Distraction.

Bruce Sterling.

1.

For the fifty-first time (according to his laptop), Oscar studied the riot video from Worcester. This eight-minute chunk of jerky footage was Oscar's current favorite object of professional meditation. It was a set of grainy photos, taken by a security camera in Massachu-setts.

The press called this event "the Worcester riot of May Day '42." This May Day event did not deserve the term "riot" in Oscar's professional opinion, because al-though it was extremely destructive, there was nothing ri-otous about it.

The first security shots showed a typical Massachu-setts street crowd, people walking the street. Worcester was traditionally a rather tough and ugly town, but like many areas in the old industrial Northeast, Worcester had been rather picking up lately. Nobody in the crowd showed any signs of aggression or rage. Certainly nothing was going on that would provoke the attention of the authorities and their various forms of machine surveillance. Just normal people shopping, strolling. A line of bank customers doing business with a debit-card machine. A bus taking on and disgorging its passengers.

Then, bit by bit, the street crowd became denser. There were more people in motion. And, although it was by no means easy to notice, more and more of these people were carrying valises, or knapsacks, or big jumbo-sized purses.

Oscar knew very well that these very normal-looking people were linked in conspiracy. The thing that truly roused his admiration was the absolute brilliance of the way they were dressed, the utter dullness and nonchalance of their comportment. They were definitely not natives of Worcester, Massachusetts, but each and every one was a cunning distillation of the public image of Worcester. They were all deliberate plants and ringers, but they were uncannily brilliant forger-ies, strangers bent on destruction who were almost impossible to no-tice.

They didn't fit any known demographic profile of a trouble-maker, or a criminal, or a violent radical. Any security measure that would have excluded them would have excluded everyone in town.

Oscar assumed that they were all radical proles. Dissidents, autonomen, gypsies, leisure-union people. This was a reasonable as-sumption, since a quarter of the American population no longer had jobs. More than half of the people in modern America had given up on formal employment. The modern economy no longer generated many commercial roles that could occupy the time of people.

With millions of people structurally uprooted, there wasn't any lack of recruiting material for cults, prole gangs, and street mobs. Big mobs were common enough nowadays, but this May Day organization was not a mob. They weren't a standard street gang or militia either. Because they weren't saluting one another. There were no visible or-ders given or taken, no colors or hand signs, no visible hierarchy. They showed no signs of mutual recognition at all.

In fact-Oscar had concluded this only after repeated close study of the tape-they weren't even aware of one another's existence as members of the same group. He further suspected that many of them-maybe most of them-didn't know what they were about to do.

Then, they all exploded into action. It was startling, even at the fifty-first viewing.

Smoke bombs went off, veiling the street in mist. Purses and valises and backpacks yawned open, and their owners removed and deployed a previously invisible arsenal of drills, and bolt cutters, and pneumatic jacks. They marched through the puffing smoke and set to their work as if they demolished banks every day.

A brown van ambled by, a van that bore no license plates. As it drove down the street every other vehicle stopped dead. None of those vehicles would ever move again, because their circuits had just been stripped by a high-frequency magnetic pulse, which, not coinci-dentally, had ruined all the financial hardware within the bank.

The brown van departed, never to return. It was shortly replaced by a large, official-looking, hook-wielding tow truck. The tow truck bumped daintily over the pavement, hooked itself to the automatic teller machine, and yanked the entire armored machine from the wall in a cascade of broken bricks. Two random passersby deftly lashed the teller machine down with bungee cords. The tow truck then thought-fully picked up a parked limousine belonging to a bank officer, and departed with that as well. At this point, the arm of a young man appeared in close-up. A strong brown hand depressed a button, and a can sprayed the lens of the security camera with paint. That was the end of the recorded surveillance footage. But it hadn't been the end of the attack. The attackers hadn't simply robbed the bank. They had carried off everything portable, including the security cameras, the carpets, the chairs, and the light and plumbing fixtures. The conspirators had deliberately punished the bank, for reasons best known to themselves, or to their unknown controllers. They had superglued doors and shattered windows, sev-ered power and communications cables, poured stinking toxins into the wallspaces, concreted all the sinks and drains. In eight minutes, sixty people had ruined the building so thoroughly that it had to be condemned and later demolished.

The ensuing criminal investigation had not managed to appre-hend, convict, or even identify a single one of the "rioters." Once fuller attention had been paid to the Worcester bank, a number of grave financial irregularities had surfaced. The scandal eventually led to the resignation of three Massachusetts state representatives and the jailing of four bank executives and the mayor of Worcester. The Worcester banking scandal had become a major issue in the ensuing U.S. Senate campaign.

