The lieutenant enjoyed a glorious circuit of the Collaboratory, ostensibly to check it out for security purposes, but mostly in order to exhibit himself to the awestruck locals. Oscar tried to make himself useful. He introduced the lieutenant colonel to his local security experts: Kevin, and Captain Burningboy.
During the briefing, Kevin said little—Kevin seemed rather embarrassed. Burningboy proved most forthcoming. The Moderator captain launched into a detailed and terrifying recitation of the Collaboratory’s strategic plight. Buna was a mere twenty kilometers from the highly porous border with Louisiana. The murky swamps of the Sabine River valley were swarming with vengeful Regulators. Though the armed helicopter attack against the Regulator commandos had never become official news, the assault had provoked them to fury.
The threat to Buna was immediate and serious. The Regulators had swarms of airborne drones surveilling the facility around the clock. Huey had given up his plans to co-opt the facility. He wanted it abandoned, ruined, destroyed. The Regulators were more than willing to carry out Huey’s aims. They were lethally furious that the Collaboratory was hosting Moderators.
This briefing enthralled the lieutenant colonel. Sickened by his desk job and embarrassed by the sordid cover-up of his glorious attack, the man was visibly itching for a fight. He had come fully prepared. His all-volunteer squad of forest ninjas were lugging whole arsenals of professional gear: body armor, silenced sniper rifles, human body-odor sniffers, mine-proofed boot soles, night-fighting video helmets, even ultraspecial, freeze-dried, self-heating, long-range patrol rations.
The lieutenant colonel, having debriefed the locals on the ground, announced that it was time for a reconnaissance in force, out in the swamps. His media crew would not be neglected; their helicopters would serve as his comlink and impromptu air backup.
Oscar had some acquaintance with the lieutenant colonel through his NSC connections. Having finally met the man in person, he swiftly realized that the colonel was a clear and present danger to himself and every human being within firing range. He was young, zealous, and as dumb as a bag of hammers; he was an atavistic creature from the blood-soaked depths of the twentieth century.
Oscar nevertheless made his best professional effort.
“Colonel, sir, those flooded woods in the Sabine River valley are tougher than you might expect. We’re not just talking swamps here—we’re basically talking permanent disaster areas. There’s been a lot of severe flooding in the Sabine since the rain patterns changed, and a lot of the local farmland has gone back to wilderness. That’s not the forest primeval out there. Those are deserted, toxic locales of no economic value, where all the decent lumber is long gone and there are poisonous weeds and bushes half the size of trees. It would be a mistake to underestimate those Regulators when they’re on their native ground. Those Cajun nomads are not just native hunters and fishers and swamp dwellers; they’re also very big on sylvan audio surveillance.”
It was, of course, of no use. The lieutenant colonel, and his men, and his impressionable, airborne war correspondents, left on dawn patrol the next morning. Not a single one of them was ever seen again.
__________
Three days after this silent debacle, Captain Burningboy announced his own departure. He was now “General” Burningboy again, and having successfully retrieved his reputation, he felt it was time for him to leave.
Kevin threw a block party for the General, on the grounds of the police station. Greta and Oscar attended in full dress and, for the first time ever, as a public couple. They had of course been kidnapped as a couple, and rescued as a couple, so their appearance made perfect sense. It was also a boost for morale.
In point of sad fact, Greta and Oscar had very little to say to or do with one another at Burningboy’s farewell party. They were both hopelessly preoccupied with the exigencies of power. Besides, Kevin’s party featured a massive banquet of genuine food. After days on nomad biotech rations, the scientists and proles flung themselves on it like wolverines.
Oscar was pained to see Burningboy abandoning him. It seemed so unnecessary. Burningboy, who had been drinking heavily, took Oscar aside and explained his motives in pitiless detail. It all had to do with social network structure.
