Silicon Uprising

by Conor McCarthy

  “Both. You’re a capitalist, but you fight our enemy.”

  “I gotta keep moving. What are you gonna do?”

  “I, ah . . . got separated. Need to walk to . . . a place.”

  Jason indicated a direction with his thumb. “We better get as far away as possible in the next few hours. I’m going that way.”

  “So am I.”

  They leapt up and pressed on.

  “Sniffer dog is on the way,” Jason said. “I’ve got a stink bomb.”

  “Ours? Saving your ass again.” He grinned.

  “And yours. By the way, did I see you at the house when we nailed those goons?”

  “Nah, I was keeping an eye on things.”

  “Okay.”

  When they reached thicker growth and a carpet of leaves and twigs covered the ground, Jason planted the stink bomb and armed it. The poor dog would get a nose full.

  Ten minutes on, he planted an incendiary set to trigger in two hours to erase any hope of a new dog picking up the trail. It would announce where he’d been, but he intended to be far away by then. He changed direction toward Bob’s Gridder community, or whatever remained of it after the goons’ visit. From Jason’s memory of the map, the nearest safe house lay a few miles beyond that.

  They jogged hard for an hour. Jay ran right behind Jason without trouble. Eddie kept his people fit. They paused only to cross open ground, using the satellite schedule app on Jason’s neutered phone. The first time Jason opened it, Jay said, “So you guys got that info too, huh?”

  “Yeah, somebody in the right place.”

  “Lucky you. We’re holding a guy’s daughter prisoner to get it. Whatever it takes.”

  Jason made no comment except to call out the right moment to dash across to the next patch of forest.

  When thirst and fatigue set in, they slowed to walking pace for a drink.

  Jason said, “How’d you plant those bombs on their cars with the chopper up there?”

  “One of our guys in the scrub across the road flashed a mirror at it. That can happen naturally anyway, you know, the sun off car windows, broken glass, or whatever. So we got to the cars while they flew over to check it out, found nothing, and flew back. We’re good at being invisible.”

  “I noticed.”

  Jay laughed. “And when they got back we’d left presents on their cars.”

  “What’re you guys working toward, anyway?”

  “The revolution,” Jay said. “A free anarchic society where everybody works for the good of all. No more worker exploitation.”

  “Leaving people without electricity for days doesn’t win you much support.”

  “Winning popular support isn’t our job. We’re the radical guerrilla army. Political revolutionaries will build support when we’re done.”

  “Done doing what?”

  “Mocking Half-Bit’s perfect government. Can’t even keep the power on? Ha! Every time we pull something like that, Half-Bit’s an even bigger joke. We’re gonna take it down.”

  “How will your political wing run things?”

  “We need to break down the established structure. Oppression runs deeper than you know! Local collectives will run everything. No money, no profits.”

  “Half-Bit wants to abolish money, or so I heard.”

  Jay contemplated that for a moment. Jason regretted saying it. He’d promised Susan not to repeat it and she must have had a reason for hiding it.

  “Who says?” Jay asked.

  “Rumor,” Jason said.

  “Capitalist propaganda or something. They made Half-Bit as a capitalist system to stop capitalism from failing.”

  “Maybe. But anyway, after your revolution, what about people who don’t like your system?”

  “Only capitalists won’t like it. They’re the reason all past revolutions failed. The capitalist counterrevolution was too strong.”

  “What do you do about it?”

  “Our local collectives will handle it. When everyone’s in cooperative harmony, what do you do with people who just won’t take part? Always off doing capitalist bullshit? We have to send them away.”

  “What if all the capitalists assemble in one place and make a thriving community?”

  Jay frowned. “They wouldn’t get any workers. Okay, maybe they’d get some who have dreams of becoming wealthy capitalists. The whole thing would be a destructive temptation.”

  “So you’d stop it?”

