by David Wong
11
They were back in the van, stuck in traffic downtown. They were patched into a group call with Budd, Echo, and Andre, their faces showing on the monitor in split screen. Budd was at what looked like the dining room at the Fort Fortuna hotel and casino. Behind him was a massive stone fire pit with various meats dangling over a roaring flame, buxom servers slicing off fresh hunks for tired-looking tourists.
“Nobody knows squat,” said Budd over a plate of charred sausages. “Tilley’s body was found in the parking garage here; that was true. Looks like someone from Zoey’s fan club then came and scooped it up before anyone from the city could get down here, like they’d been tipped off it was here, or already knew. Fortuna staff didn’t even follow up after that, seemed like they were just relieved somebody took him off their hands. Either way, the carcass was here long enough for word to get out that it’d been found at the largest and most well-known Ashe joint in the city, which I suppose was the point.” Budd noticed his sausages were in the frame and said, “Oh, and, while I was here, I decided to do some quality control on the buffet.”
Andre and Echo were calling from Andre’s Bentley, also stuck in traffic.
“We found Dexter Tilley’s mother,” said Andre, “but she did not want to talk to us. Showed her the ol’ Ben Franklin subpoena, a whole stack of ’em. Didn’t budge. Then we decided to track down Shae LaVergne, but it looks like she’s temporarily out of the country.”
“Like she knew this was all about to go down and wanted to get away,” said Zoey. “That’s weird, right? Okay, so who else is there to talk to?”
“That’s actually the problem,” said Andre. “Ideally we’d be able to talk to Tilley’s friends but if they’re all part of The Blowback then they’re definitely not gonna talk to us.”
Echo said, “They’re always in the Hub.” That was a popular VR hangout. “But I don’t have an account, obviously, I’m much too cool for that.”
“Oh, god,” groaned Zoey, “my ex used to have a part-time job in the Hub, growing these power-up berries in a digital orchard that he’d sell for Spoils. We’d be on a drive somewhere and I could see him logged in with his glasses, harvesting his stupid berries. Who here has a login? So we can go in and talk to them?”
“Not me,” said Andre. “Why do I need a whole second life to make a mess of?”
Will shook his head. “What happened to Tilley didn’t occur in the Hub, it occurred in reality. Megaboss Alonzo said the confession bounty was put up by a single donor, hinted that it was someone high up in private security. I assume he’s talking about—”
“But that’s not who killed Tilley,” interrupted Zoey.
“Maybe not,” countered Will, “but it is who wants you to go down for it. That’s who we’re after, not the murderer. That could be anybody. Random street crime, for all we know.”
“No. I want to know who did it.”
“Somebody should comb through Blink,” said Will, ignoring her. “See if Tilley had any dealings with—”
An alert popped up on Will’s phone. Zoey couldn’t read it from where she was sitting, but she saw Will’s forehead scrunch up.
Another alert, this one on Wu’s phone.
Another, this one on the van’s security system.
She heard three more tones through their conference call, Andre, Echo, and Budd all getting the same notifications.
Budd jumped up from his table. “Where are you guys? Right now?”
“Intersection of Thirty-first Street and Thirty-sixth Avenue,” said Will. Note: The street naming system in Tabula Ra$a made no sense whatsoever. “Heading west.”
Budd was moving now, abandoning his food. “You need to get off if you can, or you’re gonna run right smack into it.”
Zoey asked, “Run into what?”
Will said, “There’s going to be a riot. At the Night Inn.”
Wu studied the display on the windshield. “We can turn off at Park, that would likely keep us clear…”
Zoey said, “No. Take me there.”
Wu said, “That is an extremely bad idea.”
“If these are Tilley’s friends showing up at the inn, they’re going after the girls, right? To get revenge? These are the girls we convinced to go back to work after the thing last month. Wu, go. Don’t make me repeat the order.”
Traffic cleared as navigation systems collectively started routing other vehicles away from the disturbance. Zoey’s disguised van rolled up to a spot about a block away from the Night Inn, close enough to see the front of the building had been repaired from the hostage crisis (in reality, that’d probably been done weeks ago) and the entire front of the building was a looping video of an adorable girl’s smiling face, big round cheeks and brown eyes, her fingers laced under her chin. Animated text scrolled around her face saying,
YOU’RE SAFE HERE.
Subtle, thought Zoey. Also, the situation did not look like a riot. There were a few dozen people in front of the building, just kind of yelling at it. She couldn’t quite make out what they were saying. Something about ponies? Zoey had expected burning cars and clouds of tear gas, but it was just a weirdly awkward gathering of idiots. None of them seemed to know what to do. It was actually kind of disappointing.
“This is what everybody’s freaking out over?”
Will studied the scene. “We didn’t say there was a riot. We said there was going to be one. A spontaneous riot, within the next five to ten minutes.”
“It’s a spontaneous riot, but they scheduled it in advance? That’s thoughtful.”
From up front, Wu said, “It wasn’t scheduled. There’s an unrest algorithm that uses Blink to predict outbreaks of violence.”
“So it’s saying there might be a riot.”
“No,” said Will, “it’s telling us there will be one.”
