After the Rain

ꘈ

After the Siege
by Cory Doctorow
From www.infinitematrix.net
http://www.infinitematrix.net/stories/shorts/after-the-siege.html

The day the siege began, Valentine was at the cinema across the street from her building. The cinema had only grown the night before and when she got out of bed and saw it there, all gossamer silver supports and brave, sweeping, candy-apple-red curves, she'd begged Mata and Popa to let her go.
She knew that all the children in the building would spend the day there -- didn't the pack of them explore each fresh marvel as a group? The week before it had been the clever little flying cars that swooped past each other with millimeters to spare, like pigeons ripping over your head. Before that it had been the candy forest where the trees sprouted bon-bons and sticks of rock, and every boy and girl in the city had been there, laughing and eating until their bellies and sides ached. Before that, the swarms of robot insects that had gathered up every fleck of litter and dust and spirited it all away to the edge of town where they'd somehow chewed it up and made factories out of it, brightly colored and airy as an aviary. Before that: fish in the river. Before that: the new apartment buildings. Before that: the new hospitals. Before that: the new government offices.
Before that: the revolution, which Valentine barely remembered -- she'd been a little kid of ten then, not a big girl of thirteen like now. All she remembered was a long time when she'd been always a little hungry, and when everything was grey and dirty and Mata and Popa whispered angrily at each other when they thought she slept and her little brother Trover had cried thin sickly cries all night, which made her angry too.
The cine was amazing, the greatest marvel yet as far as she was concerned. She and the other little girls crowded into one of the many balconies and tinkered with the controls for it until it lifted free -- how they'd whooped! -- and sailed off to its own little spot under the high swoop of the dome. From there the screen was a little distorted, but they could count the bald spots on the old war heroes' heads as they nodded together in solemn congress, waiting for the films to start. From there they could spy on the boys who were making spitball mischief that was sure to attract a reprimand, though for now the airborne robots were doing a flawless job of silently intercepting the boys' missiles before they disturbed any of the other watchers.
The films weren't very good in Valentine's opinion. The first one was all about the revolution -- as if she hadn't heard enough about the revolution! It was all they talked about in school, for one thing. And her parents! The quantities, the positive quantities of times they'd sat her down to Explain the Revolution, which was apparently one of their duties as bona fide heroes of the revolution.
This was better than most though, because they'd made it with a game and it was a game that Valentine played quite a lot and thought was quite good. She recognized the virtual city modeled on her own city, the avatars' dance-moves taken from the game too, along with the combat sequences and the scary zombies that had finally given rise to the revolution.
That much she knew and that much they all knew: without the zombies, the revolution would never have come. Zombiism and the need to cure it had outweighed every other priority. Three governments had promised that they'd negotiate better prices for zombiism drugs and three governments had failed, and in the end the Cabinet had been overrun by zombies who'd torn three MPs to bits and infected seven more, and the crowd had carried the PM out of her office and put her in a barrel and driven nails through it and rolled it down the river-bank into the river, something so horrible and delicious that Valentine often thought about it, like you poke a sore tooth with your tongue.
After that, the revolution, and a new PM who wouldn't negotiate the price of zombiism drugs. After that, a PM who built zombiism drug factories right there in the city, giving away the drug in spray and pill and needles. From there, it was only a matter of time until everything was being made right there, copies of movies and copies of songs and copies of drugs and copies of buildings and cars and you name it, and that was the revolution, and Valentine thought it was probably a good thing for everyone except the old PM whom they'd put in the barrel.
The next movie was much better and Valentine and Leeza, who was her best friend that week, put their arms around