The yard in front of the homeshare is filled with the kind of ungoverned cars you’re not even allowed to drive anymore. A little Suzuki with the hatch cut off hides in the tall weeds, next to a Dodge panel truck that’s lost its panels and the skeleton of some ancient muscle car. The house is a lot older.
Eden laughs as she and her friends sit there in the rental car, recalibrating their expectations.
“It looks like the Alamo,” she says.
It doesn’t really. It’s a brick house. Old, and out of place. Out of place with this rundown street in a weird part of town, with the online pics Nick sent around, with their idea of where they belong.
Eden already feels out of place with Nick and Marley and Shannon and Honda, even though they have been friends since college.
“Why can’t the world look more like the website?” says Marley.
Eden sees the silhouette of some big water bird in the trees back there, watching a cargo plane come in so close you can see the seams.
“This place is cooler than any website,” she says, but it’s hard to hear.
“Maybe just wait until we see the inside,” says Nick.
“Maybe just we shouldn’t let you pick the rental next time,” says Marley.
“At least it’s close to the airport,” says Honda.
“Like not even five minutes, right?” says Nick.
“Which is why all the trailer parks,” says Eden. “And that junkyard or whatever that was down the street. This is awesome. Adventure travel.”
“Well it’s only ten minutes from downtown,” says Nick. “And it’s just a place to crash. We’re gonna be at the festival the whole time.”
“Where’s the river?” asks Honda.
“Right past those trees,” says Nick, with the confidence of a dude permanently connected to the network through his glasses.
“Why don’t you all get out of the car and come see,” says a man’s voice. The guy is standing there by the car. His smile reveals a couple of fucked-up teeth. His hands are dirty with engine grease. He wipes them on his jeans, then pushes his long hair out of his eyes. His hair and his jeans both look like they have not been washed in a long time.
Eden watches Nick look at the guy. Nick is the driver of the rental, too. He said it was because he was the only one who had already turned 25.
“Finn,” says Nick.
Finn nods.
All the windows are rolled down on the car. Eden is in the back, behind Nick, where the window only rolls halfway down. She looks over the edge of the window at their host. His black T-shirt is faded to the color of primer. He has a piece of metal tied into his hair.
Finn looks back at her.
“You all need some help with your stuff?” he asks.
“No,” says Eden. She opens the door. “Pop the trunk, Nick.”
“Yeah, sure,” says Nick.
“You can leave the extra eyes in the car,” says Finn.
Nick looks at him through his specs.
“Yeah, okay,” says Nick. “They don’t even recognize you.”
“Good,” says Finn.
Eden tries to remember how she got here.
◊
The plane from New York to Austin is new. It smells like a dental office. The plastic is the color of whitened teeth.
Through the porthole you can see the world in tilt shift. You try to figure out where you are. The river from space looks like ice, but it’s August, and you realize that’s the reflection of the sun.
A river of mercury flows through the heartland. It’s how they power all the things we let them make us carry to stay connected.
The whine of the jets shuts out other noise. Each turbine turns at ten thousand revolutions per minute, faster during takeoff. You wonder how they count that. You wonder how much a giant machine like this costs. Three hundred million dollars.
You wonder how many revolutions you could buy for three hundred million dollars.
There are people, individual people, who have that much money. There are people who have ten times that much money. You are not one of them.
In the future, we will all be richer.
We will each have our own robots.
We will live in cities covered in green.
We will live without rulers in true democracies.
You wonder how much it would cost to buy your own tiny island and declare it a separate country.
One time you read a post about this guy who declared his house in the suburbs an independent kingdom. Guess who the king was.
The little television in the seatback cannot be turned off. You cannot hear it without headphones, but the closed captioning reads it out for you. Even the ads. Mostly the ads. Sometimes the computer translator makes mistakes. Other times it spews gibberish. You wonder if it is a secret code.
You imagine you are a spy who keeps the one-time pad in her purse, to translate the messages from control.
When you land in Austin, the first thing you do is sneak outside on the upper level to smoke a cigarette. You do this even though you know some of your old friends are already here, looking for you downstairs, excited to see you, waiting with strong hugs.
It is really fucking hot here. Almost too hot to smoke, but not quite.
You see a corporate hotel over there on the other side of the parking garages. A Hilton. The building is a squat cylinder. You imagine the inside. You remember a movie you saw once on TV. Inside an office building like that, they were experimenting on captured aliens.
When you all get in the car, and pull onto the freeway, the first thing you notice is the billboards. There is one for a strip club, one for a real estate development on the shores of a man-made lake, and one for a political candidate.
BELTRAN
The candidate is in profile, looking up at an angle like he’s watching the planes come in. He wears a red tie and a white shirt. His jacket is off, slung over his shoulder. His skin is white and his hair is dark.
THE FUTURE IS NOW
The second thing you notice is how stubby the trees are here. Like they’re not getting enough water. Never will.
Nick says the trees that were meant to be here all died.
We are killing the world. You are helping.
◊
Finn shows them around the place.
It’s not as bad as it looks from the outside.
They will sleep in the rooms on the first floor. The couples will take the two bedrooms. Eden takes the couch in the hall between the rooms. This was all agreed to before. Nick and Shannon are the ones paying for the whole deal.
They share the first floor bathroom. It is clean enough. They clean it up some more before they go out.
