by Ted Weber
His stomach clenched. Did we ruin our lives for nothing?
21
January 4
Waylee
The Friendship Farm residents loaned Waylee a clunky-looking laptop. Like all the farm computers, it had been custom built by techies in Takoma Park, a DC suburb governed by the People’s Party, and ran an Ectoplasm GUI over ArchDruid Linux. It had a standalone roll-up screen she could clip to a frame or tack to a wall, kind of like Pel’s computer. Waylee brought a small wooden table into the room, set up the equipment, and confined herself there. The first thing she did was wipe the hard drive and reinstall Linux, then all the other programs she needed, so the computer couldn’t be traced back to the farm.
She had to sort through twelve hours of New Year’s footage, add background material, and compose narratives and music. She’d structure the video like a breaking news story, where you had to grab the viewer and summarize the most important information in the first thirty seconds, and then add increasing layers of detail. Trouble was, Pel wasn’t making much progress with the comlink data and she needed that to decide where to focus.
Pel opened the bedroom door, as if she’d summoned him. He started to say something, then stopped.
“What?”
He closed the door behind him and sat on the joined beds, pushing aside the rumpled sheets. “I have some good news and some bad news.”
“Can’t you speak without clichés?”
His eyes narrowed. “Yeah, well I can do some things you haven’t a clue about. Like, I found some video tutorials on signal processing, and it’s making more sense now. That’s the good news.”
He’s a techie. Why does he need video tutorials? “And the bad news?”
He smirked. “Will you whip me with my belt again?”
“If you’re talking about our roles as Estelle and President Al, those were just love smacks. Lucky for you I respect your boundaries.” She locked eyes with him. “Actually, I’m sorry I did it at all. Too much to drink.”
He leaned back. “And if I really were the president?”
“I’d have been…. Uh, less restrained.” She slid her bulky chair away from the computer table, scraping the wooden floor in the process. Oops. “So what’s this sort of bad news? Obviously it’s not catastrophic or you’d have come out and said so.”
“Homeland thinks Charles was behind that BetterWorld op, where he hacked into their system.”
“Well he was, wasn’t he?”
“Yeah, but they figured it out, or guessed it, and the FBI’s offering a million dollar reward. And a hundred thousand each for me, you, Dingo, and Shakti. Broadcast all over the Comnet.”
Waylee relaxed. “That’s it? That means they don’t know we were Estelle and Greg.”
Pel leaned forward. “Yeah, they’d be pretty panicked about that. But Charles had to delete his avatar.”
She shrugged. “So he’ll create a new one.”
“Yeah, I don’t think he can go a day without seeing Kiyoko.”
Waylee bolted from her chair. “What do you mean see? He’s barely seventeen.”
“It’s just BetterWorld.” Pel stroked his chin, now rough with stubble. “She probably doesn’t know it’s Charles.”
I don’t have time to babysit long distance.
“Pel, can you straighten that out? I don’t want anyone, Charles included, messing with my little sister. Remember how long she cried after her last boyfriend?”
“Yeah, but he was an asshole, slept with two of her friends.”
True. Which was why Waylee smacked him on the side of the head with a bottle of gin, and while he was out cold on the floor of the club, took a sharpie and drew a dick on his forehead. “I’m not saying Charles isn’t a nice kid. But one or both of them are likely to get hurt, and I can’t deal with the extra drama.”
Pel gave her the ironic eyebrow.
She ignored it. “You’ve got a rapport with him. I’ll just piss him off and we need him.”
“I’m sure it’s all harmless.” He stood.
Men always stick together. The bro code. “Well Kiyoko’s my sister, don’t forget. And we can’t have Charles moping around with a broken heart.”
She glanced at the door. “I’ll talk to Shakti. Someone here could make a fortune by ratting us out.”
Shakti wasn’t in her bedroom. They walked downstairs, then Pel headed back to his computer.
She heard Shakti in the sun room arguing with Dingo. Her voice sounded distinctly Caribbean, which only happened under stress.
