Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2013 (28 page)

Everyone around me reaches a similar decision, all at the same time. We surge toward the tiny lane that is John Street to get away from the crowd. The lane fills within seconds, and I can't get through, but behind me Broadway begins to clear. I consider just going on, until I look ahead.

It's not terrorists I see.

The city's cops have blocked the march. They've formed a solid line across Broadway, all of them wearing helmets, armor, and gas masks, standing shoulder-to-shoulder behind transparent riot shields. They're not advancing on us. Not yet.

I turn and push my way into the crowd, as eager as anyone to slip away, and to my relief I make it onto John Street—only to discover that the cops have been here first. We're hemmed in between ten-foot-high, glowing orange barrier webs that keep us in the street, and away from the buildings. My elbow brushes one and it stings, even through my shirtsleeve. I shift away, trying to get in the middle of the crowd.

A glance at my overlay confirms my signal is still out, so I can't check what's ahead, I can't see what's behind, and I can't query the residents in the towers above. It's like a brain injury and I hate it. The only live icon in my overlay is the one that tells me I'm still recording, saving a local copy of everything I see, until my connection is restored.

I squeeze through a group of white-haired senior citizens. Up ahead there's a cop on horseback, but he's on the sidewalk, outside the barrier web. People are yelling questions at him.
What's going on? What happened to our phones?

No pushing,
he answers in an emotionless voice.
Proceed in an orderly manner...

We're all scared, so there isn't much argument. We shuffle down the packed lane like a tame zombie horde, toward what, no one knows, not until word rolls back, passed from one person to another in worried whispers:
There's a barricade in the street.

I trade looks with a guy beside me. He's wearing data glasses over a dark scowl, and a gleaming yellow War Machine over-vest. "I think it's true," I tell him. "My friend messaged me about barricades, a little while before the signal dropped."

"Yeah, I heard the same thing. Before tonight they mostly ignored us, hoping we'd go away. No way did the mayor expect a turnout like this, so they're scrambling." He made a dry snort of amusement. "If a crowd of this size showed up outside City Hall, the mayor's sponsors might think she'd lost control."

That's when I get it. "It's the cops. They're jamming us, aren't they?"

"It won't last long."

I'm happy Nick left the march when he did. I feel better, knowing he's outside the
crowd, and safe—but I'm scared too. "Why are they doing it?" I ask, hearing an edge of panic in my voice that I don't like. "Why don't they just let everyone go home?"

My companion is dead calm. "They want to know who we are. So they're probably doing facial scans. They'll image everybody, levy fines, and do whatever they can to encourage us not to come back next week."

"So they're just harassing us? I mean, a drone already imaged everyone in the crowd."

He gives me a funny look. "You saw a drone?"

"Yeah. Gliding between the towers, right before the signal dropped."

"You couldn't see the markings on it?"

"No. Why?"

"Good to know if it was police or a private security outfit."

"I could probably pull it out of the image with some processing."

"You got a capture?" He looks impressed and, reaching into his pants pocket, he pulls out a business card. "Send me a copy of what you've got, okay? Strip any identifiers if it makes you feel better—we just like to know who's watching."

I glance at the card. Elliot Weber, a journalist for the War Machine website. I'm in elite company. I hold out my hand. "My name's Shelley."

We lock fingers. "Your first time to a street party, Shelley?"

"Yeah." I laugh. "I don't know why I thought this was a good idea."

The lane marked off for us by the barrier webbing is getting narrower. Our pace slows as we crowd up against each other. Outside the stinging web, mounted police are on patrol. We watch them. I hear grumbling about how late it is, and how we all just want to go home, and who the hell do the cops work for, anyway? But conversation falls off when we finally approach the barricade.

There's nothing frightening about the way it looks. It's just a solid, white plastic fence, but it stands eight feet high, with bright lights mounted along the top, that glare into our faces. I can see three narrow openings, each one of them guarded by a cop, but against the blazing lights I can't see what's on the other side. People disappear through them, one by one.

