We The Believers (Pt.1)

A story is a wish for a new world. A good story delivers that world with a tectonic shock, destroying what has come before. You see this process most vividly in politics—my world, briefly.

You might assume my father inspired the righteousness that ended my career, but I was just a little girl when I lived in China. His activism and legal problems touched me only through his moods: an irritation as he was drawing; periods of inactivity, when he crossed his arms over the tablet computer and seemed to nap; only once or twice, smoking at the side of our patio, where the mountain fell away to the city, a worry deep enough to make me wonder what was wrong. The only subversive idea he taught me was that words are magic. By age six I could perfectly draw the characters for candy (糖果), not because I had been drilled by an instructor (my school was mostly digital) but because my dad had told me, adapting age-old folktales, that a perfectly drawn word would become the thing it represented. Each evening we would fold the best word I had drawn into a zhezhi box, a "present" to be sent to heaven, seemingly a hundred folds just to make the crease pattern. The next morning, on our patio, my dad would fire up the gas jets on the indoor/outdoor fire pit (a nice table with a cutout for grilling, a small luxury) and use tongs to put the box gently into the fire. Then one of us would catch a spark, my father grabbing it in his fist, or me, older, clapping it between my hands—a piece of ash caught between two worlds which we would crumble onto the foredeck of an old-time fishing trawler, a model of my great-grandfather's ghost-hunting vessel sailing between our indoor potted plants. After school I would run to this potted garden near the window and find, if I had done exceptionally well, exactly what I had tried so hard to write into existence, there on the deck of the ship. My dad had told me that my great-grandfather, the scholar and writer Gan Biao, now taught in heaven and that I was his student, too.

I didn't yet appreciate Knowing Grandfather's love of writing. His life I knew only in outline. I knew he had first moved from the coast when Peking University fled the Japanese invasion and later married the daughter of a local professor. During the Cultural Revolution, which I only vaguely understood, I knew he'd concocted his own re-education as a deck hand, by joining the same fishing collective as his wife's family when the government had "revoked" his field, ethnography. I had been told how precious his remaining years had been, when he could once again collect stories from the mountain villages, though to me fishing sounded like more fun.

To be honest, I loved Knowing Grandfather less than the ritual of sending messages, of being seen and getting rewards: the magic, part tradition, part my father's imagination. I tested it with impossible requests, making sure I did a good job on the characters, and the magic always worked. I asked for air (空氣). That afternoon, tied to an outrigger of the ship, I found a helium balloon. I asked for a city (市). That afternoon the ship carried a snow globe of our own city, Chongqing. I could see the fork of the Yangtze and Jialing rivers and the towering buildings where everyone I knew lived, went to school, shopped.

Careful writing could make my world, my dad taught me, and I can't remember a time when I didn't approach every composition with the fierce determination to bring it to life. For a poem in grade school I came to expect sighs or at least a "very nice" from my strict Chinese teachers. A decade later, in a new country writing in a new language, at Brown University, where I was a columnist for the paper, every editorial I wrote was a tool to change minds and move events. When it came time to find a job I should've known I'd end up at an advocacy like Civic Sense, not just because I was an aspiring opinion-maker and they were the most notorious political action studio, but also because the organization, having expanded since the early 2020s into twelve floors of a San Francisco high-rise and into all forms of new media and activism, was the apotheosis of the power to speak that my father had wanted for me and for the Chinese people.

My first year at Civic, to undermine the Republican governor of Illinois, Adel Abaza, I destroyed a company—helped to, that is, since I started as a staff writer. On our digital War Wall, for months, we had Global Perceptronics Ltd. flayed wide open, using the same forensics software as the Chicago Police: an org chart connected to a network diagram connected to process flows connected to a social graph . . . like bones, tissues, veins, nerves—but not for medical purposes, since our aim was to kill the patient. We tended disease wherever we found it: love affairs, petty theft, abusive treatment (once our freelance hackers had network presence), leadership squabbles . . . but at first these were all isolated, run-of-the-mill incidents. The comedians on our team, trying to spark news with social-media rumors, came across as little more than internet trolls.

