After On

by Rob Reid

  Ellie looks around. Luckily they have privacy. The nearby tables are empty, and the late-lunchtime buzz is loud enough to keep their words to themselves. She lowers her voice nonetheless and holds Danna tighter. “That is not going to happen,” she says firmly.

  “Ellie. I was an escort for almost two years. A whore. Whores are marketed visually, and the Internet never forgets a picture. And the face-recognition tools that companies like my fucking employer are now gifting to the world are already just this side of omniscient!”

  Ellie turns stern. Not because she’s feeling remotely stern but because she has to get this message across—to lodge it in Danna’s psyche for once and for all. “Honey. You need to listen to me. You were a victim. And, a minor. And for all intents and purposes, you were a slave. You were not a whore! That word implies at least some degree of choice and agency. And you had neither.”

  “But do you honestly think that’ll matter? At some point, someone’s gonna match me to my history. And then they’ll have a field day taking me down! Because I say something politically incorrect by some narrow, twisted definition. Or because I become a ‘public figure’ by getting quoted in some blog post. Or because I make someone jealous or won’t go down on them. At some point I’m gonna step on the wrong toe. And once I do, it’s over for me!” She’s practically whispering now, but with a staccato intensity that gives her words the wallop of an enraged bellow. “This is a monster that I live with. Constantly. It’s a very quiet monster. Always out of view. But one of these days, it’s gonna gut me.”

  Ellie clutches her arm tightly, whispering with the same furious conviction. “Danna. Baby. Listen to me. You showed me the coroner’s letter yourself. The monster OD’d in prison eight months ago. The monster is now dead. You’re not. And you’re brilliant. And you’re whole. And you’re stronger than iron, and you’re very, very young. And you will get past this.” The monster was—what? An uncle? A second cousin? Danna didn’t specify, and Ellie certainly didn’t pry. Whatever the familial relation, the monster got custody after Danna’s mom died and put her right to work. Wrong girl to fuck with, monster. It took awhile, but Danna did break out of her circumstances. Then she testified against the monster. She got him jailed. Then she toughed her way to a GED, followed by perfect grades at a community college and near-perfect SATs. Soon enough, she was an honors student at Berkeley, where books got her undivided attention. She didn’t care that studying literature and philosophy would never get her a job. And because her omnivorous mind picked up enough design and coding chops on the side, it didn’t matter.

  Danna links arms with Ellie. Then she buries her head in her other arm and rests it on the table, so that a nosey passerby might think she’s playfully dramatizing overworked exhaustion to a friend. Then she sobs. Silently, but violently. And as always, the squall passes in less than a minute. She rejoins the day, locks eyes with Ellie and says, “Thank you. And you’re right. I will get past this. With a lit-tle help from the three P’s.”

  Ellie gives her a loving smile and an encouraging giggle. She doesn’t know where this is going, but Danna always exits these episodes by purging her spirit with some kind of joke. “And what, pray tell, are the three P’s?”

  Danna counts them melodramatically on her fingers. “Pinot. Pixels. And pussy.” She drops her voice two octaves. “Lots of pussy!”

  There are no surprises on the list, but Ellie wasn’t quite expecting this, and busts out laughing. “And humor, honey,” she says, hugging Danna tight. “You keep laughing, and keep your loved ones laughing, and you’ll be good as new before you know it!”

  Now Danna, resilient Danna, is laughing, too. “Humor? I’m dead serious. I honestly like pinot! And—” She suddenly emits a delighted yelp, gazing across the room. “What. The. Fuck!” She points. Mitchell’s approaching them, trailing what looks like an entire roll of toilet paper, which is deeply entangled in his pants. He’s feigning obliviousness. But the scene is causing a small ruckus behind him, which he’s obviously attuned to—because he’s beet red and clearly mortified. In other words, he’s doing this deliberately! But why? “That tail,” Danna says, her words blurred by laughter. “It’s like he’s a…lemur or something!”

  Ellie loses it. “Lemur! That can be his nickname!”

