Red Tide

by Larry Niven

  He turned and moved to avoid three more newstapers stepping out of booths. They nodded; he nodded; they passed. As he reached for a booth door, a woman flicked in in front of him. Rush hour. He smiled at her and stepped over to the next booth, consulted the list, dialed, and was gone.

  He had not spoken to anyone that morning.

  ***

  The east end of Wilshire Boulevard was a most ordinary T-intersection between high, blocky buildings. Jerryberry looked around even as he was dialing. Nothing newsworthy? No. He was two blocks away and dialing.

  He punched the numbered buttons with a ballpoint pen when he remembered. Nonetheless, his index finger was calloused. It had been a long time since he’d used buses to get around. The city didn’t operate them anymore.

  The streets of the inner city were empty, this early. In a minute or so Jerryberry was in sight of the vacant freeway. He stepped out of the booth to watch trucks and bulldozers covering this part of the Pasadena-Harbor Freeway with topsoil. Old machines find new use—but others were covering the event. He moved on.

  The booths were all identical. He might have been in a full-vision theater, watching scenes flick around him. He was used to the way things jerked about. He flicked west on Wilshire, waiting for something to happen.

  It was a cheap, effective way to gather news. A technique Jerryberry had picked up shortly after being hired on at C.B.A. At a dollar per jump per man, C.B.A. could afford to support scores of wandering newstapers in addition to their regular investigative staff.

  Instead of a quarterly stipend, Jerryberry now earned a modest monthly salary, plus a bonus for each news item that got George Bailey’s stamp of approval. These days, the bonuses had more zeroes compared to the ones the Golden State Bulletin-Gazette had given out. Especially for major breaking stories guaranteed to generate huge traffic on C.B.A.’s livestream channels, not to mention TV viewership.

  Jerryberry Jansen knew every foot of Wilshire. At twenty-four he was old enough to remember cars and trucks and traffic lights. When the city changed, it was the streets that had changed most.

  He watched Wilshire change as he dialed.

  At the old hat-shaped Brown Derby they were converting the parking lot into a miniature golf course. About time they did something with all that wasted space. He queried Bailey, but Bailey wasn’t interested.

  The Miracle Mile was a landscaped section. Suddenly there were people: throngs of shoppers, so thick that many preferred to walk a block instead of waiting for a booth. They seemed stratified, with the older people hugging the curbs and the teens taking the middle of the street. Jerryberry had noticed it before. As a child he’d been trained to cross only in the crosswalks, with the light. Sometimes his training came back, and he found himself looking both ways before he could step out from the curb.

  He moved on, west, following the list of numbers that was his beat.

  ***

  The mall had been a walkway when displacement booths were no more than a theorem in quantum mechanics. Dips in the walk showed where streets had crossed, but the Santa Monica Mall had always been a sanctuary for pedestrians and window-shoppers. Here were several blocks of shops and restaurants and theaters, low buildings that did not block the sky.

  Displacement booths were thick here. People swarmed constantly around and in and out of them. Some travelers carried fold-up bicycles. Many wore change purses. From noon onward there was always the tension of too many people trying to use the same space for the same purpose.

  The argument started outside a department store. At the time one could see only that the police officer was being firm and the woman—middle-aged, big, and brawny—was screaming at the top of her lungs. A crowd grew, not because anyone gave a damn but because the two were blocking the walkway. People had to stream around them.

  Some of them stopped to see what was happening. Many later remembered hearing the policeman repeating, “Madam, I place you under arrest on suspicion of shoplifting. Anything you say—” in a voice that simply did not carry. If the officer had used his shockstick then, nothing more would have happened. Maybe. Then again, he might have been mobbed. Already the crowd blocked the entire mall, and too many of them were shouting—genial or sarcastic suggestions, random insults, and a thousand variations of “Get out of my way!” and “I can’t, you idiot!”—for any to be heard at all.

