Noise - By Darin Bradley Page 0,1

together our first Plan. Knew how to get started. How to get the jump. We couldn’t afford most things—guns or food or medical supplies. We planned to Forage for these, after the Event.

If we tried to steal everything, we would’ve just been arrested and thrown in jail. We’d be fucked when things Collapsed.

But we were going to need things. Primarily, we were going to need to get out of Slade. To get out of everything. After the Collapse, the town would get hungry. And other people would have guns.

The Collapse was like a Renaissance Faire. In my mind, they were the same. Some years before, my best friend Adam and I had gone together. Turkey legs, incense, cornets of roasted almonds. That sort of thing. We’d spent most of our adolescence playing Dungeons & Dragons—old school. Second editions from the 1980s that had been my uncle’s. So we knew about trebuchets and scorpions—the difference between a glaive-guisarme and a fauchard fork. The numbers of another generation, of the Gen Xers with their hybrid engines and text messages. 14 16 15 17 17: saving throws for a first-level fighter. The unforgettable code of every Silicon Valley headcase who’d gone from twelve-sided dice to stock options and copyrights. We knew these things. We bought swords at the Ren Faire. Unsharpened things that had to be peace-bound while we stomped around the fields in the mud, paying older kids to buy us beer. They were carbon steel, which was important. They would take an edge, but that would nullify the warranty.

• • •

When word came through Salvage about the bank runs and the riots—long before it slipped through the FCC feed, before it interrupted programs and slid semi-transparently, like a snake’s skin, across the bottom of every digital display in the country—we got the jump. Before anybody panicked. Salvage had been watching the silent bank runs, the electronic ones, for weeks. It knew who was going to start throwing things, in which cities, almost before the demonstrators themselves did. It knew who had been out of a job, and for how long. Who couldn’t buy bread. Who had sick children.

Salvage had long since silenced the hobbyists—the ’casters who weren’t up to anything more than teaching people to play the guitar, or crochet, or to understand the Bible. If you hadn’t found a way in, if you hadn’t cracked our codes, it was just noise. Nonsense. The only integrity behind jamming had been to silence the Outsiders first.

Salvage had become self-aware.

There were only two of us, Adam and me, but we’d need others, to grow strong, to be safe. And we’d have to either recruit them or intimidate them. So we began with swords. With getting edges.

When word came through, when the jamming stopped and everything harmonized into a layered fugue chanting the one mantra that meant the same thing to every conspiracy-head, deviant, and tagger, we ran to the square. To Meyer’s.

… This assumes that you will kill other people….

We left our swords on the kitchen counter—the Faire was just beginning—because they didn’t have edges. There wouldn’t be disorder, not yet, so they would just get in the way. We threw a cinder block through the front window of the pawnshop, and it lodged at a slow angle through the skin of a kick-drum on display.

… It assumes that a new competition for resources has begun….

We were fifteen years old again, a wall of old toasters and secondhand TVs and abandoned jewelry an open stall before us. We were standing on broken glass wrapped in Faire smells—sautéed onions and garlic. We listened to broken music from the bar next door … that there are resources yet available … while we were stealing a bench grinder. We were thinking in numbers and obscure acronyms. We were thinking 14 16 15 17 17, THACO, hit points. We were thinking, What are the numbers for a good strike with a sword? Which dice do we roll?

Nothing had fully Collapsed yet. We got the jump. But it was Before, so we were just criminals. We were running, as best we could, with a bench grinder, back to our duplex near campus. The first step was to put edges on our swords, so we would be strong.

… primarily, the Event involved ab initio (or has since developed) an economic revolution … We didn’t need a generator at that point because the electrical grid was still alive then. The Northern Lights would come later.

We were running. We were several