Distraction - Bruce Sterling [196]
“Yes, Oscar, we know all that. We’re not blind. And I’m very unhappy about what the President did. I certainly don’t see why we have to imitate his radical, bully-boy tactics.”
“Greta, the President is imitating us. That is exactly what we did, right here. The President is doing it because you and I got away with doing it! You’re very popular because you did that, you’re famous. People think it’s exciting to seize power with prole gangs, and to throw all the rascals out. It’s a very slick move.”
Greta was very troubled. “Oh … Oh my God.”
“I admit, this isn’t great news for American democracy. In fact, it’s bad news. It’s terrible news. It might even be catastrophic news. But it’s wonderful news for the lab. This news means that we’re all much, much less likely to get arrested or indicted for what we’ve done here. You see? We’re going to get away with it. It’s a wonderful political gift from our chief protector and patron—the President. We’re home free! All we have to do from now on is change our shirt whenever the President changes his shirt. From now on, we have protective coloration. We’re no longer crazy radicals, on strike at a federal lab. We’re loyal citizens who are fully and mindfully engaged in the grand experiment of our President’s new social order. So from now on, that’s why we’re the War Committee.”
“But we can’t be the War Committee. We don’t have our own war.”
“Oh yes, we do.”
“No, we don’t.”
“Just wait.”
Two days later the President sent federal troops to Buna. The U.S. Army was finally responding to his orders, despite their deep institutional distaste for coercive violence against American citizens. Unfortunately, these soldiers were a marching battalion of Special Operations/Low-Intensity Conflict specialists.
The American military, at the historical tag end of traditional armed conflict, knew that they had entered an era where the pen truly was mightier than the sword. The sword just wasn’t much use in an epoch when battlefronts no longer existed and a standing army could be torn to shreds by cheap unmanned machinery.
So, the U.S. military had downgraded their swords and upgraded their pens. The President’s U.S. Army Seventy-sixth Infowar and Social Adjudication Battalion were basically social workers. They wore crisp white uniforms, and concentrated on language skills, disaster relief measures, stress counseling, light police work, and first aid. Half of them were women, none of them had firearms, and, as a final fillip, they had been ordered into action without any federal funding. In fact, they were already four months behind on their salaries. They’d had to sell their armored personnel carriers just to make ends meet.
The Collaboratory was now seriously overcrowded. Poaching and eating the rare animals became a commonplace misdemeanor. With a battalion of five hundred mooching soldier/psychoanalysts, plus their camp-follower media coverage, the long-suffering Collaboratory was seriously overloaded. The interior of the dome began to fog over with human breath.
To keep the newcomers usefully occupied, Oscar deputized the Infowar Battalion to psychologically besiege Huey’s loyalists, who were still stubbornly on strike, holed up in the Spinoffs building. They did this with a will. But the Collaboratory was beginning to resemble a giant subway.
The ideal solution was to build more shelter. The Moderators, in uneasy symbiosis with the feds, set up tents on the Collaboratory’s spare ground outside the dome. Oscar would have liked to build annexes to the Collaboratory. Bambakias’s emergency design plans suggested some quite astonishing methods by which this might be done. The materials were available. Manpower was in generous supply. The will to do it was present.
But there was no money. The Collaboratory was surrounded by the city of Buna, and its privately owned real estate.