The People's Republic of Everywhere and Everything

***

Lilian always snorted when she saw the sign reading NUCLEAR FREE ZONE on the border between Berkeley and Oakland, though she learned to suppress it when Jonothan was in the car with her. Everything—nuclear disarmament, overpopulation, alternative hemp-based fuels, animal rights—was serious business with Jonothan. This time though, as she aimed her car up Telegraph Avenue, she didn't snort. Not because Jonothan was sitting next to her, his arms crossed and his head tilted out the window as he went on about the Revolution, but because Jonothan was sitting next to her, sure that he was already dead.

"I'll miss food," he said. The Smokehouse, a kitschy old burger joint, zipped by. Jonothan was a vegetarian. Maybe I should say had been a vegetarian. But anyways, he liked the French fries at the Smokehouse. 

"You'll be fine, we just have to get to the house, get you into bed, get some rest," she said. 

"You sound very sure of yourself," Jonothan said. "I don't have any internal organs. I'm so hollow. Is this hell? Are we touring hell right now?" 

Jonothan had been like this for most of the day.  He was a street kid who mostly lived in People’s Park, where the long-term homeless sleep under the tree and hold friggin’ committee meetings and write letters to the governor demanding their rights. Jonothan was pretty political; he had a canned speech defending his white-boy dreadlocks that he’d rehearsed on Lilian several times since they’d met the month before. Jonothan was still cute under all the dirt and the raggedy clothes, and when he laughed he had a mouth full of straight white teeth that told Lilian one thing—the kid was slumming.  

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Slummers, in the end, always like their creature comforts. So he’d come by and use the co-op's shower, play with Lilian's Nintendo DS and update his Facebook on her laptop, and cook up the food he’d liberated from the Dumpsters behind the Whole Foods and Andronico’s supermarket. “Beggars can be choosers, after all,” Lilian had said, and Jonathan had screwed up his face and started on a rant about locavores and how the Safeway is such an energy sink that even Dumpster diving wouldn’t help, but then he made some delicious vegan stir-fry and Lilian had scrubbed him up in her tub and had taken him to bed.  She found out about the herpes only later. And now there was this:

“I’m dead, Lil,” he said. “How will you get me up the stairs? My legs are rotting out from under me. Can you even hear me? It’s like all I can hear is my teeth knocking together. Do I even have skin?” Then he barked and slammed his head against the passenger-side window of Lilian’s Saab. “Look! Devils!”

It was the kids. Lilian had just crossed Dwight, and this part of Telegraph Avenue belonged to the kids. Not the students at Cal, of course. They kept their heads down, their blue and gold sweatshirts clean, and their cell phones on vibrate. The homeless kids gathered in the pools of light in front of the smoke shops and giant CD stores, playing with their dogs, taunting the cops, and now, hooting and throwing stuff into the street. Lilian saw a streak of orange arcing overhead, then the Molotov cocktail opened into a puddle of flame right in front of her car. Suddenly, the police were everywhere, in riot gear, with long batons. Lilian slammed on the brakes.

“Get down!” she said.

“No,” Jonothan said, “this is what I des—” Lilian slammed her forearm into his chest, and the whole bucket seat fell backwards, taking Jonothan with it. She put on her prettiest, most frightened look and tried to catch the eye of one of the police swarming into the street. Fire in front of her, cops all around, some carrying portable barricades that just a few minutes ago were innocent-looking bicycle racks on the campus. Then her phone chimed. A text. From me. 

RU THERE TO GET THE GIFT??

She looked over at Jonothan, who was still mumbling to himself, and now picking at his skin. Then someone started slamming their hands on the hood of the car. It was a dykey woman cop, helmet up, mouth wide open and screaming. For a second, Lilian found her foot on the accelerator. All she needed to do was give it a little pressure. But she shifted into reverse and moved the car backwards and onto a side street. Barricades went up right after she exited Telegraph, and the mass beat-down began.

Jonothan was pliable enough to get pushed down the street to the co-op house Lilian shared with nine other people, including me, but Lilian still had too many problems. The riot had begun too early, and got violent way too quickly. The cop had probably gotten a good look at her. Now the car was probably going to end up either torched or at least well-known to the local pigs as well. And Jonothan was insane.  

There’s an app for that, and with her smartphone Lilian was a regular Wikipedia Brown—Jonothan had Cotard’s Delusion, the belief that he was unreal, a rotting corpse somehow able to still walk and think. It’s a rare disorder, but these were rare and imperfect times, Lilian knew. Sometimes schizophrenics had Cotard’s, and sometimes it was a side effect of anti-herpes medication. A probable double whammy when it came to Jonothan, but he still might be useful to her. Plus, she probably loved him. She did love climbing atop him every night and pinning his wrists down. He had a tattoo across his chest that read, We can carry a new world here, in our hearts. She liked that. I liked to watch them, eavesdrop.