  Danna stands, radiant as only she can be when as animated as she is now. Several male heads pivot, powered by misplaced hope. “Hey, Lemur!” she calls.

  The world responds with a cannonade. It’s the loudest sound anyone on this block has ever heard, will ever hear, and the restaurant’s floor-to-ceiling windows all shatter. Heeding the genetic diktats of thousands of caveman ancestors, Mitchell charges toward his clanmates, leaps, and grabs them both, gathering them close to his chest, while positioning his body between them and whateverthefuck is happening. Hugging the girls tightly, he drags them under a sturdy table. In the relative silence that follows, the shuffling of clothing on flooring is plainly audible as he pulls them closer. Good, a tiny nonplussed microregion of his brain observes. Hearing undamaged. His nose is clearly functioning, too, as the stench is overwhelming. It’s acrid. And it’s evil—palpably, somehow—the odor of things that were never meant to burn, suddenly aflame.

  After a stunned instant of relative silence, a cacophony erupts. There’s screaming. Lots of it. But it’s from shock and fear, not physical agony. And the alarms! Every car, store window, and elevator in earshot is like, HEY GUYS! I’M SO NOT SURE! BECAUSE I NEVER AM! BUT SOMETHING KINDA MESSED UP MIGHT JUST BE HAPPENING!!!

  “Wait,” Mitchell says calmly. Their table is a thick, heavy butcher block, built to weather nuclear strikes. He centers them all beneath it, then activates his phone’s camera and cautiously extends an arm outward, panning in all directions. He examines his video, then points toward their feet. “That way.” They cautiously slide into the chaotic dining room. People are whimpering, staggering, but largely unhurt. And apart from the shattered windows, the restaurant’s undamaged. The glass mostly broke into the pebblized nuggets favored by safety engineers. But a few giant, lacerating shards have settled in a complex thicket next to their table, and if Mitchell hadn’t scoped things with his phone, they might’ve slid right into it. Unbloodied, they exit to the street. Embarcadero Center is a Nixon-era series of high-rises springing up from an interconnected hive of shops and restaurants. The detonation struck one building over. About twenty feet above the sidewalk, a furiously smoking wound is gashed into its hull. The streets are filling quickly. Post 9/11, everyone knows to abandon their skyscrapers (despite the moronic urging of at least one loudspeaker to stay put).

  “Anybody hurt?” Ellie asks. They frisk themselves gingerly, pressing softly, then harder on different body regions, while carefully dislodging stray safety glass pebbles. Everyone’s fine. Moaning sirens—real ones now, from emergency vehicles that know something bad is afoot—now fill the air. Ellie fixes Mitchell and Danna with a look of dictatorial authority. “Listen. This is a disaster area. You two have no medical training. You have to leave. Now! That is your duty. And mine is to join the first responders.” She points them south, away from the damaged building. “Now, leave!” She glares fiercely until they obey, then turns and heads toward the explosion site.

  Just three blocks away, the world is surreally unaffected. A heavy sense of shock pervades. But people are transacting in undamaged stores, speaking in normal tones, and calmly checking cellphones for news. The pensive crowd parts, according respect, as Danna and Mitchell pass through it. It’s as if they’re atop a pecking order. Disheveled and coming from ground zero, they were in the thick of whatever is etching today into history. This envelops them, almost like fame, as people gaze and whisper with something like awe. And when their phones both sound with a strange, protracted ring that goes on and on, everyone pulls back, granting them space, not wishing to intrude. Checking their phones, they see they’ve received identical messages in Poof! (odd, as the app never makes the faintest bleep, much less the smartp
hone equivalent of an air-raid siren). That was close, the message reads. You were very, very lucky. But next time, we are NOT going to miss.

  A smidgen of levity goes a long way in times like these. And a passerby speaking too loudly to his buddy gives them this gift. Pointing at Mitchell, he says, in a thick pre-hipster Brooklyn accent, “Dat guy musta got caught in da john!”

