John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

“What of it?”

“You’re giving the orders now, and the men know it. This is what you’re going to do: Tell all SA units they’re to meet at the ordnance center. Tell them it’s for disbursal of new equipment. They’ll be getting new armored uniforms and new weapons which just came in on the shuttle. They’re to line up and wait. They’ll be called in one by one. Once inside, they’ll undress, and, one by one, in a separate room, hand over the old gear and…” He smiled crookedly. “And then we’ll give them something new.”

“You’ll kill them?”

“Don’t be absurd. This is going to be a bloodless coup. Or it will be if you let it be. We’ll cuff them, gag them, take them out into the maintenance corridor and into storage. One of our people will put on the armor. And one by one we’ll have them. They’ll be put in Detention Brig.”

“You’ll never take Ordnance. It’s well-guarded.”

“We already have. They trustingly let Faid and me in, and we threatened them with high explosives. They gave us their guns and we’ve let our friends in. Two hundred of them.”

“But I won’t play along, you know that. I’d rather you killed me.”

“Would you rather I killed Praeger?”

She became a thing of wax, still and pale. Then she laughed, almost explosively. “I know you. You have an overblown ego that supports an overblown sense of ethics. You’d never shoot a man down like that. Just execute him.”

Russ went to the door into Praeger’s chambers. “Faid! You’re going to hear a gunshot! Don’t do anything to Praeger even when you hear the shot, unless I tell you to!”

“I understand,” Faid called.

Russ turned to Tate. “This thing with Rimpler is as much your fault as anyone’s.” He pointed the gun at Tate’s chest. Van Kips backed away from Tate.

Much of the missing age returned to Tate’s unnaturally young features. He stood up and took a step backward. “I don’t think you’ll do that,” he said after a moment. “After all the hours I spent trying to help you.”

“And reporting on me to Praeger. Yeah, I know about that. But you’re right. I’m not a natural killer. I don’t know how to do this without getting sick.”

Russ squeezed the trigger; the gun leapt in his hand. Tate’s chest burst open, sprayed red onto the console. Tate spun and fell. Blood dripped down the computer’s monitor screen.

Sure enough, Russ was sick to his stomach. He took deep breaths and turned to Van Kips; he managed, just barely, to keep from vomiting.

“Judith!” Praeger called. Then, to Faid, “That redneck has shot her!”

“She’s all right, Praeger. I shot Tate.”

Van Kips moved to the seat and sat down. She stared at the wall, hugging herself. “You’ll be convicted of murder.”

“Maybe. We’ll see. Anyway, you can tell I’m committed now, I guess. Wipe the blood off the screen and call your people. Tell them what I told you to. And no one else will have to get hurt.”

She looked at the door to Praeger’s chambers. “I believe you’d do it.”

Russ nodded.

She took some tissues from a drawer and thoughtfully cleaned the blood off the screen.

And then she did as she was told.

On a hot afternoon, and on the island of Merino, in a small, air-conditioned bungalow with cool blue walls and wicker furniture, James Kessler, Julie Kessler, Stoner, and his wife, Janet, were sitting on a wide sofa and in wicker chairs, watching satellite television. Cindy and Alouette were on a field trip with the NR’s day-care unit, collecting seashells.

Attached to the media console was a Media Analysis microprocessor, booting up Kessler’s Media Alarm System. On the smaller monitor next to the big wall-screen, arrows, exclamation points, and capsule analyses flashed as the system interpreted Worldtalk’s propaganda.

“How many of these did you send out?” Stoner asked.

Kessler said, “Witcher sent out more than three million media-alarm software disks. Spent three or four fortunes doing it. But it’s having its impact. Congress has been inundated with letters and emails and tweets and even actual demonstrators, in person ….” Kessler said it with a quiet satisfaction. Julie reached over and squeezed his hand. Her other hand lay on her pregnancy-swollen belly.

On the big screen, the Worldtalk-produced drama Ghetto Cop paced itself through a series of archetypal confrontations. The blond, blue-eyed hero was confronted with a dull-witted spectacled higher-up who tried to mitigate the cop’s macho dynamism—in short, a Liberal—and the hero plowed right through his boss’s misgivings and went out to kick some ass; the hero was confronted with drug addicts and whores who were reluctant to give up information on the doings of a Zionist terrorist ring hiding in the ghetto, and the hero beat the truth out of his informants, plowed right through them to the next obstacle where the hero was confronted with the miscreants, who were reluctant to give up their sniping positions, and the hero kicked down their doors and…

The media-alarm system went ping, and the propaganda analysis appeared on the little monitor screen:

THE FOLLOWING IDEAS ARE PROPAGATED BY THE STORY IN THIS EPISODE OF Ghetto Cop.

• Liberals are dupes.

• Terrorists, no matter what their color, typically hide in ghettos, implying collusion with ghetto residents.

• Ghetto residents are mostly whores and junkies.

• Ghetto residents know where terrorists are hiding and what they are up to, implying that the nonterrorist residents are somehow part of the conspiracy.

• Terrorists plan to blow up a white grade school, therefore terrorists hate white children and wish them harm.

• Terrorist sees news report of new New-Soviet invasion, remarks, “Time we did our part,” implying that all terrorists are in league with the New-Soviet.

• Terrorists are Jews (or Arabs or blacks).

• Violence with no holds barred efficiently eliminates terrorism.

THE FOLLOWING BACKGROUND DETAILS FOUND IN THIS EPISODE OF Ghetto Cop COMPRISE SUBLIMINAL SUGGESTIONS APPEARING WITH A FREQUENCY THAT ADDS UP TO NINETY-SIX PERCENT PROBABILITY OF DELIBERATE INSERTION BY THE PRODUCERS.

• During scene in which terrorists make plans to blow up white middle-class grade school, there are seven objects arranged in the background of their hideout to form subliminal shape of the Star of David.

• During the scene in which the hero confronts the liberal demagogue the tides of books on his office shelf all have one word which is larger than the others; the large words taken from each title and reading left to right are:

and

The titles are too small to be picked up by the conscious mind.

• In the scene in which the hero breaks into a whorehouse, a TV screen in the back of the whorehouse’s living room, behind the main action, shows the following images, almost too small to see:

“You get the idea,” Witcher said, as he came into the room. He turned off the air-conditioning and stood in the back of the room, rocking nervously on the balls of his feet. “What you say we switch channels. Smoke should be coming out of the hearings about now. Yeah, there it is.”