arab what?” Susie asked.
“The point is that this is a real threat. The public is engaged in a way we haven’t seen in many years. And if that engagement passes a tipping point, we won’t be able to control it. Take care of this.”
“I’m on it.”
5.11
What was once a hollowed shell of a campaign headquarters grew into a bustling hub of youthful political energy. Ko Bain and Flannlgrrrl93 corralled large groups of enthusiastic college students and twentysomethings as they organized the distribution of Mod materials around the country, spreading the Mods’ political platform far and wide. The once abandoned classrooms buzzed and snapped with the sounds of old computers, typewriters, and dot matrix printers creating the most recent issue of the Mod Times or policy papers written by the team members. Distribution networks of zine “republishers” were becoming more efficient by the day. There was incredible demand for paper to print the zines on, and young people all over the country raided their parents’ dusty libraries and long since forgotten cardboard boxes for sheets of paper that they could print on, giving the zines an imperfect, slipshod appearance that only increased their authentic feel.
Hours after the North Carolina rally, Flannlgrrrl93 brought up a news report from the fEN about Manny and shooshed the room in order to listen to it. The entire office stopped to watch the news anchor announce Manny’s involvement with the Mods to the world. With a headline that read, “Manny and the Mods?” the announcer spoke with an indolent gait over ominous sounding string music: “The inexplicable rise of the Mods in the polls marches on as former Democratic and Republican strongholds continue to fall prey to this subversive rhetoric. Questions regarding the source of this party’s money appear to be answered. Pictured here we see Señora Fiona Mathis’s chief campaign donor, Manny Kahn. The disgraced founder of furtl has been out of the spotlight for many years amidst rumors of nefarious financial and personal activities.”
Manny turned the computer off and walked to his office, a cramped, retrofitted music practice room that was now home to a leaning tower of zines and about eight square feet of available space to move. Fiona walked in and closed the door behind her. The room was now at capacity, or perhaps a half person over, and Manny and Fiona stood within inches of each other. Manny avoided eye contact. Fiona did not.
“We knew this was a risk,” she said. “Now we need to deal with it.”
“What are you suggesting?” Manny asked.
“We own it. You’re a reformed man. We don’t need to be ashamed of your involvement.”
“It makes the movement vulnerable. It’s not worth it.”
“If we don’t address this, we look like we’re hiding something. And we aren’t.”
“You don’t need me anymore. This movement has a life of its own now.”
“We need you.” Fiona put her arm on Manny’s shoulder.
“I can still help out financially, but don’t let my presence jeopardize everything we’ve worked for.”
Fiona paused as if considering his plan. “There is room in this movement for everybody. We keep saying it and now we have to own it,” Fiona said. “If we are relying on only changing the minds of the young, then we are merely marginal players. You said we could do better than marginal results, and I believed it.”
“I’m not used to attention like this. It’s been a long time. I think part of me enjoyed being under the radar.”
“That’s over. Why don’t you put something together for tomorrow’s zine? Lay it all out there: where you’ve been, what you believe, and why you believe in this movement. I believe in you, Manny.” Fiona looked at Manny with clear eyes.
He knew this was important for both of them. “Okay.”
“Start writing,” Fiona said. She walked out the door and closed it behind her.
Manny put his headphones on and began to type away on his Smith-Corona typewriter. At first, he struggled to get his thoughts onto the page and went through a whole container of whiteout, which made him more anxious because it was in short supply around the office. Eventually, he hit his stride, writing about his past, his journey, and his present. He railed against the nanny state, furtl’s invasion of his privacy, loss of rational debate, proliferation
of extreme rhetoric — and he was putting his name on it. It felt good. He was channeling the younger Manny that took down FlowerPower.com and created the furtl search algorithm. He was typing furiously, creating a sharp punching sound with each keystroke. In mid-keystroke, a hand softly tapped him on the shoulder. Manny didn’t look up or turn off the music in his headphones.
“I’m on a roll, can you give me a few minutes?” Manny said.