This event was clearly significant. It had required organization, observation, decision, execution. It was a gesture of brutal authority from some very novel locus of power. Someone had done all this with meticulous purpose and intent, but how? How did they compel the loyalty of those agents? How did they recruit them, train them, dress them, pay them, transport them? And-most amazing of all-how did they compel their silence, afterward?

Oscar Valparaiso had once imagined politics as a chess game. His kind of chess game. Pawns, knights, and queens, powers and strategies, ranks and files, black squares and white squares. Studying this tape had cured him of that metaphor. Because this phenomenon on the tape was not a chess piece. It was there on the public chessboard all right, but it wasn't a rook or a bishop. It was a wet squid, a swarm of bees. It was a new entity that pursued its own orthogonal agenda, and van-ished into the silent interstices of a deeply networked and increasingly nonlinear society.

Oscar sighed, shut his laptop, and looked down the length of the bus. His campaign staffers had been living inside a bus for thirteen weeks, in a slowly rising tide of road garbage. They were victorious now, decompressing from the heroic campaign struggle. Alcott Bambakias, their former patron, was the new U.S. Senator-elect from Massachusetts. Oscar had won his victory. The Bambakias campaign had been folded up, and sent away.

And yet, twelve staffers still dwelled inside the Senator's bus. They were snoring in their fold-down bunks, playing poker on the flip-out tables, trampling big promiscuous heaps of road laundry. On occasion, they numbly rifled the cabinets for snacks.

Oscar's sleeve rang. He reached inside it, retrieved a fabric tele-phone, and absently flopped his phone back into shape. He spoke into the mouthpiece. "Okay, Fontenot."

"You wanna make it to the science lab tonight?" said Fontenot.

"That would be good."

"How much is it worth to you? We've got a roadblock prob-lem."

"They're shaking us down, is that it?" said Oscar, his brow creas-ing beneath his immaculate hair. "They want a bribe, straight across? Is it really that simple?"

"Nothing is ever simple anymore," said Fontenot. The cam-paign's security man wasn't attempting world-weary sarcasm. He was relating a modern fact of life. "This isn't like our other little roadblock hassles. This is the United States Air Force."

Oscar considered this novel piece of information. It didn't sound at all promising. "Why, exactly, is the Air Force blockading a federal highway?"

"Folks have always done things differently here in Louisiana," Fontenot offered. Through the phone's flimsy earpiece, a distant background of car honks rose to a crescendo. "Oscar, I think you need to come see this. I know Louisiana, I was born and raised here, but I just don't have the words to describe all this."

"Very good," Oscar said. "I'll be right there." He stuffed the phone in his sleeve. He'd known Fontenot for over a year, and had never heard such an invitation from him. Fontenot never invited other people out to share the professional risks he took; to do that countered every instinct in a bodyguard. Oscar didn't have to be asked twice.

Oscar set his laptop aside and stood up to confront his entourage.

"People, listen to me, here's the deal! We have another little roadblock problem ahead." Dismal groans. "Fontenot is on the situation for us. Jimmy, turn on the alarms."

The driver pulled off the road and activated the bus's inbuilt defenses. Oscar gazed briefly at the window. Actually, the campaign bus had no windows. Seen from outside, the bus was a solid shell. Its large internal "windows" were panel screen displays, hooked to exter-nal cameras that scoped out their surroundings with pitiless intensity. The Bambakias campaign bus habitually videotaped everything that it perceived. When pressed, the bus also recorded and cataloged every-thing that it saw, exporting the data by satellite relay to an archival safe house deep in the Rocky Mountains. Alcott Bambakias's campaign bus had been designed and built to be that kind of vehicle.

At the moment, their bus was passively observing two tall green walls of murky pines, and a line of slumping fence posts with corroded barbed wire. They were parked on Interstate Highway 10, ten miles beyond the eldritch postindustrial settlement of Sulphur, Louisiana. Sulphur had attracted a lot of bemused attention from the krewe of staffers as their campaign bus flitted through town. In the curdled fog of winter, the Cajun town seemed to be one giant oil refinery, mea-sled all over with tattered grass shacks and dented trailer homes.

Now the fog had lifted, and on the far side of Sulphur the pass-ing traffic was light.

"I'm going out," Oscar announced, "to assess the local situa-tion." Donna, his image consultant, brought Oscar a dress shirt. Oscar accepted silk braces, his dress hat, and his Milanese trench coat.

