by Spencer Baum
“Coming here to try and kill her,” the woman said.
The man formerly known as Gordon Bogel looked at the woman formerly known as Sparrow Hollister. A hint of suspicion, something unsaid, years of shared experience between them. They had been through a lot together, these two. They had come a long way since hatching a crazy plan to change the world when they were wide-eyed freshman at Mary Nolan College.
“I suppose you’re happy I can’t get to her now,” the man said.
“She’s not a threat to us,” said the woman. “She never has been.”
“She’s a loose thread,” said the man.
“We’ve talked about this,” said the woman.
“Yes, we have,” said the man.
Jenna’s decision to forego the lethal injection table and choose the Tetradome instead had come as a surprise to them both. What to do in light of Jenna’s decision had been a point of contention between them ever since. They were in agreement about what needed to happen to Jenna’s brother, but not about what needed to happen to Jenna.
The man thought Jenna needed to die as soon as they could kill her. The man thought that every day Jenna continued to live was a day she might say something on the Yack Shack or in one of the press junkets, something that would put the plan at risk.
The woman thought otherwise. The woman, who had never before shown any hesitation to kill when killing was needed, was strangely reluctant to see Jenna die.
Even though they both knew Jenna was as good as dead anyway.
“She’s locked away from the world until race day,” the woman said. “Your attempts to kill her have left Bart spooked.”
“That’s a good thing, I guess,” the man said.
“But you’re still nervous about her, aren’t you?” said the woman.
On the other side of the window, on the course below, Nathan Cavanaugh once again pulled into first place.
“I’m nervous about everything,” said the man.
CHAPTER 35
Seth Daron: Radical
Excerpted from A Victim of Circumstance: The Memoir of Jenna Duvall
I have this nostalgic vision of the Blue Brigade I joined in fall semester of freshman year. It’s not an accurate vision. I’ve fictionalized the group in my mind based on what I wanted it to be, on what I chose to see and chose to ignore.
In my vision, the Blue Brigade at Hillerman College is a gathering of students who are interested in discovering their political identities, becoming better citizens, and engaging in peaceful protests. We did three peaceful protests my first semester at Hillerman. Peaceful, calm, loving—and yes, that’s really a word I would use to describe how I felt at those marches. I felt like we were engaged in an act of love.
This rainbows and pancakes vision of the Blue Brigade was never the truth, but it was a truth I believed until spring semester. In spring semester, after Rudy came back, I saw the Blue Brigade more for what it really was.
The Blue Brigade was a paramilitary organization in training. It was agitators trying to rouse their rabble. Kids from rich families who had grown bored in their opulence and, in that boredom, were easy targets for Sunny.
Sunny’s first target, her best target, her greatest creation, was Seth.
Let me tell you what I know about Seth.
He was born in Dallas. His family was Old Texas Money, with some kind of fortune made generations back that kept flowing down through the family.
He was salutatorian in his high school class. He did the drama club and the debate team. His parents spent thousands on test prep classes and he aced the SAT’s. He came to college with more than 40 hours of accumulated AP credits. He declared as a history major his first semester at Hillerman with intent to go to law school after he graduated. He wanted to be a public defender and live off his family’s fortune while he defended the indigent for little to no pay.
Sounds like a pretty upstanding guy, doesn’t he?
This is the thing that gets lost in our politics and the rancor of our domer / antidomer schism. Most people want to do good with their lives. Most people aspire to be kind, generous, and heroic. Seth was no different.
Seth was a flawed person who was trying to do right in the world. He was a weak man who aspired to be strong. He was born innocent, like we all are, and the world damaged him.
By the time I met him, Seth was more damaged than most.
He was a year older than me. Portrait of the privileged, white, erudite liberal arts major—that was the Seth I met at my first Brigade meeting. He had a fridge full of locally grown organic produce and a wardrobe assembled at neighborhood thrift shops. He gave money to the food bank and did tenant rights advocacy at the Peace & Justice Center. He was careful not to overeat, mindful of his carbon footprint, conscious about his consumer habits, and dedicated to his cause.
His cause was justice. He saw himself as a fighter for justice and his primary weapons in that fight were his mind, his education, his rhetorical skill, and his moral righteousness.
He was good at what he did.
I’ll spare you my antidomer spiel—I know you’ve heard it all before, and that’s not what this memoir’s about, anyway. But I’ll tell you that whatever pro-domer argument you might have in your arsenal, Seth had a well-rehearsed counterargument ready. I’ve seen that guy dismantle everyone from professors to advocates to fanboys to Internet trolls, and I never once saw him lose a debate.
I don’t know where his antidomer passion came from, but I do know he had it long before I met him. I know he was already an activist when I was still in high school and he was a new freshman at Hillerman.
Something happened to Seth as a freshman. Something the most plugged-in among you already know about, but very few of you understand.
The pedophile thing.
