by Alexander Jablokov

Alexander Jablokov has always lived dangerously: He used to rip the warning labels off mattresses, he’s been known to consume products well past their “sell by” date, and he drinks coffee despite all notices about how hot the liquid’s temperature. Alex also wrote and published a novel, Brain Thief, despite the warning represented by his advance. So he just may prove to be an unreliable guide to the future represented by . . .

Groom should have known there was going to be trouble when even getting breakfast the first morning of his visit to his friend Wedge was an ordeal.

He looked up. Cereal tags flickered on cabinets twelve feet off the floor. The sold dates on the boxes were a week or more ago. Wedge usually ate a box in a day. But the moisture indicators claimed everything was still crunchy. Great. But how was he supposed to get up there?

Wedge’s unit’s maintenance overlay pointed Groom at the right spot: an aluminum stepladder in an otherwise invisible closet. He pulled it out and it unfolded itself. He put his foot on the first step.

Damn Wedge. He just had no sense.

Any ladder is tagged up with safety warnings: about that fatal top step, that near-fatal next-to-top step, tilting, excessive weight, uneven surfaces, high winds, how dripped paint can make surfaces slippery, low-flying helicopters—there was really no limit.

Wedge clearly had tired of blinking warning tags out of the way and had gotten a bootleg warning-suppression overlay to make his life easier. If he’d stuck with something like a BSmart physical consequence overlay, he would have been okay. That overlay converted standard warnings into lever arms and tensile strengths. It disguised hysteria as information, but the ladder manufacturer usually didn’t notice.

Instead, Groom had gone for a sarcastic “how dumb can you be” overlay that provided additional instructions on how to balance the ladder on top of a speeding vehicle or use it for climbing from one balcony to another in a high-rise apartment building. So a tampering notice had shown up at the manufacturer, and its legal department had upgraded the safety overlay to take noncompliance into account.

The ladder seemed to waver back and forth as Groom climbed. On the second rung he was incautious enough to look down. The roiling depths beneath promised a long fall and an agonizing death. Whatever purveyor of paternalistic paranoia had designed that overlay was a twisted genius.

When Wedge finally got up he found Groom sitting against the ladder, his head on his knees, his long blond hair hiding his face.

“Oh.” Wedge glanced up at the cabinets. “I meant to tell you. But there’s some leftover noodles in the refrigerator. Got to warn you, they got some hot on ‘em. Great breakfast, though, gets you moving. Better than cereal, really.”

Wedge was a beefy guy, much taller than the skinny Groom, with curly black hair and loose, big hands. He’d gotten his nickname from the wide-shouldered shape of his body, and the matching shape of his head. Groom had met him at a long-ago job selling humorous pickup tags to use while watching people in bars. There had been a season when they had been popular, then they weren’t, and everyone at the company had gotten laid off. Groom sometimes saw someone pushing a stroller or buying mouthwash who still had an “X’s Evil Twin” tag slapped on them in some long-ago pickup spot, claiming they looked like some forgotten celebrity, floating around in their unpurged identity history.

“When are you going to crack and click the safety training tag?” Groom found chopsticks and started on the noodles.

Wedge sighed. “Are you saying I should just take the climbing quiz every time I go up? Confess that I am sunk in the depravity of gravity and accept the salvation of the rungs?”

“No, I’m not saying that. I’m saying if you want help, you should ask for it.”

“I’m asking, Groom. I’m asking. Please get me up to my cereal. Hey, don’t hog the noodles.”

The noodles were good—and spicy, as per both Wedge and the container’s mandatory capsaicin tags.

Groom held the container out of Wedge’s reach. “My fee. You wait for your sugar bombs.”

Instead of being annoyed, Wedge grinned at him. “Good to see you again.”

“Yeah.” Groom blinked. He wasn’t used to having the ogs in, and for an instant, reality and its overlays went out of sync. “Good to see you too.”

Groom tended to go out of commission, particularly after a tough contract like this last one. He’d take out his ogs and go bareye. He’d also suppress any overlay that referred to him. Being disconnected in a large city like Boston was more isolating than being alone in the wilderness. No one saw an un-networked, untagged, uninteractive person. Even the rare people who looked where they were going would sometimes walk right into him. The tags they paid attention to were much more vivid than the reality they annotated, and whichever street navigation overlay they subscribed to, it did not tag Groom. He was just a shadow in their ogs.

Wedge knew that being a ghost somehow appealed to Groom, and worried about him. After a decent interval, he’d persuaded Groom to come over, which meant Groom had to og up, and now Wedge had found something that would make him feel useful and encourage him to rejoin the species.

But that wasn’t everything. Groom could sense that there was something else Wedge was fretting about, something he hadn’t yet linked his conversation to. Groom was patient. It would come.

Despite himself, Groom found he was interested in this elementary ladder warning tag problem. He now took the time to examine every tag connected to that ladder, and tracked each one back to its source.

It took awhile. Ultimately, Wedge pulled out a half-empty jar of peanut butter, and ate out of it with breadsticks.

Ogs made tags seem completely real, part of the objects they annotated. Your refrigerator just naturally spilled parts lists, maintenance instructions, where, how, and by whom it was built, the fact that the lettuce was getting soft, that the lower left drawer’s humidity was alarmingly high, that putting a box of baking soda in it was actually a futile and pointless activity, the dollar cost of standing there with the door open looking for a snack, that it was designed for 97 percent efficient post-obsolescence recycling, that a decorative front panel could completely upgrade the look of your kitchen, and that you hadn’t touched that bottle of barbecue sauce in six years. Your refrigerator was so chatty because, after all, you were in this together. Right?

