by Smith, Skye
Maya moved to one side and leaned against the doorway. She turned her head towards the police. She could turn nothing else without dropping the camera. "Leave him alone, he is a disabled war vet."
"We just want the camera."
Chuck took his prize possession, his digital SLR, from around his neck. "You don't want the camera, you just want the photos." He clicked the memory card out of the camera and handed it to the closest policeman."
"Afghanistan?" they asked.
"Iraq," he replied. The police turned and ran towards the next cameraman.
"This way," Chuck told her and grabbed her arm and half dragged her down the street in the opposite direction from the running police. She almost tripped holding her knees together until she grabbed the camcorder and pushed it up her skirt to her belly where she could hold it with both hands.
They rounded a corner and fled as fast as Chuck could limp up a deserted street. The end of it was blocked with police cars. Maya dragged him into an alley. "This is the garbage access for the next street," she said, "the coffee shop I used to work for keeps their cans in here. Come on, we can go through the shop and onto the next street."
It worked. They were beyond the police - just. They half-limped, half-scurried the five blocks to Chuck's tiny apartment.
Inside, Chuck locked them in, and then powered up his laptop. "Hand me the camcorder," he said, "we have to load the video onto the web, and quick, in case the police come here."
She pulled the camcorder from beneath her skirt and handed it to him. He went to his camera shelf and found some specialized wires and used them to connect the camcorder to the laptop, and then he was busy with the mouse for a few minutes.
"Soup time?" she asked. He just nodded. By the time she had two steaming mugs of miso soup, he was calling her to come and watch the video.
It was all there. While she was watching the full video in one computer window, he was using another window to cut out two scenes. The ski-mask man talking to the police and then smashing a newspaper stand and lighting papers on fire, and then the spraying of the two girls with pepper-spray.
She finished watching just as he finished filling out a web submittal form to upload the edited video onto a web site. He sipped some Miso soup while the upload ran. "There. The whole world can see it."
She read the caption. 'San Francisco police start riot, then pepper-spray innocents.' She sipped her miso and watched the clips. There was a counter beneath the caption. It said 2.
"So how do we get everyone to watch it?" she asked.
"It has to go viral. That counter has to get so big that it starts being cross-linked to other web sites, and starts showing up on automated viewing lists. You know, like 'best video of the day'."
"So how long will that take?" she asked.
"Weeks maybe. But meanwhile, even if the police come in here and grab all my gear, they can't grab the web copy."
"Weeks, what? There must be some way of getting it some attention."
"Well, we could ask all our friends to keep playing it over and over. Every time it is played the counter increases."
"So how big does the counter have to be before it is picked up by the automated lists?"
"Sometimes a 100,000, sometimes 250,000," Chuck said. His leg ached and he was trying to stretch it out and not show his pain to this beautiful girl. "I wonder if any of the other guys got away with their cameras?"
"May I use your phone?" she asked. He nodded. "Long distance to L.A.?" He nodded again.
She opened her change purse and pulled out a list of phone numbers. She punched one into the phone. It rang. "Ted, this is Maya.
No, I'm in Frisco. Are you at your computer, of course you are. Listen, open a browser and type in this web address." She painstakingly read out the URL letter by letter, number by number. "Okay, now read it back.
You have it.
Yes, cops spray innocents. Watch it."
While she waited she noticed that the web counter was now up to 5. "Like a half hour ago, about five blocks from where I am now.
Yeah, I know. Maybe seventeen.
Yeah, bare legs. The pig did it up their skirts on purpose." She took a sip of miso.
"So, Ted. For obvious reasons I want the whole world to watch that video. My friend says it has to go viral or something.
Yeah, that's what he said, dependant on the counter. Is there anyway to like, boost that counter?
Well, watch it again if you don't think this is important. Those guys in the ski-masks were working with the police.
Okay, good, phone me back later." She looked on the phone and reeled off the number.
"Who is Ted?" asked Chuck.
"He's a computer nerd I work with in L.A. sometimes. A bit roly-poly from his eating habits, but a good guy."
The phone rang. She picked it up immediately and said her name. "Chuck, log on to your email service. We have to send Ted the original of that clip." She wrote down the email address for him. "Okay Ted, you'll have it in a minute. Really, will you? Well, thanks a million."
She watched Chuck upload the file to the email and send it. "Ted says he was just on the phone to some nerds in his computer club. I can't even imagine what they must be like if Ted thinks they are nerds"
Chuck said, "He said more than that, I heard part of it."
She grimaced and closed her eyes to remember the words. "Ted always speaks techie, you know, blah blah blah. He says one of the guys has some way of, what did he say?' binary decimal overflow using improperly-ended sequel statements'. Or something like that. Another guy has an auto loader that can put that original we sent onto hundreds of video sites automatically."
They went back to the web video and played it again while they sipped their soup. The counter was up to 30. A few minutes later it was 42. "At this rate it will take years," she moaned.
"What was that?" Chuck cried out, pointing to the counter. It was now 1,000,042.
"Yay Ted!" cheered Maya. The counter started climbing faster. Then faster still. By the time they finished their miso it was over 1,010,000. Minutes later over 1,050,000.
