Vigilance

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  His Ideal Person does not want slaughter. They think they do, they claim to—but they don’t. Despite their inclinations, McDean’s Ideal Person doesn’t have the guts for modern warfare, and he knows it.

  * * *

  He charges off through the pits, mind churning, repeating his research like a religious mantra, a bloodless Hare Krishna of stats and ratios and demographics.

  Fantasies, he thinks to himself. Regrets.

  McDean’s Ideal Person has served in some branch of the military, or at the very least, they hold the military in very, very high regard. In fact, McDean has studied the analyses and has detected a quiet, anxious guilt within those Ideal Persons who did not serve: an envious, desperate belief that they should have served, that they missed their calling, and that if they had served, they would have been an excellent soldier, an exceptional but exceptionally modest trooper. Usually when McDean’s Ideal Person waxes poetic about this aching desire, they summon up phantoms from the mid-twentieth century, nearly a hundred years ago by now: images of John Wayne and Frank Sinatra (two actors who, McDean knows, successfully dodged the draft, and then made their careers playing soldiers) huddled in the sands of Iwo Jima, their helmet straps dangling by their cheeks, a cigarette drooping from their lips.

  A far cry from what service has been for two decades now, all technicians huddled around tiny glowing screens as they pilot incomprehensibly lethal robots through the stratosphere, the civilian structures below rendered in necromantic greens and grays, punctured by a phosphorescent white as a missile makes contact. This is the war that McDean’s Ideal Person emphatically supports waging (his Ideal Person is largely for any kind of war, his research shows; it doesn’t matter where or why) but it is not the kind of war that they understand, that they know, that they admire. It is not the story in their minds, the story in which they cast themselves as the heroes.

  John McDean thinks a lot about those stories.

  Focal point, he thinks. Paternity.

  The Ideal Person is a father, and they think they’ve been good ones, but McDean knows his Ideal Person feels they don’t really understand their children. There is always this unspoken, yawning gap between the Ideal Person and their progeny, this awareness of a sharp divergence in . . . something. Everything, maybe. McDean knows they’d feel this way even under the best conditions, but these days, when so many of the younger generation have fled—to China, to Canada, to South America—this alienation is even more extreme. But McDean has capitalized on this extensively, making sure to use younger anchors and actors at Our Nation’s Truth. The image of these fresh-faced youngsters, all so stern and earnest, fills that void for McDean’s Ideal Person: he has given them a spectrum of imaginary children, which they embrace eagerly, because all of these imaginary children just so happen to believe the very same things they do.

  Focal point, he thinks. Violence.

  But the final thing, the core quality that John McDean’s Ideal Person must have, just absolutely must have, is that they must, must, must own a gun.

  Preferably a pistol rather than a rifle. McDean has confirmed time and again that rifles suggest a very different lifestyle than pistols: rifles are for outdoorsmen, rigorous, confident people who are happy to venture beyond their homesteads—not his target demographic, in other words.

  Rifles are for people who are going out to do shooting. But a man carrying a pistol—he’s worried about getting shot at.

  Pistols are for killing people. Pistols are for urban environments. Pistols are for defense. They are the perfect choice of John McDean’s Ideal Person, isolated within their huge suburban house, wary and suspicious of the outside world, listening to the beautiful women on the television warn them of horrors and depravity in the lands beyond the borders, of corruption creeping into our cities.

  Pistols are the choice of the afraid. Pistols are the choice of the vigilant.

  And if there’s one thing John McDean loves more than anything else in the world, it’s telling people to be vigilant.

  * * *

  McDean stalks through the control room, through the crews of muttering men and flickering screens, toward another pit—the sitters.

  “How are our actives?” he asks as he approaches.

  Bryce Perry picks up a giant plastic cup from beside his monitor, thoughtfully holds it below his chin, and sends a massive stream of chaw spit spattering into it. He licks his lips and considers what to say. “These boys, hoss,” says Perry, “are softer than a fucking boiled egg.”

