The Deluge, page 64
Kate Morris made the rounds, thanking people for staying, urging them to reach out to their networks to bring in more bodies. Most people listened to her from inside their tents because the rain had picked up.
The status quo, for its part, was laughing at her. The president was in Japan for a meeting of the G20, so Vice President McGuirk and the head of Homeland Security got on a holo-chat with the mayor of D.C. With the threat of Dallas-level riots appearing to be a mirage, all agreed it was best to encircle the Mall for now, keep a phalanx of menacing crowd-control cops between these granola-eaters and the Capitol, and let the whole thing fizzle in a few days from crummy weather. Once it was down to the hundreds, they’d start making arrests.
Morris, Levine, Young, Yudong, and their fifteen most veteran organizers huddled behind the stage that second night debating if this whole thing was already over. Two years of planning a complex and dangerous nonviolent ambush, on top of the difficulty of simply planning a major concert, and the only thing they hadn’t counted on was that “We’d barely be able to summon a crowd the size of a poetry reading,” said Seth.
“The Fyre Festival of the climate crisis,” Liza added.
“It’s still early. It’s raining. People are waiting to see what will happen,” Kate assured them, but she was fending off an alarming sensation. She could take the death threats, the hate mail, the deepfake porn, the actual leaked sex video, all the vicious internet bile, but what truly got at her was this ego blow, this rebuttal of her entire thesis that she was a unique conduit for activating people’s faith in themselves. She felt stupid. The National Park Service had sent her an email explaining that she was in violation of her permit and laid out the consequences. She could go to jail for two years for the most embarrassing protest action in modern memory.
By morning, black clouds had moved in. At the sight of the dread-filled sky, hundreds more packed up and left. What was left of the patchwork crowd circulated around the National Mall pointlessly. The folks in the lockboxes had unshackled themselves when the cops appeared to lose interest. The city was busy cutting the knot of chains and dragging the overturned buses away. Everyone waited for the conclusion of this sad effort.
APRIL 4
It’s hard to say why the fourth day.
Maybe it took that long for people to pick up gear at the nearest REI. Maybe the rain letting up was key. Or maybe Morris’s speech took a few days to make its impact. Whatever the reason, twelve hundred people descended on the Mall, setting up tents and registering with organizers, who assigned them jobs in sanitation or the kitchen or construction. The next day, as the sun dried the grass and people didn’t have to hop puddles, an additional twenty-one hundred bodies arrived, an influx so large it took until midnight to process them all, get them shelter, and go over the encampment’s rules demanding nonviolence, respect, and nothing even remotely resembling a weapon. Within a week, nearly fifteen thousand people had taken up residence in the heart of D.C., with more arriving every day. The Mall transformed into a city grid. Several Indigenous action groups—including members of the Oceti Sakowin, Navajo, Choctaw Nation, Hopi, Potawatomi, and the Cree and Métis from as far away as the Northwest Territories—erected enormous tipis, bringing with them years of experience occupying and blockading. They arranged their shelters around a firepit in the shape of a buffalo horn and planted rows of the national flags of all the represented tribes. The library lent books. Folks waited in line for their turn to generate power on the bikes. Huge industrial pots cooked rice, soups, and stews around the clock to keep everyone fed. Medics provided whatever care they could, and teachers set up classes on climate science and the history of nonviolent resistance for the kids. Each night an emcee announced new activities and what had showed up in the lost and found. Donations of tents, sleeping bags, food, clothing, medical supplies, books, and solar generators were dispersed from a central distribution point on Seventh Street, and demonstrators swapped out of the frontline blockades every five hours, pushing nervous police farther back as a dense wall of people wearing masks, goggles, shields, and other improvised armor inched across Fifteenth Street and up the hill toward the Washington Monument. Crews were jackhammering apart the streets, planting even more trees in the soil below. Finally, police caught on and stopped any flatbed truck with a mature tree on it, but at this point the concert’s landscape artist, a Lakota Blue Band from North Dakota, had transformed key intersections into miniature forests. For example, Fourth Street, between the National Air and Space Museum and the National Museum of the American Indian, had been commandeered by a dense copse of maples, dogwoods, and tulip trees, like a sprite-land set for A Midsummer Night’s Dream had grown straight out of the tenderized asphalt. The crowd, for days drifting like steam, began to coalesce and, having gained power, drive an unseen engine. Police with sniper rifles watched from the rooftops.
