Geek Mafia

by Rick Dakan

  The mayor, being a take-charge kind of woman, stepped up to the microphone and said, "Excuse me, you need a permit to..." Which was all anyone heard once Bee hit the switch that remotely shorted the stage's sound system. Without electronic assistance, the mayor couldn't compete with Chloe's magnified verbal screed. That's ok, thought Paul, it would all be over soon enough.

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  Under the cover of Chloe's shouted ravings, the team had reached the front of the crowd, all of whom were more than eager to make way for them. Fear of the unexpected intimidates large crowds of yuppies with ease.

  Plus, five of the crowd members were part of the Crew, planted there right up front to help direct the assembled yuppie mob in the right direction.

  Chloe continued, "You fuel your bodies with the fruits of wage-slave labor! You drive your SUV's with liquid drawn from the body of Mother Earth without any concern for her or even your own well-being!"

  Paul and Popper raised the coffee-cup contraption onto their shoulders, the bent straw pointed directly at the crowd. Paul reached under the cup's bottom with one hand and found the pump switch.

  "This festival of the damned you've all come to! This desperately contrived, false, feel-good affair is sponsored by two of the world's most despicable and hateful criminal cabals!" She gestured with her sign towards the corporate logos on the stage backdrop. The mayor was yelling for security, but no one could hear her. "This is a festival of death, oppression and, most of all, BLOOD!"

  Paul hit the switch and Bee's ingenious pump mechanism sprang flawlessly into action. The straw atop the coffee cup concealed a nozzle that shot forth a jet of blood red liquid that arced out over the crowd. Paul and Popper swiveled the coffee cup back and forth, spraying as much of the suddenly screaming and retreating yuppies as possible. Urged on by the crew members in their midst, the crowd began to retreat back towards the craft tents.

  After thirty seconds the blood reservoir was empty. Chloe was just shouting wordlessly into the bullhorn now, ululating madly to further rile up the crowd. When she saw the blood run empty, she paused for the briefest moment to turn towards her comrades. "Ok, ditch and run. Now." She then started screaming again as she turned towards the van and took off at a full run.

  They heaved the coffee cup forward towards the retreating crowd. With the reservoir empty it was pretty light.

  No one had ever touched any piece of the contraption without wearing latex gloves, and none of the common parts used in its construction could ever be traced back to them. Even the tools used to put the pump together had been disposed of, lest some ambitious policeman someday try to compare tool marks. The long banner fell to the ground as well, and the four clowns raced off after their leader.

  Behind them the police had finally arrived on the scene, but there was too much going on for them to even make sense of what had happened here. The mayor was screeching at them from up on the stage, so naturally their first instinct was to make sure she was OK. As the two cops fought through the crowd towards the stage, Chloe and company were already piling into their van.

  Across the park, perched on the porch of a nearby restaurant, a lanky diner watched the whole scene unfold through the viewfinder of his camcorder. He didn't manage to catch the van's license plate as it sped off towards the highway entrance, but that was by design. As order once again exerted itself in the park, Raff shut the camcorder off and put down $20 to cover his lunch. He wanted to make sure he got on the road before this crowd decided they'd had enough excitement for one day and headed home. He had at least one TV station to visit before the evening news.

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  Chapter 23

  "Fuck Yeah!" hooted Paul in the back of the van as he clawed the clown wig from his head. "Whoooo!" The rest of the crew couldn't help themselves from laughing at Paul's enthusiasm. "That was awesome! I can't believe that actually worked! The blood! Did you see their reaction?"

  "And let's not forget the all-important getaway," Chloe chimed in. She was watching out the van's tinted back window, alert for any sign of police pursuit. They'd gotten off the highway just a few miles down from where they got on and were now driving at a sensible, circuitous pace through the streets of Campbell, working their way towards San Jose proper where they could ditch the van and transfer to separate vehicles.