The astounding growth of Global Perceptronics, founded by Abaza with money earned from selling his father's wedding present (a parking garage), had endeared the second-generation American to big business and big business cultists. To us, he was a profiteer indifferent to how his nanoscale sensors, legally protected better than corn by a Republican Congress, were destroying privacy, feeding corporate AI, and making totalitarian governments all but omniscient. He was a blind, self-serving plutocrat—that was all I needed to know. As soon as we found a weakness, my only feeling was impatience to get started. A new hire, I heard the starting gun crack. Go! Idea, storyboard, script, then—somehow—production, advocative media, change. Could I do it?

Three years later at a conference in Georgetown I had a drink with former Governor Abaza. He had kept his family, since we couldn't find any handholds there, but he was done with business. He had settled into a quiet life as a professor of economics at Baylor in Texas, which is what had brought him to the conference. "I have stopped believing that my mind, my person, is the critical juncture for the workings of the world," he told me, perfectly self-aware.

"There are many ways to lead," I said.

Even in stagnant air smelling of beer, with a view of little more than bottles, he trained his explorer's gaze on the horizon, a place he must have studied often now that he was a professor guiding younger minds. "Yes. I have led," he said. "Now I teach leaders."

A new philosophy of life . . . initiated by Civic Sense with a single unpleasant fact: an obscure detail about how his former company managed its "security tiers." Though the company's own IT experts were exceedingly unlikely to have noticed how a certain utility program could be used to violate software export restrictions, the information was enough to establish a narrative, a semi-fictional universe not unlike a movie franchise, within which certain new stories could be told.

Initially, I stumbled, not feeling the drama, which led to a sarcastic lecture from my boss at the time, who was barely a year my senior. "Naijin," she said, still adding an extra syllable from how my name looked on-screen, "you don't say that they're scary. You make them scary. Like, we have a U.S. governor trafficking trade secrets to thirty-seven foreign countries. Scary."

What I was being asked to do—I did hesitate, despite what you might think. I felt uneasy, not about committing slander, since Civic never made up facts, but in being asked, first and foremost, to insinuate, to work in the subjunctive, to spin a question into endless slideshows, video skits, games, quizlets. Very simple: raise the question—treason—then get out of the way. Create mainstream media interest, add a dash of racism, and an Abaza gets hit by investigations, convictions for minor infractions, fines, brand erosion, finally bankruptcy . . . leading to a new governor of Illinois.

I just had to learn, like any young professional, the techniques of the job. This wasn't the play journalism of a college paper, I told myself.

Three years later, in a purely physical way, Abaza was an engrossing presence, drawing you in with the rich timbre of his voice even when he spoke softly. He had an electric white smile. His expressive wide-set features reminded me, xenophobically, of a sultan gazing across his lands. In the cramped college bar rented by the conference, he was an interloper, seemingly from a better place.

He bored me with more sententious remarks like "Now I teach leaders." When I realized he was too disconnected from politics to be of use during the upcoming primaries and too contented to neurotically listen to me reveal the backstory of his character-assassination—to be entertaining at all—I left him at the bar to work on his philosophy.

~

I didn't know my father was magic until he was taken from us. Before then myths were everywhere. The beetle on the patio was an astronaut searching a universe of concrete for a habitable world. The highland fog was a theatrical device, like a curtain, invoked by Cao Guojiu, god of the theater, to end one earthly act and begin another. "When it lifts, you start the next part of your life, always better than the last," my dad told me. Myths were simply how the world worked, even though I was old enough to know that the mythology—quasi-ancient, quasi-modern—was the product of my dad's imagination, the way American children, even after the truth is revealed, still believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, a little.

Happy in these daydreams, I completely missed the signs of danger. Weeks before my dad disappeared I saw him at a Starbucks with, I thought, several of my mom's banker friends. In formal clothes and quiet smiles, they were the opposite of the boisterous friends my dad had made in his life as a cartoonist. I was on my way home from school, walking the half block between two high-rises with some girlfriends. My father and the men looked so relaxed, sipping their drinks under a green umbrella, that I thought they were in fact friends, or had just happened to sit together. Almost a decade would pass before I would get my mom to recount what she knew, which was that they were MSS officers who had bought my dad coffee in order to have a nice conversation about how a certain video cartoon of President Xi Jinping had embarrassed the city party chief. About three weeks later I came home to find the apartment empty. I didn't see him again for months.

