To see a Tactical on an interstate was not normal. The usual practice would have been for Tom and Kevin to dismount the machine gun from the tripod, or at least throw a tarp over it. But they’d specifically said, back in Des Moines, that it was needed for the last few miles of the journey—this part right along the Missouri River, with Nebraska in plain view off to the left. So Sophia, riding shotgun, couldn’t help gazing off in that direction, scanning the opposite bank of the great river for—what? What could be over there that would create a need for such precautions? They were still in flat Midwestern country. The river ran sluggish and brown between gentle banks for the most part, with no dramatic gorge to be gazed across. Much of the time she couldn’t see anything except trees between the road and the riverbank. When she could look across, she saw mostly trailers, parked in clusters and compounds on the floodplain opposite, with boats of various descriptions strewn around on the muddy banks. Kind of an extremely spread-out linear slum, then, that somehow derived sustenance from the river. Barges moved up and down that, using it as cars used the interstate: a way of getting between more prosperous places.

“They’d be river pirates if they weren’t so hopelessly outgunned,” Pete explained, noting her interest. “But they can still hole up in the tall grass and snipe at river traffic from half a mile away. So there’s an understanding in place. A protection-money kind of thing. The watermen buy trinkets or eggs or just fork over money as an out-and-out payoff. The people over there refrain from sending high-velocity rounds their way.”

“Do they ever cross the river?”

“When they get desperate or some meme convinces them it’s a good idea. They follow these weird edit streams. No one knows where they come from. I looked at one of them once. I thought it would be conspiracy-theory stuff but it wasn’t even coherent enough to be called that.”

“Hmm. Yeah, I guess the whole point of a conspiracy theory is to offer a kind of false coherence.”

“That’s right, Sophia, but what I saw didn’t even rise to that standard—didn’t even know about it. It was—well, just plain weird. Algorithmically generated mishmash images, sounds . . . no sense to it at all. Just whatever worked, you know, in the sense of getting the viewer to watch a little more. They use eye tracking, you don’t even have to click. But every so often, whoever’s behind it—whoever generates these edit streams, assuming, that is, that there’s a human anywhere in that loop—will put it into the minds of those people, and then bad things can happen.” Pete glanced at the Tactical as if to add, But not to us.