The hand didn’t move. Manny continued to type. After a few more moments, Manny stopped typing and looked up, frustrated that someone was disrupting his flow. Standing over him was Mindy.
5.12
The athletic concourse behind the school was overgrown with weeds, and recent thundershowers turned what was once the football field into a mud and puddle-filled obstacle course. Manny and Mindy navigated their way through this course, the only place in the Mod headquarters where they could be alone. It was an unseasonably cold and blustery September day and Manny was underdressed in a button-down flannel shirt and jeans, but he wasn’t focused on the weather. Mindy, who was all bundled up, was silent as she walked beside him. Manny looked at her closely. He was confused as to why she was here, and her stiff demeanor wasn’t clearing anything up.
“Manny,” Mindy said.
“Mindy,” Manny said. “What are you doing here?”
Mindy stopped walking and looked at Manny. The wind kicked up. “I want in.”
“I don’t know what to–”
“I made a mistake, and I want to fix it. We can fix it. We can fix us.”
“So much has happened,” Manny said.
“Seeing you here, with all this energy, is inspiring. I knew that I missed it and that you got it back. That’s what I want, the old Manny back.”
“I believe you said I was naïve.”
“I was the one being naïve.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I buried that energy I once had deep in me someplace because I didn’t believe it could live out in the world any longer, that if it had died in you, it had died out in everybody. But it was just buried. This is where I’m supposed to be. You are who I’m supposed to be with.”
“I don’t know what to say, Mindy.”
“I really think we can do this. We don’t have to rush into anything. I just want to help.”
The next day, when Manny’s zine article with his byline hit the streets, Mindy was at Mod headquarters with him. She was with him over the coming weeks when he started working the rooms at the college campuses and when he gave speeches on Fiona’s behalf, too.
Mindy’s relationship with Manny confused Fiona, and pretty much everybody else on the team. Fiona declared to herself that she wasn’t going to get in the way of it. She needed Manny around. His presence on the campaign trail was a boon to the effort, and his zine piece was one of the most widely republished of all their articles, making its way across the country via hand-to-hand distribution in a record setting four days. The Mod audience was ready to believe in Manny.
5.13
In mid-October, one month before the presidential election, the campaign crossed a threshold that once seemed impossible: according to HCC polls, Fiona Mathis became the frontrunner in the presidential election. She was ahead in the national polls of likely voters by four percent – Mathis 45%, Field 40%, Montgomery 15%. And the DCS still couldn’t figure out a way to stop it.
The HCC polls came out weekly, as opposed to furtl’s hourly polls, and were distributed via a number of zines throughout the country. But furtl’s credibility had been so thoroughly destroyed by years of biased reporting that the furtl polls — which put Fiona in a close third — only served to fuel Fiona’s attacks on the status quo. Duggans Montgomery was as troubled by the Mathis campaign as Vice President Field. As such, Montgomery shifted his attacks away from Field to focus on Fiona as a radical threat to US stability. Field chose to focus most of his attacks on Fiona’s Mexican heritage, framing her as weak on national security and eager to embrace the Chexican economy, decrying her “Chexicanomic ideals.” Throughout the campaign, there were also many veiled references to her gender, such as the claims that she was too emotional to be president, and not so veiled references, such as signs at rallies that said: “Just say no to this Mexican Ho.”
5.14
Election debates in recent years had become exercises in theatrics. The moderators tended to lob softballs to the candidates, who would respond with prepared remarks only marginally relevant to the question asked. In this election cycle, there had so far been two of these events, and they only included Field and Montgomery. They went after each other with the energy of a couple of inebriated fraternity brothers playing video games at three in the morning. Lots of yelling, most of it incoherent.
The first two Field/Montgomery debates did little to affect each candidate’s polling numbers, which was exactly how Kurt Sturdoch wanted it. The candidates did, however, manage to score on a handful of zingers prepared for them by their team of comedians. In 2020, after Mitch Fletcher, the senatorial candidate from Maine, fired his debate prep team and replaced them with comedians from Harvard, then won his election in a landslide, other candidates followed suit, making these debates excellent proving grounds for the nation’s up-and-coming comedy talent.
