Ecotones: Ecological Stories from the Border Between Fantasy and Science Fiction Page 13

  Down the rabbit hole, off to meet the mock turtle, and now to engage in even more silliness. But these mad hatters were certainly offering cold cash. I checked my phone, and the bank confirmed an escrow offer.

  “The Edgewater guys, we’re hands off them, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’m your guy.”

  MockTurtle smiled. “Welcome aboard, Colonel Stratton.”

  I cringed. “That’s why you came to me?”

  “Of course. Welcome to Starship Detroit.”

  “You have a silly name,” I said.

  “You might not think so when we’re done,” said the strange man in the wheelchair.

  I was in the heart of the sleeping dragon I’d sensed curled up in the darkness, the thing that CMO S. Whatten feared.

  I was deep into the crazy shit.

  Whatten, in his permanently wrinkle-free working suit, looked surprised. “Didn’t think you’d show back up.”

  “Didn’t think I’d be back.” I handed him a receipt. “I refunded your payment. There’ll be a claim on the car. It was wrecked.”

  Whatten took a sip of coffee, and looked down the street at the pair of men who’d biked me over to the compound. “Stratton. Colonel. I’m considering calling in reinforcements, or at least talking to the Edgewater board. I’m guessing that there are thousands of these people lurking around the city.”

  “I think you’re overestimating,” I replied. He wasn’t. He was way, way underestimating.

  “We tried to get satellite pictures of their camp from the other night, but someone has blocked it. A clever trick. I don’t know the size of my enemy, or their nature. And now they have a known counter turk-army specialist. You spent years taking down networked insurgencies, Stratton. Overseas. Now, if I didn’t know better, you seem to be working for one.”

  I leaned forward, until my face was just an inch from the chicken-wire and bars. “They are eco-freaks, Whatten. They applied for a protest license.”

  “No one gets that anymore.” The right to assemble and protest had long since been finessed into oblivion. Didn’t stop them from happening, just meant you had no right to do it.

  “I know. So they’re going to go ahead with it anyway.”

  “And we’ll have to stop it. I’ll need reinforcements. Tell me why I shouldn’t bump this up?”

  “A gentlemen’s agreement,” I said. “I promise that the protest will not exceed a given number. How many can the local Eddies and their compounds handle?”

  Whatten chuckled. “I tell you that and you deploy a larger number and I’m up the creek.” He sipped from his mug.

  “Whatten, I shit you not, I’m trying to do you a favor. These are people who’re going to do this one way or another, but they’re scared of you. Remember fighting for country, the way things used to be? That’s what they’re after. The right to express dissatisfaction without getting a skull cracked. They hired me to keep it civil, keep things from getting crazy, because I have that expertise. Now, I could hire toughs to keep a barrier going between us, could get snipers up in the roofs, could make for some real ugly back and forths, but I just want to make an easy buck. We keep it small, balanced, and you get to round up some easy fines. They get to make their point. I get to make some serious cash from these hippies. One grunt to another, Whatten, let’s make this easy.”

  I watched the gears turn. “You really think this’ll go down that easy?”

  “Do you want the board staring down too close into your operation? You want them calling in military? National coverage of the event? Serious battle?”

  Whatten looked off in the distance. “Some of my men are a bit jumpy right now.”

  “Control them. Offer them bonuses for a calm day of rounding up these guys. Tell them chaos is not welcome. Tell them anything you want, but tell me what your threshold is for kicking the protest upstairs.”

  “I see more than three hundred people, I’m calling in reinforcements,” Whatten said.

  “I’ll keep it to half that.”

  “Half that?” Whatten looked incredulous. “It’s not going to be a protest, it’ll be a lunch date with a bad ending.”

  “Half. Thank you, Whatten.”

  “Call me Samuel. If it goes the way you say, I’ll even shake your hand when it's all done. But Stratton… fellow grunt or not, we’re going to round people up. And if it gets big, it’s going to hit the fan. It isn’t just my men who’re jumpy. I’m getting it too. I’ll make the call the second it looks odd.”

