The Affinities by Robert Charles Wilson

alone, he had come to the door with an aluminum baseball bat in his hand. When Mouse refused to let him in, he shattered a ground-floor window, climbed inside, and began a systematic room-by-room search for her.
    Mouse, meanwhile, barricaded herself in her basement room and phoned Trev, who in turn called Dave Santos, the Tau cop who had helped us out in December. Both of them hurried to the house, but Trev was the first to arrive.
    Mouse still had her phone, and she told Trev that Bobby was in the basement hammering on the locked door of her room. Trev had no weapon, but he let himself in and hurried down the stairs. In exchange for this act of heroism he took a blow across the face that broke his nose and dislocated his jaw, but he was far enough inside Botero’s swing radius that when he fell he took Botero down with him. Botero was strong, but so was Trev, and the lessons he had learned as a club bouncer served him well even as he was dazed and blinded by the blood flowing into his eyes.
    They were still wrestling when Dave Santos crept down the stairs with his handgun drawn. Botero dropped his bat, and at that point it was all over except for the police car that took Bobby away to be booked and the ambulance that carried Trev to the hospital.
    Trev’s jaw was supported by a wire brace that made it difficult for him to speak, and the bandages across his face were rusty-brown with blood. His eyes seemed a little vague—he was probably on industrial-strength painkillers—but he was more or less alert. He took a pad and pen from the bedside table and wrote,
    THIS WILL ONLY ENHANCE MY RUGGED BEAUTY
    â€”which caused Amanda to laugh and leak a tear.
    â€œWe’ve been talking about what happened at the house,” Damian said. “Trev’s going to need to sign a statement. With any luck, Botero is headed to prison for a stretch. The only possible complication is what you guys did—stealing his drives and threatening to expose him. We don’t want that coming out in court. Hopefully, neither Botero nor his lawyer will want to expose his mob connections. So we’re probably okay, but it could have been cleaner.”
    We had acted carelessly, in other words, and Trev had paid for it. “I understand,” I said contritely. “What we did about Mouse and Botero—we need to stop doing things like that.”
    Damian startled me by laughing.
    â€œ Stop it? Fuck no! We have to learn to do it better .”

 
    PART TWO
    A Theory of Everyone
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    In the early decades of this century we saw the world’s financial elites become increasingly divorced from national loyalties. The wealthy learned to think of themselves as essentially stateless—citizens of the Republic of Net Worth—while the rest of us clung to our old-fashioned patriotism. Now the masses (or some fraction of them) have discovered their own post-national system of loyalty. They would rather tithe to their sodalities than pay taxes, and they love their tranchemates just a little bit more than they love their neighbors. If this trend seems harmless, give it time. Politicians should be worried. So should activists. And so should the stateless, wealthy one-percenters, whose continuing influence over the legislative process is no longer assured.

    â€” Mother Jones, online article, “Why the Affinities Matter”

    One thing the church has traditionally offered, and secular society has not, is fellowship: a body of shared values and a time and place at which congregants commune for worship. This is not the essence of faith, but it is faith’s essential scaffolding. But the new secular communities—the Affinity groups—are beginning to make inroads into faith’s monopoly on fellowship. Statistics have demonstrated a falling-away from traditional doxastic communities commensurate with the rise of the Affinities. And so we must ask ourselves: Is this a benign social technology, or