Hieroglyph (35 page)

“I guess I've been, well, offered an internship.”

“Why didn't you say so?”

“It's a bad internship.”

“There's no such thing, Arun. Internships can always lead somewhere.”

“It's probably illegal.”

“Illegal? Are you sure?”

I told him about Johnny.

“But that's wonderful, Arun. It's an opportunity to work as a social media consultant, which is just what you trained to be. And my legal analytics say that it's not at all against the law to work for him. You can take Jobber's word on that. Our guarantee is always to find you employment in compliance with federal and state law.”

“It pays nothing. Literally zero.”

“Don't think of it that way, Arun. Think of it in terms of developing your reputation. Just imagine how much attention your work will get if you took on such a high-profile client! Our analysis shows that Mr. Appledrone is at the center of some very influential networks. If you do good work, which I know you will, your future will be unlimited.”

I wondered whether I was still employed at BigMachine. I didn't have a shift scheduled for the next two weeks. That was what finally convinced me. When the sun was high enough in the sky that I wouldn't feel embarrassed to admit I was awake, I called Charlotte.

I CROSSED THE LINE.
Charlotte picked me up from BigMachine, and we headed to Utah. As the car self-drove, our destination marked by a colorful confluence of hovering objects, drones alighting and taking flight, I decided that Charlotte loved me. Her love was not sexual—it went beyond mere sex—but was instead a sort of bottomless comradeship, togetherness, friendship, whatever. I was drunk. I smiled at her, and she smiled back, tense. The Third Dronepunk Congress was being held in Rockport Exxon Park, on the shore of a dazzling lake, yellow canoes and white sailboats peppering the water's deep blue, new condos rising, being built by robots, on the far shore. Hailing from all over the world, dronepunks circled their wagons, created a temporary city, ostentatiously occupied the recently privatized land. The community was partial to autonomous vehicles of one type or another. The authorities showed restraint, but the ad hoc encampment was ringed by private security, slickly armored in the latest paramilitary gear, armored drones mixing with the civilian variety. Charlotte had a registered pass and gave me a guest pass, allowing me into the fortified encampment.

A circus wheeled in the sky. I gawked at it, the constellation of animals, insects, zeppelins, hot-air balloons, demoniacal parade floats, hovering dolls in various states of undress, a life-real animatronic Superman swooping here and there, banners advertising myriad political views, reflecting the vast ideological range of the dronepunk community. It was a gathering of anarchists, anticopyright libertarians, hard leftists, soft liberals, civil libertarians, militant hobbyists, Pirate Party Scandinavians, transhumanists, Singularitarians, batshit entrepreneurs. Though he fashioned himself as something like the prophet of the dronepunks, Johnny represented only a thin slice of the activist spectrum, albeit a very vocal slice. It instantly seemed less strange to me that his interns dressed like corporate lawyers rather than punk rockers. Maybe I felt the way I did because I was so blotto, but
man oh man,
I thought,
what beautiful sky pollution,
what a dizzying, spiritual poetry of drones.

“C'mon,” Charlotte said. “He's waiting.”

THE CAMPER WAS PARKED
near the WikiLeaks Foundation's thirty-foot-tall life-real inflatable statue of Julian Assange. Johnny had torn out the Camper's sink and gas range, replaced them with a fancy workstation—hoses, test tubes, circuit boards, small vials of fabricator mix—on which dozens of half-finished drone prototypes were splayed, pinned like exotic insects to corkboard. Where the front passenger seat should have been, a fridge-sized fabricator wheezed away. The cabin smelled of hot thermoplastic and human stink. The Camper's owner didn't often shower. In the midst of the beeping, whirring, buzzing machines sat the king, the venerable, wizened Johnny Appledrone himself, bedecked with his dreaded beard, on his ergonomic throne, which made subtle movements in response to thought or gesture. The Camper was an extension of his nervous system. He was overweight, very overweight, dressed in strangely colored military fatigues. He wore open-fingered gloves over form-fitting carpal tunnel braces, held in each hand a multitool, a Leatherman hybridized with some brutal offshoot of Cthulhu. On his face he wore a shiny Byzantine rig. You could call them glasses. Numerous lenses of various strengths and functions, three affixed loupes, rotated into his field of vision at unexpected times. When we entered, he looked up, didn't stop working on his prototypes, typing on primitive keyboards, scanning multiple monitors, also ancient, lashed against the window port.

