Cold

by Robert J. Crane

  “You rock on with your bad self,” Holloway said, reaching his room and opening it with a key. “Just remember if it gets too hot, you can always claim you’re in a ‘bad service area’ and disconnect for a while.”

  “Thanks for the tip,” I said as he disappeared into his room and I thumbed the screen to answer. “Hello?”

  “Ms. Nealon,” came a slightly familiar, male voice from the other end of the line. “My name’s Russ Bilson. Maybe you’ve heard of me?”

  All the fine work that Burkitt had done cooling me down instantly faded as my personal thermometer raced right into the red. “Yeah,” I said, “it’d be hard to forget you since up until a couple months ago, it was impossible to turn on a cable news channel without hearing you trash talk my name to everyone on the planet.”

  63.

  Olivia

  “Ummm,” I said, staring at the black blur. A scream echoed over the wood-paneled barroom, this slice of old-fashioned, old world English sophistication suddenly the site of a metahuman showdown between little old me and a blurring, faster-than-the-eye-could-follow speedster.

  The hole in the wall where Veronika had flown was filled with motes of dust where she’d gone crashing in, disappearing under the power of the speedster’s attack. It looked deep, my ability to see into it vanishing after six or seven walls. It receded into the structure of the Venetian, the wood paneling of the bar giving way to more decorative Italian themes through the hotel and finally to behind-the-scenes employee service corridors that lacked any of the resort’s charm.

  I wheeled on the speedster, who regarded me with…indifference? Anger? It was impossible to say under that vibrating black mask. It could have been sneering contempt or unbridled lust for all I knew. I couldn’t even see the eyes, the blurring effect making it look as though the speedster didn’t even have them.

  “What do you want?” I asked, glancing back at the hole in the wall, wondering if Veronika was going to come crawling back through at some point. The last time this had happened, she’d been wrecked. That suggested she wasn’t going to come, cavalry-like, to my rescue. At least not any time soon.

  “Chaos,” the speedster said.

  I looked back at the hole. “Well, you’re doing fine, then.”

  “More chaos,” the speedster said, that voice sounding like they’d swallowed a gallon of broken glass before speaking, like a swarm of bees was at war in their throat.

  “I…can’t let you do that,” I said, trying to decide what my next move was.

  The speedster took a flashing step toward me, cutting the distance between us in half. “You…what?”

  “I can’t let you do that,” I said, trying to make my voice sound strong, like Veronika would. I stood my ground, not daring to look weak, forcing myself to look the speedster in the—well, where their eyes should have been.

  “How are you going to stop me…mouse?” The speedster’s voice carried the unmistakable hint of a grin, though I couldn’t see it through the black mask.

  I just stared. That was not a bad point. I tried to come up with a response, and what came out was, “Like I did on Fremont Street. That’s how.”

  The speedster regarded me, head cocked, like I was some curiosity. Almost faster than I could see, they picked up a glass from the bar and threw it at me, blurry.

  The glass flashed as it almost cracked into my skull. I flinched away right as it entered my personal bubble and it rocketed away, shattering against the nearby wall. Gin dripped down the wood paneling as I pried my eyes open to look back at the speedster.

  “Hm,” the speedster said. “You still can’t stop me. Chaos comes whether you want it or not.” Some animating urge broke through the bizarre effect around their voice. “It’s the natural state of the world. We fight it, try to build walls to keep it out, try to set our world neatly in order, to the detriment of all. Everything we do is to try and keep the world out of its natural state. We fight nature, but the moment you realize you’re on the wrong side of that fight…suddenly, you’re free.” The speedster spread their arms, as though trying to encompass everything around them. “There is no holding back the chaos. Why try? Join it. Embrace chaos.”

  “I’m not much of a hugger, so, I think not,” I said. I took a deep breath. “All right. I have to stop you now.”

  The speedster’s head blurred and shook. “You can’t. Even if you want to. Chaos is coming. And you can’t hold back its tide, mouse.”

  With that, the speedster lurched into motion, and the bar exploded as they struck it with incredible speed that translated into force. It almost seemed to shatter, shards of wood flying in all direction. I flinched away, but the pieces reached my personal bubble and bounced in the opposite directions.

  A scream cut off behind me, and I looked over my shoulder. One of the bar’s other patrons had fallen off her chair and her eyes were wide, crimson sliding down her cheek from a dozen wounds on her face.

  It took me a second, and then I realized—

  The speedster had used my bubble to accelerate the chaos he’d created, sending the splinters of the bar away from me at high speed…

  Right into that lady, who now probably had splinters buried in the bones of her face.

  “What are you doing?” My question came out as a cry. The lady was spasming, and I wondered how deep those splinters had gone. Had one lodged in her brain?

  “Making chaos happen,” the speedster said, over my shoulder, as I slid down to the wounded woman’s side.

  “She’s innocent!” I stared down at her. Her eyes were already unfocused, and her movement was stilling.

  “Chaos cannot be controlled,” the speedster said. “It falls on the innocent and the guilty.”