  McDean glowers at him. He does not like Perry, his Active Participants chief—also known as the “babysitters department.” Perry is Texan (or he used to be, maybe—McDean isn’t sure of the terminology, since a lot of Texas burned down over the past four years and is probably still alight), and he’s the sort of Texan who really, really wants you to know he’s Texan: Perry talks loud, jokes louder, and dresses loudest, all plaid and pearl-snaps. But he’s good at what he does—McDean imagines he sees in Perry something of a sadistic gym teacher, a powerfully built man with a body gone to seed, but still sporting an eye and an appetite for human weakness. Which is why he’s good with the actives.

  McDean leans over his shoulder and sees nine windows open on the monitors, depicting live, close-up feeds of nine young men. (Their actives are always young, and always men.) They’re all nervous and sweaty, with dull eyes and sunken cheeks. They don’t look healthy. Or impressive.

  “This is who the algos pulled?” asks McDean.

  “These are indeed our proud and estimable contestants,” says Perry. He fires another squirt of chaw spit into the cup. “They’ve all trained, a bit. They know how a gun works like anyone knows how a camera works—point and shoot. None of them are formidable. Except maybe this one.” He points at one window, where a dead-eyed, blocky-faced young man with neck tattoos stares into the screen. “Gabriel Bonnan. Eval says he’s into all kinds of Aryan crap. Iowan.”

  “Of course.” Iowa is overrun with Aryan types these days. The goddamn governor practically goose-stepped around the capital building and off into the fucking cornfields.

  “He’s also got a nasty rap sheet,” says Perry. “All the classic warning signs. Were I to go digging around his yard, I bet I’d find dissected squirrels and cats, that kind of shit.”

  “Being mean doesn’t make you good,” says McDean.

  “No. But people like to see mean guys go down,” says Perry. “And besides, he’s the kind of mean that makes everyone’s needles dance, yeah?”

  “Zoom closer,” says McDean.

  Perry taps a button, and the window zooms in. Bonnan doesn’t blink, he just stares into the camera. McDean is slightly impressed—he knows these feeds are all coming from nine little camera drones hovering in front of the prospective actives’ faces, analyzing their biometrics. Being a prospective active naturally makes you jumpy, and having a flying robot in front of your face doesn’t help. But Bonnan looks cool as a goddamn cucumber.

  McDean reviews the prospects and sighs. “You think these guys can go up against seventeen veteran LEOs, Perry?”

  Perry laughs. “I wouldn’t trust these boys to fuck a happy hooker,” he says. “They’d lose their nerve.”

  “What are our numbers on seeing someone like Bonnan get pulped?” says McDean.

  “Depends,” says Perry. “Our target audience demos increasingly have sympathy for the Aryan sort. Ever since the Nazis started dressing natty, the older demos have started thinking—why, these boys seem pretty nice, they’re just standing up for their people.”

  McDean scowls. “Bonnan doesn’t look like he owns a fucking collared shirt,” he says. “He looks more like a hoodie-and-Velcro-shoes type of dumbass.”

  “True,” says Perry. He sends another spurt of chaw swirling into the depths of the cup. “But seventeen veteran cops spraying the walls with Bonnan’s guts . . . that’s not going to generate enough threat quotient. People don’t want to see a mean dog get put down in the street.” />
  McDean knows this. He’s the one who created the models for it. People wanted to see conflict—if a guy was bad, they wanted to see him being bad, and worry he’d do more bad things. They didn’t want to see him just get vaporized like a chump. They’d tune out.

  Perry sits back. “They got the train station locked up tighter than a Chinaman’s ass, huh?”

  McDean says nothing.

  “I told you, Hopper keeps trying to get us to target public transport,” says Perry, “and eventually they’re just gonna turn every bus station and train station into a goddamn bunker. This is gonna piss him off something fierce.”

  McDean ignores him. “The actives are in position?” he asks.

  “My handlers have them twenty minutes away from all three possible environments,” says Perry. “Their bodycams are on and feeds are tested. We’re ready.”

  “Good,” says McDean. He leaves the sitter pit behind.

