The Deluge, page 63
“Fuck yes!” Kelly screamed, and her voice rippled back through the crowd, past Seventh and then Fourteenth Street, nearly all the way to the Washington Monument.
“So what are we going to do?” Morris demanded. She held three fingers on her right hand high. “We are going to save our biosphere, we are going to remake our unjust and unequal economic system, and we are going to re-democratize our country and our world. History shows us that people can be monsters. That they can kill and maim and enslave and exploit, and they can do it while telling themselves how enlightened they are. But history also tells us that when people band together, they can do mighty things. Whole systems can fall overnight. We don’t need armies, guns, or bombs. Great change is made by a tired, pissed-off woman who doesn’t want to give up her seat on a bus, or by a scrawny Indian lawyer who decides to stop eating. What is extraordinary about the people we revere in history is just how unbearably ordinary they were. All that separates us from them—literally the only difference—is that they had the courage to act. When the wealthy and powerful told them what they were doing was meaningless, they didn’t listen.”
Quinton Marcus-McCall watched the crowd feast on this woman’s voice. He’d first heard her at a speech at Wayne State in 2025 when he was failing at his nursing degree, and though he hadn’t known it then, it set his life on a new course. This speech didn’t sound all that different to him from the rest of her catalogue, but it was good to know she still had some juice left. He set his backpack on the ground and went rooting through it for the strip of blue cloth and began tying it around his left bicep. Kate Morris continued:
“Remember, you have courage in you. All these disasters the past thirty years, from 9/11 and Covid-19 to the Great Eastern Flood, and what do people always do? In the LA fire, you know what they did? Fishermen sailed their boats up the coast from Mexico to rescue Americans they’d never met. Because when disaster comes, we don’t run, we don’t eat each other, we don’t say ‘That’s the other gal’s problem, why bother?’ Even if the powerful want us to forget it, we are innately brave and always carry within ourselves hope in the face of the impossible. We don’t run from the fire, we run into the fire.”
She leaned hard into the mic, the flesh stretched tight across her collarbones as she surged into her own skin, her fist beating the air for emphasis.
“So here’s what we do: As I speak, we have organizers, here, today, setting up encampments and building barricades in the streets, and we’re asking you to stay, right here, for as long as you can. We will lay siege to this city. We’re not leaving until our leaders hear us, meet our demands, and address, immediately, these emergencies of democracy, inequality, and climate.”
At this point, what Kate Morris was actually saying didn’t quite connect with the crowd, which let out a half-confused round of applause. She pushed on, trying to make them understand.
“Find the people wearing the blue armbands, and they will set you up with the supplies you need: tents, sleeping bags, water, food. For those watching, anywhere in the world: Get here. As quickly as you can. We are not here to spark violence or damage even a single brick. This is not a MAGA rally. The buildings that surround us, this is our heritage. It’s our home, and we will treat it as such. We must be uncompromising in our nonviolence, but the business of the heartless and violent corporate plutocracy that now passes for governance in this city? That’s finished. Not one deal will happen, not one law will pass, not one piece of corporate welfare will be enacted until we, the citizens of this country, are heard.”
Walt Pasquina watched as three guys with blue armbands carried a piece of fencing from Seventh Street down to Madison Drive, where a few others appeared to be reassembling the portable metal barriers to form a barricade. In the streets just beyond the Mall, police had erected two-meter-high smart fences, which suddenly, like a mini Maginot Line, were being hacked, disconnected, and carried away in pieces by teams of four or five. He could see them being reappropriated at certain points along Madison Drive. Kelly was pestering him, thrusting her phone under his nose: Kelly, it read. We need your help. Here’s what you can do next.
“Never forget,” cried Morris from the stage, “at any moment we can choose to be agents of change. I promise you, there is nothing more meaningful than when your life is on the line and you choose to fight back.”
