The Revelations by Erik Hoel (e ink ebook reader txt) 📕

wore ski masks and all-black clothes, and were smashing windshields and throwing Molotov cocktails into empty police cruisers, all of which had happened just blocks from the conference hotel.

The next day Kierk and Mike were standing around their poster, smiling vaguely and hopefully at each passerby. The two of them were wearing their nicest dress shirts and ties, looking out of place for how young they were. Then came the mind-numbing hour of explaining their poster over and over to passersby in thirty-second sound bites.

They ended up outside just after noon, with Mike smoking and Kierk throwing pebbles against the side of the conference building. Far away, sirens wailed, coming and going.

A young man about their age walked past them wearing a backpack. They both noticed that it was unzipped and a black mask peeked out. Sharing a look and in silent agreement, Mike flicked his cigarette and Kierk threw his last stone and then they began to follow him.

As they traveled deeper toward the areas of the previous day’s protests the police activity grew around them. People were walking in odd paths on the sidewalk to avoid the shards of broken glass from pay phone booths and bus stops and bottles. Kierk paused in shock when he saw the arm lying on the ground in front of him, before realizing it had been disembodied from a shop mannequin, and that other parts were lying about: a leg poised on a bench, a head tilted skyward in a tree. Shop owners were out boarding up windows. Unmarked white vans blasted down empty roads and through red lights for no discernible reason, a sea of tinted windows moving and crisscrossing in a higher order that looked random from the ground.

Mike and Kierk were swept away with the crowd, and soon began to see the first gangs of riot police dressed in black body armor with opaque, light-reflecting helmets, their badge numbers covered up with black flaps of fabric. The two ended up following a thin stream of people through lines of standing cops containing and directing the flow. They realized that they were surrounded by an army, and it was closing, shuffling closed, everyone flowing in the suggested direction, walking quickly or jogging down the only available route, and then they were funneled out into the south end of Queen’s Park.

The statue of John Macdonald looked like a focal point for the protesters. There were at most a thousand, congregated densely in the front with a long petering tail farther back into the park. Behind Kierk and Mike, from the direction they had just come from, there was truly an army of police, almost as many police as there were protesters. Cop cars were parked sideways in the street and, far in the back, a division of Mounties patted the sweaty flanks of their horses outfitted with blinders and equine armor. The protesters, skewed toward the young, seemed motley and unorganized. Some passed around stainless steel water bottles, signs held down at their sides. A few of the protesters looked out for the hell of it, but others wore UV-resistant sunglasses and were tan and fit, like they had just come out of some protester boot camp.

The day was dipping toward boredom for all involved. A shirtless man sat on the top of the statue, flapping his arms. Signs were laid atop one another on the ground, people sat scattered and cross-legged. A few of the braver citizens had walked directly up to the police and began to chat with them, exchanging a few jokes, getting a few responsive faces, so nervously encased in glass and armor, to laugh.

A man in his thirties with a beard and forearms a deep tan shared his water bottle with Kierk, who looked fundamentally out of place in his dress shoes and dress shirt and dress pants and little laminated Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness conference badge. Wiping his mouth, Kierk handed the water bottle back. “Hey, man, I appreciate that. So what are you protesting about?”

The protester looked around, out at the police. “The world’s pretty fucked up. What’s not to protest about?”

“Actually, that’s a pretty good answer . . .” But the protester was already moving off, because he had noticed something Kierk hadn’t, which was that there had been some kind of change in the air, in the mannerisms of the cops. The police, arranged in a loose line a couple hundred long, twenty men deep in places, seemed to be organizing into different contingents. Somewhere in the city, a single man behind a desk, having in mind the Molotov cocktails used on empty cop cars yesterday, having heard reports of cops being sneered at or bullied and the windows of shops being broken, distilled all these individual facts together by the alembic of binary command: Do It. And the order had been relayed down the hierarchy from the original node, spreading out and multiplying diffusely along the branches until it reached an output layer thirty-thousand times larger than the source at locations all throughout the city.

Shots went off—the police were firing into the crowd. Kierk hit the ground, rolling away as the screams began to ring out. Looking up, he couldn’t see anything, but people had stopped running. Kierk was one of the few on the ground. Mike was gone. Standing, he saw a haze of dissipating yellow gas, and realized that it was the sound not of bullets but pellets of tear gas. As the gas cleared people were falling over themselves trying to get out. A girl was too slow and the cops descended on her, binding her wrists as she screamed and her friends made confused half steps forward, yelling at the cops to let her go but keeping their distance as the girl was dragged by her feet back behind the lines. The last thing Kierk saw of her was her head bouncing along the concrete sidewalk as her body slipped from view.

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