Ghosts of the Revolution

Part One: Parallel Wars

French 75 still called themselves revolutionaries, though the only thing they’d overthrown lately was their lower backs. Once, they had been a rumor whispered in basements and faculty lounges; a footnote with smoke and teeth. They came up through Pynchon margins and photocopied manifestos that smelled of toner and sweat. They’d tried to change the world before the world learned how to package rebellion into streaming content.

Bob Ferguson had been one of the bright ones back then—sharp, furious, incandescent with purpose. Now, he looked like a man carved out of regret. His beard was a thicket of gray. His eyes were the color of road salt in February. His jacket—army surplus he had worn since the Clinton administration—hung off him like an inheritance he could neither discard nor defend.

He spent his nights leaking ICE surveillance data, pixel by pixel, hoping exposure might still mean something. He spent his mornings lecturing whichever recruit was unlucky enough to cross his path about the death of authentic political culture. “TikTok is an attention machine,” he’d declare, voice hoarse. “Not a revolution. Revolutions require blood and memory. Not filters.”

He said this most often to Perfidia Beverly Hills.

Perfidia had once been Bob’s partner in the movement and in the messier parts of love. Twelve years ago, in the aftermath of a failed action and a police raid gone sideways, she’d chosen to run. She disappeared into another identity, another city, another cause. She left Bob holding their daughter—Willa—who was ten at the time and already tall enough to look him in the eye when she asked why her mother was gone.

Willa hadn’t forgiven either of them. Last anyone heard, she was organizing mutual aid in a college town that didn’t know how to pronounce “solidarity” without irony.

Bob still set a place for her in his mind at every meeting.

Perfidia had returned two years ago, thinner, glamorous in the brittle way of people who have lived too hard, too fast, and without the luxury of regret. She still believed in spectacle—the theater of uprising. She choreographed protests the way some people staged operas: color-coded ponchos, synchronized chants, flares and glitter canons timed to the arrival of riot police.

Bob resented how she could still believe. Perfidia resented that he could still doubt.

French 75’s mission was the same as it had always been: expose the parasitic marriage between evangelical nationalism and corporate opportunism. They hacked HR systems to demote CEOs to unpaid interns. They hijacked delivery drones to rain leaflets over ICE detention sites: WELCOME TO AMERICA — NOW GET OUT. Their actions were half-slapstick, half-elegy. They made middle-aged radicals laugh into their turmeric tea and say, “Well, at least someone still remembers how to try.”

Across the city, Operation Mayhem had aged worse.

Once upon a time, their sabotage felt like revelation. Now it had the gaudy sheen of content. Their younger recruits livestreamed warehouse fires and ATM explosions with ring lights. They paused mid-sabotage to get the camera angle right. Revolution had become stunt work—brandable, memeable, monetizable.

Yet the rage remained. The desperation remained. They still rewired billboards to scream CONSUME UNTIL YOU DIE. They still shut down server farms and clogged delivery-supply chains. They still wanted to burn something that mattered.

The empire laughed at both movements. MAGA politicians posed with flamethrowers and spokesmodels. Corporations printed “RESIST” hoodies sewn by workers making twelve cents an hour. The microphone was owned by the machine, and the machine owned everything.

But both groups—French 75 and Mayhem—shared one quiet, stubborn belief:

If enough people became furious at the same time, the machine might actually crack.

Part Two: Selling the Impossible

Clémence Rousseau pushed open the warped door to the French 75 safehouse—the former co-op bookstore, now more mildew than ideology. Bob was hunched over a wheezing Windows XP laptop, frowning like the screen had personally betrayed him. Perfidia lay on the threadbare sofa, scrolling through video of Paris protests, her thumb moving slow, reverent, like prayer beads.

Clémence waited, then cleared her throat.

“I met someone,” she said.

No one looked up—not yet—but the room shifted. New faces were never casual. A new face meant recruitment. Or infiltration. Or disaster.

“A Mayhem guy,” Clémence said.

Bob didn’t look away from the screen. “They’re gym-bros with slogans. Their idea of political theory is quoting Fight Club over protein shakes.”

Clémence leaned forward. “Maybe. But they’re doing things. Meanwhile, we’re arguing about banner fonts.”

Perfidia’s thumb stopped on an image of students overturning tear-gas canisters. Her eyes flickered. She remembered when spectacle could change weather.

“What’s his name?” she asked, softly.

“Spider,” Clémence said. “Nate Garvey. He knows what we know. Alone, we’re nostalgia. Together, we might actually matter.”

