by Ramez Naam
He waited, and waited, and waited for them to stop, these people who’d stuck with him through thick and thin, who’d supported him when he’d taken unpopular positions, when he’d stood up for a restoration of civil rights, even when a frightened populace was ready to constrict them even further, when he’d fought for an America that looked to the future instead of being mired in the past.
They thought they were cheering him for a noble effort. For the old college try. They thought they were buoying his spirits in the face of defeat.
He loved them for it.
He waited until the crowd quieted, and then he trumpeted out three words, his voice amplified across the space.
“WE. FIGHT. ON.”
The crowd cheered their approval, whistling, waving their banners, hooting and hollering, most of them still not really understanding.
He bellowed out across the crowd, his hands held out to them.
“We fight for a land where every woman and man among us can choose our own fates for our own minds and bodies!”
The crowd roared its approval.
“We fight for a nation that is founded on the freedom of individuals as its fundamental, bedrock principle.”
The crowd cheered uproariously.
“We fight for a country where lying to the citizens, manipulating them, torturing them, and murdering them is a crime!”
The crowd roared.
“Where no matter how high and mighty they may be, the perpetrators of those crimes are brought to justice!”
“Jus-tice!” The crowd started chanting. “Jus-tice! Jus-tice!”
“We fight for a land where the government is more frightened of its citizens than its citizens are of the government!”
The crowd roared. Pumped up now.
“WE. FIGHT. ON.”
Flashbulbs burst across the space. The confetti and balloons stored above were set free, raining down on the thousands assembled here. The giant screens behind him came alive,
ELECTORAL MAP – INCLUDING UPDATED VOTES
Showing large swaths of blue down the west coast, across the mid-west, down the north east, in Florida.
The crowd went wild, screaming, getting it now.
“More than eleven million voters attempted to switch their votes to us in the last forty eight hours! When those voters have their votes counted correctly, as is their constitutional right, as we’re asking the Supreme Court to uphold: WE HAVE WON!”
23
Riot Boy
Tuesday 2040.11.06
“Oh, Jesus,” Oscar said. “It’s a fucking riot.”
“What?” Rangan exclaimed.
“People everywhere,” Oscar said. “Oh hell…”
Rangan pulled himself upright, felt a stab of pain from his rib as he did, and then he saw.
Beyond the windshield the street was full of people, angry people, some waving signs, some chanting or raising fists into the air, others…
Rangan watched a man rise into the air, hanging limply by his neck from a rope dangling from a long pole. His mouth gaped in horror. They were murdering people. And the man’s face looked familiar…
“We’re getting the fuck out of here,” he heard Oscar say.
The car lurched into reverse, throwing Rangan forward, into the gap between the front seats.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Oscar yelled, seeing Rangan, turning to berate him. “If you can see the windshield…”
The collision alarm cut him off, blaring through the car. The brakes slammed on of their own accord and the car came to a screeching halt, throwing Rangan backwards into the rear seat.
Pain burst through him. He groaned out loud with it. The whole world shrank to the agony in his guts as the deceleration pressed him into the car’s seat.
When he faded back into reality, the first thing he saw was the man they’d hung.
No. Not a man. Something about the way the figure swung back and forth was wrong. The weight was all wrong. The pole hardly bent.
Not a man.
A caricature.
An effigy.
Of John Stockton.
Someone held a flame to its foot as he watched, and the figure lit, fast and bright. The flames spread up the foot, the leg, to the figure’s torso, its head, its arms, engulfing it in seconds.
“Not real,” Rangan croaked in relief. “It’s not real.”
“Fucking real enough,” Oscar replied. He was almost horizontal in the front, his hands buried under the dashboard, digging for something.
Jesus, Rangan thought, he’s got a gun.
Oscar came up with a data fob instead, the kind that went into a car’s nav system.
“We gotta go,” he said. “Get outta the car.”
“What?” Rangan yelled in alarm. Out of the car? “Just drive back the way we came!”
“Look around, asshole! There is no way we came!”
Rangan looked. The riot had engulfed them. He turned left and saw a woman waving a DOWN WITH THE FASCISTS sign. He turned right in time to see a brick fly through a shop window. Rangan craned around backwards and saw… oh fuck.
There was another car behind them. That’s what had set off the collision alarm. A car that had been flipped over onto its back by the mob, who were now slamming bricks and boards and pieces of signs against its windows, trying to batter their way through the Gorilla Glass. In the windshield he saw a terrified face, a middle aged man in a suit, huddled on what had been the ceiling of his car, his phone in his hand, his face lit by the glow of it. He’d probably been taking his own route around the accident on the freeway. Fuck, maybe he’d even voted for Stan Kim.
“Holy shit,” Rangan breathed.
“Can you run?” Oscar asked.
Rangan waved his arms at the man, trying to catch his attention, saw him take notice.
“Can you RUN?” Oscar yelled.
He pantomimed taking something off, a jacket, off one shoulder, off one sleeve, then the other. Take off the jacket, man. Take off the fucking suit!
The man stared at him blankly. Rangan heard a sound behind him, suddenly found the car more full of light.
