Anarchy of the Mice

Chapter Seventy-Five

Sergio Diaz, smiling, poured a pair of drinks at his mahogany sideboard. Three of the four walls in the mayor's office had been repaired—the last just needed a little touch-up over stray burn marks—and the portrait of Don Juan again hung over the fireplace. Outside, New York City hummed with the sound of jackhammers, hydraulic lifts, and shouting construction workers.

Quaid accepted his drink, a prairie fire prepared with Cholula hot sauce. "Good to be back in the old digs, I take it?"

Sergio nodded. "Yes, quite. We are still finding raccoon nests, and occasionally I do catch a whiff of burned tire. But these are trifles."

"Rifles?" Quaid said.

"No, trifles—I said the raccoons and smell of tires were trifles."

Ten months after escaping Roche Rivard, Quaid still hadn't fully recovered his hearing. Durwood figured it'd come back eventually—he had a call in to Yakov asking what specific mechanisms the sonic weapon employed. The arms dealer hadn't called back, still sore over being strong-armed in a New Jersey storage shed.

"Right," Quaid said now. "I suppose you've got time to fumigate."

The mayor smiled again. Gray streaks glinted in his formerly jet-black hair, but he looked good. Just last week he'd been reelected to another four-year term. While mayors of most U.S. cities had gotten hammered in the first post-Anarchy elections for capitulating to Forceworthy and other private muscle companies, Sergio had been lauded for holding out—for attempting to govern humanely.

"The sideboard came through well," Quaid observed. "I'm amazed looters didn't take it."

Sergio ran his hand over a carved hydra. "Perhaps the piece benefited from supernatural protections."

The old friends considered this over a swig.

Quaid drank his in one, finishing with throat and eyes stinging. "Or from weighing half a ton and nobody being able to budge it."

He poured himself another and joined Sergio at the window.

Six busy months after Data Rejuvenation Day, the Manhattan skyline was beginning to shed its blight. Holes had been patched in skyscrapers. The orange-black haze, whose onset climate researchers had never quite understood, had lifted.

The journey back from the Anarchy's abyss hadn't been easy—though the technology piece had come together quickly. Once Piper downloaded the kernel sourcecode off the keychain drive she'd stolen (back) from Blake Leathersby, it took her less than an our to write an antidote patch and post it to every public server and message board around. She then tweeted from the josiahTheAvenger account that the Blind Mice had "accomplished their goal of bringing the high low and the low high" and were gifting the world back its data.

Few trusted this. Corporations took it for another prank. Cities feared it could further damage their systems. Rivard LLC propagated rumors that the patch actually contained advanced AI laying the groundwork for the enslavement of humans by sentient machines.

Eventually, the success of American Dynamics and New York City in restoring their data convinced others to try the antidote. Gleeful pictures of bank statements and accurate property records began appearing on social media. The process was hampered by hoaxes, opportunists, and cover-up murders, by doubt and guilt and pessimism.

None of these, finally, were enough to stop people from coming together again.

From trusting each other.

The Anarchy already showed signs of becoming instant nostalgia. Hawkers sold buttons with the silhouette of Josiah (missing but presumed lurking somewhere) superimposed over the nose-eyes-whiskers symbol. People wore shirts that said, I Survived the Anarchy and All I Got Was This Lousy Mass-Manufactured T-Shirt.