Vigilance

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  On and on and on.

  He drinks them in, watching the tiny gestures, the little, special moments that he knows will anchor each ad in the right demographic’s mind. One ad shows a virile, muscular white man, wearing jeans and no shirt, standing on his farmhouse porch with a pistol in his hand. There’s a close-up of the pistol—his wrists thick and veined and meaty and rippling, excellently subliminal stuff. Holding the gun, he looks amplified, magnified, just bigger. His wife is beside him, small and delicate in her gauzy nightgown—she’s a pixie, fragile as a leaf. The man, it appears, is defending his home from invaders, who are a spectrum of minorities—Hispanic, black, Asian, one of them might be a Pacific Islander, it depends on the algo—though they all wear do-rags, and baggy shirts, and ridiculous pants. Exactly what these distinctly urban characters are doing attacking this guy’s fucking farm in the middle of the night is unclear—are they going to steal his horses, or his goddamn corn?—nor is it clear why his wife has chosen to join him, exposing herself to danger in her bright, white nightgown. And why are they well lit, while the attackers are in the dark? McDean knows none of this matters—not to the audience.

  The powerful man fires away at the assailants, taking down one, two, three bad guys. The rest turn and flee, the ends of their do-rags whipping in the wind. As the woman clutches the man’s meaty torso, the logo of the sports equipment retailer splashes up on the screen, along with a URL and a slogan: FOR YOUR HOME, FOR THE FIELD, FOR AMERICA.

  “Numbers!” shouts McDean.

  “Sixty-four,” says Ives.

  His eyebrows crawl up his brow. They’re starting with a .64 on their target market activation ratios? That’s fucking unbelievable!

  Another ad, this one for a tax service for people deep in medical debt—which is most of Vigilance’s core audience, of course. Images of wholesome, white professionals parade across the screen, accompanied by flashing red words like PROTECT YOURSELF FROM FRAUD! Of course, no financial work is being done by such men—it’s all computers these days, and the computers whose services are being sold in these ads aren’t nearly as smart as the computers that conspired to put the target audience into debt in the first place.

  McDean watches as the screen flashes WATCH OUT! and BEWARE! This one is a little over the top, but all of his ads are generated to maximize anxiety, which is exactly what he wants.

  Another ad—this one is for a “tactical light.” McDean personally has no fucking clue what a tactical light is—how can a light be tactical?—but the ad shows another beefy, military-looking dude, clad in camo, sporting a serious look and a serious crew cut. He is walking across his driveway to go get his newspaper (another anachronism the audience expects and loves) when he hears a snap sound from behind. He whirls, whips his hand out, and turns on his tactical light, which flashes a bright spotlight on . . . his young son, wearing feetsie pajamas (patterned in ducks and balloons) and clutching his blanket (Pantone 304). “Sorry, Daddy,” he says. “I just wanted to see you some more before you go fight for our country again.” The beefy dude’s serious glower dissolves into a pleasant smile, and he walks over and picks up his son. “I’m home now, though,” he says. He looks into the camera and says, “And home is safe.” Then he turns on his tactical light, hands it to his son, and lets him light the way as they walk back into the house. Then the logo flashes on the screen.

  “Andrews, did you see the problem there?” says McDean.

  Andrews sighs. “He didn’t go pick up the paper.”

  “No,” says McDean. “He went out to go get the newspaper, and yet he left it there.”

  “Maybe he forgot it?” says Ives.

  “Maybe his son is more important than the paper?” proposes Neal.

  “It’s not that,” says McDean. “It’s an AI fuckup. Something to fix in the future.”

  Another ad, then another—and then it’s back to Vigilance. It’s time to start the show.

  * * *

  Stacey Robwright holds a hand to her ear, pretending to listen. “I’m . . . I’m being told that tonight’s Vigilance could be . . . yes, it’s now imminent. We’ll know shortly which of the three sites has been chosen.”

  Cut to feeds of the three actives in their shuttles—each feed has STEWART, RISON, or BONNAN in the corner.