The two stopped and stared when she entered.
“Something wrong?” Waylee asked.
“Nah,” Dingo said. “She’s just being bossy, probably taking after you.”
Waylee didn’t bother editing her thoughts. “Grow the fuck up.”
Shakti, who was still wearing the saffron sari she fled her workplace in, strode over and nudged her into the living room. “Dingo wants to leave. Boy says he can steal a car and sneak into Canada. Good riddance I say.”
“Come on, you can’t mean that. Sure he’s an ass sometimes, but he’s good at the core.”
Shakti crossed her arms. “So what do you want?”
I bet real revolutionaries aren’t distracted by personal drama. She led Shakti up to her bedroom and shut the door. “Did you know the FBI issued a huge reward for us?”
Shakti’s arms unfolded. “How huge?”
“One million for Charles, a hundred thousand for the rest of us.”
“How come he’s worth ten times the rest of us?”
Waylee shrugged. “Our price may rise. But you know these people better than I do. Would anyone turn us in?”
“I don’t think so. Your footage really riled them up. Peter and Sunshine watched all twelve hours.”
“So, no worries?”
Shakti pressed her lips together. “It is a lot of money…”
Waylee’s optimism evaporated. “Can you find out? On the sly?”
She looked down at her feet. “Yeah.”
* * *
January 5
Dingo
“Smell you later, bitches!” Dingo hopped into the trash-filled cab of an old pickup truck. A pungent Rastafarian named Raustis sat behind the wheel.
Nobody looked happy. Shakti looked about to cry.
Sorry. But he had to do what he had to do. Time to move on. “You got my new Comnet ID, stay in touch. I’ll let you know where I settle.” He blew Shakti a kiss. “’Til next we meet.”
Raustis threw the truck into gear and off they drove down the dirt road. “I’ll take you up to Baltimore, but can’t take you any further.”
“Thanks bro. I’d have said DC, but that place got cameras everywhere.”
They exited the farm and drove north. Dingo had shaved his head and changed piercings to disguise himself. He had his bag o’ tricks, some clothes and shit, his stun gun, a new comlink, and an empty wallet. No gas money. He’d refused to borrow anything from Shakti – she was near broke herself. Pel, Waylee, and Charles – none of them had a cent left. Hard way to televise the revolution.
Raustis switched on the truck’s sound system and tapped a playlist link on the display. Heavy dub bass boomed through the cabin. “Where in Baltimore are you going?” he shouted over the music.
“Putty Hill. Need to earn some money off the grid so I can get to Montreal.” Paulo said he’d throw some work my way.
“Where’s Putty Hill? Never heard of it.”
“Northeast suburbs.”
Raustis frowned. “That’s a two hour drive.”
“Just take me to a bus stop then.”
“Buses and trains all got cameras.”
“Yeah,” Dingo said, “but I look different now.”
“Not that different. And how you gonna pay the fare? No, I take you, then check up on our distributors, make sure they not cutting our product or other such mischief.”
“Need backup? I know Krav Maga like most people know breathing.
” He threw a couple of quick punches to the air.
“Near tempting, but a man with a price on his head bring about bad vibrations.”
22
January 6
Charles
Charles abandoned his fruitless work on the Comnet and joined Pel in the humid cellar beneath the big house. Bottles of homemade wine and mead filled wall racks floor to ceiling. Barrels crowded the concrete floor. Pel sat at a table made from unfinished planks, staring at Big Red’s clip-up screen.
A million dollar reward. Biggest price on a hacker ever. He must have owned some big players. The downside was, he lost an awesome avatar. He’d put a lot of work into Iwisa. But with all the uproar over his vampire attack, he had to delete it. No more horse rides with Princess Kiyoko.
Pel pushed back his wooden chair. His eyes were red. “Can’t get anything useable from the government comlinks. The president, the Congressmen, their staff, all seem to have special shielding and encryption. No detectable processor signals, and our program can’t decipher the screen or transmission signals. Must be state of the art NSA stuff.”