  "Right!" said Paul. "The getaway! Very important to the whole plan. Fuck! I still can't believe we pulled that off, can you? They're going to be talking about that for YEARS!"

  "So, what's next Paul?" asked Chloe. "This is your show."

  "Well, first we see how good Raff's videotaping skills are," said Paul, his mind racing forward through the next steps of the plan. "I checked out the Web site this morning and that all looked great. So as soon as we get Bee's pics we can upload those to the site along with our communiqué."

  "Sounds like you've got a handle on everything."

  "I think so. You'll let me know if I'm screwing up too badly, I'm sure."

  "No, I won't let you screw up at all." Chloe turned back and smiled at him. "You're doing great. Just keep your head and everything will come together for you."

  "Thanks. I hope so."

  "It will, but first you've gotta get that fucking clown makeup off."

  Paul laughed. He had forgotten all about the white face paint. Chloe had worn a mask so she could change back to 'normal' quickly and do the driving. The other four had gone for the full on make-up. "Really? Just when I was starting to like my new look."

  "Your choice hotshot," she said as she tossed him a damp towel. "But I'll tell you one thing - no way I'm kissing that face."

  Paul started to wipe his face clean, "Well, the clown look is so last season. Perhaps I should reconsider."

  "Good choice," said Chloe.

  Three of the four local TV stations led their early evening newscasts with the Los Gatos protest story. Raff had managed to quickly cut up his video into different bite sized chunks so that each station could have its own "exclusive." Even with the video, it might have been a minor human-interest story or even gone unnoticed. Instead, it had been catapulted to the lead by the mass e-mail that Paul sent out to every media outlet in the Bay Area.

  The anchorwoman on Channel 4 said, "Shock and dismay today in Los Gatos as radical anarchist protestors calling themselves the Global Freedom Army disrupted a community event with a grisly display. As this exclusive video shows, although they were dressed as clowns, these protestors were anything but funny."

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  This particular clip showed a wide shot of the five clowns standing before the crowd and then cut to a closer in shot of the giant coffee cup spraying blood over the surprised onlookers.

  "Channel 4 has just received a message from the group claiming responsibility for the disruption in which they claim that they sprayed Mad Cow infected blood on the unsuspecting fair goers. Channel 4 has not been able to confirm this with local health authorities but we are urging everyone exposed to take appropriate precautions."

  "Perfect!" exclaimed Paul from the couch in Chloe's living room. "They'll have the story right in a couple of hours when they find out it's just food coloring and water, but that Mad Cow meme is going to make it around the internet and back before the real story gets out. We've got our first impression!"

  "And we all know how important those are," said Raff from the easy chair. "Great job, Paul. I can't believe they bought it."

  "It's local TV news. They'll show anything as long as it sounds exciting. What's the saying? If it bleeds, it leads."

  They flipped to the other news channels and saw similar stories. Everyone was leading with the Mad Cow angle and Raff's videos were the stars of the show.

  "How's our Web coverage going?" Paul called out.

  From the Server Room, Chloe shouted back, "Ready to go now. We're hitting all the big time right-wing blogs as soon as the news finishes their coverage."

  P
aul, a long time blog reader, had created a dozen or so personas for the Crew to use as they posted on the message boards and comments sections of some of the most popular conservative Web sites. They'd been using these false identities for two weeks in order to establish some bona fides with the other people who regularly visited the sites. Each persona had a different but decidedly right-wing point of view, ranging from the radically religious to the ultra-free market conservative. The crewmembers would post a wide range of comments that Paul had prepared about the "horrible happenings" in Los Gatos, stirring up the pot of outrage with as many different spoons as possible.

  As the last of the news casts finished its coverage, the Crew sprang into action and posted the first comment.

