“Missions,” the Nigerian said. “DC, Houston, Chicago, the Mall. A reference to me. To Kate. To Hiroshi. But not real names. Just aliases.”

“Damn it,” Breece said.

“What about the mission this month?” the Nigerian asked.

“We have to do it,” Breece replied. “But we don’t have to get our hands dirty.” Breece looked out the window, onto DC. “I think it’s time we tapped some of the local talent.”

John Stockton looked across the room at Jerry Aiken, his Chief of Staff.

“Every detail,” he told Aiken. “The car company. The cops and paramedics who reported to the crash. The flight crews for the planes and the helicopter. The agents on Jameson’s detail. The phone records for any calls Pryce made. The car’s nav data. All of it.”

His Chief of Staff nodded.

“Everything, Jerry,” the President repeated. “Quickly. And quietly.”

“Yes sir, Mr President,” Jerry Aiken said. “I’m on it.”

81
Integration

Saturday 2041.01.12

Yuguo held his sign aloft, atop the wooden table. LET A BILLION FLOWERS BLOOM! On the other side, his sign showed faces of his friends, his missing friends, bloodied, the last images seen of them, and the word JUSTICE.

Around him thousands of students and ordinary Shanghai residents thronged the central square of Jiao Tong. The air was thick with the thoughts of them all, from a continuous supply of Nexus being produced in the chemreactors in the buildings around them.

The campus was theirs.

Two kilometers to the east, a tremendously larger crowd, more than a hundred thousand strong, held People’s Square.

Above them the sky was thick with drones, crisscrossing, buzzing them at high speed just over the height of their signs. Around them, State Security police waited ominously, reinforced with soldiers, with tanks, turrets and machine guns pointed at the crowd.

Let them come. The censor codes were still down. The protesters were communicating freely with the outside world. In the engineering buildings, circuit printers and fabricators were churning out more devices now, devices to be sure they’d stay online if the censor codes ever came up.

Satellite uplink phones. Laser communication links. Devices that let them bypass Chinese infrastructure entirely, talk directly to the world via the constellation of hardware whizzing past them in the sky.

Devices they would have been executed for printing weeks ago.

Some were staying here. Most were being snuck out at night by runners, bound for the larger protests at People’s Square. In other cities, other university campuses and small private workshops were doing the same.

Every day now their numbers grew, as more men and women snuck past the army lines, and into the square.

Every day brought word of new protests in far-flung cities.