The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [76]
That, or just give up. Go into hiding, just hide from the burning shame. Yes, he, Derek Ronald Vandeveer, was a phony-baloney security expert for an agency that didn’t even exist. But it wasn’t like he could return to his previous life. What had happened to Mondiale and their competitors . . . that wasn’t a “bubble.” That was a train wreck on top of an avalanche. He, Derek Vandeveer, was part of the worst destruction of wealth in human history. Men he knew and trusted, corporate visionaries building a new and better electro-world, were out on bail. The very guys who used to drop by his lab in Merwinster in their pressed slacks and cashmere sweaters, to ooh and ahhh at the prototypes. Their second homes were auctioned off by bailiffs. Their trophy wives had vanished off the fashion pages into dry-out tanks.
Why had he ever, ever believed in that crap? As a last, fatal bottom line, what kind of terrible verdict was that on his own integrity and good judgment? He’d been in the lab blowing money entrusted to his company by widows and orphans. By the mothers of Space Force generals.
What possible right did he have to thrust himself into public policy? What was he doing here now? A full nightmare awareness struck Van. An awful vision of the hordes of the cheated, the deceived, and the damaged. Millions of normal people across America, across the whole world, who had no awareness of what he had done to them, what he was trying to save them from . . .
Remember that hot stock that you bet on, Mr. and Mrs. America? All those nerds you trusted to bring you a New Economy? Well, they’re driving massive trucks in Colorado. Lost, alone. With drunken ex-soldiers. In a War on Terror. Cursing, bewildered, frustrated, violent.
In his panicky haste to flee Cheyenne Mountain, Van had abandoned his cell phone and even his beloved Swiss Army knife. His pockets were truly empty now. Nobody would even talk to him. He was doomed. The CCIAB was doomed. The satellite was doomed. Maybe even America was doomed.
“You’re sure as hell not saying much,” said Hickok.
“I screwed up bad, Mike. I should have nailed that. That should have worked.”
“You’re the one bitching? I don’t even have a job now!” Hickok flung his empty whiskey bottle out the Humvee’s window, with an overhand Molotov lob. Then he cracked the seal on a second. “You’ve got a wife and a kid, fella! All I got in my life is this truck and some Dixie Chicks tapes.”
“You want a job, Mike?”
“That wouldn’t hurt me,” said Hickok. “What, a job with your outfit, you mean?” The idea amused him. “You’re gonna turn me into a true-blue cyberwar freak, Dr. Professor?”
“Yeah, Mike. You’re hired. Come by my office when you get back to D.C.”
Hickok peered at the fine print on the whiskey label. “I think maybe I’ll drive back straight through Tennessee. Tennessee makes the best damn liquor in this whole wide world!”
Dottie’s telescope needed black skies. Black skies in America were few and far between. There were some strange and spooky places in the backwoods of Colorado. Mountain people always lived free. The nooks and crannies of the Rocky Mountains had Space Force generals, and ancient hippies, and silver miners, and jack Mormons.
“Out here in God’s country, we got ourselves some dropouts!” crowed Hickok, drunkenly pounding his leg with his rocklike fist. “The real off-the-grid people! Polygamists. Unabomber types. And there’s survivalists!”
During the Y2K panics of 1999, Van had come to know quite a lot about survivalists. And what he knew, Van didn’t like. Survivalists were people of bad faith. Their faith was that civilization would break down, and ought to break down, and deserved to break down. That no one in charge should ever be trusted. That all authorities were useless, deluded, or evil.
The survivalist faith was to abandon everyone and everything. Go into hiding. Buy lots and lots of gas masks. Cement. Water filters. Sacks of grain. Bars of gold.