All American Girl @aag . 1m
President gives amnesty to ILLEGAL MEXICANS poisoning
U.S. Reality Check @USRealityCheck . 1m
Missing Evidence of prior #Keffiyeh Girl Relationship with
#ILLEGALMEXICANS poisoning #OUR BEES
Veteran Freshman @yusufyuie . 1m
FBI not allowed to search #ILLEGALMEXICAN cellphone? I was like waaaaaaaaiiiit!!!!
Blogs said she’d damaged $300,000 worth of light and sound equipment. XactlySo’s FB claimed it was $500,000. But Gabe knew, she fucking knew, it couldn’t have been more than a couple of grand. She stood in the middle of the Insectarium she managed, too stunned to work. Hunted. She’d never been hunted before. The day after the concert she’d called in sick, afraid to go outside. But then, after watching the witch hunt unfolding on social media, with her as the witch, she thought she’d better just act natural. She biked into work, late, feeling a thousand eyes follow her: sensors switched traffic lights to green as she approached; ads for bike helmets flashed at her as she passed signs; her bike lock reported where it was being used; the doors to her job opened and the heat of her body was scanned for fever, then added to the building’s climate-control system, reporting to its heat exchangers reporting to the power grid, reporting to…. Once inside the Insectarium, though, she was glad she came. Her routine with the lice was comforting, as was working deep in the bowels of the lab, deep in the basement where no one would normally go, and cameras weren’t allowed. As with her own loft, she’d rigged it to be an island—as dumb as possible—and what networked devices there were—heat, light, humidity—were focused on the life of the insects, not her. She could almost believe the other night had been a dream….
Around her, in place of the flies feeding on dung that she had managed at the start of the study, aquarium-like containment boxes housed lobotomized blue-fronted parrots from Paraguay. They were the most common parrot found in pet shops, so were found in lots of places where they didn’t belong. In Chicago, the first colonies had managed to survive the winters by huddling for warmth in streetlights—the same kind of early mutation in the brain that made humans the smartest of primates making parrots the ‘chimps’ of the bird world. Since the winters had grown mild, they could be found in lots of parks.
Gabe moved about the ratty, wired-up parrots, trying to keep her mind on her work instead of the growing number of photos being put online by people who had been at the LIVE.NATION concert or its NO.IT.AN.EVIL parody. Using her handheld vacuum cleaner, she began to suck lice off of the chewed-up feathers of a duck. But the news that she was wanted had struck her like a sledge between the eyes and she felt lobotomized herself. She began to think what police could do to anyone the government pinned the terrorist tag on these days. People disappeared. As the population of Guantanamo prisoners swept up in the oil wars died of old age, they’d been replaced by younger prisoners swept up in the wars over conflict minerals and water. Some had already been in one black site or another for years. And even those lucky enough to resurface, often without ever having been charged, couldn’t do anything about having lost their lives to executive powers in time of war, a time that had no foreseeable end, and a beginning that was hard for people her age to remember.
Stop it, she told herself, trying to take comfort in the white noise of the Insectarium, the perpetual whir of its humidifiers making it easier to forget the swirl going on up above, out in the real world, the chips and sensors embedded in chairs, in floor tiles, in light bulbs and switches like a million witnesses reporting to the cloud where she was or wasn’t, even monitoring how much toilet paper she used—a sensor in each dispenser wired into the reorder center. There must be hundreds of photos of her—or rather of parts of her—online by now: her ankle in one, an elbow in another, but none, at least the last time she’d checked, of her face. And even if there were, her face had been covered by the keffiyeh she’d found on the ground. Should she have thrown it away? She could imagine its black-and-blue checkered fabric hanging with a few N95 masks off a kitchen chair back home, right where anyone who walked into her loft could see it.
Having her face covered while she smashed the stage equipment probably bought her some time. And NGers claimed that if enough of them wore those electronic face-scrambling necklaces, it gave the whole rave facial-recognition herd immunity. Still, there must have been a gajillion cell phones and surveillance cameras—even a police drone with infrared and night vision imaging, for God’s sake—Not to mention FB, Google, Flickr, Twitter, and every other website that aggregated photos, instantly scanning them, comparing them, logging every detail in ways that made any sense of secrecy a thing of the past. Any teenager with a Snap account could probably out her. But so far, none had. Why?
The question gave her that creepy feeling of being watched. But when she turned around, there was only the shelves of lice-coated geese. It gave her the urge to check, for the thousandth time, for updates. What was going on out there in the Twittersphere? What? She pulled out her phone to check, but down here in the bunker there wasn’t any cell service. And even if there were, she only carried a dumb phone, because, she remembered with a laugh, she didn’t want anyone to track her—not because she had anything to hide—rather, it was because, as she liked to tell people, she didn’t like walking around naked either. Duct tape covered the holes she’d made in her sneakers to dig out the chips that monitored the number of steps she took in order to report her movement to the Fitbit she didn’t own—and also the Fitbit manufacturer and who knew who else. She’d dug them out long ago—as an up-yours to the Internet of Things, and also to keep someone from hacking her shoes. But could that be used as evidence against her now?—evidence that she was, in fact, hiding? Nah. If so, they’d have to arrest nearly everyone at the concert, lots of people there even making their own clothes to keep any form of biometrics out of the cloth.
As she prepared to go upstairs to check on how the hunt for the witch was going, she wondered if there was something to that idea of preemptive arrests: the claim that algorithms could identify criminals—people who didn’t let the chip in their shoes talk to their Fitbit—from their patterns of behavior, before they’d committed any crime….