Eden’s hallway is across from a room full of books.
This is the library, says Finn. Help yourself. Take one, leave one.
There is a small bookshelf, a big leather armchair, and a beat-up old rug. There are stacks of books everywhere, stacked so high they touch the bottoms of the old postcards pinned to the wall. Some of the stacks are ready to fall over. You can smell the words going slowly back to pulp.
There is some old fucking hippie dude sitting in the armchair, reading. This was not in the pictures on the website. The color of the guy’s hair and beard is the kind of white that used to be blonde. The color of milk gone bad. Maybe she thinks that because the guy smells so much like cigarettes.
“Who’s Gandalf?” says Eden.
Finn laughs. “That’s Billy. He’s my roommate.”
Billy smiles. “What’s up.” He has a real Texas accent. Which is a weird thing to hear coming out of a hippie.
“Whatcha reading?” asks Eden.
“Wild stuff,” says Billy. He smiles, holds up the book in one hand. It’s an old paperback. The cover shows two women and a man standing in the ruins of a city, a giant sun blazing behind them. “The orgy at the end of the world.”
Ewww.
Finn shows them the kitchen. It is crammed full of hardware.
“Is that a 3D printer?” asks Nick.
“Two of them, actually,” says Finn.
“Government surplus,” says Billy. “From the labs.”
“Need to find a better place to put them,” says Finn.
Finn shows them where the coffee is, how the water filter works, and where he keeps the beer. He says they can help themselves to the beer, but please don’t mess with the printers.
The beer has its own fridge. Mostly cans. There’s some other stuff in there, too. Opaque white Tupperware, labeled in black script. Dates.
The back of the house looks over the river from a tall bluff overgrown with viney trees. You can see downtown off to the west. Directly across is an old gravel pit. A crater lake of dirty rainwater next to a small mountain of asphalt.
“Indians lived here,” says Nick. “Just upriver was a low water crossing for the Chisholm Trail.”
Finn looks at him.
Marley holds his hand.
◊
Job descriptions.
Marley, Nick, and Honda all work in marketing.
Marketing means math. Certain words or images produce certain results. People are numbers.
They put the words into semi-autonomous machines whose job is to sell things.
Basically, the job of the machines is to monitor people and figure out which ads are the best ones to show to get the people to buy stuff. Or at least to get the advertisers to pay to get their flash in front of the people’s eyeballs.
Shannon is in law school.
Eden works for a magazine. Which is really a website. They think of themselves as digital muckrakers. They are looking for a story that will drive enough traffic to get them more eyeballs and more money from advertisers to pay for more muckraking.
The pay sucks.
Collectively, it will take the five of them approximately ninety-two years to pay off their student loans.
Whatever.
What if everyone stopped paying?
◊
There are hipsters on horses here.
The first one they see is a guy in selvedge jeans and a hat like you might see an Australian wear in a war movie. The dude has a moustache that looks like it gets almost as much attention as the horse.
The horse is big, mostly black.
They see more as they walk the long blocks to Proteus from the spot where they park their car.
The riders tower over the pedestrians. Everyone smiles at them. The idea is still new.
Two women ride appaloosas. Eden knows this because she had plastic toy appaloosas as a child. One woman wears leather motorcycle pants and a sleeveless T-shirt that shows off her art. The other has a wrinkled chambray button down and waxed leggings.
“Chaps?” says Marley.
“It’s like a post-apocalyptic Western,” says Eden. She wonders when the whimsy will run out.
Nick tells them about it, relating what his glasses tell him. How the municipal code expressly permits horses on the road, a relic of old times purposely protected in anachronistic pride. How nobody ever really took advantage of it until a year or so ago, when the owner of a bar on the East Side opened up a stable in the property next door.
They are talking about making them put crap catchers on the backs of the horses.
They are talking about taking the idea to other cities. Organizing cross-country trips that follow old trails.
They stand right next to one of the horses waiting to cross the boulevard. You can hear it breathe. It draws flies.
Eden is thinking about touching it when the sirens come.
Police on motorcycles, windscreens flashing, pull up to the crowd waiting to cross and block the way. Their machines emit a horrible tone, a flat electronic cut, crazy loud, designed to cut off all other thought. The horse next to them freaks out. Rumbles and neighs. The hipster in the saddle does not handle his horse like a guy in a Western.
Patrol cars follow, traveling fast, escorting two black Suburbans. As they pass through the intersection they slow just enough that you can see inside. The bright sun penetrates the tinted windows. He is sitting in the back seat of the first Suburban, talking, oblivious to the crowd. You’ve seen the profile a thousand times.
Beltran.
“Beltran!” screams someone in the crowd.
“Fucker!”
“Fascist!”
“Turn the eyes on Beltran!”
Somebody throws something at him. A full bottle of beer. It breaks across the unbreakable glass shielding Beltran’s face. He looks out at the people.
The motorcade accelerates. Except for the last Suburban. It diverts, pulling up between the two motorcycles.
Men in suits get out of the Suburban carrying guns. The kind of guns that take two hands to carry. Black metal.
“MOVE BACK,” says the disembodied machine voice of the Suburban.
The motorcycle patrolmen dismount. They pull little wands from their belts. Crack them with flicks of the wrist. Turn them into metal whips.
