Chapter 557 - 261: The Ineffective Chasm of Power
Washington D.C., Georgetown.
8:00 PM.
The air here always felt a little more relaxed than on Capitol Hill.
Inside a renowned French restaurant, crystal chandeliers cast a soft glow as waiters glided silently between tables, silver trays in hand.
Senator Edward O’Connor sat in a booth by the window.
He had just cut into the filet mignon on his plate, and the tender juices flowed out, mingling with the aroma of black pepper.
His wife, seated across from him, was enjoying a bowl of truffle soup. Beside him, his twelve-year-old daughter fiddled with her fork, complaining about her math test tomorrow.
O’Connor was in a good mood.
He had just cast an affirmative vote on the "Critical Infrastructure and Healthcare Worker Safety Protection Act."
Although the decision left him feeling a little uneasy, the reelection campaign funds promised by the insurance company lobbyists had already been deposited into his Super PAC’s account.
Eight million US Dollars, to be exact.
He picked up his wine glass and took a sip of red wine.
"Dad, why doesn’t my phone have any service?" his daughter suddenly asked, looking up and waving her iPhone.
"It’s probably just too crowded in here," O’Connor replied dismissively. He took his own phone out of his pocket, ready to glance at the evening news alerts.
The moment the screen lit up...
"BZZZZ—"
The phone began to vibrate.
Not just once, but a continuous, unceasing vibration that made his hand go numb.
The notification bar on the screen was scrolling madly, like a waterfall.
Missed Calls: 128.
Text Messages: 342.
Twitter Mentions: 999+.
O’Connor frowned.
He assumed a work group chat was glitching, or that an intern in his office had messed up the push notification settings.
He tried to unlock the screen, but the phone’s processor clearly couldn’t handle the sudden data deluge. The screen froze on the lock interface.
"What the hell?" O’Connor muttered, holding down the force restart button.
Just then, the atmosphere in the restaurant changed.
The elegant background music seemed to fade as a cacophony of ringing phones suddenly erupted.
The reservation phone at the front desk rang.
The phone in the manager’s office rang.
Even the internal line at the bar began to shriek madly.
The restaurant manager, a French man who normally wore a professional smile, was now running over from the front desk, his forehead slick with sweat.
His steps had lost their usual composure, replaced by a frantic, hurried pace.
He rushed straight to O’Connor’s table.
"Senator." The manager’s voice was trembling. He dispensed with all etiquette, leaning down and lowering his voice. "You need to leave. Right now."
"Why?" O’Connor put down his knife and fork, displeased. "My dessert hasn’t even arrived."
"Our phones have been ringing off the hook." The manager’s face was deathly pale. "Hundreds of calls, all for you. They’re saying..."
"Saying what?"
"They’re saying you’re feasting on the blood of the people," the manager said, swallowing hard. "They’re calling you a murderer. And some of them say... they’re right outside."
O’Connor froze.
He instinctively turned his head to look at the floor-to-ceiling window beside him.
Outside, the street had been quiet.
But now, there were shadows.
First one, then two, then three.
In just a few dozen seconds, the sidewalk outside was filled.
People in dark hoodies, wearing masks or scarves, held up their phones. The flashes from their cameras lit up one after another in the darkness.
They were like a swarm of luminous jellyfish cruising through the deep sea, or like countless pairs of eyes peering out from the shadows.
They pressed up against the glass.
Twisted, furious faces were pressed tight against the transparent window, their hot breath condensing into white fog on the glass.
"BANG! BANG! BANG!"
Someone started pounding on the glass.
The sound was muffled, yet it was piercing.
The other patrons in the restaurant shot to their feet in a panic. Some screamed, while others tried to run for the kitchen.
"Daddy!"
His daughter was terrified. The fork in her hand dropped onto her plate with a harsh clatter.
She shrank into her mother’s arms, trembling all over.
O’Connor shot to his feet.
"Call the police!" O’Connor roared at the manager. "Get the Special Zone Police over here! This is harassment! This is a threat against a Federation official!"
"It’s no use, sir." The manager threw his hands up in despair. "The lines are busy. All of them."
O’Connor’s phone finally finished rebooting.
With trembling fingers, he opened Twitter.
He wanted to know what was happening.
He wanted to know where these lunatics had come from.
The number one trending topic: #OConnorsDinner.
He clicked on it.
The first tweet was the video that had been meticulously crafted by Sarah.
In the video, there he was at the hearing, an arrogant look on his face, a non-existent smirk playing on his lips, saying, "We must ensure the operational safety of our hospitals..."
The caption was in huge red letters: HE’S LAUGHING AT LUIGI. HE’S LAUGHING AT THE POOR WHO CAN’T AFFORD THEIR MEDICINE.
O’Connor felt a wave of dizziness wash over him.
’The video is fake! I wasn’t even smiling!’
But the comment section below had already become a living hell.
"He’s eating at a French restaurant! A five-hundred-US-Dollar-per-person French restaurant!"
"That’s the patients’ life-saving money!"
"Go to hell, Vampire!"
What terrified him even more were the next few tweets.
An account with the handle "JusticeAvenger" had posted a picture.
It was a screenshot of a map.
A red pin was dropped precisely on the location of the restaurant where he was sitting.
"Target confirmed. The traitor is eating."
He scrolled down further.
O’Connor’s breath caught in his throat.
It was a screenshot of his personal information, now posted for the entire world to see.
Name: Edward O’Connor.
Personal Cell: XXX-XXXX-XXXX.