Identifying tags with their objects was dangerous, because all those tags were out in the flow, location-linked through high-resolution positioning data and fed into your ogs, corneal and auditory. You didn’t own or control them, and they could change at any time. The illusion that they were part of their object was irresistible, even to someone like Groom, whose job was tracing historical links for purposes of establishing provenance of rare, valuable, or otherwise fraught objects. When a job was over, he tried to look at reality bare, no matter how boring and inert it was, just to ignore the endless arguments over who owned what.

“Here’s what you’re going to do,” Groom said finally. “There’s a single digit difference between the catalog number of this ladder and the 20-foot version. The safety overlay won’t see that change. . . .” It took him a couple of minutes to edit Wedge’s home inventory. “Your usage records now show you as having been climbing a twenty-foot ladder, not a twelve-foot one. So, by your stats, you’re an unusually cautious ladder climber, even a scaredy cat, never going much more than halfway up. That should give you some cred with these guys. Let’s see . . .”

Cautiously, Groom took a step on the ladder. Solid. Another. There was a vague thumping noise, like music from a distant horror movie, but he managed to get up to the cereal cabinets without serious incident.

“You want any cereal?”

“Nah.” Wedge threw the empty peanut butter jar in the recycler. “I’m not hungry.”

“So what’s your real problem?” Groom said.

“Eh? Look, Groom, all I wanted to do was see . . .”

“If I was okay. But you also think what will make me okay is an interesting problem. Now that you’ve warmed me up with this one, you might as well tell me what it is.”

* * * *

Half an hour later, Groom found himself in a windswept city park, looking up at a virtual monument to a long-vanished political figure.

“Why her?” Groom said. The woman’s face and other information were invisible beneath an insane number of denunciations and error corrections. “I think my parents were fans. I remember her on the TV. But some things get old fast, and I think she’s probably the oldest thing from that decade.”

“That’s just it!” Wedge was enthusiastic. “Everyone has made fun of her for years. I happened to be looking around for things no one’s tagged for a while, and came across this . . . I guess you’d call it a statue. A site-specific created image, anyway. You can’t even see it, people were so mad! Now no one pays attention. Perfect. Watch the water!”

An arching cascade swept through the circular plaza to which Wedge had hauled them. Before they could react, it was gone. The unpredictable spray of water was a feature of this bleak park, with its curving slabs of polished granite and hidden nozzles. You had to watch the overlay, which warned you of an impending soaking while trying to teach you the algorithm that governed the spray pattern.

It looked like a gentler spray was headed their way in fifteen minutes or so. This was how kids learned to use their ogs, chasing cool water on summer playgrounds. It was fall now, and too cold for that.

Wedge’s hobby was reviving once-popular things that had been forgotten. Maybe the woman who had the semi-official title of Emergency Management Director for just under a year a couple of decades ago was ripe for revival. Groom didn’t know. He’d never been able to figure how Wedge spotted something ready for return. He did have a pretty good success rate. Just last year he’d brought back those crude virtual tattoos from the early days when tags and overlays just appeared on phones people carried. Updated og versions had spread everywhere, before disappearing again.

Sight of the monument itself was completely jammed, but links led to millions of other images, recordings of speeches, texts of directives. She’d been astonishingly busy, launching programs daily during that buoyant time, sending troops across the sea to enforce tolerance, rebuilding infrastructure, creating mass experiential artworks . . . In the linked images the long face under the bristled copper hair, with its high-cheekboned mix of what were allegedly African, Scandinavian, and Quechua features, was compelling, even to Groom, with his allergy to joining anything.

To the unogged eye, there was nothing here but a circle of pavement and a thin person-high metal rod. The original monument had been both virtual and site-specific, depending on IR reflections from the precisely placed slabs to manifest itself. Even now, people had an odd liking for things that appeared in only one place, as if that were somehow more authentic. Groom could see similar monuments, looming up above the rock slabs: local politicians, musicians, inventors of useful technologies. Each of these was all tagged up too, but it was easy enough to filter out a couple of graffiti and commentary layers and get rid of the tags. Commenters on the Emergency Management Director had used some seriously resistant programming.

“And you want to clean her off,” Groom said.

“At least establish some usable filters,” Wedge said. “I started picking at the tags a few weeks ago, but it’s not just random stuff. Someone went through a lot of trouble to make sure you can’t perceive her. If you could help me out. . . .”

It wasn’t as if there was anything politically dangerous about the memory of the Emergency Management Director, Florina Vance. She was just reputationally toxic, even now. Those who had maneuvered her from office had been superb spinmeisters. Everyone now knew exactly how to think of her: she was an absurd mistake, and her fans had been hyperenthusiastic dorks. To touch anything associated with her was to risk embarrassment. Groom’s potential clients would certainly see the connections, if they did the usual due diligence, and it might influence their decision if someone was competing against him for a high-end provenance job.

He looked at Wedge, who was smiling confidently at him. Wedge had no sense about things like this. Since Wedge’s reputation depended on exhuming ancient fads and obsessions and retooling them for modern relational consumers, he didn’t interpret the risk the way Groom did.

But Wedge was his friend. He deserved what help Groom could give him. And, really, who cared by this time? Even the embarrassment was old.

