The second bomb scare this week for New Truth Media means the editorial staff is being redirected to the coffee shop two blocks over. Brad McCauliffe, lead writer and videographer, shoves his way through a line of protesters, knocking over a sign that reads “MOLECULAR REGENERATION IS A HUMAN RIGHT.” He never breaks stride, stepping on it and leaving a perfect shoeprint of his $1800 Salvatore Ferragamo loafers dead center.

“Hey!” a voice protests.

“Hey yourself,” Brad says without turning as he breaches the doors to the café.

Emma Jacobin, his newly-hired intern, is already seated in the corner window spot, watching the protesters with interest.

“They’re projecting numbers in the millions. Every cop from Manasses to Glen Burnie will be out there tonight.” Her eyes look huge like a cartoon character’s, magnified behind thick-framed glasses. Curly dark bangs flow out from a burgundy soft-knit cap emblazoned in the center with an image of Boston University’s mascot, Rhett the Boston Terrier. Her hair hangs at the edges of her tiny face, her expression resembling jungle prey staring out from the safety of dense foliage. The morning cold had turned her freckled nose rose red, and she grips her hot tea with two small hands, bringing it up to her face and letting the steam fog up her glasses.

“Snap a few pictures before tonight,” Brad says.

“Crowds?”

“Faces. Angrier the better. Tom wants to keep running with the terrorism angle – the clicks last week were through the roof. We set a record for comments.”

“We got ratio’d hard,” Emma says.

“And? Advertisers pay for engagement, not affection.”

“The fact checkers—”

“There you go with that again,” Brad says. “The fact checkers can’t keep up. And the fact checkers don’t pay our salaries. You know who does?”

“Russian bot farmers?”

“Tom.”

Their chrome communicators buzz alive in unison, Emma’s with the ALERT! sound effect from Metal Gear Solid, Brad’s with Tom Cruise’s character from Jerry Maguire yelling, “Show me the money!” at full volume.

“Speak of the lord,” Brad says. The group message from Tom reads: News. Now.

The pair turn to the LCD screen on the opposite wall and see it. Big bold capital letters in a red stripe: BREAKING NEWS – COULTER OUT OF PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE W/ ILLNESS, DOUGLASS IN.

Protesters outside erupt in chants of “Douglass! Douglass! Douglass!” Many are looking at their chrome communicators, some tapping away in a hurry to share the news. A few people exchange big, emphatic hugs.

“Holy shit,” Emma says. “The widower?”

Brad takes a moment to process the seismic shift. Somewhere above his head, he imagines the great tree Yggdrasil shedding all its leaves, and all the leaves are American dollars.

“The puncher is in,” he says at last. His trance breaks in a burst, taking off in a mad dash toward those falling bills. “We’ll need to run a bio, front page. Start with his childhood – focus on fistfights, roughhousing. Hear me, Emma? I want baby pictures with clenched fists.”

“Then what, high school? He was on the national debate team—that’s where he met his wife. Then college, Harvard Law—”

“Skip all that. Straight to the first enlistment, find pictures from combat training. B-Roll of the tech being developed – big mechanical fists on conveyor belts. Early tests, I’m talking exploding concrete walls at Fort McCoy, soldiers cheering. Retweet that viral video from a few months ago, the one where he punched that whole terrorist hideout into dust.”

“That was debunked,” Emma says. “It was actually a scene from a Bollywood—”

“Just retweet it. The debate’s in a couple hours. We’ll do a small print retraction tomorrow. Extra small.”

“Want me to put his platform in there?” Emma asks. “Universal molecular regen, New Tech for all, street ban on war tech.”

Brad wasn’t listening. “The puncher is in,” he repeats to himself.

*          *          *

That evening, the pair share a flying taxi toward the auditorium where the debate will be held. Emma stares out the window as they swoop over massive crowds of protesters filling the streets of D.C., block after block after block. Brad’s neck is craned, face buried in his communicator, watching the analytics numbers change on the New Truth Media social hub.

“60,000 reshares on that bio we ran. The comment section is insane – I can’t read it fast enough,” Brad says, doing a gleeful little tap dance with his toes.

“Incoming,” Emma says, plugging her communicator into the taxi’s central console. “Gifts from Tom.” Two press badges come sliding out of a 3-D printer tucked underneath. Emma turns hers over in her hand and watches the anti-counterfeit holographic White House change color. Blue, then red, then blue again. Her first real D.C. press badge. Emma earned her undergraduate degree from Berkeley, graduated valedictorian with a focus in social policy and a minor in New Tech theory. She got her master’s in journalism from Boston U, and was editor-in-chief of BU Today before interning with three different newspapers when the labor strikes of 2048 began. After thousands of applications, she finally landed a minimum-wage spot as a part-time intern with New Truth Media. I thought you were going to write about social policy, she remembers her mom saying. But rent in D.C. waits for no one.

