“Really?”
“Of course. It’s why I’m with you.” He kisses him again, but gently this time. Tenderly. “I love it.”
Rush catches himself in the mirror again, sees himself blush. “I was talking to some guy earlier. Out on the balcony. I think I referred to you as my boyfriend.”
“Oh really? Is that what you’re calling me now?”
“I’m sorry, I—”
Scott laughs. “Jesus. What are you apologizing for? So fucking British sometimes.” He pulls him forward again. This time the kiss is harder, deeper. Lingering. When they separate their foreheads meet, resting against each other, noses nudging. For a second Rush thinks his legs will give way beneath him.
Scott unhooks his legs, playfully pushes him away. “C’mon, then. We can finish this later. Let’s get you to your protest, boyfriend.”
They move quickly and purposefully through the city, thousands strong, shutting down traffic as they flow around it. Streets full of driverless cars are paralyzed, unable to react to this many human bodies flooding their space. The few remaining yellow cabs, artifacts from a dying age, honk in support, their human drivers reaching out of wound-down windows to high-five protestors as they pass.
At Rush’s insistence both he and Scott have got their scarves and hoods up to try to mask their faces from the police drones that float constantly above their heads. Most of the rest of the marchers have done the same: if not hoodies or scarves then actual masks—3D-printed re-creations of too many other black men and women slain by the police, to keep their memories alive as much as to hide identities, as if vengeful ghosts have been summoned to march with them.
Pretty much everyone is wearing spex, too, which gives Rush some pause. When he jumps into the #blacklivesmatter hashtag channel he can see why they are: virtual protest signs appear floating above heads, demands and slogans, calls to action, tweets from supporters across the globe, and video streams from simultaneous marches in Atlanta, D.C., L.A. But Rush knows for sure that probably most of the protesters don’t have their shit as locked down as much as he does, that they don’t have the same levels of encryption as his custom OS, and that as well masked as their faces might be they’re still leaking personal data, that just by using the spex they’re betraying their identities to the drones sniffing the air above them.
It’s not just NYPD drones buzzing around them, though—the protesters have brought their own, of all models and sizes, from tiny, cheap toys to prosumer hexcopters. Illegal to fly in NYC as far as Rush knows, they play a constant cat-and-mouse game with the cops: filming and streaming the crowds, blocking the NYPD drones’ cameras, flashing arrows across LCD screens to show the marchers which way to go as the route dynamically changes to avoid blockades and police lines. Most important, they relay, from tiny Bluetooth speakers strapped to their undersides with string and sticky tape, the never-ending call-and-response chants that the marchers echo back at them.
The air is electric, and Rush can almost feel it pulsing through the ground, the same way he imagined he could feel the data flows earlier back in the penthouse—the ground and the buildings shaking again, but this time the marchers are the network nodes, pulsing through the city, reclaiming the streets and the infrastructure. It’s intoxicating. He squeezes Scott’s hand tight as they walk.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.” Scott seems hesitant.
“You sure?”
“Yeah, oh yeah. I’m fine. I mean, this is amazing. It’s just, it’s so different from marches I’ve been on before.”
“How so?”
“There’s just so…” He pauses to pick his words carefully. “So much urgency, you know? And focus. I’ve been on Pride, and I went on the Women’s March… but this… They were different, right? Like it felt like people were there to have fun. Like the signs all had jokes on them, people were partying, taking selfies. This, this feels like it’s about something. Like I said, focused. Urgent. Angry. But with good reason. You know what I mean?”
Rush smiles behind his scarf. “I do.”
“Plus, on those marches, there was never this many cops.”
They turn a corner and hit a wall of dark blue, a line of police in body-warping armor, their chests and shoulders encased in black plastic, faces hidden behind tinted visors and apocalyptic breathing masks. Most of them hold batons, some shotguns. Behind them are parked two huge armored personal carriers, towering above the crowd like futuristic mobile fortresses, more cops leaning lazily from hatches and nursing assault rifles. Rush has seen crowd-control units back home before, on the streets of Bristol and London, but this is something else, something terrifying and barely believable, like an exaggerated dystopian sci-fi movie, or the hyperstylized cover of some comic book about a fascist police state.
Immediately the protesters’ drones start to drop lower, arrows scrolling across their screens to shift the march’s route, and new cues rattling from speakers to realign the chanting.
Rush spots a couple of cops behind the main line not wearing headgear, senior officers or strategic management agents, and blinks to grab images of them, storing them away to run through image-search algorithms later. Until you can dismantle them, he tells himself, always use the oppressors’ tools against them.
Then they’re being picked up by the momentum of the crowd again, as it communally senses that it’s nearing its target, seeming to pick up speed. Suddenly they’re turning off Forty-fifth—Rush has lost all sense of direction—and marching down Seventh Avenue, and they’re here, swarming around gridlocked traffic and into Times Square. It’s the first time Rush has seen it; Scott had refused to bring him before, saying it’s not somewhere real New Yorkers go. It’s just as awful and wonderful as he’d imagined.
Hundred-foot-high superheroes fill the air, punching their cartoon nemeses into skyscrapers that explode into glass-shard blizzards, only to be replaced by hundred-foot-tall anthropomorphic M&Ms, arguing and laughing and falling over, only to be replaced by hundred-foot-tall teen pop stars, peering down at him and smiling over the rims of the latest Samsung spex, only to be replaced by koi carp the size of humpback whales, lazily orbiting a Sony logo built from iridescent bubbles, only to be replaced by hundred-foot-tall NBA legends, slam-dunking—
Rush yanks his spex away from his face and the augmented-reality adverts disappear, the towering hyperreal simulations vanishing from the warm night air, but the screens are still there, still everywhere. Some are the size of apartment blocks, some mere tennis courts, but they’re fucking everywhere, everywhere that isn’t a shop front or a Starbucks, on every wall and building. They cycle through brand after brand, from Google to Coke, Delta to Facebook, Hershey to Tesla. Brands merge into faces: politicians, the celebrity president, bleached-hair Aryan news anchors, all peering at him over scrolling text. Share prices, breaking news, war atrocities, football scores, celebrity gossip, fake news and real lies. It’s like somebody took the Internet, the hyperactive never-ending churn of the timelines, the constant scroll through Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, and made it real, physical, and nailed it to the walls of the fucking city.