  “Easy thing to say when you’re killing people and framing innocent men for your deeds,” I said, my knees aching from my slide.

  “I’ll kill more—if you get in my way,” the speedster said. “You won’t stop the chaos.”

  And with that the speedster zipped away. I stared down at the bleeding woman as she rasped, her breaths shallowing. I was helpless, no action I could take coming to mind. The speedster crashed in the distance, more screams echoed through the casino resort, but there was little I could do but sit there and hold this wounded woman as she bled.

  Nothing I could do, really, without making things worse, so I just sat there and hoped someone would come and save us all.

  64.

  Sienna

  “Hey, it was nothing personal,” Russ Bilson said, and I could almost see his smarmy, shit-talking smile even though we were only on the phone. I unlocked my hotel room and slipped inside, the air conditioner humming to keep the New Orleans heat at bay.

  “Let me break some news for you, Mr. News Commentator Guy: it feels really, intensely personal when someone you don’t even know shits all over your character on television for the whole world to see.” The running AC did not, unfortunately, do anything for the heat that seemed to be building under my skin. “And just as an aside—what is this, asshole day? I feel like the scum of the universe is beating a path to my door right now.”

  “Hah!” Bilson sounded like he laughed for real, and I rolled my eyes. Of course the TV crap-talker would take me calling him scum as some sort of perverse compliment. “I heard you stumbled into a political consultancy down in Louisiana this morning and didn’t know quite what to make of it.”

  “Oh?” My blood was pumping, hot. What kind of asshat would have told this douchebag what I was up to? “Is that so? Who said?”

  “Director Chalke,” Bilson said. Of course. “She’s monitoring your investigation very, very closely, and mentioned you hit on something involving a Louisiana group headed by Rouge Future, LLC? Said you were having a little trouble figuring out what was going on with it?”

  My eyes flitted around my hotel room as I tried to calculate the odds he was lying to get some sort of scoop. “I can neither confirm nor deny—”

  “You don’t have to say anythi
ng,” Bilson said, chuckling on the other end. I would have punched his voice, if I could somehow manage to solidify the sound waves. Ripping out the voice box probably would have been more my style, though. “Like I said, I’m already clear on it. I just figured I’d offer some insight, because this Rouge Future thing? It’s right up my alley.”

  “It did feel like the guy who ran it, Mitchell Werner, was a total and complete d-bag,” I said, “so maybe you’re right.”

  He ignored my last snipe. “From what I hear, Rouge Future is housed in the same office as several other LLCs and PACs controlled by the same person?”

  “Yeah, they all share office space,” I said. “Which is confusing, because—”

  “It’s only confusing because it’s meant to be,” Bilson said, apparently deciding the conversing part of our conversation was annoying, and that engaging in a monologue would be better. “This Mitchell Werner? He’s a political consultant, and all those groups are just tools in his toolbox to do different things in the political sphere. The LLC is so he can accept donations and transfer payments from donors without having to report them, the way a PAC—that’s political action committee—would have to. Because of their tax-exempt status, PACs have to account for their spending, including any salaries they pay. I’m guessing any of the PACs he runs pay him a modest salary. Likely as not, he gets most of his money from management fees the PACs pay to his LLC—”

  “Oh, for crying out loud,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s a shell game.”

  “Well, of course,” Bilson said, and I could still hear the smile in his voice. “Donations go into the various organizations from big and small money donors, and content comes out—content that influences politics in the direction Werner chooses.”

  “How perfectly scuzzy,” I said, pretty sure my voice dropped the temperature in my room by several degrees. I didn’t feel it myself, but hopefully Bilson did, over the line.

  “Admittedly it’s not the cleanest process, but you know what the alternative is?” Bilson’s voice-grin had faded as he moved into a more serious mode of explanation. “Accepting restrictions on free speech. Quashing people’s ability to speak.”

  I frowned. “It seems to me that the major people speaking through this swampy mess are people who could afford to get their own damned megaphone if they wanted.”

  “Not all of them, though,” Bilson said. “And maybe not as many as you think. Given some of the issues it looks like Werner agitates for—protecting coastal swamps from drilling, more money into education—he probably has a decent number of small money donors, if he’s doing any kind of grass roots—that’s lower-level—organizing. This is all local politics, so by extension, it’s going to be smaller dollars than Washington deals with.”

  I blinked. “Wait. This happens in Washington? This weird network of groups thing? Where money gets passed back and forth between companies?”

  “Oh, absolutely,” Bilson said. “Let me give you an example of how it works. Say Bilson wants to do an ad campaign on protecting wetlands, and he wants to engage on all fronts. One of his businesses looks like it focuses entirely on the internet, another on messaging. What he’d do is have his lead organization issue a press release and use his contacts to make sure it was covered to the best of his ability to spread it far and wide. The web side would create sites and social media profiles, maybe even try and use some sock puppet accounts they have—”

  “Do I even want to know what a ‘sock puppet’ is?”