As the stylist ministered to his shoes, Oscar gazed meditatively upon his krewe. Action and fresh air might improve their morale. "Who wants to do some face-time with the U.S. Air Force?"

Jimmy de Paulo leaped from the drivjJer's seat. "Hey, man, I'll go!"

"Jimmy," Oscar said gently, "you can't. We need you to drive this bus."

"Oh yeah," said Jimmy, collapsing crestfallen back into his seat. Moira Matarazzo sat up reluctantly in her bunk. "Is there some reason I should go?" This was Moira's first extensive period off-camera, after months as the campaign's media spokeswoman. The nor-mally meticulous Moira now sported a ratted mess of hair, chapped lips, furry eyebrows, wrinkled cotton pajamas. The evil glitter under her champagne-puffed eyelids could have scared a water moccasin. "Because I will go if it's required, but I don't really see why I should," Moira whined. "Roadblocks can be dangerous."

"Then you should definitely go." This was Bob Argow, the campaign's systems administrator. Bob's level tone made it icily clear that he was nearing the point of emotional detonation. Bob had been drinking steadily ever since the Boston victory celebration. He'd be-gun his drinking in joyous relief, and as the miles rolled on and the bottles methodically emptied, Bob had plunged into classic post-traumatic depression.

"I'll go with you, Mr. Valparaiso," Norman-the-Intern piped up. As usual, everyone ignored Norman.

The twelve staffers were still officially on salary, mopping up the last of Bambakias's soft campaign money. Officially, they were all tak-ing a richly deserved "vacation." This was a typically generous gesture by Alcott Bambakias, but it was also a situation specifically arranged to gently part the campaign krewe from the vicinity of the new Senator-elect. Back in his ultramodern Cambridge HQ, the charismatic bil-lionaire was busily assembling an entirely new krewe, the Washington staff that would help him to govern. After months of frenzied team labor and daunting personal sacrifice, the campaigners had been blown off with a check and a hearty handshake.

Oscar Valparaiso had been Bambakias's chief political consultant. He had also been the campaign's Executive Director. From the spoils of victory, Oscar had swiftly won himself a new assignment. Thanks to rapid backstage string-pulling, Oscar had become a brand-new pol-icy analyst for the U.S. Senate Science Committee. Senator Bambakias would soon be serving on that committee.

Oscar possessed goals, a mission, options, tactics, and a future. The other campaign staffers lacked all these things. Oscar knew this. He knew all of these people only too well. During the past eighteen months, Oscar had recruited them, assembled them, paid them, man-aged them, flattered and cajoled them, welded them into a working unit. He'd rented their office space, overlooked their expense ac-counts, given them job titles, managed their access to the candidate, even mediated over substance-abuse problems and romantic entangle-ments. Finally, he'd led them all to victory. Oscar was still a locus of power, so his krewe was instinctively migrating in his wake. They were "on vacation," professional political operatives hoping for something to turn up. But the esprit de corps in Oscar's entourage had all the tensile strength of a fortune cookie. Oscar fetched his oxblood-leather shoulder satchel and, after ma-ture consideration, tucked in a small nonlethal spraygun. Yosh Pelica-nos, Oscar's majordomo and bagman, passed him a fat debit card. Pelicanos was visibly tired, and still somewhat hungover from the pro-longed celebration, but he was up and alert. As Oscar's official second-in-command, Pelicanos always made it a point to be publicly counted on.

''I'll go with you," Pelicanos muttered, hunting for his hat. "Let me get properly dressed."

"You stay, Yosh," Oscar told him quietly. "We're a long way from home. You keep an eye peeled back here."

"I'll get a coffee." Pelicanos yawned, and reflexively clicked on a satellite news feed, erasing a bus window in a gush of networked data. He began hunting for his shoes.

" I'll go with you!" Norman insisted brightly. "C'mon, Oscar, let me go!" Norman-the-Intern was the campaign's last remaining gofer. The busy Bambakias campaign had once boasted a full three dozen interns, but all of the campaign's other unpaid volunteers had stayed behind in Boston. Norman-the-Intern, however, an MIT col-lege lad, had stuck around like a burr, laboring fanatically and absorb-ing inhuman levels of abuse. The campaign krewe had brought Norman along with them "on vacation," more through habit than through any conscious decision.

The door opened with a harsh pneumatic pop. Oscar and Norman stepped outside their bus for the first time in four states. After hundreds of hours inside their vehicle, stepping onto earth was like decamping onto another planet. Oscar noted with vague surprise that the highway's patchy shoulders were paved with tons of crunchy oyster shells.