Bob said nothing, because the truth was a bruise and he could feel the pressure of the finger pressing into it.

Spider’s return to Mayhem headquarters wasn’t smoother.

The self-storage unit smelled like gasoline and hormonal despair. The young recruits were arguing about whether tonight’s livestream should feature burning electric scooters or crashing a Tesla into a Whole Foods loading dock.

“Idiots,” Spider muttered. “We’ve become influencers with explosives.”

One of the kids—shaved eyebrows, jaw like a mallet—snorted. “Alright, Grandpa.”

Spider ignored him. He threw his backpack down.

“I met someone. French 75.”

The groans were loud. French 75 was a joke—a punchline for people who thought quoting Marx was cosplay.

“Listen,” Spider said, and the word landed. “They’ve got history. They’ve got narrative. They have legitimacy with the kind of people who remember when protest meant something. We’ve got the reach. We’ve got the chaos. Put them together—and maybe we’re not just noise.”

The laughter was thinner this time. Not gone. But softened. Seeds do not ask for permission.

One week later, Clémence and Spider sat across from each other in the back of a shuttered laundromat, surrounded by peeling paint and the ghosts of detergent.

Two folders lay between them. One held the faded manifestos and annotated histories of French 75. The other held blueprints for drone hijack rigs and pipeline sabotage technology too easily sourced from hardware stores.

“This is going to be impossible,” Clémence said.

Spider’s grin was slow, sharp, feral—the grin of someone who had run out of things to lose.

“Good,” he said. “Impossible is the only thing worth doing.”

They didn’t shake hands.

They didn’t need to.

The world had just shifted a fraction. But enough.

Part Three: The Spark and the Gatekeepers

The laundromat had become their embassy—a cracked-tile purgatory lit by flickering fluorescent tubes that hummed like dying hornets. Spider and Clémence sat across from one another, folders open, pens idle. They had an idea now. A direction. A thing with weight.

And then, they both realized the same brutal truth at the same time:

Nobody followed them.

They were not the legends of their movements.

They were the stubborn ones who stayed after the music stopped.

“We can’t move anything without a voice,” Clémence said, massaging the bridge of her nose.

Spider nodded. “Yeah. We need the priests. The saints. The mascots.”

He spit the last word.

Both groups had their figureheads—mythologized, irritating, complicated.

French 75 had Bob.

Operation Mayhem had Prophet Ellis.

Bringing those two into alignment would be like making a pit bull and a cobra agree to share a chew toy.

But revolutions had never been built by the reasonable.

Recruiting Bob

Clémence found Bob in the back room of the bookstore, surrounded by stacks of outdated radical theory and unopened mail addressed to legal defense funds that no longer existed.

He didn’t look up when she entered. That was his way of saying: I’m listening. But don’t waste this breath.

“Bob,” she began, no softness in her voice—softness was how you got devoured in these circles. “You remember what it felt like when we mattered.”

He didn’t move.

Good. He was listening.

“You think Mayhem is sloppy,” she continued. “They are. They’re reckless. They’re loud. They’re undisciplined. But they have reach—we haven’t had reach since the detention center raid, and you know it.”

His jaw twitched.

Mentioning the raid was a knife.

But necessary.

“We’re ghosts, Bob. Footnotes in political science textbooks no undergrad will ever read. And I know you don’t care if they forget us.”

Now he looked up.

“But I also know you care if they forget Willa.”

Silence. Heavy and sharp.

Perfidia, somewhere in the next room, stopped breathing.

“She hates me,” Bob murmured, voice gravel. “She has every right to.”

“She doesn’t hate you,” Clémence said. “She hates what happened. She hates the story. So rewrite the story. Make the cause worth the cost.”

Bob stared at the cracked plaster on the ceiling, the way men do when they need permission from ghosts.

Finally, he exhaled a sigh that sounded like surrender peeling off old bone.

“What does Mayhem want?” he asked.

“Not to be forgotten,” Clémence replied.

A bitter smile.

He knew that hunger intimately.

“Fine,” Bob said. “Set the meeting.”

Recruiting Prophet Ellis

Spider found Ellis where Ellis always was: performing sermon to a warehouse congregation smoking cheap cigarettes like incense.

Ellis wasn’t a strategist. He was a symbol. A man who had watched Fight Club at thirteen and never recovered. A charismatic with a jawline that suggested he thought in angles rather than thoughts. Young, hungry, dangerous in that evangelical way people become when they believe they’ve seen God through tear gas.

