TonyStark couldn’t stop laughing. He would pause for an instant but then catch a glimpse of Cassie and begin howling all over again. If nothing else, she figured she’d impressed him, which was nice. Meanwhile, others had gathered around, some yelling recriminations, others defending Cassie.
There were no leaders at OHM, just a collection of like-minded people finding common ground where they could and otherwise leaving each other alone. OK, it reminded Cassie of the classical democracy her mom always talked about, but Cassie couldn’t even think about her mom. Too painful.
If there’d been a leader, maybe someone would have punished Cassie or singled her out for praise. Instead, she was treated to a good half hour of people yelling at one another. Where there had once been only the sound of keystrokes, there was now nothing but fervor and rage.
The broadcast network had to take its feed down for a full fifteen minutes, showing only a static rainbow grid while the in-house cyber-squad located Cassie’s worm and throttled it. She hadn’t had time to give it any sort of replication vectors, but she had enough time to make it look like it had reproduced itself multiple times once in the network’s systems. So the cyber-jackals had to spend additional time scrubbing their system, looking for more iterations of the worm. When they didn’t find any, they would probably spend a couple of days panicking, reinstalling packages “just in case” and generally living in hell for a little while.
Oh well.
“Friggin’ hilarious,” TonyStark said. “Abso-friggin’-lutely hilarious.”
“Are you nuts?” someone challenged. Cassie didn’t know his name, but from his appearance, she decided he was Piercings Guy. “She’s already at Level 6 and now she’s bringing even more heat down? If she wants to blow herself up, fine, but not while I’m standing in the blast radius!”
There was a chorus of murmured agreements, but TonyStark just crossed his arms over his chest. “You said it yourself, man — she’s Level 6. WTF they gonna do? Kill her twice? Whole goddamn internet wants to eat her brains. Zombie hordes roaming the streets looking for a taste of that sweet Cassie-meat. Can’t get any worse.”
“Not for her,” Piercings Guy shot back, “but what about for us?”
Cassie could sense that TonyStark was losing the crowd. Democracy could be ugly, she knew. As much as she’d tried to block out her mom’s lectures on the early throes of democracy, she couldn’t unhear them.
“I was told to impress,” Cassie said, brushing her hair back. “I thought you guys were about resistance. About disruption. If you’re not going to kick the powers-that-be in the balls every now and then, what’s the point?”
It was her voice but not her words. Harlon had said the same thing to her once. “We disrupt to shake out the old order. To clear-cut the old growth and make way for the new. There’s a purpose. It looks chaotic, but it’s not. We have to kick the system in the balls every now and then; otherwise, there’s no point.”
“Chaos masks order,” she went on, recalling her father. “Like a fractal. There’s hidden order in the chaos and that’s what makes it all make sense. My prank will piss off the people who already hate me. Big deal. But it’ll give the people on the sidelines something to rally around. The president won’t be able to resist — he’ll have to punch back. Hard. And he’ll be punching down. And the people who care will be turned off by that and maybe we get a foothold into reversing my little problem.
“Oh, and BTW,” she said over her shoulder to TonyStark, “Who are you calling ‘meat,’ Mr. My-Scalp-Looks-Like-Easter-Ham?”
A ripple of surprised laughter filled the room. TonyStark smoothed back his bald dome with one hand and clucked his tongue. “Damn, girl. I’m on your side.”
“Coulda fooled me.”
More laughter. Piercings Guy could tell he was losing the room. Shared amusement went a long way toward shifting the mood of a crowd. That’s how memes worked, really. Her banter with TonyStark was infectious.
“We have their attention now,” Cassie said.
“Jesus Christ, like you didn’t before?” Piercings Guy grumbled.
“Now we have it for being something other than a victim of so-called Hive Justice,” she said. “There’s no way out of this on the defensive. There are too many of them and just one of me. If I ever want to go home again, I have no choice; I have to go on the attack. People respect strength. They’re drawn to it. Trust me.” There was a story from Roman history lurking somewhere in her mind, some memory of Mom discussing one of the endless ancient wars. But she couldn’t dredge up the details. What she did remember, though, was something from last year’s advanced biology class. “It’s evolutionary. Part of our lizard brain. Back when we lived in caves, we were drawn to the person confident enough to kill the mastodon or get us past the sabertooth lair.”
“This is true,” TonyStark said. He stepped closer to her and seemed ready to throw a comradely arm around her. She wasn’t quite ready for that and was relieved when he didn’t bother. She liked him and she was glad she’d impressed him, but that was enough.
“That’s how politicians and other assholes take charge,” TonyStark went on. “They don’t know jack or shit, but they pretend they do and people get suckered. Cassie just judo’d them.”
She was absurdly touched that for the first time he’d used her name instead of “that girl.”
Piercings Guy gritted his teeth and appeared ready to volley back. Cassie was already weary of him, especially since she wasn’t even 100 percent sure she was right. Fortunately, fate intervened in the person of Tish, who cleared her throat more loudly than any human should be able to and stepped in between Cassie and Piercings Guy.
“Data don’t lie,” she announced, holding up a tablet.
It took Cassie a moment to tell exactly what it was she was looking at. She realized it was a graph tracking her BLINQ status. She was still at Level 6 (that wouldn’t change), but her Likes had ticked up slightly. In fact, they were rising faster than her Condemns.
Her heart quickened. That familiar post-hack rush careered through her limbs; she’d missed it. She wondered briefly if returning to code was somehow betraying her father, if by giving up her self-imposed code ban, she’d made his death mean less.
Based almost purely on the satisfaction pumping through her veins, she decided no. Nothing that felt this good could be that bad. It was time for her to get back in the game. “I did it!” she blurted out.
A groan from the crowd. Tish fixed her with a withering, contemptuous glare that Cassie knew — even after only three days — was Tish Default. “Girl, don’t be so proud. Yeah, your Like velocity is up, but the ratio of Condemns to Likes is so great that it would take six years at the current rate for your Likes to outpace and drop you back to Level 5.”
“Six years? For real?” Cassie’s shoulder dropped.
Tish shrugged. “Five years, ten months, six days. I rounded up.”
“Well, shit.”
“See?” Piercings Guy licked his lips. He was back on a roll. “See?”
“Brother, she moved a needle no one has ever moved before,” TonyStark said. “With just a couple of days and an impressively shitty laptop. I say we help her. Even if we can’t set her straight online, she’s an asset to us and what we do.”
She spied some nods in the group. Good. She didn’t relish the idea of staying at OHM forever, but right now it was better than the alternative. If they kicked her out … she’d be back on the street again. Defenseless. On the run with nowhere to go.
Piercings Guy grunted. “No. No way. She’s a risk and a liability and a loose cannon. And this is coming from the guy who turned off every traffic signal in the city last May. I know what a loose cannon is.”
A murmur of agreement. Bad.
Tish turned to Cassie. “What do you have to say for yourself?”
It should have been something from Harlon. It should have been from one of his infamous manifestos, the ones that set off Twitter wars and blog threads. She should have channeled him the way she always did in times of stress and crisis, used his words and his beliefs to sway these people — his people — to her side.
But the first thing that popped into her head was her mom.
“‘Give me a firm place to stand and with a lever I will move the whole world,’” she told them.
The room fell silent.
“Archimedes,” she said, by way of explanation. “Like TonyStark said — I had a little time and a little tech and I moved the needle. Give me a firm place to stand and a lever and see what I can do.”
Piercings Guy shook his head. TonyStark grinned.
“Let’s vote, people!” Tish called out. “Hands up if you think she should stay.”
Cassie didn’t want to watch. She forced herself to anyway.