“Look up into your periphery. Remember the date and time.”
Mary just gawps back at her. “I—”
“Listen.”
Mary does as she’s told, staring back into the crowd, as the slow, spaced-out bass hits from the sound system reverberate through the spex’s bone conductors, and Anika smiles as she sees the penny drop. Mary flicks her face back to look at her.
“This is… this is her?”
Anika just nods, turns back to the crowd, lost in some toxic fog of regret and nostalgia. She watches herself dance and wonders how she could have ever been so fucking stupid.
A shout goes up from the crowd, hands point to the air. Booing. She looks up and sees it, the small police drone—not the fixed-wing air force one that’s been circling for days, this one looks like a lump of floating infrastructure, an overly complex street sign hanging from six whirring rotors. An unlikely looking LED display transcribes the messages a cold female voice recites endlessly from the speakers that hang from the underside of its insectile body.
A STATE OF EMERGENCY HAS BEEN DECLARED RETURN TO YOUR HOMES BY REMAINING IN THIS AREA YOU ARE ENGAGING IN AN ILLEGAL GATHERING A STATE OF EMERGENCY HAS BEEN DECLARED RETURN TO YOUR HOMES THE USE OF ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATION DEVICES IS CURRENTLY FORBIDDEN A STATE OF EMERGENCY HAS BEEN DECLARED RETURN TO YOUR HOMES THE USE OF WIRELESS NETWORKING TECHNOLOGIES IS CURRENTLY FORBIDDEN…
A missile arches up from the crowd, a bottle. Anika flinches as it misses the drone, wondering where it lands in the crowd. A second one goes up, and to her surprise it makes contact—she’s seen these drones dodge thrown projectiles with unsettling, algorithmically judged ease, but this one seems sluggish, almost distracted. The bottle explodes in a cloud of glass fragments as it hits the drone’s screen, the still-scrolling messages partly masked by a spray of dead LED pixels that glitch across its surface. Another cheer from the crowd. And then, as Anika watches, the whole drone tilts sickeningly to one side, its rotors failing as one, and falls from the sky.
The crowd below just manages to make way for it as it hits the ground. Screams and more cheers. Anika knows that its failure was due more to infection than a well-aimed Red Stripe bottle, but there’s no use trying to explain that to the ghosts now crowding around its shattered carcass, dancing around it and picking at its polycarbonate bones, hoisting them above their heads in celebration. Another victory, another downed victim of the revolution.
Anika hits FAST FORWARD.
Less than twenty-four hours. The sky above her is full of bottles.
The crowd around her has gone, replaced by the exploding glass of missiles falling too short, and the occasional crumpled human form.
It’s disconcerting at first, the jarring transportation into open space. And then she realizes where they are: standing in the no-man’s-land between two warring fronts.
Ahead of her, as she looks into the Croft, is the crowd, retreated now farther up the road, leaving behind it a street full of smashed glass, crumpled bodies, abandoned loot, like a receding ocean tide depositing its bounty of plastic trash.
Although still launching missiles, most of the crowd seems to have fallen back for its own safety, apart from a few scouts that dance along its forward flank, a dozen or so that refuse to retreat, their faces hidden by spex and scarves and hoods, leading the charge of hurled bottles and taunts.
Glass still exploding around her, Anika turns to face the opposing front. And there it is, what was meant to be the final battle line of the establishment, a row of police shields, helmeted skulls cowering behind them as the unrelenting shower of glass and masonry rains down on them. Paralyzed and prone, the police line has barely emerged from under the 5102, and Anika realizes now that most of the debris falling on them isn’t coming from the crowd at all but from the roof of the building itself. Looking up, she spots the crowd up there, weaponizing the architecture as they rain fragments of it down onto the invading forces: roof tiles, pipes, microwave transmitters, the reflective shards of shattered solar panels.
She doesn’t look too hard; she doesn’t want to see herself up there, dropping pottery shrapnel from the kicked-in remains of a crumbling chimney.
The first canister lands surprisingly near her feet, the second a few meters away. She sees one of the rioters scoop it up as he dances past, and hurl it back. Mid-flight it begins to hiss, along with the one near her feet, and within seconds the world is filled with white.
She blinks through menus, brings up settings she remembers being there. Filters. Turns off smoke. The air clears instantly, just in time for her to hear the distinctive, ear-shattering crackle of gunfire.
From behind her, from the crowd.
Both lines disperse, the rioters scattering in panic, the police falling back in full retreat.
She almost forgets Mary is there.
“You okay?”
“I’m fine.” To Anika’s surprise she seems quiet, almost resigned. “I’ve been here before. This is usually where I start. This is where the dying begins.”
Anika is suddenly flooded with guilt and disgust at this child, too young to remember all this herself, being made to relive other people’s death and suffering. At being turned into a repository for the city’s posttraumatic stress. Anika feels a sudden urge to grab her, hold her tight. To yank the spex from her face.
She does neither, just looks at her, helpless. “We should stop. That’s enough.”
“No, please.”
“You found what you were looking for—”
“Please. Let’s go on. I want to finish this.” She seems distant, but committed. “I… I’ve always felt trapped in a loop here. Unable to get past this. I need to see how it really ends.”
“Are you sure? It’s not pretty—”
“I’m sure. Please.”
Anika hits FAST FORWARD.
She punches them out of the motion blur just a few minutes short. Unconsciously perhaps, but certainly intentionally. As she stares at the recording’s date and time counter hovering in her periphery she knows there’s no way it could have been a mistake.
The crowd is back, surrounding them but subdued. Apart from a little head-nodding and shuffling the party has died. At least half sit on the floor, wrapping themselves in blankets, huddled together. Here and there some tend to the injured and fallen. Others stand, grouped together in suspicious circles, whispering to one another and glancing around. Faces are stunned, tired, resigned, and sobbing eyes are bleached red by gas and tears. Anika is struck by a sudden, disturbed cognitive dissonance: all-too-familiar news footage of foreign war zones or distant refugee camps suddenly playing out on her doorstep, and all to a relentless soundtrack of grime-tinged techno. Industrial drums and distorted analog chord stabs. Refugee crisis or music festival? Terrorist attack aftermath or warehouse rave morning-after?
The sound systems are at full volume. Unrepentant and penetrating. She blinks to her filter settings again and kills their volume, and then remembers why they’ve been cranked so high—from the other side of the makeshift barricades that now fill the space under the 5102 comes the booming voice of repeating police announcements. The same warnings, the same orders to disperse and return home. No longer automated, they now sound like a human voice: fatigued, desperate. Pleading.
And for the first time, among the repeated phrases, she hears call for individuals to surrender, to come forward. She hears names. Names she knows. Rush’s. College’s. Hers.
It draws her forward, Mary following, toward the barricades built from shattered masonry and street signs and bicycles and ripped-down shop shutters. It draws her past the gunman, with his covered face and his 3D-printed Kalashnikov, as he paces anxiously, looking like he doesn’t know whether to watch the crowd or the cops, whether he’s meant to be guarding or detaining.