Master Patrol Officer Andrea Sanchez, an undercover with the D.C. Metropolitan Police, could not decide what to do. Standing just north of the Smithsonian Castle, she watched as groups of blue-armbanded folks were basically running off with every last piece of physical infrastructure intended for crowd control. Her instinct was to start making arrests before things got out of hand, but the instructions in her earpiece were contradictory. There was something else going on in the city, and officers were being pulled from the concert to deal with it. Meanwhile, there were more portable toilets being delivered mid-event, and big trucks with pallets of food and water being off-loaded onto the Mall, and strangest of all, there were construction crews jackhammering into the pavement of Jefferson Drive. Everything was happening extremely fast.
“In this moment, in this city, in this dark hour, we will prove that all the divisions heaped on us by the powerful and wealthy are false. They don’t fear us yet—but they will. Because we are what they didn’t see coming and what they never thought possible. We are the deluge. Join us. Get to D.C. It is not too late. The future is not yet written, and all anyone will ever ask you twenty, thirty, forty years from now is where were you? What did you do when you were called?”
And instead of walking off, Kate Morris took two steps and jumped from the stage to the grass below, where she was greeted like one of the rock stars. She grabbed the first random guy from the audience, as security looked on in confusion, and together they picked up the crowd-control fencing that enclosed the VIP area and began carrying it south to the roadway. People were cheering, screaming, looking at one another like, Wait, really? When Beyoncé and Eddie Vedder peaked out from backstage, their general bewilderment mirrored that of the audience.
The remainder of the event proceeded strangely. The bands and musicians went on, played the hits, and for the most part people behaved as though they were at a concert. Yet in the midst of this, the crowd leaked, siphoning off to join roving gangs of impromptu construction workers, directed by field marshals IDed by their blue armbands. Messages arrived on phones, watches, and glasses. A wider blast reached over five million sympathizers, asking for their help in both bodies and donations. On key streets, people began to build a series of blockades out of smart fencing, portable toilets, and tire-puncturing police wire, unspooled on all roads between Constitution and Independence Avenues. The area had already been cordoned off by police with standard protocol concrete barricades and metal detectors, and the street blockades would deny the authorities access to remove the concrete. Groups of severe-looking Blue Bands stationed themselves outside the entrances to each of the buildings within their perimeter. The National Gallery of Art and the National Air and Space Museum, for instance, would be closed for the foreseeable future. Finally, groups began erecting tents in neat rows between the stage and Fourteenth Street, creating bisecting pathways around which their makeshift city could grow. Two medical tents and two cafeterias sprouted up on either end of the Mall, with twenty-five solar and ninety bicycle generators deployed as connective tissue between those hubs.
Officer Andrea Sanchez’s insistence that there was something going on at this concert—not a terrorist attack, not an active shooter, not a riot, but something far weirder—went ignored, as did the calls from other officers on the scene. For thirteen years, the Metro and Capitol Police had gone on high alert whenever a large group of people descended for any reason whatsoever. The Capitol Building and White House became veritable fortresses for so much as an AARP knitting convention, and crowd-control mechanisms were deployed throughout the district in case things got out of hand. But now their drones were flying away, vanishing across the Potomac, and many of her fellow officers complained that their radios weren’t working or that they were getting conflicting orders. It was giving her a sickness in her gut, as she wondered what a mob turned loose might feel like. When she confronted one of the men coordinating the larceny, though, he was so calm and reasonable.
“You can’t do that,” she said, flipping her badge open and stuffing it in his face. “You can’t move that there.”
“No, no it’s fine,” Quinton Marcus-McCall told her, and he showed her a forged permit. Officer Sanchez studied it while Quinton’s team continued to carry fencing from the access aisles to the points of entrance and egress along the Mall. “This is part of the performance. Call it in.”
“I did call it in, man! Y’all got to stop! Now!”
“There really must be some confusion,” said Marcus-McCall, scratching his head. “Let me call my boss quick. This all must be a misunderstanding.”
And moments later, Sanchez’s dispatcher, which was not a person these days but a soothing electronic voice hooked into the Metropolitan Police’s central computer, told her that indeed this was part of the concert, including all the mature trees being planted right into the jackhammered concrete on the north-south roads.