He got to work. Most of the tags were just random denunciations. Groom was a bit surprised that Wedge had had any trouble getting through them, and found himself just a bit annoyed that Wedge thought something this simple would be enough to make him feel useful and alive . . . wait a minute. He reached a set that seemed as random as the rest, but were actually linked together in a referential net that made it difficult to penetrate. They were so cleverly connected that you might not even know you were being led off from your original target. It was like a shell over the monument.

But they were old, from around the same time as the monument itself. Groom had logic tools unavailable at that time, which made getting through possible. Still, there was some nice work here. Groom admired it as he created filters and workarounds that would finally let anyone see the monument as it was designed. This blocking layer had gone up so soon after the monument did, it was possible that no one had ever actually perceived the thing.

“Hey, great work.” Wedge had brushed dirt off the top of a granite slab that held back a flower bed and now sat on it. A couple of the rose bushes behind it tilted back, as if something had been digging under them. “I had no idea how to get through that.”

Groom activated the final filter, giving them a clear view of the monument to the Emergency Management Director.

They both stared.

“Where is it?” Wedge said. “Do you see it?”

“No,” Groom said. “There’s nothing here. No head, no monument.”

Under the warning label was nothing but a few construction notations from when the park had been laid out.

“Everyone was just commenting on what other people had already commented on!” Wedge said.

“The Emergency Management Director’s real monument: geologic layers of denunciation.”

Wedge slumped down on a granite slab. “It’s funny. I really thought we could use a little of that spirit now. Everyone working together, a high mission, all that. We’ve been embarrassed by it long enough. But I guess she shook things up enough that some people never want it to happen again.”

Groom should have felt nothing but relief. He’d helped his buddy out, but escaped negative reputational consequences: the good-parts version of friendship.

But he found the missing monument worrying at him. Because Wedge’s immediate conclusion was wrong. It was clear that the damn thing hadn’t been removed right after it was put up. That tag net had been linked directly to the underlying programs that displayed the monument. He was sure the monument had been removed only recently—probably only since Wedge’s messing around had revealed that someone was going to try to revive it.

That was the kind of thing that really got Groom working.

“Someone’s taken out the actual monument, but they couldn’t have gotten rid of all the information it linked to,” Groom said. “For example, the monument seems to have commemorated an actual event that happened somewhere around here, a speech Ms. Florina Vance gave long before anyone even thought of the office of Emergency Management Director, before she was even on the City Council, when she was just a community healthcare activist. It’s just a chance, but if I work my way out along any links from the event itself, I might get us somewhere.”

“I don’t know if it’s worth it, Groom,” Wedge said. “I mean, I was just hoping—”

“You wanted to get me involved in something? I’m involved. Let’s find out what happened to the image of our beloved disgraced leader.”

* * * *

He sank into the tags. A fine spray wetted him, but he no longer paid attention to that level of information.

What Groom perceived instead was a thick impasto of random observations, each one unexceptionable: a discussion of the cracked sidewalk here; an essay on a drain that explained where dumped toxics would end up, complete with flow diagrams that eventually linked up to some pre-colonization watershed data; historical markers with the places of the first foundations, birthplaces of people who had successful law offices, locations of homes of people of various politically significant ethnic groups; and a variety of yard sales, lost pets, food drives, Christmas tree disposal instructions, and block parties.

Then, a park with spindly trees that were always dying. Arborist work orders. Schedules of neighborhood events: ethnic food festivals, craft fairs, outdoor poetry readings, candlelit vigils for local dead youths, Easter egg hunts, prayer meetings. Photos, photos, photos galore, seemingly one taken at every angle from every possible location on it, of crowds, of kids standing in squinty-eyed array, of attractive young women drooping out of misadjusted clothing, of maybe-famous people in three-quarters rear profile linking to ear shape databases for confirmation.

It was just too perfect. It was like when someone was asked to mimic a random flip of a coin . . . and avoided long runs of heads or tails, thinking that seemed more real. Surely no part of lived reality was as free of narrative as this was.

He’d been standing in one place for half an hour now, looking through it. His lips were cracking, his throat dry.

Something prodded his lips. It was a straw, held out to him by Wedge who, after all, knew exactly what to do. Groom sucked down the lemonade, and kept sucking until the cup was empty. He didn’t move. He didn’t want to lose his concentration.

The speech was missing too. Incredible. Someone had gone through a lot of trouble here. How could they have gotten rid of the mass of hostile tags that must have been stuck on even this minor early speech? Florina Vance had given it at an event to celebrate a new wing on the health center.

More tags: girls commenting on each others’ hair, boys saying the hair looked okay with them, detailed references to what the boys and girls had done the night before, which was comment on what had happened at school during the day. . . . Ogged reality contained a density of experience that was impossible to comprehend. No wonder people typically filtered out most tags, paying attention only to those left by friends or related to current celebrities.

Groom found himself examining park cleanup instructions: trash receptacle locations, pounds-per-square-inch pressure specs for cleaning hoses, portable toilet load point stacking details . . . not from the health center celebration, but a concert by some revival band, a few weeks later. Who cared how portable toilets got put away after those hairy guys sang their last encore?

And, finally, he found her.

Florina Vance stood on the steps of the health center, a young woman, not pretty, made for being seen through a multiplicity of media, with strong bones and the ability to look directly at you, no matter where you were. She was usefully ambiguous in her ethnic look. At this event she wore beaded braids. She’d soon dump those in favor of a skull-emphasizing buzz cut that varied its color depending on the event.

