Note: (Category (Speculative Fiction, Political Thriller). Speed writing. 11 minute timer.) This started as a timed writing session in which the text must include the words plant, despicable, and pomelo (as you read keep a watch out for the context in which they appear, for an extra bit of fun). In that first 11 minute timer (the extra minute is for prep/setup time in whatever writing program is used) I wrote about what was on my mind after watching the news on Venezuela. So my story quickly became a story about occupation and resistance (but not of Venezuela).1 The first section was quick to write under a very strict time enforcer. That got me the first four to five hundred words of the story. The rest of it was fleshed out that same evening, and then revised into the current offering the next day. It’s amazing how a timer can force your mind to wake up and get creative within seconds after it starts. Although the title is “Eight Seconds”, it will take you substantially longer than eight seconds to read it.

—

—

The Prime Minister of Canada was pacing, the office walls closing in on him, unaware that in the bowels of the building, American operatives were already ghosting through corridors, rifles poised, faces camouflaged into matte-black anonymity, gliding silently towards their target.

“Sir… Prime Minister, we’ve lost access to the Trans-Canada Highway.”

The PM’s jaw ached from clenching so often in the last few hours. The occasional crack, crack, of rifle fire was in the streets and even, faintly, within the ancient stone chambers of this very building. Communication across Canada was disrupted, internet and cellphone service was mostly cut, what remained was sporadic, unreliable, and likely monitored. He couldn’t get through to his family, not by calls, text, Signal, not even the private ultra-secure communications method set up exclusively for him. And now physical channels were disrupted as well—the great continental spine binding the provinces, the peoples, the economy itself.

“That’s our economic lifeline. Why was there no warning?” His voice cracked, and he felt the floor tilt beneath him, as the cumulative shock of the past hours, the speed, the coordination, the ruthless precision was exacting its physiological toll. Where were security and the protective services that should have been here by now? Were they neutralized…or worse?

And why had he and his cabinet not protested more vigorously against America’s repeated violations of international law and standards of behaviour; instead of Canada’s usual tepid, bland, prevaricating reactions to shocking U.S. actions. Thinking back, he had supported, with a little too much enthusiasm, extra-judicial kidnappings and killings which his own intelligence and common sense told him were entirely made-up excuses for oil, mineral, or land theft. All were supposedly part of bigger grand strategies which Canada must back, or so his intelligence advisors told him. Well, it didn’t seem too intelligent now. Unfortunately the entire nation was paying the price for his moral and political obtuseness. It made him feel like a Judas. But it was too late for regret; it had been a different world then, or had it really?

The habits of lazy politics and indolent governance are hard to unlearn. And living in the shadow of a powerful neighbour dulls the instinct for independence. Deference, once institutionalized, masquerades as pragmatism. And now…perhaps it was too late.

The aide’s voice faltered. “There’s more… Quebec, Alberta… well, they’re rumoured to have pre-signed some accord… with the Americans. With so many comms malfunctioning, we can’t know for sure….”

The PM froze. ”You mean they’re… colluding”. The word didn’t feel big enough. It was a chasm, a canyon, too big to comprehend. “They knew? They… they… betrayed us?” It was a question in his voice, not wanting to accept that this was even a possibility.

“Or some factions… maybe just discussions. We don’t know for sure... But they may have had some pre-knowledge…” The pause was an abyss. Prior awareness unshared with the PM, fit only one category: treachery.

And suddenly it all slammed into him. Hours, only a few hours, and the fighter jets had sliced apart the Trans-Canada like a freshly sharpened knife through a ribbon of connective tissue. Where was the Canadian military? A ghost army, impotent, or concealing themselves waiting to see which way history tilted? He couldn’t know because none of the usual communications methods were working. Every channel that might have offered situational awareness was dead.