The motorcycle cops wear jodhpurs and riding boots.
The Suburban emits that tone again. It’s like the sound your phone makes sometimes. The Citizen Emergency Alert.
The tone is designed to make humans freeze and obey. That’s what Nick says, later, when he asks his wearable.
Nothing about what it does to horses. Especially when men are coming at them with guns and truncheons.
The horse next to Eden rears.
It’s a crazy thing to see from that close.
The horse ejects its hipster.
People are screaming.
Boys are screaming.
Girls are yelling at cops to stop.
POP.
A suit fires a shot. Into the air.
Another horse bolts. Runs right through the intersection, for the trees of a traffic island on the other side.
The horse next to Eden comes right down on the motorcycle cop who is yelling at it with a metal whip in his hand. Knocks him down hard. You can hear his helmet hit the pavement. Then you hear the sound of hoof on helmet.
BADDADADADDADADABDADADADADABABADAT. Machine gun burst, from one of the suits.
The horse stumbles, goes down.
People start running, in every direction.
Eden runs behind the 24 Mart, into the weeds grown up around the fence at the base of a cell phone tower. She hides in there, for what seems like forever, but isn’t.
There are sheets of paper on the ground. Abandoned homework.
1776.
They are teaching little kids about revolution.
◊
A while back Eden got hooked on watching the coverage of a revolution in another country. The people of the country took the streets and stood up to soldiers and tanks. The movement coalesced online. Actions coordinated on an obscure dating site called Flingue. The media kept looking for a leader to personalize the movement, but there wasn’t one. All there was was everyone.
◊
They find each other later at Proteus. The festival is just down the road. The show goes on. Few people there even know about what happened.
Nick and Shannon drink, beer and tequila. Honda and Eden share a big bowl, good stuff Honda brought from California. Montana mutata. You’re not supposed to take it on the plane, but no one really cares. Half the airport security guards are probably high. You can see it when three of them gather around the X-ray screen, debating what that green outline is. The flight attendants are definitely high. Legalization has increased job happiness, if not productivity.
Proteus is a festival of networked music. There are no guitar solos.
At Proteus, there really aren’t even any bands. There are improvisational instigators, who initiate prompts that carom through the mesh and come back in cascading responses.
Eden watches the improviser known as la Sirena take her place on the platform. La Sirena walks up five old chipped steps onto the concrete foundation of a building demolished years ago. La Sirena does not really look like a mermaid, but when she puts the reed in her saxophone and blasts a series of tones out into the air and over the airwaves, Eden remembers the riddle from grandma’s game.
Con los cantos de la sirena, no te vayas a marear.
Eden already feels dizzy before the song starts, from the high-altitude herb, and what happened before.
Eden remembers then to turn her phone back on. She turned it off when she was hiding from the cops, behind the cell phone tower, hoping to disable the geolocation.
Proteus is an app, and a network, and a festival, and a movement, and a corporation.
The app lets her program her own response to la Sirena. And to the four thousand, seven hundred and thirty-two others it says are participating in the piece. Two-thirds of those people are here, inside the fenceline with her. The others are in the cloud.
The sound from the amps is generative polyphony, electronic and analog and something else entirely.
Nick and Marley are dancing at the base of the platform. Marley is barefoot. Nick is wasted. Eden can see the beats their moves generate, Dionysian release incubated in the cubicles of hypercapital.
Honda and Shannon are spooned on a blanket next to Eden, in partial retreat, blissing out on Texas sun and networked trance.
Eden turns on her node and holsters her phone. Puts in her earbud, to elaborate the layering. Feels her way into an improvised asana. Channels a long, pitched tone that is a response not just to the piece, but to the harsh control tones of the police vehicles, and the sounds of the flyover. An alarm that turns into a jet turbine and then an endless siren aum.
The algorithm pulls her out, puts her in the front of the layers. Then she loses the pose.
She loses the pose because another app interrupts her with a preemptive alert. A pinq. Three pinqs, actually.
She goes back into the piece before she looks at who they are.
◊
Pinqi is a proximity matcher. Its algorithms are tuned to rapid connections. You can play with the settings as your mood and needs suit. Eden retuned hers on the flight down, sitting there in her window seat, thinking about hanging out with her coupled friends.
There are three thumbnails dancing on her screen. A dude named Paxton, a woman named Lara, and a guy named Federico.
“Oh yeah?” she tells Federico, as they sit across from each other in the rest area twenty minutes later. “My grandma was from San Antonio. When I knew her at least. Before that she was from Matamoros.”
“Matamoros is crazy,” says Federico. “There used to be a port there. During the Civil War. For smuggling guns and stuff. They called it Baghdad. ’Cause of the dunes.”
“Really,” says Eden.
She takes a long drink from the water, which is served in a chalice of 3-D printed corn byproduct. The concession sells glacial melt, bottled at the source. Federico suggests the Volta, but Eden picks the Whitechuck.
“Do you know any gun smugglers?” asks Eden.
“Uh, no,” says Federico.
“Too bad.”
Eden looks at the tableau relief rendered into the chalice. Strange animals, diminutive monsters, freaky chimera, cavorting in a fantastic forest.
She looks at Federico. Tries to assess the integrity of the gaze. She does not trust the herb when it tells her it can tell.