“What about the others?”
“That’s the good news. Luxmore and his wife have NSA tech, but the others we can crack. Including the MediaCorp board members. It’ll just take a while.”
Pel didn’t have a Comnet connection down here. He seemed to get more paranoid by the day. Wouldn’t be long before he wore aluminum foil on his head. Trouble was, that shit was contagious. “Should we tell Waylee?”
“Yeah.” He locked his supercomputer—even Charles didn’t know the password. “How’s the Super Bowl feed coming?”
“Uh…” Charles wondered the best way to confess.
“Well, we’ve got plenty of time. Come on.” They climbed two sets of stairs to the guest rooms.
In the bedroom she shared with Pel, Waylee sat at a desk staring at her computer screen, moving video clips with an editing program. “Hi guys,” she said without turning.
“Pretty sure I can get some material from the comlinks,” Pel said, “except for the government ones. They’re levels ahead.”
Waylee turned and smiled. “Got anything good yet?”
“Working on it.”
“Any progress on the Super Bowl?”
Charles thought about turning and running, but stood his ground. “About that. It’s impossible to do remotely. You need an insider.”
Waylee froze like ice.
“But you did it before,” Pel said. “Put that zombie message on the news ticker.”
“I wanted to tell you, an insider helped me. An engineer most likely, but a closet Collectivista. We’re everywhere.”
Waylee just sat there.
“This engineer,” Pel said, “can you get in touch with him or her?”
“I don’t know for sure he’s an engineer. I’m just guessing.”
Pel stared at him.
“I don’t know who he is. I thought about taking over the news feed this one day when my gramma was watching it and they said this stupid shit how the Collective might be spies from Kazakhstan.”
“I remember that.”
“So I started a thread on one of the Collective boards, asking for leads. And this user disgruntld1, he posts a lot of anti-Authority stuff on snarknet, set up a backdoor and sent me a network map and instructions. Then he looked the other way when my text went out.”
Pel glanced at Waylee and back. “I’m guessing the backdoor’s gone now?”
“Yeah, sorry. I checked a couple weeks ago. And I had to erase all my old files.”
Pel’s mouth opened but nothing came out.
“I’ve been researching. No pinging though. Haven’t found another way in.”
At the desk, Waylee shut her computer down.
“I was gonna contact him, but thought you’d frown on bringing in an outsider.”
Pel’s face reddened. “Then you should have mentioned it earlier. We can take precautions.”
“You know, taking over the whole feed is way harder than adding some text. They monitor it as it goes out. They can just flip a switch if they don’t like what they see. You might have to take over the control room.”
Pel turned to Waylee. “He’s probably right. I should have thought of that.”
“We should just get out of here,” Charles said. “Give your video to some journalists in Korea or someplace.”
Waylee jumped out of her chair. “No one will see it, that’s the whole problem!” She screamed.
He felt like running for the stairs.
She slapped her head. “MediaCorp controls the entire Comnet, and they’ll squash it. Sure it’ll pass around the marginal wonk crowd, freaks like me and Shakti, but it won’t hit the mainstream. Not enough people will see it to change anything.” She pointed at him, her eyes murderous. “We ruined our lives breaking you out, Charles, and now you say it’s all for nothing.”
“Wasn’t for nothing, I…”
But she stomped out of the room, tears streaming down her face.
Pel started to follow, then threw up his hands. He turned to Charles, fists clenched. “Why the fuck didn’t you say that a long time ago? Like when Waylee first contacted you?”
Charles burned with shame. He felt like a child, like he should hide somewhere. “I…” Words wouldn’t come. Although really, social engineering was an accepted hacking technique. People did it all the time.
Pel shook his head. “I can’t believe how stupid I was, thinking you were this great hacker when really you’re just another lame-ass kid.”
* * *
Shakti
Except for the watchman on duty, who guarded the ganja fields with the aid of half a dozen German shepherds and a whole heap of electronics, most of the farm residents gathered in the main house’s dining hall each night for dinner. They lined up and served themselves from steaming pots and buffet trays. Some talented cooks lived here, and used fresh ingredients, often picked that day.