  At 12:55 P.M. Jerryberry Jansen flicked in and looked quickly about him while his hands were reinserting his credit card. His eyes registered the ancient shops at the end of the mall and lingered a moment on the entrance to Romanoff’s. Anyone newsworthy; sometimes they came, the big names, for the cuisine or the publicity. No? Jerryberry passed on, jumped to the crowd in front of the department store two blocks down.

  There were booths nearer, but he didn’t know the numbers offhand. Jerryberry picked up his card and stepped out of the booth. He signaled the studio but didn’t bother to report. Circumstantial details he could give later. But he turned on his camera, and the event was now … real.

  He jogged the two blocks. Whatever was happening might end without him.

  A young, bemused face turned at Jerryberry’s hail. “Excuse me, sir. Can you tell me how this started?”

  “Nope. Sorry. I just got here,” said the young man, and he strolled off—he would be edited from the digital recording in the camera’s memory.

  But other heads were turning, noticing the arrival of:

  Jerryberry—a lean fellow with an open, curious, friendly face, topped by red-blond hair, curly as cotton; a tiny wireless phone combo piece in one ear, a coin purse at his belt.

  In Jerryberry’s hands—a superlight gyrostabilized digital camera equipped with a directional condenser microphone on a small boom.

  Official newstaper, C.B.A.

  Jerryberry still relished the title.

  One pair of eyes turned toward the camera for an instant too long.

  The woman swung her purse.

  The policeman’s arm came up too late to block the purse, which bounced solidly off his head. Something heavy in that purse.

  The policeman dropped.

  Things happened very fast.

  Jerryberry talked rapidly to himself while he panned the camera. Occasional questions in his earpiece did not interrupt the flow of his report, though they guided it. The gyrostabilized camera felt like a living thing in his hands. It followed the woman with the heavy purse as she pushed her way through the crowd, shot Jerryberry a venomous look, and ran for a displacement booth. It watched someone break a jeweler’s window, snatch up a handful of random jewelry, and run. The directional mic picked up the scream of an alarm.

  The police officer was still down.

  Jerryberry went to help. It occurred to him that of those present, the policeman was most likely to know what had been going on. The voice in his earpiece told him that others were on their way, even as his eye found them leaving the booths: faces he knew on men carrying cameras like his own. He knelt beside the policeman.

  “Officer, can you tell me what happened?”

  The uniformed man looked up with hurt, bewildered eyes. He said something that the directional mic picked up, but Jerryberry’s ears lost it in the crowd noise. He heard it later on the news. “Where’s my hat?”

  Jerryberry repeated, “What happened here?” while a dozen C.B.A. men around him were interviewing the crowd, and police were pouring out of the displacement booths. The flow of uniforms looked like far more than they were. They had to use their shock-sticks to get through the crowd.

  Some of the spectators-shoppers-strollers had decided to leave. A wise decision, but impractical. The nearest booths could not be used at all. They held passengers cased in glass, each trying to get his door open against the press of the mob. Every few seconds one would give up and flick out, and another trapped passenger would be pushing at the door.

  For blocks around, there was no way to get into a displacement booth. As fast as anyone left a booth, someone el
se would flick in. Most were nondescript citizens who came to gape. A few carried big cardboard rectangles carelessly printed in fluorescent colors, often with the paint still wet. A different few, nondescript otherwise, had rocks in their pockets.

  For Jerryberry, kneeling above the felled policeman and trying to get audible sense out of him, it all seemed to explode. He looked up, and it was a riot.

  “It’s a riot,” he said, awed. The directional mic picked it up.

  Jerryberry felt his heart begin to pound, just as it had during the bank robbery many years before.

  The crowd surged, and Jerryberry was moving. He looked back, trying to see if the policeman had gained his feet. If he hadn’t, he could be hurt … but the crowd surged away. In this mob there was no conservation of matter; there were sources and sinks in it, and today all the sinks were sources. The flow had to go somewhere.