Chuck started clapping his hands and yelling eeehaa. "She's going viral, watch out world, she's going viral, up yours pigs, she's going viral." He looked over at Maya. She was sitting quite still watching him. "Don't you get it? Once it goes viral, people in every city in the world will watch it. They will tell their friends, who will tell their friends, who will link to it, and on and on until tens of millions will have watched it."
"So?" she asked meekly.
"So, it's a PR nightmare for American police. So, instead of a hundred kids in the square tomorrow, there will be a thousand, or ten thousand, and not only kids. What happens when parents of seventeen-year-old girls watch that clip? Those two could easily have been their daughters."
The phone rang. Maya picked it up and said her name. "It's for you. A John."
"Yeah, John. Did they get your camera?
Too bad.
No, I got away with my camcorder.
It's already there, bud. It's already going viral."
He spelled out the web address of the video. "What about the rest of the guys?
Bugger. Do you think they will hold them overnight.?
Aw, shit. Can we get them out.? You know what happens to gays in the lockup.
Okay, meet you down there."
He put down the phone and reached up to a high shelf and pulled down a wooden box. She watched him, slightly fearful. The box was big enough for a pistol. He pulled crumpled money out of the box and turned to her. "I have to go with John and see if I can pay bail for some friends. You can wait here if you want."
"Thanks, but I should get home. My friend will be watching the TV and if I'm late she'll be worried."
By the time she got home on the bus, and got one of Karen's laptops working and pointed it to the video web site, the counter was at 1,275,479. She took it upstairs to show Karen. By the time Karen had watched the video twice, and
yelled out every swear word she knew, the counter was over 1,500,000.
She phoned Ted and thanked him. He thanked her back. "Hey, Maya. Do you think those girls will be okay?"
"I don't know. Those weren't little bear spray canisters. That was industrial strength stuff."
"You know, I have never seen a counter climb that fast. I wonder if in twenty years the historians will be calling this a 'Boston Tea Party' style pivotal event. I mean, at the rate it's growing, the Euro media is going to pick it up soon. Then everyone will want to see it for themselves. Those poor girls."
By the time Maya turned off the laptop to go to bed, the count was over two million.
* * *
She woke beside Karen. She was still snoring gently against Maya's arm. She pulled her arm away and tried to get some feeling back into it, ugh, pins and needles. She could hear Karen's mom crashing pots about downstairs in the kitchen. Mom always did that. In Mom's eyes it was a sin to sleep in past seven.
Her robe was on the floor at the end of the bed. She wrapped herself in it and crept out of the room, pulling the door to after her. She would wash up and pee downstairs so the flush wouldn't wake Karen.
On the way through the kitchen towards the back bathroom, she lifted a frying pan out of Mom's hands just before it crashed on the stove top. "No," she said sternly. "She was awake half the night with cramping. Give it a rest. If you need something to do, I would kill for coffee and toast, and please don't burn the toast."
She flipped open Karen's laptop and went to the video site. Twenty seven million plays. She grinned. Take that San Francisco police. She checked her email. She ignored the twenty new emails in her studio folder and instead clicked on the one in her general mailbox. It was from Ted.
Like most techies, he couldn't spell and couldn't punctuate. Apparently Al Jahzeera in Qatar, a Middle Eastern spin-off from the BBC, wanted to show the video but needed the permission of the author. Chuck wasn't answering emails or his phone.
She dressed in the same look as yesterday but in different colors, although with the same shawl, and called a cab. She paid it off outside Chuck's dowdy apartment building and rang his buzzer. No answer. She tried again. Nothing. She rang the manager's button.
It took some fast talking, but the manager agreed to let her peek into Chuck's apartment just long enough to see that he wasn't dying of his Iraq wounds. He was. She rushed in and with the manager's help they dragged him onto the bed. He weighed, like, nothing compared to his height.
"Do you want me to call an ambulance?" asked the manager.
"Not yet. Leave me with him for a few minutes and I'll call one if he needs it." She smiled at the manager. It always amazed her how much authority the smile of a pretty woman carried with men.
She stripped him out of his clothes, the same ones he had been wearing yesterday. When she got to his long boxers, she had to stop and take a deep breath and turn away for a second. His wounds were horrific.
She threw off her shawl and pulled her blouse off her shoulders and down to her waist and then kneeled beside the bed and prayed. She cut off the build of her aura after a few moments and then started levitating her hand across his chest. First, encourage the lungs and heart, and then find the cause. That is how she had been taught in the Himalayas.
Once his breath and pulse were regular, she had her aura explore the rest of his body. It was obvious of course, that the problem would be around his wounds beneath his belly. She used her aura to sooth and warm. Suddenly she felt a flash of brilliance and pulled her hand away immediately. What the hell was that? It scared her.
She was now afraid to use her aura on him and was thinking about calling an ambulance when he mumbled, "Well, this is embarrassing. I think you are the first woman to see the damage. Just my luck, it had to be the prettiest woman I have ever met."
She pulled his sheet up to protect his modesty. "Not even the nurses?"
"The nurses in both Iraq and Germany were all male. No, I think you are the first. What were you doing? That felt so good, and it eased the pain better than any drug I take. Do it some more, please."
