I attend my first protest: Chapter 20
In which Deimos finds out he is "at the very beginning" of his "activist journey."
Previously, on Jupiter Ruins Everything: Deimos Zaragoza has returned home to Ganymede to put a complex bloody revenge plot into motion, and he finally secured a spot in Pyroxene Triangle, the city’s most expensive enclave—the better to ingratiate himself to his plutocrat targets. He also accidentally got involved with some working-class locals fighting back against the xenophobic concentration camp Wormwood Piers. Which is a major distraction from his primary mission, which is moving toward a crucial moment now that he acquired thousands of outer-city homes from one of Ganymede’s most brutal slumlords…
The last chapter is right here. Remember that you can always consult the Cast of Characters or The Lore document if you need a refresher, or start the story at Chapter One!
Hands down, the best part of living in Pyroxene Triangle was the view. Not of the city, or of Jupiter, though you could see both those things quite clearly. The real draw, the unwritten amenity that topped everyone’s list, was the view across the gulf between the three linked buildings, into the windows of my new neighbors. The filthiest of the filthy-rich plutocrats, their homes open to me like little boxes of light. I saw their expensive art and their disobedient children, their soaring ceilings and massive screens, all shrunk down to almost-insignificance.
Saturday when the rationed daylight ebbed early from the sky, I stood in the dark at the window and stared across. Watching; studying; letting my augments provide answers on who occupied each unit. No one could see me, and I wondered how many of the other darkened windows hid fellow creepers.
A ping came in and I ignored it—Klotho Prime’s algorithmic pegged priorities, and this one didn’t make the cut—but then three more came in, and then a call.
“Deimos?”
“Hey, Tlatelolco, hi. What’s up?”
“What’s up? He asks me what’s up. THE PROTEST, FOOL. The thing you came to the meeting to help plan, and then did outreach to help get folks to come out for? Any of this sounding familiar?”
“No, yeah, sure—of course, that protest. But I… uh… I figured I already… uh, did my time? Like I went way above and beyond what most folks did, and I figured that, uh, counted for something?”
A deep, disappointed sigh. “When Psamatha said you were like plutocrat-rich, I told her, no way, he’s a scrapper, no matter how much money he has he’s not going to become one of them. But this shit right here, Deimos? Treating a massive violation of human rights like it’s some gamified shenanigan you can get points for, instead of A PROBLEM WE ALL NEED TO WORK TOGETHER TO SOLVE? That’s a plutocrat mentality right there.”
“Hey, now,” I said, offended, but I didn’t really have a good response. Or even a bad one. “I just… I wasn’t sure what good I could do, being just another face in the crowd.”
She took a breath. “Okay. I hear that. And I’m sorry—I should be more patient with people who are on at the very beginning of their activism journey. We need all the faces in the crowd, Deimos. All the voices in the choir. None of us are too good to carry a banner, or join a chant. You need to get your ass down here.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m sorry, Tlatelolco.”
“We’ll see.”
I opened up Mapp and asked it for the quickest set of hops to Wormwood Piers. Unsurprisingly, the path was easy. It always is, for the obscenely rich. Two hops; I didn’t even need to leave my floor. Just walk down the floor to a gate that would take me to Inter-City, Ganymede Prime’s main hub for destinations inside our bubble, and then take one more hop to Wormwood Piers.
I was at Tlatelolco’s side in under five minutes.
“Nice,” she said, startled to see me so soon, but determined not to give me any credit. “Carry this.”
It was a sign that said WE ALL CAME FROM SOMEWHERE ELSE.
There were probably two hundred of us: familiar faces from the meeting in the lobby cafe; grizzled old activist types who I knew turned out to absolutely every protest; a sprinkling of excited wide-eyed people who you could tell this was their first protest.
And, behind us, the great white bloated bulk of Wormwood Piers. High walls with tiny narrow stacked windows: misaligned limbs linked up incongruously. The black smoke of human waste incinerators rising from three chimneys, tainting the air with a countryside stink: farm manure and forest fires. So strong it blotted out Ganymede Prime’s whole spectrum of wild smells.
I’d never seen Wormwood before, and my joints throbbed the way a primate’s might, confronted with a predator. The place had clearly been designed by monstrous geniuses: it struck fear into any heart, to imagine oneself or a loved one trapped behind those dirty walls, those skeins of layered razor wire, those rail-gun towers and grids of corrosive gamma pulses.