  A young woman pushed herself close to Jerryberry. Her eyes were wide; her hair was wild. A kind of rage, a kind of joy, made her face a battlefield. “Legalize direct-current stimulus!” she screamed at him. She lunged and caught the snout of Jerryberry’s camera and mic and pulled it around to face her. “Legalize wireheading!”

  Jerryberry wrenched the camera free. He turned it toward the department store’s big display window. The glass was gone. Men crawled in the display window, looting. Jerryberry held the camera high, taking pictures of them over the bobbing heads. He had the scene for a moment—and then three signs shot up in front of the camera. One said “TANSTAAFL.” and one bore a mushroom cloud and the words “POWER CORRUPTS!” and Jerryberry never read the third because the crowd surged again and he had to scramble to keep his feet. There were men and women and children being trampled here. He could be one of them.

  How had it happened? He’d seen it all, but he didn’t understand.

  He tried to keep the camera over his head. He got a big, brawny, hairy type carrying a stack of flatscreen LCD televisions under his arm: half a dozen twenty-inch sets, each almost an inch thick. The thief saw the camera facing him and the solemn face beneath, and he roared and lunged toward Jerryberry.

  Jerryberry abruptly realized that there were people here who would not want to be photographed. The big man had dropped his loot and was plowing toward Jerryberry with murder on his face. Jerryberry had to drop his camera to get away. When he looked back, the big man was smashing the digital camera and gyrostabilizer against a lamp post.

  Idiot. The scene was permanent now, broadcast back to the servers in the C.B.A. buildings in Los Angeles and in Denver.

  The riot splashed outward. Jerryberry perforce went with it. He concentrated on keeping his feet.

  -2-

  THE EXPLOSIVE GROWTH of the mall riot took enforcement agencies by surprise. Police managed to hold the perimeter and were letting people through the lines, but necessarily in small numbers.

  The screen showed people being filtered through a police blockade, one at a time. They looked tired, stunned. One had two pockets full of stolen wristwatches. He did not protest when they confiscated the watches and led him away. A blank-eyed girl maintained a death grip on a rough wooden stick glued to a cardboard rectangle. The cardboard was crumpled and torn, the Day-Glo colors smeared.

  Meanwhile all displacement booths in the area had been shut down from the outside. The enclosed area included fourteen city blocks. Viewers were warned away from the following areas, et cetera.

  Top-down scenes were taken by C.B.A. helicopter.

  Most of the streetlights were out. Those left intact cast monstrous shadows through the mall. Orange flames flickered in the windows of a furniture store. Diminutive figures, angered by spotlights in the helicopter, pointed and shouted silently into the camera viewpoint.

  Digital transcription of the news anchor’s words scrolled across the bottom of the screen: We are getting no transmissions from inside the affected area. A dozen C.B.A. newsmen and an undisclosed number of police in the area have not been heard from.

  Many of the rioters are armed. A C.B.A. helicopter was shot down early today but was able to crash-land beyond the perimeter—footage showed a close-up image of a helicopter smashed against a brick wall and two men being carried out on stretchers, in obvious haste—The source of weapons is not known. Police conjecture that they may have been looted from Kerr’s Sport Shop, which has a branch in the mall.

  The square brown face looking out of the screen was known throughout the English-speaking world: Wash Evans.

  When news was good, Wash would smile enormously.

  He was not smiling now. His expression was more earnest—shaken.

  Jerryberry Jansen looked back with no expression at all. He had thrown away his camera and seen it destroyed. He had dropped his coin purse and ear phone into a trash can. Not being a newstaper was a good idea during the mall riot.

  Now, an hour after the police had let him through, he was still wandering aimlessly. He had no goal. Almost, he had thrown away his identity.

  He stood in front of a pawn store window, watching through the cracked, wire-reinforced glass.

  How did it all start? Wash asked.

  Evans’s face vanished, and Jerryberry watched scenes taken by his own camera: a milling crowd, mostly trying to get past a disturbance—a uniformed man, and a brawny woman with a heavy purse.

