But you need a storyteller, to win a war like this one. The Executive General figured that out, early on: a body in wartime can be conquered by bloodshed, but how to conquer a mind? Why, through culture, of course. The words you speak, the languages you’re allowed, the ideas bouncing about thump-thump-thump inside your skull. Which is why the first conquest the Propagandist made on behalf of the Incorporated was media—art, entertainment, even newsreels—for what’s media, really, except the uncontrolled expression of free thought?
Regulate people’s ideas, thought the Executive General, and you could make them want anything. Including their own subjugation. Which was how, I suppose, the very first Propagandist got his job.
In my first week, the Propagandist asks me to invent an insurgent, properly frightening, and sensationally unmasked. I understand. I make the first revolutionary I met into a boogeyman. Now the monster in the closet needs an origin story. Lucky for him, I imagine several to choose from.
In one version, my insurgent has ivory skin and sea-blue eyes and a nose as thin-bladed as an Incorporated officer’s. He’s born to a sunlit house with a vast veranda, and grows up in starched, expensive shirts. Cruelty should come easy to boys like him, but he enjoys the company of people too much to fall for such a petty pastime. He listens more than he speaks, and that, perhaps, is what makes him see the world through such funny lenses.
In the wake of a war for the continent’s soul, he figures out quick that being rich and pretty makes him less likely to get shot at by Incorporated soldiers than some of his friends. This makes him useful. This also makes him frightening. Boys born into his world—princely and self-assured—have a remarkable capacity to weaponize their power. Their near-invulnerability.
Boys like him are born to be aimed at people. The only difference between an Incorporated officer and an insurgent, when both are fair and fine-boned, is what target they decide to fire themselves at. My insurgent has spent a lifetime listening. He doesn’t hesitate when he chooses.
“It’s a good story,” says the Propagandist, brow furrowing, “but it’ll never do, for our purposes. An insurgent must be frightening, yes, but he must be frightening for the right reasons, you understand? He can’t seem too familiar. We must fear him, but we mustn’t imagine being him. Tell another tale, Scheherazade.”
The next version of my insurgent is as pretty as the first—the public does love pretty—but he’s born in a poorer neighborhood, the sort rich folks call “bad” and “dangerous,” which equips him with canny, self-protective edges the first never sharpened. Like me, he’s got no interest in the war effort. Keep your head down, his mama advises. The less easily seen you are, the harder it is for folks to shove you low. His mama’s a clever woman, so he keeps his head down like she says, and that helps a little.
It’s not enough, though, when war comes. People in wartime, determined to prove their own mettle, go looking for excuses to shove others lower and lower, until some lie six feet underground. When folks take on a warlike mood, poor boys are found wanting, every time. So he buys himself a tacky, low-slung hat, a great wool scarf, and hides himself from sight.
The Incorporated call this deception insurgency, but in the insurgent’s eyes, he’s only saving his own life.
“No, no, no,” interrupts the Propagandist. “Really, I applaud your imagination, but such an insurgent is far too timid to frighten anyone. People are more likely to feel sorry for him than not. Tell another.”
My third insurgent isn’t a he at all. After all, I never got a good look under the hat, and revolutionaries can be anybody, really. So this insurgent’s born a she, who, wrinkling her nose, tries on “he” in his adolescence, before finally settling on “they.” They like that one, a single pronoun for one person somehow implying the many.
This one, at least, harbors simple motives for all their troublesome, frightening, revolutionary tendencies. They enter the war as an insurgent because they never had the option to choose otherwise.
“How dreary,” interrupts the Propagandist, wrinkling his nose. He doesn’t seem to like any of my stories, yet he won’t stop asking for more. “I’ve never liked a foregone conclusion, and neither will the public. You disappoint me, Scheherazade. Why can’t you conceive of anything tastefully frightening? A clever girl should know how to spark the public to action!”
His patience with his Scheherazade wears thinner, day by day. I’m careful to bide the time. At night, when my work shift ends, I buy produce from the bodega. I don’t ask the owners about the revolutionary in the low-slung hat, and they don’t volunteer any stories. When I return to my apartment—always well before curfew nowadays, thank you very much—I lie back in the creaky wooden bed, and toss an apple overhead, over and over again. It bounces gently against the ceiling, then back into my palm. I watch the red of its skin flicker through the shadows of my room. I think of a scarf-masked face. I think of blood on snow. I remember half-gloved fingers cold beneath mine, the skin of cheap fruit between us.
I imagine my insurgent—pale and princely, dark-skinned and subtle, one person who lived a life of many—and feel terribly young. In films, revolutionaries always burn so bright and die so fast. No wonder I mistook the first one I ever met for a ghost.
“You ought to grow old,” I tell the shadows. They never answer me.
Here’s the part I don’t share with the Propagandist: I tell him stories, but he’s not my only listener.
The Office of the Propagandist boasts countless wireless channels. The Incorporated spared no expense on their greatest asset. An employee of the Propagandist can upload 3-D holograms, or vocal recordings, or even old-fashioned, plain-typed text. Do it right, and the whole continent can access your transmission, all part and parcel with the wonders of wartime broadcasting. When you work the office shifts long enough, no one pays you much attention when you fiddle with the wireless. Everyone here is very busy and important, you see, and no one has time to do anything so banal as sorting through the thousands of wireless uploads we process each week.
I drop my stories sparingly, secretly, one at a time, like crumbs charting the path from a monster’s house in the woods. I space my insurgent’s adventures out painstakingly between weeks, then months. Any girl worthy of a nickname like Scheherazade gets good at biding time. Things happen slowly, at the very beginning, in small and quiet ways. A mention in a digital magazine read by twelve people. A title drop in an obscure talk show. A scathing review on a late-night holovid network.
People begin to talk. They tell each other about rich boys turned righteous, and insurgents’ low-slung hats hiding frightened children beneath. They whisper of a boy—or is it a girl, or both, or neither at all?—like a wraith, infinite and untouchable and deathless. Slowly, very slowly, in small ways, and then larger ones, the public stirs, waking drowsy after a long, long slumber. It’s not that these made-up tales of rebels are really so extraordinary. But people have only been allowed to hear one story for so long that they are starved for literally any other. They lap mine up with greedy, wagging tongues.