“Are your friends from New York, too?” he asks.
“No. I mean they all live in California now. We met in school. I guess Nick grew up in New York. He works for Proteus.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Cool.”
“Wait until they start embedding the ads.”
“Yeah.”
Eden looks at the contrail drawing itself against the sky, behind Federico’s head.
“Did you hear about that shooting or whatever?” he asks.
Eden nods.
“I wonder what that was about,” he says.
Eden looks at him. Reads the face that just said that.
“You fucking elected him,” says Eden. “That’s what it’s about. And now we all have to deal with him.”
“Huh?”
“Beltran,” she says.
“Oh.”
“It was his motorcade. I was there.”
“Wow.”
Wow. “I don’t like your future,” she says.
“I was there, last summer, at the Capitol,” he says, pleading. “I got arrested. I know.”
“It didn’t work. You people need to do something about him. He’s going to run for President. And he’s going to win.”
Federico looks down at his chalice, swirls his finger in the remains of southern New Zealand’s ice cap.
In the break in their conversation, they hear the sound of the multitude trying to find its voice.
“What do we do?” he asks. “People love him.”
She tries to imagine those people. She tries to answer his question. She remembers she had an idea about this, but she can’t remember what it was.
“I think I’m going to find another piece to play in,” says Federico. “See you around?”
Bye.
◊
Eden does dervish as the sun disappears and the energy accelerates with the cool. She’s in the main set, which ends up all beat and no trance. She dances with the silhouette of the trees behind the fenceline, and the power line towers marching off through the volunteer foliage of the right of way like giant stick figure robots.
She tries to influence the crowd with strong rhythms from deep inside. Jungle drums, like from an old movie, like they are going to war.
La Sirena te llame.
◊
When her friends want to go to an after party, Eden takes a carshare back to the place.
She finds the book Billy was reading. Picks it up and gives it a try. Starts in the middle. Jumps to the end. Which is also beginning. Realizes she has been reading the same three pages over and over again for more than an hour.
The text burns its way in, even as you don’t think you understand it. A different kind of code, for soft machines.
◊
Eden wakes up in the night. The noise of metal gears grinding against lube.
She has been dreaming about men with jungle fatigues and balaclavas occupying the ruins of downtown. She can’t tell if they are soldiers or insurgents.
Maybe what she is really remembering is the things she saw in that long year after she dropped out. Crossed over. Got in trouble. Before Mom intervened and hooked her up with this job.
The weird smell is what gets her out of bed.
In the kitchen, one of the 3-D printers is laying down goop on the build plate. Creamy brown, with flushes of blue. It looks wet.
It sounds like a regular printer, the way the carriages move. Crossed with a squirt bottle.
Eden makes the noise.
“What are you doing?” asks a voice standing in the doorway. Finn.
“Wondering what woke me up,” says Eden.
“Oh shit, sorry,” says Finn. “Didn’t know you could hear it way over there. Want a beer?”
Sure.
Billy is out there with Finn, on the back porch.
The river is there down below, lit up like a black mirror by moonlight and light pollution.
She hears a cacophony of frogs, cars going over the bridge, horny night birds calling to each other, a low-flying helicopter.
“How was your festival?” asks Billy. His cigarette smoke moves slowly through the muggy air, trapped in the light from the candle.
“Gimme one of those?” says Eden.
“Sure,” says Billy.
The cigarette is strong. Eden feels clear.
“Festival was cool,” says Eden, exhaling a cloud. “Everything else was kind of fucked up.”
“That’s that interactive stuff, huh,” says Billy.
Eden nods.
“I don’t get that.”
“You’re too old,” says Eden.
Finn laughs.
“Seriously,” she says. “Your brain has to be open to the software. Which means the tones. They work like code.”
“I already hacked my brain pretty good,” says Billy. “I’ll leave that to you.”
“They’re probably inserting commercials into your head,” says Finn.
“I’m sure they’re trying,” says Eden. “That’s what Nick does.”
“No thanks,” says Finn.
“So what do you guys do? Sit around printing jizz all night?”
They both laugh.
“Seriously,” says Eden.
“Research,” says Finn.
“Research?” says Eden.
Finn nods.
“What?” says Eden.
“All kinds of stuff,” says Finn.
Eden laughs.
“Seein what we can make with those machines,” says Billy. “It’s pretty cool.”
“You can print guns, right?”
“Lot more interesting things than that,” says Finn.
“I want to print a gun,” says Eden.
“First you gotta design one,” says Billy.
“Come on,” says Eden.
And so they do. Finn’s laptop has a metal case, DIY, covered in stickers. Yes, he makes his money working on cars. He shows her how you find the download sites, through a series of mirrors. Shows her the illegal freeware you use to anonymize your browsing from the eyes of the state. Air drops her a copy.
On her phone, she trolls through screens of seditious objects.
There’s a lot more than guns.
“What about this?” asks Eden.
◊
While the machine lays down the render, Billy works on his model. He holds down the butcher paper with his clay ashtray. The cigarette burns on its own while he puts the pieces together. They make a frame of interlocking tubes printed from a bad copy of the bones of bats. He spreads out the pericardium across the wingtips, and leaves it to dry.
When Eden uses the bathroom by the kitchen, there is a piece of tissue floating in the toilet. It does not look like a wing. It looks like a used pocket, made from the inside of skin, trailing ropy threads.