  “I know.” I handed Samuel Whatten my phone number. “We’ll keep in touch. Keep the lines open. The air clear. Just in case.”

  I walked back down the street, blinking in the morning sun. Charlie, the axe-wielding bike enthusiast, waited for me.

  “So?”

  “The Eddies can handle a hundred protestors.”

  “Damn it.” Charlie hit his bike handles in frustration. “There is no way we can shut Detroit down with a hundred protestors.”

  I smiled. “We have an hour to do it, and then we have to keep doing it for twenty four hours. Come on Charlie, don’t you believe in the vision enough to trust me?”

  He just stared at me.

  I laughed. “We’ll need far more than a hundred people. We’ll need thousands and thousands.”

  “But we’re trying to avoid getting the military to come out after us,” Charlie said.

  “No more than a hundred can gather and protest. But the rest of the city is still a tool, Charlie. They still have eyes.”

  Charlie was frustrated that the citizens of the city wouldn’t work to change their paradigms. But they would.

  You just had to turk them out in just the right way.

  Detroit. Late morning. The first dry run I chose was near Grand Circus Park, a big intersection near a rundown, gothic-looking church. A set of roads ran a semi-circle around a portion of the intersection as well.

  I sat, cross-legged, on top of a large stone block, in front of which was a statue of a sitting man.

  It looked like Charlie’s wet dream. One hundred bikes converged from four different directions. MockTurtle had given me a list of thousands of possibles, and I’d chosen the fittest, with the fastest bikes.

  Speed would be an essential part of this equation.

  A small smile quirked the side of my mouth, seeing the four sets of twenty five bikers stream in at full tilt, pedaling away. They all braked to a sudden stop at the center of the intersection.

  Now the chaos came. Cars with green lights braked, confused at the sudden clutter as the bikes made a barricade around the square of the intersection.

  Waiting in electric utility vans was my support crew. I picked up my phone and selected the mailing list. “Roll out,” I typed.

  Fifty men leapt out from the backs. My heavies. Anyone with a self-defence or military background. They lugged plastic cones, and began placing them around the edge of the bicycle barricade.

  I slipped on a pair of shades and let them talk to my phone, I needed more screen real estate. Because now, things would get tricky. The more practical drivers, realizing something was afoot and not wanting to get caught up in the middle of some riot or demonstration, managed to start turning their cars around.

  Finally, the signs went up declaring the area a car free zone. I could see Charlie standing with a bullhorn. Behold the rhetoric. Burn the gas-using relics of a failed era. Embrace the pedal-powered and walkable future.

  All around the city I’d deployed bikes, messengers, and paid turks to call in the location of the Eddies. Small flags started popping up in my vision, a map of Detroit via my heads-up-display glasses. Scrambling Eddies.

  “Security out, ten to stay,” I sent. And the heavies melted back into the vans, which pealed off, a handful remaining to the sides.

  The Eddies were ripping up Washington Boulevard toward us. When they crossed Michigan Avenue I tapped in the scatter signal. Just as abruptly as they’d appeared, the protestors sc
rambled onto their bikes and took off in every direction, leaving only the stalled and snarled traffic, the cones, and the signs.

  I hopped off the public art and strolled down into the park near the empty fountain, then turned back to watch as the Eddies waded into the mess we’d created. Angry drivers, confused Eddies, not sure if it wasn’t the drivers somehow involved. Some of them were. Paid to have trouble turning around, that was.

  There was a small part of me inside chuckling. Being on the other side, there was a sort of beauty to this creative destruction. I’d always suspected.

  Twenty Edgewater contractors, in full company uniform, were a bit frustrated.

  I called a randomly selected heavy. “Atwater and Bates. Start forming it up.” It was close to the tunnel into Canada, enough to really freak the Eddies out. The fleeing bicyclists would find warehouses, shops, and eateries to duck into. Beta group was activated and ready to go.

