SiSU: - Homeland - Cory Doctorow

“Yes, sir!” I said.
“Good man,” he repeated.
-..-
Homeland
Mom and Dad were surprisingly cool about everything. I tried about six Skype calls to my
old phone, but Dalia wasn't answering. Finally, I gave up and dialed into it and picked
up my voicemail (about a million messages from Mom, Dad, Ange, Liam, Flor, and Joe,
preceded by a series of panicked calls from a woman speaking Arabic whom I took to be
Dalia's mother, who must have had kittens when her conversation with her daughter was
so rudely cut short and redialed my number). Then I found an old phone and brought its
firmware up to date and stuck in a pay-as-you-go SIM I bought at the Walgreens down the
hill and changed the outgoing voicemail on the old phone to a message telling people to
use this number until I could get a new SIM from my phone carrier.
I did work a little on Joe's darknet moderation site before bed, despite what he'd said,
because while Joe was a nice guy to insist, the darknet was my project, and just because I
was working on it, it didn't mean I was working on it for him. I worked until the muscles that
allowed my eyes to focus on my screen went on strike, blinked hard, brushed my teeth,
stripped off, and fell face-first into bed, amid all the junk I'd dropped there, not even feeling
the sharp corners that dug into me.
I was 99.9999 percent of the way to sleepyland when my eyes opened so fast I heard the
click of my eyelids ungumming.
Lemmy's quadcopter.
We'd put it in the sky just before the gas attacks on the crowd, after the police thought that
every camera had been killed. The tweet telling people where to look for its feed hadn't
gone out, but that didn't mean it didn't create and store that feed. I pounced on my laptop
and after a few minutes' dicking around, found the file I was looking for.
It was all in ghostly night-vision monochrome, with false-color splotches of orange and
red where the people gathered. The SFPD stood out hotter than the rest, with bright
red splotches on their hands and feet -- I wondered if they were using boot- and glovewarmers?
We didn't get the firing of the HERF gun on the camera, but we did get some
amazing footage of the gas blimps setting sail, moving into position like sinister circus
balloons, unleashing their chemical rain, a kind of grey static that fell on the screaming,
terrified crowd below. The gassing went on and on and on, different blimps releasing at
different times, filling the air with wave after wave of choking chemical droplets.
I'd lived through this on the ground, but I hadn't seen it, not the way I could see it now.
Watching thousands and thousands and thousands of Americans of all stripes, choking
and falling down -- kids, moms, dads, old, young, writhing, crawling over one another,
vomiting, screaming. I know that worse things have happened. I know that bombs have
fallen on cities, mustard gas sent over trenches, people machine-gunned wholesale.
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