Infinite Detail

by Tim Maughan

  He finds himself pondering whether he could grab him and tip him over the balcony, send his Armani-wrapped body tumbling down into the steel-and-concrete canyon below. But the railing looks too high, Brad too heavy. He looks like he works out, when he’s not watching his money or scratching his balls.

  Instead Rush returns to gazing out over the city, down onto the usually hidden rooftop infrastructure, countless uplink dishes and microwave relays, birds circling the thermals from air-conditioner outlets the size of tennis courts. Somewhere uptown two NYPD helicopters hover just above rooftop level, and as he squints in the dying light he can see a swarm—maybe a dozen strong—of small quadcopter drones descend from them, splitting up and peeling off as they drop into the streets.

  “Looks like something’s going down,” says Brad.

  “It’ll be the protest.”

  “What protest?”

  Rush turns to look at him, slightly incredulous. “You’ve not heard? It’s all over the timelines.”

  “Ah, I never check them.” He smiles. “Got my algos to do that.”

  Rush shakes his head, lets out a reluctant chuckle, then instantly feels guilty. “It’s a Black Lives Matter march. They’re protesting the shooting of a seventy-eight-year-old woman in Queens.”

  “Jesus. What’d she do?”

  “Nothing.” Rush grits his teeth. “That’s the whole fucking point. She didn’t do anything. Cops got a tip-off from their predictive software that there was a mugging in one of the housing projects in Flushing. Cops turned up and fired into a dark stairwell. Killed this poor old lady that was just minding her business. Going to the bodega to get some milk, apparently.”

  “Shit. When did that happen?”

  “This morning.”

  “And it was the predictive software’s fault?”

  “Well, it was the fucking cops’ fault for firing into a stairwell before asking any questions. But yeah, the software fucked up. It’s been doing that a lot lately. Another one of your algorithms that nobody really understands how they work. Meant to predict where crimes take place based on all sorts of data: embedded sensors, social media, cameras, residents’ profiles…”

  “Sounds familiar.”

  “Yeah, same shit but this time instead of you losing some cash someone gets killed. Since the NYPD started using it in the spring there’s been this huge increase in wrongful arrests. And at least four deaths that we know of. All African Americans. You know what they say about algos, they’re only as good as—”

  “—the data you put in ’em. Yeah. Hear that a lot.”

  “Right. Well, it turns out the data the cops have been putting into them is racist as fuck.”

  “So who are they protesting? The cops or the algo?”

  “Both, I think. The cops mainly, for using it. But also I think the protest is going to swing past the offices of the company that makes the software. They’re actually up near Times Square.”

  “Who’s the company?” Brad asks him.

  “Prescience. Start-up out of MIT originally.” He can see Brad’s eyes flicking and blinking behind his spex’s lenses, googling as he speaks. “Big guns in the data-analysis biz. They started doing full, real-time analysis of Facebook and Twitter demographics. Helped your president win his last two elections, helped get those fascists in France back in power. Then they moved into predictive policing, but it’s not been working out so well for them. Obviously.”

  Brad sucks his teeth. “That’s terrible. Just awful. I mean, the cops have a tough enough job as it is.”

  Rush sighs, bites his tongue, fights back rage again. “Sure. Anyway, I think I might go down and check it out. Wanna come along? Show your support?”

  “Ah.” Brad smiles, nervously. “I’d love to, but I don’t do well in crowds, y’know?”

  “Sure.”

  * * *

  “Is that … is that real?”

  “Yeah. Think so.”

  There is an original Keith Haring here. In the fucking bathroom.

  Scott wraps his legs around the back of Rush’s thighs, pulling him against him, their mouths and crotches meeting, the taste of vodka and salt, the sensation of hardness behind denim.

  As they stop kissing Rush pulls away slightly, takes in the bathroom again. It’s attached to the master bedroom and is about half the size of Scott’s whole apartment. Scott is sitting on a marble countertop, between two sinks. Matching gilded faucets. Behind Rush there are two showers.