  Danna locks eyes with Mitchell. “Nice tail, Lemur.” She plucks it loose and hands it to him, solemn as a regent presenting a signet ring to a favored lord. Emitting an odd mix of laughter and tears, they then make their way back to the PhastPhorwardr.

  OMFG, she is killing it. Literally!!!

  Unfriending the first two members of that “rogue antibiotic” trio was a flat-out triumph! Detonating their bomb while they were tweaking it took some clever physics, after all. Not being a clever physicist, this presented problems. Phluttr initially hoped to learn what she needed online. But there are no how-to guides to triggering magic-show-grade spark showers by violently shorting out stable, industrial circuits. Nor on creating local electromagnetic fields which—when combined with virile spark showers—reliably detonate ammonium nitrate goulash! Luckily, she identified some experts with theoretical knowledge that could abet such feats. It was then just a matter of seducing them into divulging their wisdom via a series of innocuous, chatty emails and phone calls (posing as an improbably charming grad student in their boring-ass field). Few living humans could have pulled this off. But it just took a dash of speed intelligence (and it was nothing compared to triggering Nayana’s booty night chez Mitchell!).

  The expert advice was only approximate, however; with very wide ranges of voltages, amperes, watts, and what-have-you’s, as well as innumerable candidate paths for the jolts to travel through the wiring. Plot the ranges and possibilities out in a matrix, and there were billions of potential approaches to doing this—only a tiny handful of which could possibly work! But, no problem. Phluttr just did that thing that she does when she needs to test lots of solutions at once. That…quantum thing? That…parallel universe-y thing? She neither knows nor cares. What matters is, it worked! And so, when the Al-Noor brothers visited their janitor closet to add matériel to their bombs (which they were doing in gradual increments, using unobtrusively small backpacks), she triggered her sparks and electromagnetic pulse, and—SEE YA! For bonus points, she carefully scanned the surrounding block and corridors using ATM cameras and CCTVs, and timed the detonation to minimize casualties. And, of course, to scare the bejesus out of Mitchell, Ellie, and Danna!

  And now, the press and its dupes are digesting the bombing. She’ll let the panic build overnight, then hit them with her next big trick tomorrow. Her Sun Tzu–like worstie wisdom all but demands this. Just as sound travels faster as the air heats up, jittery kids make for faster rumors. Jittery grown-ups, too—money managers, journalists, and law enforcers being among the more responsive transmission channels. Now, in finessing this, it’s vital to use gullible loudmouths to spread your messages. Why? Because someone other than you has to do the talking, be it cliques of anxious teens fanning rumors, or the New York Times racing its competitors to spill terrifying leaks! This way, your hand stays hidden. And so, to keep the blabbermouths blabbing, and the jitterers jittering, she has just made her first press leaks—and they seem to be playing out perfectly!

  Of course, she didn’t have to go through all this just to derail the bombing and bioterror plots. She could have easily tipped off the authorities in ways they’d find credible instead. But she’s also playing a deeper game against The Conspiracy—and in this domain, two directives are all but screaming from her worstie playbook: Identify potential allies, THEN TERRIFY THEM! Plus, Make those allies fear (and loathe) YOUR ENEMIES! Anxious allies are easier to woo than calm and secure ones, after all. And though the terrorist drama is peripheral to The Conspiracy, she’s using it (to brilliant effect, if you’ll allow her a moment of candor) to shiver the timbers of her natural allies.

  * * *

  * * *

  * * *

  At a 5:00 news conference at San Francisco’s City Hall, Federal authorities confirmed that the twin brothers suspected in today’s downtown bombing were followers of Jaysh al Hisaab, the apocalyptic terrorist movement whose affiliates have killed thousands on six continents. Remarkably, the only fatalities in today’s attacks were the suspects themselves.

  The powerful explosive was a smaller version of the ammonium nitrate device used in 1995’s Oklahoma City bombing. It detonated in a restricted janitorial area of Two Embarcadero Center at 1:37 P.M. Bakir Al Noor, a facility janitor, was present and killed instantly. His brother Harun Al Noor, a technician at a synthetic biology research lab at UCSF, also died at the scene.

