Crooked Little Vein

“—yeah. I know. I do that sometimes. No. Not sending a probe to Mars. Though if I did it would rock and would almost certainly drop a base on the moon on its way. But no. What I’m doing in here is changing the nature of democracy. Did you ever read science fiction novels?”

“Not really.”

He gave me a sour look out of the corner of his eye. “No kidding. Well, see, this seriously cool guy called Alfred Bester wrote a novel in the 1950s and I’m not going to get into it way deep except for there’s this bit at the end where the guy in the novel has gotten hold of this stuff called PyrE, which I guess could be pronounced pyr-ee because the e is like a capital letter? And this stuff is thermonuclear explosive that can be detonated by thought alone. Like you could stash it someplace and then just think at it and it’d go off. And what he does is, instead of keeping it for himself, he scatters it among the people of the world. Which is an awesome thing. Because not only does it put the ability to fight power in ultimate weapon-of-mass-destruction mutually-assured-destruction kinda terms, but it also means that the ability to destroy the world is in the hands of people rather than governments. You got a cell phone?”

“Yeah.”

“Is it the kind with the camera in?”

“Yeah.”

“Take it out.”

I fished my phone out of my pocket and showed it to him. Zack pointed at it. “PyrE.”

“No no no. Phone. Fff oh nnnn.”

He laughed and snatched it out of my hand. “Don’t be giving me that shit. You’re like a century out of date. You’re a technological Neanderthal. You make fire with sticks. And fuck chimps out on the savannah. Or maybe dinosaurs.”

My gag reflex convulsed.

Zack pulled out his own phone, something small and freaky-looking, and began ambidextrously operating both devices at once. “See, what these things do is put the ability to fight power in the hands of the people. And what denotes power, right now?”

“WMDs? Terrorist strikes? Shock and awe?”

“Old thinking, my brother. What’s the one thing Osama bin Laden does that touches everyone on the planet?”

“Kills three thousand people in my fucking city?”

“Dude. He makes a video. He’s made more videos than he’s committed acts of terrorism. He controls the message, he controls the media outlets who fall all over themselves to give airtime to fucking Satan, and he controls the Western governments who blow days and weeks on hunting through the runtime for hidden messages to decode and clues to decipher. When all he’s really doing is getting people to listen to what he’s saying. Some old shitbag in a cave with a camera, man. That’s the power. Getting the footage and getting it out.”

Down the goddamn rabbithole again. I pulled up a chair. “Can I smoke in here, Zack?”

“Sure you can. Have one of mine, in fact. Robbie? Robbie! Can you gank us an ashtray from the other room?”

One of Zack’s sticky-armpitted clones spoke in a wheedling tone that probably got him slapped around a lot in school. “We don’t got any ashtrays in the other room.”

“Jesus Christ, Robbie, I got a guest here. I need an ashtray.”

“Got pizza boxes.”

“Do any of the boxes still have pizza in them?”

“I think maybe Natalie didn’t have the last slice of three-cheese.”

“So that’s our ashtray. Go get it. I’m really sorry about this, Mike. These people here are total fucking geniuses, but social skills? Forget it. Where was I?”

“Zack, I have no clue. Something about Osama bin Laden and cameras.”

“Yes. Dude. It’s all there.” He passed me a cigarette, I tossed him the lighter. “The guy with the camera and the proximity to extraordinary information and the access to the media—that guy wins.”

He tossed me the lighter back, and I thought a moment as I lit up. “So this is about cell phones with cameras.”

“Right. People with the proximity to extraordinary information—that’s anybody who happens to share a location with a sudden event, right? It used to happen with camcorders, people taping cops beating guys up for no reason other than that it got them off. But the thing about camcorders is that it’s pretty easy to see you’re using them.” He held up his cell phone. “What am I doing right now? Am I reading a text message? An instant message? Trying to dial a number? Taking a photo of you? Shooting a video?” He angled the phone down. “Holding it like this, I’m not shooting a video. But I could be recording audio. And these phones are everywhere, Mike. They’re in Iraq.”

“Soldiers in Iraq have cell phones?” Robbie put half a pizza box on the desk Zack was at, and Zack tipped ash on the rotting slice of pizza in there, which had to be at least a week old.