Adam laughed and yelled, “Come here! Everyone to a television!”
As the dozen people still in the newsroom trotted into position or craned around in their chairs, the woman helping Judy rushed back into view with a clear glass of water, presumably, in one hand and a stack of papers in the other, evidently to give Judy something to fiddle with while the crew behind the cameras scrambled to get the teleprompter filled with words. Somewhere in the background, editors were typing furiously no doubt, but other than the fact that everything appeared to be back on, what could they say? The young woman stood directly in front of Judy, reached forward out of sight with both hands and when she stepped away again, Judy’s décolleté was in proper order just under her collarbones.
“StreamNet’s up!” Someone screamed in the newsroom.
“Fuck!” Came a reply, probably from the night copydesk chief, Brenda, who spun away from the closest television by the night city editor’s station and trotted to her desk. Brenda doubled as late night web producer, making sure all local copy got published for the morning rush of traffic.
Adam looked over at his desk but saw only the teeth still on the screen.
“As you can see, ladies and gent …” Judy coughed, cleared her throat roughly and slugged some of whatever was in the glass. Adam didn’t think water would have made her cringe quite like that but maybe. “As you can see, we’re back on the air. We’re getting some reports now about how widespread the uh re-establishment of the StreamNet, cable and satellite uh activities are …” She glared at someone left of the camera. “We’re back live. We’re back live and still gathering information, but what we can tell you is that the StreamNet appears to be fully up and functional. I’m sure everyone is as relieved as we are to be back on the air. We still don’t know what happened earlier, but we’ll stay with the story continuously, with updates as we get them. Our weatherman, Richard Brockton, is live on Capitol Hill where hundreds of people have taken to the street in an impromptu block party.”
The screen switched to a well-dressed, smiling Brockton. “Judy! Thank you. We’re on Capitol Hill where, as you can see behind me” he stepped slightly into the street and was nearly hit by a bicyclist who yelled “Goddamn it!” Brockton jumped back to the sidewalk. “As you can see there are thousands of people in the street here. Live music …”
Judy broke in, an inset square with her head in it appearing in the upper left corner. “Do you have any idea how much of that area is back online?”
“So far, from what people are telling us, everything is back up, from cash registers to personal computers. Including, of course, our satellite link back down to you.”
“Okay, people!” Adam yelled. “Let’s get our own reports up. I want a headline across the top of the homepage right now!”
From just out of sight Brenda yelled, “I’ve got the story up. One sentence. File name is netback12. It’s all yours. Photo! Send me something, a cellphone shot of a computer, anything!”
Adam sat at his desk, reduced the last image from the video. He scoffed at the preposterous nonsense, but then quickly remembered that Natalie might be in danger precisely because of how crazy the group was. He got his phone in his left hand, searched her name and dialed the number. While her phone rang, he moused over to the StreamNet browser icon and fired it up. The Daily-Record’s homepage banner, as big as Brenda could make it, read: “StreamNet restored; cause of outage unknown” on two tall all-cap lines. Adam wondered about the semicolon …
Natalie’s phone switched to voice mail. He hung up. Robert and the photog would be there soon. She might even be on the line with them. His generalized panic began to subside. Whatever was going on now was regular ol’ life, regular journalism. He relaxed back into his chair, the pain in his chest leveling off, replaced by the warmth from the vodka. And then a terrible realization slammed into his brain: They had hundreds of thousands of newspapers soon to be tossed on door steps, stuffed in street boxes and store shelves that were completely wrong. His entire career as a newspaper man collapsed into a vacuum of irony. Beach came storming in shouting commands like an angel of war and his head cleared.
“We’ve got a special section on the books! I want it ripped up. Switch to single broadsheet. Get me some copy for the cover. Headline: StreamNet back! as big as you can make it. First deck: Relief as world returns to normal or like that.”
She swirled past him to her office.
“Adam, I want some copy for that story.” She didn’t look at him. “We’ll run whatever you can put together and back fill with Marr’s column.” She stuck her head out of her office. “Adam!”
“On it!” He typed furiously.
“We’ll wrap as many papers as we can with it. I’m not going down without a fight.”
Adam pushed down the feeling of futility. It ain’t over yet, by god. He continued typing in a notes file, “… the StreamNet proved robust, resilient, in early morning hours today, demonstrating it could and would survive an attack that had been strong enough to shut it down, apparently worldwide, for a few short hours.” He hit the return key. His cellphone rang.
The name on the screen was “problem child,” AKA Natalie.
Adam answered it. “Hey!”
“Hey! Adam!” She was a little out of breath, but she sounded okay.
“Are you …”
“I’m fine, but listen. It isn’t over yet. It’s not over.”
“What’s not over? The StreamNet outage?”
“Yes!” She huffed. He could hear sounds of running, shoes slapping pavement. “The outage. The Hive AI. Something terrible has happened. Something really really bad …” She coughed on words while, apparently, running.
