Vigilance

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “Just lifted the comms ban,” says Neal from the eval pit. “Tons of people calling in now, trying to warn them.”

  “Too late,” says Darrow.

  All the ringing phones also make it a lot harder to hide—which is the point.

  Bonnan is surprisingly good at this: he moves slowly, carefully, taking aim and using short bursts. The AL-18 really is just a fucking amazing weapon, minimizing kickback and concentrating the burst. A teenage girl drops, then a twelve-year-old boy, then an old man who’s just sitting on the ground crying, bang, bang, bang.

  “This is why you make sure to train with the best possible equipment,” narrates Bowder on the screen. “Look at how he’s moving down the hallway. Look at how he’s staying out of sight lines, maximizing his view of the field while minimizing his exposure. Remember, the bad guys will be ready, and they’ll have access to such remarkable weapon systems as the AL-18 just like you.”

  “That’s an excellent reminder, Bob, thank you,” says Robwright. “If these people had weapon systems comparable to the AL-18, would they be prepared enough?”

  “They’d have a much higher chance for survival, Stacey,” says Bob. “Much higher.”

  McDean, though, is very aware that carrying around an AL-18 in public is liable to make anyone think a Vigilance is taking place, and blow you away in hopes of getting a cool five million. Ives is very good at suppressing those news stories, because Wayne Hogget Hopper is, of course, a huge investor in the company that manufactures the AL-18. It’s critical to maintain the weapon’s branding as a token that prevents death rather than inviting it.

  “Oh!” says Gramins on the screen. “Looks like . . . Looks like Bonnan has a challenger!”

  A police officer has taken cover behind a row of trash cans. His Klimke is in his hand. He waits for a break in the action, then pops up and fires . . .

  He misses. This isn’t huge surprise—most police officers score about a 20 percent rating when it comes to marksmanship.

  But Bonnan does not miss, almost solely because his weapon is so superior to what the cop’s sporting: the AL-18 saws through the trash cans instantly, and the policeman collapses to the ground.

  “Not a good sign for this mall’s security so far,” says Robwright’s voice. “Not good at all.”

  Delyna stares at the screens, surrounded by images of the officer lying on the ground, motionless. The cameras pour over him, taking in every angle of his death. She is struck by the galling humiliation of it all, dying alone behind a row of mall trash cans, purely for spectacle.

  Someone is shouting at her. She blinks—the man in the Oklahoma hat is standing at front of the bar, snarling, “—oors Light!”

  “What?” says Delyna, startled.

  “I said give me another fucking Coors Light before I miss anything else!” he shouts. “Goddamn, girl!”

  Delyna grabs the tap with shaking hands and begins to pour yet another beer. Oklahoma whirls around as there’s another burst of shooting and passingly makes some comment, but all Delyna can hear is the sound of knocking at a door, and shrieks of dismay and grief.

  She watches the glass fill and tries to remember where she is.

  “Something interesting happening with Stewart,” says Darrow from the eval pit.

  “Let’s check him out,” says McDean.

  “We now go to Stewart,” says Robwright’s voice, almost automatically.

  The feed cuts to Stewart, who’s stalking around a women’s clothing store—small, upscale, very nice. The sign says it’s called Epheme.

  “Crank up the ad dollars from Epheme,” says McDean. “Just look at this fucking exposure we’re giving them.”

  “You got it,” says Ives.

  As Stewart stalks through the store, he pauses, thinks, and fires a couple of rounds at the checkout desk. An older woman, about sixty, gray-haired, and overweight, tumbles out from behind it, bleeding copiously from the neck.

  Stewart stares at her for a moment, then walks forward to confirm she’s down.

  “Yep. Yep! Got a shooter in the rack!” says Darrow suddenly, excited. “Look, there! Right there!”

  It’s rare for Darrow to be excited about a Vigilance—after four or five of these, nothing really surprises you anymore—but then they see what he’s pointing at: there’s a twitch from a thick rack of dresses in the far back, and then the barrel of a pistol emerges, ever so slowly.

  “Ohh, shit!” says Neal. “This is some fuckin’ television, folks!”

  For a while, nothing happens.