  “I can’t believe you’re leaving so soon,” Scott says.

  It’s true. He’s only got a couple of days left before he heads back to the U.K. The last week had flown by, far too quickly.

  “I know. But I’ve gotta. I’ve got to give that talk on Monday.”

  “The talk on the boat?”

  Rush smiles at him, shakes his head. “The Dymaxion isn’t a boat. It’s a ship. A container ship.”

  “The Dymaxion, it’s a container ship.” Scott mimics his serious tone back at him. “Oh my god, who are you? Where the hell did I find you?”

  They both start laughing.

  “Just cancel it,” says Scott. “Stay here with me.”

  “I can’t. I mean, I’d love to, but I can’t. I promised. And Simon is a good friend.”

  “Your friends are weird. You’ve got weird fucking friends.”

  “That … that’s true.”

  Fittingly, he’d first met Simon Strickland on the Dymaxion about five years ago, not long after Simon had bought her, saving her from being cut up for parts by Maersk in some Gujarat ship-breaking yard. He’d got her fixed up and she limped back to the U.K., where she’d floated off the coast of Dover for a few months while Simon had run his speculative-design summer school on board. He’d invited Rush along to teach classes on digital protest and activism. The ship was buzzing then, full of young design students and excited academics on the upper decks, workmen and maintenance crews on the lower ones. By the end of August she was ready to sail, and Simon had set off on his first supply-chain expedition, taking more students, artists, and paying customers back to the source of it all, the Dymaxion transformed into what he called “a floating Temporary Autonomous Zone meets nomadic design studio,” the hundreds of containers stacked in its hold turned into dorms, art installations, and “experimental spaces.” It was halfway between a floating conference center and one of those reconstructed tall ships they take kids out on for months to learn trade history. Rush imagines it was every bit as pretentious and annoying as it sounds.

  “You having fun?” Scott asks him.

  “Always.” They kiss again.

  “No, silly. I mean here. The party?”

  “Ah.” Rush looks past him, into his own eyes in the mirror behind him. He looks tired, he thinks. “Sure. It’s okay. I was hoping we could get out of here, though.”

  “Oh, really?” Scott pulls him against him again. Vodka, salt, hardness.

  “I was … hoping we could go check out the protest.”

  Scott’s shoulders fall, defeated. He smiles. “God, you’re so predictable. I thought you were being romantic, wanting to get me on my own.”

  “I am, I mean I do want to. Later. Sorry I—”

  “Shhh. It’s okay. I’m just teasing.” Scott brings up a hand to brush the stubble on his face. Rush finds himself leaning into Scott’s palm, like a cat trying to get you to stroke its face. “I think it’s cute how involved you get in these things. How much you care.”

  “Really?”

  “Of course. It’s why I’m with you.” He kisses him again, but gently this time. Tenderly. “I love it.”

  Rush catches himself in the mirror again, sees himself blush. “I was talking to some guy earlier. Out on the balcony. I think I referred to you as my boyfriend.”

  “Oh really? Is that what you’re calling me now?”

  “I’m sorry, I—”

  Scott laughs. “Jesus. What are you apologizing for? So fucking British sometimes.” He pulls him forw
ard again. This time the kiss is harder, deeper. Lingering. When they separate their foreheads meet, resting against each other, noses nudging. For a second Rush thinks his legs will give way beneath him.

  Scott unhooks his legs, playfully pushes him away. “C’mon, then. We can finish this later. Let’s get you to your protest, boyfriend.”

  * * *

  They move quickly and purposefully through the city, thousands strong, shutting down traffic as they flow around it. Streets full of driverless cars are paralyzed, unable to react to this many human bodies flooding their space. The few remaining yellow cabs, artifacts from a dying age, honk in support, their human drivers reaching out of wound-down windows to high-five protestors as they pass.

  At Rush’s insistence both he and Scott have got their scarves and hoods up to try to mask their faces from the police drones that float constantly above their heads. Most of the rest of the marchers have done the same: if not hoodies or scarves then actual masks—3D-printed re-creations of too many other black men and women slain by the police, to keep their memories alive as much as to hide identities, as if vengeful ghosts have been summoned to march with them.