Vance was already saying the things she’d later be known for saying: Groom could be whoever he wanted to be, and she would help him become it. As he listened, Groom believed her. He could almost feel her hand on his shoulder. He could see why people who liked keeping things a little more under control might be uncomfortable with her.

There were a lot of people around, but most were there for some kind of festival, and to eat ribs and papusas and catch up with their neighbors. Almost no one was listening.

But among those who were listening were a couple of operatives from the national party, desperate for someone who could catch some attention, no matter that she was only the second-ranking administrator in a local health center. They saw the star quality. These same operatives would later arrange for her overthrow, and the elimination of any kind of personality in power, but right now their notes were enthusiastic. And there was an activist, someone unknown to later history, making a recording for post-speech debrief from where she stood. This was someone with an early connection to the woman who would become the Emergency Management Director.

Then Groom found himself having tag problems again, as he searched the personal histories of those who had heard the speech. Nothing led to the right place. Each person’s links seemed to be someone else’s. There were always mistakes, but he’d never seen it this bad.

He was overwhelmed by a blast of white noise, and then freezing water cascaded down his neck. For a second he didn’t even know what he was looking at, out here in what passed for the real world. The air roiled, distorting everything.

“What the hell?” Groom yelled. “Wedge!”

“I’m sorry, Groom.” Wedge said. “She startled me when she started up her fryer.”

A menu and a health inspection tag clicked Groom in: he was looking at a mobile food cart. Hot air rose from its glowing griddle. The owner, a chunky Asian woman named Chenda San, popped a few sales coupons into his visual field. There was another blast of white noise as she threw lotus root slices into the hot oil. And the cascade of water . . .

* * * *

Wedge had been standing next to him the whole time, holding an umbrella over his head. Wedge dripped from the just-passed shower, and his black hair was plastered to his forehead. He’d raised the bid price for an umbrella high enough that a vendor had wandered into the park from elsewhere and sold it to him.

“Sorry, Wedge.” Groom was contrite. Wedge had been doing his best and didn’t deserve to be yelled at.

“Don’t worry about it.” Wedge tugged him out of the way of an arching spray from somewhere on the park’s other side, and toward the food cart. “Are you hungry?”

“You know it.” Groom pulled his thin blond hair off his face and tried to straighten himself out, while Wedge approached Chenda San, the food cart vendor, and ordered.

She immediately went to work on a Fish Farmer’s Fury. She chopped squid, octopus, bream, and cuttlefish, all with beautiful promotional images of suns settling over water and trees only partially concealing the more industrial pumping and filtration images that were required by food regulations. Inspection certificates, bacterial assays, and the times the scurrying harvesters with their huge skimmers had punched in at the hand washing station were all available, but Groom was too tired to dig through them.

Chenda then seared peppers, onions, green beans, and squash. Data on heat-induced breakdown into dangerous radical compounds mocked the antioxidants in the raw vegetables.

Why were those irrelevant connections so clear, while those at the speech were so confused?

But, wait . . . That early associate, the one taking the official recording of the health center speech for later review. The recording she’d made was missing, but she had a lot of sightline notes, as well as irritated notations about people who had promised to show up but hadn’t. Those were still there.

And she’d come back to this layer of the past and added comments at a later time. “Murchison’s been claiming he was here that day, but I can see that he wasn’t. He thinks no one will actually check. And, hell of it, he’s right.” And one, a bit later: “Look at the conservative top I picked! To think what I could have carried off back then. . . .”

“I thought you were taking a break.” Wedge held out a plate of steaming noodles.

“I only have one thread,” Groom said. “If I lose it, we’ve got nothing.”

“What?” Wedge said. “Who?”

Groom flicked him the tag. Margaret Dunster. Despite being a fierce loyalist of the Emergency Management Director, she’d given up on the movement relatively quickly after the removal. For most of the past decade her interest had been gardening. Deep layers of tags here: rare varieties, soil pH, a philosophical debate about what was a weed and what wasn’t. She had quite a reputation going.

While Wedge looked, Groom ate. Chenda San really did make a mean noodle. Her powered cart was already on its way to another sales location.

A transportation map showed that Margaret Dunster was a quick subway ride away from where they stood. She was a bit less diligent about updating her status than she should have been, but it looked like she was home, taking advantage of the clear fall day to finish cleaning up her garden for the winter.

* * * *

“It’s been a long time since I’ve had any trouble.” In person, Dunster was a striking woman of about sixty, with dark blue eyes. She looked up at them from where she knelt in her beds, putting in bulbs, but did not look intimidated.

“No trouble,” Groom said. “We’re just doing a little historical research.”

“That’s the worst trouble of all.” She stood up, took off her gloves, and brushed off her knees. She was tall, and looked way down on Groom, and even down on Wedge. She kept her hair tucked under a wide straw hat.

“It’s the head!” Wedge said frantically. “I was trying to clean the graffiti off the monument. You know—”

“I know.” Dunster looked up and down the quiet street, an older person’s gesture: no one younger than middle age thought that what was visible physically conveyed any useful information. “So, what will it take to get you two the hell out of here?”

Wedge must have expected to be greeted like an old friend. “I . . .” He turned to Groom.

“Someone’s pulling tricks with the Emergency Management Director’s monument,” Groom said. “It’s missing. Wedge here is after inspiration. Me, I just don’t like censorship.”

