John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

It was like the 1989 student-led rebellion in China, coming in alignment with Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost, and the triumph of Solidarity in Poland. Or later, the Arab Spring: Partly a function of global telecommunications, social media; partly emerging from a shared idea riding the wave through the collective mind…

Jerome had thought about it—and decided to take part. It was an intuitive decision. It felt right.

And now he let his chip transmit the program Smoke had provided, impulses that his brain would transmit to the global psychic field, adding its microscopic ripple to the Big Ripple.

Maybe it was bullshit. Maybe it was wishful thinking. Maybe Smoke was still a little crazy, hungry for meaning in a world of random violence.

Maybe it was just more psychological comfort, the way a prayer was.

Like a prayer, it was worth a shot.

They came from the surrounding countryside; they poured in from the south of France, from Spain; they’d come from North Africa, some of them, just across the Mediterranean. They came out of their hiding places in the city. They came from certain Processing Centers deserted by panicked and unpaid SA guards, where the cameras and automated guns had been neutralized by the New Resistance hackers. They came across the Channel from England. They were led by Badoit’s troops, and by the NR, but most of them were civilians, armed with whatever was handy or nothing at all.

They were Jews and Arabs and Iranians and Indians and Blacks and Orientals. They were people of color, people of varied religion. They were Judaic and Muslim and Hindu and Buddhist and Sikh and Sufi. And there were thousands of sympathetic Christians.

In all, about half a million people came, that morning.

It was a sunny morning in the Place de Hôtel de Ville. The sky was a cloudless expanse of blue like the New Resistance flag. The great, ornate building the Second Alliance had taken as its headquarters was inscrutably unresponsive to the chanting, surging crowd outside. The chant Roseland had initiated: JAMAIS PLUS! NEVER AGAIN! JAMAIS PLUS! NEVER AGAIN! JAMAIS PLUS! NEVER AGAIN! As they waved their blue flags, most of them homemade. Fists pumped the air, charged with consensus.

Inside the Hôtel de Ville, Watson sat in the janitor’s room that constituted his jail cell, watching the event on the watery image of an ancient portable television.

He could hear them, chanting and shouting, outside; could see them on the console, could hear the excited voice of the commentator who sensed he was witnessing a turning point in history. There had been a few skirmishes that morning—resistance fighters clashing with the Soldats Superieurs, and the Paris skinheads. But most of the Unity Party’s “fighting elite” had deserted, were in hiding, or running, trying to buy new identities. They’d panicked after NATO investigation teams closed down the remaining Processing Centers that morning. There were about five hundred refugee Second Alliance in the building. The hard-core five hundred inside against the five hundred thousand outside. There were autotanks lined up in front of the Hotel, of course—completely impotent. The New Resistance had taken over their guidance systems, overridden them with their remote-control hackers. This Badoit had provided the money that in turn provided the technology. Surgical strikes from the Mossad and Badoit’s forces had rendered the Jægernauts inoperable, if not entirely destroyed.

Watson changed channels, came to another report from London, showing another kind of rabble loose in the streets. Watson laughed bitterly, seeing the subhumans; the “Puppies” wandering about. Resistance provocateurs had incited a riot outside Second Alliance research facilities—looters had broken in and smashed into the cages—recoiling in horror at what they’d seen. They’d left the gates open. The subhumans, the late Dr. Cooper’s pets, shuffled and crawled and toddled out of the lab, into the street… were wandering, starkers nude, down the street.

The commentator babbling it all: the SAs genetic research experiments, gotten loose; attempt to create a race of subhuman lumpen-workers; the commentator’s impromptu editorializing called the experiment illegal and ethically deplorable…

The Puppies. Pausing now and then to defecate and lick a filthy wall, or to paw through a heap of trash. Looking repugnantly stunted, physically warped, like animated wads of much-chewed pink bubble gum badly sculpted into something almost human. Making noises like donkeys and monkeys and… hairless bipedal stunted subhumans…

God, what a sight.

And down in the corner of the screen a prompter flashed: “3D AVAILABLE.” Lovely. If you had a holoset, you could watch the twisted little wankers defecate in 3D.

Watson began to laugh. He laughed for a long time. There were tears in his eyes, and his sides were aching, when he heard the click of the lock at the door and looked up to see Giessen there, with Rolff.

So Rolff had worked out a deal with him.

Both men, Watson noticed, wore ordinary printout street clothing. Giessen had abandoned his curious antiquated costume.

Watson stopped laughing, but only for a moment. The look on Giessen’s face made him laugh again. The little prig was scared.

“Rolff, he’s hysterical,” Giessen said in German.

Rolff, gun in hand, expressionless, advanced on Watson, and pistol-whipped him twice, hard, splitting his lip and knocking the laughter from him.

“Rolff,” Watson said, tasting blood, blood mixing with the words, “you are a traitorous coward.”

Rolff stared at him impassively then took him by the elbow and pulled him to his feet. The other hand pressing the gun against Watson’s side. “Come along.”

“You think you’re going to trade me to them? To the mobs outside?” Watson asked, his voice going shrill. “Do you really think they’re going to mistake you for their kind?”

Giessen murmur, “It all depends on what is said, and who it is said to, it seems to me. Bring him into the hall, Rolff.”

“They’re not going to let you leave,” Watson said as they dragged him out. “And if they do, then what? We’re bloody war criminals now.”

“The dead can’t hold us to trial,” Giessen said. “There’s still the final phase of Total Eclipse.”

“Is there, indeed?” Watson laughed as they shoved him into the hall. “Total Eclipse is Bugger All. The RSV is done, Giessen. The only cultures of the virus we had have been taken from storage by the Resistance, before we could deploy them. There is no more of the virus, Giessen. They got it all. You understand?”

Giessen stared at him. “You idiot. Keeping it all in one place!”

“It was only for a day,” Watson said, shrugging. “But they knew which day. Their hackers were into our logistics schedules…” He shrugged once more, hugely, imitating a Frenchman, and then burst out laughing again. “The dead can’t hold us to trial? You’d be surprised at how the dead can speak, Giessen! And I’ll speak too! Let’s put all our cards on the table and see who’s cheating, eh?”

“One thing won’t go wrong,” Giessen said. “You won’t speak.” He nodded to two burly SA guards in armor and mirror helmets. They helped Rolff hold Watson down as Giessen drew a scalpel from a coat pocket, pried Watson’s mouth open with a gun barrel, and cut off his tongue.

Larousse had gone on TV, of course, to try to calm things down, pour the oil of rhetoric on the troubled waters, but not one of his transmissions got through without NR jamming. The NR pirates were everywhere now, it seemed.

The Inner Circle were waiting pensively in the Hôtel De Ville, for the helicopter that was supposed to take them out of there… until they got word that the Mossad had shot it down. And that two Israeli gunships were circling the building.