Even after repeated requests for entry, Fiona Mathis had yet to break into this debate fraternity. Until one day in early October when she received word that she would be allowed to participate in the third and final debate, just as her campaign was hitting its stride and breaking away from the pack. If Fiona could solidify her status as a frontrunner and energize enough of the dormant voting population in this debate, there would be very little her opponents, and furtl could do to stop her.
The Mods shifted all of their attention to preparing for the debate, and Manny and Sorenson worked on a number of strategies for Fiona. Scheduled for the Angry Birds Arena, which seated 110,000, this was uncertain territory for Fiona, and she was uncharacteristically nervous about this event. Security would be high, lest there be a repeat of an incident that occurred in 2024 when a gun-control candidate was shot and killed.
But the audience could still be vocal and judgmental. Sometimes the answers to questions got drowned out by less than polite chants. In Fiona’s case, these would likely question her citizenship and her sexual preference and anything else her opponents might think effective. These were not going to be like the fireside talks that Fiona mastered, where she slowly outlined her positions and engaged in back and forth with the participants. Her team reminded her that she needed to speak quickly, with precision, and without using any big words – and that she was going to be exposed to a segment of the population that she had not yet spoken to. Many of these people were comfortable with political contests that focused on who could yell the loudest, demonize everything about their opponent, and characterize a policy position as either the worst thing that had ever been thought of or the most sacred beacon of perfection that should not be tampered with. These people, Democrats and Republicans alike, remained skeptical of the HCC polls and the zine scene. In short, Fiona had her work cut out for her.
In response to her qualms, Manny and Sorenson put together a number of strategies for the debate, but none of them seemed quite right. “Beat ’em at their own game” failed when it became clear that none of the Mods were that mean or funny or simplistic – they tended to qualify their attacks so heavily that insults felt more like college lectures than one-liners. The “rope a dope” strategy didn’t get much traction either; it involved accepting most of the criticism leveled at Fiona up front and then pouncing when each candidate had run out of juice.
With the debate approaching and optimism waning, the group grew desperate. Then, 48 hours before the debate, Mindy stormed into an advisor meeting and announced that she had found the solution. Waving her tablet around, she announced, “A little birdy just sent me the questions for the debate.”
“The questions?” Manny asked.
> “Yeah, they’re all here,” she said, pointing to her tablet.
“How?” Frank asked.
“I have my sources. Let’s just say one of my neighbors at the Vault secretly sympathizes with our cause,” Mindy replied. “It’s the edge we were looking for. If we don’t use them, we’re toast up there.”
“But is it ethical?” Frank asked.
“This reminds me of Abe Lincoln’s seldom mentioned episode at the council of Saratoga in 1842,” Dolores said, leaning back on her chair. “He was flummoxed by an overeager county official during an otherwise unremarkable campaign stop. And sensing the growing paradigm shift within himself and his party, he embarked upon a strategy that is still hotly debated today amongst scholars whereby he–”
“Dolores, the dilemma at hand,” Manny said, walking up to the front of the room.
Over the next two hours, the team went back and forth on whether or not they should use the questions. Ultimately, with the group deadlocked, they looked to Manny, who was glaring at Mindy’s tablet. None of the team had looked at the questions yet, but the tablet sat there, sucking all the air into its core and calling out to be read.
Manny looked at Mindy, then back at the rest of the group. “Let’s use ’em,” he said. “We’ll still need to beat them on the merits of our arguments, but this will help us level the playing field.” Manny’s fingers twitched and tapped against his cheek, a physical tick he hadn’t experienced since the early days of furtl.
Frank, against the idea from the beginning, shook his head. “Recipe for disaster,” he said, contorting his bulky body anxiously in his metal folding chair and nibbling feverishly on his thumbnail. “Such a strategy entails rejecting all the tenets of my reciprocal behavioral modeling matrix.”
Dolores, who ultimately voted to use the questions, finished up her Lincoln story while the rest of the team filed out of the meeting room.
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