This story is one of five winners of the Stop Copaganda short story contest, run in collaboration with Fight for the Future, Rightscon, and COMPOST Magazine.

“Any progress yet?”

Loan watched James spin the Rubik’s cube back and forth in his palm. She watched her friend grimace, his eyes on the dimly glowing screen in front of them. The computer fan whirred frantically as he eked out another line of code. “Patience—this is harder than I thought. Are you sure this is possible? You know, without breaking this computer?” He frowned. “Why are we using this old one, anyway? Mine can run triple the processing speed on this.”

Loan tracked the rapidly generating and regenerating pixels on the screen, the colors morphing and smearing into an ugly topographic mess. She craned her neck, her face so close to the screen she could’ve kissed it. “Old computers aren’t connected to online networks in the same way they are now. It’s a little more … untraceable.”

That was part of the reason. The other part of it was that she wanted to relive their childhood days of coding in this very same basement. Loan had known James since they were kids in Tacoma, two geeks who met in middle school over some video games. Nowadays, she was thankful to have one of the state’s top computer vision scientists—at least, in her opinion—on call, even if it meant that she had to periodically wade through her friend’s piles of dirty laundry to get what she wanted. “And yeah, it is doable. Not really something you can put on your resume, though.”

James had decided to take a gap year from his computer science program but if Loan was honest, she wasn’t sure if he would go back. Despite probably being able to land any job he wanted, James had eyes for only his dream childhood job. But the industry had been in a series of layoffs for the last few years, and didn’t look like it was hiring anytime soon. Instead, James spent his days lingering around Seattle’s various convention centers and hotels, hoping that video game conventions and competitive gaming meetups would yield a measly networking chat or two. “No one’s looking for animation and video game developers anymore,” he had complained to her last winter.^[1] “The only people at the career fairs here are military recruiters.”

Tacoma was only a handful of miles from the military facility Joint Base Lewis-McChord. Growing up, their school was full of military kids and on-base Tough Mudder competitions.^[2] James’s mom had dated two or three of the stationed men throughout his childhood, enough that he had a deeply embedded hatred of the military both on a systemic and interpersonal level. As he once described to Loan, “One time where a white man wants to act like a dad to a Cambodian kid but doesn’t know how to do it without calling them a slur is one too many. Three times—I think at that point, I must have done something very wrong in my past life.”

So instead of raking in six figures, James was here, raking in a fistful of cheese puffs in one hand while he punched in some code with the other. His particular experience with the military and computer graphics also made him uncannily good at identifying counterintelligence and surveillance tools. “Just because you went off to Stanford doesn’t mean you know everything. Have some patience,” he rebuked. Loan tried to ignore the orange fingerprints on her keyboard. “What is this for?”

“I’ll tell you when it works,” Loan retorted. “Can you do it?”

James scoffed. “You doubted me?” He hit enter on his code, and spun around to face the computer again. Slowly, the morphing image settled in front of them into an ugly cacophony of disjointed, blocky colors that resembled a combination of a Rorschach inkblot test and a toddler’s finger paint project. The computer fan slowed down, signaling the program’s completion. On cue, his family’s decades-old printer started eking out the image in loud clunks.

“So, now tell me.” James crowed in success. “What do you need a facial recognition deterrence pattern for, anyway?”

“A scarf.”

“This is going to be such an ugly scarf—oh.” James stopped, the gears clicking together in his head. He looked at Loan appreciatively. “Nice. What are you up to now?”^[3]

Loan reached over to the Rubik’s cube, studying it. She spun it softly. After a few deft movements, she tossed the cube back to James, perfectly solved. “We’re going to break into the Seattle Police Department’s database. And you’re going to help me do it.”

“No way.” Amanda shook her head, a dirty rag slung over her shoulder. “You’re not going to rope me into this. You know how many guys I’ve had to bail out already this month? I’m not adding my best girl to the list.”

Amanda turned her back to Loan, wringing water over another dirty table before wiping it down. It wasn’t like Loan to accost Amanda at her workplace, but this was technically before the bar opened for the night, and Amanda had been determinedly screening Loan’s calls and texts ever since Loan had come back to town. She figured one more try couldn’t hurt.

