Revolution World (14 page)

Seth was exhausted too. He'd been working long hours lately on some software to camouflage Clio's genetech lab from DARPA's satellites. He knew she had a few questionable little side projects and he worried that she'd attract the wrong kind of attention. The wrong kind of attention could get her thrown in jail or snatched by terrorists. He'd already come up with some software variants to hide her information trail on the globenet, but he wanted to make sure that no one would accidentally see something weird if they took a closer look at her labs.

By the time they floated down the river and back to Seth's hovercar, they were both fighting to keep their eyes open. Clio had been hoping this would be the evening he finally kissed her. All this time they had spent together and he still hadn't made a move. She could tell he was interested and this tubing trip should have been a prime time for romance. Everything was going so well until he start that stupid joke about being a vampire. Was he just trying to talk to her about his medical condition? That seemed like an odd way to go about it. Was it supposed to be some sort of pick up line? Maybe it was the sort of joke you had to be a tech geek to understand. These computer guys were frustrating.

As they were loading the car, Clio stumbled over some tree roots. Seth had her in his arms before she could scrape a knee. He gulped audibly as he gazed into her deep green eyes.

Clio caught her breath and tried to tell herself calmly that her pounding pulse was just a natural response to the hormones flooding her system right now. Hormones were temporary and didn't mean anything. But then she felt the strength in his arms around her and forgot pretty much everything.

Seth just decided to go for it. The worst that could happen is that he slobber all over her and she'd be totally repulsed. Then she'd slap his face and he'd never see her again. Actually, since they both lived in the same tiny town, he'd probably just see her everywhere and it would all be tragically awkward. Unless he put in for a transfer back to Canada. Which wouldn't be too bad except it was so cold there and he'd be ridiculed by everyone he knew. He really needed to stop thinking and do something now. Oh brother, he better make this good.

Beneath the wide and starry sky, Seth gently pulled Clio to him and kissed her for the very first time.

They rode home in a cloud of bliss. They were giving each other sly smiles and giggling for no reason at all. Seth wondered what would happen when they got back to her house. His mind filled with overheated fantasies until red lights and little alarms started going off on the dashboard of his hovercar.

"Oh you have to be kidding me," he practically screamed when he realized what the readings were telling him.

"What? What's going on?" Clio asked anxiously. Lights and alarms couldn't be good.

"There's a van following us. I have infrared sensors extending a mile in each direction. I thought it was weird that this van has been behind us for the last thirty minutes but now they've just tried to scan us. What a bunch of amateurs," he scoffed and tapped commands into his handheld angrily, letting the autopilot drive for a while. Of all the ways to kill the mood, getting pinged by DARPA was one of them.

The car bounced abruptly. Seth laughed, just a tad viciously, and then stopped the car. He tapped a few more commands into his handheld and then slapped his hands together briskly.

"There, that should do it," he said briskly, leaning over to give Clio a quick kiss.

"What is going on?" asked Clio again. Her hair had risen in a weird way when the car bounced abruptly, like it was suddenly full of static cling.

"Oh just going to go give DARPA the finger," Seth replied with a scowl. He turned the car around and headed toward the black van that had stopped on the road. "This may be a little loud."

"Wait. We're doing what now?" asked Clio, not liking the look of the van. Seth patted her hand in what he hoped was a comforting manner. Then he made the tinted glass of his windows clear. Soldiers started streaming out of the van. They all seemed to be cursing at one piece of equipment or another.

"Please stay where you are. The authorities have been alerted and will be here momentarily," Seth said through a loudspeaker he had activated. He turned it off.

"Pardon the theatrics," he said to Clio. "I just didn't think rolling down the windows was the wisest idea right now."

"Seth, those are DARPA soldiers. Look, there's that creepy guy who knows cryptography math. I think his name is Stuart," Clio said with a frown.

Seth nodded. "Yes, I know." Then he turned the loudspeaker back on.

