But while Lana, Donna, and Moira grew bored in the bus and often petulant, Oscar was never idle. As long as he had his laptop and a net-link, the world was his oyster. He tended his finances. He memorized the dossiers of his fellow staffers on the Senate Science Committee. He traded mash email with Greta. Greta was particularly good with email. She mostly spoke about her work—work was the core of Greta’s being—but there were entire paragraphs now in which he was actually comprehending what she said.
Political news ran constantly on the bus’s back windows. Oscar made a special point of following the many ramifications of Bambakias’s hunger strike.
Developments in the scandal were rapid and profound. By the time Oscar reached the outskirts of Washington, DC, the Louisiana air base had been placed under siege.
The base’s electrical power supply had long since been cut off for lack of payment. The aircraft had no fuel. The desperate federal troops were bartering stolen equipment for food and booze. Desertion was rampant. The air base commander had released a sobbing video confession and had shot himself.
Green Huey had lost patience with the long-festering scandal. He was moving in for the kill. Attacking and seizing a federal air base with his loyal state militia would have been entirely too blatant and straightforward. Instead, the rogue Governor employed proxy guerrillas.
Huey had won the favor of nomad prole groups by providing them with safe havens. He allowed them to squat in Louisiana’s many federally declared contamination zones. These forgotten landscapes were tainted with petrochemical effluent and hormone-warping pesticides, and were hence officially unfit for human settlement. The prole hordes had different opinions on that subject.
Proles cheerfully grouped in any locale where conventional authority had grown weak. Whenever the net-based proles were not consistently harassed by the authorities, they coalesced and grew ambitious. Though easily scattered by focused crackdowns, they regrouped as swiftly as a horde of gnats. With their reaping machines and bio-breweries, they could live off the land at the very base of the food chain. They had no stake in the established order, and they cherished a canny street-level knowledge of society’s infrastructural weaknesses. They made expensive enemies.
Nomad proles didn’t flourish in densely urbanized locales like Massachusetts, where video surveillance and police search engines made them relatively easy to identify and detain. But Green Huey wasn’t from Massachusetts. He was totally indifferent to the standards of behavior there. Louisiana’s ecologically blighted areas were ideal for proles. The disaster zones were also impromptu wildlife sanctuaries, since wild animals found chemical fouling much easier to survive than the presence of human beings. After decades of wild subtropical growth, Louisiana’s toxic dumps were as impenetrable as Sherwood Forest.
Huey’s favorite proles were native Louisianans, displaced by rising seas, hurricane damage, and levee-smashing floods from the rampant Mississippi. Sinking into the depths of their tattered landscape, the Louisiana hordes had become creatures of an entirely different order from the scattered dissidents of the East Coast. These Louisianans were a powerful, ambitious, thriving countersociety, with their own clothing, their own customs, their own police, economy, and media. They could rather lord it over the nation’s less-organized dissies, hobos, and leisure unions. They were known as the Regulators.
Jungle war in the swamps of Louisiana gave Huey’s Regulator nomads a Maoist tactical advantage. Now Huey had unleashed his dogs of netwar, and persistent low-intensity hell was breaking loose around the federal air base.
As was sadly common with American political disputes, the best and most accurate news coverage was taking place in the European media. Oscar located a European satellite feed featuring a Louisiana press conference, held by a zealot calling herself “Subcommander Ooney Bebbels of the Regulator Commando.”
The guerrilla leader wore a black ski mask, mud-spattered jeans, and a dashiki. She stalked back and forth before her audience of journos, brandishing a feathered ebony swagger stick and a handheld remote control. Her propaganda conference was taking place in a large inflatable tent.
“Look at that display board,” she urged the massed cameras, the picture of sweet reason in her ski mask. “Do y’all have your own copies of that document yet? Brother Lump-Lump, beam some more government files to those nice French boys in the back! Okay! Ladies and gentlemen, this document I’m displaying is an official federal list of American Air Force bases. You can grab that budget document off the committee server for yourself, if you don’t believe me. Look at the official evidence. That air base you refer to? It don’t even exist.”
