Sycamore 2

by Craig A. Falconer

  Minter, ever efficient, fell asleep as soon as he closed his eyes. Kurt needed a few minutes to silence his thoughts but soon drifted off all the same.

  ~

  Kurt awoke to a loud banging sound on the workstation door. He jumped out of his chair, saw the time, and immediately regretted ever going to sleep.

  It had been the kind of too-short-and-too-late sleep that always made him more tired than he was to start with.

  Kurt opened the door, glad to see that it was Ty.

  “I’m all done,” Ty said. “Were you guys asleep?”

  Kurt nodded. “But only since 6am, and only because we need to be able to focus all day today.”

  “I know,” Ty said. “I stayed up all night but now I feel like I could sleep for the rest of the week.” He handed Kurt his laptop.

  Kurt sat down with Ty’s laptop in front of him. Minter rubbed his eyes and paid attention as Kurt played the videos. The main sky video was up first. This was the video that most people would see; the one of Amos confessing to Stacy’s death, with smaller videos of the explosion and Kurt’s reaction beside it.

  “It’s perfect,” Kurt said, and it was. His instructions had been clear and Ty had followed them to a tee. Even though the footage of Kurt grabbing Amos’s throat was significantly shorter than the other two clips, Ty had managed to make them all loop perfectly by slowing it down slightly so that it was exactly half the length of the others and played twice in every full loop.

  “That was some dark stuff,” Ty said. “When I had Amos on my show last year, I knew he was weird. And then when he threatened me and Lisa, I knew he was a messed-up dude. But this? Even after everything everyone has said, I didn’t expect this.”

  “No one will,” Minter said.

  Kurt moved on to the other videos. He had given Ty only general instructions for these, telling him which pieces of footage were to go together. What Ty produced was better than Kurt could have hoped for.

  The quick cuts and the subtle zooming were perfect for this era of six-second attention spans. One example was the video which Kurt’s rough notes had called “the Idiot Video.” This was a sequence of seven short clips in which Amos expressed his true feelings towards Sycamore’s consumers. Like in a lyric video, the important words popped up in different sizes and at different angles as Amos spoke. When Amos said things like “the people want what I tell them to want,” and “it’s not my fault we were born in a country full of idiots,” Ty had made it so the words appeared on screen at the right time to emphasise Amos’s contempt.

  Kurt decided that this video would be the first one they would show in Trixilicious’s vista. Amos even mentioned Star’s Eye View in a clip suggested by Minter, deriding its users as “genuine oxygen thieves whose lives are so bad that they’ll pay to pretend to live someone else’s,” before throwing in the most backhanded of compliments: “but at least these losers are smart enough to know how pointless their own lives are.”

  That video would play in the SycaStars’ vistas a few minutes into the event, ensuring that they and their millions of viewers would turn hostile towards Amos.

  “Does it all look okay?” Ty asked.

  Kurt told him it was better than okay, thanked him for his help, and began to transfer the finished videos. Ty had already copied them to an external drive so that he would have been able to make changes to one of the videos in his room while Kurt was transferring the others in the workstation, should it have been necessary.

  But with the videos looking perfect and now safely transferring from the external drive to Ernesto’s computer, Kurt, Ty and Minter went out into the food court to see everyone else.

  The group were as hungry for updates as they were for breakfast.

  It still felt surreal for Kurt to see Randy and the kids sitting in the food court with Mary and Lisa and everyone else. He was glad how quickly and easily they had settled in.

  Ernesto, predictably, was the first to ask how things were going.

  Kurt put Ty’s laptop down on a table and invited him to watch, along with everyone else. He started with the Idiot Video, which raised some smiles and led to everyone congratulating Ty for doing such a good job.

  Next came the video that would play in the sky; the video collage of Stacy’s death, Amos’s confession, and Kurt’s reaction.