  The officer was trying to arrest a suspected shoplifter, who has not been identified, when this man appeared on the scene.

  Jerryberry saw an image of himself, camera held high, caught in the view of another, different C.B.A. camera.

  Barry Jerome Jansen, a roving newstaper. It was he who reported the disturbance—

  The woman swung her purse. The policeman went down, his arms half-raised as if to hide his head.

  —and reported it as a riot, to this man—

  Jerryberry’s boss, at his desk in the C.B.A. building.

  Jerryberry twitched. Sooner or later he would have to report to Bailey. And explain where his camera had gone.

  He’d picked up some good footage, and it was being used. A string of bonuses waiting for him … unless he got docked for the cost of the camera.

  George Bailey had sent in a whole crew to cover the disturbance. He had also put the report on cable and satellite—practically live, editing it as it came. At that point anyone with a television, anywhere in the United States, could see the violence being filmed by a dozen veteran C.B.A. newstapers.

  The square dark face of Wash Evans returned.

  —and then it all blew up. The population of the mall expanded catastrophically. To understand why, we have to consider who these people were.

  Wash Evans had long, expressive fingers with pink nails. He began ticking off items on his fingers.

  First, more police, to stop what was being reported as a riot. Second, more newstapers. Third, anyone who wanted publicity.

  On the screen behind Wash Evans, signs shot out of a sea of moving heads. A girl’s face swelled enormously, so close she seemed all mouth, and shrieked, “Legalize wireheading!”

  Wash had it. Anyone with a cause. Anyone who wanted the ear of the public. There were newspeople! And cameras! And publicity!

  Behind Evans the scene jumped. That was Angela Monk coming out of a displacement booth. Angela Monk—the popular porno movie actress with her own reality show, looking very beautiful in a dress of loose-mesh net made from white braided yarn. She seemed self-possessed for the split second it took her to figure out what she’d flicked into.

  Then she tried to dodge back inside—to hell with the free coverage.

  Male hands pulled the booth door open before she could dial again; other male hands pulled her out.

  Jerryberry shuddered. How could this happen? This wasn’t Syria or Egypt. It was California!

  Wash kept speaking, his words printed on the screen in white letters.

  Then there are people who have never seen a riot in person. A lot of them came. What they think about it now is … something else aga
in.

  Taken as a whole, these “disturbance tourists” might be a small percentage of the public—how many people are adventurous enough to come watch a riot? But that little percentage, they all came at once, from all over the United States—and some other places, too. And the more there were, the bigger the crowd got, the louder it got—and the better it looked to the looters.

  Scenes shifted in Evans’s background: store windows being smashed, a subdued wail of sirens, a C.B.A. helicopter thrashing about in midair, an ape of a man carrying stolen LCDs under one arm …

  Evans looked soberly out at his audience.

  So there you have it. An unidentified shoplifting suspect, a roving newsman who reported a minor disturbance as a riot—

  “Good God!” Jerryberry Jansen exclaimed, suddenly coming completely awake. “They’re blaming me!”

  ***

  “They’re blaming me, too,” said George Bailey. He ran his hands through his glossy, shoulder-length, white hair that grew in a fringe around a dome of suntanned scalp. “You’re second in the chain. I’m tired. If only they could find the woman who hit the cop!”

  “They haven’t?”

  “Not a sign of her. Jansen, you look like hell.”

  “I should have changed suits. This one’s been through a riot.” Jerryberry’s laugh sounded forced, and was. “I’m glad you waited. It must be way past your quitting time.”

  “Oh, no. We’ve been in conference all night. We only broke up about twenty minutes ago. Damn Wash Evans anyway! Have you heard—”

  “I saw and read some of it.”

  “A couple of the directors want to fire him. Not unlike the ancient technique of using gasoline to put out a fire. There were some even wilder suggestions … have you seen a doctor?”

  “I’m not hurt. Just bruised … and tired, and hungry, come to think of it. I lost my camera.”