The mayor and DHS debated what to do. They had the protestors hemmed in and there hadn’t been a single report of violence. There were also a lot of children in the crowd, as Media Relations had made sure to circulate images of kids playing in the grass, the rain, in and around the legs of police. As many as ten million people were watching on their VR sets, taking tours through the camp, communicating with occupiers, and watching the daycare, preschool, and elementary classes learn about the carbon cycle. This was a calculated risk deemed vital by Morris, Young, and Yudong: to encourage people to bring and keep their children there. It gave authorities, especially the mayor, pause. This situation had to be resolved peacefully. These were not alt-right lunatics in Viking gear storming the Capitol Rotunda. There were kids in reading circles by day and folk singers crooning onstage at night. “It would be better if they were rioting,” the mayor grumbled to an aide.
In a holo-conference, President Love remained utterly unconcerned. He had bigger fish to fry (like China’s increasingly unhinged president; like the AWOL Mars mission), and cute actions like this tended to burn themselves out. Forging his political career through the Democratic Party, he had particular disdain for lefty agitators who couldn’t organize a barbecue. Let their trash pile up and the porta-pots overflow. He would finish his Asia tour, and if they were still there by the time he got back, he’d start choking them out with vomit gas.
Logan Dougall came from North Carolina, where he’d lived for two years on an anarchist commune scavenging his own food and stitching old clothing back together, no plumbing or electricity. When he hitchhiked into town for provisions, the driver told him what was happening in D.C. He decided he was sick of the commune anyway and kept on hitching north. Bridget Zeckhauser bought a ticket out of Juneau, Alaska, where she’d spent a decade studying the fate of the northern sea otter. She’d been drowning in a lot of despair lately, and when she saw Morris take the stage for that speech, she had a real “Fuck it” moment, packed her sleeping bag and tent and was in D.C. eighteen hours later. Walt Pasquina’s younger sister refused to leave. They argued about it for a day and a night, but she was not only smarter than him, he realized, but way more stubborn. He called their parents and told them what the deal was, Kelly was being a pain. “She was born a pain,” their mom said, totally unsurprised that her daughter wanted to get herself fully wrapped up in all this. Walt told his mom he’d stay and at least make sure Kelly was safe and things remained orderly and peaceful.
The Clean Energy Labor Coalition, much of its leadership under investigation, racketeering charges in the works, had to cling to the right side of the law, even as many of its members, educated in the strike and agitation, saw the D.C. action and began to deliver cash, supplies, and bodies. CELC members formed the bulk of the construction crews and got to work dealing with what organizers knew would be the key issue: waste disposal. Bathrooms in nearby buildings were quickly seized and treated as the occupation’s most vital treasure; the sanitation team cleaned the portable toilets and showers every hour, the refuse pumped into either nearby sewers or sanitation trucks, trash minimized, collected, recycled, and repurposed whenever possible.
Morris opened a line of communication with the mayor’s office to assure the city that the occupation would do everything it could to keep the crowd nonviolent and nondestructive. They would police their own. Would-be looters, provocateurs, and other troublemakers would be expelled by the Blue Bands. Though everyone is welcome, it is a privilege to be a part of this, the AI warned any incoming insurrectionists. The rule of law will prevail within these new borders of freedom. In other words, don’t smash a Starbucks window, jackass, or you will be forced to leave. Like Gandhi’s satyagrahas, the Blue Bands formed the point of the spear for an army of warriors whose strength was not to fight. They brought a militarized discipline to the operation. Though she often talked the talk, Kate Morris had no patience for horizontal structures or autonomous self-organization. Leaderlessness was for the birds. She only intended to offer people the fiction that they were in the arms of an organic movement. But she needed more enforcers, so her people found a kid named Dougall from North Carolina, a sea otter scientist all the way from Alaska, and a Marine from Maryland. After brief interviews and background checks, she offered them blue armbands with tracking chips sewn into the fabric.