I look over at Elliot. He's checking his phone, but the signal's still out. He slips it back into his pocket. "Cooperate," he warns me. "Do what they tell you. Keep polite and answer all their questions."

"They're just trying to scare us, right?"

"They want us to keep on quietly paying the taxes for their wars. They don't want us protesting them."

Fear and frustration get the better of me. "How can they do this? Don't we have rights?"

He gestures at the barricade. "You tell me."

Elliot goes through first. A few seconds later, a cop at the next gate beckons to me and, cautiously, I step through.

I'm blinking and half-blinded as I escape the glare. As my eyes adjust to the dimness, I'm surprised to find myself inside what looks like a long, narrow shed. It's made of two white plastic walls, with a flat roof linking them—no doubt so the people in the towers around us can't video what's going on.

Cops are everywhere; all of them in armor, and their communications gear seems to be working just fine. I start to look for Elliot, but one of the cops gets in my face. She's almost as tall as I am, and she's used a pigment to give herself spooky gray eyes that lock on mine. "ID?" she barks.

I hold out my hand and let her wave a wand over the microchip embedded in the back of my wrist.

"James Shelley," the wand announces in a mechanical voice with female overtones. "Age nineteen. No priors. No warrants."

"First time for everything," the cop says as she wipes the back of my hand with a disc of white paper, the kind used at stadiums and airports to check for gunpowder residue. She turns the disc over, and nods. "Positive."

"What?"

Two more cops move in, one on either side of me, while Gray-eyes steps back.

"Mr. Shelley," she says, "you've been tagged."

"I don't understand. What are you talking about?"

She turns the gunpowder swatch around, showing me a bright green stain. "Positive rendering for trace amounts of a particulate tag, released from an aerial drone."

I rub at the back of my hand, but there's nothing there.

"The tags are much too tiny to see," she says with a satisfied smile.

"What does it mean?"

"It means you were a leading participant in an illegal demonstration. You were there, Mr. Shelley, among the leaders, and now I'm placing you under arrest for disorderly conduct and illegal assembly."

"No.
You can't do that. I'm a citizen. I don't need a permit to walk in this city!"

"Mr. Shelley, please turn around and put your hands behind your back."

In the back of my brain, I know I should listen. I remember Elliot warning me to do what I'm told. But I'm new at this. "No. This is wrong. You can't—"

And just like that I have a close-up view of the pavement. There's a knee between my shoulder blades, and my arms are on the verge of leaving their sockets. The only reason I'm not screaming is because I need air to do that and I've lost whatever I had in my lungs. Someone goes through my pockets. All they find is the business card Elliot gave me. "He's one of them," a low voice announces.

"Bag it," Gray-eyes says.

She grabs my hair, and lifts my face an inch off the ground without bothering to tell the other cop to get his knee out of my back. "Kid, where's your phone?"

I hear myself talking in a strained whisper, but it's not really me. My voice has been hijacked by someone a little short on brains. "It got stolen. I want to report a crime." My face gets slammed against the pavement. My lip bursts open and I'm drooling blood.

After that I get taken to a truck where the cops are collecting their victims. They sit me down on a bench. I'm hunched over, with my hands cuffed behind my back.

"Come on, Shelley," someone says in an undertone. "Tell me you didn't resist?"

I look up. I'm almost knee-to-knee to Elliot, who's eyeing me from the bench on the other side of the narrow aisle.

Did I resist? I'm too shocked to think straight, but I can feel blood trickling down my chin. I want to call my dad.

Out of habit, my gaze shifts to the overlay and I'm astonished to see I have a signal again. I stare at the icon for phone calls and names start scrolling. Then I remember where I am. Two cops are standing in the aisle, watching us, their batons out. Somehow I don't think they're going to let me have a conversation with my dad, so I decide to message him instead. That's when a small woman, not in uniform, looks into the truck. "You've got a point source," she says. "Someone in here has a communications device."

My heart takes off. How do they know? I'd run a search to find out, but right now it's more critical to figure out how to turn off my link—something I've never done before. I stare at the signal-strength icon on my overlay as the woman moves between the seated prisoners with a thin black tablet cradled in her hand. A menu descends from the icon. One of the choices is
isolate.
I try it, and to my immense relief I get the red circled X.