“Find the police!” Adam yelled into the phone, mad at her for interrupting his triumphal moment. “Get somewhere away from those crazy bastards and …”
“We are!” Shoes clapping on sidewalk, panting. “We’re running to his car. There are federal agents all over the place.”
“Great news! Get safe and get back here as soon as you can. We’ve got a full day in front of us.”
“What!” Hurt and surprise mixed together.
“Get some rest but get in here!”
“You don’t understand!”
Adam thought he heard something like a cry bubble up in her voice.
“They’ve killed millions of people. The president. Congress and military …”
The word “Who” on his lips, he looked up to the television set to see if something was happening there. On the screen was an image of the White House taken from Pennsylvania Avenue, just overlooking the chaotic North Lawn. It took a full second, Natalie huffing into the phone as she ran, for Adam to understand that masses of people were climbing over the main barrier fence, part of which had been broken down to the ground. The people, some cheering with hands raised, swarmed onto the main steps and to the doors and windows of the White House without meeting any resistance. The scene ran with no reporter’s voice. On the screen’s upper left corner were the words “White Horse Breached.”
“Natalie.” He did not take his eyes away from the people now banging on the windows of the fucking White House. She didn’t respond. “Hey, Natalie! I have to go. Get safe and …”
“I said, You have to talk to this guy.”
“Later!” He switched off the call.
Out of the corner of his eye, Beach stood in her doorway, slack-jawed looking at the same TV. Adam opened his mouth to yell at someone, anyone, just a need to state a command, because something really really fucked up was happening and Beach was standing right there, but then a tank stormed around the corner of the White House, smoke pouring out its back. It launched itself on top of at least two dozen people then stalled. The camera providing the live feed zoomed out and panned down to a bushel of blond hair in the grass, the body of a woman lying face down with a microphone still gripped in her hand. A tennis shoe clad foot came into the video frame. It touched the leg of the woman. Her body san
k where the foot touched her and collapsed from that point outward until her body fully dissolved away. The microphone sat alone next to a blue pants suit. The camera panned back up but stayed distant. The sun nearly fully risen in a clear blue sky over the White House. People crawled over the tank like rats, pulling on parts of it but unable to get in. The tank, however, didn't move. A pickup truck smashed over the barrier fence and spun all four wheels in the grass of the North Lawn in acceleration at the White House. The pickup didn't honk or serve hard but nor was it trying to hit people. It missed some if it could without veering too much, and others jumped out of the way but several went under its front. The truck struggled to keep speed amid all the bodies and slick grass. But as it hit the edge of the pavement, it bounced up and then lurched forward when its tires caught. The path in front of it was nearly cleared of people. It slid left against the massive pillars and smashed into the windows. The frames of the windows held, but the thick glass in one pane must have jared loosed because a swarm of people began smashing the pane with whatever they could hold and swing. None of the crowd seemed the least bit concerned about all the dead and dying on the ground around them and under the tank and pickup.
The room around Adam was completely quiet. No sound came from the television, other than the distant roar of the crowd. Adam heard sirens outside the newsroom and felt the urge to bark at someone again, but then the hatch of the tank flopped opened. The individuals surrounding the hatch jerked and fell off. Several fell all the way to the grass, lifeless dolls. An arm and a head appeared out of the hatch. The arm twitched and bits of flame came out of a blur of a hand. After about four rapid-fire shots, the swarm of others on the tanks overwhelmed the shooter and dragged him out. His gun taken from him as the crowd dragged him off the tank and across the grass. A second later, someone stood over the hatch with both hands on the gun, firing into the opening.
“Oh my god,” someone in the newsroom said, quiet, as if in church.
The sirens outside the Daily-Record building stopped at some point during the broadcast. When he noticed the silence, Adam looked through Beach’s office window to see what he could see outside. Perhaps the pandemonium at the White House had spread. The zombie apocalypse upon them. What they saw on the television was so disorienting that he wouldn't have been surprised to see ghouls dancing in the streets. The street outside the window was, however, empty of zombies and moving cars. Back on television, the camera started panning left, silently. The sound crew had dropped all their gear, evidenced by it laying all around the camera and the pantsuit of the woman formally holding a microphone. One of the protesters must have taken control of the camera after whoever was on the ground in front of it had met her fate and her crew fled or died. The big street in front of the White House was packed with people raising fists and shouting encouragement to those attacking the building. If the rioters had protest signs, they’d abandoned them for iron bars and chunks of pavement. However, Adam decided, the rioting crowd must have come from the body of protests that had grown increasingly violent for several months since the President had continued his predecessor’s dismantling of what his administration called the “administrative state.” Those institutions nearly completely dismantled, such as the Department of Labor, HUD, NIH, EPA, FDA, DOE, FAA, Education, Securities and Exchange Commission, etc. tended to be the ones that looked out for the health and wellbeing of citizens. As a result, American cities had become dirty, crowded with homeless streaming in from the impoverished countrysides, dangerous and rife with conflicts between dwindling police departments in all but the wealthiest of neighborhoods, public utilities had become spotty and expensive, water periodically too dangerous to drink. And, yet, somehow the all-corporate party had won election after election, by thin margins but they won as people looked to the all-powerful corporations to bring order to their lives through the magic of loss-lead discounts and other mysterious economic forces. Voter fraud was of course rampant, but the cheating on both sides evened that score. Meanwhile, the backlash by the growing ranks of the poor, poisoned and disenfranchised had grown ever more intense. The more protests, lawsuits and isolation of cities and counties from federal agencies intensified, the more Ma and Pa Kettle voted for law and order, for the corporate independence that would make them all rich and set the world right. They “Dare to Dream of a Better, Richer America.” The president dared to dream of marshal law from time to time, but local police wouldn’t participate and had few officers to contribute to the effort at any rate. He’d tried to mobilize the military, but the Constitution or what was left of it got in the way. Meanwhile, the rest of the world did what it could to stay out of a war with the floundering U.S., betting the country would collapse before mounting a serious military campaign, though it would be a close shave.