The crowd bloomed out into the core of the city, one day unfurling another petal into Fourteenth Street, engulfing the Department of Commerce, the next plunging down the throat of Twelfth Street and Independence until the Department of Agriculture was swamped by tents and tarps. The next day an estimated four thousand people arrived, colonizing most of the hill around the Washington Monument. The police had no capacity to push back. Their drones kept flying in the wrong directions, swamped by some sophisticated computer virus. Their cyber units understood they’d been hacked, their networks still disrupted by a relentless machine learning algorithm. FaceRec tech was getting its lunch eaten by masks, hats, and T-shirts designed to scramble the software and turn all face ID data to bunk.
DHS was furious at D.C. Metro’s incompetence and various turf battles ensued in the back rooms of city services. Meanwhile, the National Guard was called in, but they quickly found themselves busy elsewhere. Two weeks into the siege, as more and more resisters quit their semesters or left their jobs, micro-occupations were springing up in L’Enfant Plaza and Benjamin Banneker Park; in Dupont and Logan Circles; at Howard University and the Zoological Park; on the George Washington Memorial Parkway, as protestors tried to shut down traffic to Reagan National Airport with a snake march. Seven hundred people walking against traffic required the full attention of the Guard, who fired tear gas into the crowd, kettled the mass of people into manageable chunks, twisted arms, slammed bodies into hoods, arrested freely. Liza Yudong’s AI had nothing to do with this, but people took its lessons and ventured out into the city to snarl traffic, get themselves arrested, and keep the Guard busy and away from the main encampment. Early in their planning, Kate had explained to her old friend Liza what she wanted: “We clog the jails, overwhelm their capacity to arrest their way out of this. We don’t want chaos or destruction, we want befuddlement. Head-scratching.”
Now Yudong’s AI continued its dance with law enforcement, allocating bodies, swarming a given area of the city. Mass arrests were like swatting at a cloud of gnats: maybe you dizzied a few, but they recovered as quickly as they dispersed. Meanwhile, the executive committee threw up a digital map of the city on the wall of their command center and, after consulting the AI, ordered all new arrivals to find space on Upper Senate Park, just north of the Capitol. It was a risky annexation, but that afternoon they poured nearly fifteen hundred bodies across the streets, jamming all movement outside the Russell Senate Office Building. Most members of Congress had already left the city. The next day, the Secret Service erected a razor-wire fence around the White House and Capitol. President Love, back from Asia, was rerouted to Camp David.
“How the fuck did it get this out of hand?” he demanded. When his advisors began whimpering excuses, he knew they were not sufficiently fearful of him. He had experienced this kind of disrespect in the military. What he’d done about it was, the first time someone coughed “queer” at him, he put that guy on the ground and beat his ear until it was cauliflower with 70 percent hearing loss.
Huddled with his cabinet via a secure VR link, Love wondered why they couldn’t send a six-pack of horror drones down there firing tear gas and rubber bullets. Dallas was too fresh in everyone’s mind, his cabinet warned. There were children. “We should be forceful but careful,” Secretary of Defense Caperno warned. “Right now this is peaceful and contained. There is no predicting what would happen if we act rashly.”
“Is it contained?” Love scoffed. “Because when I first checked in, a few snowflakes were roasting marshmallows and now these animals have surrounded half the city.”
“We need a place to put the arrested following any action,” the secretary of defense went on, and she suggested RFK Stadium, a ghostly and dilapidated urban sore that Nixon had used to respond to the May Day Tribe protestors who’d attempted to shut down the district over the Vietnam War.