A journalist objected. “But, ma’am, we have that air base on live feed right now.”
“Then you gotta know that’s a derelict area. There’s no power, no fuel, no running water, and no food. So that’s no air base. You see any federal aircraft flying around here? The only thing flyin’ here is your press copters. And our private, harmless, sports-hobbyist ultralights. So y’all should can that disinformation about any so-called armed siege. That is total media distortion. We’re not armed. We just need shelter. We’re a whole lot of homeless folks, who need a roof over our heads for the winter. That big derelict area behind the barbed wire, that’s ideal for us. So we’re just waiting here outside the gates till we get some human rights.”
“How many nomad troops do you have on the battlefield, ma’am?”
“Not ‘troops,’ people. Nineteen thousand three hundred and twelve of us. So far. We’re real hopeful. Morale is really good. We got folks coming in from all over.”
A British journalist was recognized. “It’s been reported that you have illegal magnetic pulse devices in your guerrilla camps.”
The subcommander shook her ski-masked head impatiently. “Look, we hate pulse weapons, they strip our laptops. We strictly condemn pulse-blasting. Any pulse attacks coming from our lines will be from provocateurs.”
The British journo, nattily kitted-out in pressed khakis, looked properly skeptical. The British had larger investment holdings in the USA than any other nationality. The Anglo-American special relationship still had deep emotional resonance, especially where the return on investment was concerned. “What about those antipersonnel devices you’ve deployed?”
“Stop calling them that. They’re our perimeter controls. They’re for crowd safety. We got a very big crowd of people around here, so we have to take safety measures. What? Tanglewire? Yeah, of course! Spongey sticks, yeah, we always have spongey sticks. Foam barricades and the tear gas, sure, that’s all over-the-counter stuff, you can buy that anywhere. What? Superglue? Hell yeah, we got a couple tanker trucks of that stuff. Little kids can make superglue.”
A German correspondent took the floor. He had brought an entire media krewe with him, two bench-ranks of veteran Euro hustlers bristling with precision optical equipment. The Germans were the richest people on earth. They had the highly annoying habit of always sounding extremely adult and responsible. “Why are you destroying the roads?” the German inquired, adjusting his designer sunglasses. “Isn’t that economically counterproductive?”
“Mister, those are condemned roads. They’ve all been condemned by the State Highway Department. Tarmac pollutes the environment. So we’re cleaning up these roads as a public service. Tarmac is petroleum-based, so we can crack it for fuel. We need the fuel so our little kids don’t freeze to death. Okay?”
Oscar touched his mute and the video windows in the campaign bus fell silent. He called out, “Hey, Jimmy, how are we doing for fuel?”
“We’re still okay, man,” Jimmy said distantly.
Oscar looked at the bunks. Lana, Donna, and Moira were fast asleep. The bus seemed painfully empty now, like a half-eaten tin of sardines. His krewe was dwindling away. He’d been forced to leave most of them in Texas, and he missed them sorely. He missed looking after his people, he missed cheering them up and cheering them on. He missed loading them and pointing them at something vul
nerable.
Moira was fiercely determined to quit, and she was bitter about it. Fontenot was out of the picture for good now; he had dumped his phone and laptop in a bayou and moved into his new shack with a boat and fishing tackle. The Bambakias campaign team was the finest thing he had ever built, and now it was history, it was scattering to the winds. This realization inspired Oscar with deep, unreasoning dread.
“What do you make of all this?” he called out to Jimmy.
“Look, I’m driving,” Jimmy said reasonably. “I can’t watch the news and drive.”
Oscar made his way up the aisle to the front of the bus, where he could lower his voice. “I meant the nomads, Jimmy. I know you’ve had experience with them. I just wondered what you make of this development. Regulator guerrillas, strangling a U.S. Air Force base.”
“Everyone else is asleep, so now you have to talk to me, huh?”
“You know I always value your input. You have a unique perspective.”