A subdistrict officer and a police officer waited to let me into our apartment and stayed with me until my mom returned early from the bank where she worked. The words she said were meant to be comforting —"Daddy had to go somewhere, an important matter he needs to help with."—but I could see that she was shaken. She flinched when the subdistrict officer excused himself with a taut little bow to each of us, followed by the bored policeman, who simply stretched his arms and left.

I did everything that evening I normally did, including writing a message to Grandpa Biao by practicing the characters for tánghúlu (糖葫芦), a candied hawthorn snack I wanted to have after school. In the morning I pestered my mom relentlessly to perform the ritual at the fire pit, oblivious to the stress she must have felt delaying her usual commute, not to mention her worries about my dad. She burnt the paper hastily and then killed the gas, not bothering to watch the ashes and sparks vanish into the spirit world. I had to catch a spark and crumble it myself. When she insisted on accompanying me to school, not yet sharing my dad's comfort with me walking to a building two doors down, I knew suddenly that my ancestor wouldn't be greeting me after school with a skewer of tánghúlu.

She got permission from work to walk me home from school at 5 p.m., but as a financial advisor she had to bring home a lot of work. After dinner and talking about my day she vanished into the bedroom to work at a little desk. My evenings from then on were spent alone doing homework and trying to amuse myself. I played the same old games, in my mind, exploring the details of our little circumscribed world, half hoping my dad would walk through the apartment door and join in—that he was just "away," like my mom said. Only years later did I realize what patience he had shown me, setting aside his WeChat channel to talk to me all evening. The video blog didn't seem like serious work, even to a ten-year-old, but it was his job. He made a small income from views and merchandise. Very unusual, him staying home to raise me while my mom earned a corporate salary, but if he was fighting for anything it was for the right to be unusual. When he returned three months later I would watch the blog become a continuous labor—of love, maybe, but also of something newly difficult and serious.

He remained huge in my mind, leaving an empty space at home. When the Spring Festival came I was home all day with that emptiness, like the emptiness of a museum full of things but missing the people who had used them. Being home, I was unable even to daydream, like I would do at school, that he was already back, hunched over the glow of his drawing tablet. I was alone for most of the day because my mom had to work until the exchanges went on holiday. She took me to the lantern shows, a different one every other night, with businesslike regularity, to keep up our spirits. The other world, the world of light and dreams, was gone, though. The forests made of mushrooms and flowers, the famous cities like Moscow and Paris floating on the river, the scenes from video games or the indigenous Miao and Tujia people or European cheese-makers, beer-drinkers, red-coated soldiers . . . all of that was there. But gone were the stories my dad would tell about dragons living in the pipes and blowing the city fountains out of their noses or triggering last year's earthquake with Chinese freestyle rap. They were stories my mom didn't remember and couldn't make up herself. In place of that other world were ingeniously constructed paper lanterns and thrilling but make-believe lion dances erupting in great splashes of steel sparks. My father was already beginning to feel like an ancestor himself, a story. Half-expecting to see him in paper and light and twenty feet tall, I looked too hard and saw the paper, the electric lights, the plastic or bamboo or steel frames. I saw the real world's desperate attempts to make magic.

Why, then, I kept nagging my mom to take me out, I don't know. It was more than boredom. I remember an ache, a hunger that couldn't be fed. The same feeling had been gnawing at me the last day of the festival when I demanded to be the one to let our sky lantern go. I had been duly respectful all evening, thanking my grandparents for the envelopes of money they had given me before dinner, waiting patiently for the tedious grown-ups to get their share of candy and melon seeds, but in that moment of excitement in the park, seeing the wishes and joys and sorrows of a city going up into the sky, shrinking into eternity, I just had to be the one to cast our hope up and away. My dad had let me release our lantern the previous year, so I thought it was my privilege, my right as a child to be immersed in everything. My mom's very Chinese grunts were like side-arm shoves, single forceful syllables—"Mm. Mm."—but I kept begging and reaching for it. Finally she gave in, irritably. "Fine, do it," she said, and I was either so excited or so scared that I grabbed it roughly and gave it too much of a push. It went up rocking violently and then burst into flame and came crashing down into the crowd of other families. Hands flying up to her mouth, my mom swallowed a scream and then hollered over the heads of the crowd, "I'm so sorry! [Fēi cháng bào qiàn!] Are you okay? I'm so sorry!"