◊
The sun comes up through the ozone, bringing birdsong and ailerons.
They walk down to the river for a proper test flight. Eden carries her new tool in her pocket. Stops and holds it up to the light to see its inner structure. Finn carries the beer.
The hill is steep, through dense foliage. They walk under a canopy of scraggly elms crowded with cackling black birds.
She sees an old mattress in a small clearing.
The beach is made of trash, and rocks.
She goes in anyway, leaving her pants and her tool on the shore.
The water is warm by the shore. It smells like dead plants and sick fish.
Eden goes all the way in, swimming out, into dark cool. She comes up, current carried downriver. There is a big pipe embedded into the rocky bed. She stands on it. Salute to an exploding sun.
There are holes in the sky, big enough for old gods to sneak back in.
Cliff swallows swirl around her head, buzzing the hydroplaning bugs before they can become fish food. She saw their nests the day before, beautiful pustules of dried mud growing out of the steel spans of the bridge.
The bridge was built when capitalism collapsed, by a legion of lost men, while they incubated the war machine that ate them all. Nick told them that, when they drove over. Not in those words. 1933, he said.
Over there, upriver, the old hippie is running after his gossamer batplane, and the motorhead host is removing his clothes.
She keeps swimming, away, into a dream of cities under water.
◊
“Is that a beer?” asks Shannon.
Eden drinks from it, and nods.
“It’s 9:42 a.m. Sunday morning,” says Nick, in that practicing to be paternal tone.
“Where were you?” says Shannon. “We’re waiting to go to brunch.”
All four of them are sitting there, on their laptops.
“Did you lose your phone?” says Nick.
“I’m fucking hungry,” says Honda. “Let’s go.”
“Sorry,” says Eden. “Do I have time to shower?”
No.
◊
They brunch at the shopping center called Zona.
Zona is an old one-story mall that died, lived a second life as an immigrant market with a dance studio, died again, and was reborn as this curated gallery of eclectic fetish objects. The anchor is a store called Stan that specializes in vintage televisions. No one is sending any signals that the sets can receive anymore, but Stan sells little boxes that repurpose them as displays for contemporary devices, channeled through retro filters.
Eden watches a yellow star explode against a saturated red sky on one of the sets while she drinks her michelada in the courtyard of Bishop’s across the hall. On her phone she types a four hundred-word piece for the magazine about the eyes of Beltran and the bodyguards of Texas. There’s only so much muck the advertisers will let you rake.
Who knew jalapeño waffles would be so good.
Syrup makes everything good, says Honda. She’s right.
The skylight over the courtyard caved in when the mall was abandoned, and they left it that way. Feral. Nick and Marley are making out in the grass, mood improved by bacon and weed. Honda and Shannon come back with bounty. An old mixing board, a porcelain figurine of a cowgirl with alien eyes, and a pineapple grenade.
Eden takes hold of the grenade. A dummy, with the paint chipped off. Heavy. She wonders what a real one would feel like.
The eye of the satellite watches through the aperture in the ceiling. They say they can see around corners.
Eden shows Honda and Shannon her tool. Asks if they can tell what it is.
They tell her she smells like the river.
◊
Shannon wants to go to the museum before they go swimming, and so they do. There is an exhibit commemorating the tenth anniversary of the attacks. Eden looks at the photographs of the White House in flames, and wonders what it would be like if they had finished the job.
◊
That night Eden dreams of the riot in New York, when they looted the private stores on Fifth Avenue, the ones you need an invitation to shop. An invitation from an algorithm.
When she sees Finn in the kitchen in the morning and he says you look tired she does not tell him about the dream, or the boy she was with, or what he looked like after the corporate security teams came in with their trucks and sonics and retook their masters’ block.
“I can sleep on the plane,” she says.
He asks about the show they went to see. She tells him she skipped it. Went to bed early, not that it did any good.
He tells her he was out all night, because Billy got arrested. They caught him stealing at the hospital. In a lab, behind security. He found an access badge on the fucking street.
He asks when her flight is, she says five, he says then why don’t you go back to bed, she says ‘cause her friends have to leave in an hour. He says I’ll give you a ride and she says ok.
She says why don’t we get some towels and take a nap on the beach.
◊
When she imagined Finn he was like one of those shirtless jeans models, the ones with no heads. But after they had done some time. Then she imagined a whole catalog like that, selling pre-distressed rebel fashions. J. Prep goes to the Supermax. Political detainees in torn denim and faded black cotton. Lean young revolutionary hunger strikers showing off their prison tats and the places where you can see the bones of their hips pushing against the skin of their hairless abs.
Turns out Finn is not like that. Has a bit of a muffin top, in fact. Must be all the beer.
There are a pair of freaky looking blue birds buzzing up and down the river. Giant-beaked heads almost as big as the rest of their bodies. Their clickety-clack calls sound like a pair of old movie projectors taking turns. They fly in spurts. Then they dive for food, straight down, living missiles.
Eden eats a cactus and sausage taco and works on her tan. She washes the salsa down with a cold can of Nicaraguan beer.
She drifts into napland. When she wakes up she can’t even remember where she is, until she sees him down there by the water making a cairn out of river rocks. She watches him clandestinely, pretending to still be asleep.