You may have heard that Seth is a pedophile, or that Seth was involved with pedophiles, or he financed some kind of pedophile ring…whatever you heard, it’s all bullshit. Seth was a lot of things, a lot of awful things, but he’s not a pedophile. That particular lie took off because he made enemies during his freshman year, and his enemies wanted to hurt him. It’s nothing more than a slander meant to discredit him, and serve as a warning to any other young man with a strong opinion who thinks of speaking his mind.
Here’s what happened.
Remember that video of the acid attack in Sacramento? You know, Domer Day parade runs into protestors turns into riot and a guy in a pith helmet flings a jar of acid at a nineteen-year-old girl’s face? Yes, that video.
That video had a huge impact on Seth. He was so upset by it that, the weekend the video went viral, he went door-knocking in two of the boy’s dormitories on campus, and when people answered, he put them on the spot.
“Do you watch The Tetradome Run?” he said.
If they said no, Seth gave them a hug and said, “Thank you for standing up for justice.” If they said yes, Seth gave them a flyer. The flyer had a picture from the video, the girl getting drenched in acid, and underneath the photo, the words, “This is what you support. Reevaluate your life.”
Predictably, this door-to-door stunt caused a backlash. The next week at school, some anonymous troll, almost certainly one of the pricks in the Rule of Law Society, covered the campus in flyers that showed a photo of Seth with his arm around a 10-year-old boy.
That boy, BTW, was Seth’s nephew, and that photo was taken off Seth’s Facebook feed. But who cares about the truth, right? What’s that quote? A lie travels around the world three times while the truth is still getting its pants on. Forgive me if I got the quote wrong. I’m not allowed Internet access in here. But you get the idea. Some jerkwad took a perfectly normal, perfectly happy photo of Seth and his nephew, and twisted it into something sinister. On the flyer they put all over campus, there were a bunch of fabricated quotes underneath that photo, quotes purporting to be from people who knew Seth in high school. Every quote suggested that Seth had a secret life as a pedophile and regularly paid children
for sex. And at the very bottom of the flyer was a suggested Internet search: “Google ‘Seth Daron pedophile’ to learn more.” That suggested Internet search yielded nothing, of course, but it got hundreds of people to type that wretched phrase into the search engines, meaning that if you started to type Seth’s name into the search engine the search bar would suggest an autocomplete to “Seth Daron pedophile.”
What a crazy, fucked up world we live in.
I’ve heard the story about how this went down from Sunny and Seth both. I’ve heard them explain how lots of people at school rushed to Seth’s defense. How the school paper gave Seth a front-page interview to defend himself. How the search engines, when notified of the incident, fixed the autocompletes. How the Hillerman administration dedicated time and resources to try and uncover who spread this lie. How they made a counselor available to Seth and released an official statement condemning the lies.
I’ve heard Sunny and Seth both explain how the good people at the school tried their best to make it right and failed. The damage was already done, Seth told me. The whispers are still happening behind my back. People still think about that word when they look at me.
Can you fucking imagine?
I’m going to say some ugly things about Seth in this memoir. He is a murderer and a horrid, selfish prick who put me in a terrible position and I will never forgive him for it. But he’s not a fucking pedophile. Jesus. The way people can cloak themselves in anonymity and make up whatever they want about someone else…
Sometimes the media holds me up as an example of the anger of America’s youth. I’ve seen it on television. My picture above some cable news banner that says, “Why Are America’s College Students So Angry?”
While the use of my photo in such a question is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of who I am and what I did, the question itself is a good one. I was a college student before I was arrested. I saw the anger with my own eyes. America has turned into an angry nation with two warring factions that ceaselessly demand that we join in their fight, and ground zero for that anger is the American university.
Why are young Americans so angry? You’d be angry too if you grew up in the world we did. Set aside the economy, and student debt, and the way my entire generation gets demonized every day. Those are all reason enough for us to be angry and they’re not even the half of it. To truly understand what’s going on with the youth of America, you need to realize we are the first generation that has spent our entire lives in the hyper-connected world. The Internet, social media, mobile devices—previous generations didn’t deal with the ubiquity of this shit and have no clue how dangerous and exhausting it is to go through the trials of adolescence and young adulthood in a world that is always on. There is no privacy. There is nowhere to hide. There is no disconnect. And if you piss somebody off, your enemy has an arsenal of brand new weapons, WMD’s that didn’t exist until recently, to launch at you. A lie on social media. An attack on the search results of your name. One or two enemies in the physical world can quickly become a mob of anonymous accounts that are coming after you on your own pages or worse, spreading shit about you online that you don’t even know about.
Seth got hit with a WMD. It changed him. How could it not?
Seth was a young man who came to college with high ideals about democracy, justice, and public service. But the cycle of war got to him. The tribal instinct, the mob mentality that Sunny counts on…someone who was already ensnared in that mentality came after Seth, sucked him into the cycle, and ensnared him in it too.
This is how it works. I get angry at you, you do something mean to me, I find a group of friends to come after you, you find a mob to help you defend yourself. Round and round it goes, escalating each time. Roving angry troll armies on the Internet become angry mobs in the street. Innocent, well-meaning people become radicalized, and before you know it, you’re in the fight because how can you possibly stand on the sidelines when you see people being so, so horrible to one another?