  “Taking aim,” says Darrow. “Making sure they got a clear shot . . .”

  Stewart stands up, looks around the store . . .

  Four shots ring out, and Stewart falls.

  “Did you see that?” cries Perry from the sitter pit. “Wow!”

  Almost in unison, Robwright’s voice says, “Did you see that, folks? Wow. Wow!”

  The drone feeds quickly establish that Stewart is not down, not out, not dead: most of the shots hit his body armor.

  “Of all the times a fuckin’ moron goes with the armor,” says Perry, “and it actually comes in handy.”

  But being shot while wearing body armor is still not at all a pleasant experience. Stewart is on the ground, moaning and whimpering, and he’s dropped his pistol. So, he can’t react when the shooter leaps out of the rack of dresses and advances on him.

  It’s a woman—a young woman, about twenty-four. She’s crying as she advances on Stewart, the gun trembling in her hands. She’s Asian. Neal and Darrow’s AIs go to work, and they quickly identify her as Phuong Dang, visiting from Chicago.

  “Shit,” says McDean. “Shit! Asian, foreign, and from a big city? What are the numbers like?”

  “They’re . . . okay,” says Ives.

  “Will this blunt our TMAs?”

  “It might slow them down a little, yeah. Like, it’s good—but not great.”

  McDean sighs. It’s not that this would hurt them—but his job is to follow the numbers, give people what they want, and break records every time. “Go to dupe mode,” he says.

  “Ten-four,” says Andrews.

  The main feed has maintained a distant perspective on the action for this very reason: since the civilians are the hardest to prepare for, they keep to wide, unclear angles in case they need to do any live editing.

  Andrews does his thing, and the big screen in the control room splits in two. They seem to be duplicates of the same feed, showing drone footage of Epheme and some ONT pundits.

  But then Andrews runs a script. Both drones zoom in on the girl, and in one, the feed shows the girl as she is, Miss Phuong Dang from Chicago. But on the other, she’s suddenly different: now she’s a white, Irish-looking girl with dark black hair. Perfect for Indiana.

  This second image is what the viewers are seeing—the other is reality. It’s essentially an image overlaid on top of her—a highly advanced copy-and-paste.

  “Who is that we’re seeing, Bob?” asks Robwright on the screen.

  “Our ONT sources say this is Miss Molly Jones,” says Bowder’s voice. “And isn’t she remarkable? Look at her stance as she holds the pistol!”

  “Molly Jones?” says McDean. “From the Beatles song?”

  “The algo pulled it on random chance,” says Ives. “I’m putting together a social media profile for her now.”

  “Miss Jones is visiting Daileyton from Bloomington,” says Bowder on the screen. “Just complete chance that she’s here today.”

  “Mm,” says Robwright’s voice. “That’s why you have to be vigilant, of course. Anytime, anyplace.”

  “Exactly, Stacey,” says Bowder.

  McDean cringes. That’s a little on the nose for his tastes. But his audience likes it, he knows.

  McDean’s team watches on the unfiltered drone feed as Miss Dang advances on Stewart, weeping and trembling and shouting in Vietnamese. Stewart coughs, looks up, and sees her. He holds up a hand, alarmed: “No! No, no, no, I’ll spl
it it with you, I’ll split it with yo—”

  “That’s against the rules, pard,” says Perry.

  Either way, Miss Dang isn’t having any of it: she screams at him in Vietnamese, and the control room’s AIs, sensing the language, translate it almost instantly for the control room to read: “Do the fuck to yourself! Do many fucks to yourself!”

  Darrow bursts out laughing. Dang is shrieking and sobbing now, her words so overwrought that the AIs can’t make heads or tails of it.

  “No!” screams Stewart. “No, no, no, n—”

  She starts firing, over and over again. Some shots hit his armor. But not all—his neck is unprotected. His throat bursts open, and a nearby hanging rack of off-white bras is spattered with arterial spray.

  McDean checks the viewers’ feed. On that one, the white, handsome-looking Molly Jones is shooting at Stewart, screaming, “I’m a patriot! I’m a patriot! I’m a patriot!”

  He narrows his eyes. Sometimes, he can’t believe the shit that tests well with his audience.

