UNIVERSAL TURBULENT

XXVII - PLANET EARTH

Monitors, receivers, transmitters, routers, switchers, amplifiers, junction boxes, and more, hung from ceiling-mounted racks, filled his homemade shelves, and covered eight worktables. Hundreds of cables squirmed this way and that, tying his Kingdom together and connecting Kenny with the world.

The teenager sat in his favorite chair, an executive model he had rescued from a dumpster and equipped with wheels. Large wheels that enabled him to roll over cables, empty meal paks, and cast-off clothing.

A spot threw light down across Kenny's shoulder-length hair, badly scared face, and filthy T-shirt. The youngster felt jubilant, frightened, and defiant all at the same time. He and his fellow netheads had created Radio Free Earth, what? Twenty four hours ago? Thirty six? He couldn't remember.

The whole thing had happened so quickly. Most of the infrastructure already existed, resident not only in his garage, but in hundreds of similar facilities all over the world. The revolt, Governor Usmos' speech, and the street fighting simply provided Kenny and his friends with a purpose, a reason to do what they had always wanted to do: prove how smart they were....and earn some respect.

That's the way it started. However, once Zuon Inc. and it's media subsidiaries seized control of the mainstream news networks, that created a hunger for news coverage.

One of Kenny's associates, a computer programmer with ties to Zuon Inc., estimated that their last program had attracted 3.1 billion viewers worldwide. An audience of almost unimaginable size in an age when carefully focused narrow casting had whittled viewership down to well-defined groups of one or two hundred thousand.

That, the teenager thought to himself, is the good and the bad news. The powers that be, or want to be, will do anything to shut us down. A supposition support by the fact that the average life expectancy of a Radio Free Earth fly cam was down to a matter of minutes.

Still, the relative units were relatively easy to manufacture. They were mass-produced by a somewhat eccentric netizen known only as L. L. and, for reasons known only to him, placed under Kenny's control.

Kenny had absolutely no idea who his ally was, or where he or she might be located, except that L. L. had to have access to some sort of high-tech manufacturing facility.

Each fly cam was a work of art, though small, about the size of the insect after which they had been named, a camera still managed to deliver high-quality holo images via some sort of relay system that Kenny had yet to figure out.

But none of that mattered, not now, as both sides struggled to take control of the city.

Rather than expand his assets in drips and drabs as he had in the recent past, Kenny had decided to a mass an entire fleet of the miniature cameras and launch them all at once. Then, by picking and choosing between hundreds of shots at his disposal, the teenager hoped to create a real-time mosaic of events as they transpired.

It wouldn't last long, the bad guys would see to that, but for ten, maybe fifteen minutes the world would see that truth. Whatever that was.

Most people liked to talk to their computers, but Kenny preferred an old-fashioned keyboard. Keys clicked as the sent insurrections went out over the airwaves.

Approximately half a minute passed before anything happened. The fly cams had been parked inside a garbage bin near the corner of Roscoe and Van Nuys. No one noticed as they swarmed out of the dumpster, departed along preassigned vectors, and went to work.

Kenny smiled as video blossomed within his jury-rigged holo tanks. If properly selected, the pictures, along with the natural sound that accompanied them, would tell the story all by themselves. He went to work.

What billions of human beings saw over the next twenty minutes was some of the most moving footage ever shot. The citizens of Earth watched as the tiny cameras introduced them to heavily cratered neighborhoods, buildings that continued to burn, and a battalion of teenager legionnaires.

Viewers watched in stunned fascination as the youngsters fired their SLAMs, fell back to prepared positions, and fired again. They bit their lips as the cyborgs continued to advance, as the defenders died in clusters of two, four six and ten. Many broke into tears as the line eventually broke, the cadets were flanked, she the battle was lost.

Boyle and Cindy Morgan uttered exclamations of surprise as their daughter Morgana appeared in the tank before them. She looked over her right shoulder, shouted an order, and reached for her sidearm.

That was when more than half the people on the planet watched the camera pull out, saw the cadet surrender, and saw Major John Usmos fire a bullet into her head.

Morgana collapsed like a rag doll, her mother screamed, and Usmos pointed to the camera. It ceased to exist.

Morgana Morgan's summery execution would have set the rebellion back no matter who pulled the trigger, but the fact that it was the governor's son served to polarize the population. Most of those who already believed in the revolt continued to do so. But those who were on unsure, and that included millions upon millions of people, were shocked. The civilian resistance movement, which had been weak up until then, gained intent legitimacy. Ad hoc demonstrations were held all over the world. Brute force was used to put them down. Radio Free Earth covered as many as they could. A battle had been won, but the war was far from over.

A burial detail entered the loyalist TOC half an hour later, saw the manner in which Larisa Wales' green beret had been positioned on the carefully arranged corpse, and added it to their loot. They were the victors, and the victors got the spoils.

* * *

The Cynthia Harmon Center for Undersea Research was located one hundred fifty feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean. A sprawling complex, built piece by piece as funding became available, it consisted of twenty three cylinders, all of various sizes connected by semi-flexible tubing.