  “Let’s confirm that our bodycams are active,” says Robwright, “to make sure we can understand what’s happening from the perspective of the threat.”

  “And, Stacey,” says some vaguely military-looking pundit, “this is honestly so important for the public, to see what the perpetrator is thinking, what they’re doing, what their goals are.”

  McDean paces in the control room and asks, “Perry?”

  “All set,” says Perry.

  The feed cycles though the bodycam feeds, these also stamped with STEWART, RISON, BONNAN. They’re also suited up with a neat little shoulder bodycam that can show the shooter’s face and expressions.

  “We can see them,” says Robwright on the screen. “So we can understand them . . . Yes.”

  “I do not want to hear any more of this fucking philosophizing,” says McDean.

  “Got it,” says Andrews from the back.

  “Her mouth looks great, though, Andrews,” he says.

  Andrews scowls.

  “All right,” says Robwright on the screen. “And now . . . Yes, they’re in position.”

  Feeds of the three shooters huddled before the shuttle doors. The main feed then splits into three different sub-screens, showing the shooters’ perspectives as they wait, all rattling, blurry videos from their bodycams.

  “This is so intense, Stacey,” says Bowder. “This is always such an intense experience. Who’s going to make it? Who isn’t?”

  “This is a true, honest-to-God—I apologize for my offensive language, but that’s truly how I feel about it—an honest-to-God test of America,” says Robwright. “And now . . .”

  The shuttle doors fly open.

  Stewart, Rison, and Bonnan leap out of the shuttles and find themselves faced with glass doors—through which you can see the busy walkways of the mall.

  “It looks like . . . yes, it looks like the mall!” says Robwright. “Is it the mall?”

  “It’s the mall, Stacey,” says Gramins.

  “Oh my God, it is,” says Bowder, sounding excited and horrified. “It’s the mall. And Vigilance begins!”

  In the control room, McDean whirls to snarl at Andrews. “Robwright’s supposed to say that,” he snaps. “Not fucking Bowder.”

  “I thought it’d be interesting to mix it up,” says Andrews.

  “Well, it isn’t. We need to maintain our branding.”

  The shooting begins.

  * * *

  It’s not pretty, coordinated, or easy to follow—but then, it never is, and McDean’s team is very used to that.

  The main feed is still split into three different sub-screens. In one, Stewart opens the door, staggers through, raises his pistol, and starts firing indiscriminately at the crowd. In a second, Rison walks through and starts fumbling with a grenade—his hands are shaking. A lot. In the third, Bonnan walks through the doors, lifts his AL-18, draws a careful bead on a man staring at his phone while holding his wife’s bag, and opens fire.

  “Pivoting to angle shots,” says Neal.

  The three windows move to drone footage. The drones are smaller than the palm of your hand, possess cameras more advanced than a Hollywood blockbuster’s, and have been imprinted on the three active shooters: they follow them like a play camera might in the NFL, zipping behind the main actors. Most of the drones are keyed into the movements of the shooter’s gun—they line up so you can kind of see what they’re shooting at. This is critical, because mass shootings are, like most shootings, confusing and difficult to understand. It’s not like a sport where you can see where the ball is, where it’s going, who it’s intended for, and who wants to take the ball away from them. It’s just a wild blur.

  Bonnan’s
shot is true: the man holding his wife’s bag drops to the ground, eyes staring up in dull surprise. Stewart hits, like, fucking nobody—he catches some white lady in the leg, and a glass wall of a shop explodes behind her, but for the most part, his shots are all over the place. Rison, wisely, has chosen a deserted entrance close to the stairs: he quickly makes for the stairway and runs up, hoping to get a better angle on the action, maybe heading for the food court.

  “This is always what shakes me the most,” says Robwright’s voice darkly on the screen. “How un-alert these people are. They are just not paying attention. They just are not.”