Jimmy sighed. “Look, man, I don’t do ‘input.’ I just drive the bus. I’m your bus driver. Lemme drive.”
“Go ahead, drive! I just wondered if…if you thought they were a serious threat.”
“Some are serious…Sure. I mean, just because you’re a nomad, and you’re on a reputation server with a big trust-rating, and you’re eating grass and home-brewing all kinds of weird bio-stuff…Look, that doesn’t make you anything special.”
“No.”
“No, but some of ’em are pretty serious guys, because, well, you might bust some homeless loser someday who looks shabby and acts nuts, but it turns out he has heavy-duty netfriends from all over, and bad weird stuff starts happening to you out of thin air…But hell, Oscar, you don’t need me to tell you about that. You know all about power networks.”
“Yeah.”
“You do that kind of stuff yourself, that’s how you got that guy elected.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“You’re on the road all the time. You’re a nomad yourself, just like they are. You’re a suit-nomad. Most people who meet you—if they don’t know you like we do—they have you figured for a really scary guy, man. You don’t have to worry about your reputation. There might be some nomad netgods who are scarier guys than you are, but not many, believe me. Hell, you’re rich.”
“Money isn’t everything.”
“Oh, come on! Look, I’m not smart enough to talk to you, okay?” Jimmy shrugged irritably. “You should be sleeping right now. Everybody else sleeps.” Jimmy checked a readout and gripped the wheel.
Oscar silently waited him out.
“I can drive eighteen hours a day, when I have to,” Jimmy said at last. “I don’t mind it. Hell, I like it. But I get tired out just watching you, man. Just watching you operate, it wears me all out. I just can’t keep up with you. I’m not in your league. I’m just a normal guy, okay? I don’t want to take over federal science bases. I’m just a working guy from Boston, man. I drive buses.”
Jimmy checked the overhead scanner, and took a breath. “I’m gonna drive this bus back to Boston for you, and I’m gonna turn the bus in, and then I’m all done with you. Okay? I’m gonna take some time off after this. I mean, I want some real, no-kidding time off. I mean some leisure, that’s what I want. I’m gonna drink a lot of beer and go bowling, and then maybe if I’m lucky, then maybe I’ll get laid. But I’m not gonna hang out with politicians anymore.”
“You’d really leave my krewe, Jim?” Oscar said. “Just like that?”
“You hired me to drive this bus, man! Can’t you leave it at that? It’s a job! I don’t do crusades.”
“Don’t be hasty. I’m sure we could find another role for you in the organization.”
“No, man. You don’t have any role for me. Or for any guys like me. Why are there millions of nomads now? They don’t have jobs, man! You don’t care about ’em! You don’t have any use for ’em! You can’t make any use for them! They’re just not necessary to you. Not at all. Okay? So, you’re not necessary to them, either. Okay? They got real tired of waiting for you to give them a life. So now, they just make their own life by themselves, out of stuff they find lying around. You think the government cares? The government can’t even pay their own Air Force.”
“A country that was better organized would have a decent role for all its citizens.”
“Man, that’s the creepy part—they’re a lot better organized than the government is. Organization is the only thing they’ve got! They don’t have money or jobs or a place to live, but organization, they sure got plenty of that stuff. See, they’re exactly like you are, man. You and your campaign krewe, you’re a lot more organized than those dinosaur feds that are running the Collaboratory. You can take over that place anytime, right? I mean, that’s exactly what you’re going to do! You’re gonna take that place over. Whether they like it or not. You want it, so you’re just gonna take it.”
Oscar said nothing.
“That’s the part I’m gonna miss most, man. Watching you put your moves on people. Like that weird science chick you’re recruiting. Man, that move was totally brilliant. I just didn’t have the heart to leave, before I saw if you’d score with that science chick. But you nailed her, all right. You can do anything you want.” Jimmy laughed. “You’re a genius! But I’m not a genius, okay? I’m just not up for that. It’s too tiring.”
“I see.”
