Tropic of Kansas by Christopher Brown

Author:Christopher Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-07-11T04:00:00+00:00

54

Tania bought a trucker’s road map of the central United States, taped it to the wall, and annotated it in grease pencil, string, pushpins, and paper notes, trying to reverse-engineer the network by mapping it.

There were no topo lines on the map, but you could infer their broad outlines from the ways the river flowed. And when you spent enough time looking at the region that spanned from Minnesota to the Gulf, you realized it started with the river.

The river system, when you drew it over in thicker blue, looked like a tree, the way its many branches fanned out across the northern plains. Like the capillaries and veins of the heart of the continent. Like a network.

On another network, she found a database of the communications infrastructure that predated the MOFUC. She marked each transmitter with red pins. She drew dotted line circles to mark transmitter ranges. She flagged three she suspected could be the live station Walker claimed.

One was in North Dakota. The tallest TV antenna on the continent, apparently.

One was in Mexico. An actual border blaster whose specs she found on a page about those old high-wattage stations.

One was in New Orleans. That seemed least likely, given the conditions on the ground there. Maybe that’s why it made the most sense.

It was right before the last presidential elections that the people in New Orleans took back their city. The storm that drowned half the wards made it possible, driving an evacuation of the MMCs who had made the city their principal staging area for operations in the near South. The city had been granted an independent corporate charter by the feds, reasoned the committee that replaced the board of managers, and this was just a change in ownership.

They lasted almost two years. Then came the Repo. And the Purge.

There was still fighting going on. People hadn’t given up. She saw the hero clips every night around eleven on Channel Zero. Scenes of resistance sent in from New Orleans and all over the Tropic. Vehicles on fire. Grainy zooms of primitive bombs detonating at the gates of storage depots and biorefineries. Shaky fragments of unlawful arrests and citizen roundups at the end of electric truncheons. Morale videos of disabled veterans making their own machined prosthetics as they prepared for what was coming. Combat-ready DIY cyborgs.

The clips were curated. Some nights by Walker himself, but mostly by others when he was “in the field.” When the sound was bad, or the shot didn’t speak for itself, they added voice-over narration.

At the end of each segment they flashed a long code across the screen. An address, Tania gathered. The direction to transmit your own footage for inclusion.

Maybe it was her set. Maybe Todd got the wrong kind of box. Or maybe she was missing some essential hardware you needed to make the thing interactive. Watching the broadcasts, and the messages from the other viewers that flashed on the screen, she got so frustrated with the primitive controls of the idiot box that she wanted to smash it.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.