01.Potholes and Streetlights

“There is always another pothole,” Paige said. It was meant to amuse Planet who knelt to pour the cold mix into the massive gash in the street directly in front of a hardware store’s parking lot. Planet often complained that the group needed new mottoes. This one was wearing thinner with every pothole they repaired. It was just too true.

It was not always potholes and streetlights to repair. Tonight, there would be a high speed escape.

Just as Planet raised her head to admonish Paige for her unfunny joke, she spotted the police cruiser a few blocks away. “Police,” she said.

“Seen us?”

“Turning around.”

Paige peered over the hood of the van. Sure enough, the cruiser had turned around and lit its searchlight. Paige darted to the window of the hardware store and knocked three times. Planet tamped the cold mix and threw the tools back into the van. Paige slammed the van’s rear doors. Then she and Planet took off down the alley. PJ and Bitburg would exit out the back of the store. They’d be safe. Paige didn’t turn around. She heard Planet’s breath right behind her.

They didn’t have to run far. They’d stowed their scooters — flat black, off-road models — behind the building, in front of the wall and its spray-painted question: “Where is Stacie?” In seconds, they were on the machines and racing away.

The group had bailed out of a mission before but never with such haste. They’d also panicked before but never about so immediate a threat. So they followed standard procedure — separate and get safe.

This was Long Beach and it wasn’t difficult to get lost from anyone who might be watching. Paige and Planet rode down a couple of the cluttered streets side-by-side. As they emerged from the neighborhood streets to the more brightly-lit main corridors, Paige held her left hand out, thumb up. Planet clasped it with her right hand, thumb down, and the two separated, north and south.

The run down the alley and flee from their target had set her heart racing. She slowed down and turned off into another neighborhood. It wouldn’t take her long to navigate back to her apartment. She just had to stay safe.

The night’s mission had gone south quickly. Pothole repair was a favorite of the team’s. “An easy win,” PJ always said. Paige and Planet were to fill the hole while PJ and Bitburg did the networking. They’d done their research. The owner of the store had requested the city fill the hole five times over the last year. Research on this mission was Bitburg’s assignment and the reason he’d gone inside with PJ.

Paige and Planet had arrived first. They ditched their scooters behind the shop and quietly walked up the alley toward the front. PJ and Bitburg arrived soon after in the van — the cold mix concrete, shovels, and tamp were in the back. Paige and Planet went to work on the pothole while the guys went in the hardware store to convince the owner that the four young people in black masks were not a threat. Then the cop rolled past.

Separate and get safe.

Paige felt a vibration against her left leg in the security pocket of her scrubs. She knew she should keep riding but she had to know if it was an “all safe” from PJ. She found a dark street and pulled over. She withdrew the black device from her scrub pocket, pressed the side button combination, entered her safe phrase, and pressed her thumbs to the screen. Green text materialized in ripples across the front:

@pj: all safe

She locked the device, returned it to her pocket, and rode home. When they’d formed the Orderlies, they’d set a simple motto: “Don’t engage. Build.” That helped them develop their bailout strategy. They’d learned from others’ attempts that arguments led to entrenched positions. Their goal wasn’t to change minds but to connect people who wanted to build something.

In their loftier moments, that something was a new culture in which individuals could rely on each other rather than on the slow-moving bureaucracy of Grand Lodges more concerned with building football stadiums than with doing the work they had been assigned of maintaining infrastructure and protecting citizens.

But in the Orderlies’ practical moments, that something they built was the simple connection between individuals who couldn’t get help from the official services. It led to a lot of pothole and streetlight repairs. Los Angeles never lacked for those.

The advantage to Paige’s apartment — and the only reason she kept it — was the alleyway garage entrance. She pressed a button on the scooter’s dashboard that she called the “Dimmer” and the streetlights in the alley flickered and lowered. She silently rode halfway down the alley, pressed another button which raised her garage door, entered, and then re-lit all the street lights. Spending so much time repairing utilities for her neighbors had given her an intimate knowledge of the city’s electrical grid.

As the garage door closed behind her, she felt another buzz against her leg. Unlocking it, she saw the simple message:

@pj: debrief tomorrow 0951

9am. Location 51.