My grandfather had to hold her back, arms outstretched. He ordered her to stay while he went to make sure no one was hurt.

Consigned to waiting, my mom—frantic from thinking she saw a burned child—lit into me. "Look what you did! Look! That's what happens when you're selfish and don't listen." She made me so sick that I didn't touch another air lantern until years later, when I was in America.

At last, my grandfather returned with the news that no one had been hurt. "Fine. Good. Hm," she said. "Okay. I'll get another one."

I moved to follow her but felt my grandfather's big, rough hand close over my shoulder. He looked at me with his creased eyes, the eyes of a high-rise steel worker, a builder who had walked the skies over Chongqing when the ideas of skyscrapers had made their way from minds into today's stacks of lives overhead numbering millions. "Let your mother do it," he said.

I yielded to the steady voice. Staying with my relatives, I studied my mom's martial stiffness and biting stare as she waited for a second time in the long line and then the extreme care she took in checking every seam in the lantern, in getting a good flame going on the fuel pad, and in waiting for just the right breeze. She watched the one light's gradual ascent long after my eyes saw only a river of other lights. My grandfather had been right: my purpose that first full moon was simply to observe. This was how my mother felt Dad's disappearance. I knew she understood much more than I did. Was he just a spirit now, too?

At breakfast the next morning, despite the risk of upsetting me before school, she told me the truth, or some of it. She said that my dad had been summoned for questioning—not arrested, exactly . . . just summoned. Certain people in the government were afraid that his jokes were meant to make them look bad. Dad of course didn't mean anything of the kind, she said. He was just giving people something fun to watch. His characters faced problems, modern problems. He would convince the officials and then be able to come home.

"Didn't he tell them?" I asked. "What's taking so long?"

I could tell my mother didn't know, but she wasn't yet ready to admit it. "Some people take time to convince," she said.

~

The act of convincing—though not always a contest of life and death—is the only meaningful social act. Minds are always in motion, and they are either moving with you or against you.

In the West, and in democracies generally, this fact is written into law, such that every mind has explicit power over others. In politics, candidates for office become supplicants to all of us. In business, the supplicants are the employees, internally, and the salespeople. To exist in society is to sell your story, whether that be your skills or your intentions, and selling is only one part fact.

Selling as a political profession wasn't invented by Civic Sense. Lee Atwater, today's political operators believe, "fixed" 1987 Democratic candidate Gary Hart with an eloquent drama worthy of The Bard. He had a woman hop into the candidate's lap for a photo and, playful poet, switched party boats at the last minute to one named Monkey Business. His was a great battlefield victory, studied maybe not in universities but certainly in conference rooms. Hitler, the great storyteller, began the invasion of Poland with a play-acted Polish attack on Germany: he dressed up inmates as Polish soldiers, shot them, and then deposited the bodies at the border. A faction in Athens won a death sentence for the great general Alcibiades, while he was away at war, by blaming him for an act of vandalism; even the ancients knew the craft of grounding fiction in fact.

These other means of storytelling, employed by Civic across multiple media and software platforms, were no mystery to me even before I began to direct them as an associate. My job had been to master them, and I had. I hadn't come to the organization to write stern editorials; I had come there to change minds.

Persuasion has always been less a matter of the tale than the telling. In China, traditional píngshū storytellers amplify their words with a block of wood, a gavel, which they smack on a tabletop to fix attention, each clap marking a great beginning or ending. The block is vestigial from the bamboo clappers of older quyi genres, the plucked strings and beaten drums, the tools for shaping space and time in support of common oral storytellers who not so much played their parts as lived them.

My father did this, too. He cut the air with his hand to break a story in parts, clapped when danger struck, traced the flights of birds and descents of dragons . . . not a píngshū but seeming to possess generations of muscle memory. Every emphatic sentence contains a performance, a summons. That may be why, my first month as associate, having come back from the field with a scoop, I fairly danced my way across the war room, impressing the editors by blocking out a full campaign, ranging from those stern editorials to procedurally generated chatbots. As one of the oldest "gray-hat studios" on the left, Civic was funded to the gills. To me, suddenly having the means to fight this tougher kind of politics was simply intoxicating.

