Melody had arrived.
For the first few days after the Cabot party—if you can call five minutes of beats a party—the networks were convinced it was a serious attack gone wrong. Melody’s little stunt meant she got called an Islamic extremist—she’d never mentioned any religion to Grids—and a terrorist, which even with hindsight still sounds ridiculous. Eventually the truth came out. Her crew shouted about it enough on the blogs and timelines, and the police cleared it up when they charged her with illegal use of electromagnetic pulse devices, breaching the peace, aiding cybervandalism, and wasting police time, after holding her under the terrorism act for a solid week. Were they using her as a scapegoat, as many claimed? It wasn’t like they’d ever be able to get the hackers behind the whole thing—part of Anonymous, or Dronegod$, or one of the many other hydra heads it had split into by then—so holding Melody up as an example was the best they could do. But to be fair, Grids always told Mary, the authorities weren’t the only ones using her for that.
She had authenticity, significance, something her shadowy backers lacked. Even when they were wrecking e-commerce sites and CCTV networks, individual Anon members were far from the front lines, nothing more than cells in DDoS swarms. As much as they protested against the remote-controlled drone assassination policies of the United States, in many ways what they did was just as removed, just as clinical. Both sides keeping their hands clean as they blinked commands from a distance—no troops on the ground, no rioters in the streets. War and protest by proxy. For the politicians it was plausible deniability, for Anon it was making sure their parents or college didn’t find out. Safety in distance.
But you need figureheads, icons people can look up to, martyrs. Despite their claims of lacking leaders, even Anon realized they needed poster children, and not from within their own ranks. It’s hard to buy that a bunch of white middle-class teenagers, who would sell out their mates as soon as the feds knocked on the door, were going to start a global revolution. Melody became one of their symbols, and there were others, picked up by the hacker ’claves—poor, hungry kids around the world with real issues to fight for, communities to support, bricks to throw, nothing to lose. Kids with already dirty hands. It was a good partnership most of the time: kids like Melody got the weight of hacker clans behind them, the hackers got a public figure, and both got plausible deniability about the other—no physical traces, few digital ones. But Grids could never shake the feeling it was all a bit one-sided, the Anon kiddies sitting in their suburban bedrooms while Melody waited in her pretrial cell.
“It’s always how it goes down, you get me?” he told Mary. “Always some white, educated people with some idea of revolution, always some brown, poor kids taking the risks and the beatings.”
Not that she had done too badly out of the deal, in terms of fame and recognition, at least. It seemed to Grids, even in the months before the trial, that whenever he blinked on someone’s pixelized head in Bristol they were listening to Melody, their faces hidden behind their digital masks but their consumer choices open for all to see. She would have hated that hypocrisy, he said, but would have loved the attention. She was a star, finally. Even if she was dividing the city into those that saw her as an attention-grabbing menace and those that saw her as a local hero, it didn’t matter, they all knew who she was. She’d achieved that much, at least.
At the same time, Grids was trying to keep himself busy. Jobs came and went, and then just stopped coming altogether. Even in the few short months he’d been in prison so much had changed. Shops were closing down, retail jobs disappearing. He spent a couple of weeks standing in the rain in lime-green-and-white waterproof overalls outside the service station at Tesco, plugging recharging cables into driverless cars. Then one day he came into work late to find a robot, some egg-shaped thing with a single stupid fucking arm, doing it for him. It bleeped angrily and told him it was calling the cops when he kicked it with his split, leaking, limited-edition trainers.
Instead he found himself hanging around the still-standing towers, putting a new crew together, building up his rep again. Graduating from looting to dealing, from points multipliers to hard cash.
On the day of the trial, though, he was there. He couldn’t tell Mary why, apart from some deep need to see Melody again.
She didn’t look too bad when they brought her out, just tired. The hoop earrings gone, confiscated. Older slightly, but not much.
Nobody was shocked by the guilty verdict, but when the judge handed down the sentence late that afternoon there was surprise. The public gallery erupted, the air in the courtroom thick with shouting and gavel hits. Two years. Two years in a military academy—the final legacy of the last-ever Labour government—learning “the service ethos, discipline and responsibility, and most importantly learning firsthand from veterans that terrorism is no joking matter,” as the judge put it.
Amid the uproar Grids couldn’t take his eyes off Melody’s face.
A look of shock, but so quick.
Then relief.
Then a smile.
Then a look to someone in the gallery, a family or crew member, another smile, as if to say It’ll be all right.
Then relief again.
It’s easy now to pick those brief seconds apart, says Grids, to understand what was going through her mind. The relief makes sense. If she’d walked out of there a free woman then that might have been it. Game over, back to level one, please return to obscurity. But now, courtesy of an overzealous, attention-surfing judge, she had been handed fame on a plate, her status as teenage pop martyr guaranteed.
And then the lights went out.
It was daytime, so it wasn’t like the courtroom was plunged into darkness, but it still got everybody’s attention, a ripple of subdued panic running through the building, amplified when everybody realized they’d lost connection too. That always made people jumpy.
The judge dismissed the court, security trying to get people out as calmly as possible. There was a crowd on the steps, and Grids couldn’t tell who was more angry, the pro-Melody protesters trying to get through the police cordon or the media realizing there was no Net outside either, no way of tweeting, posting, or streaming.
Car horns filled the air, police trying to guide traffic by hand, as the lights outside Bristol Crown Court had shut down. Over to his right Grids could see another crowd gathered around something, jostling while more cops tried to break them up. He managed to push through the outer layers to see what they were gawping at. Shattered glass crunched under his feet like autumn leaves.
A car, a small Nissan, sat by the curb, its roof smashed open like a crushed egg, as if something had hit it hard from above. At first he thought it was a jumper, a protester taking Melody’s example to its logical conclusion, but there was no blood, no gore; the only entrails were fused from silicon, glass, plastic, and twisted, painted metal.
It was a drone, one of those insectile police ones, fallen from the sky like a swatted wasp.
Mary doesn’t really know what the networks are, what the Internet is. How can she, when it all disappeared when she was so young? She listens to College and Grids and all the others tell her endless stories about it, but it seems like ancient history to her, lies and mythology. No more real than dinosaurs or spaceships, more distant than China or Africa, less believable than DVDs.
So when Grids tells her this part of the story she can’t visualize it at all, can’t imagine what’s missing now, doesn’t recognize some of the words and places, any of the names. But still she listens, remembers every word he says.