"Where's your phone?"

I look up to see her standing over me, her black box detector held in her upturned palm.

"The arrest report says no phone was found on you."

Somehow I manage to shrug. "I left my phone at home. You guys don't want any of this recorded, right? So I knew you'd just take it away."

She doesn't believe me, but I don't care. My phone
is
at home, while my overlay is silently recording every fucked up thing I'm seeing through my eyes. "Call me," I tell her. "Maybe I'll answer."

She pretends she doesn't hear me. Turning to one of the uniformed cops she says, "Signal's gone. You guys are clear to leave."

Elliot is watching me with a thoughtful look.

I refuse to meet his gaze.

"Strip."

The cop who tells me this sounds bored. He's huge, hard, and ugly, with no reason to hope I'll give him a hard time, but I surprise him. "I want my attorney."

"We haven't gotten that far yet, kid. Strip."

"I want my attorney!"

I have his attention now. "You want me to write you up for failure to obey a lawful order?"

"Goddamnit!"

"Strip!"

I'm shaking. It's not so much anger, not even fear. It's outrage. I know why the police are doing this. It's not because they expect to find anything on me. They just want me scared—and they'll go on making things worse for me until they get what they want.

So I do it. I console myself that at least I'm in a private room. I strip off my clothes and lay them on a small table. He tells me to put my hands behind my head, to squat, to stand up again, to shift my genitals.

Then he snaps a rubber glove over his right hand. "Lean over the table."

Oh fuck, no.

I'm not there anymore. I've checked out of my head. It takes him a few seconds to read my blank expression and then I'm face down on the table and he's got his hand up my ass. I want to kill him. "Is your paycheck worth it?" I growl.

"Shut up!"

He backs away and I stand up again.

His face has a dark flush. His cheeks are shining with sweat. I can't decide if it's me he hates, or himself. He peels off the glove, pitching it into a can with a hundred others, all turned inside out. He puts a new pair on. "Open your mouth."

I do it and he pretends to look. Then he grabs my chin. The heat of his hands scares me. I never felt hands as hot as that. He wrenches my head one way and then the other. I think he's supposed to be inspecting my ears, but it's only a gesture. He's not really looking. He doesn't even notice the metallic tattoos at the back of my jaw.

So he's done my ass, my mouth, and my ears. That only leaves my eyes. I try to keep my gaze down, but he won't have it. He takes a handful of my hair and jerks my head back until we're glaring at each other, so close we're both breathing used air. He looks straight at my overlay screens and I'm thinking that he'll see their glint and flickering, and that he'll kill me the moment he realizes what they are.

But he's thinking something else entirely.

"What the hell were you doing out there tonight?" he screams in my face. "Spoiled kid like you? What have you got to bitch about? You got money, clothes, a future. What the hell were you doing out there, except making my life harder?"

I almost feel sorry for him.

Not really.

"It was for fun."

He trades his grip on my hair for a backhand slap that sends me into the wall. I spit blood—it
hurts
—but when I hear the door open I turn around fast, thinking that now they'll get serious about beating the shit out of me... but the cop who comes in just looks tired. "Get out of here, Jeffries," she says. "Take a break."

My intimate friend is visibly shaking as he nods and leaves.

The new cop turns to me. "Thirty seconds, smart ass. Get your clothes on, or I'm walking you naked through this station."

Twenty-six seconds later, I'm dressed. I even have my shoes back on. Lissa would be proud.

Now that the police are sure I don't have any bombs or drugs, I get to stand in a long line of other dangerous criminals, men and women, most of them still wearing War Machine vests, arrested because they dared to walk the street together and protest the way our taxes are spent. I'm the only one who looks bloodied and bruised.

After a few minutes I notice Elliot. We trade glances, but no one's talking. A few people are crying. Most are just standing with cold, stony expressions. I make it a point to look at every face there: every prisoner, every cop. My overlay records it all.