  “It’s just a fake social media account,” Bilson said. “Anyway, they’d rally these accounts together and follow the new social media presence of this group. Let’s just call it ‘Save the Wetlands.’ Which is too vague to be an actual campaign, but you get the idea. It sounds good, has a feel-good sort of moral air about it—what kind of monster would want to destroy the wetlands, after all?”

  “If some of my enemies were clustered together in one, I’d bomb the hell out of it.”

  Bilson chuckled. “You’re special, then, Ms. Nealon, because most people would be horrified to be thought of as being against saving the wetlands. See, that’s the beauty of an operation like the one I’m talking about—even calling it what I am defines the moral terms, immediately casting the other side as evil, because what sort of monster would want to do such a horrible, horrible thing?”

  I rolled my eyes again. “Yes, congrats to you, Orwell Jr, and all your minions, for defining political reality in such stark terms. Thanks for making any discussion an immediate ‘us versus them’ proposition. I’m sure that won’t have a deleterious effect on our societal interactions at all.”

  “Anyhow,” Bilson said, “money is moved back and forth between the organizations to produce things like advertising campaigns—print, radio, TV, online—and getting their social media presence engaged—”

  “I thought you said all they did on social media was get their suck Muppets moving?”

  “Sock puppets,” Bilson said. “But the sock puppets are just a placeholder to get people to see social proof that others care about the movement so that they feel more comfortable jumping in to the cause. It just warms the water up for others, see?”

  “Like peeing in a pool, sure.”

  “Hah,” Bilson said, not actually laughing. “It’s just psychology. It also gives them outsized reach if a legislator looks at their movement’s profile page and sees six thousand followers versus five people.”

  “That’s really cynical and gross.”

  “It’s politics,” Bilson said. “And it’s called ‘Astroturfing’. Kind of a play on ‘grass roots’ movements—”

  “Hilarious. Or at least it’s funny, but not in the humorous way.”

  “Anyway,” Bilson said, “these are the methods of the modern political operator. They use every means at their disposal—advertising, research papers, internet operations, traditional media sources—to influence public opinion to get a movement going. It looks to me like this Mitchell Werner has five, six pet causes he’s working—again, mostly state issues—and this is how he’s set up his structure to maximize his effectiveness and, well,” Bilson chuckled, “what he gets paid, too.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Thanks for the crash course in political skullduggery. That was eye-opening. I really feel like I need a shower after all that.”

  “Why?” Bilson asked. “It’s not at all illegal, and it’s totally normal.”

  “No wonder people hate Washington,” I said, “because this crap is cynical, gross, and scuzzy AF. You’re talking about people using the internet to inflate the perceived interest in their cause—”

  “That does happen,” Bilson said, “but it’s also a valuable way to get messaging out, to train media operatives like myself in the basic dictums of the issue—called talking points—so we can go on TV and discuss them without being uninformed.”

  “You train those numbskulls that go on cable news to parrot the same bullshit?” I asked. “This is why I turn on a news panel for five minutes and get these cookie cutter morons that say the same thing over and over again like a robot with its wires crossed?”

  “Like I said, talking points. And yes, it’s important for messaging that operators don’t stray too far from the topic at hand. Or stay ‘on message,’ rather.”

  I shook my head, flopping back on the bed with a new, angrier appreciation for the way things were going in politics. “Let me ask you something that I think I already know the answer to—if you had someone, say a famous someone, political candidate, and they got on the wrong side of someone like this Mitchell Werner…how would one of these political networks go after them?”

  “With everything they have,” Bilson said. “It happens all the time. Private detectives are hired to do background—called ‘oppo,’ for oppositional—research. The people we have that are better on the web are deployed to trawl their social media and internet footprint for anything they’ve ever said. We send operatives to their political rallies and film, looking for
controversial statements, comb through their past seeking anything we can use against them, let loose an army of commentators to rip them apart in every media appearance—”

  “That’s kind of what I figured,” I said, nodding along. It sounded familiar because it was—everything he was describing had been done to me.

  By him.

  Bilson seemed to get it a couple seconds later. “Like I said, it’s not personal when something like this happens to you. Sometimes it’s not even coordinated, it’s just the result of the person being in the zeitgeist and on the side of an unfavorable issue.”

  “Yes, I’m sure that the digital mobs that roam the dystopian internet wastelands are entirely undirected by anyone,” I said, feeling the soft bed beneath me. “Thanks for the primer on modern political dickery. I guess the only other question I have is about the way these guys make money. You say it’s all legal?”

  “Sure,” Bilson said. “Unless the politician is directly coordinating with the PAC or there’s some sort of favor being exchanged with an actual politician that you can prove, it’s all legal. And even those things do happen; it’s all in what you can prove.”

  “So much scuzzy,” I said. “I’m going to go get some bleach and take that shower now. Try not to smear anyone else today, hmm?”

  “Well,” Bilson said, chuckling again. So many punchable faces today. “I’ll try. But keep in mind—it’s the job.”

  “Your job is gross,” I said, and hung up on him without any further pretense toward politeness. Then I shuddered and went to take that shower, wondering if I could get the water temperature hot enough to scourge off a full layer of skin, because I felt like after today, I desperately needed it.