Once the organizers controlled those north and south borders of Independence and Constitution, they went to work on Third Street in the shadow of the Capitol and Fourteenth Street just east of the Washington Monument. Groups of twenty sat down in the street in circles and fed their hands into tubes. Inside were handcuffs that secured their wrists. This tactic of deploying multiple wheels of human beings chained together, impossible to move without ripping off someone’s arm, was sometimes called a lockbox, sometimes a sleeping dragon, and had been cribbed from long-ago WTO protests in Seattle. The police converged on Fourteenth and Third Streets, but all they could do was stand there until the proper tools arrived. On a cue delivered by the app, two hundred people in interlocking human chains broke into song: “Wild World” by Cat Stevens followed by “The Way You Smile” by Zeden, followed by a more obscure number by veteran troubadour Joe Pug. They had a list fifty tunes deep, and they’d repeat it until they went hoarse. As long as they held the road.
And yet instead of reinforcements showing up to cut open the tubes and remove the protestors, the D.C. Metro and Capitol Police were being diverted elsewhere. Intelligence agencies had asserted, through their monitoring of social media traffic, that several Black extremist groups were trying to spark riots in the city’s ghettos. The chaos in Dallas was still on everyone’s mind, so the bulk of the city’s police force was dispatched to sections of Deanwood, Anacostia, and LeDroit Park, where supposed riots were breaking out. Indeed, that morning small groups of protestors, holding signs demanding an end to police violence, had hustled from one neighborhood to the other, barricading streets at random. Numbering only in the hundreds, they nevertheless managed to sow enormous chaos. Police intelligence insisted that this was a real threat, that thousands of Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and 6Degrees extremists were stoking riots on par with Dallas, but wherever the city’s generous helping of riot police showed up, the threat had already melted to another block, another section of the city. Meanwhile, twenty-seven buses pulled into major intersections in the heart of D.C., blocking traffic on every street that led to the Mall. Teams of thirty to forty people exited, faces covered (by bandanas, balaclavas, Guy Fawkes and Joker masks), and with military coordination, they rocked the buses onto their sides. Bystanders filmed as the huge vehicles toppled and crashed onto the street and then ran, thinking the buses would explode. This strategy proved most useful at the four corners of the captured territory, essentially cutting off Jefferson and Madison Drives at Fourteenth Street and Third Street from the rest of the city, allowing organizers the rest of the day and night to establish a fortified perimeter and sow confusion for any authority trying to hinder their tactics. By the time the concert wrapped up, for all intents and purposes, Kate Morris’s foot soldiers controlled the National Mall, and no one in Washington, D.C.’s chain of command, from the chief of police to the mayor to the Feds, quite knew what to do about a bunch of folks with their arms handcuffed together by the Washington Monument singing Pharrell’s “Happy.”
In the organizers’ command center, a trailer discreetly situated behind the stage, Tom Levine hovered behind Liza Yudong, watching her manipulate an AR screen. Only the night before, Levine had told his fiancée where he was going and what was happening, knowing that it could mean the end of their engagement. He was in D.C. by dawn the next day with nothing but a toothbrush and a change of clothes in a backpack.
“How are you doing all this?” Tom now asked Liza. She removed a pair of harlequin-style ARs, rubbed her eyes after a long day of watching the chaos organize in three-dimensional graphics around her face, and looked at her old coworker like he was boring her.
“You know in the movie when the screenplay says ‘Computer stuff, computer stuff, computer stuff’? The AI does all that, and I just sit here.”
“And here I was afraid you’d lose your sense of humor without me, Liz.”
Liza went on to explain, in the most dumbed-down, patronizing way she could manage, how not only was her algorithm pushing tactical intelligence to individuals as open-source resistance but also how it created a unity of command. Identity prediction analysis gave her algorithm a solid notion of who could be called upon to do what, and each instruction arrived on the device of a person deemed likely to carry it out.