“We used to handle these things the way the Regulators do,” Burningboy confided. “Promote the best, and segregate the rest. But they ended up with an aristocracy—the Sun Lords, the Nobles, the Respected, and down at the very bottom, all the lousy newbies. In the Moderators, we use balloting. So we have turnaround; people can spend their reputations, and lose them, and earn them back. Besides—and this is the killer point here—our technique prevents decapitation attacks. See, the feds are always after ‘the criminal kingpins.’ They always want ‘the top guy in the outfit,’ the so-called mastermind.”
“I’ll really miss these briefings of yours,” Oscar said. It had been a long time since he had appeared in public with his full regalia of spats, cummerbund, and proper hat. He felt a million miles away from Burningboy, as if he were receiving signals from a distant planet.
“Look, Oscar, after thirty years of American imperial information warfare, everybody in the goddamn world understands counterinsurgency and political subversion. We all know how to do it now, we all know how to wreck the dominant paradigm. We’re geniuses at screwing with ourselves and deconstructing all our institutions. We don’t have a single institution left that works.” Burningboy paused. “Am I getting too radical here? Am I scaring you?”
“No. It’s the truth.”
“Well, that’s why I’m going to jail now. We Moderators have a kinda pet state magistrate out in New Mexico. He’s willing to put me away on a completely irrelevant charge. So I’ll be spending two or three years in a minimum security state facility. I think that once they’ve got me nice and safe in the slammer, I may be able to survive this thing you’ve done here.”
“You’re not telling me that you’re actually going to prison, Burningboy.”
“You should try it, amigo. It’s the ultimate invisible American population. Prisons have everything that interests you. People with a lot of spare time. Weird economics, based on drugs and homemade tattoos. There’s a lot of time to think seriously. You really do regret your old mistakes inside a penitentiary.” Burningboy had an impossibly remote look now. Oscar was losing him; it was as if he were bound on a flower-decked Valkyrie ship for the shores of Avalon. “Besides, some of those poor evil bastards are so far gone that they actually have bad teeth. I can practice dentistry again, when I’m in stir. Did I ever tell you I used to be a dentist? That was before the caries vaccine came in and destroyed my profession.”
Oscar had forgotten that Burningboy had once been a dentist. The man had earned a medical degree. Oscar was alarmed by this, not merely because the annihilation of the noble profession of dentistry was a stark barometer of America’s social damage. It bothered him because he was forgetting important things about important people. Was he too old now, at twenty-nine? Was he losing his grip? Had he taken on too much? Maybe it was the way Burningboy dressed and talked. He was a dropout, a prole, a marginal. It was just impossible to take him seriously for more than a few instants.
“I have no regrets,” Burningboy said, emptying his cocktail glass with a flourish. “I led my people into a lot of trouble here. That wasn’t my idea—it was your damned idea—but they wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t given it my big say-so. If you change hundreds of people’s lives, you ought to pay a stiff price for that. Just to, you know, keep everybody from tryin’ it. So I’m doing the honorable thing here. My people understand about prison.”
“That is the honorable thing, isn’t it? Doing time. Paying dues.”
“That’s right. I led the charge, and now I step aside. At least I won’t end up like Green Huey.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean that Huey can’t put it down, son. He can’t put down the cross and take off the crown of thorns. He can’t
mosey off the stage and go sit quietly in the corner. He’s the red-hot self-declared super-savior of the meek and downtrodden, and you can’t pull a stunt like that in America without somebody shooting you. That’s just the kind of thing we do in this country. Huey looks a mile high right now, but he’s made out of meat. Somebody’s gonna kill Huey. The lone nut sniper, a crowd of spooks outside the motorcade…” He shot Oscar a sudden opaque look. “I just hope he doesn’t get offed by somebody that I personally know.”
“It would be very regrettable if the Governor came to harm.”
“Yeah, right.”
Oscar cleared his throat. “If you’re leaving us, General, who’s going to be in command here?”
“You are. You’ve always been in command here. Don’t you get that yet? You need to wake up a little, son.”
“Look, I don’t give any orders. I just talk to the relevant parties.”
Burningboy snorted.