“Amandaaa,” Loan begged, dragging the last syllable out. “Come on. You’re the best person for this job, and you know it. I couldn’t do this without you.”

“Pickpockets are a dime a dozen around here.”

It was true. But this job was a little more involved than Loan’s typical pitch, which usually required deft fingers and a distraction or two. Amanda had been balancing multiple jobs ever since she graduated high school to support her family. She’d worked as a waiter at catering events across the larger Seattle area, a bartender on her night shift and a pole dancer on other night shifts. Loan knew no one else with the level of connections, dexterity, and acrobatic core strength, and she needed to keep her team small this time around.

Amanda frowned, brushing her hair out of her eyes. “I can’t afford bail for other people, let alone myself. And”—she waved the dirty towel at Loan—“what’s my cut, negative two percent?”

Loan paused. “Actually. There’s no money for anyone.”

Her friend whipped her head around, eyes widening in disbelief. “So what, you’re doing this for fun? A thought exercise? Stanford must’ve really scrambled your brains.” She shook her head mockingly, taking the rags back to the sink. “Good luck. Your dad might’ve been a doctor, so unlike you, I’ve got bills to pay. And real work to do.”

Loan brushed off the jab. Going to Stanford had scrambled her brains, that much was true. She remembered the day she had gotten her admittance email. Her screams of excitement had echoed down the apartment complex so loudly that they had gotten a noise complaint from their elderly neighbor. She remembered the days after, her parents poring over their budget to see how they could make their daughter’s dream college work. And she remembered the years after, seeing her wealthy classmates call places just like her hometown backward and uneducated.

Loan took a deep breath and followed Amanda to the backroom. “What if I told you I could get rid of your brother’s record?”

Amanda scoffed as she rinsed her hands in the water. “Fat chance. You know the number of paralegals I’ve asked for advice? They said it was a bogus charge, but there’s no way of appealing it now.”

“I’m serious. You know the Emerald Casino? ”

“The run-down one in Seattle? No one goes there anymore.”

Loan nodded. “That’s the one. It has the data servers with your brother’s record. And the last thirty years of Seattle PD arrest records. And we’re going to get rid of it. But—” Loan paused, looking around before she said her next part. She kept her voice low over the drum of the running water. “—only with you. Or not at all.”

She’d met Amanda in her freshman year of high school, the only two kids from Lincoln International District to be finalists for some kind of statewide award. Lincoln High School rarely received the honor of having one finalist, let alone two. That year, their school paraded them around nonstop. And then it turned out that their parents knew each other—it seemed that every Vietnamese person in Tacoma did—and couldn’t resist the urge to have them become best friends.^[4] Lesser people would have become enemies, but instead, the two of them stuck together, weathering every gifted child photo opportunity to the point where they were swapping the same two blazers back and forth.

They were the exact same, until their paths diverged. Their junior year, Amanda’s older brother was detained by ICE.^[5] He had been born in a refugee camp, not in the United States—so even though he had spent his entire life in the United States, he wasn’t technically a citizen by birth. That year, instead of meeting up for study sessions for the SAT, Amanda spent more time driving to the Northwest Detention Center and helping her parents cover shifts at their restaurant. The two of them—Loan and Amanda—should’ve gone to Stanford together. But they didn’t.

Amanda turned off the faucet, watching the suds swirl down the drain as she considered Loan’s proposal. “Okay. I’ll do it. Who else?”

“Me, James, Toni—”

“Toni.” Amanda groaned. “God, they’re so unpredictable. You’ve got to be—”

“—joking.” Toni rubbed their face in exasperation. “Amanda? What a stick in the mud. What’s the fun in this anymore?”

“You’ve got to trust me on this,” Loan reassured them, trying to resist the urge to sneeze as layers of powder fell on her face. “Amanda’s the best for this job. As are you.”

“I mean, sure,” Toni ventured, sweeping the makeup brush across Loan’s nose for what must’ve been the seventieth time. “But you said this is about teamwork, right? I’ve never seen that girl hang out with anyone else but her boyfriend of the week. And, well, you, I guess.” They tilted Loan’s face to the left, dusting her cheek with a sparkly highlighter. “Okay, take a look.”

Loan blinked. Her new false eyelashes weighed heavy on her eyelids. “Whoa.”