  An electric waited for me at the far end of the park. Hopefully Charlie and his pals would leave this one alone long enough for me to get through the day.

  After swinging around the effects of jammed traffic, I headed for a view of the next mess. I found a spot a block away from the intersection and parked the car. Lit up my heads up display glasses. The Eddies were chasing bicyclists. They’d captured a few, given the ten SOS flags I saw. Time to send in the lawyers for them.

  “Atwater and Bates, go,” I ordered via my phone. The bicycles kicked into gear, and my heavies moved onto the scene to stand ready with cones and signs once more.

  Since the turn of the century, mobile networked insurgencies had been upsetting the balance of force in urban environments for First World militaries. Infrastructure, I imagined scolding Whatton. Infrastructure.

  As laws ate away at the rights to demonstrate, free-form riots had begun to grow, imitating the guerilla tactics abroad. Standing still for a protest didn’t make any sense. Not when rioters would get classified as non-state terrorist entities when rounded up.

  The trick was to control your membership. No violence. Which was hard to do when real insurgents waited in the wings to join protests as a cover for whatever they had in mind. And when the Edgewater types paid turks to bring violence to a protest, so that they could shut it down and levy massive fines for pure profit, one had to be quick on their feet.

  Damn quick.

  Even as my protestors set up, I saw Eddie flags popping up on my HUD map. They were reforming, dropping their chases and coming my way. Samuel Whatten was smart. Eyes on the ground reported a detachment of fifteen Eddies regrouping at Grand Circus Park.

  “Security out,” I ordered. And then, as the Eddies approached, I ordered half the protestors to evaporate ahead of the brunt.

  The remaining fifty scattered tire-piercing jax with bluetooth signals giving up information about the negative effects of personal transportation as practiced by the city currently. I was sure the driving public would be thrilled with that.

  But the message delivered was this: today, any cars in the area defined by the river and Interstates 375, 75, and the Lodge Freeway, would be harassed. Charlie shouted it. Agents delivered messages to blogs, podcast hosts, old media outlets, and placed battery powered projectors on overpasses all around this section of Detroit we’d staked out for the protest.

  Here be no cars welcome.

  Of course, we couldn’t shut down every street leading in. But if we caused enough trouble, and spread the word, enough people would get the idea and stay away because they didn’t want to get caught up in an Edgewater round up and riot.

  The effect would be the same. And I had a few specific goals up my sleeve.

  I ordered protestors to pedal out. We had more non-critical intersections to demonstrate at. A few hackers under our pay tapping into Eddie radio chatter reported that the order was going out for all the compounds around Detroit to contribute extra contractors. All Detroit Eddies were getting yanked out of bed, no matter their shift. Riot gear was being passed out.

  Things were getting warm.

  I yanked Charlie off the streets and had him chauffeur me around in my electric car. Things were getting so complex I couldn’t drive and coordinate at the same time. Enough people had heard his talking points and been briefed. They were handed loudspeakers and told to carry on the crusade.

  Plus, making pedal-powered Charlie drive me around appealed to me on a deep level.

  “Spaceship Detroit,” I asked him. “What do you know?”

  “It’s the higher level project,” he said, from the front seat. He was doing his best to follow my orders, but not chat too much. Driving me around really had irked him.

  It cheered me up.

  “Urban renewal.” I knew I was running a big diversion, and I wondered if true-believers like Charlie knew they were just turking out.

  It was like one of those games-with-a-purpose you could play online. You thought you were taking over the world in a digital simulation, but instead you were helping develop an algorithm for bottle packing computers based on your reactions to certain variables.

  I had to admit, I was enjoying myself a hell of a lot more than I was working as a bouncer just a few nights ago.

  “It’s noon,” Charlie said.

  “I know.”

  “So…”

  “Give it a few minutes,” I said. We passed by a series of office buildings. I could see faces in windows looking out. Word of a potential riot had gotten around. People were checking the streets before leaving for lunch.