  “I don’t know. The political wing works out this kind of stuff. We’re fighting for the revolution. Right now, man, this is it, it’s time! Tear down the old order. There needs to be nothing left so we can start over. Anarchy is the natural choice after that.”

  “Your political wing’s solutions could get pretty dark and messed up.”

  “Well, that’s counterrevolutionary propaganda. See what we’re up against? You’re fighting against the capitalist dictatorship, but you spout their propaganda.”

  “Nonsense. It’s my own thought. And how do you detect all of these people?”

  “Each community will know who the capitalist pigs are.”

  Jason grinned at him. “They could hold trials, you know, like in Salem.”

  Jay glared back at him. “I hope you wise up. Keep fighting the capitalists and you will.”

  They began jogging again with Jason in the lead. He rarely ran long distances. A stitch on his right side tormented him. He felt ill, but his drive to escape and regroup with his friends pushed him on and boosted his endurance. He drank enough water on the run but had to give some to Jay, who’d brought only one small flask. Even if Jay and Jason parted company soon, the water would run out before Jason reached the safe house.

  Jay kept up and suffered without complaint. His belief seemed to motivate him. Jason felt an instinctive suspicion of anyone who was so certain about how everybody should live. Jay didn’t know that Jason worked for Zarather Systems and respected the hierarchy. Would the anarchists declare him a counterrevolutionary? Jay’s belief seemed fervent enough to make him ruthless on that point. Maybe the leaders were the same.

  After an hour Jason gave up on jogging. Jay seemed relieved at the decision too. He pulled out a phone.

  Jason’s eyes widened. “I hope that’s neutered.”

  “You mean transmitters clipped on the circuit board? Of course.” Jay pointed at a map on his phone. “If you’re going on straight ahead, this is where I fork off. Got a place to be.”

  “Mind if I come and use your Internet, or hitch a ride? I can message my people with my phone if I can plug it into a networked computer.”

  “Sorry, got none at the place. I’d need Eddie’s permission to bring you at all, but got no way to ask. There’ll be transport but he might not want you tagging along with us.”

  “Okay,” Jason said. He shook Jay’s hand. “Nice running a marathon with you. Should do it again some time. One fine Sunday morning.”

  Jay laughed. “After the revolution, bud. Bye.”

  He walked off. Soon the trees hid him from view.

  Jason walked on until after dark. He dug a depression into the forest ground and settled in under the insulated cover, both for warmth and in case a passing satellite could make out his heat signature through the trees. He ate the last of the food in the pack.

  All the next day he walked hard without eating. In the early afternoon he emptied the last water bottle. When darkness fell, thirst drove him to climb a hill and search for civilization. Some houses glowed in the distance. He set off for them using night vision.

  His parched mouth dragged him to the back fence of a small house. It looked like one step up from a trailer. At least no dogs barked. He climbed over the fence and found a garden hose. The sound of a TV blared from the house, covering any noise he made while unscrewing the hose from the faucet and filling his bottles.

  One problem down. But he was starving and had another long day’s travel ahead. He moved to the back door and rested the M4 against the house. The
kitchen lay just inside. Shifting colored light from the TV illuminated the living room. Walls hid the TV itself and the people watching.

  An ad began playing. A man’s voice in the living room said, “I’m gettin’ a beer. Want one?”

  “Sure,” a woman replied.

  Both sounded middle-aged and the man’s voice had a hardened quality that, combined with the setting, suggested he might own a shotgun. These people had survived the Strife as adults. The woman probably had at least a snub-nose .38 handy. Or maybe he was being paranoid.

  Jason retreated from the door and waited. The refrigerator opened, glass rattled, and the door shut again.

  Confrontation meant police at the very least. No doubt mysterious men with clout would come and take him away from the county jail. Goons sent to bring him to Lowgrave.

  He felt the Glock .40 resting in its holster.

  These people had bought the lies and supported the CMC by inaction if nothing else.

