The Anti-Social Underground
Meanwhile, back in Zone 23, back in officially mid-October, Taylor was being subjected to torture.
A particularly excruciating type of torture.
“The Anti-Social Underground movement is a totally leaderless, decentralized network of autonomous militant revolutionary cells collectively employing a diversity of tactics to resist all forms of Corporatist oppression. The A.S.U. does not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, age, A.S. Class, or any other basis. Discrimination will ...”
This was Adam.
Adam was the leader of the totally leaderless Fifthian Cluster of the A.S.U. He was reading out the text of the Eighth Revision of “The Standard Preamble to All A.S.U. Meetings,” which, before you could start an A.S.U. meeting, someone like Adam had to do.
Adam was a little pink sawed-off white guy who wore his hair in a dreadlock Mohawk and had that kind of white-guy skin with zero melanin that never really tans. He was reading out the text of the Standard Preamble to the hardcore members of Fifthian Cluster, a totally autonomous insurrectionist cell employing a diversity of militant tactics to achieve the liberation of all Anti-Social Persons and resist all forms of Corporatist oppression. The hardcore members of the Fifthian Cluster, who numbered thirteen, including Adam, and who also sported creative haircuts, and facial tattoos and copious piercings, were sitting around in a semi-circle, giving Adam their undivided attention. Taylor, who was bored, and detested Adam, was sitting near the door at the back of the meeting, an Actions Working Group Action Update, which Adam had convened in some airless basement winos used as a field latrine .
“Autonomous cells are free to plan and take what actions they deem appropriate. Such actions include, but are not limited to ...”
By this time Taylor could recite the Preamble, having heard it read out on a daily basis, by Adam or one these other idiots, at the start of each meeting for the past five weeks. The actions each autonomous cell was free and encouraged to deem appropriate, plan, and theoretically take, included, but were not limited to, educational and fundraising activities, property destruction, vandalism, theft, détournements of corporate Content, and other more militant types of actions, which up to then Adam had only alluded to. But those had all been general meetings, which were open to anyone with an honest desire to resist all forms of corporatist oppression, and where security culture was strictly maintained. This was Taylor’s first Action Group Update, which one of the peripheral hardcore members, a woman named Sarah, had invited him to.
“Does anyone have any general issues?”
Nobody had any general issues.
“Good. Then I’ll turn things over to Jamie.”
Adam turned things over to Jamie, a gigantic, hairless, ethnically ambiguous, indeterminately gendered person, so as not to in any way reinforce the arbitrary race- or gender-based dominance of skinny little pink-skinned white guys like Adam, who were always trying to dominate everything.
“OK, everybody, listen up.” Jamie took a pause for dramatic effect. “Word is in from the last few cells. This is it. The D.A.D.A. is on.”
The hardcore members of the Fifthian Cluster sat bolt upright in their chairs and twinkled. Twinkling was when you raised your hands, palms toward the speaker, and wiggled your fingers. You did this to convey consent, or approval, or enthusiastic support, or something positive in any event.
“Before we break out into working groups, we need to discuss and consense around a preliminary Phase Two security culture ... which maybe Adam could facilitate that, and Maya and Dorian could handle the stack, and ...”
Another round of twinkling ensued.
Taylor, who could not believe these idiots were actually going to sit around and exhaustively discuss “security culture” for the fourteen fucking hundredth time, steeled his nerves for what he knew was to follow, which was probably going to take all night. According to their non-hierarchical principles, the hardcore members of Fifthian Cluster, before they could make a decision on anything, which could only be made by consensus, naturally, needed to sit around in a circle, typically for several hours at a stretch, and exhaustively discuss whatever it was they felt they needed to consensually decide. Now this was even worse than it sounds, because the hardcore members of the Fifthian Cluster, despite their clearly extensive knowledge of militant insurrectionist theory (or maybe as a consequence thereof), could not articulate a simple concept in plain fucking English to save their own lives. It was like they were all infected with some kind of polysyllabic lexical virus. Virtually every other thing they said was couched in this pseudo-militant jargon, as if there weren’t already words for whatever the fuck they were trying to say. On top of which they had all these rules, rules about twinkling, and stacking questions, and checking one’s race- or gender-based privilege, which they had to review before every discussion, and refer to, repeatedly, during discussions, which you couldn’t just fucking have, of course, because they had to be facilitated, and someone had to “stack the speakers,” and someone else had to “monitor vibes,” so that no one’s latent hierarchical or normatively privileged choice of words unintentionally verbally oppressed, or excluded, or otherwise offended anyone.