“I don’t believe either of you.” She turned her back to them and pulled off her hat, revealing close-cropped silver hair which she fluffed with her fingers. “But you’ll be worrying me until you get something you can accept as an answer, so come in.”

The small house was clean and spare, with only a few pieces of square furniture.

“I don’t have anything, like lemonade. Or even tea. I don’t have a lot of people over. You can pour yourself some water, if you like.”

Wedge and Groom sat down on a couch that looked comfortable, but turned out to be as hard as a wrestling mat.

“We tracked you from your attendance at the health center speech on—” Groom said.

“I know when it was. You don’t think I put an alert on that? I knew as soon as you looked at my little style comment. For some reason, that’s the kind of thing people pull up.” She sat down in a metal folding chair that didn’t look any more comfortable than their decoy couch. “I was with Florina when she was just running for City Council. She was incredibly young for a candidate. I knew her parents. Silly, right? Throwing in with some kid barely out of high school. But she was something, even then. She moved up fast. I thought I’d stay in her inner circle, since I’d been there from the first, but sentiment was never her weakness. She found people with specific skills, but didn’t keep using them when the skills were no longer necessary. I was soon just another member of the team, and then out of it completely.”

Despite Dunster’s apparent reticence, she’d told versions of this story before. At least five people had noted her oral history, and annotated it in various degrees of detail. One, someone with some skill, had linked each episode to other records of the events she described: photographs, videos, news reports.

Dunster must have been either tiresome or intimidating when young: big featured, gawky, never indicating doubt, physically stronger than she had a right to be. Age had slowed her down enough to make her tolerable.

“It was an incredible ride, from City Council to Mayor, to Governor. Way too fast, I can see now. But at each point, the party needed her at a level of prominence above. She fulfilled so many people’s needs, and there was no one else available. Every possible competitor had been accused of corruption, had slept with someone on their staff, or had pardoned a criminal that went on to murder someone. She seemed immune. Then came the disasters, and the emergency decrees swept her up to the top. None of us could believe it. A dream come true, that dedicated little activist finally with the power to get things to work the way they were supposed to.

“Is it any wonder she got a little out of hand? The national infrastructure work corps. The liberation marches. But then came the intervention in Tibet, the budget catastrophe, the mass manager strikes . . . Operatives were behind those, orchestrating them, we all knew that, but there was no way to bring those guys out into the open. She was finally forced to resign.

“She seemed . . . not happy to go. Relieved, maybe. She’d never really had a life. Single, dedicated, working fourteen hours a day. So she left, married that Tyrel who no one took seriously, moved to Chicago, had three kids, and started a home insulation business. Every so often she calls a tag conference. She’s careful to be absolutely as boring and off point as possible. No one pays any attention. All you really need to hide in plain sight is to seem to want to be famous, but not be good at it.

“I’d been out of it for a while then, but I still felt like I had lost something. The night she resigned I got drunk with a guy. He listened to me cry and then I let him do what he wanted. It seemed to make a kind of sense. We’d lost pretty much everything, but it was like none of it had ever happened. Amos. I haven’t thought of him in years. But I picked up gardening from him. Whatever his other problems, he was a good man with a plant.”

Groom could see Amos, or rather his post-mortem memorial, nicely put together by his second wife and his stepdaughter. He’d died just a few years before. A poignant timelapse showed what happened to his garden once he was no longer around to take care of it. Year by year it faded, as perennials came back more sparsely, and plants eventually died. Eventually, it was just a square of weeds. Dunster had looked at it regularly, but had never left a tag on it.

“So do you know what happened to the monument?” Wedge asked.

“Oh, it’s under there somewhere,” Dunster said. “You just need to get all the nasty crap off.”

Wedge looked at Groom.

“We did that,” Groom said. “There’s nothing underneath. It’s completely missing.”

Dunster stared at him. For the first time he’d startled her. “That can’t be! How could someone . . .” She thought. “Anything happen to the other two monuments?”

“Who?”

“There are two other monuments right there, a labor leader and an inventor. No one pays much attention to them, but some city council resolution put them there. I think it was to make absolutely sure no one would show up at Florina’s marker by mistake. They’re about as boring as you can get.”

Groom was already scanning their references. A nineteenth century mill organizer, with her hair in a severe bun, and a twentieth century camera inventor holding his invention over his head in triumph. They were named in the park’s reference list, and on any number of school syllabuses. Even information in plain view was useless if you didn’t know to look for it.

“That space looked completely blank,” Wedge said. “I had no idea there was supposed to be anything else there.”

“Oh, there’s something there all right.” For the first time, Dunster smiled. “With a little work, I’m sure you’ll find it. Do you have a lot of people following this?”

“No,” Wedge said. “I mean, we wanted to have something before we got a lot of followers.”

There was something appealing about the tall older woman, and Groom found himself wanting to please her. Wedge’s reluctance to get publicity was quite unlike him.

“We’ll get the word out,” Groom said.

“A lot of old movement types will certainly be interested. But please go now. There might be a frost tonight, and I want to get the rest of the bulbs in.”

“I can’t believe it,” Wedge said as they got back to the park. “That poor woman . . .”

“What?” Groom said. “Who?”

“Margaret Dunster.” Wedge was surprised. “The one we were just talking to?”

“She seemed perfectly happy to me. Why should we feel sorry for her?”

“Why, she’s lost everything that meant anything to her. All reduced to historical footnotes and jokes. It must be miserable.”