Given that background, Adam felt just the tiniest bit of thrill at the attack on the White House. Clearly, however, several aspects of the attacks weren’t computing in his brain. Like, what the hell had happened to the Secret Service? Where had the President got to? Was he in his secret bunker? How could they have lost control so fast and so completely? As he watched, it made a visceral sense that people would rush the White House on foot and smash windows. Adam, apparently like those rioting, didn’t give a second thought to what had to have been dozens of dead and dying former protesters under the tank or shot down in the first few moments of the riot.
Once again, the silence outside their own building jumped out at him. How could that be happening on television and nothing going on in Seattle? He looked at Beach just as she looked at him with her eyes wide in revelation, adrenalin and fear. They’d had the same realization: Seattle could explode at any moment. Anyone stunned by the television scenes from the nation’s capitol would soon revive and do lord knows what.
“Hey, everyone!” Beach yelled. “If you have family, check on them. If you need to go, take off. Come back when you can. If you want to stay, we need to prepare for whatever is about to happen in Seattle. If you’re going downtown, take riot gear, emergency water and food and extra gas mask canisters. We’re canceling the special section. I gotta bad feeling about this.”
“Does that mean my story isn’t running?”
Adam turned to where the question came from. Marr’s eyes flicked from Beach to him and back to Beach. She turned and stepped into her office, slamming the door behind her. Adam watched her put her hands on her face and run them through her hair. The words She has family lurched forward in his brain. He turned to Marr and was about to say the F-word a whole bunch of times when the phone in his hand buzzed. He nearly dropped it, but caught it and looked. Problem Child, again. He stuck it against his ear.
“Hi Adam. My name is Josh Fines. I am with Natalie. She’s fine.”
“Oh that’s great news!” He said with mocking enthusiasm. “Whew! All is well then! But, uh, who the fuck are you and why do you have Natalie’s phone?”
“I am an officer in the Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center in the office of the Director of National Intelligence and part of the U.S. military Cyber Command. I was undercover investigating Celestine, Mannerheim and The Clans. Natalie gave her phone to me because there isn’t much time before the StreamNet and all cellphone systems degrade again, this time for good.”
And, true timing, as Adam watched flames gushing out of the top windows and balcony doors of the White House, the TV signal began to gutter, like a flame going out. But this guy could have been anyone, and he could also be who he said it was. The bio fit. “What’s causing this?” Adam asked as he threw a pen at Kelli McCammon, one of their higher education reporters who sat several desks away. The pen skipped off the top of her computer. She popped up, brown hair bouncing up in big curls.
“Hey!” She challenged. She’d come in around 5 a.m., because she had drawn short straw a couple weeks earlier to cover morning general assignment with Debora out on maternity leave. Clearly, Kelli had been hiding while ostensibly hounding the university for professors wh
o might have government connections and or heard something about what was going on.
Adam waved her over with rapid hand motions, while intermittently pointing at the phone in his hand. She came over, eyes up and defensive, because higher ed was constantly poached for reporters to pick up breaking news. Adam wrote Josh Fines down and mouthed “Look up!” Lucky for his state of mind, Kelli didn’t look to the ceiling but instead grabbed the paper and trotted back to her desk.
“… so you better get to researching all you can. I’ll text you my login. I want you to go to my database, just follow the link, and download and print everything you can. You’ll find what you need there to tell the story of how this all happened. We need to get the story out. We need to tell people that their government is responding.”
“Have you seen what’s going on at the White House?”
“The White House? Adam, it’s everywhere. The Hive AI has unleashed a wave of its microcomputers, nanites, that has killed all the top decision makers across the globe. All the leaders of government, military and corporate operations have been wiped out.” In spite of the training for holding back hysterics, Josh Fines nevertheless had a hard time keeping his voice from cracking. “I don’t have time for an explanation.” Throat clearing. “You’ll find most of what you need to know in those documents. You have to hurry. The AI turned all our systems back on in order to use them for its next stage of growth. There isn’t any way to stop it now. We have to …” Someone interjected. Sounded like a question. A man’s voice. “Yes!” Josh said. “Here’s Natalie.”
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