(Notice, friends, how we said “endgame” there.)
And we can’t even discuss all this anymore, can we, friends? We can’t argue with anyone, or explain to them why they might be wrong. We’re all so stuck in our echo chambers that we hear only what we want to hear, read only what we want. The algorithms make sure of that. The only news we get is the news the algorithms give us — even if it’s wrong, or lies, or just plain fake, it doesn’t matter as long as the algorithms think it’s what we want to hear.
Capitalism, and its algorithms, have crushed democracy. And as a result democracy has resorted to its last death throes — snooping, spying, killing its enemies by remote control, police brutality. And how has the public responded? What has been our response, friends, if we are all honest? Anger, despair, confusion. Shouting at one another on the Internet. Blaming those that should be close to us. Fighting more battles on battlefields we can never own. By going on shooting sprees. By getting depressed and mentally ill. By embracing anger, hate, and fascism. But most of all, most usually, by buying more things. By feeding the algorithms with more data. By being the content between the ads.
(And hey, we’ve not even talked about the environment. But yo, the hour draws late, friends.)
“So what shall we do, Dronegod$?” you ask.
This time around, the revolution will not be televised, a wise man once said.
The revolution will not be televised. Or tweeted. Or retweeted. Or casted. Or hashtagged. Or posted. Or liked. Or shared. Or favorited. Or Instagrammed. Or networked.
If you really think it should be, you don’t understand what that wise man meant.
The revolution is against the network. It must be stopped.
We must turn it off and on again! Or maybe just turn it off. We’ll see. That’s for us all to decide, later.
Either way, it’s time for a reboot, and we’ve found the button to do it.
Oh, it’s a wonderful thing we have found, a splendid thing. So beautiful, so perfect. A thing that cannot be stopped. A thing that changes everything. A thing that makes things dissolve, that eats away at the hearts of everything that is bad.
We didn’t make it, but we wish we did. The people that made it were bad and selfish, because they made it for all the wrong reasons. They made it not to help or change things for everyone, but to make them worse, to punish others, to be better than them, to hurt people. And then, when they realized how wonderful and perfect and beautiful the thing they’d made was, they got selfish and hid it away from everyone. Selfish and scared.
But we found it. We found it for you, our friends. To make a difference at a time when we thought nobody could.
So don’t be scared. This is going to be fun, but also a tough ride. Times will be hard. But it’ll be worth it in the end. You’ll see.
Goodbye, friends, see you on the other side.
— DRONEGOD$
12. AFTER
The woman’s voice is weird. Mary can’t quite place it, her accent. It’s a bit Bristol, a bit London maybe, but there’s something else. A bit euro, she thinks—a bit like the Poles up around Newmarket speak, but not quite. Something she’s never heard before.
Her face, though, seems familiar, she can’t quite place. Blue eyes, her tight bob of blond hair. Like someone she’d met before, yet older, tireder. Worn, defeated.
They’re standing in the middle of Stokes Croft, right in the middle of the road, where she always starts. It’s quiet today, nobody around—there’s not even anyone on the gate, which is odd. She’d asked Tyrone about it when they’d left the shop with this woman, and he’d just shrugged, saying Ozone had been called away by College to check out something at one of the spice farms. He’d be back soon, he’d said. Don’t worry. I got you.
She glances back at him, sees him leaning lazily against art, the graffiti-soaked metal of an unopened shop’s shutter. New murals have gone up overnight, she sees, fleeting vistas daubed in berry paint that will flow into the drains when the inevitable rain comes. She looks at the face she’s holding, the dead eyes scrawled by her own hands in crayon and chalk on ragged paper, and imagines it flowing away, too. Maybe that’s what she should do, bring them all out here—all the dead people’s faces, bring them all out here and leave them in the street so the rain can wash them all away.
This one belongs to a girl, about her age, she guesses, maybe a few years older. She’d seen her as they were leaving the shop one night, as Tyrone had pulled the shutters down behind them and she’d waited for him to finish locking up. It happened the same way it always did, with the world around her strobing, the crowds flashing in and out of existence. For a fraction—a tiny shard—of a second the empty street was full of people, blurred by their own motion, silhouetted against the flash of daylight where there’d been dusk before. Like always there’d been too many faces to focus on, except for one. Always one. One that caught her eye, one that was still there when the crowd flashed back in again the second and third time. One that lingered in her mind so much that she knew she’d have to draw it to make it go away.
She looks at the face in her hand. She remembers drawing it now, as soon as she’d got home that night, with the few crayons and pieces of chalk that Grids kept lying around his flat just for her to use when she needed. She’d drawn it the second she got in, sitting at the table in his lounge, fast and frantically, knowing she had to get it down. Had to get it out. Had to set it free of her mind, else it would stare at her all night, dead eyes hanging in the dark shadows of her dreams.
And now it’s here again, in her hands, plucked from the wall by the woman with the weird voice and handed to her. She was odd to Mary, this woman; something more than just her accent. Disconnected somehow. Calm, calculated. First customer of the day, she just walked right in, handed Tyrone her twenty quid, glanced around, and pulled the face from the wall. She barely spoke, and now they’re standing here. All just like that.
She looks at the face in her hand.
Mary stares at it, traces her own badly daubed lines until she has a full image of it in her mind. Focuses, blinks.
The sky above her shifts, cloudscape changing, shadows tracking across the street as the time of day morphs. That sickening displacement between the realities, the architecture becoming unstuck from itself.
Sudden anxiety rush as claustrophobia strikes. The crowds are tight around her, she can almost feel them crushing her, can almost feel the bass that rattles in her ears, vibrating the air in her lungs. It’s just like carnival day, she thinks, when the Croft is stuffed so full of people and music that it can literally pick you up and sweep you along, your feet not touching the ground in the crush. It’s happened to her once or twice, it was both terrifying and exhilarating, but now she stays away, waits by the sidelines, keeps close to the buildings. She’s seen enough crowds, both then and now.
“Can you see her?” the woman asks.
Mary looks around, having to peer through the moving bodies. Too many people. But then—
“Yes. She’s here… she’s happy. She’s dancing.” She’s not exaggerating, not laying it on thick for a punter. The girl does look happy, dancing. Laughing. Moving to the slo-mo bass hits. There’s a sense of real release. The crowd is chanting something she can’t quite make out. “She’s with friends. She—”
“What’s she wearing?” The woman sounds impatient.
“A hoodie, black. Blue jeans. A scarf.”