© 2013, Haylee Bolinger / ASU

“They goddamn just bent over and said to the federal government and to the corporations, go ahead please and fuck us all in the ass!” was the first thing he said to me. “Do you understand?”

“I'd like to, sir,” I said.

“You're a polite boy.”

“I . . . try.”

In its morning session, Johnny explained, the congress had issued a tepid statement offering condolences to the victims of the Cheyenne Massacre, defending the continued need for the Commons, but promising to work with government and law enforcement to help prevent its abuse.

He smiled. “Charlotte didn't warn you. I chew people up if they get in my way.”

“No, sir.” I looked at Charlotte, who gave me no guidance. “She thought—”

“Thought you might help me. But I'll ask you now, what is it you think you can do for me?”

“I have a social media certification from WCC Fa—”

“WCC?”

“Wyoming Community College. Well, the—”

“Tell me this, Arun. How you gonna explain me to the mainstream world when even my own so-called allies, as I say, bend the fuck over at the slightest challenge?”

I DON'T REMEMBER WHAT
I said in reply, but Johnny decided he liked me. My first test would be to write up a press release for the afternoon session. He was part of a panel discussion called “Right to the National Airspace? A Roundtable,” featuring Johnny as well as an ACLU lawyer, a technology reporter from
Finn
magazine who'd written three books on national airspace regulations, a sociologist from the University of Texas at Austin, and a representative from the Federal Aviation Administration. It was a headliner event. Promised to be a bloodbath. The room—or rather, the tent—was packed full, hundreds and hundreds jammed together. They booed when the FAA guy, in his cheap suit, took the stage. I was in the front row with the interns and Petra, an intern-in-training, on loan today from the ACLU.

WHEN EXACTLY DID IT
come to blows? It's hard to say, even when you review the video, which I have, carefully, many times now. The elegant UT-Austin sociologist, who had an Eastern European accent, gave a jargon-clotted talk, which took far longer than her allotted seven minutes. At one point, she proposed that “reifying the skies” was a response to “secular ouranophobia.” Some found her talk rousing, but most of us were perplexed. I understood maybe every fifth word. Bringing us back to earth, the journalist, a middle-aged white guy, gave a shallow, anecdote-filled talk, showing lots of clever slides, concluding with a fatalist shrug that, in the final analysis, the FAA more or less knew what it was doing. The woman from the ACLU—tense, precise—rapidly outlined numerous legal questions related to the peaceful civilian use of drones, hoping that these questions might be addressed in the Q&A period. The FAA guy, nervous as hell, cleared his throat, loaded up his boring-ass presentation, and tried to make the case for the need to control U.S. airspace. It was a matter of national security and public safety, he argued. When he used the phrase “Cheyenne Massacre,” the crowd immediately turned against him. Boos, hisses mounted. Some in the audience, die-hard supporters of the FAA, stood and started shouting, “He's right!
He is right!
” Johnny gave a louche grin, leaned back in his chair, laced his fingers behind his head, and let the “FAA neo-fascist” (a term he'd used earlier) stew.

“I can't believe it,” Zara whispered.

“What?” I said.

“Johnny's acting like such a jerk. Goading the audience.”

“Johnny hasn't said a word,” Sandy said.

“But look at him. Smirking like he's enjoying the poor guy's . . . It
was
a massacre. It's, like, a betrayal of everything he supposedly stands for. Johnny could end the boos with a word. Everyone here respects him so much. I . . .”

“Johnny has no obligation to do what you want him to do, Zara.”

“I just feel—”

“You know,” Sandy said acidly, “Johnny isn't your
boyfriend
.”

Silence choked the intern corner. A formidable taboo had been despoiled.