Brad got his G.E.D. from Whitefish Bay High School in Wisconsin, spent the following summer running a baseball fantasy league out of his uncle’s garage, then went viral after tweeting a photoshopped image of a Californian gubernatorial candidate making love to a communist robot. The image was picked up by a swarm of a Russian bots and had been seen by half the industrialized world before fact checkers were waking up the next morning. Tom had called him and hired him before lunchtime.

By the time they arrive at the debate location, every major news station is running nonstop coverage of Marcus Douglass and his giant robotic fists. A rubber barricade separates press from audience members, and a concrete wall separates both from the mass of protesters. The press line continues into a hallway, creeping toward a bio-tech scanner where posted guards point to electronic signs that read “UNREGISTERED BIO-TECH INDIVIDUALS NOT ALLOWED ENTRY.”

A monitor above is set to the most popular news station in the country. On it, a panel of well-dressed individuals surround an oblong table with the words “PRE-DEBATE ANALYSIS” bordering the frame.

“Never in American history have we had a candidate on stage who, so easily, could turn and kill the person next to him with a flick of his wrist,” exclaims an obese older man whose suit is three sizes too small. The top button of his shirt looks as if it’ll burst and fly off at any moment, but it never does. He flicks his wrist at the commentator to his left, a woman in an audacious red-white-and-blue business suit. The woman flinches and laughs.

“They’d better not tick him off,” she says. “He might go commando on them! We’ve all seen the videos.” Behind the panel is a giant screen displaying an old photo of Douglass. Someone has edited it to make his bio-tech fists look five times larger than they really are.

“I mean, his campaign should be frustrated,” says a younger fellow with a combover, joining the conversation. “He’s struggling in the polls; he’s always yelling on the campaign trail. Honestly, he seems like a loose cannon. Everybody in that room may be in danger.” The headline now reads: EXTREMIST ON STAGE AT D.C. DEBATE?

A squirrelly, shaggy man with unkempt hair puts a hand up, struggling to be acknowledged by the others. Finally, he summons the courage to interject.

“S-s-senator Douglass is a war hero, and his late wife was a champion for the working class. Those poll numbers, frankly, were disputed, and Senator Douglass has never shown any violent—”

“Can you imagine taking that right hand?” the older man shouts to no one in particular. “Kaboom! You’d be vaporized. Your bones would be dust.”

An animated graphic appears on the screen showing a cartoon body absorbing a blow from bio-tech fists. A cute little mouse (just dissimilar enough from Mickey to avoid copyright issues) takes a bump on the head, a comic book POW and puff of smoke envelop the screen, and a mass of cartoon bones fly off in every direction. A child standing next to Emma yelps in delight at the sight.

“We’ll be right back!” the old man announces. The camera pans up and some of the commentators play-fight with each other. The old man lands a soft punch on the man with a combover, who flails his arms in theatrical explosion. It cuts to commercial as the words “THE MOST TRUSTED SOURCE IN NEWS” cascade through the frame, accompanied by a patriotic melody of triumphant horns.

“Vegas has it at 2-to-1,” Brad says.

“What?”

“2-to-1 that he’ll punch somebody. Over-under is decent on him taking out both Conner and Williamson; Blue Party’s been dogging him for weeks. Could parlay on anything non-lethal, blowing up a podium or something.”

“This way, folks,” a guard says. The two walk through the scanner and into the auditorium. In the distance, the sounds of protester chants fill the night.

*          *          *

The auditorium is filled with rabid fans of each candidate, party delegates, some college students and activists, an outright whacko or two, and more than a couple “plants” – folks from pro-status-quo political groups inserted into the crowd, pre-selected to ask slanted questions during the townhall portion.

“This is democracy,” Emma says.

“This is a prize fight,” Brad says.

Emma slinks to the back of the press pool while Brad pushes and elbows his way to the front, trying to find the best vantage point to see Douglass’ podium from the side. He had come up with the brilliant idea to livestream a constant zoomed-in shot of nothing but the man’s fists.

The first 30 minutes of the debate pass mostly without event, though fact checkers note Douglass was cut off by moderators 20 seconds earlier than the other candidates. The ones flanking him on either side are skittish; one social media outburst comes when Conner noticeably jumps as Douglass turns to him to refute a point. The live viewer count of Brad’s “24/7 FIST-FEED” reaches twelve thousand, a plague-ridden social soup of the anonymous: adolescent jokesters, incels, near-radicalized extremists, and those that blur the lines between all three.

The lone moderator, who could easily be the lost twin of the old commentator from earlier, directs his next question to Douglass.

