I thought I wouldn't be able to because we'd swapped work schedules around, but then we had to swap back at the last minute, so I marched after all!

Here, then, is the cyberpunk future we have earned:

Hundreds of thousands of angry citizens stand on the wide boulevard, waving signs and chanting, jammed shoulder to shoulder, wall to wall. In the background of 12th Street is a massive neoclassical monument to bribery and graft, emblazoned with the golden name of our corrupt chief of state. Every window but one has the curtains closed; in that one, a tall, pale-skinned figure dressed all in black stands watching the shouting crowd, sipping something from a glass, periodically blocking the light of the crystal chandelier in the room behind them.

Block after block of badly-arranged amplifiers blur the speakers into an unintelligible echoing roar. I want to hear what they're saying so I jack into my pocket computer; all the newer information networks are inaccessible so I tune to the official government FM radio station, which is carrying the same audio as the amps. It's on a forty-five second delay, which makes the timing of the cheers disconcerting - but it's fine, because nobody around me can tell when to cheer anyway. None of them remember how to use FM radio so I try to explain what's happening (on a forty-five second delay.)

An 18-year-old bisexual Hispanic woman with a buzz cut, truckloads of charisma, and absolutely no fucks left to give for anybody's bullshit stares down the crowd for six minutes and twenty seconds, standing with her friends to change the world. You see them via a giant LCD screen that glitches out every few minutes into jagged lines of color. A fifth grader explains she organized a protest at her school because one of her eleven-year-old classmates was shot and killed last month. Ahead of us the blue-and-silver-haired white lady raises her sign that says "I WILL NOT BE OLD AND IN THE WAY" and blocks the screen again. "STOP BEING IN THE WAY, OLD PERSON," the people behind us shout.

Nobody around you has any idea what's going on because they don't have the radio feed.

Suddenly the screens all stop glitching and turn to plain blue with a list of subway stations. A voice - now perfectly understandable - repeats over and over in monotone "This event is ended. Please follow the instructions on the screens to leave the area."

"Are we marching?" everyone asks. "We were supposed to march, right?" "Toward the White House or the Capital?" "I think the White House?" "Is the President even here?" "No, duh, it's a weekend, he's golfing." "We're marching whether we're supposed to march or not."

We march. The monotone voice keeps intoning.

Somebody hands me a sign to wave that says "This IS a dystopia".

We go to the NMAI and have hominy-black bean and mushroom-potato soup. A little girl on the train home has a hand-drawn protest sign on a piece of construction paper and boots made out of unicorns. The official government radio station has switched to replaying the Lyndon B. Johnson presidental tapes from 1968. I get ice cream and post to my blog feed.


(No, but, how amazing are the Parkland survivors though? No wonder Fox News was convinced they were ringers; you couldn't have picked a better, more photogenic, articulate, resilient, resourceful, passionate set of spokespeople if you had gone to Central Casting. There's a meta joke in Les Mis fandom about how Les Amis de l'ABC are all unrealistically attractive and intelligent and competent but the Parkland kids outdo them. In a couple decades someone will try to do a movie based on them and fail to find any movie stars that have as much screen presence as the originals. Sucks to be their enemies.)