Distraction

The text was nowhere near so sinister and sophisticated as he had somehow imagined it. In fact, the text was crude and banal. He found it deeply embarrassing to discover his own name inserted into a mur-derous rant so blatant and so badly composed. He nodded, slipped the paper back to Fontenot. The two of them smiled, tipped their hats to the little girl, and went back to walking.

“It’s pathetic!” Oscar said, once they were out of earshot. “That’s spam from a junk mailbot. I’ve seen some junkbots that are pretty sophisticated, they can generate a halfway decent ad spiel. But that stuff is pure chain-mail ware. It can’t even punctuate!”

“Well, your core-target violent paranoiac, he might not notice the misspellings.”

Oscar thought this over. “How many of those messages were mailed out, do you suppose?”

“Maybe a couple of thousand? The USSS protective-interest files list over three hundred thousand people. A clever program wouldn’t hit up every possible lunatic every single time, of course.”

“Of course.” Oscar nodded thoughtfully. “And what about Bambakias? Is he in danger too?”

“I briefed the Senator about this situation. They’ll step up his security in Cambridge and Washington. But I figure you’re in much more trouble than he is. You’re closer, you’re louder, and you’re a lot easier.”

“Hmmm … I see. Thank you for bringing this to my attention, Jules. You’re making very good sense, as always. So what would you advise?”

“I advise better security. The commonsense things. Break up your daily routine. Go to places where you can’t be expected. Keep a safe house ready, in case of trouble. Watch out for strangers, for any-body who might be stalking you, or workin’ up the nerve. Avoid crowds whenever possible. And you do need a bodyguard.”

“I don’t have time for all that, though. There’s too much work for me here.”

Fontenot sighed. “That’s exactly what people always tell us… Oscar, I was in the Secret Service for twenty-two years. It’s a career, we have a real job of work. You don’t hear a lot in public about the Secret Service, but the Secret Service is a very busy outfit. They shut down the old CIA, they broke up the FBI years ago, but the USSS has been around almost two hundred years now. We never go away. Because the threat never goes away. People in public life get death threats. They get ’em all the time. I’ve seen hundreds of death threats. They’re very common things for famous people. I never saw a real-life attempted assassination, though. Spent my whole career care-fully watchin’ and waitin’ for one, and it never, ever happened. Until one fine day, that car bomb happened. Then I lost my leg.”

“I understand.”

“You need to come to terms with this. It’s reality. It’s real, and you have to adjust to it, but at the same time, you can’t let it stop you.”

Oscar said nothing.

“The sky is a different color when you know that you might get shot at. Things taste different. It can get to you, make you wonder if a public life’s worthwhile. But you know, despite stuff like this, this is not an evil or violent society.” Fontenot shrugged. “Really, it isn’t. Not anymore. Back when I was a young agent, America was truly violent then. Huge crime rates, crazy drug gangs, automatic weapons very cheap and easy. Miserable, angry, pitiful people. People with grudges, people with a lot of hate inside. But nowadays, this just isn’t a violent time anymore. It’s just a very weird time. People don’t fight real hard for anything in particular, when they know their whole lives could be turned inside out in a week flat. People’s lives don’t make sense anymore, but most people in America, the poor people espe-cially, they’re a lot happier than they used to be. They might be pro-foundly lost, like your Senator likes to say, but they’re not all crushed and desperate. They’re just… wandering around. Drifting. Hang-ing loose. They’re at very loose ends.”

“Maybe.”

“If you lie low awhile, this business will pass right over you. You’ll move on to Boston or Washington, on to other issues, out of Huey’s hair. Automated hit lists are like barbed wire, they’re nasty but they’re very stupid. They don’t even understand what they read. Once you’re yesterday’s news, the machines will just forget you.”

“I don’t intend to become yesterday’s news for quite a while, Jules.”

“Then you’d better learn how famous people go on living.”

Oscar was determined not to have his morale affected by Fontenot’s security alarm. He went back to work on the hotel. The hotel was coming along with the usual fairy-tale rapidity of a Bambakias structure. The whole krewe was pitching in; they had all been in-fected by the Bambakias ideology, so they all protested stoutly to one another that they wouldn’t miss the fun of construction for any-thing.

Strangely enough, the work really did become fun, in its own way; there was a rich sense of schadenfreude in fully sharing the suf-ferings of others. The system logged the movements of everyone’s hands, cruelly eliminating any easy method of deceiving your friends while you yourself slacked off work. Distributed instantiation was fun in the way that hard-core team sports were fun. Balconies flew up, archways and pillars rose, random jumbles crystallized into spacious sense and reason. It was like lashing your way up a mountainside in cables and crampons, only to notice, all sudden and gratuitous, a fine and lovely view.

There were certain set-piece construction activities guaranteed to attract an admiring crowd: the tightening of tensegrity cables, for in-stance, that turned a loose skein of blocks into a solidly locked-together parapet, good for the next three hundred years. Bambakias krewes took elaborate pleasure in these theatrical effects. The krewe would vigorously play to the crowd when they were doing the boring stuff, they would ham it up. But during these emergent moments when the system worked serious magic, they would kick back all loose and indifferent, with the heavy-lidded cool of twentieth-century jazz musicians.

Oscar was a political consultant. He made it his business to ap-preciate a crowd. He felt about a good crowd the way he imagined dirt farmers feeling about a thriving field of watermelons. However, he had a hard time conjuring up his usual warm appreciation when one of the watermelons might have come there to shoot him.

Of course he was familiar with security; during the campaign, everyone had known that there might be incidents, that the candidate might be hurt. The candidate was mixing with The People, and some few of The People were just naturally evil or insane. There had indeed been a few bad moments on the Massachusetts campaign trail: nasty hecklers, nutty protesters, vomiting drunks, pickpockets, fainting spells, shoving matches. The unpleasant business that made good cam-paign security the functional equivalent of seat belts or fire extinguish-ers. Security was an empty trouble and expense, ninety-nine times in a hundred. On the hundredth instance you were very glad you had been so sensible.

The modern rich always maintained their private security. Bodyguards were basic staff for the overclass, just like majordomos, cooks, secretaries, sysadmins, and image consultants. A well-organized per-sonal krewe, including proper security, was simply expected of mod-ern wealthy people; without a krewe, no one would take you seriously. All of this made perfect sense.

And yet none of it had much to do with the stark notion of having one’s flesh pierced by a bullet.

It wasn’t the idea of dying that bothered him. Oscar could easily imagine dying. It was the ugly sense of meaningless disruption that repelled him. His game board kicked over by a psychotic loner, a rule-breaker who couldn’t even comprehend the stakes.