"Oh my. You appear to be agents of the US military," he announced over the loudspeaker with elaborate surprise. Clio smothered a laugh. "My apologies. In response to your scan and pursuit, my vehicle automatically released an EMP pulse. I am afraid your van and any electronic equipment you were carrying is now irreparably broken." He snickered as the soldiers began cursing and throwing broken handhelds at the car.

"We should get out of here before they remember their guns will still work," Clio urged him.

"The car is bulletproof, but I do agree," Seth replied. They sped off.

"Wow, you are like one of those old spy movie heroes," Clio cried. "A bulletproof hovercar that releases EMP pulses while you shower pithy one-liners on the enemy. Oh my god, this car is expensive. You could buy a small country for what all this cost you. Those DARPA guys are going to hate you now."

"I'm pretty sure they already hate me. Last week you wouldn't believe what they did," he replied casually, but inside he was doing a little dance of joy. He had impressed her!

"We ordered pizza for game night and they tried to send in a fake pizza guy to plant spy cameras and surveillance bugs," he continued. "Like we don't have scanners set to pick up that stuff five hundred feet from the building. When we explained to the guy that we knew who he was and we'd already EMP pulsed the equipment so it wouldn't work, he was really hacked off. He took the pizza with him. We had to order another one."

She laughed. "Like you even need all the scanners. There's only one pizza place and that's Pignetti's. And they only have one delivery guy and that's Joe. Anybody else shows up at your door and you know something isn't right."

"I know," he cried throwing up his hands in mock dismay. "They couldn't have been more obvious if they pasted a huge black horsehair mustache on the guy. No wonder they want help with their spy tech. But making me pay for two pizzas isn't going to convince me to help them."

Seth watched the DARPA van fade into the distance and tried to shake the sense of foreboding. Clio snuggled up next to him. They rolled the windows down and watched the stars stream past. As music flowed past him in the cool night air, Seth's world shrank down to the cabin of the car and the girl on his arm.

CHAPTER TWELVE

T
he governor of Texas walked away from the gloriously pink monstrosity that is the Texas capitol. He strode confidently down Congress Avenue, past the glitz and joyful noise of the Sixth Street bars. As he took a short flight of stairs down to the dark little bar, he loosened his tie and undid the buttons on his tailored suit.

Inside the Elephant Room was the perennial smoky haze and gritty gloom he had come to love. In the corner near the bathrooms, the optimistic stage harbored a lone musician, pulling soulful jazz out of an unwilling saxophone. In all the years he'd been coming here, he'd never seen it clean and never heard it quiet. He thought that the grime and the jazz were probably soaked into the bedrock now. Even if they tore the place down and paved over it, jazz and grit would rise up out of the soil and flood whatever else they put here.

He nodded to the bartender and collapsed gratefully into one of the many dark corners. The bartender brought him his favorite without a word. The governor closed his eyes and tried to listen to the music, but the worries of the day pounded in his head.

He looked around. It was practically empty. Two large men in jeans, baseball caps, and dirty boots were drinking Lone Star beer at the bar.
Probably truckers or train drivers,
he thought.
Fewer of those all the time.

"In my town, we get together every Tuesday night and practice maneuvers," one of the men was saying. "It really improves your avatar's in-game skill level quite a bit. Quite a bit. Some folks are even talking about having a Sunday night rifle session, but there's church to consider." They must be talking about that game everyone played, Revolution World.

The governor wondered, as he did on occasion, if people who weren't from Texas could understand the speedy twangy accent the men spoke in. He occasionally daydreamed that the military would use people with really thick Texas accents for information security like they did in World War II with the Code Talking Navajos. But that would imply the US valued Texas in some way.
Very unlikely
, he thought with a resigned bitterness.

"Really? Well don't that beat all," the second replied. "And you just get a hologram set up and bullets with those funny tags in them and it will track how well you shoot and your game avatar will shoot better? The things they think up. Is it hard to set up?"