The whole scheme was simple enough to start. Lilian had spent months integrating herself into Berkeley’s anarchic street life—even the Revolution appreciated a pretty girl who shaved her armpits and smelled like patchouli rather than patchouli and landfill. Once she had made all the right friends on-campus and off, she’d be able to snag the Q-chip and sell it. All she needed was a distraction, and the Telegraph Avenue kids were already ready to provide that, especially if it meant mixing it up with the police. But everything was falling apart. For her, not for me. The kids had rioted too soon, and Lilian was woefully out of position. Cal was probably already under lock down. Jonothan was crazier than usual; there'd be no talking him down.

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“Everything is falling apart,” Jonothan said as he stumbled ahead of Lilian. “Can you feel it? No, no, you can’t. Let me tell you about it. I’m seeping out of my body, like steam. That’s what the spirit is. Filling the whole world, swirling around. I’m blocks away already, in every direction at once.”

“Up the steps, John Boy,” Lilian told him. Two palms on his back got him the staircase. He turned to face her. “It’s like being everywhere, all at once.” At least he wasn’t talking about being in hell anymore, but then he said, “No walls, no doors.” That was the slogan Lilian had come up with for her plan to steal the Q-chip. The Q-chip, or quantum chip, which promised to break every and any code. 

While normal computers were stuck with binary operations—everything was either a one or a zero—quantum computing allowed for one, zero, or the superimposition of both. Not just onezero or zeroone, but OzNeEro and ZoEnRoE and any other combination, for cheap and without any more power than a nine-volt. The Q-chip could crack any password, perform any calculation, and derive a question to any answer on Jeopardy, even “This woman is currently living in a forty-room mansion in the Maldives, which lacks an extradition treaty with the U.S.” Who is Lilian Tanzer? Yes! 

“No walls, no doors” was just to get the anarchists on her side. They wanted to use the Q-chip—as though they could pop it right into an ordinary laptop—to eliminate Third World debt, bring down the President, and erase their student loan information. 

He said it again. “Lily! No walls, no doors! I know it all now; everything.” Then he grabbed her, his fingers tight on her biceps. “We can’t go inside, we have to go to campus now. Do it now! My soul is already there!” Jonothan had been freaking out for three days, but something about him made the back of Lilian’s neck tingle. She glanced around. There was a white van cooling on the corner, and across the street from the co-op house, in one of the apartments she was pretty sure was empty, a light was now on. A McDonald’s wrapper was crumpled up on the curb, which was the biggest clue. There wasn’t a Mickey D’s on this side of town, and almost nobody would be caught dead eating one of those toadburgers on this block. The cops must have been tipped off, not just about the riot, but about the heist.

***

That was my burger wrapper. At least, I presumed that Lilian was smart enough to spot it.  They say you should never give a sucker an even break, but maybe I’m just a sucker for a sweet smile myself. She figured out that Jonothan had somehow had a lucid moment and booked down the street toward Shattuck. That was a crowded street, with bookstores and nicer restaurants and a couple of good movie theaters. Pretty apolitical scene—I call the little shopping zone “The Gelato District.” She ignored the calls for her to stop, to freeze, that came from inside the co-op. Jonothan stumbled after her, howling about how no no, he was back in hell now. And he was going to be, soon enough.

I don’t quite know everything that happened, not even now, so please do forgive the embellishments. Maybe the cop wasn’t a woman, but a male pig with a high-pitched voice. Perhaps Lilian didn’t even consider that the cops would run her car’s plates, even if she looked like a semi-innocent victim. But most of the events of that night are easy enough to piece together. I wasn't part of the riot. I'd been sitting in Cory Hall all day, munching pizza, reading the flyers, waiting for my chance.

I had a police scanner feed in my Bluetooth, and I’d tapped Lilian’s smartphone two days after she showed up with her acoustic guitar and sob story about a touchy-feely daddy on Central Park West she was running from. My hotrodded version of FlexiSPY gave me access to her text messages, her phone logs, the semi-nude pics she liked to take of herself in front of the bathroom mirror and send right to Daddy. Thanks to her phone’s built-in mic and GPS app, I could listen in on her conversations and Jonothan’s idiot ramblings, and keep track of her location within a few feet.

Yeah, I’m a sleaze, but I’m a sleaze for the Revolution. Lots of people come through Berkeley, and some of them are even authentic anti-capitalists. But most of them are like Lil and Jono: police agents provocateur or middle-class thrill-seekers who want to exploit us before settling down to a bourgeois lifestyle of voting for the Democrats and employing undocumented workers from Mexico to raise their Ritalin-addled children. So when they knock on the co-op's door, I keep an eye on them. 

