“You must miss that life.” Roger Tran walked up beside her, his crisp slacks and Windsor protruding from the sea of baggy plaid worn by the production crew. “A lot happens in those buildings every day.”
Tran was skeptical toward Wall Street and its role in American life, even while he implored the staff to keep raising funds from it.
“I miss having weekends off,” Mia said. “I’ll admit to that.”
Tran laughed. “Are you a person of faith, Ms. Tucker?” he asked.
Mia considered the question, and why Mr. Fix-It would be asking it. He hadn’t mentioned church before but that didn’t mean anything. “I believe in the importance of belief,” she said. “Why do you ask?”
“In case a countryman of yours becomes poor and his means with regard to you falter, then you are to sustain him, like a stranger, that he may live with you.”
“Hmm. Not a creed you’ll find etched in any of those buildings. Old Testament or New?”
“You’d think New, wouldn’t you? That’s where much of the direction on wealth exists. But it’s from the Old. The book of Leviticus. From Yahweh Himself.”
“I dislike riddles, Roger. I thought you knew that by now.”
Tran laughed again. “No masked intent here, Ms. Tucker,” he said. “Just making conversation while the general goes over her lines.”
General Collins was playing a small but vital role in the episode: that of a Gold Star mother who lost her son in Vietnam. President-elect Bobby Kennedy, weeks from assuming office, is strolling through the harbor park with his wife, staring out at the statue beyond, contemplating the challenges ahead. General Collins’s character approaches and asks, without preamble: “How do you ask a young man to be the last to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a young man to be the last to die for a mistake?”
It seemed a strange role for a retired general and decorated Vietnam War hero. But that’s what makes it so good, Mia thought. No one loved Utopia like left-leaning bohemians in their twenties and thirties. If they could convince even a slice of that voting bloc that General Collins shared their values and worldview, the center would grow. Their ranks would grow along with it. The radical middle could begin to represent both stability and progress.
That General Collins believed peacemongers were fools more interested in moral purity than pragmatic realities was beside the point. Same with the fact that the guest spot came through an executive producer who sat on the Council of Victors. A platform like this couldn’t be assigned a price, not one that’d do it justice. By Yahweh, Mia thought, or anyone else.
She asked Tran if he’d heard anything about Empire News. The report hadn’t yet aired but staff had been briefed it was only a matter of time.
“Not much,” Tran said. “Seems like they’re focusing more on the homeland intel command. Not the Hero Project. Which is good.”
Mia nodded. She’d asked the general point-blank about the journalist’s allegation of other superpowered citizens. She’d expected Jackpot to deny. Instead the older woman had just shrugged. “I don’t know, Mia,” she’d said. “I’d say it’s unlikely but here I am talking with a Roosevelt heir who can fly through the sky. Even at my highest command, there were files and programs I didn’t have access to.”
Mia believed her, or at least didn’t disbelieve her. Still, the possibility of what had been raised lingered. It suggested that what’d happened in Tripoli hadn’t been a freak accident. It suggested something Mia loathed deep in her bones. It suggested conspiracy.
Mia left the view of the Finance District to check in with the security team; it bothered the Sheepdogs that a deputy campaign manager talked perimeter details and sectors of fire with them, which made her do it all the more. Across a park trail, outside his trailer, River Phoenix worked with a voice coach on his Kennedy accent. All these episodes later, it still didn’t sound quite right.
She returned to the set. General Collins sat in a folding chair under a tree conversing with the executive producer, a silver-haired man with a salt-and-pepper beard. The general waved Mia over to them.
“America Honors the Warfighter.” Mia greeted the man, adding, “And Praise to the Victors.”
“Right back at you, young lady!” The man talked with his hands, and more quickly than his business equivalents on the Council. He had thick, black eyebrows that seemed glued to his face. He formed finger guns and aimed them at Mia’s slight bump, a way of congratulating her. She nodded and in turn congratulated him on Utopia’s success. It was everywhere.
“My baby, in a way.” The man spoke with exclamation marks in his voice. “Twelve Emmy nominations is nothing to sneeze at, nothing to sneeze at. And the ratings! Up to 7.4 million last episode.”
“Crane was just telling me about the struggle to get Utopia on air,” General Collins said. The slight stoop in her shoulders tipped the older woman forward in her chair. Mia noticed that the makeup team had used concealer on the dark circles under her eyes; the late nights and early mornings of the campaign were affecting them all. Mia herself was spending far too much money on a caffeine-free protein energy drink designed specifically for pregnant women. “Now look at it. The talk of the country.”
The man launched into the particulars of that struggle: how network after network told them an uplifting alternate history would never work. Viewers wanted dystopian escape, they were told, to make the real world more tolerable. Who’d watch a show about an America that valued diplomacy? Who’d watch a show about an America that attempted restraint? The politics seemed muddled, too—using liberal Bobby to push what seemed an anti-intervention message? Framing the grand victory in Vietnam like it could’ve been otherwise? They didn’t understand, and especially didn’t understand why the Council of Victors was championing it. State TV couldn’t say no, though, the producer explained. They’d been desperate.
“In a way, it was the perfect place for Utopia,” he continued. “The revolution will be televised!”
The man laughed and laughed at his own joke, the general managing a grin for the same. Mia wondered, not for the first time, just how long ago this campaign had been planned out.
* * *
The producer excused himself to check on River Phoenix and River Phoenix’s accent. Mia pulled out her phone and found an hour-old text waiting there like a stale crumb. It was from Britt Swenson.
“Remember my bouncer friend I told u about? He saw the guy from the ballroom on TV—promo for Victory Parade. Bernard Galt (sp.?) Old white guy.”
Then a second text: “Yes he’s sure, in case you ask.”
Mia put away her phone and took a deep, measured breath of city air, a bladed darkness entering her mind. She walked away from the set to find some space. Was it betrayal she felt? Something like it, she thought. That son of a bitch, she continued, meaning Bernard Gault, meaning the Council of Victors, too, meaning Roger Tran and the whole lot of them. Anyone involved in this stupid little oligarchy. They could shove it. They could keep it. She didn’t need them. They must’ve thought her a fool, a dupe. She could’ve lost her child in the ballroom that night. One errant gunshot would have ended it all.