  Bonnan has switched to full auto now and is just shredding people: an old Asian man in a parka slumps over, blood pouring from his skull; his wife spins around like she’s forgotten something, but she’s missing most of her lower arm; a family of six—chunky white people in sweats—are sitting on a bench, looking at their phones, and they don’t even see the gun before the hail of bullets plows into their torsos, legs, faces, and they wilt like plants in desert heat. A girl of about seven is screaming by a stone water fountain—then the fountain erupts in dust as the bullets saw into it. When the dust clears, she’s lying facedown with her arm at a strange angle.

  “Bonnan is taking a classic approach here,” says some army guy in military fatigues in a sub-screen window. “He’s taking full advantage of these people’s state of complacency.”

  McDean steps closer to the screen. “It’s getting hard to keep track of these quasi-army fucks,” he says. “Let’s winnow them down, please.”

  “Got it,” says Andrews.

  “Just taking maximal advantage of these citizens,” continues Army Man. “They’re just not ready, and he’s got a high-velocity weapon with a high firing rate. Unless you’re prepared, what you’re seeing could happen to you.”

  “I just don’t understand,” says Robwright. “How can these people let this happen to their families? How can they not be ready?”

  “I just don’t know, Stacey,” says Gramins. “I really just don’t know.”

  Another burst of gunfire rings through the control room.

  Delyna is filling up yet another pitcher of beer when she hears the sound: the chatter and tinny crack of gunfire, the eruption of screams.

  The surface of the beer in the pitcher quivers: her hands are shaking. She doesn’t want to look, doesn’t want to see it, but she can’t help it. She glances up and spies the three strangely fish-eyed feeds capturing the pandemonium and terror, just three boxes on the screens, each with an arm holding a pistol emerging from the bottom left corner—or, in one instance, some kind of much larger assault rifle. In two of the screens, the gun is shooting. The third is not—not yet, at least.

  The crowd at the South Tavern whoops and claps like spectators at a horse race. It seems some of them bet on the mall being the selection, and they’ve made a good bit of money with their guess. Those who bet against them appear only mildly downcast. It is hard, it seems, to feel bad when you are witnessing such grand entertainment.

  Delyna finishes putting another tray together, then scoops up two orders of cheese fries from Raphael’s order counter. She waits on the last element—chips and salsa—and stares back at the crowd.

  These people. They are much like her, working-class and only somewhat educated, but they seem to be from some other nation, where guns and violence are a cheerful fantasy and not a reality as it had been for Delyna. It comes down to entitlement, she supposes: the people in the South Tavern grew up being told that, if a shooting happened, then they would be the survivors, the ones shooting back, or the ones righteously doing that shooting in the first place. The world had not told Delyna or people like her any such thing. Perhaps her role in the frenetic narrative these people dream of is simply that of a victim: sad, perfunctory, but necessary for the story to work.

  Or perhaps she’s been forgotten altogether. She is not the intended audience for this story. That has always been clear.

  Raphael slides over a basket of chips and salsa. She picks it up and drops the order off at the tables around the televisions. No one seems to notice.

  Again, she thinks, Why am I still here? Why didn’t I leave with everyone else?

  The question plagues her more and more. She’s seen posts from her departed friends on Nuuvu depicting their happy, contented new lives in South America, or China, or Africa, or Europe. The world is turbulent and changing, that is clear—Europe is still recovering from the last hurricane—but at least in those places, it isn’t actively hostile.

  But she knows why she hasn’t left: because she believed that things would change. That they would get better. She wasn’t sure why—she just thought it would. Such an idea had been engraved in her mind since childhood: the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. It is the American story, or so she thought.

  Yet she’s realized all too late that it is exactly that—a story. An idea, a fiction, or maybe even a piece of propaganda designed to keep her here and quiet. Perhaps change isn’t always slow and incrementally positive. Perhaps it can be fast, and for the worse.

  Perhaps things will never get better. Perhaps the present is also the future.

  Delyna listens to the gunfire in her ears and pours another beer.

  McDean stands stock-still in the control room, watching. In the STEWART window, people are scrambling like crazy. One civilian has produced a pistol, and is about to shoot back at Stewart—the drones’ AIs recognize the gun and zero in on it, highlighting the story.