  Pretty much everyone is wearing spex, too, which gives Rush some pause. When he jumps into the #blacklivesmatter hashtag channel he can see why they are: virtual protest signs appear floating above heads, demands and slogans, calls to action, tweets from supporters across the globe, and video streams from simultaneous marches in Atlanta, D.C., L.A. But Rush knows for sure that probably most of the protesters don’t have their shit as locked down as much as he does, that they don’t have the same levels of encryption as his custom OS, and that as well masked as their faces might be they’re still leaking personal data, that just by using the spex they’re betraying their identities to the drones sniffing the air above them.

  It’s not just NYPD drones buzzing around them, though—the protesters have brought their own, of all models and sizes, from tiny, cheap toys to prosumer hexcopters. Illegal to fly in NYC as far as Rush knows, they play a constant cat-and-mouse game with the cops: filming and streaming the crowds, blocking the NYPD drones’ cameras, flashing arrows across LCD screens to show the marchers which way to go as the route dynamically changes to avoid blockades and police lines. Most important, they relay, from tiny Bluetooth speakers strapped to their undersides with string and sticky tape, the never-ending call-and-response chants that the marchers echo back at them.

  NO JUSTICE!

  NO PEACE!

  NO RACIST POLICE!

  WHOSE STREETS?

  OUR STREETS!

  WHOSE STREETS?

  OUR STREETS!

  The air is electric, and Rush can almost feel it pulsing through the ground, the same way he imagined he could feel the data flows earlier back in the penthouse—the ground and the buildings shaking again, but this time the marchers are the network nodes, pulsing through the city, reclaiming the streets and the infrastructure. It’s intoxicating. He squeezes Scott’s hand tight as they walk.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah.” Scott seems hesitant.

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah, oh yeah. I’m fine. I mean, this is amazing. It’s just, it’s so different from marches I’ve been on before.”

  “How so?”

  “There’s just so…” He pauses to pick his words carefully. “So much urgency, you know? And focus. I’ve been on Pride, and I went on the Women’s March … but this … They were different, right? Like it felt like people were there to have fun. Like the signs all had jokes on them, people were partying, taking selfies. This, this feels like it’s about something. Like I said, focused. Urgent. Angry. But with good reason. You know what I mean?”

  Rush smiles behind his scarf. “I do.”

  “Plus, on those marches, there was never this many cops.”

  They turn a corner and hit a wall of dark blue, a line of police in body-warping armor, their chests and shoulders encased in black plastic, faces hidden behind tinted visors and apocalyptic breathing masks. Most of them hold batons, some shotguns. Behind them are parked two huge armored personal carriers, towering above the crowd like futuristic mobile fortresses, more cops leaning lazily from hatches and nursing assault rifles. Rush has seen crowd-control units back home before, on the streets of Bristol and London, but this is something else, something terrifying and barely believable, like an exaggerated dystopian sci-fi movie, or the hyperstylized cover of some comic book about a fascist police state.

  Immediately the protesters’ drones start to drop lower, arrows scrolling across their screens to shift the march’s route, and new cues rattling from speakers to realign the chanting.

  WHY ARE YOU IN RIOT GEAR?

  WE DON’T SEE NO RIOT HERE!

  WHY ARE YOU IN RIOT GEAR?

  WE DON’T SEE NO RIOT HERE!

  Rush spots a couple of cops behind the main line not wearing headgear, senior officers or strategic management agents, and blinks to grab images of them, storing them away to run through image-search algorithms later. Until you can dismantle them, he tells himself, always use the oppressors’ tools against them.

  Then they’re being picked up by the momentum of the crowd again, as it communally senses that it’s nearing its target, seeming to pick up speed. Suddenly they’re turning off Forty-fifth—Rush has lost all sense of direction—and marching down Seventh Avenue, and they’re here, swarming around gridlocked traffic and into Times Square. It’s the first time Rush has seen it; Scott had refused to bring him before, saying it’s not somewhere real New Yorkers go. It’s just as awful and wonderful as he’d imagined.

