DeLupa hurled a roll of paper down the steps with theatrical gusto, holding the end so the scroll billowed like a streamer in the post-storm wind.
“This has been circulating among the Humanists for decades now,” he cried. “It’s called the Wish List. If you want someone dead, you put their name on the list. If someone else wants them dead, they add a second vote. The rumor claimed that somewhere out there someone was watching the list and secretly granting these ‘wishes.’ The Anonymous and I, like many others, always thought this was a sick joke, but now we know it wasn’t. The police just found the master Wish List, updated hourly, kept in the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash’ computers. This … This is…” Again he touched his tracker, scowling as if the Anonymous’s instructions came over the line too fast for him to follow. “This is not a government scheming to enrich itself, this is private individuals picking victims, and not a few. Each Hive Member can only vote for each name once, so if one name has a hundred votes that means a hundred different would-be murderers have added that victim to the list. The highest ranked name has nine hundred and eighty-nine million, four hundred and eight thousand and sixty-one votes. That’s nine hundred and eighty-nine million individual Humanists who have willed to commit murder, at least ninety percent of the Humanist Membership, and we must assume … there must … be more since … since…” The red-faced Proxy ripped the tracker from his ear and hurled it on the steps. “Little wonder a nation of murderers would elect a willing murderer to lead them! Even now they’re trying to stop me from saying what must be said”—he gestured at his tracker on the ground—“but I won’t let them! I’m not directing this appeal to the Humanists, I’m talking to everyone else. Arrest Ganymede, yes, but don’t make me President! You trust the Anonymous, I trust the Anonymous. If I became President, the Anonymous through me would lead the Humanists wisely until the next election, but the system wouldn’t change! A system that reliably picks murderers, because the Hive members are murderers themselves! The Hive is the problem, this Hive which breeds competition, and glory-seeking, and backstabbing, and idol worship, and will keep producing murderers as long as it exists!”
The crowd on the steps below DeLupa began to churn, and murmur terms of fear.
“I’m not speaking as Vice President anymore!” The Proxy’s cheeks puffed like an arriving wind. “I’m repeating the Anonymous’s plea: Dissolve the Humanists! Dissolve the Hive! Make all current Humanists into Graylaw Hiveless, at least until they join a new Hive which will give them something better to believe in. They won’t keep thinking like murderers without the poisonous Humanist atmosphere to twist them. They need to be split up, offered something better, new ideals, new guidelines. Let them—let us—become Cousins and Masons, and learn from their good models. Dissolve the Humanists! That’s the only real way to make the murders stop!”
“Stop this, DeLupa.” The bronze Senate doors behind him opened, revealing a wall of Senatorial guards, so polished, so ready, and so adrenalized by the day’s danger that one might almost call them soldiers. Ektor Carlyle Papadelias stood at their head. “You don’t have the authority to—”
“No one does!” the Proxy shrieked up at the Commissioner General. “Only the crawling, tiresome Senate has the authority to expel a Hive, but it has to be done fast! Now! And if the Anonymous is the only person in the world who dares to try, then—”
“You know the Anonymous has nothing to do with this.” Papa scowled. “This isn’t their idea, it’s yours.”
“What are you—”
Papa used his own tracker now to play aloud to the crowd a rough voice, garbled by computer modulation to sound more inhuman than not. “Friends, do not be deceived. I am the Anonymous. DeLupa has been my Proxy in the past, but I did not write the speech they just delivered, nor do I support their call to disband the Humanists. DeLupa is exploiting my name to trick you.”
DeLupa sputtered like a rabid thing. “Don’t listen! It’s a trick!”
Papadelias sighed through his wrinkles like an old birch. “Don’t try it, DeLupa. I’m Commissioner General. Everyone knows I know who the real Anonymous is; I have to for security reasons. Just give it up.”
The Proxy stumbled as he turned toward his accuser. “Ridiculous! I’m the one who speaks the Anonymous’s words! You’re just abusing your office so you can prop up a fake Anonymous for your own ends!”
“I will stop you, DeLupa,” the digital voice warned, “at all costs. If that requires me to reveal myself, so be it.”
“You wouldn’t.” The Proxy’s eyes sought the crowd’s support. “Did you hear that? The real Anonymous would never—”
“You think I’m bluffing?” the computer warned. “I won’t protect the office of Anonymous at the expense of shattering a Hive. You know there is a protocol if I need to reveal myself. I have already called MASON.”
Papa’s face reflected the black tone which the Anonymous’s distorted words could not convey. “It’s true,” Papa confirmed, “MASON’s in place in Alexandria, at the Sanctum Sanctorum, ready to open the vault, and furious that your antics have dragged them away from the hospital where their child may still be dying. I don’t think the Anonymous is bluffing. If you push this they’ll come out here, slap you across the face, and call you a liar in front of the entire world. Back off, or it’s not the Humanists you’re going to destroy, it’s the office of Anonymous.”
One of Papa’s men held out a screen which showed the lighthouse tower of gray stone rising in the harbor of Alexandria. A gilded ziggurat crowned the tower, small but flashing angry in the overcast as sunset fired the bellies of the clouds. The guards, ba’sibs of MASON or past MASONs, had already unsealed the vault chamber, a round sanctum, no more than ten paces across, which formed the hollow heart of the gilded pyramid. In this heart’s heart, a waist-high block of glass-smooth black technology held in its impenetrable womb the Masonic Oath of Office, and the name of the one who will be next to read it. Not a few of Earth’s other Powers prefer sharing the Emperor’s security to paying for their own. Earth’s other great secrets slept in a ring of vaults nested in the round wall like a columbarium: the list of Gag-genes rested here, the Registry of Sensayers’ Beliefs, logs of Censors’ Office predictions, the wills and marriage contracts of Earth’s remaining monarchs, and in Vault Four the true names of the Seventh Anonymous and their six predecessors. Here, with Jehovah’s blood crusting his black left sleeve with brown, the Emperor waited.
“Last chance, DeLupa.”
Brody DeLupa refuses absolutely to be interviewed. I do not know why he attempted what he did, whether he was a simple traitor, or whether deep down he believed that the Anonymous would want the Humanists dissolved. Beneath that grotesque shell he might be any kind of man, an innocent appalled to find himself surrounded by murderers, or a viper of Madame’s positioned to backstab Ganymede should the Duke President turn rebel. It hurts not knowing, but you feel this all the time, do you not, reader? Frustration’s itch as you boil with questions which I and my peers, distant or dead, cannot be made to answer. For your sake I did manage, at least, to ask the Anonymous why he picked DeLupa as his Proxy in the first place. He answered that, of the ambitious young Humanists he had found flocking Buenos Aires, DeLupa had seemed the emptiest.
The Proxy stepped aside, a few steps, just enough to let himself get both Papadelias and the crowd in line of sight. “I am the voice of the Anonymous. I am the one chosen to share their wisdom with the world, not you or anybody else. Dissolve the Humanists. That is the Anonymous’s wish, not mine.”