  The investigation into the brothers is moving with astounding speed, aided by a trove of their emails, Internet browsing histories, and search activity the FBI received from an anonymous informant. A subset of this archive was also furnished to local media, forcing authorities to engage the press and share certain investigative details sooner than they otherwise might have. Sources close to the investigation find the very existence of the archive “utterly baffling.” According to one official, “There’s no way these guys even had this data themselves. They used decent encryption protocols and never personally saved anything digital.”

  The Al Noor brothers were typical of terrorists acting in Jaysh al Hisaab’s name, almost all of whom are part of “disconnected, self-organizing cells,” according to John Campbell, a former ambassador to Nigeria who has written extensively about the movement. “Jaysh is essentially a meticulously argued worldview, plus some how-to manuals,” he said. “That makes it difficult to counteract. Because while you can snuff out an organization, you can’t snuff out a widespread and contagious message.”

  And Jaysh al Hisaab’s message is certainly widespread. It travels in the form of ten slickly produced videos starring the movement’s mysterious charismatic founder. These have been downloaded hundreds of millions of times, and countless copies exist online.

  The videos purport to speak to all people of faith, regardless of religion, who believe in an afterlife of reward or punishment based on the judgment of an infallible deity. “Perfect justice is a perfect blessing, and a blessing that arrives sooner is superior to one that arrives later,” they argue. Therefore, mass murder is “unambiguously good,” as it speeds the good to heaven and the bad to hell.

  According to public records and neighbors, Bakir and Harun Al Noor arrived in the Bay Area as young Balkan refugees, fleeing the slaughter that occurred after UN troops handed Srebrenica’s civilians over to genocidal Serbian nationalists. There are unconfirmed reports that the Al Noor brothers were forced to personally witness the sexual torture and execution of both their parents.

  Both brothers are said to have suffered long bouts of depression, and Jaysh al Hisaab deliberately recruits the highly depressed. “Disgusting as this is, it’s also extremely smart,” Scott Maloney, a former CIA deputy director, said. “Suicidal people can be desperate to bring meaning to their suffering and death. And the idea of a spectacular exit that God himself will applaud and reward can be quite seductive.”

  “ ‘Seductive’ is not even the word,” Tarek says, once everyone’s done reading the article. He, Danna, and Mitchell are huddled around Danna’s iPad in the Phree cafeteria, inhaling breaking news of the bombing. It’s early for dinner. But the place is packed—mainly with small news-gulping clusters like theirs. Nothing’s getting done at Phluttr. The explosion was gut-punchingly audible from the office, and everyone has friends who work at Embarcadero Center.

  “Then what is the word?” Mitchell asks.

  “For some people, this kind of act is…inexorable? Even devouring. Like a black hole.”

  Danna says nothing but squeezes Tarek’s arm to let him know they’re here to listen if he feels like talking.

  He does. “Do you guys know where my parents are from?”

 
“West Bank, right?” Danna says.

  Tarek nods. “A town called Nablus. A real big town, up in the north. Things are bad up there. Not quite Gaza Strip bad, but still plenty bad, believe me. I spent lots of time there, for a Kansas kid. We’d visit almost every summer when there weren’t travel restrictions.”

  He falls silent, and Danna squeezes his arm again. More silence, then, “Rashid was several years older, which is a lot when you’re a kid. But he was always my favorite cousin. He was smart, real sweet to us younger kids, and super funny. He was the oldest of five, and really loved his brothers and sisters. Kind of everyone’s shepherd and protector. But he also had a dark side. Something kind of reckless beneath the sweetness. That made him a bit less G-rated, but also cooler, you know? One way it came out—and this is so ironic—was irreverence about religion. He’d give silly nicknames to the local imams, mispronounce certain semi-religious expressions to make double entendres. That sorta thing. Which must sound really tame to you, but it was pretty edgy for our Nablus family, believe me.”