I heard Nephthys before I saw him: deputized as a chant leader, he was calling out in a loud clear surprisingly-melodic voice:
Ho ho! Hey hey! Off-worlders are here to stay!
One struggle, one fight—housing justice, migrant rights!
No more raids, no more prisons / Let’s build power, not division
Then Tlatelolco tugged at his sleeve and whispered in his ear (and I knew what she was saying even though I am no protest expert: you gotta repeat each chant more than once, people can’t join in if you keep jumping from chant to chant) and then, yes, sure enough, he started chanting each one repeatedly, the crowd getting louder and more excited each time. His smile swelling along with the volume.
He was beautiful.
“Hey,” I said, when a new chant leader tapped in for him, to give his hoarse voice a rest. “You’re great at that!”
“I thought we’d get more media coverage,” he said, frowning at the street beside us. Mostly people just hurrying by, pretending we weren’t there. A few journalists scribbling notes and grabbing cinematics, but then again they might have all been agents of the secret police. “If it doesn’t make it onto the feeds, it’s like—did this even happen?”
“Yeah, I feel that,” I said. “But think of how much it’s going to matter to the people in there, to hear us out here. And they don’t have any access to the feeds.”
“That’s true,” he said, biting his lip.
“And look how many people are taking our flyers,” I said, and pointed, and lots of people were. “Remember how when we were trying to hand them out during outreach, no one wanted to touch them? Because we seemed like random weirdos. Now people are more open. They see this is something real. Every one of them is someone who potentially agrees with us, even if they’re not fully ready to take action, and this could be the step that moves them forward.”
“You sound like Tlatelolco,” he said, grinning. “You sure you’ve never done this before?”
“Protest, activism, organizing? No, but I was in a cult for a while. So.”
I said it like I was joking but it was not a joke, not really. The smell of burning was so strong in the air.
“There’s overlap?” he asked.
“I, uh, got good at learning how to speak to someone’s self-interest, and to recognizing the signs of someone who was actually interested. Versus someone trying to sleep with you, or scam a hot meal off you, or arrest or beat the shit out of you.”
A grin. “Tell me about this cult.”
“Cult might not be the best word. Is there a meaningful difference between cult, organized crime ring, youth gang?”
“I think I need more information,” he said. “You’ll have to tell me that whole story.”
“I’d love that,” I said.
Someone in an expensively-woven-together trio of sweaters slowed down to pan their screen past us, recording us as we chanted Love, not hate / that’s what makes Ganymede great!!
I wondered what plutocrat group chat this might end up in, who from Pyroxene Triangle might see me—what they might think.
But that was how a poor person thought. A plutocrat didn’t pay any attention to what another one did, or even what they said. For them, money was the Prime Mover in this universe, and the real action happened behind the scenes. I might be investing heavily in this building, financing its construction or underwriting its insurance, and showing up here to publicly distance myself from the project. A plutocrat might make a donation to a cause, only to make a much larger donation through a shell corporation to its opposition.
If anything, my presence here would make them more intrigued by me, lend more weight to whatever whispers Chiba spread about my market-based agenda. Something connected to Wormwood Piers and the metal business.
In no time at all, Chiba would have them convinced I was officially Up To Something.
And of course I was, but nothing they’d imagine in a million years.
Feeling suddenly indescribably bad-ass, I was about to follow up with Nephthys about picking a time and a place for the “crepuscular activity” he’d promised me—in spite of his having plural boyfriends—when a ping came in from Umbriel.
Your big meeting is on the books. Crystal Ballroom. Tomorrow at 8PM. Scheduled it late so folks could attend after work. RSVPs through the roof. Gonna be a big crowd of very scared people. Let me know how I can help make it successful.
You already have, I pinged back, but bring Gayatri just in case we need to fight off an armed mob
And after that I was way too busy with logistics to give Nephthys or the protest another thought.
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[ Like all the imagery for Jupiter Ruins Everything, this image is a collage made from old posters that are in the public domain, NASA imagery from the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes (hence, also in the public domain), and sometimes my own photos. I’ve made these collages myself. Which is why they are not good. But hopefully establish a vibe? ]