  But so had he. Until that encounter with Zarather on the sidewalk. He couldn’t justify shooting them to defend himself. It was his responsibility to raid their fridge undetected. If caught, he’d tell his unbelievable story and they’d call the cops.

  A couple of minutes later the ad break ended.

  Slowly he opened the screen door. It squeaked. He opened it more slowly but it continued its infuriating racket. He stared through the living room entrance, hoping the loud scene on the TV would cover his noise.

  By the time the door stood open enough, nobody had showed. Jason figured the guy must be heading for his shotgun cabinet after all that racket.

  Everything inside appeared old but clean, accompanied only by the smell of a plug-in air freshener. Hunger pressed Jason on as he slinked across the kitchen to the fridge. A UFO-shaped magnet clung to it. Across the center it bore the inscription Sighting Report Network.

  He’d never expected to be so relieved to see a UFO on a refrigerator. Maybe they’d accept his shadowy conspiracy story after all. It brought to mind a conversation he’d had with his father. Jason had scoffed at UFO hunters, and his father said, “If they think aliens are here to help, or at least study us because we have a bright future, it brings positive meaning to their lives. Maybe the search is all they have left. In that sense the UFOs do exist.”

  Inside the fridge he found a neglected bag of grated cheese with a little mold down in one corner. The rest looked okay, so he took it. He stole two apples out of a bag of them. Quietly he closed the door.

  From the kitchen counter he swiped a handful of cookies out of a jar and then made for the door.

  At that moment a quiet scene began on the TV. He stood frozen at the squeaky door.

  Soft, tense music played. A sudden and nasty surprise awaited someone.

  His arm began to ache from his rigid grip on the door handle. When the hell would the action begin?

  The homeowner emitted a gigantic burp. Jason convulsed, trying to suppress a burst of laughter.

  Shouts and crashing from a violent struggle broke out on the TV. Jason swung open the screen door, exited, and shut it quickly with a brief loud squeak while he grabbed the M4. He made a beeline for the fence, vaulted it, and disappeared into the night, checking behind him only once.

  Nobody had come out.

  Twenty-One

  LATE THE NEXT day, he walked atop a low rise and came within sight of the forest that he and Michael had fled through while the police raided Bob’s settlement. Half an hour later, near sunset, he stood inside Bob’s trailer. Most of the contents had been removed in a hurry, leaving a dusty floor, some trash, a broken chair, and a stack of old clothes. At least they’d given Bob time to take something.

  From the entrance road beyond the trees came the sound of car tires rolling on dirt and gravel. For a second Jason thought about waiting to see how many vehicles there were. He could attempt to shoot all the goons and die trying because he felt tired and it seemed like a good way to go. But instead he dashed out the trailer doorway and into the woods. Hiding in the leaves and undergrowth, he had a view of the access road between two trees. Not the best cover but better than nothing.

  A few glints of color appeared through the greenery in the distance and then from around a sweeping bend a familiar car rolled into view. Michael sat in the driver’s seat.

  A wide grin burst out on Jason’s face. He waited for Michael to pass, so as not to startle him, and walked back to the trailer.

  “Where did you get to?” Michael said.

  “You were asleep I think. I got tailed and had to exit.”

  “Damn. You have something to do with the drama at that abandoned building?”

  “I let Crimson Unity know where I was headed. They took out two goon cars.”

  “Careful not to get too close to those people. Given a choice between Half-Bit’s plan and theirs, you’d probably choose Half-Bit.”

  “I ran with one of them for a while. He sounded reasonable until he talked about who they needed to remove from society to make their system work. But he made it sound like a caring community.”

  “Utopians. It’s always a perfect paradise or doom for them. That’s why members are prohibited from disagreeing even on minor points. What wouldn’t you do to save your flawless future?”

  “I guess they’d do anything. See enemies everywhere.”

  “Exactly. Find any sign of Bob?”

  “Nope.”

  “I hoped to track him down somehow. Anyway, best that we go. We have intel that Half-Bit has produced and deployed equipment for . . . I’ll just say its next plan. The nuke was a sideshow.”