Spider waited until the disciples dispersed.

“You want legacy,” Spider said, not bothering with small talk. “Not fame. Legacy.”

Ellis’s eyes sharpened.

He was smarter than his sermons suggested.

“Go on.”

“Spectacle doesn’t last anymore,” Spider said. “The internet has devoured shock. You can set fire to a Walmart and it will be ‘old news’ in eight hours. If you want the world to remember you, you have to shift its axis. Not burn it—tilt it.”

Ellis let this settle.

“We combine our force with their narrative,” Spider continued. “We break something structural. Something that can’t be ignored. Something no network can spin. A truth that can’t be walked back.”

Ellis didn’t smile.

He didn’t blink.

He tasted the idea like communion.

“And what do we get?”

Spider didn’t hesitate.

“We become chapter one in the next history book.”

Ellis inhaled, slow and reverent.

“Set the meeting.”

The Convening

They met in a gutted warehouse in Newark—neutral ground because no one liked Newark.

Bob arrived first, hands in pockets, shoulders tight.

Ellis arrived second, flanked by two young zealots, each looking like they’d been cast in the role of "Revolutionary #3" in an indie movie about moral decline.

Spider and Clémence didn’t mediate.

They placed the folders—evidence, targets, strategies—on the table between them.

For a long moment, no one spoke.

Then Bob reached forward, pulled the first folder open, and said:

“Let’s ruin them properly.”

And Ellis, satisfied, murmured:

“Amen.”

Part Four: The Enemy Revealed

What they were up against wasn’t just corruption.

It was administration as extraction, patriotism as branding, nation as subscription service.

MAGA was no longer a movement; it was a management style.

The White House resembled a luxury timeshare conference staffed by resentful waiters with security clearances. Every appointment, every policy, every podium speech smelled like something left too long under heat lamps.

The Cabinet looked like a casting call for a reality show titled America’s Next Top Crony:

• The Secretary of State, a former cable-news panelist whose foreign policy experience consisted of yelling “LET ME FINISH” faster than his guests.
• The Attorney General, who treated the Justice Department like a personal Yelp-review vengeance squad.
• The Secretary of Defense, a television war-fetishist who believed strategy was cosplay—Patton jackets, mirrored aviators, Instagram thirst traps captioned Duty.
• And below them: a parade of loyalty hires, failsons, disgraced talk-radio hosts, crypto influencers, anti-vaxx chiropractors with opinions on missile systems.

Competence was treason.

Loyalty was law.

The mechanism of oppression had evolved.

It was no longer about secrets, but volume:

Say the lie loudly.

Repeat it until the truth seems impolite.

The Lies

The administration’s messaging machine was a cathedral of manufactured panic:

• “Caravans” of immigrants that never existed.
• Crime waves that dissolved when you looked past the chyron.
• “Antifa super-soldiers” that were just angry baristas with union cards.
• Political enemies “funded by shadowy puppet masters” who turned out to be public school teachers with GoFundMe accounts.

Fear was the product.

Fear was the export.

Fear was the brand.

They didn’t defend America.

They sold it back to Americans at a markup.

The Theft

The voting system—already fragile—was treated like a broken ATM that powerful hands reached into casually.

• Voters purged because their names were “statistical anomalies.”
• Ballots discarded in counties with “unreliable demographics.”
• Polling places consolidated until some citizens had to travel forty miles to stand in line ten hours deep.

French 75 saw it in the numbers, in the legislation, in the language.

Mayhem saw it in the streets, in the enforcement, in the bruises.

Different angles.

Same truth:

They weren’t losing democracy. It had already been stolen.

The press was supposed to sound the alarm.

But the for-profit networks behaved like carnival barkers selling tickets to a ride whose safety bar had already snapped.

When Mayhem blocked highways or torched substations, the headline wasn’t WHY ARE THEY FURIOUS?

It was LOOK AT THESE MANIACS INTERRUPTING TRAFFIC.

When French 75 hacked ICE databases, the headline wasn’t WHAT IS BEING DONE IN OUR NAME?

It was CYBER-ANARCHISTS STRIKE AGAIN.

Everyone was screaming.

No one was heard.

The Clarity

Clémence and Spider saw the same truth, from opposite ends:

The system would not expose itself.

No committee, no op-ed, no oversight board would save them.

To reveal the rot, you had to force the country to look directly at it.

Not a leak.

A spectacle of evidence.

Not chaos.

Consequence.

French 75 brought history: the names, the dates, the receipts.