"Umm, I can't. It may be dangerous. I have, like, this nurse's healing touch, but somewhere near the top of your leg it went all haywire."
"Ah, that will be my titanium joint. They had to rebuild my left leg. Please try again, please."
She started again, trying to stay away from the top of the left leg. He kept saying 'thank you,' over and over.
He was getting stronger, strong enough to talk in a normal voice. "I overdid it yesterday. I did the one thing all the doctors warned me never to do. I tried to run." He looked down at the wreckage of his body where the feminine young woman was silent and concentrating and holding her right hand up with her left as it hovered over his wounds. He felt like he had a boner, but that was impossible. There was nothing there but air.
"Are you feeling better now? Are you hungry or thirsty?"
"I feel better than I have felt in years, love. Thanks." He looked down his body again. "Funny isn't it? The army can't afford titanium armor to stop me from being injured, but they can spend a fortune on titanium bones after the fact." He looked over at the space age crutches leaning against the wall behind the door. He would have to start using them again.
"Umm, Ted is trying to reach you. He needs your authorization to feed the video to news services."
"Hand me my laptop, love. It's under my coat over on the chair." He covered himself and pulled himself up on the pillows and opened the laptop on the bed beside him. The thing played a silly jingle and whirred and then he started clicking. "Thirty million. That has to be a record. It's been what, twelve hours? Could you turn on the TV and turn it towards me, please?"
The chief of police was on the local news. "Blah blah blah, upholding the law, blah blah, dangerous element, blah blah, unfortunate accident with faulty spray canisters, blah blah."
Chuck sent the permission off to Ted, and then looked at the chief answering questions on the TV screen. "You know, the old guard really doesn’t get the Internet. He probably doesn't even know that we uploaded that video, or that thirty million people know for a fact that he is lying through his teeth."
He clicked away on his laptop. "Now what?" she asked.
"Sending the link to the video to my old company, in the field and at home. Even to the ones that hide in their basements with their gun collections. Could you pass me the phone? I'll have to phone a bunch of them to get them to read their email."
"Well, I'm sure they will be proud of you for getting the news out there," she said, wondering if there were any eggs in the refrigerator. No, best to keep him on fluids until his bruised organs healed a bit.
"Proud, schmoud. It was my duty. I didn't fight for some rinky dink outfit that swore allegiance to some mickey duck sheik. In our army we swear to protect and uphold the constitution. Our constitution was trampled yesterday."
He grabbed the phone and looked down a list of phone numbers. "Hey sweetie, I'm going to be pretty boring for a couple of hours. Could you do me a favor and walk over to the coffee shop? John will be there by now. Please tell him that I'm going to be bed-ridden for a couple of days."
* * *
* * *
MAYA'S AURA - the Refining by Skye Smith
Chapter 3 - Three years earlier in downtown Vancouver
Maya was tied up all day at the studio in 'hurry up and wait' mode. Karen was busy the whole time. The directors tried to shoot as many of the speaking parts as possible in the controlled environment of the studio, and Karen was in most of them. Maya was in front of the camera for a total of about ten minutes, and none by herself.
Karen's driver took her downtown. It was Friday night and downtown Vancouver was hopping, as it always did at the start of the weekend. People that worked downtown didn't go home so they could start the weekend partying, with others that worked downtown. Karl and Erik were waiting for her in a Thai restaurant.
"Sorry I'm late guys. There w
ere complications. What's worse is that I haven't been home yet so I will have to like, keep my coat on.
"Oh, I'm sure you won't shock the Thais if you want to take it off," said Erik, "back home all the students wear school uniforms." They had both stood while she joined them. Nice old-fashioned manners. "So, the first toast is to Maya's movie career. Are you finished this movie now?"
"No, I am on something they call retainers. I always thought that was something they put in like, teenage girls' mouths to keep their teeth straight. It's in case they have to re-shoot something, or add a new scene. The good news is that they have arranged for a work visa for me, so sometime next week I have to go to Blaine and re-enter Canada to make it official."
"You realize of course," said Karl, "that you are making a B-grade slasher movie whose plot is not as good as the A-grade slasher life you are actually living. Is that life imitating art?"
"What he means is that we are worried about you.... umm, for you," said Erik.
"I already told her about the daughter dilemma," Karl butted in. They had been waiting awhile, and not nursing their drinks, and there was no way that either could drive home.
"I though we decided that I was going to ask her." Erik looked faingly aggrieved over something.
"I still don't think this is the right place." Karl spoke slowly, with drink-powered emphasis
"Are we going to start that again? We have to ask on neutral territory."
"Ask me what?" She asked. It must be important because they hadn't even ordered food yet. They were so sweet, in their earnest, nerdy, hesitant way.
"Have our babies," Karl burst out. The tables were very close together, and the cute Thai lady next to them tittered.
"Oh very subtle, very romantic," groaned Erik, putting his hand to his forehead.
"Guys, if you want me in a threesome, just take me home. You don't have to like, promise me anything." Just how long had they been sitting there, drinking and plotting?
"We don't want you in a threesome," Karl objected, his voice slightly raised. There was another titter from close by
