Oak Tree nodded. A new, louder and almost joyful voice, somewhere between a trumpet and a pipe organ, had just joined in with those multiple, overlapping sequences of ascending notes. It began to weave a melody through the dense matrix of harmony and rhythm, strong and positive but tinged with a calm and fatalistic melancholy. It was like some large and beautiful sea creature playing slowly and gracefully among columns of bubbles that were streaming upwards all around it toward the light.
CHAPTER 29
The first of the border rallies took place at Ambassador Bridge, Detroit. Holly watched in her office upstairs in her home, leaning forward on her elbows, her head cupped in her hands, from time to time muttering to her jeenee to make a note of moments she wanted to revisit.
Only three or four hundred people turned out, which was much fewer than she’d hoped for, but all the same, while Slaymaker was speaking, she picked up a steady stream of encouraging responses in the whisperstream. As planned, the senator’s tone was friendly, conciliatory even. He said nice things about Canada, called it ‘our sister nation’, spoke of Canada and the US as being ‘two peas in a pod’, and reminded his audience that no one in the rest of the world could even tell Canadians and Americans apart. And, though he insisted it was time for that fine country across the bridge to play more of a part in resolving ‘the human problems of our shared continent’, he did so very gently, as if reminding Canada of something it would have wanted to do anyway but might possibly have temporarily forgotten. Someone like Ruby could not have pointed to a single word that was hostile or negative toward Canada. Holly had insisted on that. It was personally important to her.
But still, it was a pretty unusual thing for a senior US politician to stand on the borders of another country and ask for his people be let in, and this, for certain key audiences, was always going to be more important than the words spoken. Holly was gratified to see, within an hour, an angry reaction from the Canadian government: ‘Canada already lets in many thousands of Americans every year... We must protest in the strongest terms about Senator Slaymaker’s deliberately provocative demands.’
‘Provocative, me?’ would of course be his innocent response. ‘Where, in my whole speech, did I criticize or make demands?’
Holly sent a string of questions out into the Pollcloud straight away. There had been a measurable upturn in support for Slaymaker, but it was a small one, and not the immediate surge she’d secretly been hoping for, and not enough to lift him from third place behind his two rivals. Meanwhile, both Montello and Frinton were putting out sharp, well-targeted and well-crafted reactions.
‘I’m starting to worry about the senator’s mental health!’ Lucy Montello sneered. ‘Not only is Canada a sister-nation, with the same language and the same way of life as us, but it’s been our stalwart ally in no less than – count them! – twenty-eight different wars, all the way from World War I in the early twentieth century through to the Fourth Copper War less than ten years ago. I thought it was weird enough Slaymaker wanting to move everyone from the south to the north, but it seems that wasn’t enough for him. Now he’s trying to drag a neighboring country into his crackpot plan.’
‘Crackpot’ was a good word, Holly had to acknowledge that. And a crackpot is just what he looked like in the image Montello’s people put out. It showed Slaymaker at Ambassador Bridge, caught at an unflattering moment, with his eyes oddly half-lidded, his hair thrown all over the place by a gust of wind, and his mouth wide enough open to see his tonsils, all taken from an angle that left almost all of the crowd out of view, apart from a small cluster of confused-looking elderly folk who happened to be at the front.
‘You almost feel sorry for the guy,’ said Soames Frinton. His team of humans and AIs had also scoured every millisecond of the footage from Ambassador Bridge, and the image they’d managed to find showed Slaymaker looking old and tired and defeated, a lame old dog reduced to rummaging in trashcans because it could no longer hope to catch living prey.
‘It just shows how desperate he is,’ Frinton went on, ‘that this is what he falls back on.’
‘Desperate’ was a good word too, and it had the advantage of actually being true. Slaymaker’s team was desperate. This Canada plan was its last throw of the dice.
And it was the last throw for Holly as well. She’d always been isolated within the Slaymaker camp, and now she was more so than ever. Apart from Slaymaker himself, only Jed was willing to take her side in any way.
Richard came up with a cup of coffee and a cupcake from a batch he’d baked.
‘So? How’s it gone? Any sense that it’s having an effect?’
She’d just put on immersive goggles that allowed her to receive material in three dimensions, but even with her upper face hidden, he recognized that dangerous brightness that burnt inside Holly when she felt cornered.
‘The rally was just raw material,’ she said shortly, without removing the goggles or turning toward him. ‘It’s the story I build on it that’s important.’
Richard said nothing, just put down the tray for her, kissed her head, and backed quietly out. He was convinced that Holly’s plan would fail. Slaymaker, having belatedly realized that his followers would not be keen on giving rings instead of receiving them, was proposing to mitigate this by asking a neighboring country to provide some rings as well. It seemed obvious to him that this wasn’t going to be enough.
Holly herself feared that this might be the case. ‘Make demands on Canada!’ she could imagine Ann saying to Sue. ‘That turned out to be a great idea, didn’t it?’ They were circling her now, with their claws and their hooked beaks, waiting for her to fall.