This was mostly what they did all night, the hardcore members of the Fifthian Cluster. They sat around in semi-circles, in the basements and attics of abandoned buildings, with their insurrectionist haircuts and piercings, not oppressing or offending each other. They did this in the course of discussing a range of vital revolutionary topics, like which corporate storefront to boldly vandalize, or which unpronouncable pronouns to use for non-hierarchically gendered persons. The general meetings, which it had to be assumed were being attended by Cooperators, and possibly even Corporatist agents, and where an atmosphere of total paranoia prevailed, usually began with a lengthy discussion of the ins and outs of “security culture,” and the definition of “security culture,” and the need to maintain “security culture,” and then moved on to other more militant topics, like “report backs” on various acts of vandalism, or bake sales, or other fundraising efforts. Once these points had been covered in detail, and the lexis used to cover these points thoroughly scrutinized and challenged, and so on, and consensually revised for future discussions, they would set about discussing, at inordinate length, ways of inciting, or “calling out,” the completely apathetic Anti-Social masses, and convincing them to join the hardcore members of the Fifthian Cluster, and other clusters, and other cells of the A.S.U, in the streets and the squares of Zone 23 on the Day of Autonomous Decentralized Action. According to Adam and his inner circle of hardcore militant resistance fighters, on the Day of Autonomous Decentralized Action (or D.A.D.A., and one pronounced it “dah-dah”), leaderless cells of the A.S.U. in every sector of Zone 23, and in Zones throughout the Northeast Regions, and presumably throughout the entire U.T., would rise up against their Corporatist oppressors, occupy In-Zone factories, stores, assembly plants, administrative offices, and seize control of the means of production, and eventually control of the Zones themselves. These occupied Zones would then be used as totally leaderless fortified bases from which to launch some globally-coordinated anti-Corporatist revolution, which would bring to an end all forms of oppression and establish a peaceful, non-oppressive, global economic and political system, the definitive nature and features of which had not yet been consensually decided.
Taylor wished them luck with all that.
In the meantime, what he was actually doing there (i.e., what he’d been doing for the past five weeks) was sitting in the back of their general meetings, listening, nodding, and twinkling along, as he kept an eye out for person or persons connected to whatever ultra-secretive baby-smuggling inner circle Meyer Jimenez had led him to believe was operating deep within the A.S.U. Theoretically, once he found them, and they agreed to take Cassandra’s baby, and smuggle it out to the Autonomous Zones, or hide it in one of their underground safehouses, or tunnels, or whatever they did with the
babies, Taylor’s life could go back to normal. At this point, five weeks into his mission, he hadn’t met any such person or persons. All he’d met were a lot of Transplants ... polysyllabic jargon-spewing, privilege-checking, twinkling Transplants .
The Anti-Social Underground movement, the old one, the one that Taylor remembered, had a long and rather apocryphal history. How and exactly when it had started were questions no one could possibly answer, and were thus the subject of heated debates at watering holes like Gillie’s Tavern. Older guys, like Young Man Henry, T.C. Johns, and Jim MacReady, sat around drinking and told all these stories, stories they’d heard as younger men from older men in other such taverns, but everybody knew that that was all they were, tenth-hand, wildly conflicting accounts of people who had probably never existed doing things that had probably never happened.