“I never . . . I
never
. . .” Zara stood up, her eyes wide with shock at what Sandy had said, the gall of it,
how dare she,
and left the tent.

The remaining interns glared at Sandy. They were proud of their professionalism, and Johnny had never even made a slightly inappropriate gesture toward any of them. My attention divided, subdivided. Onstage, Johnny had stood up at some point, resting his weight on the folding table, and was speaking, waving his index finger in outrage. I was supposed to attend to what he said. I had to write a press release about this event. Eventually, I would start managing his status updates, social network communications. “—
know who to feel angrier at, the neo-fascist FAA, or the weak-willed, easily intimidated so-called dronepunks who pretend—
” (“Sit down, fat man!” someone shouted from the audience.) “—
in anything resembling resistance to the corporate state, or if you believe that by asking for power's permission to resist you will
—” (“You have the right to shut the fuck up, Johnny, you fucking cocksucker!”) “—
have the right to call yourselves dronepunks, you vile, obsequious, docile, fair-weather
—” I'm still not sure who hit me, but the last thing I remember, before the whole tent fell down around us, was a folded metal chair making its way toward my face.

WHEN WE LEFT THE
congress three days later, sans Zara, Petra newly hired, I rode with Johnny in the Camper, my head still aching, my arm burning, now part of his circle of trust. Over instant Ramen cups, as we traversed the interstate, we discussed his social strategy. Johnny showed me his rump mediasphere sites, of which there weren't many. He didn't bother arguing his side of the drone debate to nonspecialists, thought engaging with mainstream media was beneath him. He had elaborate visions of alternate communications networks, alternate economies, alternate models of human governance. He showed me some of the dronepunk forums he frequented. The rumors were true. He'd written hundreds of thousands of words, sprawling, densely hyperlinked rants. I felt the force of his passion, half-comprehended the allure of the dronepunk community's vision of a genuinely decentralized communications network, no mediasphere satellites, no state approval, no corporate masters. The vision was powerful enough, urgent enough to draw hundreds to the congress, to inspire thousands to attempt to build the Commons, to provoke possibly millions to bypass the official mediasphere. It was a universe unto itself, the Commons, a tiny photonegative of daylight media. I imagined explaining Johnny to Maa or Baba. His mission would mean little to them. It made sense only to those who were already converted. That was his main problem. Johnny would have, I saw, only limited public appeal, unless he changed his style. When I tried explaining this to him, at a rest stop, he didn't want to hear it.

“I didn't let you in here for your social media certificate, Arun.” We were sitting in lawn chairs he'd set up in front of the Camper. Thousands of drones, disguised as locusts, flew from his fabricator's chute, through the moon roof, in a gorgeous spiral pattern. They were almost silent as they flew away, making only slight chattering noises, seeking out weak patches of the Commons network to fill in.

“Then what have we been talking about?” The day had grown unusually beautiful. “What did I get beat up at the congress for?”

“All that stuff about mainstream social media is interesting enough, which is to say not at all interesting. What I really want to know about is BigMachine.”

“You working for the FBI, Mr. Appledrone?”

Johnny slapped his armrest, laughing. “That's right, Arun. I'm a traitor to the cause, just like those motherfucking jerkoff delegates at the congress.”

What Johnny wanted was a list of names, the names of truckers who'd liked me, some hint as to their allegiances. The “mainstream dronepunk” community, he explained, was selling itself out. “Give them a year, year and a half tops, and they'll just be some fuckwit political action committee or lobbying group. Which means the end of the Drone Commons as we know it. What I need, Arun, is an army, an army of the newly unemployed, people who need a sense of mission, who're still angry and stung enough to remember what they're fighting for. What's at stake. If you want to help the cause of informational freedom, which is the only true religion, your talents as a social media consultant are irrelevant. We're not trying to persuade the soccer moms to love us. What we need is motivated networks, and a man who can move networks. You seem likable enough, Arun, which is why I let my interns bring you to me, why I let you see the Dronepunk Congress. You know the community of truckers better than you probably realize.”