“That was less than eight thousand people,” Love’s chief of staff noted. “There are nearly ten times that many right now on the Mall alone. Maybe a quarter of a million in the city at large.”
Caperno suggested building a series of floating internment facilities off the shore of Annapolis, similar to what the Europeans had done to house refugees in the Mediterranean: Extrajudicial spaces where they could let the movement’s leadership rot for a year or so in legal limbo under PRIRA. DHS was already preparing floating prisons in the Caribbean as Haiti faced famine and its people tried to make a run for Florida. It wouldn’t be too difficult to redirect some of that budget and infrastructure toward the waters off Annapolis. Love, grinding a pen cap between his molars, eager to get a few vodka tonics in him, told them to go ahead. They added a short provision to the executive order allowing Xuritas units to join the peacekeeping forces.
And still they came.
From every state in the Union, from overseas, from disappearing islands in the Pacific most Americans hadn’t even heard of. A grocery store clerk from New Mexico, an electrician from Vermont, a prep school student from D.C. whose mother happened to be a Supreme Court justice.
“Why are you here?” a CNN reporter asked him.
“I don’t understand why everyone isn’t here,” he told her. A gas mask dangled from his hip and his shirt read FIGHT BACK. “I’m here because we have nothing left to lose. Win now or die.”
Letitia Hamilton was eleven years old and homeless. She’d been in foster care most of her life until she decided what was going on in the home where she was staying was “hazardous to my health,” as she told a white lady with butterfly tattoos on her arms. Living on the streets for two years with a subterranean class of children who inhabited the shadows in the capital of the richest, most powerful country in the world, Letitia learned many ways of getting by. Not just how to sleep and eat but how to be fleet of foot, to trust no one, and how to con people into doing things for her. For a few months, she’d been living in an empty condo, having figured out the code to the Realtor’s lockbox. She went in at night and came out in the morning before any potential showings. When she saw what was happening on the Mall, though, she packed up. It didn’t all make sense to her. The intricacies of climate, inequality, and geopolitics had not been in any of the TV shows, video games, or VR worldes she’d experienced in her brief interactions with those formats. What she did know was that people were pissed off, the world was mean and shitty, and now a bunch of them were getting together to do something about it. She told the woman at the intake that she and her mom wanted a tent. The white lady gave her the tent, but Bridget from Alaska with the butterfly tattoos knew what was up, because she kept coming by to check on her. Not that Letitia needed it. Unlike the adults, she could move anywhere she wanted, flow between worlds with ease. She slipped outside the borders of the occupation, overheard what the police were telling each other, and ran back to whisper it to somebody with a blue armband. She helped make the coffee every morning. (She loved coffee, had been drinking it since she was eight.) People got to know her in the camp. They thought they were looking out for her, but they had it wrong: She was looking out for them. It was funny, she’d always thought of the place she laid her head as somewhere she had to stay. Never permanent. Never to become attached to. And yet her little one-person tent in the dead center of the National Mall, boxed in at this point by seventy-five thousand other people, damn if this didn’t feel very much like home.
At first there was a show every night. A musician singing a few acoustic tunes, a stand-up comedian performing, an actor, author, or activist giving a quick speech. Haydukai rolled back through for a set. A former vice president, an ex-senator, and a few other former lawmakers arrived to show their encouragement. Tracy Aamanzaihou planned to speak, but then the White House called. After careful consideration, ashamed of her cowardice, she decided against it. There were dances in which people conscripted large parts of the lawn to shake out their tension and wring out some joy. Someone had erected a pink and purple bouncy castle for the kids. This was right beside the fencing and razor wire D.C. Police used to garrison the Capitol Building, and the images zipped across the planet: All these children slamming into pillowed walls with militarized police watching behind barbed wire. They tried to keep booze and hard drugs out, but obviously people did what people do. There was a lot of hooking up in tents and tipis. In the middle of each and every night, somewhere in the huge swath of territory they’d annexed, there would be the grunts of fresh sex, stifled (or not so stifled) cries of orgasms. Human beings and all.