Shakti dished a plate of veggie enchiladas and rice, the onion and cilantro aroma making her mouth water. She took a random spot at one of the long tables, hoping to make some more friends and consign Dingo to the past. Men are such bastards.
Amy, a thin sixteen-year-old redhead, sat next to her. Shakti didn’t know her well; she kind of kept to herself.
“Hi, Amy,” Shakti said.
Amy turned and smiled. “Hi.”
“So how’s everything with you?”
Amy’s eyes widened in surprise. “Uh, okay.” She started poking at her food.
Shakti cut off a bit of enchilada, rewarding her taste buds with peppery squash and mushrooms. “Where’s your mom?” Amy’s mother took care of the chickens and kept the tractors and other equipment running.
Amy jerked a thumb toward the neighboring table, where her fortyish mother flirted with Carl, the brown-bearded man. “I can’t wait to get out of here,” Amy said. “This place is so lame.”
“Are you kidding? This is heaven compared to Baltimore. Ever been there?”
Amy squinted. “The Inner Harbor once. Seemed okay. But I’ve been to DC a bunch of times. That’s where I want to live. There’s stuff to do there.”
Shakti ate a forkful of tomato-filled rice. “Community’s important. What you have here on the farm, the People’s Party is working to build in city neighborhoods, but it’s a struggle against lifetimes of indoctrinated anonymity.” She paraphrased Councilman Cutler. “Without community, we’re each lonely, desperate creatures, impoverished of possibilities, alienated from our humanity and defenseless against those who hold power.”
Pel and Charles shuffled in and picked separate tables. Shakti looked around but didn’t see Waylee. “Excuse me,” she said to Amy. “I’ll be back.”
She walked over to Pel’s table and sat across from him. “Where’s Waylee?”
Pel shrugged. “Moping. I wish she was normal. I don’t have the patience for this shit anymore.”
Her muscles tightened. “
Just want to be there for the good times?”
He smacked his fork against the table. “You don’t know how much I gave up. Or don’t care.” He pointed at Charles, lost in his meal. “We had a good life before we made the mistake of trusting ourselves to a teenager.”
He threw up his arms. “And now what? How are we supposed to cross the border and find a place to settle and not get extradited or kidnapped or wasted by a drone? The government doesn’t like thorns in their side, and neither forgets nor forgives.” He picked up his plate and stormed off, not waiting for a reply.
When Waylee still hadn’t appeared by the end of dinner, Shakti took some food up to her room. She wasn’t there. Nor in the shared bathroom.
Shakti returned downstairs. Some people had left, but most were cleaning and chatting. “Anyone seen Waylee?” she shouted.
No one had.
“Anyone wanna help me find her?”
Pretty much everyone but Pel and Charles volunteered. “She’s just moping somewhere,” Pel said. “She’ll come back when she gets hungry.”
“Don’t be an asshole,” Shakti said. “She needs you.”
“She’s right,” Charles said to him. “You her man.”
Pel scowled. “What the fuck do you know about it?”
“Basta,” Shakti said. “Chill. You’re both helping and that’s that. We’re a team.”
Everyone threw on jackets or fleeces. Sunshine and Amy passed out LED flashlights. “We’ll fan out in pairs,” Sunshine said.
Pel waved an arm. “Just don’t yell out her name, ‘kay? We’re trying to keep a low profile.”
Shakti paired up with Amy and walked down one of the dirt roads, exhaling clouds of fog. She swept her flashlight back and forth, bathing small spots of trees, fields, and buildings in brilliant white, the spots sometimes unblemished circles or ellipses, other times pierced by the jagged shadows of senescent branches. Something crawled from the pit of her stomach, but she forced it back down, knowing at least they were in friendly territory.
“We’ll find her,” Amy said. “Farm’s not that big. Only takes fifteen minutes to walk from one end to the other.”