Groom didn’t get that sense, somehow. Dunster had moved on. Some people had that ability. Still, she seemed to want them to find and uncover the Emergency Management Director monument. Maybe he was supposed to think that she had some of that old feeling left, but he thought she was actually up to something else. What?

The other two monuments in the Emergency Management Director’s spot were definitely missing. Now that he was looking, he could see their own swarms of tags, mostly notes to school groups about historical context, and a few rude responses from students about what their subjects looked like or probably smelled like.

Wedge sat down and frowned. “You know, these slabs have been shifting lately. Frost heaves or something.”

“Maybe. But look.” Groom pointed at the dirt he’d noticed earlier, and the tilted roses. “I think it’s more recent than last winter.”

No one had tagged the slab or the roses. They were just there, visible, and so hadn’t caught their eye.

Groom examined the specs for the pole that oriented the monuments. Its IR beams bounced back off its surrounding to create the site-specific sculpture. If the surroundings changed, it was no longer defined as the same site.

“Someone moved these,” he said. “Just far enough to disrupt the processing. We can’t fix it, not without more muscle than we have, but we can do something temporary . . .”

He tagged up the spots that would need to be shimmed out to reflect the infrared back properly. Wedge went off and swiped a trellis from a planted area nearby. They took it apart, and slid slats into the proper spots, moving them back and forth to approximate the original slab placement. It took a couple of hours to get the measurements right. By the time they were done it was getting toward evening, and growing colder.

All three of the coextensive monuments flickered back into existence. The first was bulky middle-aged woman from the 1840s, with most of her hair in a bun, but the rest swirling around wildly. Someone had imagined her voice as a stentorian bellow. The second was the inventor from the 1950s, a middle-aged man with half glasses. He was a nice piece of work. Though three-dimensional, he seemed to constantly be developing on one of his experimental emulsions, seeming to get clearer and more defined but never actually getting there.

The third . . .

“What’s that?” Wedge asked.

They could see the sober, almost beautiful face of the Emergency Management Director looming above them, but in front of it, blocking its details, was a message: “Warning: this movement contained seductively oversimplified solutions to complex societal problems. Support for this contention available here.”

Underneath was a series of statistics, simulations of financial flows, quizzes, and informational snippets, all leading to the conclusion that the Emergency Management Administration, despite its revolutionary rhetoric, had entrenched existing interests and deadened innovation.

“Man,” Wedge said. “This will take forever to get through. How did we miss this the first time?”

“It wasn’t here.” The tags had a familiar style. Groom dug through the data cascades and the linked tags. There were any number of choices you could make when doing an overlay like this—and the choices made here were similar to the ones in the tag net he’d removed just that morning. But in this case, it was brand new. And it was incredibly hard for him to maneuver through. He might have thought it had been designed specifically to take advantage of his cognitive weaknesses. The blocks had been moved to give someone time to put this up.

“Jeez,” Wedge said. “I’m starving. How about some noodles? Chenda’s around here somewhere.”

“No more noodles!” Groom said. “We had them for lunch and we had them for—wait! Wedge.”

“What?”

“You got those noodles in your refrigerator from that same cart. Right?”

“Yeah, sure. Chenda knows what she’s doing.”

“I’m sure she does. She was there, right? When you were checking out the monument the first time.”

“Have you looked?” Wedge said.

“No. I’ve got a hypothesis, and I’m making a prediction. You take a look and see if I’m right.”

Wedge gave the question his full attention. He pulled up surveillance images of what he had been doing and reviewed whatever messages he had sent during the period he was trying to uncover the monument. He also ran back streetfood data and accounts for the past few months, to establish a baseline. As he found relevant ones, he flipped them over to Groom.

Chenda San’s usual territory was up Charles Street, at the base of Beacon Hill, and over near the river. But within twenty four hours of Wedge’s first inquiries about the monument she’d refiled her streetfood licenses and repositioned here, to City Hall Park. The first time Wedge tried to remove the netted tag graffiti, she was right behind him, and even sold him noodles when he got frustrated.

The night after that, someone had moved the granite blocks a few inches in various directions. A little read back on the specs for her cart revealed that it had a motor somewhat larger than what you would have expected. Maybe Chenda just liked high performance, or maybe she sometimes had a need to move heavy objects.

And she’d been right here this morning as Groom performed his investigation of the concealed layers surrounding the speech on the health center steps. Somehow she’d tracked what he’d done, what he’d looked at, probably by a direct read of his pupils combined with known tags. And now she was in the area again, as he tried to get through this new net.

“She’s been gaming us while providing us with high-quality noodles,” Wedge said grimly. “You’ll never get through if she’s around to update it. It’s time for some real political action!”

“What are you going to do?”

“Get some of my folks together. We haven’t had anything fun in months. It shouldn’t be hard to get everyone out of their holes. I’ll get Chenda San out of the way for long enough for you to scrape off her stupid quiz and get to the monument. “

* * * *

“Wake up, Groom!”

Wedge was shaking his shoulder.

“What?”

“Our opening’s narrower than I thought. We’ve got to roll.”

Groom managed to get to his feet. He was still wearing his shoes, he noticed. They were soft shoes, almost moccasins. Still, he usually managed to get them off before falling asleep.

“Oh. Ow.” His head spun, no matter how hard he pushed his feet into the floor.