Covert historians, like Meyer Jimenez, reasoned the original resistance had been founded back in the mid-to-late 2300s, so during the Age of Emergency Measures, which was when the Zones were first established, at least according to the corporate records. According to these records, the 24th Century had been a period of reconstruction, during which what was left of humanity, having clawed its way back from the brink of destruction, had moved above the 40th parallel, and established life as everyone knew it. Purportedly, the Age of Emergency Measures (which had officially ended in 2570, but in reality was still very much in effect) had been preceded by something called the Age of Chaos, or the Age of Anarchy, or whatever they called it. (Taylor could never keep that straight.) The dates of this age had not been confirmed, however, as far as Meyer could tell, it had spanned at least two (and maybe several) centuries, during which time a combination of sociopolitical and meteorological catastrophes, including, he wagered, a limited exchange of tactical thermo-nuclear weapons, had wiped out sixty to seventy percent of the sentient population of the planet.
Or maybe all this had happened earlier. Whatever. The point was, whenever it had happened, this Age of Anarchy, or Chaos, or whatever, had ended circa 2300, when the Age of Emergency Measures was declared, and Anti-Sociality discovered, and anyone even vaguely disgruntled, much less outright uncooperative, was herded into the inner cities, around which, possibly fifty years later, the Security Walls had been erected. Presumably, in fairly short order after that, the Anti-Social resistance had been born.
In any event, by 2565, or 6325, or the Year of the Blowfish, or any of a number of other such years (all being the year of Taylor’s birth), the Anti-Social Underground movement had been around ... well, if not quite forever, then longer than anyone alive could remember. Jackson Village, the four-block quadrant of low-rise projects where Taylor was born and lived until the age of five, back in those days, was A.S.U. City. Virtually all of his mother’s friends, and probably his mother, had been involved, just how deeply he did not know ... and he told himself he did not care. They’d lived in some tiny-ass shared apartment with fifteen, maybe twenty other people, where, exactly, he couldn’t tell you ... those three-story red brick housing units (and there were hundreds of them) were nearly identical. His earliest memories were all just bits of scenes his mind had spliced together into this kind of weird montage of kitchens crammed with faceless people ... shirtless, bearded, smoking men with crude tattoos and scars like his, sweat-haired, heavily-titted women, also smoking, also tattooed, their featureless faces floating over tables piled with pots, plates, bottles, the jar lids they used for ashtrays, talking, drinking, shouting, laughing, the salty stench of their sunburned bodies, rice and beans and beer on their breath ... and somewhere in there, in those kitchen memories, somewhere among those faceless faces, one of those faces was the face of his mother, whose face he thought he did remember ... or maybe it was just some random face his mind had somehow linked to his mother, which maybe didn’t even look like his mother, which Taylor would never know for sure, as there weren’t any photos to help him remember, and mostly that’s how memory works. Sometimes, and more and more often recently, for no clear reason, and at the oddest times (like right in the middle of this fucking meeting), he found himself wondering which of those faceless men in those kitchens had been his father, assuming one of them had been his father, and not some other faceless face he had never seen and so had never forgotten. Whatever, he thought. Who cared who he was? Some hairy old guy who’d fucked his mother. The point was, he was fucking dead, as was his mother, and the rest of those people. Everyone in a nine-block radius of Jackson Avenue at the time of the Uprising, or everyone over the age of ten, or all the grown-ups in any event, and the older teens, and a lot of the younger ones, all of them, they were all fucking dead .
And see, that was where resistance got you. It didn’t get you out of the Zone. It didn’t get you better conditions, or sympathy from the fucking Normals. It got you zipped inside a bag, and loaded into the back of a van by IntraZone Sanitation Technicians, and driven off to some crematorium. It got your whole neighborhood leveled by missiles, hammered to pieces by urban artillery, bulldozed flat, and left like that, as a warning to anyone stupid enough to not just sit around and talk about occupying, but to actually occupy corporate property, and take Community Watchers hostage, and make a series of hopeless demands on IntraZone Waste & Security Services, which is what the Jackson Avenue cell of the A.S.U. had done that summer.
