“Yes. We can’t win this with force.”
The external speakers clicked on. A voice spoke: “Gordy, this is Tracey. Your sister Tracey, Gordy. I know we haven’t spoken since I walked away, but I want you to know that I love you. I’m safe and happy. I think about you every day. You have a niece now, we called her Eva, for Mom. The way we live here is better than I ever thought. People are nice to each other, Gordy, the way it was when we were kids. I trust my neighbors. They look out for me. I look out for them. We’re not terrorists, Gordy. We’re people default had no use for. We’ve found a use for each other. Gordy, you don’t have to do this. There are other ways to live. I love you, Gordy.” Another voice, a baby, crying. “That’s Eva, Gordy. She loves you, too. She wants to see her uncle.”
The feeds zoomed in on one of the front-liners, a man, whose shoulders shook. This had to be Gordy. The crowd had identified him through gait analysis, doxxed him, walked his social graph, found a hit in a walkaway town in Wyoming, gotten Tracey out of bed, recorded the message.
The silence stretched. The private cop beside Gordy put a tentative hand on his shoulder. Gordy shook it off violently, shoving him away.
The moment stretched. Then Gordy shucked his gauntlets with a flick of his wrists, sending them to clatter in the road. His bare fingers worked the catches of his visor, until it yawned open. His face was an indistinct moving blur, brown with camera-corrected streaks of white where his teeth and eyes were. He took his helmet off, shucked his weapons, let them fall around his feet.
The cops around him stared, body language telegraphing the open mouths behind their visors. He walked off, orthogonal to the jails and the cops’ lines, up 15 toward Ottawa, toward the dairies and dells of eastern Ontario.
He walked away.
The silence was something holy, church silence. It was a miracle, battlefield conversion.
“Akin!” the voice was amplified, from behind cop lines, loud enough to rattle the glass. “Get back into line, Akin!” It was a command voice, an asshole-tightening order-giving voice. Gordy’s shoulders stiffened. Gordy kept walking, divesting himself of more body armor, dropping the jacket into the road behind him as he walked. His head was high, but his shoulders shook like he was crying.
One of the cops in the front line raised his gun, muzzle big as a cannon, built to send focused, bowel-shredding ultrasonic at its target; the prolapsizer, they called it. The man whose hand had been flung off Gordy’s shoulder tackled the man with the gun before he could aim. They writhed on the ground until they were pulled apart by more cops, and stood, facing one another, held by the arms, chests heaving.
Gordy disappeared over a hill.
Jacob Redwater’s breath was noisy on Gretyl’s phone.
“We can’t win this with force.” She hung up as the next announcement started playing through the prisons’ outward-facing speakers.
*
In the middle of the third announcement, the cops opened fire on the speakers, more RPGs. The prisoners switched to backups, out of sight behind the roofline. When the cops’ drones went up for a look, they were harried by more walkaway drones, which chased them around the sky and even suicided on two cop drones. While the air battle raged, they got four more announcements out. They got five walkouts from seven announcements. The crowd was going fucking bananas on the boards. They doxxed the cops on the lines as fast as they could, running their graphs, finding more people to record messages.
Gretyl shook her head in amazement as the recordings came in. In the men’s prison, someone was playing D.J., queuing them up. In the women’s prison, someone else was doing the same. One of the boys in the control room did for the cops out front of their institution. She had been skeptical of the plan.
It turned on graph theory: once you hit a critical mass of walkaways, the six-degrees thing meant every single rent-a-cop on the line was no more than two handshakes—or family Christmas dinners—away from a walkaway who would shame and sweet-talk them into putting down their weapons.
Announcements eight through ten played on the parapet speakers, before the cops brought out mortars—mortars!—to attack the walls, bringing them down in piles of rubble amidst mushrooming dust clouds. TransCanada’s stocks plummeted. The contagion spread to all those other places where walkaways were holed up—universities, research outfits, all those refugee detention centers. When the market saw what it was going to take to get those facilities back to default shipshape, investors panic-sold. They always panic-sold, every time one of these fights broke out. Even the true believers in zotta superiority sold. The root of credit was credo: belief. Watching rent-a-cops bring out their big guns to wipe out speakers had an enormous impact on the market’s animal sentiments: their belief system was crashing, just as it had every other time.
More drones: with speakers, crowd-control drones that came stock with the prison, so big they needed extra avionics to course-correct them from the vibrations of their own speakers.
The drones homed in on the men and women they’d targeted, turned them into spectacles as their squad-mates stared at armored cops haloed by circling drones, too close to their bodies to shoot down safely, even with armor. What if their hydrogen cells blew? What if they were booby-trapped?
When the order went out to rotate those unlucky bastards, they trudged toward the APCs at the back of the formation, circled by buzzing drones that haunted them like outsized, big-voiced fruit flies. In one case, a drone managed to slip inside the APC with its target. The big tank-like car rocked on its suspension as cops inside chased it around, freaking like a church-load of parishioners chasing a lost bat. The video from that drone was a tilt-a-whirl confusion of fish-eye claustrophobia. Eventually, motion stopped as the drone was smashed to the APC’s deck. A moment later, the hatch of the APC opened and three more cops walked away, two women and a man. The man and one of the women argued with the other woman, maybe trying to convince her to stay, but they all left their weapons by the roadside as they struck off for Ottawa.
Things settled. The prisoners had damned few ways to make contact with the cops now, which meant that there could be no negotiation. There had been none before.
Gretyl’s phone rang.
“You have to get Natalie out of there. Now.”
Gretyl felt her guts curdle. Maybe it was a zotta trick to flush them out by making them think the big push was coming. Redwater wasn’t above that. But he sounded desperate in an un-Redwater way.
“No one is coming out until we can all come out.” She carefully avoided confirming Iceweasel’s present location. She guessed this meant Nadie wasn’t working for the old man, because otherwise she’d have let him know his precious bloodline was safe.