  Then, in a very weird unison, the women on both screens collapse beside the bleeding, dying Stewart, and weep hysterically.

  “That,” says Andrews approvingly, “was some very good tape.”

  “Victorious!” cries Gramins on the feed. “Victorious. Can you believe it! Can you believe it?”

  “Amazing,” says Robwright. “Simply amazing. She passed. She did it. Miss Jones—you, more than anyone else we’ve seen so far—are vigilant.”

  “I’m pulling up her Nuuvu profile now,” says Bowder’s voice. “It appears Miss Jones is a fervent marksman. She trains, she prepares—and today, it really paid off.”

  McDean walks over to Ives’s pit. “The real lady—Miss Dang—is a goddamn accountant,” says Ives. “Barely knows how to fire a gun. She got lucky as hell.”

  “But you’ve made a profile for Jones, right?” asks McDean. “And you’ve made sure she likes and supports all of our advertisers?”

  “Miss Jones is a very, very big fan of tactical lights,” says Ives.

  “Excellent.”

  “What are we going to do about the Vietnamese lady?” asks Ives.

  McDean thinks about it. He sure as hell doesn’t want to pay her the five million—such a thing would cause talk, and people might eventually realize they’d edited the feed.

  But then, all kinds of people are getting killed here today. “What’s Bonnan’s location now?” asks McDean.

  “He’s about six hundred feet down the hall from her,” says Darrow.

  “Well. Why don’t we give him a trail of breadcrumbs, then?”

  The patrons of the South Tavern bar whoop and clap as the Jones girl fires round after round into the prostrate form of the shooter.

  “That’s how you do it, baby!” shouts one man. He pumps his fist. “That’s how you do it!” Other exclamations include “Pow!” and “Bam!” and “Tee Kay Oh!”

  “Look at her,” says one woman. “That is some ugly crying right there. Ugly.”

  “Bitch, like you wouldn’t be sobbing your eyes out if you went through a Vigilance,” says her friend.

  “The second I knew a Vigilance was going down, I’d be reaching for my makeup, not my gun,” she says.

  “Tough for a face to be pretty when it’s got a lot of holes in it,” says a man.

  They stare at the sight of Miss Jones weeping hysterically on the floor—and then, abruptly, the television goes blank.

  The crowd stares at the dark television screens.

  “Huh?” says a woman.

  “What happened?” says a man.

  Finally, the man in the Oklahoma hat turns and sees Delyna standing at the bar, shivering with rage, holding out the remote with one hand, her index finger pressing down the power button. “What the fuck?” he squawks, furious. “Turn it back on!”

  Delyna slowly takes a breath, lowers the remote, and then stares at him, her expression calm and cool and collected. “No,” she says.

  McDean doesn’t like doing the trail-of-breadcrumbs trick, of course—this is a lot of work. They’ll have to create a whole bunch of generated shit for this totally fabricated Miss Jones—grieving parents, grieving siblings . . . Who knows. But it’s better than the alternative.

  Really, it’s just a matter of the wrong place at the wrong time—or, more specifically, the wrong person. Foreign, female, big city, and Asian . . . John McDean’s Ideal Person doesn’t dislike such a person. It’s just that they just get far more excited by the idea of a local white lady as a victorious shooter—enough to generate a significant bump to the Vigilance target market activations.

  And when it comes right down to it, you do whatever it takes to get your TMAs.

  Darrow and Neal quickly hack into the phones of the dead, using an advanced drone puttering through the hallways—it just needs to get close for them to get in. Then they set up the breadcrumbs: a trail of phones that make a loud, distinctive, high-pitched beep.

  They watch on the drone footage as the first beep definitely gets Bonnan’s attention. He skulks over, AL-18 ready. Then the next phone beeps, and the next one—and he’s drawn farther, and farther, closer and closer to Epheme.

  “Oh, dear,” says Robwright on the screen. “Look . . . It does look like maybe her crying has gotten Gabriel Bonnan’s attention, or perhaps it was the shots.”

  “Classic mistake,” says Army Man, always helpful. “You stay silent, you stay out of sight, and you do not let the situation overcome you.”

