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304 pages, Hardcover
First published March 19, 2019
“We want to help you people, let you get more out of your lives, give you more choices.”
What about the choice to jailbreak my things? She didn’t ask it.
“Honestly, I can’t understand your decision here.”
Choice is good, so long as I don’t choose not to help you? She didn’t say it.
“Can’t you see we want to help you?”
I can see that you want me to help you get more money from “people like me.”
She still didn’t say it.
This [personal] story always makes me cry a little bit. Two million people die of Aids every year. It never has the same effect.”…Doctorow’s story is a start.
The cops announced that LisasDad1990 had used Tor Browser extensively and had left behind no browser breadcrumbs, nor any records at AT&T's data centres. Inevitably, this set off a whole witch hunt over the “darkweb” and everyone wondering where the mystery man from the video had been “radicalized.”
There was another world, vast beyond her knowing, of people who didn't know her at all, but who held her life in their hands. The ones who thronged in demonstrations against refugees. The politicians who raged about the scourge of terrorists hidden among refugees, and the ones who talked in code about “assimilation” and “too much, too fast.” The soldiers and cops and guards who pointed guns at her, barked orders at her. The bureaucrats she never saw who rejected her paperwork for cryptic reasons she could only guess at, and the bureaucrats who looked her in the eye and rejected her paperwork and refused to explain themselves.
The American Eagle had seen a lot of man's inhumanity to man in various war zones across the decades, had even had to clean up after one of the “good guys” had lost his shit and done something not so good. But this affected him differently. This hadn't happened on a battlefield in the fog of war, this had happened in a little private parking lot in Staten Island in broad daylight, committed by a group of guys who could have stopped each other, but instead shouted “stop resisting” for the benefit of one another's body cams.
You know what happened next. Their insurer told Lacey that it was time for her to die now. If she wanted chemo and radiation or whatever, they'd pay it (reluctantly, and with great bureaucratic intransigence), but “experimental” therapies were not covered. Which, you know, OK, who wants to spend $1.5 mil on some charlatan's miracle-cure juice cleanse or crystal therapy? But adaptive cell transfer wasn't crystal healing and the NIH wasn't the local shaman.
Before The Event, Martin Mars spent a lot of time trying to game it out. Would the collapse be sudden, catching him off guard and unprepared, having to fight his way to his fortress as he escaped from Paradise Valley and into the desert hills? Or would there be some kind of sign, a steady uptick in civil disorder and failures from the official powers that counted down to the day, giving him a chance to plan an orderly withdrawal to Fort Doom?