“Okay, then let me rephrase my question. Who do I talk to, when I need to talk to the Moderators?”
“All right.” Burningboy shrugged. “I’ll introduce you to my anointed successor.”
Burningboy led him inside the police station. From behind the locked door of the chief’s office came a loud series of groans. Burningboy produced a swipecard from inside his medicine bag, and opened the door. Kevin had his bare feet up on his desk. He was receiving dual foot rubs from a pair of nomad women. He was very drunk, and wearing a silly party hat.
“All right, ladies,” Kevin gurgled. “That’ll be enough for now. Thank you so much. Really.”
“Your metatarsals are really trashed,” said the first masseuse, with dignity.
“Can we mark off a whole hour?” said the second.
“Oh, go ahead!” Kevin said royally. “Who’s to know?”
“This is my successor,” said Burningboy. “Our new security honcho. Captain Scubbly Bee.”
“That’s just great,” Oscar said. “That’s good news. Incredible. It’s so wonderful I scarcely know what to say.”
Kevin swung his oily feet from the desk. “I enlisted, man. I signed up with the mob. I’m a made guy, I’m a Moderator now.”
“I understood that much,” Oscar told him. “New alias and everything. ‘Scubbly Bee,’ am I right? What is that? Not ‘Stubbly’?”
“No, Scubbly. Scubbly Bee.” Kevin pointed to a nearby shredder. “I just trashed all my official ID. I can’t tell you how great that felt. This is the best party I ever had.”
“What’s the significance of ‘Scubbly Bee’? It must mean something of drastic importance in order to sound so silly.”
Kevin grinned. “That’s for me to know and you to find out, chump.”
Burningboy shook Kevin’s hand. “I’ll be going soon,” he said. “You keep your nose clean, all right, Captain? This is the last time I want to see you so drunk.”
“I’m not all that drunk,” Kevin lied. “It’s mostly that intoxicating endorphin rush from my feet.”
Burningboy left the office, throwing his arms over the willing shoulders of the two nomad women. Oscar sat down. “I hope you didn’t destroy your voter registration, too.”
“As if absentee voting in Boston is somehow gonna help us down here.”
“He’s really put you in direct charge over his own people inside the facility?”
Kevin yawned. “Y’know, when this party is over, I’m gonna have a serious talk with you, man. In the meantime, you need to eat something. Maybe even have a drink. After all, you’re the guy who’s paying for all this.”
“I won’t take much of your valuable party time, Captain Bee. This is just a friendly krewe-style chat.”
“If we’re going to be all friendly, then you’d better call me ‘Scubbly.’” Kevin pulled his socks over his reddened, liniment-reeking feet, with a theatrical series of winces. “You’ve just got to know why he did that, don’t you? You’ve got to be on top of developments, you can’t even wait till morning to learn. Well, it’s because he’s setting me up, that’s why. He’s getting off the hot seat, and he’s putting me right on it. See, he thinks the Regulators are gonna cross the border and come after us with everything they have. Because that’s what he wants, that’s his agenda. The Regulators will stomp this place, and then the Regulators will catch a truly massive counterreaction from the feds.”
“That seems like a far-fetched gambit, doesn’t it?”
“But that’s the way he set this up, man. He didn’t come here because he wanted to help your little pet scientists. You’re too straight, you just don’t understand these guys’ priorities. They gave up on you a long, long time ago. They don’t expect any law or justice from the U.S. government. They don’t even expect the government to be sane. The whole federal system just detached itself from them and floated off into deep space. They think of the government as something like bad weather. It’s something you just endure.”
“You’re wrong, Kevin—I understand all of that perfectly.”
“When they want to take action, they take actions that matter to them. The other proles, that’s who matters. They’re like tribes who are wandering through an enormous hostile desert made of your laws and money. But the Moderators hate the Regulators. The Regulators are strong and scary now. They’ve got a state Governor as their big secret Grand Dragon Pooh-bah. They overwhelmed an Air Force base. The Moderators…all they own is a few dozen ghost towns and national parks.”