“Senator Douglass, many people have pointed out your increased shows of anger on the campaign trail amidst your dwindling numbers of support. What do you say to those people?”

“What shows of anger?” Douglass says. “The American people are demanding change, and they’re right to be upset with the way things are. And our numbers are strong; those polls are done by landline and we all know that technology is barely—” His mic cuts.

“Senator, I’m sorry your time is up. Pivoting to the frontrunners…”

Douglass’s fist clenches. Vegas odds update.

Questions continue for the next hour. Douglass is barely given time to speak while the others are accommodated at length by the moderator. Pro-Douglass chants break out in the audience, and those people are swiftly removed. A plant yells every time Douglass speaks. They are never reprimanded by the moderator or security.

“Listen,” Douglass begins, “oligarchic corporate interests—”

“Criminal!”

“The American people are tired of sensationalist—”

“Savage!”

“With the technology my wife pioneered, we will fulfil her dream—”

“Phony!”

“If you would just let me finish, I—”

“Liar!”

“Listen, lady,” Douglass says, pointing a giant’s cybernetic finger at the haggler. “Sit down and—”

“No, no, we won’t be having you talk to a citizen that way,” Conner says. His grin of perfect pearly whites is somehow more artificial than Douglass’ knuckles of rotating gears and programmable pneumatic settings. “My friends and allies, what Senator Douglass doesn’t understand is that the people want civility. Dignity to the Oval Office.”

“Hear, hear! Dignity!” another candidate says.

“There’s no place here for a war criminal,” Conner says, feeling bold. Somewhere, an army of Russian bots begins to rapidly tweet the hashtag #warcriminal.

Several plants in the audience ratchet up their onslaught, chanting “Li-ar! Li-ar!”

“Yes, yes,” says Williamson, standing to Douglass’ immediate right. He jabs a skeletal finger at him. “He’s a liar!”

From the crowd, a shrill voice – one that hadn’t yelled anything until this point but was nonetheless there, dormant, building – breaks through the rest and screams:

“I bet he KILLED HIS WIFE!”

The world stops. The only motion left in the entire universe is Brad’s thumb, moving along the zoom slider of his communicator’s video recorder. But it’s already maxed out.

Conner, the self-appointed voice of civility, is the first to break the silence.

“Now, now, that’s just a bit—” He is cut off by the gargantuan mechanized fist detonating on his skull. Brains and bone fragment shower onto the next three candidates.

“Holy sh—” Williamson manages a commendable word-and-a-half before his chest cavity meets the colossal force of Douglass’ knuckles. A right hook turns Williamson’s upper torso into an $800 billion firework show of blood and ligament courtesy of the military-industrial complex. Douglass’ arm impales the man all the way through to the elbow. Screams echo through the auditorium as panicked people stampede in all directions. Douglass erupts into a gory rampage, bringing fist-to-forehead on every poor soul within reach: Secret Service, other candidates, plants from the audience. People by the dozens are reduced to a fine pinkish paste. A fleeing stagehand bumps a lever, dropping balloons and confetti from the ceiling. They land in pools of blood.

Brad feels a tug on his arm. It’s Emma.

“We have to get the FUCK out of here,” she cries.

“Are you kidding me?” Still livestreaming, Brad yanks his arm free. “This is gonna have a billion views by the morning!”

Exhilaration in his nerves, Brad tries to steady the camera on his communicator. He watches Douglass through the display, framed by a waterfall comment section updating with posts faster than eyes can track. He steps closer for a better shot.

…too close. Through the viewfinder, Brad sees the closed hand of God headed straight toward him. The communicator explodes in a shower of carbon fiber, glass, and sparks. The last thing Brad sees are his $1800 Salvatore Ferragamo loafers bursting into a hundred thousand leather threads. The world goes dark.

*          *          *

And the world stays dark.

Brad feels around… sheets. Bandages on his face. The plastic rails of a hospital bed. He listens… the faint sound, an unknown distance away and in every direction, of people cheering.

“You’re finally up.” It’s Emma’s voice.

I can’t speak, Brad realizes.

“Oh, don’t try to talk. Your vocal cords exploded. Your eyes exploded too. Well, most of you exploded. They did what they could, but our insurance doesn’t cover molecular regeneration. Your ears work just fine, though. You can listen.”

She flips on the TV.

“Apparently, he’s leading in all the polls now,” Emma says. “It’s a real populist movement. Cops just sorta stopped trying after he splattered a few dozen. Can’t say I blame ‘em. Military sided with him pretty quickly too. It’s a hit to decorum, I guess. Anyways I’m out of here—got a job interview. Ciao.”

As Emma’s footsteps fade, Brad recognizes the voice of the man speaking on TV. It’s Douglass, giving a speech. Uninterrupted.

He makes some pretty good points, Brad thinks.