The Future Will Be BS Free Page 21

  “What could Theo say that would change anything?” Boob asked.

  “He’d remind us that the world was in such bad shape because people lied, not because they were too honest. He’d say the liars are to blame for this, not the truth app.” I could hear Theo saying it; it felt like I was repeating his words instead of speaking my own. I closed my eyes and listened to his voice. “This is bigger than the printing press, the car, the computer. We’re changing everything—government, law, friendship, love—and change hurts. This much change is agony. In the end, though, it’ll fix what left us hanging by a thread in the first place.” I opened my eyes and looked at my friends. “He’d say we need to share what we learned about how to handle the truth app, because we got it right. Stand up and come clean. Cast no shadow.”

  Boob cleared his throat. “I have to say, that does sound like Theo. That damned commie idealist.”

  “Vitnik is telling the world the truth app is to blame, and no one’s answering her. We’re running and hiding, acting ashamed like we really are to blame.”

  Molly nodded. The others didn’t disagree, at least.

  “There has to be a way to fight back,” I continued. “We have to get people to see the truth app the way we do. Not as a cudgel to beat people with, but as something to make the world better.”

  Boob curled his hands into fists and grimaced. “Damn it.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  He sighed heavily. “I think I know how. I don’t want to tell you, because it would be the most humiliating thing imaginable, and because I don’t really want to live in Theo’s freaking utopia.”

  “What? Tell me.” For the life of me, I couldn’t imagine what Boob was thinking.

  Eyes closed, Boob pressed his hands to his head.

  “Come on, Boob,” Molly said.

  Boob heaved a big, fat sigh. “People want drama, not lectures. Don’t lecture them about how it’s done, show them a dramatic example. Release the video of our confession at the campfire. Molly has it. She records everything.”

  “Are you out of your mind?” Rebe looked like she was about to beat Boob senseless. “No. Do not show that video to anyone.”

  It was perfect. We were rock stars to some, the Antichrist to many, but everyone knew us. Everyone would watch. It would be humiliating beyond words, but it was a brutally honest way to show them the positive potential of the truth app.

  “That’s brilliant,” I said.

  Molly was searching for the clip.

  “Hang on,” Rebe said. “I didn’t say I was okay with this.”

  Molly paused. “So what do we do? Do we vote?”

  “I think this one has to be unanimous,” I said.

  Molly nodded. “You’re right.”

  I turned to Rebe. “Please.”

  Rebe’s glare softened, but she was still shaking. “I won’t stop you. I’m just never going to show my face in public again.” She got up and walked away.

  I looked around. “Are we unanimous?”

  Basquiat and Boob nodded. Molly resumed working.

  “Title it ‘Cast No Shadow,’ ” Basquiat said. “Then, below that, a tag reading ‘When you have nothing left to hide, you’re free.’ ”

  Molly typed faster. “Perfect.”

  Boob got up and followed Rebe.

  Everyone would know what I did to Molly. They’d know Molly broke up her parents’ marriage, that Rebe was bulimic and ran Internet scams, that Basquiat ran away, that Boob had no self-esteem. We would all be stripped bare.

  Hopefully that would get their attention.

  Molly looked up. “That’s it. Should I send it?”

  I looked at Basquiat.

  “Do it,” he said.

  Molly did it. I pictured a million fingers simultaneously opening our clip. Parties where dozens gathered to watch our video and laugh.

  I went to find Boob.

  He and Rebe were outside, on a patio set up for dining. They stopped talking when they saw me, so it was pretty obvious they were talking about all this. What else would they be talking about?

  “Is it done?” Boob asked.

  “It’s done. I don’t know if it will help, but thanks for coming up with the idea.”

  “I’m sorry to interrupt.” It was Molly, standing in the doorway. “We released that clip six minutes ago. It has been viewed two hundred million times.”

  “Two hundred million?” Boob’s eyes bulged.