But she shook off her doubts and peered back down into the whisperstream, not at a single timeline, but at a representation of the American stream in its entirety. As she leant forward on her elbows, looking at 3D charts and graphs, listening to the clamor from within, she had the feeling that she was peering through a crack in the earth into an enormous cave where millions of bats were roosting. She felt the pull of gravity. She heard the din of tiny voices, squabbling, flirting, jockeying for position. She saw the dominant animals that others deferred to. She smelt the stench of centuries of dung.
As had happened for many years, every candidate in the election was making use both of official attributable channels of communication and of unofficial channels that, in a strictly legal sense, they were not connected with. So, for instance, in spite of loud public protestations that she wasn’t in any way anti-Latino or anti- Mexican, Montello’s people were pumping anti-Mexican material that she could never have said herself, insinuating that the entire problem of homelessness and unemployment in the southern states was due not to the rapid changes in the weather but to illegal Latino immigrants.
You won’t hear it on the news hubs, but there’re whole towns down there in the south that have been taken over by Mexican gangs...
And get this! The federal government won’t help homeless Anglos – literally won’t even touch them – unless they promise to blame it all on the weather problems...
Government doesn’t want to admit that it’s lost control of the border...
And, in spite of public pronouncements about the ‘fine people of the south’, Montello’s team was also putting out insinuations about the refugees from the southern half of the country. Storm trash were feckless, lazy and potential rapists. Dusties were incompetent peasants who blamed their bankruptcies on the weather and then asked the taxpayer to clear their debts.
None of these were officially part of Montello’s message, and if she was asked a direct question about them she would of course have shrugged them off as nonsense. But Montello’s people ensured all the same that a steady stream of these stories were poured out day and night by thousands of high-quality feeders – so-called ‘seasoned’ feeders – which had been participating in whisper-stream conversations over a period of months or years, and were assumed by those who interacted with them to be real human beings like the
mselves.
A well-constructed feeder came over as a friend of a friend, that was the idea, someone that you felt you were connected with in some way but had forgotten exactly how. Holly’s profession had been using armies of feeders for several decades to manufacture a consensus by creating the illusion that a consensus already existed. Montello’s people were using them now to provide a kind of compost in which Montello’s attributable utterances about tighter border controls and punishments for illegal immigrants could put down roots and grow. It didn’t matter that there was no factual basis for what they said. Shit is the best fertilizer, as people said in the industry.
Immersed in and surrounded by three-dimensional graphics, Holly watched the stories flickering back and forth across the surface of the whisperstream. Of course, it wasn’t really a stream at all. It only seemed that way to the individual subscriber. If you wanted a watery metaphor an ocean would be more accurate, an ocean with tides, waves, dark abysses, sunny shallows and currents that streamed in different directions at different depths. But ocean didn’t really capture it either, because the whisperstream in its entirety was constantly transforming itself. It was not inanimate matter but a web of life, a vast chattering matrix of living souls, Holly’s cave of bats, with ripples of fear and excitement moving back and forth through a packed mass of warm agitated bodies.
No analogy was really adequate, though. It was a dreaming brain. It was the boiling surface of the sun. It was a sewer. It was bacteria dividing, second by second, on a sheet of agar jelly. In front of Holly’s eyes the stories about floods of Mexicans and lazy storm trash and feckless dusties multiplied and mutated many thousands of times in every second. And right there among these endlessly branching lines, she could see the ‘crackpot’ bacillus, often accompanied by that unflattering image of Slaymaker at Ambassador Bridge, reproducing itself with great vigor:
Apparently, his original idea was to send folk down to Mexico...
Word is that Slaymaker consults an astrologer before every decision...
The news hubs are covering up for him but he’s had five kids with some kind of voodoo woman down in Delaware, and she reads his fortune in chicken guts...
Which messages came from humans, which from feeders? Even with the specialist tools at her disposal, Holly couldn’t always tell. Each was amplifying the other.
Soames Frinton’s regiments of feeders had opened a new line of attack in the last two weeks, putting out rather elaborate stories about how southern states were bribing their own work-shy citizens to move north and live at the expense of northern taxpayers. His team had had fun developing an entire narrative about a fictional family from Mississippi called the Surettes who’d been paid $50,000 to cross the state line and never come back. Countless sightings of them had been claimed by whisperstreamers across America (some of whom at least were probably human) and an entire genre of Surette stories had spread themselves across that dark, agitated cave. Some of the stories were very funny. Professional stream-stars – people like Lucy Sharp and Johnny Truth, each followed by tens of millions of Americans – had been recycling them with great enthusiasm.
It was an ‘open secret’, according to Frinton’s feeders, that Slaymaker was in cahoots with all of this. (‘Open secret’ was good, Holly knew: it made people feel naïve and out of touch for not being in the know, and therefore very much disposed to recycle the supposed secret as often as possible in order to re-establish their credentials.) Never mind Slaymaker’s ‘nice guy’ image, Frinton’s feeders were saying, never mind that rugged charm, Slaymaker was a total sleazeball, and very reliable sources had confirmed that he was receiving substantial illegal payments for his campaign from ‘at least four’ state governors near the Mexican border, all of whom were on record ‘whining’ about the northern campaign for state frontiers.