And with that, a guy kicked over a trash can. Several people moved in to capture the damage on camera, getting the word out that chaos was occurring and that anyone who wanted to be famous should come join in. Breaking the seal.
“So what do we do? How do we defuse it?”
“You can’t,” said Will. “You have guards on the door and additional security on the way. If you step out there, they’ll go nuts at the sight of you.”
“Does the software tell you that, too? This is crazy!”
“It’s not complicated. You have preexisting moods, multiple ringleader personalities in proximity, and a triggering event that happened about twenty minutes ago. It’s like a chemical reaction, at that point we’re just waiting for it to start bubbling up.”
“Triggering event? What was that?”
“There’s a new video, from Dexter Tilley.”
“Tilley is dead,” said Zoey, watching as the proto-riot overturned another trash can. “Unless someone’s resurrected him again?”
“It was made two weeks ago, but it was just released while we were talking to Alonzo. Here…”
Will put the video on one of the van’s monitors. It was a close-up of Tilley’s teary, trembling, pimply face. He was sitting in what looked like a makeshift living space built out of a shipping container—ribbed white metal walls, no visible window, an open case of self-heating ramen containers in the background. The young man took some pills, then took a drink from a bottle of water. He sniffed, let out a long breath and then said,
“They call it a teaser pony. On a horse ranch, it’s hard to tell when the mares are in heat. But other horses can tell. So what they have is a male pony, a little one, maybe a Shetland. And what they’ll do is lead the mares past him and when he senses one is ready to breed, he’ll get an erection and start thrashing around, desperate. Then they’ll bring in a stallion to mount her. See, they pick a pony because he’s physically too small to even do it. Even if he gets access to the mare, he can’t mount her. And they know he’s too small to hurt anyone when he finally lashes out. That’s how he spends his life. Throbbing, desperate arousal, no relief. Rage and frustration but power
less to get revenge. Too dumb to know he’s just a tool, that others count on his pathetic neediness for their own profit. That’s me. My whole life. I’m the teaser pony.”
Outside the van, a mobile vending machine that had been parked next to the entrance of the Night Inn raised itself up on tiny wheels and started rolling away, as if it was getting worried about the riot. Some of the kids saw it, surrounded it, and tipped it over, smashing the glass in front. Zoey felt oddly sorry for it. Bottles of soda and beer rolled out and some of the burgeoning rioters grabbed them and chucked them at the facade of the building, hooting and yelling at the sound they made when they smashed.
“So, first of all,” continued Tilley on the screen, “I want to thank all my brothers out there who helped me find her. I tried to call, she blocked me. Tried to follow her on her Blink, she blocked me. Blocked me everywhere. Tried to find her at the inn, they said she was gone. Went to her mom’s place, they had private security at the door, from the Suits. Finally found out they had Shae holed up at a hotel out of town. And you guys, you heroes, you got me the room number, I know it wasn’t easy. But she’s got security there, too, the cow funding this whole thing, and I know that I can fight through and get to the door if I want. Tear down that door, tear down the building. But I don’t do it. All I wanted, all I wanted, was to say good-bye. To apologize. To make her understand…”
Tilley broke down in tears.
“I chickened out, brothers. I let you all down. Didn’t even approach the building. I know what her answer would be. I have all of this love to give, and nobody wants it. So I become everybody’s puppet. I have this need, like an addiction, so they use it to control me. They smile, flash some thigh, touch me on the arm to get a bigger tip. ‘You want this? You want this? Well, you can’t have it.’ Giggling the whole time. So funny, isn’t it? To watch me starve? Funny how I didn’t hear laughter that day at the inn. Funny how only then, when she saw what I could do, understood what I could do to her, did she finally see me as a man.
“But even then, she had all the power. If she’d refused to go along, made me kill her, we all know how it’d have played out. Headlines about another pretty girl murdered by an evil brute. A martyr. A symbol. But now, I understand. I can be that symbol. A symbol of a system that profits from our urges and then tries to shame us for having them. You did this, Shae. And for the rest of you, you know this isn’t just about her. This is about a whole system. My brothers, it’s time to burn it down.”
Outside the van, someone had found bricks. One was chucked up at the building’s facade. It smashed into a second-floor window, through the thin video screen. Sparks flew, static rippled through the animation of the smiling girl’s face, making her eyes briefly look like she was having a seizure. The rioters went wild, excited that damage had been done. Another threshold had been crossed.
Wu said, “They’re here.”
Ashe Security vehicles pulled up on the sidewalk, teams in armored gear spilling out. Zoey spotted Kowalski among them. The rioters erupted at the sight, throwing bottles, then bricks. They seemed to have hit another gear, everyone moving with confidence now, feeding off each other. Half of the security team tried to form a barrier in front of the door, while the rest went inside, presumably to evacuate the staff through the other exit. The screaming and chanting got louder, some spectators joining in until it wasn’t clear where the riot stopped and the bystanders started. They, too, fed off each other, the growing crowd bringing with it the cruel courage of anonymity.