Operation Mayhem brought velocity: the ability to make truth impossible to ignore.

They didn’t want to destroy the country.

They wanted to remind it what it was supposed to be.

The Turn

In the Newark warehouse, Bob and Prophet Ellis studied the same data spreadsheet—a map of voter suppression in three states, attached to private contracting records leading directly back to two cabinet secretaries and an overseas holding company registered in a tax haven that didn’t officially exist.

Ellis, usually theatrical, went quiet.

Bob, usually loud, whispered:

“This is the kind of thing that topples governments.”

Spider replied:

“Only if people believe it’s real.”

Clémence:

“Then we make it unignoreable. We don’t leak. We detonate. Not buildings. Narrative.”

Silence.

Agreement.

Something like awe.

This wasn’t ideology anymore.

This was the moment before a country wakes up.

Part Five: The Breaks Before the Bind

No alliance worth making ever formed cleanly.

Movements are built on memory, and memory is mostly scar tissue.

French 75 and Operation Mayhem both fractured the moment the plan reached their respective camps.

French 75’s Revolt

They gathered in the back of the bookstore, under the sagging ceiling fan that thumped like a tired heartbeat. The room smelled of old paper, instant coffee, and the sweat of arguments that had gone on too long.

Bob stood at the front, hands in pockets, voice low — the tone he reserved for things that mattered.

“We’re joining with Mayhem,” he said.

Boos first.

Then laughter.

Then the kind of silence that means someone is deciding whether to leave forever.

One of the older members — Lorraine, who had once chained herself to a courthouse door for immigration reform — crossed her arms.

“They betrayed us. Their people torched our meeting space in 2018 because they thought we were ‘too academic.’ Now we’re supposed to share tactics?”

Bob didn’t look away.

“That was a stupid stunt by stupid kids. They’re older now. We all are.”

“They’re reckless,” another muttered.

“So were we,” Bob said. “Difference is, we slowed down. They didn’t.”

Perfidia leaned forward — the room tensed. She wasn’t supposed to have a voice here. Not anymore.

“You all want the same thing,” she said. “But you want to be right more than you want to win. Revolution isn’t a romance. It’s math. We don’t have numbers. They do.”

Bob let that hang — and then:

“This isn’t forgiveness,” he said. “This isn’t healing. This is survival. If we stay like this — arguing theory in a building held together by water damage — we die as a trivia question in someone’s dissertation.”

Lorraine looked at him, long and slow.

She had been there the day Willa stopped speaking to him.

She knew what surrender looked like.

This wasn’t surrender.

This was last chance.

She nodded, once.

The room followed.

Not because they were convinced.

But because exhaustion is a form of faith.

Operation Mayhem’s Fracture

Ellis didn’t call a meeting.

He preached.

The warehouse lights flickered as his voice rose — rhythm, cadence, tempo like a sermon carved from gasoline and tinder.

“We stand at the edge of a story!” he declared.

The crowd shouted on cue.

“We have burned symbols! Broken windows! Interrupted convenience! And what has it bought us?”

Quiet.

Not silence.

Recognition.

Spider watched from the back, arms crossed.

He knew better than to speak during liturgy.

Ellis went on:

“We are unforgettable to ourselves. But history does not remember the loud. It remembers the effective. Fire is not enough. Noise is not enough. This system will not die from embarrassment.”

Someone shouted, “French 75 are fossils!”

“And fossils,” Ellis boomed, “are the only proof that something once lived.”

The warehouse stilled.

He stepped down from the crate he used as pulpit.

Walked.

Slow.

Measured.

“They carry the memory of struggle before it was content. They know the cost. They know the price. They know how to bury the dead.”

Eyes followed.

Shoulders lowered.

“And we—” His voice softened. “We know how to make the living pay attention.”

Spider exhaled — almost relief, almost awe.

But not everyone yielded.

A younger fighter — shaved head, jaw clenched — stepped forward.

“So we trade purity for partnership?”

Ellis didn’t blink.

“We trade loneliness for power.”

The kid swallowed.

Looked away first.

That was the moment the room turned.

Not because Ellis won the argument.

But because nobody else had one better.

The Plan Becomes Real

The warehouse in Newark became the drafting table for a new kind of revolution — one built not on explosions but on receipts.

French 75 brought:

• Evidence trails
• Procurement ledgers
• Voting purge data
• Correspondence between contractors and cabinet offices

Mayhem brought:

• Access tunnels
• Disruptive tech
• Anonymous routing networks
• Broadcast hijack protocols

They would not destroy a system.