Her jaw looked more chiseled. Her eyebrows, drawn darker than she had ever attempted, were arched and dramatic, pulling her entire face upward. Her cheeks had hollowed out with contour so that she had a slightly pinched look to her, and the way her eyeshadow had been cast, her eyes looked twice as large. She looked like an uncanny valley version of herself.

“Jesus.” Loan whistled appreciatively, leaning close to the mirror to admire Toni’s work. “I think I finally understand why people think all celebrities have had plastic surgery.”

“Well, they have. But that’s very flattering to my makeup skills, so thank you.” Toni rinsed their brushes in the bathroom sink. “We haven’t done anything remotely like this since college. I missed it. Hanging out with you.”

“Not dismantling the police? Or stealing from corporations? You don’t miss that?” Loan laughed lightly. The two of them had met their freshman year fall. Both of them had never felt like they had fit in their hometown, and had hoped college would be the place where they would finally feel like they had found a home. Instead, the two of them were surrounded by Silicon Valley aspirational engineers and politicians who hypothesized about the economic impact of taking away people’s rights. So, the two of them had found a home in each other, from student organizing to spending late nights watching the silliest chick flicks.

When Toni moved to Seattle—partially at Loan’s suggestion—they had quickly settled in Capitol Hill, Seattle’s queer neighborhood, and embedded themselves in community drag events and new friends. Loan, bogged down under family obligations and reconciling her new self with her hometown self, had only made it out to one or two events, despite Toni’s repeated invites.

“Well. You can do that anytime and I’ll be there, trust.” Toni grinned. “But we can spend time outside of that, too. Not everything has to be a project, you know. Not everything is as urgent as you make it out to be. You can slow down.”

But Loan couldn’t. It was a combination of the relentless drive that drove her to rack up extracurriculars in high school, spend long nights working on her college applications, and load up on her classes until she barely slept. She knew she had always operated in survival mode. But since she graduated last year, she didn’t know where to put that momentum.

Loan drummed her fingers against the armrest. “Walk me through how this is going to work. We’re talking about beating CCTV cameras here. Decades of compilations of biomechanics, facial recognition—we need to get past it. And you’re sure it’s possible?”

“Of course it is,” Toni responded easily. “Look—queer and trans folks have always been surveilled and policed. That’s not a secret. But we’ve also found ways to resist it.”

“Through drag?” Loan looked at her makeup again in the smeared mirror. “This makeup isn’t really what I would think of as drag.”

“Drag is just another kind of gender performance, girl.” Toni rolled their eyes. “What, you never had time to read Judith Butler in your computer science classes? But look, let me break it down into data terms for you, nerd—these facial recognition algorithms, these security cameras, these data classifications—they rely on thinking of gender in the way that these engineers only know how to interpret it. Woman, man. Anything else—any other sort of performance—is going to throw them off. They think people’s faces look the same on a day-to-day basis, they think everyone moves and walks the same, that they show up to their day job the same exact way they’d show up to dinner with the in-laws or to the club or to their best friend’s apartment or college reunion. But we know that’s not the case. We can see people in their entirety, but the algorithm can’t.”^[6]

Toni reached over to Loan’s phone and snapped a quick picture of their handiwork. “Look. See? Your own camera doesn’t even classify you as yourself.”

Loan looked down at the phone. Sure enough, where her photos typically sorted faces into different people, a new category had popped up. Herself, in Toni’s makeup.

“Because the algorithm’s using facial features to match me to myself,” she said slowly, putting the pieces together. “You used makeup to change what my bone structure, my eyebrows, my eyes look like … so it can’t identify me.”

Toni nodded. “Exactly. Right now, this version of you—it’s not on any databases, I can guarantee you that much. Do with that what you will.”

“This is supposed to be low profile?” Toni questioned.

Toni and Loan stood in the stairwell of a dimly lit sub-basement covered in neon decor. Behind closed doors, Loan could hear a cacophony of out-of-tune voices singing in unison to top-40 hits.

Loan sighed. “We wanted to find somewhere where no one is going to overhear us—here you go. Don’t be picky. Come on. James and Amanda are already here.”

“These rooms aren’t even soundproof.” Toni winced as they heard another out of tune belt from another room. “But I guess it’ll work.”