He comes back over when he sees her sitting up, eating another taco. Opens two more beers, breaks out the weed. She wonders why they always have to make the glass pipes in that shape.
They talk forever. Talk about riots and fake elections and 3-D printers and kingfishers and the way egrets vogue. They talk about AWOL parents and custom cars and dead stars. They try to see if they can imitate the sounds of the birds and the bugs. They talk about the metal piece woven into Finn’s hair, equine gentrification, net censorship, consensual surveillance, old relationships, Eden’s tattoo, petroleum meadows, the names of the trees, and things they would die for.
They fuck on the beach, under the hottest sun Eden can remember.
She hears the jets, wonders if any of the incoming passengers can see them. Imagine that.
She wonders if any other eyes in the sky are watching them. Of course they are.
After, Eden swims out. Feels the hairy leaves of water plants. She swims out farther, into the channel, where the current is faster, looking for clean.
She watches Finn toss the spent rubber into the water.
I guess it’s time to go.
◊
Ambient government.
Eden did not invent that phrase.
It’s when the sensorial presences of the state are so ubiquitously and subtly embedded into the environment that they are almost indistinguishable from nature.
“It takes us back to our roots,” says Beltran. “America is a big small town. Where everybody knows your name.” And everything else.
Eden can’t decide which is better. To work on new strategies to evade the gaze, or more effective ways to poke it in the eye.
Did you know that seventy-five percent of the price of a home-use brick of dispensary marijuana goes to the federal government? They like you that way.
Forty-seven percent of that pays for guns and ammo, thirty-four percent for monitoring, and the rest for productivity rehab.
◊
Eden persuades Finn to stop at the Airport Hilton for a drink before she leaves. She tries to explain to him how it reminded her of a movie she saw, but he doesn’t get it.
The building is structured like a circular fort. The bar is in the middle of the big atrium, under the skylight. You can see a gangway up there.
She asks the bartender how you access that view.
“You can’t,” he says. “Sealed off.”
“This place is messed up,” says Finn.
“It used to be the command center,” says the bartender. “Back when this was an Air Force base.”
Eden looks around, past the self-medicating software salesmen. Imagines men in uniforms the color of black and white movies, peacocking Spartans with silver wings and spiky hair.
“What did they fly?” asks Finn.
“B-52s,” says the bartender. His name tag says Gary. “Southern command.”
“So they could bomb Mexico or something?” asks Eden.
“I guess,” says the bartender. “Who knows? It was the Cold War. There’s a display about it in the airport terminal.”
“Nuclear bombers,” says Eden.
“Where’s the bomb shelter?” asks Finn.
“Dude,” says the bartender. “This whole place is a bomb shelter. There were all kinds of tunnels and stuff. They filled them with concrete when they built the terminal.”
“Yeah, right,” says Eden. “That’s where they keep the people they pull out of the security line.”
Gary the bartender gives her a look. He has the lapel pin by his name tag. The red owl.
“Are you enforcing the Constitution, Gary?” asks Eden.
Gary looks at Finn. Finn smiles.
Eden looks to see where Gary conceals his handgun. Maybe that’s it, under the apron. She imagines taking it from him.
Gary prints out their bill, pushes it in front of Finn, walks to the other end of the bar.
Eden looks at the colored cocktail Gary made her. I’ll have a Wild Blue Yonder, Gary.
“Come on,” she says.
Off we go.
◊
They roam the hotel, looking for hidden doors to secret chambers.
They try to get up onto the gangway, but find only circular hallways of identical numbered doors. The design palette is red and beige.
They try out different doors.
They find a room where the door is propped open. They go in. Eden grabs the Bible from the drawer, starts reading out loud, then tries it backwards. Finn turns on the porn channel. Eden raids the minibar. Opens the half champagne. Lights a cigarette.
They end up in the bed. You can smell the dude that slept there the night before. Eden tears off the sheets. Switches the TV to the war channel and cranks up the volume. Puts her plastic lighter to the bedspread, but it only melts.
Eden says hi to a guy that walks past the open door, pulling the suitcase out of which he lives.
When the housekeeper comes in, they are abusing the armchair. You can hear the sound of the helicopter crew talking man code in machine voice, before the fifty-cal. rips at the van. Eden is yelling at the TV, and then at the housekeeper, telling her in Spanish to leave their room.
They sprint down the circular hallway, Eden carrying her shoes in her hand, Finn chasing behind her.
They push open the emergency exit door. No alarm goes off. The warnings are all lies.
They find the basement. There is an old civil defense sign on the wall. You can see where the blast door is, metal, painted grey, a long time ago. The decals and stencils are no longer legible.
Eden pounds on the door, with her shoes, then her fists. You can hear the echo on the other side.
Finn wants to finish what they started in the room. She pushes him back, sits down, looks at the security camera hanging there from the ceiling. Thinks about the movie about the captured aliens. Gives them an Oscar clip.
◊
Eden misses her flight. They do not go to the airport.
They drive, south. Finn says he wants to show her something. Something she can write a story about.
She will email her editor tomorrow. It’s not like she has a desk to go to. They pay her for words.
When Eden wakes up, they are in the desert. On a two-lane highway, no other cars in sight.
The radio plays some chilango rap about perros and oro. She can make out about half the words.