  Kurt looked away. Ernesto saw it all for the first time. He already knew that Kurt and Stacy had planned to reveal their Orwall footage, so it didn’t come as a surprise to hear Amos blaming Kurt for what had happened and Ernesto didn’t buy into it. He saw the raw on emotion on Kurt’s face as he lashed out at Amos, and he watched on as helplessly as Kurt had while the bodyguards held him back.

  No one spoke for a few seconds. It was Harry who broke the silence. “Well,” he said, “if that’s not evidence…”

  General murmurs of agreement came from around the table.

  “He’s going down,” Ernesto said, as much to himself as to anyone else. “He’s going down.”

  ~

  After breakfast, Kurt and Minter spent the rest of the day scheduling video placements in various locations. Ad-placements were very easy to implement through the ECI, with just a few clicks needed to put a universal ad campaign on billboards around the country. Using this existing infrastructure, Minter scheduled Stacy’s Orwall footage to appear on thousands of billboards at 10:05 on Tuesday morning.

  He also scheduled the Orwall footage to arrive as a direct video link for every consumer who wasn’t in full immersion. A lot of consumers habitually dismissed such notices, though, which is why they invested so much time in making the Orwall footage visible in public spaces.

  Minter and Kurt both knew, as Amos had told them, that consumers paid more attention to content above them than around them. Sky-based broadcasts were restricted to important things like breaking news stories and SycaLotto draws, so consumers were conditioned to pay attention. This is why they were putting the main video collage in the sky.

  Kurt had the idea to play the SycaLotto intro music before the video appeared, just to make absolutely sure that everyone who wasn’t already intrigued by the Orwall footage got out of their cars to watch. Then they would all see the truth: that Amos killed Stacy and that Kurt wasn’t on his side.

  Minter scheduled the sky video for 10:10 on Tuesday morning, which would leave enough time for people to see the Orwall footage but not enough time for Amos to enact any meaningful damage-limitation procedures.

  With the Amos-hosted SycaStars United launch event beginning at 10am, Minter scheduled the Idiot Video to appear in each SycaStar’s vista at 10:05. Each SycaStar apart from Damian Dangerman, that was; his vista would show a compilation of Amos’s quotes dismissing an entire generation of young men as lazy wastes of space.

  Kurt and Minter predicted that the kind of people who watched Star’s Eye View would be more upset by criticism of themselves and their idols than they would be by flagrant privacy violations, hence showing them Ty’s snappy videos rather than the Orwall footage and hence showing Damian’s viewers a different video than the rest. This was like targeted advertising, Kurt realised. This was targeted advertising done right.

  Everyone would see the main sky footage at 10:10 and Kurt would then emerge from the crowd to confront Amos. The crowd would already be hostile to Amos but Kurt knew that his appearance would bring chaos.

  Like Kurt, Stacy had been turned into a martyr; so much so that she was invariably talked about as some kind of people’s princess. Everyone from the SycaStars and their fans to their parents and their grandparents would be incensed to learn that Amos had killed her.

  Kurt didn’t know what would happen in the immediate aftermath. Should anything go wrong, Lemarchand would at least get the truth out.

  37 hours had now passed since Kurt and Minter began their lock-in, and the job was done. They both left the workstation, ready for an unexpected but much needed night’s rest before a busy day of preparation for the long drive south.
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  The next day, Sunday, would be their last in the mall.

  Not everyone knew about Kurt’s plan to go to the city with Minter and Ernesto and not everyone would be able to go with them. Kurt wouldn’t even consider leaving Randy and the kids behind, so they would be there.

  But the back of Harry’s truck was only so big.

  Some difficult decisions lay ahead.

  26

  Kurt met Ernesto in the workstation early on Sunday morning.

  “So I see you reached our French friend,” Ernesto said. He was sitting in front of his computer, which displayed the headline: “CORRUPTION SCANDAL ROCKS WASHINGTON!”

  Kurt skimmed the article. “We sure did,” he said.

  The article, from a London-based newspaper, included a link to the audio file that Kurt and Minter sent to Adeline Lemarchand. She was credited with unearthing the recording and claimed, as instructed, that she acquired it from a disgruntled member of the president’s campaign team. The tone of the article suggested that the president’s upcoming re-election campaign was as good as over. Kurt knew that other presidents had survived a lot worse than this, but rarely was there such clear evidence of wilful wrongdoing.