  Molly glanced at her phone. “In the time it took you to ask that question, half a million more people clicked the link.”

  “I’d call it more of an exclamation than a question,” I said.

  Molly raised her hand, like she was going to slap me from ten feet away.

  “ ‘Going viral’ doesn’t begin to describe it.” Rebe covered her face. “God. Two hundred million people know I’m a bulimic thief.”

  * * *

  —

  “We were up in Yakutsk toward the end of the war.”

  Beltane’s voice startled me awake. I’d been drifting off. The room was pitch-dark, everyone bedded down.

  “Eva was with us. We called her Clown because of her hair. She was our eyes. Had a little girl at home.”

  I was completely lost. Why was Beltane telling us this out of the blue while we were trying to sleep?

  “We were sweeping an apartment complex after a firefight, and Eva spotted one of those doll-within-a-doll-within-a-doll things lying in a hallway. She stashed it in her pack for her little girl. Only it turned out the smallest doll was filled with C-4. Booby trap. Went off a few minutes later.

  “So we thought, the bastards who left this will be back to see if anyone took the bait, because where’s the fun in leaving a boom-boom surprise if you don’t get to see the results?”

  And then it hit me: this was a confession. Weeks ago we’d encouraged Beltane to cast no shadow, and she’d finally decided to take us up on it. That was my best guess, anyway.

  “So we went back and dropped a pack in that same hallway, making it look like we’d left it behind when we carried away an injured or dead buddy. We put a couple of boxed meals laced with rat poison in the pack, and we came back a day later to see if our trap had caught the rats who’d killed Eva.”

  Beltane got quiet. We waited.

  “We came back to find two kids had eaten the meals.”

  “Oh no. Oh, Beltane,” Molly said.

  “Seven, eight years old,” Beltane went on in a flat monotone, as if she hadn’t heard Molly. “One had chocolate smeared all over his face. I still see his face. Every day I see it.”

  I heard someone get up and cross the creaky wood floor to Beltane.

  “Thank you.” It was Basquiat, squatting beside Beltane in the dark.

  “Thank you,” Molly echoed.

  Then, in a chorus, Boob, Rebe, me, even some of the vets.

  “I hope it brings you peace, to share it,” Basquiat said.

  “It doesn’t,” Beltane said. “Some shadows stick with you whether you confess them or not.”

  I couldn’t even imagine. How did you wake up each morning after something like that?

  “I think maybe I figured out a way, though,” Beltane said. “When I was handing out food to those kids outside Target, it made me think of Yakutsk, except it was the opposite—I was saving kids instead of hurting them. And it got me thinking, if I can save a hundred kids, maybe that would balance things out, you know?”

  “That makes a lot of sense,” Basquiat said. “If we get out of this, I’d like to help.”

  That’s why handing out that food had been the one thing to break through Beltane’s toughness and make her cry.

  And, jeez, when she’d gone through that truth app test with the Pilgrims of Truth, that had been a much clo
ser call than I’d realized. Beltane had told the pilgrims that the people she’d killed had all been Russians. That was true, but if they’d probed a little deeper, they would have learned some of them were children.

  “Can I ask all you geniuses a question?” Beltane said.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “We’re laying down our lives because we believed these truth apps would make the world a better place. So far that’s not happening. But the thing is, I can’t even picture what this new, improved world would look like. Everyone comes clean about the shit they’ve done”—she threw her hands in the air—“and then what? At least Vitnik’s got a plan. All you seem to have is self-help advice.”

  None of us had a good answer. I told Beltane I’d have to think about it.

  A cry of surprise woke me. Molly was sitting up, working her phone. “There are thousands of them.”

  “Thousands of what?” Basquiat’s voice was thick and sleepy.

  Molly expanded her screen, which was filled with thumbnails. “I’m not sure. Videos. They’re all tagged Cast No Shadow.” She scrolled down until the thumbnails were one continuous blur. They just kept going.