Washington’s Best Karaoke was anything but. Granted, it claimed an impossible title to begin with. Between glossy upstart karaoke rooms that resembled more of an expat nightclub and wooden piano bars that catered mostly to melancholic men in their latest midlife crisis, Seattle knew what to do when it came to singing their hearts out. In all her travels, all the different internship placements, she’d never come across a city of people who committed to belting Piano Man more than Seattle. And Loan knew Seattle. She knew the curve of the streets, which buses tended to run late—many of them—and when to brace herself when the wheels would dip into a pothole. She’d run enough volunteer tours in her high school days that she could recite the history of the city by heart, from its start as a lumber city to Bill Gates taking the state by storm with his Microsoft empire.

She used to look to Silicon Valley as her way out. Back then, she felt like if she didn’t get out of Washington, she’d die. But when she moved to the Bay Area, she felt the same old familiar feeling. She was still dirt on a rich kid’s shoe. But now, the tech entrepreneurs from that very same university had come here—her turf. And she knew exactly what to do.

“This isn’t some kind of pseudo-intervention, right?” Amanda questioned Loan as she walked in. “You’re not trying to get us all in one room to talk things out?”

Toni rolled their eyes. “As if you could handle that kind of communication.” They perched themselves on the armrest of the couch at the opposite corner of the room, as far away as possible from Amanda. Loan carefully sat herself right in between the two of them.

James picked at the threads of the old leather loveseat impatiently, fiddling with the cotton tufts coming out of it. “Let’s focus up. Give us the pitch. We know you’ve got it.” He slid the binder of karaoke songs to Loan. “Celine Dion? Bruce Springsteen?” he asked loudly.

“Give me something from the eighties,” Loan responded, matching his volume. For anyone listening outside, their conversation might have sounded like any typical karaoke night out.

James nodded, and queued up Tears for Fears. The two of them had gone to this karaoke spot enough, for songs or otherwise, that they knew their cues. The loud, blown-out percussion on “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”, the reverberating guitar riffs, and the faded vocals created enough confusion and noise that any potential eavesdropper or mic could easily confuse other voices as background noise. As Loan and James had once tested, more modern studio audio was too crisp, too precisely recorded. Each take had been isolated and spliced so cleanly that there was no background noise then, not the way there was in the live recordings from older music.

Loan cleared her throat for her waiting crowd. “So. This one is ambitious. And I know I’m promising a lot. We couldn’t have done this five years ago. Or even two. But here’s the trick—I just got the tip that the city budget just gave an extra three million dollars to Seattle PD. Just to expand and upgrade their database storage.”^[7]

Amanda wrinkled her nose in confusion. “And you’re saying that’s a good thing? For us? How? This city just wants to look shinier and shinier without doing anything for us.”

“It’s true,” James interrupted. “They’re trying to turn Seattle into the next Silicon Valley. You see it everywhere, right? The cameras on every corner, everything going cashless.”

Loan nodded. “It’s not good. But thanks to Toni, we know that the police department was initially asking for ten million. And because of that, we know that they’re going to be outsourcing to cut costs. And who they’re going to outsource to.”

She took out a marker and wrote in red letters on the karaoke brochure, SEATTLE PD. Next to it, the words, DATASCAPE. She circled it three times.

“This is a startup that launched out of Stanford two years ago. A classmate of ours.” Loan gestured at Toni. “They’re nothing special, but this startup focuses on getting contracts with cities specifically, with a portable server system that can be stored in old buildings with minimal setup.”

James frowned, fidgeting with his Rubik’s cube again. “That doesn’t even make sense. I mean, in terms of technical execution. Are they any good?”

Toni giggled. “Knowing the people who create these startups, it’s nothing but hot air. But better for us if they aren’t. That means that the Seattle PD is betting all their money on something extremely data-insecure.”

Loan nodded. “We know they got the contract because they posted about it on their social media account. And they just moved their servers to the basement of Emerald Casino because it was one of the cheapest available rentals. And Emerald Casino needs money. All the time.” She locked eyes with Amanda, recalling their earlier conversation. “Which means they’re hosting events. With seasonal staff. Like caterers.”

