Chapter 24 — The Break.138 #2
Because she would have found a way to file even that. She was the best in the world at finding a way to file things, and a glitch is just a glitch, the tide moves strangely, breathe it in. So I did the cruel thing, the thing I will answer for, the thing that was the only door she had left.
I had not trusted the moment, or my hands, which turned out to be wise, because by now I had neither.
They had recorded everything on this island, that was the whole horror of it and now it was mine, and back when I still had a keyboard I had spliced one of their own files onto the tail of the gods, so that whatever they did to me, this part would play without me.
The forty Caspians ran out, and the thing I’d saved for last began.
And it was me. On the floor of the server room, in among the racks, wrists zip-tied, a strip of their tape across my mouth, a beatific man in seafoam patting my shoulder while he did it.
The plus-one. The one who came with her.
Trussed up like a calf in the room where they kept their god in pieces, on the day she was crowned for loving them.
I watched my mother see it.
The cult’s own camera was tight on her face, and so I got to watch, in close-up, the exact moment Solena stopped existing and there was only Deb, staring up at a wall-sized image of the boy she had raised bound and gagged by the people who had just told her she was chosen.
The microphone was live in her hand. The whole world was watching her watch it.
She did not perform. For the first time since the ferry, with the largest audience of her life hanging on her, my mother did not perform a single thing.
“What did you do to him?” she said, into the live mic, in a voice with nothing left in it but the truth.
Not a question for the basin. Not for the wall. She was looking straight down the barrel of the nearest camera, at me, wherever I was, and she said it again, breaking on it.
“What did you DO to him?”
And that was her turn, and it cost her everything she had spent three weeks buying, and she made it live, on her own stream, with her own mouth, which is the only way it could ever have been worth anything.
The door of the booth came off its hinges. Near enough.
The Keeper came through it like weather, gray and fast and furious in the cold contained way she had, and behind her the chaos of the deck poured in for a second before the door swung shut, the basin’s noise, a staff voice trying to be calm and losing.
“Cut it,” she said. “Cut the feed. Now.”
It was already too late for that. She got to the desk and reached for the kill the way anyone who’d run that rig for years would reach for it, and the console told her what consoles tell you when a man has been under the desk with both hands.
The channel was dead. The output read gone, dark, dropped.
The program fed the stream and the program had crashed, so the stream had crashed with it, because that is the only way it reads when you haven’t seen the back of the machine.
A saboteur pulls the plug and takes you off the air.
She’d walked in on a glitching wall and a lunatic in the booth and a feed her own desk swore was already cold, and she read it the way the evidence in front of her demanded.
A catastrophe, yes. But a contained one. Nobody outside left watching.
She had no way of knowing the desk was lying to her, because I’d made it lie.
That down in the dark, with a grown man towing me out by the ankles, I’d done the exact opposite of pulling the plug.
I’d pulled their plug and jammed my own line into the socket behind it, past everything her console could see or cut, so that the broadcast never dropped a single frame.
Solena, the crowning, the wall, all of it still going out live to every phone that had tuned in to watch her get chosen, only now with the truth wired to the front of it, the god split into forty stuttering copies and, behind her, the boy they’d trussed up in the room where they kept him.
The feed her desk swore was cold was the loudest thing the island had ever put into the world.
So she looked at the wall, at the forty stuttering Caspians and the bound idiot, and did the math a cynic does, fast and exactly wrong, and put down the only mask she had ever bothered to wear.
“Of course it dropped.” She dragged a hand down her face. “Of course it did. Tonight. Do you have any idea what tonight was worth?”
“A lot,” I said.
“More than your whole sad little life, Squid.”
She wasn’t even angry at me. That was the thing. She was tired, and disgusted, and entirely unbothered about saying any of it, because as far as she knew the room was sealed.
“You want to know the worst part? She was perfect. She was the best one we ever grew. You take a woman that hungry, that good on camera, that desperate to be told she’s special, and you barely have to lift a finger, she builds the cage herself and thanks you for the bars.
They all do. Do you know how easy you people are?
You’re starving and you call it spiritual.
You hand us your houses and your passports and your sad little faces and you beg us to tell you it means something. ”
She gestured at the wall, at the dead god, almost fond.
“He never said a true thing in his life and he didn’t need to. You weren’t paying for true. You were paying for someone to look at you. Cheapest product on earth, and you bankrupt yourselves for it.”
In the corner of the third monitor, under her voice, the stream counter ticked over six hundred thousand and kept climbing.
I filmed her on my phone, from the hip, where she wasn’t looking, getting every word.
“Tell me you’re getting this,” Don said.
“Every frame.”
The Keeper’s face changed. It is a specific thing to watch happen to a person, the moment they re-run the last thirty seconds and find the one thing they got wrong, and what she had gotten wrong was the only thing that mattered, which was assuming that a man who breaks into a broadcast comes to kill it.
Her eyes went to the third monitor, where her father’s forty stuttering faces shared a frame with a small red dot and a number that now said seven hundred and forty thousand and was not slowing down.
“That’s not live,” she said, and it came out with a crack in it now. “The program’s dead. I’m looking at a dead program.”
“You are. I killed it before you walked in.” I nodded at the monitor, at the small red dot beside her father’s forty faces, at the number climbing past three quarters of a million.
“That’s the stream. It’s been going out down a cable I put in the back of this thing with my own hand, the whole time you were talking.
You can’t take anyone off the air. I made very sure you couldn’t.
For the record, this is you honoring your journey. ”
She lunged for the rig and Don was simply there, between her and it, not hitting her, just immovable, a journalist who had spent a week pretending to tap-dance and had a great deal of feeling saved up.
And it didn’t matter anyway. It had never been about the punch.
The truth was already gone, out past the booth and the island and the dark water, into seven hundred thousand pockets and counting, and there is no lunging fast enough to catch a thing once it is everywhere.
She knew it. I watched her know it. The Keeper of the Transmissions stood in the wreckage of her father’s face and said, to a live microphone she had finally clocked, the most damning four words available to a person in her position.
“This is out of context.”
It is, at time of writing, the single most viewed thing the Isle of Saltren ever produced.
Her people found the booth then, three of them and then more, pouring through the wreck of the door in their seafoam, and they pulled up short at the sight of her, because the Keeper was not supposed to be the one who looked afraid.
She came back into herself fast. By the time the second wave was through the door she had the other voice going, flat and quick and nothing like the warm one.
“Take it down. All of it. Every account, every mirror, the backups, the lot. Get me anyone left who can touch the servers. Call the firm. Nobody on this island says one word to anything with a lens. And get these two off my deck.”
It was the right plan. It was the plan you run when the thing has leaked to one bad account and you still have a prayer of getting in front of it.
It was also about seven hundred thousand prayers too late, and I was the only one in that booth who had done the sum, so I let her have it.
You don’t tell a person the house is already ash while she’s still calling for water.
So we went with the hands that came for us, and it suited us perfectly, because the hands were going the one direction we wanted, which was out. She was already a clip, and you do not take down a clip. You only watch it find the next phone.
The hands let go of us somewhere in the first few steps, because there was nothing left to throw us off of.
Out on the deck it was bedlam, the soft, well-lit bedlam of a few hundred people whose entire world had just been revealed to run on a graphics card, milling, weeping, some of them still swaying because the body keeps its habits, and in the middle of it, on a chair done up like a throne, sat Coral.
She was fine. She was, somehow, completely fine. She had a microphone of her own and she was using it, warm and bright and without a tremor, and as I came out into the noise I caught what she was doing, which was the only thing she had ever known how to do, which was rescue.