  “Silhouette posted one of the first.” Rebe expanded her screen.

  Silhouette was sitting alone in her house, uncharacteristically stone-faced. “I’ve got to be honest, I’m a lot more comfortable getting others to fess up than I am doing it myself, but I’m going to do this.” She rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “Let’s see. I’ll start with the big ones, since that’s how it’s supposed to be done. My first video, the one that made me, was staged.”

  “She’s doing her own confession,” Molly whispered.

  “Look at this one. It’s from a nursing home.” Boob expanded his screen. A dozen elderly people were sitting in a circle, a TV playing in the background, ignored. An old woman, her face a rugged landscape of wrinkles and age spots, was crying.

  “I must have told my kids that story a hundred times. I got it from a romance book I’d read. The truth wasn’t nearly as romantic. I was married when we met. Our marriage began as an affair, sneaking around behind Peter’s wife’s back.” She paused to wipe her eyes. “To this day my kids don’t know.”

  An old man who was wearing truth app rings said, “Thank you, Angela.”

  “They’re all risking execution,” Molly said. “I mean, Vitnik can’t track down all of them, but she could make examples of some of them.”

  Meanwhile, we were hiding. But, what else could we do? If we came out of hiding, Vitnik wouldn’t maybe make examples of us, she’d throw everything she had at us. Especially now that we’d released the video. If it was turning people to our side, we were a bigger threat to her than ever.

  “What do we do now?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?” Boob asked. “We lie low and wait for things to stabilize.”

  That didn’t make sense. This was our chance—people were paying attention to us. We needed to keep the momentum going. I just didn’t know how.

  Beltane was sitting on the edge of a table with a rifle across her knees, watching from a distance. I still hadn’t come up with an answer to her question from the night before.

  It was the same question, though, wasn’t it? Beltane wanted to know what came next, what our vision was. That’s what we needed to tell everyone, except, as Boob had pointed out, people didn’t want you to tell them, they wanted you to show them.

  “Rebe? Can I communicate with Silhouette without giving away our location to Vitnik?”

  “Vitnik’s fighting for her life,” Mom said. “I seriously doubt she has the time for surveillance.” She looked to Rebe. “Is Vitnik even in control of the Pentagon?”

  Rebe consulted her phone. “General Austin is.”

  “Then she doesn’t have the electronics to track us. And I don’t get the sense that Austin is focused on us.”

  “I’ll still baffle the message.” Rebe worked her phone.

  Silhouette’s face filled the screen. “Oh, thank goodness! You’re still alive.”

  “Most of us. We lost some good people getting out of Trenton.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it.”

  “Keep it short,” Rebe said.

  “The video thing was brilliant, just brilliant,” Silhouette said.

  “Thanks. It was Boob’s idea. But we need to follow up now.”

  “Yes, you do. Keep the momentum going. You have any ideas for an encore?”

  “I do. It won’t be easy, though.”

  “Assuming everyone doesn’t hate me after the bombshell I dropped last night, I’m ready to help,” Silhouette said.

  “Thanks. What I’m thinking is, we have a summit and broadcast it live. Gather a bunch of smart, honest people and come up with a vision, a plan for moving forward.”

  “Yes.” Silhouette moved closer to the screen. “I like it. Yes. Yes.”

  When we finished talking to Silhouette, Molly asked Rebe to set it up so she could call her mother and father. She promised to keep the calls short, then went outside where she could have some privacy.

  It was a large, unremarkable movie theater with a redbrick-and-concrete facade on a block of office buildings and stores. We stood out more than the building: five teens flanked by a dozen heavily armed cybervets.

  Silhouette was waiting out front. She led us inside.

  “We have sort of a good problem. I invited forty people and told them to tell no one else the location, but it seems like half of them brought a few others with them. We’re going to be packing well over a hundred into the theater. Maybe more.”