Casinos popped up at all the fringes of Western Washington, often at the corner of Native American reservations and working-class communities. The latter longed for a turn of their luck, the former needed money for their schools and infrastructure that the US government refused to give them. It would’ve been a synergistic relationship, except for the fact that more often than not, the two communities seemed to cannibalize each other instead. Loan had lost count of the number of times Amanda had talked about her family’s gambling addictions.^[8]

Emerald Casino was built at the tail end of the casino golden age, when Seattle was betting big on its odds of raking in revenue. But unlike the other projects, which were often expansive, Vegas-sized sprawling developments at least thirty minutes away from Seattle, this one was built in Little Saigon, just outside of Chinatown-International District. The project bulldozed half a dozen small businesses and evicted residents from three buildings. The demand for parking over the last twenty years had resulted in the demolition of twice as many buildings to make way for parking lots. All of this, only to have the attendance and revenue decline so much over the past decade that the city was getting increasingly desperate to recoup its investments.^[9]

Loan knew the pattern of desperation all too well from San Francisco’s technology gambles. “The city and the mayor get nervous because they have to answer for this huge project. And because they’ve destroyed everything within a six-block radius, the area’s disinvested in and everyone calls it unsafe. So what they do to modernize it for the press is blow all their money on this new surveillance tech and plant it on every corner and make it an opportunity to frame it as a smart city.”

“Once again,” Amanda questioned, “Explain to me—how is this good for us? The cameras everywhere?”

James pulled out the fabric with the same ink blot pattern that he and Loan had been working on for weeks. “Because all we need to do is be unrecognizable. But not to people—just to facial recognition algorithms. Normally, you’d expect to have security crawling all over the place. But these surveillance tools—if we can confuse them, we’re free. Amanda—you can get us past the first checkpoint and get us badges. And after that, we just need to not show up on the cameras, which Toni and I can do.”

Loan nodded. “Exactly. In two weeks from now, there will be an art auction. All of the art is fairly old, so it will be stored temporarily on the cooling, temperature-controlled floors of Emerald Casino. The same basement floors as the data servers. We work as staff, get designated to deliver art to that floor, and we have access.”

She turned the brochure over, running her fingers between the words sprawled out in front of her, connecting the links between DATASCAPE, the Seattle Police Department, and the Emerald Casino. All of them holding her communities hostage. She thought of Amanda’s dad, running from a gambling addiction he couldn’t ever kick. The police, closing in on all corners. Startups, washing their hands clean from a city they barely knew.

“And then you destroy the servers,” James interrupted. “Recursive, self-perpetuating delete function? Like the animators in Toy Story 2, right?”

It was an old story that James and Loan had stumbled across in high school, when they were both practicing their character rigs for a video game James was working on. During the production of Toy Story 2, a stray character animator had accidentally deleted the root folder of the production, leading to the erasure of the entire film.^[10]

“Not quite. We might get access to only a random folder in the server—we don’t know what’s down there yet. Before the auction, Toni and I are going to do more reconnaissance and see which venture capital meetings the DATASCAPE startup is courting, and see if we can get more information from there on how their encryption is set up so you can corrupt as many files as possible.”

“It’s always been my life’s dream to perform as a straight venture capitalist,” Toni intoned solemnly. “I’ll do my best.”

“A question,” James added. “Wouldn’t the police just start collecting the data all over again? How fast could they replace this information?”

Toni nodded. “We’re just buying time. So Seattle organizers can build the momentum that we need without the police breathing down their necks. Knowing them, they’ll take it from there.”

“And for people to actually get a chance to build their lives again,” Amanda added. She and Toni exchanged a look, and for once, Loan actually felt like they were on the same page. They all knew what successfully deleting this database meant. No arrest record haunting people, no algorithm converging their futures into a prewritten fate. A blank slate.

James’s eyes gleamed with excitement. It was a look that Loan had seen a million times before—he was waiting for Loan to put the last piece in the puzzle. “Last thing. If we pull this off and delete the data, what if we still get caught? What if our disguises don’t work? What then? We’re stuck there?”

Toni scoffed, but Loan didn’t. James, ever the engineer, was always thinking about fail-safes and redundancies. “If that happens—there’s always another way out.”