And then you live in Sunny’s world. We all live in the world that the rabble rousers have created.
Seth was already fuming mad when Sunny found him, and fuming mad people are the ones she counts on the most. It doesn’t matter how well you’ve been raised, how smart you are, how well you’ve been socialized, when you’re the victim of the kind of attack that came down on Seth, the animal part of your brain, the part that Sunny loves to manipulate, is activated and ready for her message.
Some anonymous troll did something horrible to Seth and set him down a path where he found Sunny. With her help, Seth became something horrible too.
What path are you on? When someone like Sunny shows up in your life, and someone will, the world is full of them, will she be able to sing a siren song that calls to the warring, tribal animal inside you, or is the rational, human part of you strong enough to resist her?
And if you resist, are you prepared to pay the price for doing so? Because, believe me, there is a price. As I write this in the prison library while I await my death sentence, I can tell you without a doubt that there is a mother-fucking price.
CHAPTER 36
Before Gabe Chancellor left the campus of Mary Nolan College, he went to the library to look at old yearbooks.
He was following a hunch.
He was pleased with what he found.
CHAPTER 37
Wake up. Pace. Eat. Nap. Pace some more. Eat another meal. Sleep some more.
Why aren’t they letting me out of the cellblock?
The staff snuck in and out while she was asleep. The clothes they left for her in the bathroom changed, as did the food in the fridge, but everything else stayed the same. No one came to the door. No one let her out. No one escorted her to training.
One day, as morning became afternoon, Jenna fell victim to a moment of weakness. Furious that she was being left here to rot, she looked at the cameras and yelled, “Why don’t I get to go to training?”
As soon as she said it she cringed. She braced herself, waiting for the click. Whenever Robin and Victoria yelled at the cameras they got clicked.
Jenna, however, got nothing.
She went to the kitchen and looked at the latest batch of meals in the fridge. Grilled chicken breast, a spinach casserole, and a salad with black beans, corn, and tortilla strips.
She went with the salad.
She was still hungry when she was done, so she pulled out the chicken breast and ate it too. It took her about ten minutes to eat it all.
Later, Jenna would wonder how the night might have turned out had she stopped at the salad and left the chicken in the fridge.
If she could have those ten minutes back.
She set her dishes in the sink and went to her bedroom. She sat at the Yack Shack and shook the mouse to wake the computer.
The screen came to life and she clicked on the messaging app to open a new text window.
The text window didn’t appear. A different window appeared in its place. This window, which announced its arrival with a chime, had a message inside.
I’ve unlocked the top right-hand drawer for you and left a present inside.
Jenna stared at the message for a few seconds. “The top right-hand drawer?” she whispered.
She leaned back to get a better look at the desk.
The Yack Shack station was a desk with six drawers, all of them locked since the day Jenna arrived. She’d assumed the drawers, like so much in the cellblock, were for the staff, stocked with supplies that helped them keep the place running.
She reached for the top right-hand drawer, slowly. The drawer opened when she pulled. Easy and smooth, it rolled out. She looked inside.
The drawer was empty, save a single piece of paper.
A piece of paper that was tightly folded into a familiar origami rectangle, with a hand-drawn sketch on the front of it.
The sketch was drawn in purple ink. It showed a flower with four petals.
*****
Bart Devli
n was done for the day and on his way to the parking garage when a text message stopped him.
The message was from Pavel Steifhoussen, Managing Veterinarian at Tetradome Labs.
Testing Mortimer for live course fitness in 20 min if you want to observe.
Bart wanted to ignore the text, but he couldn’t. In Bart’s experience, the veterinarians at the Labs consistently erred too far on the side of caution, and he needed Mortimer for the Finale.
Be right there, he wrote back.
*****
Jenna looked at the paper in her hands, half-convinced this was all a trick of her mind.
She glanced at the security camera on the near wall. They were watching her. What did they see? Did they see who put this letter in the drawer?
Was someone playing a joke on her?
She unfolded the paper. She found the unmistakable slant of Sunny’s handwriting inside.
Hi Jenna,
Yes, it’s me, and no, there is no need to panic. I’ve taken care of everything. You’re completely safe. Stay seated and read what I have to say to you.
Jenna spun her chair in a full circle, taking in the whole of the bedroom, just to make sure, one more time, that she was alone.
Right now you’re probably wondering how I got this letter into your cellblock.
Yes, she was.
I’ll explain when I see you. Yes Jenna, I’m going to see you! Maybe in just a few minutes.
Remember that surgery from a few days ago? When they told you something was wrong with your implant and now it’s fixed?
It isn’t fixed. It isn’t there at all. Other than the cuff on your wrist, you are off-grid, Jenna. That’s why you’ve been locked in here by yourself ever since your surgery was completed. The central security measure in the complex, the TAC implant, isn’t installed in your spine.
This is a perfect time for you to escape.