Three days of denial of service attacks on Chenda’s lunch cart had been successful. Her supply chains had been disrupted. Her pollock was in Portland—Portland, Oregon. Her tuna had been left out just long enough to develop an illegal concentration of bacteria. A delivery vehicle had backed over her bags of noodles. Her bean sprouts were lacy with mold. The health department was checking up on evidence of cross-contamination between her prep area and sterilization station. Each individual attack looked like chance, and was almost impossible to trace, and each one was easy enough for Chenda to set right. But together, they had put her out of action.

So last night everyone had gotten together to celebrate. Groom had noticed that as soon as there was the prospect of a party, most of the organizational juice had gone to organizing that, rather than continuing the now-tedious deniable attacks.

It had seemed only polite for Groom to join in.

“Come on!” Wedge said. “You can feel bad on the way.”

The street was bleak and bright and way too early. They shuffled quickly toward the park.

“What happened?” Groom said.

“Chenda’s smart,” Wedge said.

“We knew that.”

“Yeah, well. The problem with knowing someone’s smart is that you still can’t tell what they’re going to do.”

“So what did she do?”

“She’s been protesting every move, lodging formal complaints with her suppliers, reworking her menu, the kind of reactive stuff you’d expect. Wait.” Wedge ducked into a doorway. He came out a few seconds later, looking shaken, but with no coffee in his hands. “It’s worse than I thought. While we thought she was just flailing, she was doing something really sneaky. Each time we interrupted a supply chain, she turned around and extended that interruption, rather than just trying to resist it. I mean, we should have been more careful, I admit that.”

“No coffee?” Groom asked.

“That’s just part of it. Fish deliveries got locked up, not just for her, but for everyone. Fish that’s supposed to be landing in Boston is piling up in Vancouver and Tegucigalpa, and so plummeting in price there. There isn’t a spice hotter than cinnamon moving out of the food distributors in Chelsea. Train cars of wheat flour are standing on sidings in North Dakota. Every food cart and storefront in Boston has lost access to its suppliers. And, yes, coffee supplies have been interrupted. That place was selling only to known customers. It might get savage.”

Now that Wedge said that, Groom realized he hadn’t seen a cart since they’d left Wedge’s apartment. Usually there was a cluster of them down by the subway station, curling flapjacks around sausages and slinging steaming cups of congee to sleepy commuters.

“I’m almost through the overlay,” Groom said. “Just a little bit more work . . . then you can let stuff go.”

“Groom! Every food cart in Boston is going to be after our asses now! Chenda made sure that any trace leads back to one or another of us. To me, Groom. My fingerprints are all over it. Maybe those guys at the coffee shop knew. I might never drink coffee in this town again.”

“You have to stand down immediately,” Groom realized.

“We already are! We have no other choice. People will find out who’s responsible and hang us from lamp posts. You don’t mess with this stuff. And I’m hungry, Groom. I’m really hungry. And my head hurts.”

“Your head?” Groom thought. “Where’s Chenda now?”

“She’s down at the health department, arguing things out. But she’ll know by now that she’s back in the clear.”

“I’ll finish opening up our Emergency Management Director. Meanwhile, you do whatever you need to do to find us some coffee.”

“Go ahead,” Chenda said behind them. “I think we’re all ready for it.”

She didn’t have her cart, and was dressed in an elegant cheongsam with a high neck. She was a bit heavy for it. She looked at the remains of her informational barrier, now ready to be stripped off. “Quick work. Impressive.”

“Are we under arrest?” Wedge said bleakly.

“You damn well should be!” Chenda snapped. “You and the rest of your supply-chain terrorists. That was a beautiful piece of tuna you turned into toxic garbage.”

“I . . .” Wedge clearly wasn’t used to being confronted by the actual victims of virtual mob action. “I’m sorry. But we had to—”

“Save your childish self-justifications for your generic anti-authority action buddies. And you!” She turned to Groom. “I thought better of you, at least. I thought you’d be interested in adding information, not subtracting it.”

“I have added it. You’re the one who was so afraid of real information that she blocked it.”

“A warning label on a public nuisance is real information. It represents encapsulated experience. You were a kid then, you don’t really remember. Mass rallies, forced export of democratic institutions, every person a sibling without rivalry—it all seems like good fun, until your society locks up.” She looked back up at where the Emergency Management Director would appear. “She once had the power to move people. I guess we’ll just have to see if she still does.”

Groom followed her gaze. There was something odd about the underlying monument, something he hadn’t figured out yet.

“But you’re not going to arrest us,” Wedge persisted.

“For heaven’s sake, I don’t have the authority to arrest anyone,” Chenda said. “Don’t you know how things work at all? Once she was gone, and no one needed sly political operatives like us anymore, we all got purged too. That’s just the way things work. Who wants a bunch of active regime changers eyeing an unstable interim government? That was the end of that whole heroic era. So a lot of us went into food service. We trade recipes. And, believe me, we’re all mourning that tuna. Just try getting a burrito next time you’re in El Paso, see how far you get.”

“I said I was sorry!” Wedge said.

“‘Sorry’ don’t maintain margins, sonny.” She turned to Groom. “Well, what are you waiting for? Let’s get that genie back out of the bottle.”

There was a huge uptick in people who, all of a sudden, wanted to see the monument to the Emergency Management Director unveiled. Way more people, Groom realized, than if Chenda had just allowed Groom and Wedge to clear off the monument unmolested. Wedge could never have arranged for such a spectacular marketing hook on his own.

No matter what she said, Groom could see that Chenda wouldn’t mind re-energizing her base with their old charismatic political opponent. Never mind that the real Florina Vance now had a family and ran a business in Chicago, with no interest whatsoever in combat politics. The fight could just go on without her.