“Where are we?”
“Mexico,” says Finn.
She sits up. Feels the blood drain. “Fuck! I don’t have a passport.”
She doesn’t mention how they confiscated it.
“I’m just fucking with you.”
She hits him in the face.
“Jesus,” he says. “I’m trying to show you something important. Something we need to document. Expose. I need your help. Words and pictures.” He points at the camera mounted on the dash. Eden remembers the gear they loaded in the trunk.
“Okay,” she says.
“You fucking started it,” says Finn.
Finn’s car is an old Celica, uptuned. It’s loud.
Eden opens a beer and modulates the frequency.
She sees the satellite arrays up on top of the far mesas, aimed at the sky.
They drive past a sign that says they can’t drive past the sign.
UNITED STATES BORDERZONE
RESTRICTED ACCESS
ALL TRAFFIC SUBJECT TO SEARCH
They drive off the highway onto washboard gravel, ten miles, slow grade. They come to an overlook. Top of a low ridge, wide view to the south.
It looks like a colony on the moon, the way the facility sprawls out across the basin. Razorwire and corrugated roofs glisten orange in the dying sun. Low flying aircraft move through the thermals, phase shift in the mirage lines. All so far away you can’t hear anything but the wind.
Further out, at the edge of the canyon, you can see the wall. It’s more like a fence, since you can see through it, but the first tier is so high neither word really does it justice. A barrier made of steel and software, loaded with lethal intelligence, designed to reinforce the existence of a diminishing sovereign.
Finn hands Eden his binoculars. She takes a closer look, through jittery lenses. Surveys the no man’s lands, the killing zones demarcated by the descending tiers of fortification. Finn points her to the new section of semiautonomous smart wall. It looks like a caterpillar of steel tunneling up out of the sand, stenciled with spray-paint tattoos of its identifying codes, moving on its own with machine slink and rubber paddles, adjusting to changing topographical conditions and emergent tactical requirements.
She sees a shimmering object approaching across the sand. An apparition. A coyote, she realizes when it turns, the silver in its coat sending misdirection through the light and heat.
She looks inside the base. Border security and information warfare center. It’s too far to see much. Tiny vehicles moving around between tiny black and silver buildings. A chopper in the foreground, headed in to the base.
Finn sets up a telescope on a tripod. It has a camera attached to it. Look through this, he says.
The magnification renders the landscape as an abstract painting. Everything is liquid, the edges blurred. Lights are coming on, inside and out. You can make out the metal shed frames of the buildings. The white onion domes of electronic arrays. An air tower. A small aircraft on the tarmac. A huge tracked vehicle idling nearby.
They see the helicopter land near the plane. Broad-shouldered men in polo shirts and ball caps unload a prisoner. You can’t see the restraints but you can see how his arms are cinched up behind his back. He has a yellow jumpsuit. A black hood over his head.
“Extraordinary deportation,” says Finn.
The shutter dilates in rapid bursts, like a slide projector on fast forward, like he’s making the frames of a gif.
Extraordinary deportation is when they arrest you for crimes that result in the loss of your citizenship. Eden writes about it sometimes. Finn read one of her pieces.
“We should go to Monterrey,” he says. “Or D.F.”
Mexico City sounds good. She has heard stories about the exile scene. They have taken over a whole neighborhood. Semiautonomous, experimenting with new forms of governance. Network-enabled direct democracy.
“I told you, I don’t have a passport,” she says. “They took it.”
The last one she wrote about was a kid in Boston who got denaturalized for hacking into the systems of the federal court there and posting footage from secret trials onto the public networks.
“We can get you one,” he says. “Billy knows a guy.”
It’s an emergency.
Love it or leave it.
◊
“Let’s go closer,” she says. They are back in the car now. The sun is gone.
“You’re crazy,” he says. The only light is the beams of the headlamps. The double yellow line, reeling in.
“Turn up there,” she says. By the sign that says don’t turn here.
He looks at her.
“I have a press card.”
“But no passport,” he says.
“We need to share this,” she says. “People have no idea.”
She moves in. Flips his toggle switch. Turns on the camera. Looks for the uplink light. Checks her phone for the match.
Finn looks at the lights in the distance.
“How fast can you go?” she asks.
Pretty fast, it turns out.
When he opens up the engine, it sounds like a bomb.
◊
They wreck Finn’s wheels before they get to the second fence. A barricade comes up out of the ground. Smart fortification made of steel spikes and simple software.
Eden was not wearing her seat belt when it happened. She rolled onto the floor. It doesn’t hurt too bad, yet. She milks it anyway. Leans up against the car like she can’t really stand on her own.
They didn’t get very close to the base. All she can see is the Grizzly with its embedded flashers, the land drones idling behind it, and the lone uniformed patrolman who just told them to stand up against the car.
Finn looks like he’s done this before.
“I’m a journalist,” says Eden.
The camera is still on. She thinks.
The patrolman walks closer. His uniform is a weird shade of green. The unit patch on his shoulder is the logo of a corporation.
A little light floats around overhead, very close. The eye of the computer that tells the man what to do.
“You can explain that to them at the detention facility,” says the patrolman. “Right now I need you to submit to the search. Hands over your head.”
He has a morale patch on his left breast. The owl.
“You’re not even a real soldier,” says Eden.