“So stop worrying so much, man. You wanna worry about something, worry about DC. We’re gonna be in DC by morning, and if this bus makes it out of that town in one piece, I’m gonna be a real happy guy.”
__________
Washington, DC, enjoyed a permanent haze of aerial drones. Helicopters were also extremely common, since the authorities had basically surrendered the streets. Large sections of the nation’s capital were permanently impassable. Dissidents and protesters had occupied all public areas, permanently.
Nonviolent noncooperation had reached unheard-of strategic and tactical heights in the American capital. Its functional districts were privatized and guarded by monitors and swarms of private thugs, but huge sections of the city had surrendered to the squatters. The occupying forces came in a great many ideological flavors, and while they had come to an uneasy understanding with the government per se, they violently despised one another. Dupont Circle, Adams-Morgan, and the area east of Capitol Hill boasted murder rates of almost twentieth-century proportions.
In many neighborhoods of Washington the division of streets and housing had simply dissolved. Entire city blocks had been abandoned to the protesters, who had installed their own plumbing, water systems, and power generators. Streets were permanently barricaded, swathed in camou nets and rain-streaked plastic sheeting.
The most remarkable of Washington’s autonomen were the groups known as “martians.” Frustrated by years of studied nonreaction to their crazy grievances, the martians had resolved to act as if the federal government simply didn’t exist. The martians treated the entire structure of Washington, DC, as raw material.
Their construction techniques had originally been invented by a group of overeager would-be Mars colonizers.
These long-vanished space techies, an ingenious and fanatical group, had invented a wide variety of cheap and simple techniques by which small groups of astronauts might colonize the airless and frozen deserts of the Red Planet. Humanity had never yet reached Mars, but with the final collapse of NASA the Martian colonization plans had become public domain.
These plans fell into the eager hands of fanatical street protesters. They had dug down into the squelchy subsoil of the Potomac riverbed, squeezing water from the soil, compacting it to use as bricks, building an endless series of archways, tunnels, and kivas. The radicals found that even the sorriest patch of Earth was a cornucopia, compared to the airless deserts of Mars. Anything that might work on Mars would work a hundred times better in a deserted alley or parking lot.
Now NASA’s ingenuity had borne amazing fruit, and the streets
of Washington were lavishly bumped and measled with martian settlements. Slums of compacted dirt, all glue and mazy airlocks, climbed straight up the walls of buildings, where they clung like the nests of mud-daubing wasps. There were excavation hills three stories high near Union Station, and even Georgetown was subject to repeated subterranean rumblings.
Most of these martians were Anglos. In fact, sixty percent of Washington’s populace were members of the troubled minority. Local DC government, a world-famous model of urban corruption, was dominated by militant Anglos. The ethnic bosses were busily exercising their traditional genius for fraud, hacking, and white-collar crime scams.
Oscar, though a stranger to Washington, knew better than to enter the city unprepared. He abandoned his krewe inside the bus, which retreated at once to the relative safety of Alexandria. Oscar then walked two blocks on foot, through a protesters’ permanent street market of flowers, medals, bracelets, bumper stickers, flags, cassettes, and Christmas toys.
He arrived at his destination, unmolested and in good order. He then discovered, without much surprise, that the federal office building had fallen into the hands of squatters.
Oscar wandered through the entry hall, passing metal detectors and a cyclops set of facial recognition units. The squat’s concierge was an elderly black man with close-cropped hair and a bow tie. He gave Oscar a clip-on ID bracelet.
The system was now logging Oscar’s presence and his movements, along with everything else of relevance inside the building: furniture, appliances, tools, kitchenware, clothes, shoes, pets, and of course all the squatters themselves. The locators were as small as orange pips and as rugged as tenpenny nails, so they could invisibly infest any device that anyone found of interest.
This universal tagging made the contents of the building basically theftproof. It also made communal property a rather simple proposition. It was never hard to find a tool when the locale, condition, and history of every tool was logged and displayed in real time. It was also very hard for freeloaders to anonymously steal or abuse the common goods. When it worked, this digital socialism was considerably cheaper and more convenient than private property.
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