Groom looked at the monument suspiciously. Something was definitely wrong.

“Could you do me a favor?” he said to Chenda. “Can you dig through this stack of tags here?”

“You think I’m falling for some kind of informational booby trap? No thanks.”

“No booby trap. But I don’t think you’ll be the only one who’s surprised by what we find.”

Chenda frowned as she worked through the tags attached directly to the monument, which had been invisible under the warning label. “Hey!” She opened a tag for Groom and Wedge. It was a soft drink upsize coupon from a bankrupt fast-food chain.

Yanking that tag set off a cascade. Someone clever had been at work here—someone even cleverer than Chenda. A head appeared, but it wasn’t exactly the head of Florina Vance. This one wore tiny blue glasses and a baseball cap with a hamburger on it.

“The Emergency Burger for that Emergency Hunger!” it bellowed.

Groom was too stunned to laugh. “Someone used the Emergency Management Director to sell hamburgers?”

“With a side of wasabi fries, it looks like,” Chenda said. “People did all sorts of things with her image right afterward, but boosting fast food sales wouldn’t have been my first choice.”

Groom examined the advertising head more closely. “You know, this doesn’t seem like it’s really trying to move product. Doesn’t have the polish someone with a profit orientation would bring to it. More a garage hobbyist look. And there’s no such thing as a garage hobbyist fast food chain.”

He could hear the altered sound file of a rally: “Together, we can achieve truly crunchy breakfast cereal!”

And the crowd: “Crunchee! Crunchee! Crunchee!”

“Or garage hobbyist breakfast cereal!” Wedge said. “Those things rely on network effects to taste good.”

Chenda didn’t find it funny at all. She stalked tensely around the head, then whirled and pointed.

“You!” she said. “Did you know about this?”

Margaret Dunster strolled into the park. Instead of stained coveralls she wore a light jacket and narrow trousers that emphasized the length of her limbs.

“Know about it?” Dunster said. “I did it.”

“You . . .” Chenda was stunned. “You mocked your own leader like that? Just to make some money?”

“No money. Groom here is right. It looks like a fast-food icon, but there was never any marketing muscle behind it. We did open a couple of locations, but they did lousy business. It’s harder than it looks.” After brushing it off with a handkerchief, Dunster sat on a granite block—then glanced down at it. “Who’s been moving these things around?”

“Never mind that! What were you after?”

“Making sure it never happens again. Unlike you, I don’t have a secret sympathy for charismatic politics.”

Chenda examined the smirking eyeglassed head of the caricature Emergency Munching Director. “This was underneath the warning label the whole time. You manipulated it right when it went up.”

“It was childish,” Dunster admitted. “I was disappointed. She just quit. I lost my passion for it all, and wanted everyone else to lose theirs too. But it was supposed to come out right then. Instead it got buried underneath warning labels and just sat there waiting all these years. I think it’s held up pretty well, don’t you?”

Groom could see the way the mock monument had knocked the props out of any looming sectarian struggles. Viewership fell like a stone.

“These boys were just interested in showing some political commitment.” Chenda said. “You shouldn’t mock their idealism.”

“So effects don’t matter?” Dunster was outraged. “Just the intensity of your feelings?”

“We’ve got the bun, we’ve got the sausage,” the head proclaimed. “Our wurst is filled with passionate intensity!”

“Maybe rational argument is useless,” Chenda said. “But I’m pretty sure this guerilla theater isn’t going to change anyone’s mind either.”

“I just wanted to sow some doubt,” Dunster said. “I gave up my youth to certainty. If I were to give advice to you boys, I’d say: worry about making somebody happy. One person, somewhere, who needs help. Do it today. Don’t worry about joining a movement to do it.”

Groom looked at Chenda. “What are you going to do now?”

“I’ll struggle against infective social movements, but all I can do about outbreaks of corrosive cynicism is keep my head down. Now, excuse me. I’d offer you some food, but my suppliers were a bit remiss this morning.” She stalked out of the park.

“Shoot!” Wedge looked after her. “I’m starving, Groom. Really starving.”

“I hope you don’t feel you wasted your time,” Dunster said.

The face, Groom knew, was an unreliable tag. Designed to involuntarily reveal emotion as a way of allowing people to make credible commitments, it was always hacked. Still, he thought that, despite what she said, Dunster missed what she had had then. Linking to other people was what the mind was for. To point out that their charismatic mass movement had led to bad policies was to misunderstand the whole point of political coalitions. Intrusive laws and regulatory agencies were just what passionate political commitment left behind, like trash after an outdoor concert.

“Not at all,” Groom said. “It might give me a chance to learn something about gardening.”

Dunster glanced at him, startled, then smiled. “You really don’t seem the type, Groom. At least find a plant person who’s more your own age.”

Groom watched her walk away. She had a loose-limbed gait that was oddly attractive, given that he had never favored tall women.

“What now?” Wedge said. “I was hoping to find some movement to resurrect and rerelease, but, to tell you the truth, this burger thing isn’t much to work with. Old consumer products have been the most popular thing to resurrect, and most of them have been done and done. I’ve revived the memories of the revivals—’remember how much fun it was when we made Moxie popular again?’ That’s as much recursion as I can take. I think I’ll just leave this thing for kids to play with. I’m sure someone will have fun with it.”

“There must be food somewhere,” Groom said. “But no noodles.”

“Fine,” Wedge said. “No noodles.”