Oscar nodded encouragement.
“Then you came along. All of a sudden there was a chance to take over this place. It’s a federal science facility, a much better facility than a pork-barrel Air Force base. It has big prestige. Grabbing it is an intolerable insult to Regulator prestige, because their main man Huey built this place, and he thinks he owns it by right. He’s nuts about green genetic gumbo and weird cognition crap. So that’s why Burningboy helped you. And that’s why he’s getting out now, while the getting is good. He set a trap for the other side, and to his eyes, we’re just poisoned bait.”
“How do you know all this?”
Kevin opened a desk drawer. He removed a large and highly illegal revolver, and a bottle of whiskey. He sipped from the whiskey and then began placing hinge-lid cigar boxes on the polished face of his desk. “Because I heard him say so, man. Look at these things, would you?”
Kevin flipped open the first cigar box. It was full of pinned audio bugs, with neat handwritten labels. “You know how hard it is to fully debug a facility? It’s technically impossible, that’s how hard. There aren’t any working ‘sweeps’ or ‘monitors’ for bugs—that’s all crap! Any decent bug basically can’t be detected, except by a physical search. So that’s what I’ve been doing. I round up big gangs of Moderators with nothing better to do, and we go over every conceivable surface with fine-tooth combs. These bugs are like pubic crabs, they’re a goddamn social disease. I’ve found bugs in here that go back fourteen and fifteen years. I made a special collection! Just look!”
“Very impressive.”
Kevin flipped his cigar box shut and pointed at it solemnly. “You know what that is? It’s evil, that’s what it is. It’s bad, it’s just plain evil of us to do this to ourselves. We have no decency as a people and a nation, Oscar. We went too far with this technology, we lost our self-respect. Because this is media, man. It’s evil, prying, spying media. But we want it and use it anyway, because we think we’ve got to be informed. We’re compelled to pay total attention to everything. Even things we have no goddamn right or business paying any attention to.”
Oscar said nothing. He wasn’t about to stop Kevin while he was in a confessional mood.
“So I got rid of everybody else’s bugs. And I installed my own. Because I’m finally the hacker who became the superuser. I didn’t just crack the computers here. I’ve cracked this whole environment. I can access anything that goes on in here, anytime that I want. I’m a cop. But I’m more than a cop. I mean, being a cop would be traditional—a white Angl
o guy imposing his idea of order on the restless natives, hell, every city in America was just like that once. And man, I was thrilled to do it. I loved myself, I thought I was magic. It’s just amazingly interesting, like watching other people having sex. But you know, if you do that sixty or seventy times, it gets old. It just does.”
“Does it really?”
“Oh yeah. And it has a price. I haven’t gotten laid since I met you! I don’t dare! Because I’m the Secret Master Policeman. I scare the crap out of any decent woman. Indecent women have their own agenda when they have sex with the secret police. And besides, I just don’t have any time for my own needs! The Super Master Inquisitor is way too busy with everybody else’s. I’ve got to run word scans on all my verbal tapes. Every time there’s an incident somewhere I’ve got to peel the videos back. I got bugs with their batteries running down, people are findin’ ’em and stepping on them. There’s goblins lurking in the woods. There’s spooks flying overhead. There’s drunks, lost children, petty thieves. There’s fire safety and car accidents. And every last one of those things is my problem. All of it. All of it!”
“Kevin, you’re not planning to leave me, are you?”
“Leave you? Man, I was born for this. I got my every wish. It’s just that it’s turning me into a monster. That’s all.”
“Kevin, you don’t look all that bad to me. Things aren’t that bad here. This isn’t chaos. The situation’s holding.”
“Sure, I’m keeping order for you. But it’s not law and order, Oscar. There’s order, but there is no law. We let things get out of control. We let it get all emergent and unpredictable. We let it fall back to ad hoc. I’m keeping order here because I’m a secret tyrant. I’ve got everything but legitimacy. I’m a spy and a usurper, and I have no rules. I have no brakes. I have no honor.”
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