  Kurt turned on the other computer and logged into his throwaway email account. It was a disposable and self-destructing account but would remain active as long as he accessed it at least once every 24 hours. As he expected, there was an email from Lemarchand:

  “Who are you? This is huge. Is the story in the live stream related? I will try to find a host.”

  Less expectedly, she had sent another message three hours later:

  “I will be a guest on Rene Cordier, Tuesday 10am ET, 30 minutes. They insist on a 30-second delay for live feeds. If this story is as big as you say, other networks will pick up the feed. Cordier will insist on a watermark.”

  Kurt couldn’t have cared less about a watermark, knowing that it wouldn’t stop anyone from showing the stream, and a quick search told him that Rene Cordier was the host of the second most watched news discussion show in France. Timezones weren’t Kurt’s specialist subject, but he reckoned the show would air late in the French afternoon, which was a good time for news.

  Everything was falling nicely into place.

  “So who’s all coming?” Ernesto asked, bringing Kurt quickly back down to earth.

  This was the question. Kurt hoped there would be a consensus about who came and who stayed, but he had expected Ernesto to want to play a part in the decision-making process rather than defer to Kurt like this.

  “Me, you, Minter, Randy, Julian and Sabrina in the back,” Kurt said. “I know it’s going to be crowded, but none of us can be up front where people might see.”

  “Who drives?”

  “I’ll ask Harry and Joyce,” Kurt said. “If they want to come, Harry drives with Joyce beside him. If they don’t, Val.”

  Ernesto was still angry with Val for breaching his trust, but he knew that no one else could drive the truck. “And who do we leave in charge?” he asked.

  On merit Kurt would have chosen Mary without hesitation. But realistically, she wouldn’t command enough respect. Val would have been a strong candidate if not for the blatant lie she told about going to Barnford Park without the key; but however well it all turned out, a lie was a lie. The only tenable candidates were Anthony and Michael, and Kurt knew that father would win out over son in any argument between the two. “It has to be Michael,” he concluded, somewhat reluctantly.

  Ernesto nodded. “Agreed. Do you want me to break the news?”

  “I’ll do it,” Kurt said. He Chifi’d everyone at once with a request to come to the food court, waking most of them in the process.

  Harry and Joyce were the first to show up, having evidently been awake already. This was ideal as it allowed Kurt to clear up the issue of who would drive.

  “Hell no,” Harry said. “Val can drive.”

  Kurt was quite pleased with this since Val had plenty of experience driving to and from the mall without being seen. He promised Harry and Joyce that everything would be okay and the truck would be back for them to drive home on Thursday.

  If everyone proved as easy to deal with as Harry and Joyce, Kurt would be smiling all day.

  He didn’t tell anyone else until the whole group was gathered. Minter was the last to arrive, which was excusable given the level of focus he had maintained for so long during their workstation lock-in.

  “I’m leaving tomorrow morning,” Kurt said. He let the words sit for a few seconds and slightly raised his hand for silence.

  “We have an opportunity on Tuesday that we might never have again,” he continued. “Everything is set up to appear at the right time through the AR, like we planned from the start, but now Lemarchand is also going to stream my vista on live TV. This is the only way that the truth definitely gets out. If I sat here and watched, Amos might pull off some trick to discredit the whole thing. He might say the footage is all fake. People might believe him. But if I’m standing there in front of him — if everyone knows I’m alive — then he’s finished. There’s no way out. This is how we take him down.”

  “I’m coming with you,” Julian said.

  Kurt looked at Randy and then Julian. “So are your sister and your dad,” he said.

  “Then Mary is coming, too,” Sabrina said.

  Mary looked at Kurt, waiting for him to say “of course she is.” He couldn’t meet her eyes.

  Ernesto stepped forward to end the uncomfortable silence. “I’m going, Minter is going, and Val is driving. Everyone else will stay here.”

