The statue of John Macdonald looked like a focal point for the protesters. There were at most a thousand, congregated densely in the front with a long petering tail farther back into the park. Behind Kierk and Mike, from the direction they had just come from, there was truly an army of police, almost as many police as there were protesters. Cop cars were parked sideways in the street and, far in the back, a division of Mounties patted the sweaty flanks of their horses outfitted with blinders and equine armor. The protesters, skewed toward the young, seemed motley and unorganized. Some passed around stainless steel water bottles, signs held down at their sides. A few of the protesters looked out for the hell of it, but others wore UV-resistant sunglasses and were tan and fit, like they had just come out of some protester boot camp.

The day was dipping toward boredom for all involved. A shirtless man sat on the top of the statue, flapping his arms. Signs were laid atop one another on the ground, people sat scattered and cross-legged. A few of the braver citizens had walked directly up to the police and began to chat with them, exchanging a few jokes, getting a few responsive faces, so nervously encased in glass and armor, to laugh.

A man in his thirties with a beard and forearms a deep tan shared his water bottle with Kierk, who looked fundamentally out of place in his dress shoes and dress shirt and dress pants and little laminated Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness conference badge. Wiping his mouth, Kierk handed the water bottle back. “Hey, man, I appreciate that. So what are you protesting about?”

The protester looked around, out at the police. “The world’s pretty fucked up. What’s not to protest about?”

“Actually, that’s a pretty good answer . . .” But the protester was already moving off, because he had noticed something Kierk hadn’t, which was that there had been some kind of change in the air, in the mannerisms of the cops. The police, arranged in a loose line a couple hundred long, twenty men deep in places, seemed to be organizing into different contingents. Somewhere in the city, a single man behind a desk, having in mind the Molotov cocktails used on empty cop cars yesterday, having heard reports of cops being sneered at or bullied and the windows of shops being broken, distilled all these individual facts together by the alembic of binary command: Do It. And the order had been relayed down the hierarchy from the original node, spreading out and multiplying diffusely along the branches until it reached an output layer thirty-thousand times larger than the source at locations all throughout the city.