The tall roadside ditchweed was wind-flattened and brownish green. The wind came from the east, bearing the reek of distant Sulphur-a bioindustrial reek. A stink like a monster gene-spliced brewery: like rabid bread yeasts eating new-mowed grass. A white V of departing egrets stenciled the cloudy sky overhead. It was late No-vember 2044, and southwest Louisiana was making halfhearted prepa-rations for winter. Clearly this wasn't the kind of winter that anyone from Massachusetts would recognize.

Norman alertly fetched a motorbike from the rack on the back of the bus. The bikes were designed and sold in Cambridge, Massa-chusetts, and were covered with union labels, antilitigation safety warnings, and software cheatsheet stickers. It was very typical of Bambakias to buy motor bicycles with more onboard smarts than a transcontinental airliner.

Norman hooked up the sidecar, and checked the battery. "No hotdogging," Oscar warned him, clambering into the sidecar and placing his hat in his lap. They tugged on dainty foam helmets, then pulled onto the highway behind a passing electric flatbed.

Norman, as always, drove like a maniac. Norman was young. He had never ridden any motorized device that lacked onboard steering and balance systems. He rode the motorbike with intense lack of phys-ical grace, as if trying to do algebra with his legs.

Dusk began to settle gently over the pines. Traffic was backed up for two kilometers on the east side of the Sabine River bridge. Oscar and Norman buzzed up along the road shoulder, the smart bike and sidecar scrunching over the oyster shells with oozy cybernetic ease. The people trapped within the stalled traffic looked stoic and resigned. The big road professionals-eerie-looking biochemical tankers and big, grimy, malodorous seafood trucks-were already turning and leaving. Roadblocks were a sadly common business these days.

The state of Louisiana's office of tourism maintained a roadside hospitality depot, perched at the riverside just at the state border. The tourist HQ was a touchingly ugly structure of faux-antebellum brick and white columns.

The building had been surrounded with fresh, razor-edged con-certina wire. The highway into Texas was thoroughly blockaded with sentry boxes, striped barriers, and nonlethal clusters of glue mines and foam mines. A huge matte-black military helicopter perched on its skids at the side of the highway, mechanically attentive and deeply bizarre. The black copter lit the tarmac with searing bluish spotlights. The colossal machine was armed to the teeth with great skeletal masses of U.S. Air Force weaponry. The ancient air-to-ground weapons were so insanely complex and archaic that their function was a complete mystery to Oscar. Were they Gatling flechettes? Particle accelerators? Rayguns of some kind, maybe? They were like some nightmare mix of lamprey fangs and sewing machines. Within the brilliant frame of helicopter glare, small squads of blue-uniformed Air Force personnel were stopping and confronting the cars attempting to leave Louisiana. The people within the cars, mostly Texan tourists, seemed suitably cowed.

The Air Force people were engaged in an elaborate roadblock shakedown. They were pulling white boxes out of refrigerated trishaws, and confronting travelers with their contents.

Norman-the-Intern was an engineering student. He tore his fas-cinated gaze from the copters' appalling weaponry. "I thought this was gonna be a party roadblock, more like those cool gypsy bikers back in Tennessee," Norman observed. "Maybe we'd better just get out of here."

"There's Fontenot," Oscar parried.

Fontenot waved them over. His advance vehicle, a sturdy all-terrain electric hummer, was straddling the roadside ditch. The cam-paign security manager wore a long yellow slicker and muddy jeans.

It was always reassuring to see Fontenot. Fontenot was a former Secret Service agent, a security veteran of presidential caliber. Fonte-not knew American Presidents personally. In fact, he had been serving as bodyguard to an ex-President when he had lost his left leg.

"The Air Force flew in around noon," Fontenot informed them, leaning on the padded bumper of his hummer and lowering his binoc-ulars. "Got their glue bombs down, and some crowd-foamers. Plus the sawhorses and the tanglewire."

"So at least they didn't destroy the roadbed?" Norman said. Fontenot cordially ignored Norman. "They're letting the lane from Texas through with no problems, and they're waving everybody with Louisiana plates right through. There's been no resistance. They're shaking down the out-of-staters as they leave."

"I suppose that makes sense," Oscar said. He put his helmet aside, adjusted his hair with a pocket comb, and donned his hat. Then stepped carefully out of the bike's sidecar, trying not to dirty his shoes. The Louisiana bank of the Sabine was essentially a gigantic marsh.

"Why are they doing this?" Norman said.

"They need the money," Fontenot told him.

"What?" Norman said. "The Air Force?"

"Got no federal funding to pay their power bills at the local air base. Either they pony up, or the utility cuts 'em off."

