Dark Rivers of the Heart

when he had been Rocky, but entirely black. An incognito canine. Rover on the run. A mutt in masquerade. Fugitive furball. Phil had already decided that when he shaved off his beard (soon), they would also allow Killer's coat to change gradually back to its natural colors.
        "Bob," Ron said, returning to the issue at hand, "we're living in a time when the highest of high technology makes it possible for a relative handful of totalitarians to subvert a democratic society and control large sections of its government, economy, and culture-with great subtlety. If they control too much of it for too long, unopposed, they'll get bolder.
        They'll want to control it all, every aspect of people's lives.
        And by the time the general public wakes up to what's happened, their ability to resist will have been leeched away. The forces marshaled against them will be unchallengeable."
        "Then subtle control might be traded for the blatant exercise of raw power," Ellie said. "That's when they open the 'reeducation' camps to help us wayward souls learn the right path."
        Bob stared at her in shock. "You don't really think it could ever happen here, something that extreme."
        Instead of replying, Ellie met his eyes, until he had time to think about what outrageous injustices had already been committed against him and his family to bring them to this place at this time in their lives.
        "Jesus," he whispered, and he gazed down thoughtfully at his folded hands on the table.
        Jean looked at her son as the boy happily petted and scratched Killer, then glanced at Ellie's swollen stomach. "Bob, this is where we belong.
        This is our future. It's right. These people have hope, and we need hope badly." She turned to Ellie. "When's the baby due?"
        "Two months."
        "Boy or girl?"
        "We're having a little girl."
        "You picked a name for her yet?"
        "Jennifer Corrine."
        "That's pretty," Jean said.
        Ellie smiled. "For Phil's mother and mine."
        To Bob Padrakian, Phil said, "We do have hope. More than enough hope to have children and to get on with life even in the resistance.
        Because modern technology has its good side too. You know that.
        You love high technology as much as we do. The benefits to humanity far outweigh the problems. But there are always would-be Billers. So it's fallen to us to fight a new kind of war, one that more often uses knowledge than guns to fight battles."
        "Though guns," Ron said, "sometimes have their place."
        Bob considered Ellie's swollen belly, then turned to his wife.
        "You're sure?"
        "They have hope," jean said simply.
        Her husband nodded. "Then this is the future."
        "James Joyce, Finegans Wake Later, on the brink of twilight, Phil and Ellie and Killer went for a walk on the beach.
        The sun was huge, low, and red. It quickly sank out of sight beyond the western horizon.
        To the east, over the Atlantic, the sky became deep and vast and purple-black, and the stars came out to allow sailors to chart courses on the otherwise strange sea.
        Phil and Ellie talked of Jennifer Corrine and of all the hopes that they had for her, of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings.
        They took turns throwing a ball, but Killer allowed no one to take turns chasing it.
        Phil, who once had been Michael and the son of evil, who once had been Spencer and for so long imprisoned in one moment of a July night, put his arm around his wife's shoulders. Staring at the ever-shining stars, he knew that human lives were free of the chains of fate except in one regard: It was the human destiny to be free.

AFTERWORD
        
        No First Deputy Attorney General of the United States exists. I created Thomas Summerton's position in order not to embarrass any particular federal appointee.
        The high-tech surveillance techniques in this story are real, not fictional. Enhancement of a highly magnified image shot from orbit would take longer than I allow for, but technology is swiftly catching up with fiction in that regard as well.
        The technology exists to create a nuclear-powered laser weapon and to place it in orbit. It is purely speculation, however, that any world power has developed and deployed something like Godzilla.
        The manipulation of data and the invasions of computer systems