A bottle bounced off the van. The riot was spreading outward, engulfing them. The kid who threw it was just feet away, wearing a Halloween mask that projected a holographic skull, a design similar to the digital disguise Tilley had used the night of the hostage crisis. A security guard with a riot shield shoved him back and the kid stumbled and bumped into the side of the van. His face landed right on the window, inches away from Zoey’s. The mask slipped on impact and Zoey looked right into his eyes. He couldn’t see her, the windows were so tinted that it’d have been easier to see through the metal door panels. But seeing the guy’s facial expression … that was the first time Zoey truly understood.
The trolls who occasionally showed up to yell at her, they were always smiling or at least smirking. Common bullies, having fun, members of a loose hate group who barely believed the slogans they scrawled on her buildings. What she saw on the face of this guy was something completely different: rage on a level that could only be called a kind of madness. She got the sense that if someone slid a big red button to that man and said, “If pressed, will destroy the entire planet,” he’d have hammered it. All sense of consequences gone, a fury that blots out the future.
Wu said, “Look!”
He was leaning toward the windshield, pointing upward with a finger.
A drone was buzzing in toward the building, way up, at about roof level. Dangling below it was a big plastic drum, hanging from makeshift straps. Zoey’s first thought was that it was a bomb, but that couldn’t be right. Things hadn’t progressed to the Bomb Stage, had they?
It would be much later when Zoey found out what was supposed to have happened here. The barrel was full of a white, hot liquid, a rubberized sealant somebody had stolen from a nearby construction site, the same place where they were finding the loose bricks. Their big, hilarious plan was to crash it into the building, spattering the white goo down the facade. See, so it would look like somebody had ejaculated all over the face of the girl in the video loop. They presumably didn’t know that the material was highly flammable until it cured, or maybe they did know and didn’t care. Either way, the drone and barrel crashed into the building as planned, splattering the goo down the screen and then into the sparking hole where the brick had gone through earlier. The liquid ignited immediately, a curtain of flame whipping upward.
Zoey sucked in a breath. The crowd outside went wild.
The kid outside threw a brick at the van’s window, unintentionally hurling it right at Zoey’s skull. The brick bounced off without leaving a scratch. They’d have gotten the same result if the brick had been a shotgun blast. This confused the kid, plus everyone who saw it happen. They didn’t put together the fact that this meant the van was in fact an armored vehicle in disguise—the riot hive mind is not a genius—but rather felt the dumb frustration of a dog that can’t figure out how to open the toilet lid to get a drink. Several of the rioters ran over and started pushing on the van, rocking it, having decided that it’d be fun to tip it over.
Wu didn’t wait for an order from Zoey. He slammed on the accelerator, steered up onto the sidewalk, and drove right through the crowd. They hit one guy, hard, knocking him aside. Zoey felt it in her gut. They bounced down off the curb and got onto the street again, passing emergency vehicles whooshing in from the other direction. Professionals throwing themselves into danger on Zoey’s behalf.
She should be back there. This was her crisis, it should be her mess to clean up. And yet, they drove away, farther and farther from the danger, and Zoey said nothing. She reassured herself that ultimately she would pay the bill, that those emergency workers were doing their jobs, that everyone would understand.
She hated herself.
Will told Wu to stop somewhere. If they were being followed, he didn’t want to lead them all the way back to the estate and give up the identity of the cover vehicle. They wound up in the parking lot of a company called Life Partners, a place that rents friends you can hang out with or who’ll help around the house. The building was designed so that it appeared the entire structure was being held aloft by a crowd of smiling statues, each with one hand held above their head to bear the load, the other giving a thumbs-up.
Zoey watched the feed from the inn. The fire had melted huge chunks of the facade and the blaze had spread to the interior. Smoke was billowing out of several windows. Guards and employees were draining out of the building, fleeing the fire.
She was struggling to breathe. Wu was asking her things, expr
essing concern. She couldn’t really hear him. Will was watching her, saying nothing.
She looked at him and tried to steady her voice. “Is … is this my fault?”
“Why are you asking that question?”
“Why can’t you just say ‘no’ when I ask something like that? God.”
“You’re not a child,” said Will, gently. “I won’t treat you like one. You’re asking me if this was your fault because you want to know what emotion you’re supposed to be feeling right now. Are you supposed to be beating yourself up? Well, that’s the wrong question. The world doesn’t care about your emotions.”
“So what question should I be asking?”
“Whether or not you would do it differently next time. Everything that happens matters only in terms of what you can learn from it going forward.”
“Are you going to lecture me about how I should have had Tilley killed?”
“Would that have prevented this?”
“I don’t see how it would. Even if you’d made it look like an accident, like you said, they’d have found a way to blame me. Hell, for all we know his death was an accident and they’re still blaming me.”
“I agree.”
“You do?”
“Yes. You were right, I was wrong. My way would have made him a martyr, just a few weeks sooner.”
“So, what in the hell am I supposed to learn from a bunch of people going nuts and torching my building?”
“Some rioters in this world have a legitimate grievance. Do these?”
“No.”
“Are they rational in the demands they’re making of you?”
“I can’t even tell what their demands are.”
“So, we couldn’t have done anything to prevent this—they’re doing what they were already determined to do, for their own reasons. That means we move past self-doubt and don’t look back. Now the only question that matters is how do we fix it.”