Stream-stars were picking up on this stuff as well. Lucy Sharp in particular was whispering steadily on this theme. But again, Frinton himself had never said these things, had never claimed they were true, and would if necessary roundly condemn them as a slur on the fine upstanding people of the American south and southwest, where he had so many relatives and so many dear, dear friends. In fact, a conscientious reporter from one of the news hubs had actually looked into the ‘Surette’ story recently and proved there was no such family, but there was no comeback on Frinton. He’d laughed the whole thing off as typical whisperstream nonsense, even while the feeders his people had hired were hinting darkly that there’d been a cover-up: the Surettes really did exist, and the government just didn’t want you to know.
And into this fertile manure Frinton had continued to plant his signature message: if people from southern states were going to move, they needed to move at their own expense, and only to states that were willing to welcome them. As to Slaymaker, he was corrupt, but worse than that, he was a sad desperate old has-been, who had resorted to corruption because he knew no other way to make his mark, and now, when even that had failed, had finally turned to this embarrassing and desperate performance at Ambassador Bridge.
Right now, in front of Holly’s eyes, this new refined version of the ‘desperate’ message was fanning out through the stream, taking on additional material, mutating and frequently hybridizing, in many different ways, with Montello’s ‘crackpot’ narrative.
Alone in her study, Holly removed her goggles and passed her hand over her eyes: a weary soldier in the middle of a battlefield, worn down by unremitting combat.
She was not defeated, though. Slaymaker had his own army of feeders, after all, every bit as powerful as Frinton’s or Montello’s and many battalions of those feeders were under Holly’s direct command. She and Ann had also invested heavily in so-called scoopers, which scoured the stream for useful messages already out there for their feeders to recycle. And it was to her scoopers that Holly turned now, shoving aside the goggles and returning to the multiple screens she preferred to work with: one for each separate strand within her current strategy.
There was some good material coming in, flickering in front of her at a rate of one item a second. For example, she found a cartoon posted by a tiny local news hub in Slope County, North Dakota, which normally got no more than thirty or forty hits a day. The drawing showed Canada as a fat little lapdog lying in a manger, while a half-starved but very dignified American horse stood patiently waiting to be allowed to eat. The scoopers had already passed it on to a selection of feeders, but Holly took the decision to crank this right up. She sent the cartoon to a graphics AI for a bit of tidying up, and then instructed the entire feeder army under her command to get it out there, to be picked up, modified, recycled, imitated and improved upon by human streamers.
On a second screen she was working on Canuck jokes. She’d already put some out in the build-up to Ambassador Bridge, but only a few, because the news needed really to be created on the ground before the jokes could properly find purchase. Now, with Ambassador Bridge behind her, she launched a whole torrent of them into the whisperstream through a thousand feeders – An American, a Mexican and a Canuck walk into a bar...A Canuck goes to her doctor and...What’s the difference between a Canuck and a...? AIs were brilliant at generating formulaic jokes like these. She instructed her scoopers, meanwhile, to seek out and reward every single freelance effort, however weak, by passing it to her feeder centers for multiple recycling. She even had her feeders create a few dozen quasi-competitions for ‘the best Canuck joke’, ‘the funniest thing about Canadians’, ‘the ten meanest things that Canucks have done in history’.
She was working at full speed. Having originated the Canada plan, and written the original draft of Slaymaker’s Ambassador Bridge speech, what she was doing now was crafting the underbelly of that same message. She and Slaymaker had agreed he should say that Canadians were good people and fellow North Americans, but that was all the more reason why her feeders must say that Canucks were greedy, selfish and even spiteful, refusing access to space that they themselves had no use for. S
he had her jeenee find images of verdant meadows overgrown from lack of use, and rows of fine houses standing empty behind razorwire fences:
Land going to waste last year in Northern Ontario. And Canada claims it has no room!
The Canucks say they’ve got no space, so how come these houses in Saskatchewan are boarded up?
The pictures didn’t necessarily come from Canada, but that mattered very little. AIs could doctor them in fractions of a second to replace details like signs in foreign languages, or cars on the wrong side of the road. And these pictures weren’t going to be put out in Slaymaker’s name, in any case. They would enter the stream from sources that, for all anyone could tell, were simply private citizens. If anyone found out they weren’t genuine, it wouldn’t be Slaymaker’s problem. He could rise above the whole thing, condemning the slur on a friendly nation, and resuming his courteous requests for help.
CHAPTER 30
Holly didn’t go to bed until three in the morning, but she still ate breakfast with Richard at seven, and headed straight back out to the Slaymaker ranch for a team meeting to discuss the way forward after the rally. Sue and Ann were already there when she arrived, as was Quentin, all drinking coffee in the library with their cristals on their laps.
‘Polls are not looking good this morning,’ said Sue grimly.
‘To sum up the general view,’ said Ann, pursing her little red mouth, ‘Ambassador Bridge just made Steve look random and weird.’
‘Of course it did,’ Holly snapped. ‘Because it’s a sudden and unexpected turn and people don’t quite get it yet. There’s a ton of work we need to do to build on it and get the ground ready for the next rally.’
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