Noise by Darin Bradley

operation. (ii) Party Members must be made to feel that their actions are appropriate to the Narrative. (iii) Party Members are encouraged to remember that those they must neutralize or incapacitate are Outsiders—direct opponents to Group survival. (iv) IfOutsiders’ survival interests interfere with the Group’s, then, morally, these Outsiders are natural enemies—they are predators.

[6] (i) When in Party, look twice, move once. (ii) The obvious strategy is for a Leader to move his or her Party directly into a facility to Forage supplies, counting on martial strength to carry the Party through any necessary violence. This is an unnecessary expenditure of energy, as well as an unnecessary risk. (iii) Party excursions are conservative operations. (iv) Remember that, while it is unseen and generally unknowable, personal energy is a Group’s greatest resource. It must be replenished with food, water, and rest, all of which will be in precious supply. (v) As such, squandering energy with unnecessary maneuvers or unnecessary risk is a crime of waste, committed against the Group.

CHAPTER EIGHT

    s hould I wake them up?” Four whispered.
    “No.” I waved absently at the front wall, trying to set the black-and-white’s earpiece in place with my other hand. It was a leftover, a yellowed plastic thing that had come with the crystal radio kit my dad and I bought. We had built it together when I was twelve. The year I’d quit the Boy Scouts. It had been something we’d done together—he was one of the Assistant Scout Masters. They all were—one assistant for each Scout, fathers all, even if that made for a clumsy Administration. When I quit, he was commuting back and forth, from Dallas to Little Rock, because he’d lost his old job. Arkansas during the week, Texas on the weekends—when we did things like launch model rockets and build crystal radios. The Scouts had been ours, not mine, so I didn’t go because he couldn’t go. I went back when he did.
    That was the first time we ceased to be a family.
    The earpiece fit the black-and-white’s audio jack better than our other earphones.
    “Just keep watch,” I told her.
    The black-and-white’s dials were very small. Levi and I had to be careful with them because, over time, my dad had stripped many of the tiny, plastic teeth from the housing that cinched the dial onto the much-thinner tuning rod. We had to press and turn at the same time, or the dials would just spin.
    My heartbeat was coming to a late realization about what Four and I had just seen. About what it meant. It started working itself up. I spun the dials a few times, ineffectually, forgetting to
Depress the clutch, or you’ll kill it
. I clenched my teeth to keep from cursing. Calmed down.
    KHED was one of our favorite ’casts, even though he didn’t use video often. I didn’t want to hunt for anything new. As I turned the dial through the frequencies, I heard a lot of static. Several of the ’casts weren’t active anymore.
    Salvage was thinning out.
    I found KHED. It was a simple ’cast—just the digital newscasts, stripped out of their feed (video, too, this time) and re-’cast, analog, for Salvage. I wondered how many people, other than KHED, could even still see the original report. Without power. Who outside of Salvage would have any idea that things had escalated? To the point that KHED wasn’t fucking with the feed. To the point that no jammers were fucking with him not fucking with the feed.
    I took my hands off the dials and grabbed the stenographer’s pad. Shoved the earpiece in deeper. I tried to be dutiful about this. The news anchor was trying to sound objective. The most important thing was keeping a clear perspective on the Collapse, though she didn’t call it that. They—digital, everyone else—didn’t have a name for it.
    I took notes of images and feeds in case they showed up in somebody’s ’cast later. I didn’t know how much longer we’d be in Slade, but it would be