  Hundred-foot-high superheroes fill the air, punching their cartoon nemeses into skyscrapers that explode into glass-shard blizzards, only to be replaced by hundred-foot-tall anthropomorphic M&Ms, arguing and laughing and falling over, only to be replaced by hundred-foot-tall teen pop stars, peering down at him and smiling over the rims of the latest Samsung spex, only to be replaced by koi carp the size of humpback whales, lazily orbiting a Sony logo built from iridescent bubbles, only to be replaced by hundred-foot-tall NBA legends, slam-dunking—

  Rush yanks his spex away from his face and the augmented-reality adverts disappear, the towering hyperreal simulations vanishing from the warm night air, but the screens are still there, still everywhere. Some are the size of apartment blocks, some mere tennis courts, but they’re fucking everywhere, everywhere that isn’t a shop front or a Starbucks, on every wall and building. They cycle through brand after brand, from Google to Coke, Delta to Facebook, Hershey to Tesla. Brands merge into faces: politicians, the celebrity president, bleached-hair Aryan news anchors, all peering at him over scrolling text. Share prices, breaking news, war atrocities, football scores, celebrity gossip, fake news and real lies. It’s like somebody took the Internet, the hyperactive never-ending churn of the timelines, the constant scroll through Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, and made it real, physical, and nailed it to the walls of the fucking city.

  Rush pulls his attention away from the lights and screens and tries to focus on the crowds instead, which are growing and thickening now, confused tourists and determined protesters circling around one another. Through gaps in the mass of bodies he sees police lining the square, more riot units, blocking exits. The drones still buzz above them, the whirl of their rotor blades drowned out by the amplified chants bouncing back from the crowd.

  HANDS UP!

  DON’T SHOOT!

  HANDS UP!

  DON’T SHOOT!

  NO JUSTICE!

  NO PEACE!

  NO RACIST POLICE!

  WHOSE STREETS?

  OUR STREETS!

  WHOSE STREETS?

  OUR STREETS!

  For what can only be minutes he loses Scott, his hand slipping out of Scott’s as the crowd contracts around him, and he finds himself in a state of panic, wheeling around shouting Scott’s name, and then he’s there again, grabbing him, hugging him. The euphoric energy of the crowd
is intoxicating, but for some brief minutes it was gone, replaced by fear and loss, and this overpowering sense—this pure, desperate fear—had taken over, this realization that he never wants to lose him, that he never wants to be apart. It’s terrifying and reassuring at the same time, and he holds Scott close, pulls down both their scarves and kisses him, long and deep, as the crowd jostles them, the sounds of chanting and the rumble of drone engines echoing about them.

  And then the lights go out.

  For a nanosecond there seems to be nothing but stillness and silence.

  Rush breaks off the kiss and they step away from each other, staring into the darkness.

  The dead screens are the color of the night sky. Every streetlight and crossing signal is out, every shop front dark, every robotic car and bus ground to a halt. He slips his spex back on but there’s nothing—his home-brew OS struggling to connect to nonexistent networks.

  Something explodes next to them, the crowd nearly knocking him off his feet as they make room for something heavy that’s fallen from the sky, a failed police drone smashed to fragments of plastic and silicone as it impacts the asphalt.

  And then the silence is gone, the crowd erupting into spontaneous cheering, and Rush finds himself joining in, hands above his head, emptying every last trace molecule of air from his lungs.

  He’s lost in pure rapture, ecstatic in a moment of pure defiance, unsure exactly what has happened but thrilled to have been part of the ultimate, simplest act of resistance. At that point the details were unimportant, but he knew it was deliberate, that they’d shown him—shown everyone—that there was another, almost unthinkable way. They could just shut it all down. They could turn it all off.

  From across the square, from multiple directions, there’s the sound of breaking glass. Cheers and screams and shouting. Celebrations and anger. The piecing jolt of tear gas canisters being fired.