He frisks her. Finds the lump in her pants pocket. Her tool.
“What’s that?” he asks.
“Want me to show you?”
He unholsters his taser. Watches carefully.
When she pulls it out, it springs open, almost autonomously. It’s amazing that something like that can pack down so small. It’s like a cross between a jack-in-the-box and a medieval torture device, printed from hardest plastic for personal defense. Thank you bedstuygirl92, whoever you are.
The corporate patrolman screams.
One of the spikes finds his face.
The land drones intervene.
Rubber bullets hurt a lot more than you think.
◊
Detention is not like it was in middle school. It is a white room of concrete, rubber, and steel, chilled to the temperature of a wine cellar. The clothes they let you wear are made of paper. When you rip them off in protest, they take their time giving you new ones.
The isolation is much more intense if you are a person who spends their time wired into the networks. You feel like you have been unplugged from life. They say you are addicted to interactive programs that have damaged your civic sensibilities. You scream but no one can hear you. No one who cares.
They interrogate you in another room, a room that has two chairs and a mirror, but you are pretty sure they don’t really care what the answers are. Maybe because your answers are aggressive koans generated by a fracturing personality. You tell yourself that is what it feels like to create the new post-you.
The only one is the everyone.
They tell you your boyfriend is dead. They tell you your boyfriend is alive, in solitary, and will never come out. They tell you your boyfriend is a known gun smuggler. They tell you your boyfriend is being raped in prison. They tell you your boyfriend is being detained until trial, probably next year sometime. You don’t have a boyfriend. You hope they just deport him.
Your mom gets you out. She is a businesswoman who knows lots of lawyers. The lawyer she gets you delivers mom’s lecture. Tells you one of the conditions of your release is you must leave Texas within 48 hours.
You do not go home, even though she sends you two thousand dollars for that purpose.
You give the money to another lawyer to get your non-boyfriend released. The lawyer says she probably won’t be able to, but takes the money anyway.
◊
Money talks, says Billy, stating the obvious again.
Eden turns on her networks and won’t turn them off. Proteus, Pinqi, Polis, Mitos. She is a walking transmitter. A voluntary cyborg whose wearable software cohabits the self.
There are other people in her head when she sleeps. Her dreams are digital Dionysiums that morph into spaced-out complines and back again. She falls through the space of the others, looks over, sees their projected faces. They are flying, not falling. A fleet of beautiful superheroes.
She is pretty sure the prurient eyes of capital are there with them, lurking in shadow. The Yankee peddler inside the machine looking for innovation to appropriate and hot footage to resell. Buy low, sell high.
Billy helps her make the things she needs for her new project. She designs them the same way an instigator starts a Protean piece.
The capacity of a thousand agitated minds to imagine new tools of change is more than you think.
Billy laughs when the things stand up on the build plate. Sometimes he eats them.
◊
The political festival is in the basketball arena. It is another concrete cylinder. Eden wonders if they could fit the Hilton inside it.
She dresses the part of a Beltran fan, or the best simulation she can manage in thrift store clothes. Her sunscreen is a clandestine reflective painted on in a pattern that confounds the facial recognition. Billy wires her with the scrambler. It feels like a piece of Cleopatra jewelry, without the glitter.
They stop her at the security checkpoint. Check her press credentials. They notice something on the screen. A mass. She lets them look.
The guards kind of freak when they see the tumorous flesh of her distended abdomen. I’m so sorry, honey, says the woman in charge. She has the big arms of a woman in a propaganda ad.
Inside, the crowd is exultant under the images of Beltran. His smile animates the Jumbotron for the waiting mob. He plays with his adopted children. Walks the border wall. Raises his hand at a rally. Orates at the debates, a puckish pastor who switches from wry banter to prescriptive apocalyptica. Strokes his mastiff while he holds the old terrier in his arms.
Eden tells herself that this man is not a man, but the interface of a dark network. A network that can be hacked.
When she is inside, she reactivates all her nets. She has Monocle now, the wearable eye that looks like a crystalline bindi.
Eden is small, and brown, and batshit. People give her room when she nudges her way to the ropeline.
The music that comes through the giant speaker dongles is an orchestra of trumpets remixed as civil defense alarm. The name when the voice of the stadium says it is something more than a name. It is a chant. A magic word. A religious invocation. A network login.
Billy tells her it is all working, except for a couple of signals that are not.
The man walks the red carpet, both hands out to the crowd, drawing in the mob love energy that lights up his enhanced smile.
He does not see her until it is too late. He is pointing at the face of a screaming boy on the Jumbotron, one of the winners algorithmically plucked from the crowd for special recognition.
It happens just as she steps over the rope to get to him. You can see it in his eyes. The link is made, before she even plugs him in.
Ambient democracy.
How do you turn a panopticon inside out?
Eden is sure Beltran can see them in that second, the eyes that see through her.
Then he sees her reaching for the thing she smuggled in, hears her hand pulling it out of the homemade pouch of printed flesh.
It’s like a new nerve, designed to make him feel them. It looks like a stinger made of soggy bone.
He can see it there in her hand.
It’s not supposed to hurt when the thing makes the connection, but he doesn’t know that yet.
The way people see what happens next is beyond what any Jumbotron can convey.
Eden rushes the stage.