Then he realized he was wearing a prop.
He pointed at the man, then pointed at himself, and started pulling off his own hoodie in an exaggerated show. He had the left arm off when the car door to his right opened, Oscar reached in, and grabbed him by the sleeve.
“RUN!!” Oscar yelled, pulling hard on Rangan’s sleeve. His eyes were huge, focused on something beyond Rangan.
Everything happened too fast, then, and too slowly.
Oscar pulled.
Rangan turned, to see what Oscar was staring at, and saw the black-masked figures crouched at the other side of the car, about to lift it up and over. His heart pounded.
Rangan felt the other sleeve of his hoodie yanked off his right arm. He turned back, saw Oscar crash backwards to the ground just outside the car, Rangan’s hoodie in his hands. He saw confusion in Oscar’s eyes, then fear.
Then Rangan felt the car tip up, the other side, the side away from Oscar, rising higher and higher. His open door was suddenly down and it was full of the street and Oscar’s legs and Rangan was sliding towards it. He threw out his own legs and caught himself against the frame of the door.
Oscar screamed, loudly and clearly. Rangan heard it above all the other noise, above the pain in his own guts, above his own fear. He saw the younger man’s legs, mangled as the now half-open car door came down over them.
Rangan threw himself backwards, against the car’s seat, what had once been down, trying to tip it back the way it had come.
Instead he bounced off, came forward onto his face onto the ceiling of the car, as it became the new down, as the vehicle kept rotating, kept fucking rolling.
Oscar screamed, “FUUUUUUUCK”.
And then the scream ended as the car came crashing down to a new horizontal.
Rangan found himself sobbing, sobbing, crawling, knowing he had to move, so
bbing, reaching for the door, trying to pull himself out.
Hands grabbed him, hauled him out roughly. His head banged into something as they did. Pain burst through his ribs. The world swam. He heard voices.
“…fucking dead…”
“…accident…”
“…oh shit…”
“…he’s a witness…”
“…just fucking scatter…”
He heard something clatter to the ground next to him.
Consciousness receded.
Rangan opened his eyes, found himself on his back, still here, still where he had been, just seconds before.
Not in heaven, then.
Still in hell.
There was smoke coming from the effigy of John Stockton. Glowing red embers were rising into the night.
They’re beautiful, he thought. A beautiful sight.
Around him, somewhere, there was chaos, distant, horrid, chaos. He didn’t want to go there. He shut it out.
He focused on the sky above, instead. He stared transfixed as the glowing embers rose, higher, higher still, lofted by the warmth of the smoke and fire below them.
Then one by one, as he watched, they died out in the cold air above.
Like Oscar.
BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT.
Auuuuuugggggghhhh.
A sound louder, deeper, and more painful than any Rangan had ever heard pounded through him, resonating through his bones, his teeth, his bowels. It was like every bass bin of every system he’d ever DJed had been piled atop him, turned up to twenty, and blasted on the same bass line all at once.
Oh fuck that was motivating in worst fucking way.
He rolled onto his side, curling into a ball, his stomach heaving. Someone fell to the pavement just feet from his face. He barely noticed as his stomach heaved again. He rolled all the way over, just in time, as the lunch he’d eaten hours ago with the boys emptied itself out of him onto the pavement.
Then the sirens came. WAWAWAWAWAWAWA.
He looked up and there were spinning lights out there in the distance, over the heads of the crowd, many of whom were now on their knees. Spinning lights in the direction they’d been driving. Spinning lights in the direction they’d come from. Buildings in the other two directions.
“YOU ARE ORDERED TO DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY,” boomed across the crowd. “YOU HAVE THIRTY SECONDS. ALL WHO DO NOT DISPERSE WILL BE ARRESTED.”
Disperse? How could they disperse? They were penned in by the cops and the buildings.
He pushed himself up to one knee. God, he hurt. A stranger in a mask – maybe one of the men who’d rolled their car – was on the ground, groaning. A piece of wood lay nearby, maybe part of a sign, just beyond his outstretched hand. Rangan grabbed the board from the ground, used it like a cane to come to standing.
He looked up and, not twenty feet away, a protester had a brick his hand, cocked back to throw, and then it was flying through the air, towards the flashing lights.
“Oh shit,” Rangan heard himself say.
Then the rubber bullets – he hoped they were rubber – converged on the protester, picked him up and threw him back.
There was a crash and a change in one of the siren tones as the brick made lucky contact with the top of a police cruiser, and then the air was thick with projectiles flying back in towards the protest – canisters, thick ones, spraying gas, teargas – and within seconds Rangan’s eyes were burning and he was coughing and the coughs were wracking his broken ribs and oh holy fucking god he didn’t know what to do anymore.
He dropped back to one knee, half blind, barely able to breathe, barely able to think. Next to him he saw a flicker of red in a protester’s hand. A bottle, a rag stuffed in one end like a wick. The rag came alive with flame, and the man hurled it towards the police lines.
Oh my fucking god, Rangan thought.