Our target had been Republican presidential candidate Jay Kelsey, two-term House Speaker and a sleek metropolitan preacher from Houston, aging now but still full of jerky energy like a marionette in his black slim-fit suit, bolo tie, cola-colored sunglasses—a lit firecracker even on a stroll past cameras in Statuary Hall. BAM! Out comes a prime news rant denouncing the Generations bill: "You are right I have not declared my position. I have not. I don't have to. I believe God made man in His image. Period. Our genetic code is Cre-ation itself. Don't touch it. No. 'Xactly what I said when I cosponsored the bill to ban it outright. If I say it's arr'gant, cruel, in-human, dang'rous, im-pure, grotesque, un-pre-dictable, greedy, and—and—pointless for a scientist, then it sure ain't right for Bobby the Sandwich Guy, which—if ya'll'll kindly excuse me, I have a lunch meeting in the north wing."

You can't fight such performances with editorials. Civic produced its fair share—in Kelsey's case to defend science and specifically well-regulated genetic engineering, which for the Democrats was an equalizer—but these compositions, though earnest, were considered grunt work for building up audiences. Audiences could be activated later, strategically, to stoke controversies, the frontline weapons of both parties. That was our rhythm of war: hours of boredom, moments of glee. My first try at glee had come prior to the operation, during the op design. It was called "Drug Party," an idea I put on the wall as a joke. I had actually expected a laugh, not yet accustomed to the reach of our network. "A LARP?" someone offered with half a smirk. "Alternate-reality?"

Among those in our network—activists but also performers, contractors, even unwitting citizens—was the Texas Originals League. Like Civic's other sleeper organizations, the League began as a part-time writing project for a staffer: a blog tagged into local Houston issues. Then it was all Texas cities, then a video podcast, then a street protest movement—drawing in genuine members—and finally a registered non-profit with officers and a headquarters on the 46th floor of the Wells Fargo Plaza in Houston. I watched in disbelief as our team designed and priced out a sting operation involving cocaine and a limo tour of a Houston barrio.

My new boss saw a chance to give me field experience. Not during the part dealing drugs—which would "happen if it happened," he said vaguely—and not in a role inside the League itself, where like-minded Asians were accepted but conspicuous among the anti-immigration Mexican-Americans—but instead via a pantheon play as a "money pot," for which I was qualified by having zero face-recognition.

"This one's too big for you to be the showrunner," he told me in his private office. His name, Linus Higgins, won't ring a bell because he was one of the smart ones who wrote under a pen name. A ten-year veteran of the firm, he had been plucked right out of the Princeton World Literature program and knew no other line of work. His private media wall showed the op design, which could have been a new-media study of a novel: relationship graphs, scenes, roles, lines of action. "And we'd be wasting your brain on rote surveillance. Let's build you up a bit, on the execution side of things. Who knows? Maybe you'll hear something. Like, what's the word inside the campaign? What's just talk, what's not? All longer-play stuff but more your pay-grade and better for developing a mental model for how we like to get these guys."

So I became a nanomaterials executive from Plano, Texas, which required learning all about molecular computing and the coatings on stealth vehicles. The great trust Civic placed in me, deploying me where I might meet Kelsey himself, had been there since the day of my job interview, when I revealed the name of my father. I was Naijin Gan in the U.S., my first and last names arranged in the Western order; my father was Gan Junjie, the man who had named the Oyster Revolution, inspired by an obscure myth that birds hibernated as oysters, and therefore the man thought to have brought free speech to China—to have roused a billion souls from stony undersea chambers. My mom and I became refugees when he smuggled us out of the country so he could break out of his own shell to join Bao Tong, Liu Xiaobo, Li Wenliang, and those that followed. Surely I, a refugee of that suicidal movement against government propaganda, would be critical of the American political party that denied science.

Little did Civic know that I'd been recruited by a conservative gray-hat studio, too, The Bradford Group, who were sure I must despise the Democrats' big-government attacks on freedom. In truth, both parties, as fully independent spinners of philosophy into policy, as protagonists in the world's leading democracy, were respectable institutions in my mind. What I thought made conservatism less worthy of my energy, at that time, were the policies aimed at discouraging certain voters—and the general hostility toward science and academia. I saw conservatives as the enemies of reality, being not yet aware myself that every human being is the enemy of reality.

