I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom by Jason Pargin

Author:Jason Pargin
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

And that had been it, as far as replies. Interactions on r/DCTerrorAttack were becoming less and less fruitful as its population grew; they were now forty hours into the crisis, and news of it had spread well into the sphere of casual observers, though still with little in the way of mainstream press coverage. The sub was now the home of a core group of posters and a sprawling audience of spectators whose demands for compelling news were growing faster than it could be produced. Attention-seekers were eagerly filling the void, and that, friends, is how you build a bullshit machine.

Out of curiosity, she’d then gone back to the sparsely populated original subreddit, r/AbaddonsNavigator, and posted the exact same question. It had taken roughly eight and a half minutes for the moderator, ZekeArt, to reply, “Is this it?” followed by a link to some DC insider’s blog. Key had read the post, read it again, tried to steady her breathing, then read it one more time.

On Monday, Gary Sokolov would be hosting an all-day gathering at his estate in McLean, Virginia. Festivities would kick off at eight in the morning with a concert from a children’s choir singing patriotic songs, followed by a brunch, then a “daytime fireworks display.” In attendance would be other wealthy donors, CEOs, a few members of Congress, and three members of the goddamned motherfucking Supreme Court of the United States.

That is what had sent Key thrashing out of the pool and sprinting up to her apartment. As domestic terror targets go, there were none better, if your goal was to assure and accelerate the decline of the American empire. Members of the Supreme Court are not elected and have no term limits. There is no real mechanism for removing them from office, and their decisions are all but impossible to overturn. They are the closest the USA has to royalty. There is, therefore, no equivalent assassination target in the US government.

If a president is taken out, they are immediately replaced by a vice president of the same ideology to serve out the term—it’s barely worth doing. But if these justices were killed, the current president and Senate would replace them with members aligned with the opposing party … and those replacements would have lifetime appointments. So this attack would fundamentally change the balance of power in a way that could only be reversed with another attack on the opposing members of the court. A line would have been crossed in a way that would all but guarantee it would be crossed again and again. It would be the lighting of a fuse. As such, security at the event would be a small army, but what good would that do if the host of the get-together was himself in on the plot? The Navigator was on pace to have the device at the location several hours in advance. Sokolov, and whoever else was in on it, would have plenty of time to conceal the bomb in an environment Sokolov controlled, at an event he’d planned from scratch.

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