“… that Jehovah’s real father is the King of Spain!”
Dominic flailed, not caring if the epée pierced his shoulder so long as his rapier bit back at the blasphemer. It was not Sniper tipping Madame’s hand which spurred this rage, I think, but seeing damage done to the honor of one of the few men Dominic had been conditioned to respect. No one imagined that His Majesty Isabel Carlos II had lived a widower these many years without some company, but to have his indiscretion exposed so basely, a mistress of ill repute, a bastard Son already come of age, the King’s intimate secrets shouted across Romanova’s rooftops like some schoolyard scandal, that made the courtier within Dominic burn. Doubtless you, progressive reader, see little crime in His Majesty’s transgression. To the contrary, you admire the King’s steadfastness in refusing to marry any other woman while Jehovah’s mother lived, and admire too the care he took to see the Son he could not rear at least be raised as another monarch’s Son. So thought the crowd, the world, looking, not at the shattered corpse, but at the photo archives, videos, the shape of Jehovah’s lips, His hair not quite black, the royal resemblance, unthinkable before, now obvious. Chaos feeds that species of love we call nostalgia, nostalgia for trust in this case, for honor, for good leaders who were also good men: Thomas Carlyle, Mycroft MASON, and the many Spanish Kings and Queens who had served and protected the Hive system since its beginning. How proud would that proud ancestry have been to see a Prince of their blood, even a Bastard, deliver to the Senate the long-overdue truth about the assassinations, and so end centuries of murder. Now He would not. Across the Forum, fear’s quick breathing, which had kept the cowering crowd mute, gave way to tears for the King He would have made.
“Where’s the ambulance?” the Censor screamed, half to the guards, half to the heavens. “Where are the police?”
The ring of guards, clustered like cypress roots around the Rostra, wondered the same, trying trick after trick to awaken their dead trackers and contact the cars which should have come by now to spirit their charges to safety.
“Look at the sky!” someone cried. “The cars!”
Even in my state I saw them, hundreds, thousands, wild, round, pregnant like bombs, too chaotic in their courses for the eye to distinguish flight from falling. The lowest of the mad cars nearly grazed the Romanovan rooftops, stripping flags from flagpoles with their winds, while higher swarms sliced the clouds into grids. The sky was full, not a layer of steady traffic, not flocks of cars dispersing after a game, but full of cars, from the ground to the highest fringes where atmosphere gives way to dark.
“It’s the Saneer-Weeksbooth computers!” Papadelias arrived at last, charging on foot down from his office at the best sprint his century-old bones could muster. “Sniper must have set the program before fleeing the house. They’ve launched the whole reserve, a billion cars flying wild, blocking everything, emergency zones, Utopian airspace, everything. We don’t dare launch an ambulance, it would be hit in seconds. We tried calling a civilian car, but the network is rejecting new calls, not just here, everywhere. Cars already in flight won’t land, and new ones aren’t accepting passengers. The world’s shut down.”
Panic followed, cities not yet strangling but feeling the threat of strangulation, as when the heart has just failed and the body cramps by instinct knowing it will soon starve. That sky, streaked with heedless blurs, is now the most common nightmare image of our time. Everyone saw it, in the street, through windows, the last ignorant remnants startled from play or sleep by half reports: “The cars have stopped!” “They shot Tribune J.E.D.D. Mason on the Rostra!” “There’s chaos in Romanova!” Experts tell us it was not those first minutes’ freeze that did the real economic damage, but the panic as the whole world dropped its work, huddled in corners, jammed the network with calls to friends and bash’mates, as a population of ten billion all at once needed to find their loved ones safe. One billion had watched Tully on the Rostra—eight billion now found the channels that showed Sniper.