The Testimony. James Smythe

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СКАЧАТЬ because he was so on edge, and he was making me irritable, but I couldn’t sleep because he wouldn’t stop grinding his teeth.

       Mei Hsüeh, professional gamer, Shanghai

      We went down to fourteen when we lost a Goblin Wizard called Stryfe, because he said there was something happening in New York, something about the emergency services. He was lucky we weren’t on a role-playing server. On those games, you even mention a real-world place, you can get banned, or at least shouted out of town. He quit halfway through killing the dragon, leaving us one healer down, but we weren’t angry with him. He told us that there was a bomb or something before he quit, so we knew what was going on a few minutes before the news channels even did.

       Andrew Brubaker, White House Chief of Staff, Washington, DC

      The most important thing is to keep control. In a situation where you could just lose it, where it’s ready to slip away at a moment’s notice, you cling on and pray. Straight after his TV statement we were in The Danger Room asking if there were any more coming; we had every informant we knew reporting in with what they knew. We have to know who’s responsible, POTUS kept saying, because this cannot go unpunished. He sat at the table as we all told him what we knew, and he acted like the sort of President you see on TV, gritting his teeth, his hands in fists on the table. Calm down, I told him. You can’t do anything if you’re this stressed. Somebody asked if we should get the Vice President along. Does he know about what happened? I asked, and they said that he did. Well, that’s good enough, I told them. Last thing we needed was him storming the hallways; that would have sent POTUS’ blood pressure through the damn roof.

      We knew a lot about the attacks, because of the delivery, the trigger we found at the scene, the body. I call it a body; it was shreds of skin burned into the flame-retardant belt that the IED had been strapped to. DNA markers told us that the attacker was from Iran, or the region; we just needed to know who he was working for. Over the few years before Iran had become more of a problem, or their people had, the amount of smaller attacks attributed to cells started in the country had grown exponentially. Nothing serious – car bombs here and there, more threats than actual successful attacks – but Iran, they were the buzzword. Twenty years ago it was all Iraq and Afghanistan; now it was Iran. We didn’t announce where he came from. People were making assumptions, and they were assuming correctly, but assumptions were still far less dangerous than them actually knowing.

      We had moved up to Orange alert as a reaction, without us having to even make an announcement when we heard The Broadcast, just in case. Then the bomb went off in Nevada, and the ones in Omaha and Baltimore, and before we could even breathe we kicked it up to Red. (But as the press pointed out, we’d never been at anything less than Yellow, not since we introduced the scale back at the start of the century, so it shouldn’t be a shock that we were so willing to move on it.)

       Ed Meany, research and development scientist, Virginia

      We all had friends in the Nevada office; most of us used to work with guys who were stationed there. We didn’t know what they were working on, but as soon as it blew we were told that we weren’t to say a word to anybody about it. We were all under the heaviest NDAs that ever existed anyway, so it wasn’t like any of us were in the habit of casually speaking to the press. If anything leaked out of that administration, it was meant to. The rest of the stuff? It never made it to the public. When we saw POTUS making a statement a few minutes later, he said that the Nevada office was a basic science lab; he didn’t mention the links with the army it had. He might not have even known; so much was run without going through POTUS, so that he had plausible deniability. I mean, Jesus, stuff was run through with Brubaker’s knowledge, if it had the right clearance. Sometimes, everybody had to be kept in the dark. Even then, when everything was in danger of going to shit, the most important thing was that we kept our secrets in place.

       Andrew Brubaker, White House Chief of Staff, Washington, DC

      We lost a town hall in Baltimore, a (mercifully near-empty) mall in Houston, injuries not deaths. And we lost a research facility in Nevada, so there were clean-up crews sent in to deal with that. Why those targets? We had no idea. The MO was different at each one, as well; if they didn’t all hit at the same time we’d have questioned whether they were even related. One of the joint chiefs suggested that whoever did the attack – meaning, the organization rather than the individuals – that they had been waiting for this, or that they were all in place already, waiting for something. If they were responsible for The Broadcast, he said, this was superbly orchestrated; if they weren’t, it was just incredible. We’ll worry about those, he said, and he put a staffer on it. They’ll need clean-up crews; you’ve got bigger things on your plate. I did.

      We’re at Homeland Security Level Red, POTUS told the people, which means that there is a severe threat of terror upon our great nation. Our freedom is being threatened, but the terrorists will not hold us down. Until we have caught these criminals, we will not rest. He announced that the terror level changing meant that all forms of public transport were to be locked down; that all municipal and public buildings were to be shut, with the exception of emergency service buildings; that houses and private property could be subject to police and army checks without need for warrants. We request that you stay in your homes, he said, and if you see anything suspicious, report it to the local authorities. We know you’re exercising your right to religion, but we request that, for your own safety, you keep your prayers at home rather than in the church. Get a good night’s sleep, America, he said.

      Then we heard The Broadcast again and we knew that there wasn’t a chance of anything he asked actually happening.

       Jesús Santiago, preacher, New Mexico

      When I went to unlock the church doors there was already a crowd outside. I did not have the building open for worshipping on Mondays, only on Tuesday, Wednesday, all the other days of the week. There were forty people, maybe, waiting, all the usual congregation, so I told Juanita to calm them down, park the car at the back and then go and talk to them, keep them patient. Enough, enough, I told the crowd. You have been very patient, so I will open the church in a few moments. It was so hot outside – a hundred degrees, the man on the television said – so they were sweating, fanning themselves, drinking water. Inside, the building was air-conditioned. They would have to wait for this, slightly, as I had to pack up the office in the boxes that I took over the night before; this was going to be my final sermon.

      I never meant to lie to people, I kept telling Juanita. It was never my intention to cause pain, or disrupt their lives. All I wanted was to give them something, eh? Something that they could keep and hold close to their hearts. Religion, worshipping God, before The Broadcast it was something that people did because it was there, or because they wanted to feel better about themselves; like, Somebody is watching me, I am doing this for Him. I made that more real for them. My pappi, my father, also named Jesús, from the day I was born he told me that we were descended from the family of Christ. He showed me maps and drawings that his pappi showed him, drawings of our family tree, how He travelled across His lands, across Europe, across the sea to South America, and He married a woman, and they had children together, and their children had children, and so on, and that led to me. When I was growing up, that is what I knew to be true. When he died, pappi told me that it was all a lie, that he invented it all for the sake of his church; but by then I had my own church, and I had a congregation, and they knew when they looked at me that they were closer to God than they were the days before. And the money! They donated money, to run the church, to show how much their faith was worth, and СКАЧАТЬ