John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

“You were too busy bragging about your chip access level.”

“Wasn’t bragging.”

“You were too.”

“No, wasn’t.” She took his hand and kissed it. The crow, nestled in the crook of her other arm, made a crotchety caw. “Hush, Richard,” she told the crow. “We’re going to see a television man.”

Hand, the digital-TV man. Smoke had seen Witcher’s file on him. Hand’s real name was Nguyen Hinh. Rising young muckraking our-man-in-the-field for the relatively new MediaSat, an Indie that had taken advantage of the big Worldtalk shakeup to carve out a broadcasting niche. Hinh was known to his ratings share as Norman Hand.

Nguyen Hinh. US citizen. Father was Vietnamese, mother American, thirty-two years old. Got his degree at NYU in media studies, was a member of the Democratic Party with a history of voting for party moderates. Nice head of hair, vocationally color-streaked for that streetside identity cachet. Mostly round eyes, pretty blond skin, boyish, said to be gay but not remotely effeminate, at least on camera. Suits were printouts but not stenciled. High-quality designer prints, the kind you get in your clothes printer only if you’re a platinum-card subscriber. Hinh was chic but not snobbish enough to wear real cloth.

Highly ambitious. Probably not interested in the New Resistance story for partisan reasons.

Hand was posed in the shade of the forward-swept wing of the fat-bellied blue and white jet, talking intensely into the little fist-size camera standing on a thin collapsible tripod. His black technicki cameraman hunched over the viewfinder, making minute adjustments.

Behind Hand, islanders directed by a Witcher employee loaded plastic crates from a luggage tractor onto a portable conveyor belt carrying them into the plane. A swaying robot arm whirred from the plane, grasped the crates in its immense tri-fingered metal hand, and hoisted them into place. The crates swung precariously in the robot’s grip, but somehow were snugged exactly into the optimum packing configuration. Muscular backs bare and sweat-glossy, the human laborers worked in concert with the cybernetic laborer as comfortably as rice farmers with a water buffalo.

Smoke gestured for Alouette to be quiet, and the two of them waited behind the cameraman for Hand to finish his taping.

“What you see,” Hand was saying, “is a small piece of an exodus; the final preparations for an exodus from an island—an island which must remain unspecified—which has been a haven for this intriguing band of guerrillas, now on the run from, so they allege, an illegal international force of crypto-Fascists. Their destination: somewhere distant and secret; their timetable: immediate and desperate.” His voice was deep, resonant, and utterly confident.

He paused and then spoke to the gray-jumpsuited technicki. “Go to the sound bite.”

“Gah,” the technicki said. Meaning, Got it. He made an adjustment and said, “Go.”

“NR guerrillas—getting out, and fast. In a hurry like Moses’ people, but this time it’s the supposed Fascists playing Pharaoh’s Army. Where are the rebels headed? We don’t know where, but we know when. Now. In a helluva hurry.”

He paused, then nodded to the technicki, who tweaked the mouse. “Down,” he said, nodding.

Smoke knew the drill. One recording for the upperclass public-TV seg, the smallest demographic slice, known as the C viewers; then the sound bite for impatient, hungry middle America, the A viewers: the biggest slice. The last for the semiliterate, the technickis, the B viewers. Other variants would be computer-dubbed in Cantonese, Japanese, Spanish, German, Farsi, Arabic, Ebonics.

“NuRillas,” Hand was saying in Technicki. “Gedouwf, hidgoodn’gone, s’pose fash hanimerdown—dunhu buhwheh. Hup.”

Hand paused, then nodded at the technicki. “That’s it.” He turned, smiled at Smoke, widened his smile for Alouette. Behind him the loading machinery went whir, click, clack. “Mr. Smoke. Good to meet you in the flesh.” His voice off-camera was higher, daintier.

“Likewise. That was recorded? You’re not linked, I trust?”

“Right. Your people’d scotch it anyway.” He winked.

Smoke smiled. “We’d sure try. You can send it when we’re home free.”

“You ready for that interview?”

“We could do a preliminary here, but I’d like to do the bulk of the thing in our media center, so you can see what we’ve got.”

Hand seemed to consider, then touched a corner of his jaw, spoke into his implant. “You got that, anchor? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, well no, we’re not going to let them stage a—Right. No, there’s no ER.” His eyes flicked at Smoke; Smoke knew what ER meant. It wasn’t Emergency Room, it was Editing Rights. He was going to have to take whatever they dished out and hope it looked good. That was the deal. MediaSat was the only overGrid outfit interested in covering the story. Too much of a downer, too unprovable, and too rhetorical, was what the others said. The lefties from the underGrid covered them, but who cared? They had the ears of a tiny slice of the populace. The Internet stories of an ongoing New Holocaust in Europe, after all, were countered by the authorities, were dismissed by most people as hoaxes. “Okay, just get that comparison segment ready so we can—yeah.” He tapped his jaw joint again, walked toward Smoke, hand out, his smile like a cool breeze as he went to Alouette. “Lead the way, young lady!”

She shook his hand, staring at him. “Your voice changed,” she said.

“When I was sixteen,” he said, winking.

Only a few monitors and the linkup mainframe remained in the comm room of the Merino NR headquarters. Hand’s technicki had interfaced with the linkup system so they could intercut NR video as needed. But the camera wasn’t on yet. Smoke sat across from Hand, who was trying to soften the chill that had set into the room after Hand had let slip this was going to be only a fifteen-minute segment and not the hour special he’d hinted at.

“You can’t make people understand in fifteen minutes that they’ve lost a continent to Nazis when they weren’t looking,” Smoke said. “It’s too big to comprehend, too big to believe without proof. People have this blind faith in the Grid, in media—if their media hasn’t told them it’s happened, then they believe it hasn’t happened. There’s this myth that everything is ‘covered’, everything is reported on, that free media is everywhere. It’s been a myth since the last century. And everyone believes the myth. In the face of that—we need at least an hour to get even close to proving it. Lord, just to lay the groundwork.”

“You’ll have a basis for starting,” Hand said. “A springboard. It’ll prompt more media interest…”

“Bullshit,” Smoke said. “The president slithered out of impeachment. She saw the country through a war so they don’t want to hear about her connections to a bunch of right-wing extremists. Okay, they tell us, so she got a little panicky and went too far, World War Three was on, could happen to anyone. So let’s put this nasty talk of Fascists behind us and look to the sunny future and… the whole schtick. I’ve heard it two hundred times.”

“Maybe they’ve got a point?” Like a psychotherapist, putting it as a gentle question.

“More bullshit. It’s just denial, Hand. American media and American foreign policy hide from the truth because they’re tired of conflict and maybe because they’re hoping the bastards’ll take care of the Third World émigré problem for them—”

“That comes off pretty paranoid. The Second Alliance corporate people were jailed or deported or had to jump the country, Smoke. It’s hard to believe they’re much of a threat. I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt and we’ll cover it from your angle, but—”