the “upcoming events” page, but his blog was rich with material. He had become more guarded in recent years—perhaps when he began touting himself about as a stand-up—but his early posts were honest and raw, recounting a sorry tale of bullying and victimization. He was a staunch environmentalist—hence his appearance at the charity open mic night—and he wrote passionately about climate change.
—I saw your gig tonight, I wrote. You’re funny.
I styled myself as a twenty-five-year-old blond from a town far enough away to be safe. Single. Interested. I modeled my interests around everything I’d found in his blog and expressed my delight when he found us to have so much in common. I introduced him to the group and encouraged him to play an active part in our plans.
—You’re amazing. You’re so brave. So clever. You’re making such a difference.
He wanted to meet. Of course he did.
—Afterward, I told him. In Australia.
I had never used my real name online, borrowing for my activism work the identity of a student who committed suicide, many years ago, midway through the Michaelmas term. Sasha’s family lived abroad, and as I boxed up belongings, it occurred to me that a spare birth certificate and passport might be useful. I had so far managed to avoid surrendering my fingerprints and DNA to the police, but as my political activism grew, so did the risk. Far better, I decided, for poor Sasha to retain any criminal record I might inadvertently pick up.
I adopted several online pseudonyms, providing each recruit with an appropriate mentor. In one guise, I, too, had lost a brother at the hands of the police. I shared a love of computer games in another. For Zambezi, I was the supportive friend; for Congo, the would-be lover. I slipped in and out of each persona, giving each what they needed, playing one off against the other.
I had my sock puppets argue with one another, had the majority round on an outlier, defending my own plans. Once, I staged an eviction, intimating to the others that loose lips had resulted in an unfortunate end for one individual. The compliance was instantaneous.
My recruits were no longer individuals but one homogenous mass, to be moved in whatever direction I pleased. But I knew their obedience could only be tested so far. A dog can drive his sheep for miles without losing a single one, but a fox will still scatter them in an instant. I couldn’t tell them the truth, even though truth would make the headlines we all wanted.
Two thousand people were making their way to the Concert Hall at Sydney Opera House for a community choir service. For three months, more than fifty separate choirs had met in churches, offices, pubs, and houses to practice the same ten songs. I imagined the performers, coming together for the first time backstage, all dressed in black, the only identifiable difference the colored rosettes denoting their respective towns. I imagined the guests—the celebrities, the journalists, the “friends of the Opera House”—forgoing their cocktails in favor of this special treat.
Why the Opera House?
People.
A terrorist doesn’t bomb an empty building, a shuttered shop, a closed-down factory. A gunman doesn’t blaze through a school on the weekend, a shopping mall in the small hours of the morning. Hearts are won by people, not the buildings that house them, and those people must be the right people.
Do you think the burgled single mother on the sink estate gets the same response times as the toffs in the town house? Look at the coverage given to a missing child when she’s pretty and white, then look at the ugly ones, the disabled ones, the brown ones, and tell me people care as much.
I needed to make them care. I needed politicians around the world to sit up and think, We have to do something about climate change. I needed them to say: More people will die if we don’t radically change our approach. It should have been enough that the planet was dying, but I had long understood that it wasn’t.
As the cockpit door closed, I said a prayer. Not to a god but to Mother Earth. I thanked her for her blessings, for continuing to provide for us, even as we abused the privilege and took more than we needed. I felt the plane quiver beneath me, as though it, too, was on my team.
Of course I was afraid. Wouldn’t you have been? Haven’t you been scared on a fairground ride, even