  Over the next two hours, they spread the word to every conservative corner of the Web. Paul himself logged on to post one of his favorite concoctions:

  So-called "radicals" (read, leftwing whackos) are at it again. They sprayed Diseased Blood over families and CHILDREN in a park in California. Diseased like there own blood but supposedly from a cow with Mad Cow sickness. Can you believe these traitors?!?!? They don't deserve to breath air in the USA much less have rights and vote (not that they're ever smart enough to do that probably). We need to do something to help stop these people and help the good people they sprayed diseased blood on.

  _

  Paul thought the awkward writing and grammatical errors more than captured the hurried phrasing of an incensed right winger. He'd written a couple hundred of these things, including complete dialogues between different on-screen identities. Thus armed, the Crew could control the direction of conversation and steer things their way.

  They stayed away from chat rooms, where the dynamic flow of conversation was harder to monitor and shape.

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  Besides, all the best debate (and flame wars) took place in the comments sections of political blogs and on a few select message boards. Within just a few hours, several of the sites had whole comment threads devoted exclusively to the outrage in Los Gatos. The Crew was actually having a hard time keeping ahead of the conversation - although they'd hacked some of the sites so they could control the discourse with even more precision.

  The six o'clock news repeated the same story as an hour before, although they'd inserted an extra bit affirming that authorities denied that anyone had been exposed to Mad Cow disease and that the blood was fake. Nevertheless, in the service of sensationalism, the newscasts left enough qualifiers and doubts in their news copy that a panicky viewer might still suspect that something truly awful had happened. It would be another five hours before the local news would come out with a more forceful (and truthful) view of what had actually happened. By that time, the Internet version of the story would become an almost unstoppable force.

  At seven PM, Paul gave the signal for the Global Freedom Army's Web site to go live. Hosted out of the country and through a series of blinds that made tracing it back to them impossible, the site featured video clips taken by Bee's hidden camera along with the full text of the group's anti-corporate, anti-free trade manifesto. The front page featured a large pic of a man in a polo shirt and Dockers getting drenched in

  "blood" as he stood in Los Gatos park earlier that day. Above it was the headline: THIS IS ONLY THE

  BEGINNING, while below it said WE WILL STRIKE AGAIN FOR FREEDOM!

  As soon as the site went live, the Crew started linking to it on all the blogs they'd spent the last few hours prepping for this very moment. Even without their further intervention, the right-wing readers would have exploded into outrage at the site, but with Paul and company leading the way, the self-righteous calls for action reached a fevered pitch.

  By 9:00 PM both Instapundit and the Drudge Report were linking to the story, as were a number of left-wing blogs like Atrios, Talking Points Memo, and Daily Kos. Paul felt a twang of liberal guilt at this last development, but he knew he couldn't let his own political leanings get in the way of the greater con. Besides, ultimately it was the radical right-wingers who'd feel the pain on this one, not the Dems. So they launched the left-wing phase of the misinformation campaign. In the past two weeks they'd also established a handful of liberal screen names for the express purpose of adding fuel to the fire. While most of the liberal commentators decried the protest as either juvenile or dangerous (or both), a few people posting offered their full support for the Global Freedom Army's action. They even got support from screen names they hadn't created themselves.

  And of course, the right-wing false identities quickly noticed what the left wing false identities were saying and posted links and quotes to them on the conservative sites. Every political junkie and sad sack Internet monkey who didn't have anything better to do on a Sunday night was getting involved in the debate, and before too long there was more chatter than the Crew could control.

  At 10:45 Chloe shouted from the Server Room, "We're on MSNBC!"

  Paul quickly clicked on the bookmark in his browser for MSNBC.com. And there it was. A single headline link along the right hand side of the screen: California Pranksters Cause Mad Cow Scare. Perfect. It was Sunday, a slow news night, which they were counting on to get them more attention than they deserved. He knew that lots of the internet reporters who managed the big time network news Websites also kept at least one eye on the political blogs. Something this outrageous and politically charged was likely to end up on the Fox News site too, especially since Drudge had picked it up.