  “Like sitting ducks,” Anthony said. He walked away.

  “Don’t worry about Anthony,” Michael said. “I’ll talk to him.”

  “Good,” Ernesto said. He spoke to the group. “Michael will be in charge. If anyone wants to speak up, do it now.”

  Only Ty and Lisa hadn’t been mentioned so far. “It’s cool,” Lisa said. “There’s only so much space and you need people who are going to help. We get it.”

  “Both of you have already helped,” Kurt said. “Ty made all the videos, and the whole Star’s Eye View thing was your idea. Everyone has helped. Harry drove us here, Joyce translated the first Lemarchand video, Mary did more than anyone could ever have asked, Anthony helped me with the computer, Michael stole the Lens-hacking sphere. You’ve all done your part. Now it’s our turn.”

  Mary stood up. “I really don’t mind. It’s not like you’re leaving me here by myself,” she said. She headed towards the Pig-Out counter to make breakfast.

  Everyone stayed in the food court until they had eaten, at which point Kurt gave them all instructions on what they were to do in preparation for the long drive.

  He sent Val to fill the truck’s tank and Harry’s jerrycans. Kurt hadn’t seen the mall’s water supply, fuel supply, or generator collection personally, but Harry had, and he had been highly impressed by the sheer quantity of supplies that Ernesto had managed to gather without raising any eyebrows. On that topic, Kurt asked Ernesto if he had any kind of clean portable generators they could use in the back of the truck to power the computers without polluting the already claustrophobic space. Ernesto said there was no way that could ever be safe, but that he had more than enough 20,000mAh power banks to run the computers non-stop for a week.

  Kurt took some time to talk to Mary and then Ty and Lisa, making sure that there were no hard feelings. They all told him not to be stupid and to focus on getting the job done so they could go home. Michael advised Kurt against trying to talk to Anthony.

  Randy had several questions for Kurt, like why he thought it was safer for the kids to drive into Sycamore’s heartland than it was for them to stay in the secluded mall. Kurt told him about the drone attack at Barnford Park on the day that Randy and the kids arrived. He told him how close the group had come to fleeing from the mall. Kurt said he had no reason to think that La Plethora wasn’t safe, but that the kids shouldn’t stay any longer than they h
ad to. He also made the more general point that he wouldn’t be able to focus on the takedown without knowing exactly where the kids were and knowing they were safe. Kurt could have stopped at the word “drone” and Randy wouldn’t have asked any more questions. He agreed without further dispute that they should all go.

  Minter put his differences with Val aside and took her into the workstation to talk through the routes around HQ. They printed some street-level maps and also the security information for SycaStars United, which listed all of the routes that would be restricted due to the expected turnout.

  Later in the afternoon, Kurt joined Minter in the workstation to reply to Lemarchand’s earlier emails. They told her that the story coming her way on Tuesday would blow the president’s problems out of the water. They also told her which video chat client they would be using and asked her to set up an account with the email address she was currently writing from.

  The two of them then walked around the mall, talking about the specifics of how the streaming would work. Kurt surprised himself by smiling as he passed certain parts of the mall; the cinema, the coffee curve, the store where Ty tried to climb up the wall to escape the virtual mountain lion…

  Kurt would never look back fondly on the last two weeks, but there had definitely been some good people and some good times tucked in along the way. Part of him hoped that La Plethora, however gaudy it might be, would one day open its doors to the public. It just seemed like too much to go to waste.

  Everyone gathered again for dinner. The atmosphere was tense, as might have been expected given that exactly half of the group were leaving in little over 12 hours. Anthony’s face still reflected his anger with Kurt and Ernesto but Michael seemed to have been quite successful in reining him in.

  Once most of the group had retired for the night, Kurt and Minter checked everything in the ECI to make sure that all of their timings were correct. Ernesto came in and freed his computer from the metal bar which had secured it to the desk since before Kurt and Minter arrived. The three of them took it out into the food court and went over the plan one more time.