Strange Horizons, 20 January 2025
In a dystopian near-future America, the Department for a Safe America employs “Watchers” who monitor surveillance feeds across the country, flagging suspicious activity to law enforcement agencies. Michael, a new Watcher, witnesses what appears to be a mass shooting on a bus through his video feed—a man executes four women in the street. The graphic violence makes him physically sick.
The scene, however, is revealed to be an elaborate performance by a troupe of “crisis actors”—queer activists who stage fake acts of violence to traumatize Watchers and discourage them from their work. The group includes Zephyr (the gunman), Rosa, Gillian, Kitty (a new recruit), Charlii (their tech expert), and December (the group’s leader and director). They use AR projection technology and special effects to inject convincing fake footage into the surveillance system, personalizing the victims’ appearances to resemble Watchers’ family members for maximum psychological impact.
The troupe decides to escalate their operations by targeting a “Keeper”—a higher-level surveillance operative named Eve who monitors suspected terrorists and commands armed drones to eliminate threats. Eve is a trans woman supporting her polycule, who rationalizes her deadly work as necessary employment. Kitty is assigned to catfish Eve online, exploiting Eve’s attraction to younger women and gathering intelligence about her personal life.
As Kitty develops their online relationship, she grows uncomfortable with the manipulation, particularly when Eve asks probing questions about Kitty’s trauma from conversion therapy. December shares their own experience of dating a cop who initially seemed caring but became abusive, helping Kitty understand the moral stakes of their mission.
The troupe’s final performance targets a right-wing senator and his family. They stage an elaborate deception using two houses: the abandoned McMansion they’re squatting in and the senator’s actual home across town. Charlii hacks the security systems to swap the video feeds. The crisis actors mirror the movements of the senator’s family members, but surround themselves with fake bomb-making materials while the real family prepares dinner.
When Eve launches her drone assault on what she believes is a terrorist cell, she instead kills the innocent senator and his entire family, including his children. The crisis actors, wearing protective squibs, fake their own deaths in the troupe’s house. Eve realizes too late that she’s been deceived into committing mass murder.
The story ends with the troupe debating whether to release evidence of the state-sponsored killings. While Kitty questions the morality of causing the deaths of the senator’s innocent children, December argues this “acceptable collateral damage” represents a necessary blow against the oppressive surveillance state. The group considers this their transition from theatrical protest to genuine revolutionary action, with plans to share their methods so others can join their cause.
The story explores themes of state surveillance, the dehumanization inherent in remote warfare, revolutionary ethics, and the moral compromises made by those working within and against oppressive systems.
Maddison Stoff is a non-binary, autistic author, independent musician, and occasional critic from Melbourne, Australia. She writes and performs as solo electronic-punk band The Descenters, has written fiction for Andromeda Spaceways, and published political commentary for New Matilda and Overland. She also wrote and illustrated a graphic novel on growing up with autism in regional Australia called Machine Translations: A Robot’s Path to Self-Expression and Learning To Live With Organics. She holds an honours degree in creative writing from the University of Melbourne, and a degree in Popular Music and Writing from the University of Queensland. Maddison is on Twitter at TheDescenters.
Corey Jae White is the author of Repo Virtual and The VoidWitch Saga – Killing Gravity, Void Black Shadow, and Static Ruin – published by tordotcom publishing. She has also had short fiction published in Interzone and Analog, as well as a number of sci-fi anthologies. She studied writing at Griffith University on the Gold Coast, and is now based in Melbourne, Australia. Repo Virtual won the Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. Find her at coreyjwhite.com or on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/coreyjwhite.com.