The 13 Secret Cities (Omnibus) (35 page)

2:24 p.m.

I spotted Mayor Amadeo on top of the 10
^th
float, and I laughed.

He looked so tiny from up here.

He’s just like any of the rest of us,
I thought.
Just a tiny man.

2:25 p.m.

As the web attacks began, but I fought the urge to turn on my phone to check Twitter. I had to trust the rest of us citizens who had a job to do. They had theirs; I had mine.

2:26 p.m.

The number of users of my feeds spiked from 1 viewer to 50
.

Right now, the three web sites would be taken over by OLF, defaced and filled with images of the Millennium Riot, the Englewood Fire of 2012, and the murders of teenagers by corrupt police. The fundraising campaign for Mayor Amadeo was also taken down, and we replaced it with a full archive of his own emails, where he brokered deals with the NRA and pharmaceutical conglomerates to secure his election, and eventual run for governor.

As the websites got taken down, the numbers on my video feeds rose. Someone was sharing the link to the feeds.

1,100 viewers.

2:28 p.m.

The first of the floats went dark. Gone, like an old light bulb.

Pop.

Then, in perfect succession, another float went dark.

And another.

And another.

The luxury shops set amid the valley of concrete and glass of Michigan Avenue dimmed.

And that’s when the floats popped off.

Just as soon as they had been, there, those LEDs were gone.

The lack of light soothed me. Soon, all the floats had gone dark, and the throbbing pain in my optic nerve lessened. The LED surfaces of the cars were black, matte, and opaque.

As the floats blacked out, about two thousand people were watching each of my feeds.

By now, Twitter would be on fire with the missives from people on the ground witnessing the blackout. And surely, the TV news crews covering the parade would also begin to cover the event. As messages poured into people’s smartphones, the eerie silence on the street began to expand, and I felt it. It felt good.

People started to shout on the ground. I could hear them, even from this high up in the balcony.

I smiled.

2:29 p.m.

Every LED float went back online. The OLF used all the electric power available to turn up the brightness of the screens.
 

We hijacked each of those floats, 30 of them to be exact.
 

Our video hijack used the LED screens of the floats to play the videos of every police brutality we had lived through in the Millennium Riot. The images were often out of sequence and shaky, just like I remembered.

I saw the aftermath in one of the bubble floats, as the FBI investigated the grounds of Pritzker Pavilion in the weeks after the event. Then images of the early stages of the march showed on the screens. In these I saw the thousands of us that had marched from Roosevelt and Michigan up to Millennium on October 4, 2013. The LEDs then showed the YouTube clips of the faces frozen in fear, the white clouds of tear gas blooming, and the wounded on the ground. The sound of screams and shouts filled Michigan Avenue as the floats replayed the dozens of clips. The words “SWAT KILLS” and “WE DON’T FORGET WHAT YOU DID” flickered through every screen as OLF hacked their displays.

Some of the drivers of the floats stopped their vehicles, and they rear-ended the floats in front of them. A couple of the drivers successfully shut off the LEDS on their floats, but the other twenty-eight remained on, reliving the events. I heard police sirens, and near me, beneath the tower, policemen on horseback moved in on the chaos that was starting to erupt on the ground.

About ten thousand people were watching each of my feeds.

Just one minute until moment zero.

2:30 p.m.

At that exact moment, our main event started.

Each intersection along Michigan Avenue had been staked out by pairs of OLF members. We called these pairs our “dancers.”

No one noticed how they quickly jumped into the street and began to climb the floats. Why would they? The video of the feeds was hypnotic, and they were unable to tear themselves away.

Our dancers unfurled banners, and they draped them over the floats, working quickly to make sure the banner could be seen from both the east and the west sides of the street.

The banners read things like “Most corrupt state” and “Bring our Schools Back.” Others read “Police Brutality is what Chicago is good at.”

Each of our dancers was masked, and most were able to jump off the floats and run back down the side streets. Of course, they knew their chances of escaping might be very low, but they were ready for being apprehended.

My HD camera caught all of this in its eye and fed it back out to the world.

We had relied on the broadcast media to show our struggle during the Millennium Riot, and they had shown us nothing. Instead, we broadcast the event ourselves. We outnumbered them, and we always would.

Each of the feeds now had forty thousand viewers. That was roughly a hundred and twenty viewers in total.

I ran my hands through my hair and pulled it back into a ponytail, and I celebrated our victory. I hadn’t been this happy in a very long time. I let the cameras roll while I leaned over the railing of the balcony.

And that’s when I spotted the men with the rifles across the way.

They were lying low on the roof of 436 N. Michigan Avenue, directly across from the Tribune Tower. Their hard helmets formed masks, and their dark uniforms covered every inch of their bodies like a second skin.

They held aimed their rifles down into the street, locking in on targets as they squinted at the telescopic viewfinder.

Our display below — the video displays, our dancers, the banners — had sent out a message, but the implications of what we did were real to me now.

I felt afraid — not for myself, but for the people down below. My own family was watching the parade, and it wouldn’t take much to hit them with a round from those rifles.

I considered my hidden position in the balcony of the tower, and I gathered all my strength, telling myself to be brave.

Then the wind picked up, whistling, and the men in the uniforms stirred.

As if someone had whispered to them in their earpieces
heads up,
all three of them looked up at me.

I had seen those helmets and those visors before. Men in those helmets had struck my face under the overpass on Michigan Avenue once. Tiny badges marked their breasts. Their eyeless stare felt endless. I had also seen them in my mind a long time ago, when my father told me the story of how gunmen shot down students in the plaza of Tlatelolco in Mexico City.

“Hey!” one of the men shouted at me.

In the air above those men, I spotted a thick shadow that drew itself into folds, draping itself over the men like a blanket. And as the trio evaluated me—their target—a pair of eyes emerged through the shadow, and a voice filled with needles and hate spoke across the way.

“It’s time to do this all over again,” the Ocullín said.

And then one of the uniformed men fired at me.

I should have remembered the camera. I should have grabbed it by the handle of its tripod, and swung that merciless video eye toward them, to capture them forever in my video feeds.