"The continuing Emergency," Oscar concluded.

Fontenot nodded. "The feds have wanted to decommission that air base for years, but Louisiana's real mulish about it. So Congress wrote 'em out of the Emergency resolutions last March. Kinda dropped a whole air base right through the cracks."

"That's bad. That's really bad. That's terrible!" Norman said. "Why can't Congress just have a straight-up vote on the issue? I mean, how hard can it be to close down a military base?"

Fontenot and Oscar exchanged meaningful glances.

"Norman, you had better stay here and mind our vehicles," Os-car said kindly. "Mr. Fontenot and I need a few words with these military gentlemen."

Oscar joined Fontenot as the ex-Secret Service agent limped up the long line of traffic. They were soon out of Norman's earshot. It felt pleasant to be strolling slowly in the open air, where technical eavesdropping was unlikely. Oscar always enjoyed his best conversa-tions when outside of machine surveillance.

"We could just pay them off, y'know," Fontenot said mildly. "It's not the first time we've seen a roadblock."

"I don't suppose it's remotely possible that these soldiers might shoot us?"

"Oh no, the Air Force won't shoot us." Fontenot shrugged. "It's nonlethal deployment and all that. It's all political."

"There are circumstances where I would have paid them off," Oscar said.

"If we'd lost that campaign, for instance. But we didn't lose. We won. The Senator's in power now. So now, it's the princi-ple."

Fontenot removed his hat, wiped the permanent hat-crease in his forehead, and put the hat back on. "There's another option. I've mapped us an alternate route. We can back off, head north up High-way 109, and still make that lab in Buna by midnight. Save a lot of risk and trouble all around."

"Good idea," Oscar told him, "but let's have a look anyway. I think I can smell an issue here. The Senator always likes issues." Peo-ple were glaring at the two of them from within the stalled cars. Fontenot was easily passing for a native, but Oscar was drawing resent-ful and curious stares. Very few people in southwest Louisiana dressed like Beltway political operatives.

"It's a big stinkin' issue all right," Fontenot agreed.

"This local Governor is a real character, isn't he? A stunt like this . . . There must be better ways for a state politician to provoke the feds."

"Green Huey is crazy. But he's the people's kind of crazy, these days. The State of Emergency, the budget crisis-it's no joke down here. People really resent it."

They stopped near the searing glare of the copter lights. An Air Force lieutenant was addressing a pair of day tripping Texan civilians through the open window of the couple's car. The lieutenant was a young woman: she wore a padded blue flight suit, a body-armor vest, and an elaborate flight helmet. The helmet's screen-crowded interior was busily ticking and flashing as it hung from her webbing belt.

The Texan man looked up at her cautiously, through the driver's window. "It's what?" he said.

"An Air Force bake sale, sir. Louisiana bake sale. We got your corn bread, your muffuleta bread, croissants, beignets. . . . Maybe some chicory coffee? Ted, we got any of that chicory coffee left?"

"Just made us a fresh carafe," Ted announced loudly, opening the steaming lid of his rickshaw. Ted was heavily armed.

"What do you think?" said the driver to his wife.

"Beignets always get powdered sugar over everything," the Texan woman said indistinctly.

"How much for, uhm, four croissants and two coffees? With cream?" The lieutenant muttered a canned spiel about "voluntary contri-butions." The driver retrieved his wallet and silently passed over a debit card. The lieutenant swiftly slotted the card through a cellular reader, relieving the couple of a hefty sum. Then she passed the food through their window.

"Y'all take care now," she said, waving them on.

The couple drove away, accelerating rapidly once their car had cleared the line of fire. The lieutenant consulted a handheld readout, and waved through the next three cars, which all bore Louisiana plates. Then she pounced on another tourist.

Fontenot and Oscar edged past the blazing glare of the chopper and made their way toward the commandeered hospitality post. Chest-high tanglewire surrounded the building in a mesh of bright feather-weight razors. Sheets of foil and duct tape blacked the building's windows. Military satellite antennas the size of monster birdbaths had been punched through the roof An armed guard stood at the door.

The guard stopped them. The kid's military-police uniform was oddly rumpled-apparendy dug from the bottom of a mildewed duffel bag. The kid looked them over: a well-dressed politico accompa-nied by his krewe bodyguard. Certainly nothing unusual there. The young soldier scanned them with a detector wand, failing to notice Oscar's all-plastic spraygun, and then addressed himself to Oscar. "ID, Sir?"

Oscar passed over a gleaming dossier chip embossed with a fed-eral Senate seal.