  It was now past midnight, meaning after 3:00 AM on the East coast, and things were finally starting to die down. Paul suggested they wind things down and get some sleep. Tomorrow they'd release the full video that Bee had shot on her hidden camera (disguised as a pair of glasses), along with a threat to disrupt another Chapter 23

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  public event in the next two weeks. Paul was ready for bed anyway, and besides, tomorrow he needed to be ready for what might prove their most difficult challenge - talk radio.

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  CHAPTER 24

  When Paul had first taken a stab at being a professional comic book artist, he'd also worked as a pizza delivery driver for Papa Johns. Since he was at his most creative at night - especially late at night, Paul had taken the lunch shift. His beat up old '86 Volvo's stereo system ate tapes and that left him with nothing but the radio. It was during these long hot afternoons zipping around Tampa that he'd learned to appreciate the horror and spectacle that is Rush Limbaugh. He hated just about everything that came out of Rush's mouth and the only things worse were the dittohead callers and their inane blathering. But for whatever reason, he couldn't turn it off. He couldn't stop listening. Know thine enemy, as the saying goes, or at least that's what he told himself. In truth, what really fascinated him was how easily lying and distortion came to Rush and how quick his listeners were to lick up every word of it.

  As the right-wing radio revolution blossomed throughout the nineties and into the Bush II era, Paul listened right along with it. Now, thankfully, he had the left wing Air America network to satisfy his politico-talk cravings, although their callers sometimes seemed just as high-strung and over the top as Rush's. Having logged untold hours listening to both sides, Paul considered himself a true expert on the ins and outs of conservative talk-radio. With Monday morning here, it was time to put that knowledge to the test.

  He'd slept poorly the night before, tossing and turning so much that Chloe had kicked him out of the bed because he was keeping her awake. Although they'd shared a bed ever since he returned, there hadn't been anything sexual between them since the beach. Paul got the impression that she was waiting to see how he handled himself as a leader. He felt sure that if he pulled this scam off as he'd planned, she would finally see him as an equal partner and, he hoped, lover.

  Although almost everyone in the tech-savvy Crew had been conversant with blogs and Internet bulletin boards, none of them had ever listened to much talk radio. Th
ey were definitely more a music kind of crowd, so Paul had to brief them pretty extensively about how your typical caller behaves. He'd created a simple persona for each of them to play and written just a couple basic script sheets for them to work off of. He wasn't too worried about them sounding the same on two different shows, because the odds were they wouldn't get on in any case - at least not on any of the national shows.

  The big boys who had national syndication like Rush and Hannity and even O'Reilly had thousands of callers every hour. Getting on any of those shows would be pure luck. Unlike every other aspect of the con, this was something Paul couldn't plan for or control. While getting on the air wasn't necessary, it would b a nice boost to the overall plan. As soon as the national phone lines opened, the Crew members started calling. He'd warned them to expect to be on hold for an hour or more.

  Meanwhile, Paul, Chloe, and Raff decided to focus in on the local call-in shows, where they figured they'd have a better chance of getting air-time - especially since they'd be posing as eye-witnesses to the actual event.

  Well, not really posing, since they were definitely there when it happened, but rather posing as mere innocent bystanders full of outrage at what had happened to them.

  Each caller had their own Walkman and headphones tuned to their assigned station and a phone that Bee had especially prepared for the occasion. Some of the bigger shows kept logs of incoming calls and all of them had caller ID. Simply blocking the ID signal might raise some suspicions, so instead Bee had whipped up a little device that gave a fake name and number. Each black box had the fake ID's name and number printed on it so the Crew member using it wouldn't forget who he or she was supposed to be.

  Chloe was the first to get through, in her case to a local call-in show called The Sam Evers Show. The host, a fifty-something former top 40 DJ who suddenly became conservative when he started to lose touch with the youth demographic, ran a show that the San Jose Mercury News had called "The right-wing equivalent of shock-jock radio." He delighted in making crude parody songs about gays in San Francisco, California's two CHAPTER 24