Around him he saw more Molotov cocktails lit and hurled into the sky at the police vehicles, saw more teargas canisters land, the clouds of gas grow thicker.
Gas, he thought, fucking gas.
The protesters around him had bandanas, he saw. He ripped off his tee shirt, leaving himself bare-chested in the night, and tied it around his nose and mouth and let the rest hang down.
Maybe, he thought, that’ll help.
Then more gas wafted into his lungs and made him hack and hack and hack.
Maybe not.
A phalanx of riot police in armor, with tall transparent shields, anonymizing reflective masks, and long electrified truncheons, marched forward out of the smoke. He crouched lower at the corner of the overturned car and watched as they reached a smattering of disorganized protesters, and brought their truncheons down viciously, again, and again, long after their targets were prone.
A riot cop turned and looked right at him, and Rangan hid his face, and cowered, and just hoped he looked as miserable and harmless as he was.
Holy fuck, he thought, how the hell am I going to get out of here?
Something tickled at his mind.
A thought.
Someone else’s thought.
Someone else’s mind.
And then it was gone.
He turned, searching.
Tear gas ripped a cough from him, bringing agony to his ribs.
Oh god, he realized. I’m so fucking out of practice.
He closed his eyes.
Please, please, please.
Open. Max sensitivity. Directional search.
Please, please, please.
An explosion boomed somewhere, close enough that he felt heat against his face.
Someone screamed, and he heard the sickening crunch of bones breaking, and then the gurgling end of the scream. An image of a police truncheon crushing a protestor’s skull came unbidden into his mind.
Please, please, please.
Tears were rolling down his face, from the tear gas, or for Oscar, or because he was well and truly fucked.
THERE.
THERE, MOTHERFUCKER.
A mind.
Two minds! Maybe more.
They were that way, to his left, inside the building, moving, talking to each other, not to Rangan. He was picking up their leakage. They were just barely at the limit of his range, honestly they should be beyond his range, way beyond his range, and they were moving far faster than he could right now.
He threw everything he had into one mental yell of longing at them.
HELP!!!!!
He sent them a sense of himself, hurt, nearly blind from the teargas, wanted by the cops, trapped by the police lines, needing them.
PLEASE!!!!
He felt them hesitate. They stopped moving. Data flowed fast and fierce between them, disagreement, argument.
Then they were moving back towards him. One stopped inside one of the buildings, and two of them dashed out. They were dressed in drab colors, with industrial looking boots on their feet; round black goggles over their eyes; respirators whose vents moved back and forth over their mouths and noses; and headbands with what seemed to be antennae, among other things, projecting from them. A mass of black dreadlocks sprawled out above one headband. Short, spiky blue locks projected above the other.
They each got under an arm and took some of his weight. The one with black dreadlocks was solidly built, muscular. The other was shorter than he was, and slighter of build.
A teenager?
MOVE, ASSHOLE! the big one sent him.
Rangan grunted, put everything he had into hauling forward, and suddenly they were moving at something close to a jog. Another explosion went off behind them. Another scream. Another sound of broken bone.
Off to the side Rangan caught a glimpse of more police vehicles arriving. Armored vehicles now, not just ordinary cruisers. Another teargas canister erupted before them, obscuring the view and forcing corrosive gas into his eyes and lungs. Rangan coughed, stumbled, but by then they were almost to the building, and then they were pushing in through the shattered glass tha
t was once a store front, and he thought surely they could stop here, but instead they kept moving, kept penetrating deeper into the shop, and then through a door, and out of the shop, and into a darkened inner hallway, and then through another door, and into an elevator that took them down.
The elevator opened into a cellar, and then his two saviors dragged him out to where the third, dressed a lot like them, was waiting. Rangan could definitely feel all three of them now.
The two holding him slowly lowered him to the concrete floor, and Rangan caught himself on his knees, still gasping.
“Thank you,” he said, when he could catch his breath.
The third figure, the one who hadn’t come out to him, shorter than he was, with a mass of red curls above his headband, reached forward and stuck a small rectangular object against the side of Rangan’s neck.
The redheaded figure reached up with his other hand, lifted his goggles and lowered his respirator, revealing not a he, but a she.
“Alright, asshole,” she said. “Who the fuck are you?”
Rangan stared up in surprise.
The big guy with the black dreads lifted his own goggles and lowered his own respirator, and it wasn’t a guy at all. That was undeniably a she, not a he. Then Rangan’s female savior reached forward, grabbed Rangan’s shirt-slash-bandana, and tugged it off of him in one quick motion.
“Don’t you know anything, Tempest?” the one with the black dreads said. “This is the masterfrackin Axon.”
Thousands of kilometers away, in an exclusive tower above the Pudong, the Avatar stood Ling’s body at the window. Ling’s eyes looked out over the wonder of Shanghai, out across the gap to the next tower over, and the enormous twenty-story visage of the doe-eyed, porcelain skinned actress, Zhi Li. The faux-goddess. Bah.
I will show them what a true goddess is, the Avatar thought, surveying her handiwork across the United States, the chaos she’d wrought there, the way the humans scurried like ants to distract themselves from the true threat they faced.