  “All hands on deck, huh?”

  “Soon, yeah.”

  They got in the car and it turned around to leave.

  “And after all that,” Michael said, “you still need a shower.”

  “Says the bourgeois with the car.”

  Both men laughed.

  “Careful,” Michael said. “You’ll turn into one and speak programmed bullshit every time you open your mouth.”

  “The goon boss Lowgrave does that too.”

  “Of course he does. But how do you know that?”

  “I had a run-in with him. He never laid eyes on me but he knew I was around somewhere.”

  The car accelerated down the gravel road.

  Suddenly Michael planted his hands on either side of the seat and shouted, “Restrictions off. U-turn. Back road.”

  Jason looked to him and then at a distant stretch of road ahead. Gray SUVs. Two of them.

  Michael’s car kicked up clods of dirt as it skidded around corners to the far side of the wilted vegetable garden and onto the rough back road.

  “Here we go again,” Jason said. He braced himself with a hand on the door.

  The rough ground bounced them about in the seats. “We can’t outrun them and it’s obvious where we are,” Michael said. “At this rate we’ll both end up on foot in the forest.”

  “Or shooting it out,” Jason said.

  “Why so eager for that? You know how it ends against four of them. More if their rear seats are occupied.”

  Good question. He felt a strange attraction to the idea after the house shootout. His fate seemed inevitable, and he wanted the fight to begin.

  Around a bend an armored personnel carrier rolled toward them about two hundred yards ahead.

  “Left,” Michael shouted. The car balked at entering the thin undergrowth between the trees.

  “Manual!”

  Michael steered with the car’s excuse for a manual controller. His right finger dragged the image of a steering wheel to turn left. The car lurched between the trees and through to open ground beyond. It was rough, but the forest in the distance offered a chance to bail out and run.

  The APC burst through onto the same ground, scattering clumps of leaves and broken branches in its wake. A machine-gun turret atop the vehicle rotated to aim.

  “Incoming,” Jason shouted. He and Michael crouched down as low as p
ossible. Over the noise of tires on rough ground came the explosive din of the machine gun spitting out fifty-caliber bullets.

  Holes appeared in the rear window, all the side windows shattered in succession, and the windshield disintegrated into glass grains. Impacts whacked at the rear.

  The electric motors wound to a halt. Smoke poured from the battery under the rear passenger seat. The gunfire ceased.

  Jason opened his door and hurled himself out onto the ground. With nowhere to run, he lay there facedown while the APC drove up.

  Boots hit the ground. “Freeze!”

  More goons galloped around to the other side. “You in there, hands on the dash. On the dash!”

  “Watch him,” another voice said. “Look out.”

  The door opened.

  “Nah,” a goon said. “Dead.”

  “Hear that, asshole? Your friend is dead.”

  “Don’t bring a car to a tank fight.”

  All of them laughed.

  Jason’s senses seemed to intensify until the moment became hyperreal. Facedown in the grass. A blade of it jabbing an eyelid. His right index finger resting on a twig. Every boot step on the grass, its location and the weight behind it. The smell of dirt and that one word.

  Dead.

  He’d known Michael for five days, but he seemed like a ghostly presence in every memory of Jason’s life.

  His right hand tensed into a claw and dug into the grass.

  Two. The debt now stood at two. How much should he make them pay for it? He examined that thought. Would it work as a motivation? It seemed reasonable after all that had happened.

  He closed his eyes and saw an image of a skeletal forearm and hand rising out of a black viscous liquid, stained and dripping with it. The fingers writhed.

  Twenty-Two

  LOWGRAVE TOOK THE paper from Daniels’s outstretched arm while studying the lower-level supervisor’s face. The man had presented himself to Lowgrave with an expression like that of a sheep whose backside some Crimson Unity degenerate had just shoved an erection into. It was his most obvious personality flaw. At least he was good at administration.