John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

The girl looked at Spector. Just looked at him.

It felt wrong. TV interviewers, even if they intended to feed your image to the piranhas during the interview itself, invariably maintained a front of friendliness before and after.

The silence pressed on him. Silence, the politician’s enemy. Silence gave people time to think.

“Ready at your signal,” Baxter said. He looked big, hulking over hand-sized cameras on delicate aluminum tripods.

“Now, what shall we talk about?” Spector asked before the cameras were turned on. “I thought perhaps—”

“Let’s just launch into it,” she broke in.

He blinked. “No prep?”

She smiled thinly. Baxter pointed at her. She looked at the camera. Serious. “I’m Sonia Lerman, for the People’s Satellite, interviewing Senator Henry Spector, one of the key architects of the AntiViolence Laws and an advocate of the AVL television programming…”

For a while the interview was standard. She asked him how he justified the AntiViolence Laws. Looking at her solemnly, speaking in an exaggeration of his Midwestern accent (the public found it reassuring), he gave his usual spiel: Violent crime began its alarming statistical growth trend in the 1960s, continued to mount in the 1970s, leveled out in the 1980s, dropped in the 90s for a few years, and then feverishly resurged in early twenty-first century. Columbine. No respect for law. Countries that had serious deterrents had less crime. Long-term incarceration and lots of appeals wasn’t serious. And… so on.

“The AntiViolence Laws are a heck of a deterrent,” Spector said. “Violent crime is down sixty percent from five years ago. It continues to drop. In a few years the Security checkpoints and the other precautions that make modern life tedious—these may vanish entirely. Oh, yes, because of our sped-up judicial pace, a few people a year are perhaps unjustly convicted. I’ve insisted on full funding for DNA testing—in the cases where a DNA test is possible. But there will be a few unjust executions—that’s the price we pay. The majority of the people are better off, and it’s the majority we must administrate for.”

“Even accepting that people are better off,” Sonia Lerman said, “which I don’t, how does that justify the barbarity of the executioner’s lottery, the AVL TV?”

“First, it’s more deterrent. If it’s barbarity, well, that’s why it works. The humiliation and the awfulness of being executed on TV—well, if criminals see it every day, it scares them. Also, the program gets the public involved with the criminal justice system so that they identify with society and no longer feel at odds with policemen. And it acts as a healthy catharsis for the average person’s hostility, which otherwise…”

“Which otherwise might be directed at the State in a revolution?” she cut in, her neutrality gone.

“No.” He cleared his throat, controlling his irritation. “No, that’s not what I meant, as you know.”

He was even more annoyed by her interruption, and her tone, when she broke in. “The phrase ‘healthy catharsis’ puzzles me. Lottery winners are winning the right to beat or execute a convict on public television. Ever actually watch the program ‘ What It’s Like ’, Senator?”

“Well, yes, I watched it today…”

“Then you saw the way people behave. They giggle when they’re getting ready to hang the convict. Or shoot them. They’ll give out with a happy whoop. A man or a woman, gagged in stocks; the winner blows their brains out… and they cackle over it. And the more demented they are, the more the studio audience cheers them on. Now you call that healthy?”

Stung, he said, “It’s temporary! The release of tension…”

“Two of the lottery winners were arrested, tried, and executed for illegal murders, after their participation in ‘AntiViolence’ programming. It seems fairly obvious that they develop a permanent taste for, killing, reinforced by public approval…”

“Those were flukes! I hardly think…”

“You hardly think about anything except what’s convenient,” she snapped, “because if you did, you’d have to see that you, Senator, are no better than a murderer yourself.”

Her veneer of objectivity had cracked, fallen away. Her voice shook with emotion. Her hands clenched her knees, knuckles white. He began to be afraid of her.

“I really think you’ve lost all… I don’t think you’re thinking about this calmly. You’re hysterical.” He said it as coolly as he could manage. But he felt fear turning to anger.

(Feeling, in fact, he was near losing his own veneer, his cool self-righteousness, feeling he was near snapping. And wondering why. Why had all the skills he’d developed in years of facing hostile interviewers suddenly evaporated? It was this fucking AVL issue. It haunted him. Nagged him. At night it ate away at his sleep like an acid… and the damned woman went on and on!)

“Everyone who has been killed, Senator—their blood is on your hands. You…”

Some inner membrane of restraint in Spector’s consciousness flew into tatters, and anger uncoiled in him like a snapped mainspring, anger wound up by guilt. (Fuck the camera!) He stood, arms straight at his sides, trembling. Shouting. “Get out! Get out!”

He turned to Kojo, to tell him to “escort” them to the door… and saw Baxter stretching his right arm toward Kojo; in Baxter’s hand was a small gray box like a garage door opener. And Kojo had frozen, was staring into space in a kind of fugue state.

Spector thought, Assassins.

Kojo stood and turned toward Spector. Spector looked desperately around for a weapon.

Kojo came at him—

—and ran past him, at the woman. A wrist flick and he was holding a knife. She looked at him calmly, resignedly, and then she screamed as—his movements a blur—he closed with her, drove the slim silver blade through her left eye. And into her brain.

All the time Baxter continued filming, showing no surprise, no physical reaction. Spector gagged, seeing the spurt of blood from her eye socket as she crumpled. And Kojo stabbing her methodically, again and again.

Spector stumbled back, fell onto the sofa.

“Kill Spector after me, Kojo!” Baxter yelled. Baxter turned a knob on the little gray remote-control box, dropped it—and the box melted into a lump of plastic slag. Spector stared, confused.

Baxter stepped into the cameras’ viewing area, closed his eyes, was waiting, shaking, muttering a prayer that might have been Islamic—then Kojo rushed him, the small Japanese leaping at the big black man like a cat attacking a Doberman guard dog. Baxter just stood there and let Kojo slash out his throat with one impossibly swift and inhumanly precise movement.

Kill Spector after me, Kojo.

But Spector was moving, ran to the cabinet, flung it open, snatched up his .44, turned, and, borne on a wave of panic, shot Kojo in the back.

Kojo would have turned on Spector next, surely.

But in the pulsing silence that followed the gunshot, as Spector looked down at the three bodies, as he stared at the big, red oozing hole his bullet had torn in Kojo’s back… seeing Kojo’s own PressFlesh had come off, exposing the puckered white scar on the back of his head, a scar from recent brain surgery…

Looking at that, Spector thought, I’ve been set up.

And the Security guards were pounding on the door.

“Today on What It’s Like we’re talking to Bill Mitchell, from Vendorville, Pennsylvania, the first man to participate in an actual legal duel with an AntiViolence Laws convict. Bill, you wanted to execute the man ‘in a fair fight,’ is that right?”