They called it the Jackson Avenue Uprising, as if it were some great historic battle, when all it was was a couple hundred militant A.S.U.-type idiots setting fire to corporate stores, hanging banners, making speeches, and, OK, taking a couple of hostages, but mostly just barricading Jackson Avenue and dancing around in the streets all night.
Taylor had no idea at the time, but he learned from various people later (and Meyer Jimenez confirmed all this) that the spark that had set the whole thing off was the leaking of a draft of Ordinance 119, which wouldn’t take effect for another five years. The author of this draft was one Nigel P. Gruber, Senior Vice President of A.S.P. Management, Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin. Although obviously still in the planning stages, all the basic elements were there ... the founding of ConCept, the walk-in clinics, the In-Zone Pro-Contraceptive Messaging, the Candy campaign, the whole nine yards. Someone had gotten a hold of this draft (it had to have been a 1 with a pass), smuggled it into the Zone on a chip, and had passed it on to the A.S.U. Their plan had been to “alert the world” to the Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin’s unspeakably evil and genocidal scheme to rid the planet of Anti-Social Persons, according to Nigel P. Gruber’s projections, by sometime circa 2720. The goal of the Jackson Avenue Uprising was to draw the attention of the Normal media, as well as the Anti-Social population, providing the A.S.U. with a chance to publicize this secret draft, which would horrify the folks in the Normal Communities and hopefully cause the Anti-Socials throughout the U.T. to rise up en masse. Unfortunately, due to a scheduling error, the Jackson Avenue Uprising started an hour before the opening ceremonies of the Interterritorial quarterfinal rounds of “15 Minutes of Superstardom,” the most-watched Amateur Talent Competition in the history of Talent Competition Content. And if that wasn’t terrible timing enough, immediately after the start of the Uprising, they streamed a new round of KILL CHAIN! LIVE!, which meant the Normals were going crazy flipping back and forth between the two “live” shows. And thus, though the Jackson Avenue Uprising was the stuff of legend in Zone 23, virtually no one outside the Zone was aware that it had ever happened. And as for the so-called Gruber Draft, it must have been in the hands of someone who died that weekend on Jackson Avenue, or Cromwell Place, or Walt Whitman Road, or during the purge of the 4s that followed, which had also, officially, never happened. In any event, the draft disappeared, and no one remembered it had ever existed, except for covert historians, like Meyer, and some of the people who were there, like Taylor, and ... whatever, that was all in the past.
In the going on thirty-five years since the Uprising, the A.S.U. had primarily focused on education and network-building,
and had toned down the militant street-fighting thing. They had run these underground schools for kids, but they had gradually phased out during the 90s as the last few classes of A.S.P.s, and finally the Thirties, came of age. For adults, they had offered clandestine workshops on subjects like History, Microeconomics, Gardening, Psychology, and Basic Chemistry, most of which had been poorly attended. More militant members of the A.S.U., although fewer in number, had kept themselves busy burning down ConCept walk-in clinics, corporate stores, and Security vehicles. The vast majority had been shot in the process. That, or else wherever they’d lived, or Security Services had thought they’d lived, had been blown to smithereens by a drone. Occasionally these had been surgical strikes, where they put the missile right through your window, but usually they’d just go ahead and waste the whole building, and everyone in it. Or they’d drive a bus up in front of the building, march all the residents out at gunpoint, load them in, drive them away, and they’d never be seen or heard from again. For these, and other similar reasons, the A.S.U. was not exactly popular among the Anti-Socials, at least not among the native Anti-Socials ... most of whom were simply trying to live through the day without getting wasted and had zero interest in resisting anything. Taylor had often wondered how they had kept the network alive all these years. Now, of course, it all made sense. The old A.S.U., the one he remembered, the one of his mother’s generation, had faded into the mists of history. The new A.S.U. was being run by Transplants, jargon-spewing, twinkling Transplants.
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