“So you’ve spied on people to determine if they’d be willing participants,” said Tom.
“ ‘Spied’ is a big word. We use the same data as Pepsi or the Democratic Party. I call it my Occupy AI. We determined we needed a base of five thousand good little unthinking, unquestioning revolutionaries, so that if the AI asked them to act like chickens, there’ll be five thousand smelly hippies on the Mall clucking in unison.”
It was a bit more complex than that. The predictive tech, along with the gigabytes of data gathered, bought, and sold by advertisers on behavioral futures markets, was coveted by all kinds of actors. The New York Times had reported on how Vic Love had utilized a powerful new tool from CLK Metrics to devastate his electoral opponents going as far back as his Senate bid in Montana, with his campaign uniquely targeting voters’ psychology in groundbreaking ways. Liza used the same tools to recruit their true believers, an eighteen-month process in which their group made contact with nearly twenty-five thousand potential occupiers, sifting through the best and brightest of the past twenty years of social movements, veterans of BLM, Idle No More, Sunrise, Extinction Rebellion, Occupy, and Standing Rock, as well as young people just stepping into the activist space. These microtargeted individuals were not let in on the details of the plan until they’d undergone a background check and training in nonviolent direct action and the hard skills of organization and encampment, everything from first aid to latrine construction. No one on the executive committee ever had personal contact with any of their cadre leaders. It was all done through anonymizing software and aliases. The climate concert itself went unmentioned. All these folks knew was that they were going to be called to do something bold and radical. From the perspective of law enforcement, Kate Morris, Liza Yudong, Seth Young, Anthony Pietrus, and Matt Stanton had only been planning a concert. Yudong delivered insight into the protocols that governed D.C.’s sprawling security apparatus in a post–9/11, post–1/6 environment, and she used this to develop machine learning to rapidly deploy participants in a mass-protest event. Her program could recruit, train, and direct new members without anyone so much as tapping a key, generating seemingly leaderless action, while organizing its tactics around Homeland Security, D.C. Metro Police, and Capitol Police preparations for civil unrest. When all those people ran to Fourteenth Street to lock their arms in a sleeping dragon, no person told them to do that. It was the AI processing multiple data streams at once to decide how to create the most effective disruption to gain control of Fourteenth from Madison to Jefferson.
The recruits now did their jobs with dedication and efficiency. For nine hours following Morris’s speech, under a pale ghost sky, they worked tirelessly to build a garrison in the heart of the US capital. The concertgoers made their decisions after the last acts departed, some electing to stay, picking up tents and gear, but most filtering back out to the streets and the Metro, spooked by the overturned buses, still not sure if this was for real. On that first night their makeshift city glowed with digital screens, headlamps, and campfires, and the chatter of voices and song carried across the city. Volunteers came by to feed those still chained in sleeping dragons and give them sips of water. Oblate disc of moon peeking through clouds. Errant drops of rain hissing in the campfires. She wouldn’t sleep that night, but Kate Morris did pause from her work to look out over the sea of flapping plastic pulled over tents to fight the dampness, the smattered-star glitter of people checking their phones in the hastily built commune, the buzz and energy of last call at the bar now indefinitely suspended.
And yet by morning, it seemed like the whole thing was over. If seven thousand people remained on the damp lawn of the National Mall, they would’ve been lucky. Liza climbed out of her tent and saw their disappointing numbers. Given that almost all five thousand of their Blue Bands had stayed, their larger retention rate was under 2 percent. The scene looked like a poorly attended convention for suburban camping enthusiasts. The stage remained. The backstage trailers remained, all rock and pop occupants having made themselves scarce. The north and south streets were piled with debris. Semi-amused, semi-exasperated cops were still trying to get arc welders to the sleeping dragons, a few progressive press outlets hovered around the Media Relations tent, and the kitchens fed veggie burritos to anyone who showed up, but all told, it looked like it was about to be a lot of egg on someone’s face. A revolution that’s about as much of a fart in a bag as climate change itself, tweeted one commentator.