  We continued driving. As I drew more and more people into downtown, I wondered what would be happening in the Slumps.

  Spaceship Detroit, huh?

  I just hoped it wouldn’t be a massive piece of multiplayer performance art, or something stupid. Maybe some of the rhetoric had stuck on me. It would, if people flung it at you long enough.

  I would love a walking city, like those European ones, where they’d eased into post-auto societies due to their medieval city layouts and historically high gas prices. I’d visited them, on my way to the trouble spots.

  A city where I didn’t have to scrounge out in the Wilds, where the Slumps were utilized, and where it felt like there was action, and hope. I liked the sound of that.

  “They’re coming out now,” Charlie said. He was right. The lunch crowds were starting to form.

  “Okay. Lunch time madness,” I ordered via my phone.

  Groups of twenty-five, in five different packs, descended outside popular restaurants, blocking off the roads to them with demonstrations. Again, jax, signs, and cones to muddy everything up.

  Charlie’s acolytes preached their slogans, and people did their best to get away from the traffic snarls. The Eddies, now out patrolling in full force and having gotten a sense for the area we’d staked out, descended quickly. They’d spread out in a rough net, and were using their own information to quickly rally to a point.

  Turks with live cams gave me feeds of each demonstration, as well as streaming it live to anyone who really cared. Already some people in the city were honking horns whenever they saw a pack of bicyclists going by. Drivers, sympathetic to the cause.

  Funny.

  In the middle of protest number three, my heavies dragged out a bicyclist from the middle of the group. Discreet, quick, they tossed him into the back of a van, and my phone rang.

  “He didn’t have an ID,” they reported. Each official protestor had a small RFID tag that responded to a challenge/response query that the support team could broadcast via their phones.

  “Try and work out who he’s getting paid by,” I said.

  “He doesn’t know. Just turking it,” was the response.

  “The Eddies are thinking quick. Take him out into the Slumps and dump him off.”

  Lunch had been successful. Late and annoyed business people, traffic tied up in all five locations. And we still were keeping just ahead of the increasingly frustrated Eddies. A few of the protestors captured since the first demonstr
ation had been shoved around a bit. But it was still civil.

  “Lunch is over. Afternoon delight begins.” I smiled.

  For the next four hours we just kept shifting the fun around the city, frustrating the traffic and the Eddies. Eating into rush hour traffic as everyone left just added to it. Drivers jumped at every little glitter on the road, imagining tire-piercing jax waiting for them. Outraged bicyclists not associated with the riots were getting arrested throughout the city as they tried to get to buses or home.

  The temporary protests appeared, vanished, appeared, vanished, constantly moving about. At this point some of them were riding in the vans, getting dropped off in locations faster than they could bike to. And to be honest, there were closer to five hundred bicyclists working for me, hidden all throughout downtown.

  Even though the Eddies now had extras coming in from the Slumps and the Wilds, I was prepared to keep this up all through the night. Then MockTurtle called.

  “We have a problem,” he said softly.

  Outside, the sun was dipping over the skyline, the buildings throwing their long shadows down the streets. “What kind of problem?”

  “Edgewater is advancing on the project. They’re liable to misinterpret what’s going on.”

  “Well, what is going on?”

  “Come and see.”

  And the directions to one of the skyscrapers in the Slumps popped up on my phone.

  As we drove deep into the Slumps I realized why Edgewater might get nervous. As night fell, thousands of people were crawling out of nooks and crannies. The streets were filling. People were working on portable machine shops, or turning out parts via automated stamping machines. Others ran up and down the street with carts toward the center of all the activity.

  Spaceship Detroit. The skyscraper loomed over this section of the Slumps, where the buildings made perhaps fifteen stories at best.

  Massive solar panels had already been mounted to the upper deck and outside the windows, jutting from the building like leaves from a demented, scrap metal tree. Charlie swore and stopped the car, and I got out.