In Kelsey, who had been one of the first Voter-ID champions, I saw a closet racist and therefore a deserving target for an undercover operation. I must admit to also feeling a personal connection to the Democratic president, Amy Yin, who could have taken her husband's English surname but didn't. What a revelation it had been for me to have begun in America as an alien, speaking nothing more than grade-school English, and then to have seen someone like me win a national election. Another reason Civic had faith that my heart was in the fight.

It was. I threw myself into the role of tech executive like it was a promotion. I was a big Texas donor, having given real money to the campaign through a shell company, and an attractive young woman, but I never got a side conversation with Kelsey or heard a damaging off-mic utterance. The best I managed was a talk with his daughter at the fondue table.

By that point the op was nearly over, and a complete washout. The League, billing to the project budget, had spent over a million dollars on guest speakers and entertainment, and we had nothing as of an hour after Kelsey's speech. The famed former alcoholic had proven to be a rock. He rebuffed two attempts by our League-employed agents to put a shot of tequila in his hands—"Here's how we do it in Guadalajara!"—by making his own toasts with a Sprite. He also shrugged off the Drug Party, instead giving sage advice to the sexy Dreamer operative hired to "discover" the coke and paraphernalia in the limo during a staged pit stop: "Well, it's a free country, miss, but you do a line? I advise that be it. The first time you think your heart's gonna blow a gasket. I might just step outside, though, since that could make for one com-pro-mising sitcheeation two weeks before Super Tuesday."

My chance encounter with the daughter, Mandy Kelsey-McGuire, came when Civic leadership, in my embedded earpieces, was irritably rehashing scenes like those, leaving me distracted and prompting Mandy to break the ice herself. "Like this," she said. She put a stick of broccoli on a skewer.

"Oh." My lapse perfectly supported my cover as a bumpkin businessperson making her first big donation, but I couldn't help being embarrassed. I even apologized, a complete non sequitur, which only strengthened my performance.

Mandy had a lambent beauty which flared in and out of view with the vitality of her inborn Southern joy. She had her father's straight dishrag-brown hair, pulled neatly behind her ears, and his crumpled nose like a chunk of white chocolate, but she had youth, unspoiled by the drink and heroin that, prior to his finding God, had taken her father's. She struck me as a sturdy, self-possessed young woman. Her bright smile, thoroughly lit up by that Southern joy, hooked me instantly. I couldn't help thinking that the stuff of power is carried in our genes.

After some small talk about the fondue, I introduced myself as the nanomaterials executive and instantly proved how little of an agent I was by falling into an awkward silence where someone with a boring career usually tries to say something interesting about it. Finally, I asked the obvious. "Spending a lot of time with your father on the campaign trail?"

Mandy responded with a springtime chirpiness that suggested lifetimes to come. "Sometimes. It's such an interesting process!"

"Keeping you busy?"

"Oh, I help out when I can." With this, she moved her hand to her stomach, which ensured even I couldn't miss the clue staring me in the face. Mandy was wearing a plain-Jane smock maxi maternity dress that was camouflaging a newly visible pregnancy.

"Whoa. Are you—? Wow, congratulations," I said. Mandy returned this with a bashful inward reverie, which eluded me. To me, then, reproduction was like a rumor about cancer—frightening and someone else's problem. "I didn't mean to pry," I said in a maladroit effort to just keep talking.

It was good enough, thanks to the ancient poetry awakening inside her. "Well," she said, "it's not a secret anymore!"

I loosened up enough to make jokes about campaign contributions to the little one, a political dynasty; etc. "Oh, that's too much to think about," she said quickly, "how our lives might be about to change. I'm just happy for my dad. He's worked so hard."

"Exactly. And that's why I like him. He made the decision, years ago, did the work, and now he is truly qualified—the only one even close. The man, not the politician." I spoke with steady conviction, getting settled into my role. "That's what I respect. That's why I backed your father. He isn't some biz school conservative who just wants to see his portfolio grow. He wants to do things in the world people live in."

"He's a new man. He really is."

I promptly ran out of material, leaving me little to do but smile. But listening worked too.