  Mom was shaking her head. “This is not good. What if someone figures out our location before we finish?”

  “It’s a chance we have to take,” I said. “If we’re going to meet a bunch of people, we have to meet somewhere. Movie theaters all look about the same from the inside. It’s the best we could come up with.”

  Mom squeezed her eyes shut.

  “What about General Austin?” I asked Silhouette.

  She shook her head. “I reached out. Austin’s not necessarily against the meeting, but it’s too risky to ally herself with us.”

  That was a blow. I’d been hoping Austin would back us. That would have made things so much easier.

  The vets had fanned out, one each at the entrances, two interrogating the handful of early birds using the truth app.

  The theater was small, but it had a high ceiling and a balcony.

  People were arriving in a steady stream now. A woman with long white hair touched another woman’s shoulder and gestured toward me. When she saw I was looking her way, she gave me a warm smile.

  “I’ll wait a few more minutes, then I’m going to kick things off,” Silhouette said. “I’ll introduce you, then you can get the ball rolling.”

  “Me?” I poked my chest.

  “This is your rodeo, Sam.”

  “No, Molly’s our spokesperson.”

  “I’m our spokesperson, but this is a business meeting. They’ll want to hear from the person in charge.” Molly patted my back. “And that, my dear, is you.”

  As Silhouette hurried off to take care of something, I could almost hear my palms sweating. I didn’t know who most of these people were, but they were all older than us, and most moved in the self-assured manner of people who knew they were important.

  Molly put a hand on my arm. “Your eyes are bulging like a fish’s. How about you put them back in their sockets.”

  “I can’t. What the hell am I doing up here? We’re talking about how to save civilization, and I’m leading the discussion? I’m seventeen.”

  “I’ll jump in and help. And you know Basquiat and Rebe will, too.”

  Silhouette breezed down the aisle, toward the stage. “I’m going to get started.”

 
; By the time Silhouette finished speaking, the theater was almost full. The audience clapped as I stepped onto the hardwood stage. There was no podium. I just stood there in the center, my skinny arms hanging at my sides.

  “Thank you for coming.” I needed to channel Theo again, to let him speak. “The world was hanging by a thread. Not because there was too much honesty, but because of too many lies. President Vitnik—who murdered my friend Theo Harlow—wants to blame this mess on the truth app, but the app isn’t the problem. It’s the solution.” I could feel my heart slowing as the words flowed. “We set out with Theo to create a better world—a bullshit-free world—”

  The crowd was suddenly rumbling, people looking at each other. I looked at Molly, who was mouthing a word, but I couldn’t make it out.

  “Lie,” she said out loud. “That was a lie.”

  A lie? What had I just said? My mind was suddenly blank. I could feel my face turning fire-engine red.

  Then it came to me: I’d said, We set out to create a bullshit-free world. No. We weren’t nearly that noble at the start. I wasn’t, at least.

  “I can tell you brought your truth apps.” That broke some of the tension, but definitely not all of it. “The truth is, I was in it for the money. I had no idea the truth app would have this sort of impact. But as time went by, I did realize, and it stopped being about the money.”

  I waited. When no one called me out, I went on.

  “So now everything has to change. We don’t need juries to guess whether someone’s guilty. We can’t have secrets. We can’t negotiate deals the same way, because everyone knows everyone else’s bottom line. And as my friend Boob pointed out, no more surprise parties.”

  That got a laugh.

  “Someone has to figure out the new rules, and Silhouette thought we should give it a try.” I held my hands out, palms up. “So where do we start?”

  Fifty people began speaking at once.

  I raised my hands over my head, shouted, “I think we’re going to have to resort to raising hands!”

  I called on a middle-aged woman at random.

  “I’m Jezebel Knox. I run the political microchannel Green State. We need to elect new leaders. Like, right now. Power is going out all over. I heard the Internet could go down soon, and if that happens, things are going to go downhill fast. We need unified national leadership.”