Upgunned by David J. Schow Page A

wall that I really liked and was compelled to give away to avoid being handily murdered, you may forgive my abrupt and uncharacteristic introspection.
    Listen to me: It’s not the Year of Gloss. Buzz can eat you alive. You don’t care about the A-list party animals or Fashion’s Best Catfights, or which supermodels are courting which labels. The Foot is not the New Face; trust me. It doesn’t matter what look is the talk of the runways, or how some daring doyenne turned a gallery opening into an all-night bacchanal.
    There are other things going on besides the political peccadilloes, breathless soap opera, and empty calories fed us all by a world where advertising has gone berserk. Remember that the next time you find yourself tempted by a logo.
    Right now I knew what I wanted more than anything was to kick that whole steroidal designer monster in its warty asshole as far as my boot would sink. Or at least give it a good poke in the eye. It had made me a slave. It took Char from me. It showed me what a naked coward I truly was.
    There was a whole other universe out there where Gun Guy operated, invisible in plain sight. That was the fulcrum of genuine power.
    And I wasn’t a part of it until that night.
    Thanks to the speed from my medicine cabinet, I couldn’t slip into bed on the far side of the no man’s land across from Char. So I dumped more tequila down my neck and replayed Nasja’s “erased” spycam tape.
    At about the fifty-minute mark, it showed me and Gun Guy entering the loft. The audio was crisp:
    Is that the bitch from before ?
    No.
    Then hop-to, and let’s try not to wake her up. You don’t want her to wind up in a can of cat food like your buddy Dominic Sharps … do you ?
    I’ve never swooned before and don’t know how it feels. Probably something like what was jacking my metabolism now, punching my heart, husking my breath, making the room swim as dust motes in the air ballooned to the size of asteroids.
    Then I remembered I had purposefully used the Clavius paper to run the prints for Gun Guy, in my own covert attempt at rebellion.
    The Clavius paper is thick archival bond with a hidden watermark asserting copyright, about which Clavius has always been dictatorial. If you were to digitally scan the photo—say, for illicit reproduction—a huge diagonal bar appears across the image face advising you not to do that. Neue Helvetica type across the bottom edge of the bar provides a Web site address where Clavius blogs about twice a year. Its main function is to employ a platoon of nitpicky workers who keep constant watch for violations of intellectual property rights as detailed in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Plagiarisms. Unauthorized usages or postings. Anything actionable.
    He won a whale-choking settlement from Google just last year as the distribution apparatus for “free first looks” at items that were not free. Clavius had enough of a war chest to paper them out, and the details of the accord were sealed under a strict gag order. It was a very large numeral, following a dollar sign.
    As a result, Clavius found himself in the unelected position of a popular media figure with a boner for creative rights, which is a rarity on the order of finding a still-breathing Tasmanian wolf raiding your larder’s stash of sorbet. Daily hits skyrocketed. His Web site was much-followed and often-commented upon.
    So I uploaded the video to it, without fanfare, in the M EMBERS section.
    The only reason I had thought of this was because Gun Guy had kicked such a stink about the photos not being digital manipulations. What he was really talking about—although he didn’t know it—was presenting pictures that could stand up to forensics on the fractal level.
    The Clavius watermark on the paper would autoreference any Internet upload on prohibited material, including the photos I had shot. To this red flag system I added a