"Nope," said the first man after a swig of beer, "We took up a collection so it weren't too expensive neither."

"My local group started doing that thing where you put your handheld in your pocket and go practice maneuvers in a field. It really improves your group game too. And it sure is fun. We all went and drank beer afterwards and had us a big barbeque," said the second man.

"You know, if Texas ever really wanted to start another revolution, we'd be all set up with everyone playing this game," the first man laughed.

"Aw, everybody says that, but it's just silly talk. Crazy conspiracy stories are for the back porch on a Sunday night, buddy. That game would prepare us for a revolutionary war if it were fought in 1845 maybe. These days it's all different. The military's got all them newfangled techno gadgets."

"There's that. But all this practicing and drilling has to be good for something other than passing the time on the Saturday afternoons there's no football," replied the first.

"Well anyway, Texas could never secede. The US would never let us go," the second man said, dismissing the idea with a wave of his hand.

"Oh I don't know," the first man countered cheerfully, through his beer. "It's not like the War of Northern Aggression. They're on the news every night telling us all what a hellhole Texas is these days. I bet they'd be glad to get rid of us."

"Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home. It is pretty humble these days, though, isn't it? Speaking of which, I better get on the move," the second man replied, draining his beer as he stood up. "Well, see you gameside!"

The governor watched the man leave. The senator sliding into the booth opposite him obstructed his view. The senator gave him a brief nod as he pulled off his suit coat and ordered a beer. Without a word, the governor pulled a small device out of his pocket and turned it on to ensure they could talk comfortably without being monitored, overheard or recorded.

The governor once again blessed those boys at Omerta for coming up with such easy-to-use privacy scramblers. He wordlessly cursed the current government policies that made such devices necessary.

"Shouldn't you be in Washington doing your job?" he greeted the senator with a scowl. It was a good-humored scowl. They were from opposite political parties, but after thirty years working the same rooms, they had come to a truce. Their truce was primarily based upon meeting up in dive bars, drinking heavily, and arguing about the state of the world.

"Nothing to do there but have the military tell me my job and expect me to shut up and like it," the senator said with a sigh. "Might as well come home where the food is good and the beer is better." He took a hefty swig and sighed, his mood easing.

"Let me guess. In your day, America was the land of the free, the home of the brave and dinosaurs still roamed the earth?" The governor teased the senator about his age although, in truth, he was only a few years older than the governor himself. The governor did not like to see his friend looking so utterly despondent. Dark hollows around the senator's eyes made him look even older.

"In my day, young whippersnappers did not make jokes at the expense of their better educated, more handsome elders," the senator replied with mock severity.

"Not only were we the land of the free, we practically invented the idea of the right to privacy. And you can see how that's gotten all screwed up," the senator replied, warming to the topic. "I know this will shock you, but we used to have the right to due process. Everyone got a trial with a judge and jury of their peers. They had to let you call your family. That was before military tribunals and secret courts and torture prisons." He knew it didn't change anything, but it was cathartic to be able to say these things out loud once in a while.

"Did we now? And I even hear we used to be considered innocent until proven guilty. Not terrorists until proven otherwise. But you can't countenance such wild talk," countered the governor with only a little sarcasm.

"It's true. Then we had that terrorist attack at the beginning of the century. A real one. Not the fake ones the military reports every other day now," said the senator as he emptied his first beer. The bartender brought him another unasked. They'd been through this routine before.

"So, in a way, if those original terrorists were trying to disrupt the American way of life, they accomplished more than they ever dreamed possible, didn't they?" the governor said, thinking out loud. "That's got to really chafe the hide of all the good patriots out there. What we did to ourselves was worse than what our enemies could ever have dreamed up." He had meant this statement to be funny, but somehow it wasn't. He rubbed the back of his neck.

"Ah well, we'll keep working at it," the he continued bracingly. "We'll keep fighting the good fight. Things will turn around, you'll see."