  “Can’t keep ’em on ice forever,” says Perry as he leaves. “Some of them are bound to lose their nerve!”

  One of the South Tavern regulars orders another beer, and Delyna dutifully fills the glass for him, idly wondering why in the hell this job hasn’t been automated. He’s a regular, she thinks: long hair, scraggly beard, and an ever-present trucker’s hat from some university—she thinks Oklahoma, maybe; she isn’t sure.

  She definitely remembers his friend: the short, fat man with the dirty fingers, perhaps a mechanic.

  “You and your pal carrying tonight?” she asks.

  He looks at her, surprised and vaguely offended. “Yeah? That a problem?”

  “No,” she says. “What’s a problem is when your friend forgets his loaded gun in our goddamn bathroom.”

  “Uhhh,” says the man. He looks sheepish. “Oh.”

  “Which he has done,” says Delyna. “Twice.”

  “Uh, right.”

  “Let him know that if he leaves it in there again, there’s a decent chance Randy is going to piss allll over it,” she says. She gestures to Randy slumped in the corner. “And trust me—Randy can get piss in all kinds of interesting places. I know. I clean it up.”

  “Right, right!” he says. “I got it, I got it!”

  “I hope so,” she says. She returns to filling up his beer.

  There’s a bing sound. The man pulls out his phone, checks his Nuuvu feed. His eyes go wide, and he shakes his head.

  “Ohhhh, boy,” he says quietly. “Shit. Shee-it.” She gives him his beer and he huddles with his friends in a booth in the back, suddenly deep in discussion like conspirators.

  Cold dread calcifies in her stomach. She takes out her own phone and opens up Nuuvu.

  Instantly, she’s bombarded with ads and trends, most of them sponsored. She hacks away at them until she’s finally permitted to see her feed. She scrolls through it, and at first sees nothing unusual—just the usual trifecta of babies, puppies, and patriotism, plus a bunch of hysterics about another leaked sex tape—until she spies one post from a prominent media personality: “where’s it gonna be tonight? #v.” This post sports about 18,000 re-ups and over 100,000 likes.

  She stares at the post. Like most people, she’s come to suspect that about half of the people on Nuuvu are puppet accounts, and some of these are maintained solely to spout propaganda at critical times.

  She tries to remember if this personality—some blond, smiling nothing—is one of the bigger propaganda accounts, one that it was wise to listen to.

  She glances at the door to the South Tavern. Then she examines the chairs, tables, and furniture around it, wondering how easy it’d be to blockade the door and the windows.

  A lot of glass, a lot of exposure. Not very plausible, then.

  She looks down at herself—her yellow shirt, her white capris—and wonders if her wardrobe choice has already gotten her killed.

  The heart of the matter was that, from the beginning, America had always been a nation of fear.

  Fear of the monarchy. Fear of the elites. Fear of losing your property, to the government or invasion. A fear that, though you had worked damn hard to own your own property, some dumb thug or smug city prick would either find a way to steal it or use the law to steal it.

  This was what made the beating heart of America: not a sense of civics, not a love of country or people, not respect for the Constitution—but fear.

  And where you had fear, you had guns.

  You just had to look at the great archetypes of America to see it. Look at the Continental Army during the Revolution, ragged and bleeding and starving and impoverished, but brave and noble—and why were they noble? Because of what each soldier held in their hands—a gun.

  Look at the cowboys, perhaps that most American of ideals, a lone man able to conquer the beautiful, hostile, empty world with naught but his spirit and a special tool to make his will manifest—a rifle, a six-shooter, a shotgun.

  Look at the soldiers during World War II, back when men were real men, true men, and they had a noble country worth fighting for. How did they do it? How did they beat back the tides of evil, and bring democracy and freedom to the world, and keep the forces of fascism from taking away America itself? With a whole bunch of big fucking guns.

  The point of being American was that you got to own shit. But when you owned shit, you were afraid someone would take it. But you could be brave, and fight back—if you had a gun.