“Copy that,” she replied as the replies from the rest of the team also rippled across the screen.

Paige put the SubText — perhaps Bitburg’s cleverest tool — back in her security pocket. The black device was smaller than most mobile phones and did only one thing: communicated to the team via short-wave radio signals and wifi hopping. Its messages were impossible to read, and because it never pinged any grid, impossible to trace. Its range was extremely limited but that was the beauty of the tool — it worked precisely for the team’s needs. The complex handshake which activated it assured that no one but the owner could unlock it. Any other combination of the buttons turned on a home screen identical to millions of other mobile devices with apps that looked like they’d been freshly installed.

Paige hid her scooter in a closet behind the false wall at the back of her garage and pulled off her black scrubs and hung them there as well.

CULPEPPER

“We first look at the actions of the New York City Police Department last winter,” the individual standing at the head of the table said. “A police officer performed a chokehold on a man selling loose cigarettes, an offense because it circumvents tax law. The man died. The police officer was not indicted. Citizens protested. When the mayor made statements of sympathy with the protesters, the police ceased performing small arrests and delivering citations. In other words, the police stopped acting as tax collectors — the role in which they killed the man to begin the citizens’ protest.”

Doe continued, “It is the framing of the police’s action that is important: as a protest. In their own protest of their perceived lack of support from the mayor, the police proved the point of the citizen protests of the police — that they should not act as tax collectors.”

The six men and one woman seated around the table shifted at Doe’s pause.

“We can interpret this in various ways and most commentators have pointed to the NYPD’s obvious and intentional alienation from the population they are meant to protect and serve. However, I urge you to look at this differently: as a predictable function of power and institution.”

Outside the door to the room was a small plaque which in all capital letters read: CULPEPPER. Inside sat the seven in varying shades of dark suits. Standing before them delivering their presentation was Doe: slender with sharp features and short, straight, silver hair that fell to their chin and which they pushed back at regular intervals. They wore a white suit and shirt. Doe was dispassionate in their delivery. Behind them, their laptop’s screen projected simple slides from a presentation entitled “Power, Institutions, and Predictability.”

“A few months earlier, a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri shot a young, unarmed man to death. Before protests even began, police dispatched officers in riot gear, proving the point of the eventual protesters: that the police dealt with the citizenry with force rather than humanity.”

Doe gestured to the screen behind them which changed to show another scene.

“Let us also examine two disparate cases:

“In a case you might have missed — called ‘Otaku-contra’ on the internet — throughout the summer and fall, women who criticized the video game industry as sexist were harassed, doxed, and threatened. Those harassing the women not only proved the points of the critics but also raised awareness of the issue of misogyny in the video game industry to thousands, perhaps millions of individuals sympathetic to the women. Millions who were not previously aware of the issue.

“Late in the year, Hyundai American Movie Pictures was hacked and threatened against releasing a movie critical of North Korea. Allegedly, the hack originated in North Korea. The resulting publicity guaranteed that the film became more popular than it would have become had it seen a regular release. But it also showed that the satirical criticisms of the film were accurate. North Korea was a petty and insecure dictatorship.”

Doe let their statements sink in.

“I wish to impart to you that while these consequences of countering protests may have been unintended, they were not unpredictable. Institutions traditionally respond to critics in a manner that proves the critics correct.”

Long Beach

Jemma Paige stood wrapped in a towel in her bathroom. She’d stepped out of a hot shower when her SubText buzzed on the sink.

@bit: GM shot outside the great mansion at informal press greet

Paige stared at her SubText unsure what to make of the news. The black rectangle vibrated again.

@pj: DOA at hospital

@planet: assassination?

@bit: looks that way

Paige stood baffled longer than her team. Finally, she keyed in:

@paige: wtf?

@bit: @paige internet, girl. get the news.

Bitburg often teased Paige about her lack of connectedness. In this case, it seemed she had missed something significant.

@pj: expect they’ll swear in brennan any minute.

Paige walked into her living room and opened her laptop. She found the local news feed. A video showed the Great Mansion of the U:.A:.S:. surrounded by military vehicles. Text crawled along the bottom of the video feed:

Eye of Providence Agents take suspect into custody. Senior Warden Stephen Brennan expected to take oath in the Square Office within the hour.