  Bonnan walks to the door of Epheme. He looks in, sees Miss Phuong Dang sitting on the floor, crying next to Stewart’s corpse. Without any hesitation, he aims and fires. Her back bursts open in at least three or four places. She slumps over, dying, trembling, choking.

  “Ohh, dear,” says Robwright on the screen. “No, no! She was almost out! She almost had it!”

  Gramins heaves a deep sigh. “What a heartbreaker. I can’t believe it. What an absolute heartbreaker.”

  In the control room, McDean says, “Let’s get hashtag RIPMollyJones trending on everything ASAP.”

  “Already on it, chief,” says Ives. McDean watches on his tablet as massive flocks of bots and hacked accounts begin percolating, tweeting out thousands of messages instantaneously, flooding the social media feeds.

  “And our advertisers are looped in?” says McDean.

  “We’re tied at the hip,” says Ives. “They’re all on board with it.”

  “Well, holy shit,” says McDean. “Well done, gents.”

  “Turn it back on,” says the man in the Oklahoma hat. “Now.”

  “No,” says Delyna again. She tosses the remote into the icebox behind her and slams it shut.

  “We were watching that!” says a second man. This is his friend, the man who’s always leaving his gun in her goddamn bathroom, the one she thinks of as a mechanic. His hands, she sees, are filthy yet again.

  “And I got tired of it,” says Delyna.

  Oklahoma advances on the bar in a furious bantam strut. He leans over it and sticks his finger in her face. “Now, you listen,” he says. “I had money riding on that episode. We all did. Now, you get that fuckin’ remote out of the ice, and you turn it back on. This instant!”

  Delyna stares back into his face and calmly, slowly blinks. “No,” she said. “I will not.”

  “Do it!” says Oklahoma. He leans over farther into her area. “Do it now!”

  “The same damn show is running in every bar in this neighborhood,” says Delyna. “Every one except this one. You can take your party next door and watch it there.”

  She hears a shuffling series of footsteps from the kitchen. “Delyna . . .” says Raphael’s voice reproachfully.

  “I don’t want to fucking hear it, Raphael!” she snaps, not taking her eyes off Oklahoma’s face. “I am damn tired of seeing people die on my goddamn television! I’ve seen it enough in real life, I don’t want to see it there, too!”

  “Come on,” says the mechanic. “
Let’s go.”

  “No!” snarls Oklahoma. “No! I had fucking money riding on that game. And this . . . this is disrespectful to me!”

  “We need to hurry if we don’t want to miss anything,” says the mechanic.

  “I don’t think you hear me,” says Oklahoma. “It’s disrespectful!” He turns his stare back on Delyna, and she can see he’s getting all pumped up now. His eyes are wide and drunk, and he’s shifting uncertainly on his feet, lurching back and forth. He sticks his finger out at her again. “I don’t need to take your shit.”

  “I am not giving it,” says Delyna. She switches to a bloodless, formal vernacular that she learned from her father. “I am simply making a choice about the programming we are displaying at our venue for this evening. Those who disagree with the choice have ample selection elsewhere in the city.”

  Some of the patrons are leaving, huffy and furious. But not all—about half remain, staring at Delyna with drunken, angry eyes, seemingly catalyzed by Oklahoma’s fury.

  “I want to speak to your manager,” says a woman behind Oklahoma.

  “You are welcome to,” says Delyna. “Tomorrow. He will not be in this evening.”

  “Give me that fucking remote!” says Oklahoma.

  “No, sir,” says Delyna.

  “Don’t you fuckin’ sir me,” he says. “Don’t act like you’re being respectful now! Everything about this . . . it’s all about disrespecting me!”

  “It is not,” says Delyna. “It has nothing to do with you.”

  “It does,” he says. “It does.”

  “Then it is my duty as the bartender of this establishment,” she says, “to inform you that you are mistaken.”

  He stares at her, scandalized. “That I’m what?”

  She turns and sees an order of chili cheese fries on the order counter. She picks it up, along with the beer she just poured.

  “Don’t you fuckin’ turn your back on me!” he says.

  “Again, you are mistaken,” she says. She turns back around. “I was not turning my back on you. I am fulfilling an order. Who had the chili cheese fries and the Coors?”