  “This man, though—is he ready? Is he trained?” says Robwright.

  The man—he looks like a little league coach—hesitates before he fires at Stewart. He blinks as the gun goes off, and his aim, like Stewart’s, is terrible. Stewart is all keyed up now, though, feeling the groove, and he takes cover behind a column, sets his stance, and fires back, nine quick shots. Seven of them go wild—two of them strike the man in the thigh, and then the belly.

  He staggers, falls; Stewart fires again, and his head opens up. He falls over.

  In the control room, Darrow yawns.

  “Sucks for him,” says Ives.

  “This was a man without a plan,” says Army Man on the screen. “Right there. He had the tools, but he didn’t have the responsibility, or the reaction time, to do what he needed to do with them.”

  “Concerning,” says Stacey Robwright.

  Back on the RISON screen, Rison appears to have gotten lost. He’s in some maintenance hallway in the mall, and he’s just running around with a grenade in one hand and a pistol in the other.

  “I thought these guys had familiarity with the location,” says McDean.

  “You can’t design away stupid,” says Perry amiably.

  As Rison runs around, panting, he comes upon a janitor pushing a rolling garbage can around.

  Rison stops. The janitor stares at him.

  Rison says, “Uhh . . . Excuse me, uh . . .”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ,” says McDean.

  Andrews cackles wickedly in the back of the control room.

  “Could you tell me, uh . . .” says Rison. “Uh, where should I go from . . .”

  The janitor turns and sprints away.

  Rison says, “Aw, shit!” He raises his pistol and fires, catching the man in the shin as he turns a corner.

  Rison runs after, following him. He turns the corner and finds the janitor sitting on the ground, screaming in fear, chattering away in some language—Polish, maybe—and finally saying, “No, no, no, no!”

  “This is why,” says Bowder’s voice on the screen, “you should arm everyone at your facility.”

  “Fuck!” says Rison. “Fuck, fuck!” He raises his pistol—the bodycam footage is shuddering and quaking, so they switch to a drone shot—and he hesitates. Then he screams, maybe in rage, maybe in fear, and starts shooting at the man, six shots, one after the other. Fountains of blood burble up from the janitor’s face, neck, torso, arms. He falls over and b
egins shaking, one arm mindlessly scratching at the wall, his legs kicking back and forth.

  “There’s the chicken dance,” says Perry from the sitter pit. “Musta caught him in the skull . . . Yep! There it is. Right above the temple. Fucker’s sprung a slow leak!” His tone is genial, appreciative.

  “Fuck,” says Rison on the screen, staring down at the dying man. “Jesus.” Then Rison hears Bonnan’s AL-18 out beyond, and he runs back down the hall and out to the main area.

  “We should note,” says Bowder, “that studies show most enemy agents will not hesitate this much or be this compassionate. Rison wasn’t sure what to do—but most enemy agents, like Stewart, like Bonnan . . . well, they won’t think twice or ask questions.”

  McDean turns around. “Numbers!” he shouts.

  Ives and Andrews shake their heads, amazed. “Through the roof,” says Ives. “Through the fucking roof!”

  “Really?” says McDean. “Even for another mall?”

  “Doesn’t seem to be hurting anyone’s feelings,” says Ives. “We’ve got ninety-three million tuned in. Most via smart TVs, but lots of social media feeds, some people logging directly on to the ONT site . . .”

  McDean is amazed—and then he thinks of Perseph. Kruse said to activate when the audience had reached its peak. “And still climbing?”

  “Still climbing.”

  “The moment that thing starts to plateau, you tell me, okay?”

  “Got it, boss,” says Ives.

  McDean looks back at the screen. Bonnan has turned onto a major passageway, about sixty feet wide, and it’s full of scattering people. They know what’s happening now—they see the drones, they know this is a Vigilance. People are fleeing into stores; some have been trampled and are crawling away. There’s an incredible amount of screaming—and then it’s joined by a sudden chorus of phones ringing, one after another, beeps and boops and chimes and dings.