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of high-toned protest-whistles and low-toned rolling tanks. The squeaky voice of host Barry Winterburn rubbed in our ears. Mir, sitting next to me in the backseat, yawned while fingering a tattoo on his arm of Lisbeth Salander, the classic chick from
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
. Up front, Conroy was looking out of the window at the Department Of Citizens’ freeway banners racing
by—Be On The Winning Side of Red, White, and Blue—Join Today
and many other adverts from President Donnelly’s PR Tsar.
    “Ten dollar gas,” Mir said, pointing out the window at a gas-station billboard. “Do you believe this shit? It was nine dollars last week.”
    “I hear they’re going to tap the rest of the SPR,” Brock said.
    We fidgeted in the leather upholstery, the itch of collapse on the fringe of our thoughts, how other cities seemed to be catching the cold. While the days of rioting passed through the media innocuously, Detroit had fallen deeper and deeper over the previous weeks. The mainstream news lurched away from it, averting the camera’s eye to newly uncovered celebrity affairs. But the Internet told a different tale, one where a wall of immutability stood firm with static policy and deadlocked government. One blog wrote an article titled,
From Bankruptcy to Oblivion, A Hard Look at the Last 10 years of Detroit
. It received 13 million hits. But the politicians had written it off, sweeping the city out of the headlines as much as they could. The population seemed willing to go along. Save what can be saved. Amputate the rest.
    The vans rolled on.
    The low-browed Conroy sat picking a thumbnail. Sitting on the window side of the middle backseat, shoulders slumped and yawning, was Brock. Brock was a Brooklyn brother ex-Notre Dame linebacker. Then there was bushy-haired Stanford Mir, crooked-toothed like a British schoolboy growing out of baby teeth. Out of the alchemy of an ugly smile, he forged charisma. Outsiders would say he was charming—but none of them knew he was nicknamed the Peepshow Perv. He was a boy who loved his porn, kept it pinned up over his walls. Then there was me. Full-ride MS UCLA grad in neurology and computer science, studying neural nets and writing a thesis on neuromorphic processors. Would go to work in the Silicon Valley for a while afterwards. Those were the days when Cerberus had one head in his job, another in his Black Hat role in Anonymous, and the third playing in his off-time with the genetic algorithms that would make the core of Rose, an artificial intelligence program. All of us in the van had excelled with our college educations, all in different disciplines—but recruitment paths to The Company were all strangely different.
    Conroy pointed through the windshield. “Take a look at that.”
    A sign on an overpass read,
THIS IS THE ONLY COUNTRY WE’VE GOT
.
    On the next overpass, there was a woman dressed in rags dangling out over the ledge staring down at traffic. Her feet straddled over a CCTV cam and everyone in the car had a sense of what was coming next. Another sign next to her read,
WHY WON’T OUR GOVERNMENT STOP PISSING ON IT
. We were in the middle lane and our driver merged left. As we passed, I caught a glimpse of her. Eyes wide and scared, caught up in the river of passing cars.
    “Did she jump? Did she jump?” Mir asked, peeling around to try and gaze behind us. I wasn’t going to look back. Why look backward when you’re moving forward?
    “No,” I said, “but she probably will, and you don’t need to belooking.”
    This was the new form of protest. The papers called them the Windshield Bugs, a group of homeless who had formed a suicide pact to jump when traffic got the heaviest. The banners never lasted long. Before attending to any accident or crawling traffic around the corpse, the first thing the police would do would be to rip down the signs.
    Looking back at that moment now, I remembered how those jumpers had disgusted me. I couldn’t condone their