  But sometime at the turn of the century that fear had grown. A lot—in tenor, in intensity, in scope. People became afraid of their own government, their own soldiers, their own neighbors, of companies and technology and schools and churches and other nations. There was just so much to worry about.

  So, what did you do? You bought a fucking gun.

  And here was the beauty of the thing, to McDean and people like him, who quickly spied the trend: the more people were afraid, the more they bought guns. The more guns that were around, the more people tended to use them on each other. The more they used them on each other, the more they were afraid—and so, the more everyone bought guns.

  This suited the powers that be. By that point, most of the nation was being run by a handful of people so astronomically wealthy they practically had to invent new numbers to express it. These few people knew that if you said something was for everyone’s safety, and put enough money behind it, you could do anything. Most citizens would practically let you rob them blind, right in front of their kids—and they’d thank you for it.

  But . . . you did have to keep it regulated. You had to manage that fear.

  It was the 514th mass shooting of 2026 that had spawned the idea. There’d been yet another school shooting, and some kid sheltering in place had streamed it from his phone. The social media platforms had noticed when everyone had started tuning into it, and then thousands of algorithms sprang into action, plastering the livestream of these horrific murders anywhere and everywhere, splashed with all kinds of sponsor logos or ad bumpers.

  At first, the advertisers were horrified. Some random bunch of code had jammed their ad next to a live video feed of children being shot to pieces. That was sure to ruin their branding.

  But then they found themselves surprised. Because everyone everywhere had tuned in to watch this horrible siege—and they’d watched for hours.

  Hours! Actual hours! A-fucking-mazing! The exposure was unbelievable. It was hard to keep anyone’s attention for more than three seconds these days.

  Afterward, the eureka moment happened. Some congressman—who fucking cares which one—stood up on the House floor and said, “You know why those kids died? You know why dozens of those little kids are dead? It’s because we thought schools were safe. Because we’ve been complacent. Because we aren’t ready. Because we still aren’t gosh-darned vigilant!”

  And then someone at the newly founded Our Nation’s Truth had wondered—why can’t we do both? Why can’t we find a way to get everyone to be vigilant, and get great ratings?

  And thus, the game was born.


  McDean skulks over to the next pit, A&M—advertising and media. The sight that greets him is a woman’s face, zoomed in so closely her pores look like some distant planet’s landscape. It’s an amazingly high-resolution monitor, so intense that it makes his eyes hurt. The woman’s face is perfect—or at least, McDean’s brain recognizes it as perfect. It’s difficult to say why it’s perfect, but it just is: something about the ratios of distance between the eyes, the size of the nostrils, the bend of the corners of the lips, all of this abstruse math that human brains couldn’t fathom—but AIs sure could. An AI could parse your social media feed, see which profiles you’d looked at and for how long, and instantly spit out a human visage that would positively drown your brain in a cocktail of potent hormones.

  McDean’s brain, though, is callused against this particular assault, and rather than relaxing and growing somewhat aroused, he watches, sour-faced, as a mouse cursor zips around the perfect face, altering its coloration, its shading, its pore sizes, and on and on and on.

  Sitting before the monitor, rocking back and forth with a neurotic’s classic tick-tock, is Andrews—a small, pale, thin man with receding hair and a delicate mouth and nose. “I know what you’re going to say,” he says as McDean approaches.

  “And what’s that?” says McDean crossly.

  Andrews makes a few more changes and carefully saves the file. Then he sighs. “That we have algorithms for this.”

  “No,” says McDean.

  Andrews pauses. “No?” he says.

  “No. I wasn’t going to say that. I was going to say that we have fucking expensive algorithms for this!” shouts McDean.

  There’s a pause in the production control room chatter, but it’s brief—everyone’s used to McDean tearing into Andrews.

  “We’re an hour and a half out from prep,” says McDean, “and my goddamn art guy is trying to make the most fuckable face he possibly can, when I’m literally paying millions of dollars a month for computational power that can generate a whole spectrum of highly, highly, highly fuckable faces? Are you kidding me, Andrews? I swear to God, are you fucking kidding me?”