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Lilian thought she was a big deal sneak thief. She had a few identities, a "Daddy" who was a banker back east with a hankering for a Q-chip of his very own, and a soft spot for wounded little puppies like Jonothan. Hell, I thought she was just a reporter when I saw her at first. She had the clean nails of an office worker. When I cracked her phone—whoa doggie! The town has the nickname “Berzerkeley” for a reason, and that reason is omnipresent political paranoia. But even I didn't think that we'd be infiltrated directly by the forces of international financial capital.

Like I said, her plan for the Q-chip was almost a good one, and she was able to mimic our politics enough to come up with a snappy slogan and a Utopian vision of a future without credit scores. She was so good that all I had to do was make sure everything on her checklist happened an hour earlier than she wanted, and that Jonothan would be an albatross. A little ketamine goes a long way, but even with all the other stuff wrong with that kid, who could have predicted something as weird and poetic as Cotard's Delusion?

It was easy enough to send the Telegraph Avenue kids a text from Lilian's phone a bit early—yes, in the Bay Area, even the homeless and dirty have cell phones. Lilian had figured out which lab held the Q-chip designs and prototype, and all I needed was a credit card…to jimmy open the lock. She was surging up Shattuck a little too quickly for me, so I texted her. NO WALLS, NO DOORS and WELCOME TO THE GELATO DISTRICT. Triggered every one of her ringtones. Turned on her MP3 player, full blast. Made it easy for the cops to find her, and they did. 

There was always tons of street noise on Shattuck thanks to the buses, the buskers, the constant murmur of a dozen conversations and latté orders. I could barely hear the order to halt, but Jonothan's moaning came over the aether loud and clear. Then Lilian did something that was actually pretty brave; she pulled out her phone and started recording.

I got the video—Jonothan lurching toward a pair of cops. Two kids, really. They had Mace and told Jonothan to stop, but he wouldn't. "Your guns won't work on me," he said. "I'm already dead." They shouted for him to get down on the ground, then hosed him but good with the Mace. He just wiped it from his eyes with his sleeve. Lilian was really screaming; she cared about him, poor girl. The cops called for backup for the 5150 they had on their hands, then tried a bright yellow Tazer. Jonothan looked down at the wires on his chest and pulled them free. "You pigs, you pigs! The whole world is watching!" Lilian shouted at them. Then they rushed her.

She was right. The whole world is watching, thanks to her. And to me, of course. Lilian's plan was ultimately a stupid one. She was going to steal the actual, physical Q-chip prototype and then have it couriered through a private high-security messenger firm—the type that specializes in transporting uncut drugs, little girls, kidneys on ice, and exotic pets—back to New York City. And to do what? 

What would Daddy do with it, except smash the little chip with one of the awesome decorative paperweights on his desk, or maybe crush it in his very palm like the squash-playing, power-tie-wearing alpha male he thought he was? Total twentieth-century industrial society thought. Maybe he'd spend a spare billion dollars over the next five years trying to reverse-engineer it…except that the Q-chip could redesign its own next generation in five seconds. Stealing a computer chip is about as effective as tearing up a mortgage document or telling the devil, "I take it back!" after selling your soul. 

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So I didn't steal the chip. I copied it, to share it with all of you. That was the beauty of the Q-chip—it wasn't much more than a whiteboard full of equations and a few receipts, paper receipts, for materials I'd found on the secretary's desk. I was probably picked up by some security camera, maybe spotted by a few co-eds while weaving the Q-chip stuff between the frames of Lilian's video, but it won't matter. No walls, no doors. 

You won't see me on the news—call me Anonymous if you must. The video is already going viral. Jonothan, zombielike, lurching toward the cops and taking a beating without feeling a thing. Lilian shrieking then falling, then a pair of cops towering over the camera, their batons thick as redwoods. And between the frames, information sufficient for any grade-school hacker, garage tinkerer, or steampunk Maker to whip up their own Q-chips. 

Everything's possible, starting right this very second. Berkeley really will be a nuclear-free zone now, because anyone with the Q-chip can simultaneously disable every warhead on the planet. You're welcome. No prison can hold me, for even the cells at Guantánamo Bay are controlled by computer.

Jonothan's tattoo is part of a longer saying—We are going to inherit the earth. There is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie may blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world, here, in our hearts. That world is growing this minute. That's Buenaventura Durruti, an old Spanish anarchist. And he's right. So was Jonothan. He may well be dead by now, but he is everywhere all at once, expanding in every direction, all across the Internet, carrying a new world with him. It's growing every minute. A week from now, you won't recognize the planet. Yes, I'm a criminal, but I'll be the last criminal ever. No walls, no doors, no crime, no inequality, no state to arrest us or capital to protect. You shall all be freed from hell, your souls returned to you. 

RU THERE TO GET THE GIFT??

Featured photo: Michael Dziedzic / Unsplash