Spouse’s Name: Margaret O’Connor.
Daughter’s Name: Annie O’Connor.
School: Sidwell Friends School, 7th Grade, Class B.
"Oh, God..."
O’Connor’s hand went slack. The phone slipped from his grasp and fell onto the carpet.
The pounding on the window grew louder.
"Murderer!"
"Come out!"
"Look us in the eye!"
Even through the thick glass, the voices seemed to drill directly into his brain.
He was a Senator.
He was powerful and influential in Washington. He was used to giving orders from within the high walls and deep courtyards of Capitol Hill, used to giving interviews in tightly secured locations.
He thought he was safe.
He thought there was a boundary between politics and his personal life.
But now, that boundary had suddenly vanished.
The "people" he usually saw as mere numbers, as votes, as tiny dots on a statistical chart, had now become living, breathing beasts, clawing at his window, ready to devour him.
O’Connor stared at the bobbing heads outside, a series of questions flashing through his mind.
This was Georgetown, Washington’s most exclusive, affluent neighborhood.
The security here was absurdly good. Normally, if even one or two homeless people got a little too close, a patrol car from the Special Service Bureau would show up within five minutes.
Logically, it should have been impossible for so many radical protestors to gather right here.
For a demonstration of this scale to occur in Georgetown, there were only three possibilities.
First, these people were so powerful that not even the Washington Police Department could stop them.
But that was unlikely. They just looked like a group of ordinary radical activists, not some armed rebel force.
Second, Washington’s police had also been swept up in the media firestorm. They were turning a blind eye, perhaps even secretly cooperating with the protestors.
This was possible. After all, that video of his "smirk" was incredibly inflammatory.
But there was a third possibility...
A chill ran down O’Connor’s spine.
That there was an unseen force pulling the strings from behind the scenes.
A force capable of mobilizing resources at will in the heart of Washington, of neutralizing security measures, and even of delivering protestors with pinpoint accuracy to his location.
If that was the case, it meant he had been dragged into a political struggle far beyond his control.
His opponents weren’t the mob shouting slogans outside.
It was some powerful figure lurking in the shadows, holding the keys to the city.
"Edward, what are we going to do?" his wife asked, her face pale as she clutched their daughter tightly. "Are they going to break in?"
O’Connor looked outside.
He saw the faces twisted in rage, the handprints pressed against the glass.
He felt fear.
Not the fear of violence, but the fear of power.
Because he realized that in front of the truly powerful, a so-called Senator like him was nothing more than an ant that could be crushed at any moment.
The restaurant’s main door was pushed.
Though locked, the doorframe let out a dangerous creak.
A security guard tried to hold the door, but the force from outside was growing stronger.
"The back door!"
O’Connor snapped back to his senses.
"Go through the back! Quickly!"
He grabbed his wife and daughter and scrambled toward the kitchen.
He knocked over a tray in a waiter’s hand. Red wine splashed onto his suit like a pool of blood.
Like a cornered rat, he darted through the greasy kitchen, past panicked chefs, and escaped out into a back alley that reeked of garbage.
The alley was dark.
A cold wind blew against his face, which was slick with cold sweat.
O’Connor gasped for breath, leaning against a wall.
His daughter was still crying.
He took out his phone, wanting to call the chief of police, wanting to call the Party Whip, wanting to call anyone who could save him.
But as he stared at the screen, still vibrating madly and displaying an endless stream of abusive messages, his fingers were too stiff to move.
O’Connor slowly lowered his arm.
Here, in the wealthy enclave of Georgetown, power and class were supposed to be an insurmountable moat.
This moat was the very foundation upon which his political career of the past several decades had been built.
On Capitol Hill, he was the one who made the rules, and the people outside were the ones who followed them. He was an elite holding the gavel; they were commoners waiting for relief.
This difference was the entire source of his sense of security.
But now, thinking of those faces roaring at the window, O’Connor suddenly realized a fact that chilled him to the bone.
That moat had run dry.
Power was never a tangible possession, but rather a sophisticated operation.
By creating complicated laws, by defining what was legal and illegal, by constructing expensive barriers to entry, it forcibly carved a deep chasm into the otherwise level plain of humanity.
This class difference was not a product of natural evolution.
It was a dividing wall, intentionally designed by power to ensure its own stability, to safely enshrine a select few at the top of the pyramid.
O’Connor looked at his own reflection in a puddle in the alley.
Stripped of his expensive custom-made suit, his awe-inspiring titles, and the halo bestowed upon him by the Congress Building...
...in this moment, cowering in an alley, there was no biological difference between him and a homeless man huddling under a bridge to escape the rain.
This was the most primitive, ontological equality.
When the symbolic system of power collapses, when the filter that deifies the upper class is torn to shreds by anger...
...the so-called elite are revealed to be nothing more than the same species wearing different costumes.
The people outside had realized this, too.
They no longer felt reverence; they no longer felt fear.
Because they had discovered that the sweat of a high-and-mighty Senator was also salty, and the fear in his eyes was just as pitiful.
Power had shielded this homogeneity for too long—so long that even O’Connor himself had come to believe the myth of his own superiority.
Now, the myth was shattered.
This was the true source of his terror.
It wasn’t because the people outside might break in and beat him up.
It was because the grand illusion that had sustained his dignity for decades had utterly failed.
He had lost his privacy, and with it, the mystique of being a powerful man.
When an idol is pulled from its altar, revealing the clay underneath, the wrath of its former believers is more ferocious than any they would show an infidel.
It was destined to be a sleepless night in Washington.