They would expose it — in a way no network, no senator, no PR campaign could spin away.

A reckoning, engineered for prime time.

Not chaos for spectacle.

Chaos for clarity.

A strike not on infrastructure —

but on the illusion that the system still belonged to the people.

As they drew it out — blueprint to timeline to operational roles — Clémence watched Bob watching Perfidia.

He blinked, once — slow, pained, human.

Spider saw it too.

And understood:

Revolutions do not require forgiveness.

They only require the willingness to act alongside the people you can’t forgive.

Part Six: The Crack in the Machine

They didn’t start with fire.

They started with paper.

The plan unfolded on a Tuesday morning, because revolutions failed when they announced themselves. Revolutions worked when they disguised themselves as routine.

French 75 leaked the spreadsheets first—voter rolls purged with surgical precision in districts that “leaned inconvenient.” Names flagged because they sounded too Latino, too Muslim, too unfamiliar.

And next to each purge order:

the signature of a private contractor who sat on the board of a PAC who hosted dinners where cabinet members toasted with taxpayer-funded champagne.

Then came the invoices:

Government contracts rerouted to companies owned by spouses, cousins, invisible LLCs in Delaware, shell firms in Cyprus.

Then came the emails:

Requests from the Administration to news executives:

“Minimize coverage.”

“Maintain voter confidence.”

“Patriotism requires discretion.”

And then—

Operation Mayhem took down the networks.

Not forever.

Just for long enough.

Long enough that every major news station, every feed, every billboard, every smart TV, every public transit display, every Times Square screen defaulted to:

THE RECEIPTS.

Line by line.

Name by name.

Timestamped.

No narrator.

No music.

No spin.

Just the truth presented like indictment.

For twelve minutes, the nation stared.

Then the networks came back online.

And they couldn’t not report it.

Not because they wanted to.

Because millions of people were already talking about it.

Screenshots had been taken.

Links had been copied.

Threads had begun.

The story didn’t break.

It erupted.

The Reaction

It wasn’t clean. It wasn’t noble. It wasn’t anything a documentary narration would try to claim.

Some states erupted into protests overnight.

Some counties shrugged.

Some people denied what they saw even as they stared at it glowing in their hands.

But something shifted.

People who had once said

“It can’t be that bad”

stopped saying it.

People who had once said

“Both sides are the same”

began deleting their tweets.

People who had once said

“This is just how politics works”

began crying in grocery store parking lots.

It was not consensus.

It was recognition.

The illusion had cracked.

The Consequences

The Administration didn’t fall. Not immediately.

But it staggered.

Resignations began—not in the dramatic flourish of televised disgrace—but quietly, strategically, like rats leaving a yacht they were sure would float forever.

Court cases were reopened.

Old investigations revived.

Civil servants who had once been ignored were suddenly subpoena-worthy.

And the public—

the tired, angry, exhausted, underestimated public—

showed up.

In hearings.

In town halls.

In streets.

On ballots.

With cameras.

With documentation.

With names.

Not united.

But awake.

And awakening is a harder thing to undo than belief.

The Aftermath

Bob never reconciled with Willa.

At least not right away.

Perfidia didn’t apologize.

Not because she was proud—

but because apology is a language she was never taught.

Clémence found herself able to sleep again, which felt more revolutionary than anything she’d ever hacked.

Spider stopped looking for glory.

Which was the closest thing to liberation he had ever known.

Bob and Ellis met occasionally, in that Newark warehouse, surrounded by folding chairs and silence.

“They’ll just build another machine,” Ellis said once.

“Of course,” Bob replied. “That’s what power does.”

“So what did we do?” Ellis asked.

Bob took a slow drag from his cigarette, exhaled like a man letting go of a decade of disappointment.

“We made them remember the machine exists,” he said. “And that it can be seen.”

The Closing Image

Months later, Clémence stood on a rooftop at dusk.

Below her, in the streets, small crowds gathered around portable projectors—showing the spreadsheets again.

Young people explaining procurement fraud to old men.

Grandmothers explaining redlining to teenagers.

Arguments, debates, joy, rage.

Not unity.

Participation.

Spider leaned against the railing next to her.

No smile.

No despair.

Just presence.

“Did we win?” he asked.

Clémence watched the city — fractured, flawed, ungovernable, alive.

“No,” she said softly. “We just stopped losing.”

He nodded.

And below them, the country — wounded, furious, unsteady —

began the long, uncertain work

of remembering how to belong to itself. 

Ghosts of the Revolution Pod