She stood up and started running her fingers along the edges of the room. Its thin, rose-pink wallpaper barely hid the texture of the seventies-era wooden paneling underneath. “Emerald Casino is in an older building than you think. They never scrapped the foundations of the building it sat on, just built on top of it because they wanted to make it a quick project. But I used to lead tours on this—the Seattle Underground.”

The Seattle Underground was a network of underground passageways and basements. In the nineteenth century, the passageways were at ground level, but fell slowly into disuse after the streets were elevated. Loan used to conduct tours of the underground and spend hours down there, exploring the areas that had been blocked off.^[11] “There’s a direct connection from the building that this karaoke place is in. This place used to be a medicinal herb store in Chinatown in the early 1900s. That’s why we’re in a sub-basement right now. And this route—it’s not on any maps. Not any that the city would know about.”

“I thought they closed most of those. And now it’s just a tourist trap in Pioneer Square.” Amanda frowned. “How do you know we can get back here from the casino? You told me you’d never stepped foot in that building before.”

“I’m sure,” Loan asserted. She experimentally wiggled a large, nearly floor-length picture frame of a stock photo of the Seattle skyline with the Space Needle on the far side of the room. “Trust me.”

Toni shook their head. “I’m all for risk but … Amanda’s right. How can you be sure?”

Loan took a deep breath, looking around the room. Two Vietnamese girls from Tacoma, one military brat-turned-video game developer out for revenge, and one community drag artist. If anyone had a reason to take down the Seattle police, it would have been them. For once, their fates didn’t have to be sealed—with the removal of this data, they could finally determine their own future. “Because,” she exhaled, pushing the Seattle picture aside, “that casino was built where my dad’s health clinic and first apartment once was.”

They all stood up to take in the discovery. Behind the frame was a scratched-up wooden door, far older than anything else in the room. Loan could still make out the etching on the wood and the color of the remaining paint flakes—emerald green, just like so many of the ones she had seen on her countless tours.

She turned back around to face her friends. “Look, this city—it’s our home now. So are you coming?”

^[1] Throughout 2023-24, tens of thousands of video game developers and animators were laid off nationwide. Contributing factors included the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise of AI automation in creative fields, and, speculatively, union retaliation.

^[2] The Port of Tacoma is a major avenue for military supply vessels. Joint Base Lewis-McChord is in the top ten largest military bases in the United States.

^[3] Anti-surveillance fashion designers have developed fabric patterns to derail facial recognition algorithms. The specific example here is inspired by HyperFace, developed for Hyphen-Labs’ NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism project.

^[4] Tacoma is a major Southeast Asian American enclave in the United States. Lincoln International District is home to a majority of Tacoma’s Vietnamese businesses and community centers.

^[5] Southeast Asian Americans have been disproportionately impacted by pro-deportation policies. The Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, formally known as the Northwest ICE Processing Center, is an active facility.

^[6] Toni’s use of drag as surveillance resistance is largely inspired by Dr. Harris Kornstein’s doctoral dissertation, Queer Enchantment: Contours, Cruising, Crystal Visions, and Other Queer Tactics for (Not) Being Seen. This dissertation includes an example of using drag makeup to confound facial recognition algorithms.

^[7] In 2024, the Seattle Police Department received $384 million in their operating budget, up $20 million from the prior year. This excludes additional funding support, such as police foundation expenditures.

^[8] Southeast Asian Americans are among the groups most vulnerable to gambling addictions.

^[9] While there was never a casino built in Little Saigon, Washington State’s Native American communities do run a number of casinos in Western Washington, including Snoqualmie Casino and Muckleshoot Casino, in the driving range of Seattle and Tacoma. Emerald Casino here is inspired by Philadelphia Chinatown’s fight against the development of a casino in the late 2000s.

^[10] This story about Toy Story 2 did happen—a worker deleted the root file, leading to the full deletion of the nearly complete Toy Story sequel. This was at a time in computer engineering when there was less redundancy, and secure encryption of files. Today, this lack of redundancy and encryption is less likely, but still a common mistake for new companies or startups.

^[11] While there is no evidence of these pathways extending to Little Saigon, basements and sub-basements in Chinatown to Pioneer Square do exist. The Wing Luke Museum in Chinatown-International District also preserves a replica of the 1910s import-export store of Yick Fung Co.