Nate Kenyon - Day One

But whatever Rick was into now, it wasn’t about empowering people, or making the world a better, fairer, more purely democratic place. This was about anarchy and destruction and pain. Rick had spent over a year in jail, and maybe that had changed him. But Hawke couldn’t imagine reconciling the man he knew with the person who was behind the events today. And besides, even if Anonymous had become a much more malignant and powerful network while Hawke had been away, it was difficult to believe they were capable of the kind of comprehensive and overwhelming attack that was going on now. The entire structure of the group was built upon freedom, anonymity, individuality. It was one thing to bring enough people together for a short period of time to take down a few servers. But how could they gather the resources and power to pull this off?

His phone chirped. NO MESSAGES. WE ARE MAKING A STATEMENT. TIRED OF WAITING FOR EVERYONE ELSE TO ACT.

Who?

US. THE COLLECTIVE. IT DOES NOT MATTER.

Hawke typed: What about my family? Are they in danger?

THE WORLD IS IN DANGER.

What are you doing now?

NOT YOUR CONCERN ANYMORE. OPERATION GLOBAL BLACKOUT CANNOT BE STOPPED. IT IS GOING TO GET WORSE. GET TO A CHECKPOINT. YOU WILL BE SAFE THERE. WE WILL NOT TOUCH THEM.

Hawke hesitated, overwhelmed, every nerve in his body singing, wondering what to say, how to handle it. You don’t want this. This isn’t you.

THINGS CHANGE. PEOPLE CHANGE.

I don’t believe you.

There was no answer for a long moment, and then, without warning, the screen shivered and blinked, and suddenly Hawke was staring at himself through the lens of his camera, his face caught between the shadows and flickering candlelight. There was something threatening about the act, as if he was being observed by a voyeur, the camera’s eye making some kind of point. There was nowhere to hide. His own device had been commandeered and turned against him.

I SEE YOU.

As Hawke watched himself on the screen, hypnotized by the image, someone came at him from the side with a bear hug, low and hard. His phone was wrenched from his grasp. He staggered right, barely kept his feet with a hand on the back of a pew.

He turned to find Weller standing next to him, breathing fast. “You’re going to get us killed,” Weller said. Damaged during the near collision with the SUV, Weller’s glasses sat askew on his nose, giving him an unbalanced, slightly crazed look. He glanced down at the phone, the screen still on, his face filled with an emotion that appeared to be half sadness, half fury, and threw it to the floor, stomping down with a foot as the glass crunched, grinding it into pieces.

Stunned for a moment, and then enraged beyond all understanding, Hawke felt the world go gray as blood thumped behind his eyes. He grappled with the other man with a ferocity he hadn’t known he possessed. Weller’s hands clawed at Hawke’s face as they went to the floor like animals fighting in a back alley. Time seemed to slip away before he began to come back to himself and realized Weller was grunting something at him as they rolled together.

“It’s… not… who you think—”

As abruptly as the fight had begun, it was over. Weller rolled away as Hawke lay on his back, chest heaving, his face wet. “It’s not who you think!” Weller shouted, his voice raw as he regained his feet and collected his glasses from beneath a nearby pew and setting them on his face, where they tilted even farther askew. One lens was cracked now, reflecting the candlelight in two fractured planes, and the lump on Weller’s forehead from hitting it against the curb was purple and swollen like an egg. He looked around at the rest of the group. Everyone had remained frozen in place, staring at him like he’d lost his mind.

Hawke touched his face, his hand coming away red. Weller had clawed him pretty hard, and the blood was mixed with his own tears. He felt something digging into his back and realized it was the remains of his shattered phone.

He got to his feet. “What do you mean, it’s not who I think?”

“It’s not your wife, your friend, your family, on the other end of that text message. Whoever you think it is, it’s not them.”

“How the hell would you know that?”

Weller turned away without answering. Everyone had stopped to watch the spectacle, even the rabbi and those at the front, who had gathered closer together with the others from the pews, forming a tight group around the prayer table. “Anyone else with a phone?” Weller said to the silent room. “Destroy them. Do it now. It doesn’t matter if they’re working or not.”

The look on Weller’s face was so intense and so radiant, Hawke took a step back like it was a communicable disease. Maybe the bump to the head had scrambled Weller up worse than anyone had thought. Or maybe this was more of the paranoia he’d shown in his office earlier.

A glance passed between Weller and Young, and she pulled her own phone from her pocket, placed it on the floor and stamped down, cracking the glass, grinding it under her heel.

Vasco, who had come halfway down the aisle, took his own phone out. “We can deactivate the GPS,” he said. “We might still be able to use them—”

“Do it,” Weller said, his voice holding an edge. “I can’t tell you how dangerous this is. Do it now.”

The two men watched each other for a long moment; then Vasco shrugged and glanced away. He tossed the phone on the floor, crushing it with his foot, making a show out of the process, taking his time.

“You got it, boss,” he said. “Anything you say. It’s dead anyway.”

“There are chips inside,” Weller said to the rabbi’s group. “Your phones can be operated remotely. They can be used to track your location.”

The room was electric. Hawke felt something happening here, words unspoken and hanging like ghosts, things hidden just out of sight. Weller knew something important, and he held people’s attention like a politician at a rally.

“We don’t have phones,” the rabbi called out, after a moment. “None of us.”

Somewhere outside, a faint rumble shook the foundation of the building, like a train passing at a distance. Hawke felt it through his feet.

Weller turned to Sarah Hanscomb, who was shaking her head. “What if my husband, what if he’s trying to call me?” she said, her voice rising up in a mixture of hope and panic. “He might be trying to reach me right now, if I try to turn it on again—”

“It’s nothing but a weapon, a Trojan horse to be used against you. Against us.” Weller took a step toward her, and Hanscomb shrank back, as if fearful of being struck. “They’re after us,” he said. “Don’t you get it?” He looked around at all of them again. “The singularity is here, and it’s not what we all thought it would be. It’s not a new beginning; it’s an ending.”

Hawke had written about it before, in a series of early articles he’d done for the online news blog Timeline that explored concepts rather than offering any real insight. Coined by a science-fiction writer and made popular by futurist visionary Ray Kurzweil, the “singularity” referred to the moment when machines would blend with and then transcend their makers, becoming self-aware and independent. Kurzweil argued that the moment would usher in a new utopia. Others felt it made the future unknowable, a black hole in time after which the world would be impossible to predict. But all of them agreed that the time would come, most likely in the twenty-first century, and that it would change humanity forever.

The singularity. It was nothing more than an idea that framed something difficult to express, Hawke thought. Weller had lost his mind.