THE REPORTER

She's still young, but you wouldn't know it from her posture. She slouches in her chair, as if the weight of all she's seen in the past few years weighs her down. As we settle in to begin the interview, she jokes that, normally, she's the one on the other side of the mic.

Looking back, it's crazy that the governor thought he could keep the reps out of Mississippi.

Sure, the river forms a decent boundary on the western border, and you could easily set up checkpoints on all the major highways and interstates. And the "drone wall" along the rest of the state's borders could hold back a lot. But if even one rep slipped over the border…

This is a common theme when I talk to people about this. Few understood how fast the reps would spread.

Right. The concept of exponential growth is really hard for people to wrap their minds around. Two turning into four, into eight, into sixteen—it seems simple at first, but once you start getting into the higher figures, it becomes much less intuitive. People couldn't appreciate how one rep could turn into 5,000 in the span of just a few days.

The governor and his people conceived of the reps like you would a virus. The concept of "going viral" was something most people were already familiar with. So they intended to treat the outbreak of reps the same way you might treat a disease. Quarantine anybody who has one, tell everybody else to keep their hands and noses clean.

It makes sense, to an extent. There's a big difference between viruses and reps, though, and it's that people want a rep. They'll seek out a source. That's how I fell into reporting on this story. The governor had just announced the ban, but I heard rumors that he and his friends were all keeping reps for themselves. So I called up some sources of my own at the capitol. (Laughs.)

The first few people I called denied it. These were state representatives. They said the ban was serious, and applied for everyone. They were directly parroting the party line that the reps were a security risk, because they could be used to create endless weapons.

Stories were of course coming out of neighboring states to confirm this. People using them to make bombs, drugs, infinite ammo for bigass guns.

The local newspaper business was actually picking up again. People were so hungry for stories about the reps. It's all anyone could talk about, for obvious reasons. And people were scared. So scared that many cheered the decision of the governor to keep reps out of Mississippi.

Finally, I reached a few sources at the capitol who were willing to admit what was going on. They told me that some privileged folks in Jackson had been slowly spreading reps among "trusted" Mississippians only. If you weren't a local elite, you weren't allowed to get one.

I decided to write the story up. "Rumors spread of reps in Jackson." It was all anonymous sources, which didn't really meet the standards we normally set for ourselves. But it was the best I could get. Obviously no one was willing to go on the record to talk to me. It was a short piece, just 500 words on the front page of the Clarion-Ledger. But it set off a firestorm.

People wanted to know whether their leaders were breaking their own rules and using reps. Of course, the governor and everyone in the capitol issued denials. It wasn't too long after that when the harassment started.

It started with my car. I parked it on the street right outside my apartment. Somebody broke all four of the windows, stole my backpack. And took my hubcaps, I guess to add insult to injury. I reported it to the police, and they classified it as a robbery. But who breaks four windows in a car to rob it? It doesn't make sense. The police promised they'd look into it, but of course nothing ever came of it.

In the meantime, I kept filing stories based on the rumors I was hearing. I had tons of credible eyewitnesses confirming that they'd seen folks in the governor's circle using reps at parties. Some of the reports were unprintable because of how libelous they were—accusations of serious drug use among the elites, that sort of thing—but I printed everything I was sure I could defend in court. The paper's lawyers had my back. We agreed that it was unusual to print so much scandalous material based on anonymous sources, but we were collecting plenty of hard evidence to back it up.

Evidence such as?

Photos, lots of them. Many of the same politicians who railed against the reps in the daytime using them to make cocktails for their pals at night. I felt it would be best to save these photos for a later piece in the series. I wanted to get all of the government folks on the record denying that they had reps in Mississippi before putting the information out there to expose their hypocrisy.

I never got the chance, though.

Probably about a week after the incident with my car, they came for the Clarion-Ledger's presses. And by that, of course, I mean the computers that replaced the presses after the print edition finally died over the first few years of the 2020s.

They broke in during the middle of the night and covered everything in lighter fluid. The offices went up like the big finale at a fourth of July fireworks show.

We were all distraught, of course. They had gone out of their way to do it when nobody would be physically hurt, but I knew they were gonna keep coming after me, in particular. My cat turned up dead on my doorstep the very next night.

They killed your cat?

Yeah. Probably poisoned his food. I don't know.

All I knew then was that I had to get the fuck out of Mississippi.

I felt so strongly that I was doing a public service for all the other people staying in the state by spreading the word about the reality of replicators. But with the printers being down, there was no point in staying in the state any longer. I could continue filing stories online. So that's what I did. I packed up and headed to stay with family in New Orleans. I was there when I wrote and posted the story about plans for the party at the governor's mansion.

After he got killed, well, I knew it would never be safe for me to return to the South.

So I left. Never looked back.

What are your feelings about the governor's death? Obviously you were just doing your job, but I imagine your feelings are complicated.

Oh, no. My feelings aren't complicated at all. The bastard got what he deserved.