Rush pulls his attention away from the lights and screens and tries to focus on the crowds instead, which are growing and thickening now, confused tourists and determined protesters circling around one another. Through gaps in the mass of bodies he sees police lining the square, more riot units, blocking exits. The drones still buzz above them, the whirl of their rotor blades drowned out by the amplified chants bouncing back from the crowd.
For what can only be minutes he loses Scott, his hand slipping out of Scott’s as the crowd contracts around him, and he finds himself in a state of panic, wheeling around shouting Scott’s name, and then he’s there again, grabbing him, hugging him. The euphoric energy of the crowd is intoxicating, but for some brief minutes it was gone, replaced by fear and loss, and this overpowering sense—this pure, desperate fear—had taken over, this realization that he never wants to lose him, that he never wants to be apart. It’s terrifying and reassuring at the same time, and he holds Scott close, pulls down both their scarves and kisses him, long and deep, as the crowd jostles them, the sounds of chanting and the rumble of drone engines echoing about them.
And then the lights go out.
For a nanosecond there seems to be nothing but stillness and silence.
Rush breaks off the kiss and they step away from each other, staring into the darkness.
The dead screens are the color of the night sky. Every streetlight and crossing signal is out, every shop front dark, every robotic car and bus ground to a halt. He slips his spex back on but there’s nothing—his home-brew OS struggling to connect to nonexistent networks.
Something explodes next to them, the crowd nearly knocking him off his feet as they make room for something heavy that’s fallen from the sky, a failed police drone smashed to fragments of plastic and silicone as it impacts the asphalt.
And then the silence is gone, the crowd erupting into spontaneous cheering, and Rush finds himself joining in, hands above his head, emptying every last trace molecule of air from his lungs.
He’s lost in pure rapture, ecstatic in a moment of pure defiance, unsure exactly what has happened but thrilled to have been part of the ultimate, simplest act of resistance. At that point the details were unimportant, but he knew it was deliberate, that they’d shown him—shown everyone—that there was another, almost unthinkable way. They could just shut it all down. They could turn it all off.
From across the square, from multiple directions, there’s the sound of breaking glass. Cheers and screams and shouting. Celebrations and anger. The piecing jolt of tear gas canisters being fired.
And then Scott is pulling his arm down, grabbing his hand and holding it tight, and dragging him through the crowd toward the subway entrance.
Two days later Rush stands in line at Starbucks on Fulton. He’s waiting to place his order, absentmindedly scrolling through timelines and blinking through hacker rumor forums, trying to piece together who shut Times Square down, when somebody barges in front of him and grabs his arm.
“Rush? Hey, it’s Rush, right? I got that right, yeah?”
Rush pushes his spex up onto his head, the excitable face in front of him coming into focus. “Um, yeah, it’s—”
“Brad! Brad, man! We met at the party the other night!”
“Oh yeah, sure. Of course. How you—”
“Oh, man. I’m so pleased to see you. I was hoping I was going to bump into you, man. I owe you big.” It is clear that Brad is fucking hyped about something. Hyped and loud. “You changed my life. Thank you!”
Brad is aware that the other customers in the line are backing away from them. “I—”
“The protests, man! Prescience! Black Lives Matter!”
“You—you went to the protests?”
“Ah shit, no, no. I didn’t go. Can’t do crowds. But after the party I went home. Stuck on the news, checked my feeds. Shit was crazy. And I started looking into Prescience, the company?”
“Okay…”
“Man.” Brad pauses, takes a breath, tries to calm himself but fails. “The next day when the markets opened their stock tanked. I mean it completely fucking flatlined. It was fucking amazing.”
“I’m not sure I—”
“I made a fucking killing, bro. A fucking killing.”
Rush doesn’t get it, but right now he’s still trying to process the words falling out of Brad’s mouth quickly enough, like he’s on some archaic transatlantic delay. “You made a killing off of stock flatlining?”
“Yeah, man. Soon as the market opened I was ready. Had the algorithms primed and all set to go. Within twenty seconds they’d cleaned up the market of Prescience stock. I had cornered that shit. I had them in every exchange from here to Jersey, picking them up quick and stealthy before my interest meant they could start to rally.”
“Okay…”
“And then, nine twenty-seven. BOOM.” Brad claps his hands together. It feels like everyone in the store jumps, then turns to look at them. “In comes Google.”
“Google?”
“Yeah, man, Google. The Goog, dude. See, because of you giving me that lead I’d read up. I knew Google had been eyeing a hostile for the last year. And I knew if shit went bad they’d be there to pick up the pieces. And BOOM. In they came.”
“Oh.” Rush’s brain catches up and his heart starts to sink.
“I made so much fucking money, man.”
“Right.” Rush feels sick.
“And it’s all down to you.”
“Okay.” Rush wants to actually throw up.
“The thing is, Rush, if I’m really honest?” Suddenly Brad seems serene, and Rush is legitimately unsure if that is better or worse. “It ain’t even about the money. I was about ready to quit. I was about ready to get off the street and find something else to do with my life. I was bored shitless. But then you gave me this… you gave me a lead. And I followed the lead! And it was such a fucking thrill! I am fucking born again, man!”
And then Brad hugs him. A big locker-room bro hug that squeezes the air from his lungs, and makes it very clear that, yes, Brad does work out.
“Thank you, bro, thank you. Look, I’m sorry but I gotta go. Meeting. But thank you, man. You saved my life. Thank you.”
And with that Brad is gone, as quickly as he appeared, leaving Rush alone to deflect the judging gazes of every other customer in Starbucks, and dreaming that he could just shut it all down. Turn it all off.
8. AFTER
Tyrone stares down at his tattered Nikes as they carry him along the Croft. He’s not sure the shoes will make it to winter, which worries him. Finding this pair was a chore, months of scavenging every shop from Cabot up to Whiteladies, while his bare feet became encased in an immovable cake of scabs, blood, dead skin, and concrete dust. He’d even snuck into Clifton—three times—past the magistrates and the Land Army patrols, because someone, some wasteman, had fed him some bullshit about how Clifton got all the good shit. Clifton, the fortified neighborhood up on the hill whose residents had somehow managed to hold on to enough scraps of their wealth and privilege even after the crash had come, even after the rest of Bristol had struggled and burned. He’d been fed some lie about how they had these special operatives that come down here and buy up anything of any value, secretly, as soon as it comes off the gypsy vans from the landfills. And that they’ve got secret maps for the docks at Avonmouth that show where there are still containers with stuff in them, whole containers half the size of houses full of pristine treasures from China—brand-new fresh kicks, unblemished, sealed in cardboard boxes, lovingly hand-wrapped in tissue paper. Shirts, socks, jeans—all new. Devices with the peel-off protective films still stuck to their lenses, screens, and surfaces. Unused tech, uninfected, hibernating in warm nests woven from bubble-wrapping and polystyrene beads. Brand-new stormsuits still sealed in plastic wrappers that release a heady aroma of synthetic cotton and chemical cleanliness when you tear them open. Detergent fresh. It’s not a smell Tyrone can remember, but he tries to imagine it, sometimes.