"He's proof you really do control your own destiny," Mandy continued. "I think that's what's resonating. I remember, as a girl . . . but you probably already heard my"—air quotes—"stump speech."

"Um"—research!—"I don't think so."

"Just that he had so many enablers. For the addictions, I mean. Culture. The doctors saying it was his body, that dependency was built in. Too late, right? Genetics. The idea that he was born with it."

I nodded, ready with a response this time. "And now he is who he is not because of genetics but because of effort. That's what's being lost in this country: effort." (My slight Sichuan accent allowed my political thinking to be somewhat lumbering.)

"Exactly. He sets such a good—good example." All of a sudden Mandy choked up, mid-sentence, and I could see everything in her faraway look, which was less admiration than simplehearted love. Our "Dixie Denier" was her father, her dad, the dad she had always wished he would become.

That one moment was enough to transmit a particle of feeling, tiny but pure, which stays with me today and touched me even then, despite my rational mind sticking to the goal. "He's strong," I said, "and I guess you'll have to be strong too. I mean, with all this attention, and right when you're starting a family."

"Well—" And here there was just an instant, just a moment of hesitation, powerful enough to stop the sentimentality cold—which told me my shovel had struck something. Pivoting away from it, Mandy made a faint laugh, light as the chiffon sleeve hung from her wrist. "Oh, people will keep talking. That's what they do."

She slipped free, tucking whatever it was out of sight. The flavors of the fondue cheeses reasserted their importance. Other guests shouldered up to the table. I returned to Boston with nothing more than a suspicion. That wasn't much "product" to show for an op I learned was being priced at over $2 million, due to the need to account for the League's expenses dating back to its founding—but it was a lead, a good one.

Our cyber team found exactly what we needed: proof that the Dixie Denier's own daughter had used gene therapy. The temptation had been too great for the daughter and maybe her father, too: the ability to free the baby from all known inclinations to addiction. The gene package had been very conservative—no brain boost or physical optimizations, but it was enough to crush the right's "purifier of nation and Nature."

One harmful fact let us make a whole new person, Jay Kelsey the Phony. We drew a political cartoon of him using a one-word picket sign—"Grace"—to block people's view of his daughter slipping into the back of a clinic. We built a looped animation of him tending potions and fetuses in a mad-science incubator. Games, too, which were Trojan horses for community-generated insults. The Kelsey Kid Kit, happily abbreviated KKK, in which you picked political phrases—or inputted your own asinine free text—and got back a fully simulated teenager. These beings could be shared to anyone anywhere thanks to our LOF platform (level of fidelity), later licensed to media companies, which could deliver your monster teen in a thumbnail image, a full conversational VR character vaping with her pocket chihuahua, a disembodied voice in your headphones—anything.

Then the underground stuff. Deep fakes from our 3D staff in which Mr. Purity seems to insult his true believers. "Ordin'ry kids—they're for dodos. Tryin' for perfection—strivin'—that's America. Pursuit of happiness. Starts at conception, and when we're talkin' 'bout my own grandbaby—" Absurd, denied by the campaign . . . yet . . . believable. Believable enough to make even true believers ask, "What if? . . ." and to cause sudden poll reversals in Alabama, Arkansas, Oklahoma.

Did I care how Mandy felt to see her father go down like this—to see her soon-to-be-president dad warped into a silly caricature by her own personal decision? To see her future child lampooned in twenty million permutations as a bigoted punk? Did I? Certainly, at times. I still had that particle of feeling, but my hate was measured in tons. To me, Jay Kelsey was a racist, proven by his votes in the House and by automatic phrases like "wannabe Americans" and "earn your place."

Then he squeaked out a victory in the primaries, despite all the hurt we had inflicted, becoming even more powerful. He was the quick-witted pragmatic Republican we feared could dominate the suburbs against President Yin, wounded but still standing, with time to heal. He was a master showman, a holy man good at winning believers, a subtle thinker, too, able to spin the most deceptive policies into silver-tongued doctrine. He had a real shot at changing the direction of the country. For a yellow-skinned female, and an immigrant, in a climate where both sides used their time in power to bias institutions, fighting Kelsey was like fighting to exist. Using every work-hour of my Civic production unit I had ground him down, and I vowed to do so until he was nothing, a stain, an odor, a memory.

~