Her other hand unzipped her jacket.
The crowd roared, people mimicking her, hands in the air.
Under the jacket she wore a waistcoat, sewn into it were thick cylinders, wires.
Melody closed her eyes.
Melody’s thumb pressed down on the switch.
All the lights went off, everything plunged into darkness.
A single sub-bass tone enveloped the building, rattling glass and bone.
The crowd screaming, whooping in joy as one.
A flash lit the stage, blue flame lighting Melody for the briefest of moments, before she disintegrated into a fountain of crimson and cloth, blood and flesh arching high into the dark, still air.
Darkness again.
People screaming, running, pushing.
Grids fell to the ground, the air pushed from his lungs by the stampeding crowd, his skin damp and cold from shock.
Grids doesn’t really remember how he got home that night, his memories just fragments of stumbling through cold, unlit streets and confused crowds. He remembers looting and fires, the city full of granulated glass shards and black car-fire smoke.
He can’t really tell Mary what happened, because he doesn’t really know. She guesses there are few people who do. He knows his spex never worked again. He knows the TV never came back on. He knows the phones never rang. He knows the power was out for weeks, and when it did come back it was fleeting, unstable. He knows there was fighting in the street, that martial law was introduced, that for months he never heard any news from beyond south Bristol, let alone the rest of the world. He knows a lot of people were cold, hungry. He knows a lot of people died. And in among it all he was there, trying to keep it together. Trying to keep the towers and the Croft alive. For his people, his community, his ends.
He guesses that Melody triggered something, something waiting in those unopened Flight Path Estate downloads, something Anonymous or Dronegod$ or whoever had given her. He guesses it was something they hadn’t made, something they had found or stolen, something they didn’t fully understand. He guesses it wiped out decades of history in a few short days, destroying culture, money, opinions, society, the digital. People’s prized memories were lost: their photos, their music, connections with friends and lovers. He guesses governments panicked and made wrong decisions, threw dangerous switches. He guesses the global economy didn’t so much collapse as just vanish.
He can guess that Melody rigged those explosives just right, so that they ripped her apart and harmed nobody else. Mary heard people talking about Melody just a few days ago, out in the street, outside the shop on the Croft, wondering why she did it, saying she knew what was coming, that she was too much of a coward to face what was to follow, to face her punishment, to face the world she left behind.
But Mary thinks she knows now why Melody did it. She had got what she said she had wanted, the celebrity, the fame, and had stepped from one prison to another. She can only guess how hollow that left her.
11. BEFORE
It was one night when he’d been watching Scott sleep, silently moving his fingertips in front of the pinhole of his tablet’s camera, filtering light passing through their portal to play shadows across his unaware face, that he’d realized he’d fallen in love.
They’d been watching each other sleep for weeks already at that point. When Rush said it out loud it sounded creepy somehow, or just too much, but in truth it had risen organically, a natural extension of how connected they had become. They pretty much always had a video chat window open, somehow and somewhere, in the corner of the monitor when he was coding, on the tablet in the kitchen when he was preparing food, floating in his periphery while he shopped for groceries. But however much they tried, the gap between Bristol and New York—three thousand miles and five hours—meant their lives were never quite in sync. Then late one night/early one morning, Rush’s eyes too heavy to hold open, he’d said, Well, I guess I’d better call it a night, and Scott had come back with Well, I guess I’d better log off, then, and he’d replied, Well, you don’t have to, we can just keep this open, or is that weird, and he’d got Of course it’s not, nothing is weird back, and that was it, their fifteen-hour-plus connections had become more permanent.
And that was a big part of it, Rush realizes now, gazing at the pale green pixels that trace the dimly lit contours of Scott’s sleeping face, the ease of how they connect, how they fit together. There was everything else, of course, the usual stuff: the initial rush of sex and attraction, of the new and unexplored, but it was the familiarity that had made him fall in love, the lack of pretense, the way they’d made odd, sometimes almost trivial assumptions about each other that were right, natural. It was something Rush hadn’t encountered in a new relationship before, not online or IRL; things that had taken months to tease out with past lovers had been almost instant. Preferences, words, the language they used. Humor. Small, immeasurable things. Their ability to sit on ambient video calls for hours on end, the silence between them never growing awkward. For Rush it all came together in ways that made terror and insecurity fall away like never before. In ways that, despite all his insecurities, made him feel safe, strong. That made him fall in love.
He hadn’t told him, of course. Don’t be crazy.
Maybe he’ll tell him today. His gaze flicks away from the video window, finds the time pulsating dully: 13:52 GMT/08:52 EST. He could be awake any minute. Maybe he’ll tell him then.
Scott’s sleeping face, half obscured by a duvet, floats in low light in front of a wall of code. This morning’s work, a new build of Flex, finished and slowly compiling in the background. Rush checks off items from his to-do list, filling ten-by-ten-pixel squares with cartoon ticks: updates, bug fixes. Interface tweaks requested by the Croft’s users, security improvements.
That had been the big one. Since he’d built the Flex OS from scratch, it was largely immune to most of the malware that could damage mainstream systems, and it hadn’t as yet built up enough of a user base to warrant anyone targeting it directly. But the hardware it ran on, an almost limitless multitude of spex from countless manufacturers, was never going to be secure in the same way. There were vulnerabilities built into Wi-Fi chipsets, back doors hardwired into generic control systems just waiting to be exploited. It was why what he’d seen at that BLM protest in Times Square had both thrilled and terrified him—whatever had ripped through that space, shutting down everything from crossing lights to police drones, hadn’t cared what operating systems they were running, or even what they were. It seemingly just looked for anything connected to a network, and broke it.
It was an outrageous idea, too much to believe. But a few days trawling dark web message boards and code depositories when he’d got back to Bristol and he’d pieced together some clues, some snippets of code alongside the hysterical conspiracy theories and excited exclamations. The consensus seemed to be it was of military or intelligence agency origin, and regardless of where it had come from there was no doubting it was meant to be a weapon. Rush had seen countless ransomware tools come and go over the decades, viruses designed to seize and infect systems, to paralyze them until their desperate, money-hemorrhaging users coughed up the requested bitcoins to get their data and businesses back. But this was different. There wasn’t even any pretense of making money here, no attempt to inform or give warning to users. This just broke stuff. It just stopped shit working. At the very least, after it had spread itself to anything else it could find, it disconnected what it infected from the network. Then it started to shut it down. To erase and corrupt data, wipe storage. To turn devices, whatever they were, into useless bricks of silicon and plastic.