Carefully, watching the stacked cardboard boxes in the corner as if they could leap out and attack, he pulled his laptop from his pack. It was in a double Ziploc with a scattering of Drano crystals in the bottom. He held the bag up to the light; the crystals were all still well formed, and the litmus paper was reassuringly blue.
He plugged his laptop in and set it on the little fakewood circular table facing the big window. He breathed reverently and slowly. The disk zummed to life. Software booted up, offered him menus, connected to the wi-fi, faithfully went about its work.
“I’m going to pull kind of a dirty trick on you,” he whispered to his laptop, “but it’s for a good cause and it has to be done. Just the same, I know I’ll miss you, little buddy.”
Silent mighty strength of the eternal mountains.
Little town of Eagle—little settlement, really, use a colonialist word for a colonialist thing, or pocket of people, nothing you could dignify with a grand word like village.
Pointless neon. Vulgar little fakey business fronts. People who ate too much and thought too little.
The blank document was ready. He spoke softly into the microphone, let himself flow into his words, his singing glorious words against the Big System, full of love for all the beautiful good in the world and rage for the fat bastards keeping all the good and gentle people away from it.
When he finished, he read through it twice, treasuring the way it fit so neatly into the sunlight now caressing the tips of the mountains. “Command, post document, anon poet channel,” he said. The screen glowed back with posted. Through Super 8’s wi-fi, words of magic and power found their way from him to the mighty stream of Daybreak.
He pulled on heavy-duty gloves, dampened a rag with Liquid-Plumr, and wiped all over the laptop and the table around it. Then he blasted through all the laptop’s ports with a can of compressed air and wiped its surfaces again. The rag went into a plastic bread bag, which he dropped in the wastebasket. Each glove went back into its own Ziploc; he’d be needing them all day, so he put them in his “dirty” bag—an old laptop case—with his Drano, Liquid-Plumr, pliers, screwdrivers, and tubes of glue.
He wiped his computer with distilled water, then propped up the laptop to dry. He dipped the ends of the power cord into some Liquid-Plumr in a cup, rinsed them in the sink, dried them with toilet paper, and stowed the power cord in a plastic bread bag with more Drano crystals. By then the laptop was dry enough to go into its special home among the Drano crystals in the Ziploc.
With everything he was keeping closed up tight in the pack, he took it down to set it into a closed plastic trash can in the passenger seat’s foot well. He pulled out his Drano, Liquid-Plumr, duct tape, and protective gloves, set them on the passenger seat, and sealed on the can’s lid with duct tape.
Wearing the gloves, he hauled down his boxes of egg cartons. His clothes from the day before, and the contents of all the wastebaskets, went into a garbage bag, which he discreetly emptied into the open bed of an old pickup in the parking lot, adding it to the heap of construction junk, rusty tools, and old pop cans. He turned the bag inside out and left it blowing around in the parking lot.
After checkout, he plunged right into the Big System’s comfort trap, just this once: the free Continental breakfast of plaztatic corporate bagels, probably-made-from-petroleum cream cheese, grease-and-sugar doughnuts, and the inexcusably transported, chilled, and probably-crawling-with-pesticides orange juice, and plenty of corporate coffee. What the hell, it came with the room.
All around him were loser biz guys: goopy bags of lard and fascism, empty heads poking out above neckties, men like his dad and brother, eyes dead and shoulders drooping, stuffing in plaztatic petroleum pastry, engrossed in little grunty conversations over their USA Todays, about Game Seven of the World Series, about the upcoming election, about ten billion reasons to rape the mountains and scar the land.
Daybreak begins today.
Wake-up call for all the fat bastards of the world.
He got on the road half an hour late, but what the hell, it was a freedom mission, and there might as well be a little freedom in it. The old truck had a stereo thing that Elton had set up, along with a special flash drive just for this trip, one to be left somewhere and picked up by some poor stupid fuck when Jason was done. The flash held hours of awesome coustajam and ambvo, to keep Jason feeling good all day, and if it died, that would warn him that the nanospawn was beginning to eat into the truck itself.
He had another poetic flash; that little flash drive was like the canary in the coal mine. You could enjoy the music, but its real purpose was to let him know what was really going on, by when it died. “Silicon Canary”—definitely a poem title. Maybe a band name—some of the coustajam bands were pretty aware, maybe one of them should call itself that.
The mountains in the early-morning light were glorious. The truck’s heater worked well enough to keep him warm in the crisp morning, Marty Beelman’s amazing “Mount Elbert Jam”—Aaron Copland beatjected onto acoustic guitar and spirit drums—boomed from the speakers, and the sky was that deep blue that he was sure they did not have anywhere else in the world anymore. But you will, he thought. You will.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. OVER THE WESTERN PACIFIC, JUST NORTH OF THE EQUATOR, ABOUT 650 KILOMETERS SOUTH OF THE ISLAND OF KUSAIE. JUST PAST THE MIDNIGHT TERMINATOR, SO IT IS 12:40 A.M. LOCAL TIME. TUESDAY, OCTOBER 29.
They had taken the bag off Samuelson’s head and roughly scrubbed him with a wet towel, so he only stank slightly of vomit; he was in a T-shirt and a pair of underwear, tied by the ankles to his bed in the private cabin, sitting upright.
After an interminable time, the door opened. Two of the young men came in. They dragged in a man in a suit; Samuelson recognized Taylor, one of the Secret Service special agents, more by his build than by his bruised and battered face.
“This man can do you no harm,” Samuelson said. “Let me clean him up. We cannot escape, and—”
One of the men backhanded him across his face. Then they turned to Taylor; he was breathing but seemed unconscious. One of the men drew a box cutter and slit the Secret Service man’s throat, an arc of arterial blood spraying onto the walls of the compartment, staining the American flag and the pictures of past presidents.
Samuelson could do nothing but watch the man die, and at that, he’s probably lucky. Yet he had to ask. “Why? Why did you do this?”
He had not expected an answer, but in perfect, almost-accentless English, the leader of the group said, “Because we can, and because we want you to know we can.”
They left Samuelson with the corpse, propped up so that he seemed to be looking at Samuelson from the depths of sleep or stupor. The vice president thought about looking away, curling up, doing something not to see, but he would still smell the blood no matter what, he would still know the broken body was there; he preferred to know with his eyes open.
Silently, he thought to Taylor, I’m sorry you were here for this. I’ll try to find something I can do, however petty or invisible, for you and me and the country.
He remembered that Taylor’s wife was named Beth, that they had one child, a boy that Taylor thought the world of. Taylor’s first name had been Charles and he’d endured teasing from the other Secret Service special agents about being named after a shoe. He’d been a quiet type who spent his breaks reading, and had always preferred to go home late in the afternoon when he could enjoy his family.