For God’s sake, he couldn’t even summon a private security detail here or to protect his family. And CSIS (Canadian security and Intelligence Service) seemed to have pulled a vanishing act. For one destabilizing moment an unspeakable thought intruded: what if maybe, just maybe, they were more loyal to the Stars and Stripes than to the Maple Leaf? No…no, that couldn’t be…it must be that they were easily outmanoeuvred and rendered irrelevant so rapidly as a consequence of over-sharing intelligence methods and data with a neighbour who, like Red Riding Hood’s grandma, turned out to be a voracious wolf in a feeble transparent disguise. So why had they not seen through it. Why the cultivated blindness? Questions without answers. Wisdom arriving only as postscript, as hindsight.

All the indicators were there from the beginning, so why had contingency planning been treated as paranoia rather than prudence? Why had speed, the defining feature of modern power, been so catastrophically underestimated?

The weight of his thoughts and what he didn’t know, pressed him down, down into the armchair, as if gravity itself had betrayed him, weakened him.

Then a kind of rage rose up and he stood, turning to the aide. “What—what happened to Canada that it’s been… sold out by its…”

Before the thought could finish, the double doors to the office detonated inwards with concussive violence. In that brief instant, he registered the corridor beyond, bodies strewn grotesquely across the cold stone, limbs arranged in a careless geometry of death, dark pools spreading beneath them like ink spilled from a ruptured peace. That’s what happened to the security detail, they paid with their lives.

A corrosive hatred rose like bile in his throat, bitter and burning. And then, men in tactical gear, rifles sweeping back and forth in mechanical precision, muzzles dictating reality, stormed into the room, seizing him, drove his face into the floor, cuffs snapping shut, cold steel biting into his wrists. They hauled him, his face ashen, back to his feet, his mouth tasting blood and disbelief.

“You can’t just…” , but the words strangled in his throat as he realized the hundreds of warning signals not taken seriously or downplayed or made mundane, softened, diluted, bureaucratized by the agencies which surrounded him, advised him. All this had seemed so unlikely at one time, it was like an impossible looking-glass world. But the impossible had only ever been improbable. A looking-glass world, yes, but only because he had refused to believe the mirror.

His aide lay slumped unconscious against a wall, a black hood cinched brutally over his head.

Then came another procession. The opposition party leader was ushered in, a twitching figure, pale, febrile, flanked firmly and held at the elbows by two guards in full regalia. Behind them followed a small news contingent, every jacket and badge announcing American networks, their insignia accompanied by the now-ubiquitous twin emblems of the United States and Israel; symbols of a late-stage empire that no longer pretended to subtlety.

Legs trembling, lips flickering between a grotesque half-smile and the tremor of terror, like an animated cartoon, as though ambition itself had hollowed him out and was now wearing him as a costume. He moved shakily to position himself behind the PM’s expansive desk. For a man whose life had consisted almost entirely of maneuver and performance, this was apotheosis. It seemed he was finally achieving his goal, legitimately or not, shamefully or not, as part of a coup or not, coerced or not, earned or not, of standing in the Prime Minister’s place, in the highest office of the land. Yet, there was only fear in his eyes, no satisfaction.

The news crew framed the shot.

Something inside the Prime Minister collapsed and ignited simultaneously. Rage and despair occupying the same claustrophobic space. He turned toward his opposite, voice breaking through clenched fury.. “You Canadian Judas, how does it f…”. The rest dissolved into muffled suffocation as a black hood was slammed down over his head swallowing light. His last instant of vision was of the unusual ceramic creation “Plant-Creature” by artist Ying-Yueh Chuang and the gentle pomelo plant in the corner of his office. Its lumpy, grapefruit like appearance radiating a gentle natural innocence, absurdly comforting compared to the jowly averted face of the man replacing him.

And then darkness; black velvet swallowing everything. Hauled unceremoniously out of the office, the operators around him executing doctrine rather than conscience, following orders etched somewhere deep into institutional muscle memory: “Always, always, always, treat the target as someone guilty of every crime in the book, even if you know they are as innocent and pure as freshly fallen snow. We are after grander objectives, and innocence or guilt are of no concern in the reality we intend to manufacture in service of restoring America to greatness.”

Then, as a victim, a casualty of that manufactured greatness, he was hauled down stairwells lined with soldiers frozen in rigid formation, the air saturated with the stench of gunmetal and authority, and shoved into a black bulletproof SUV that smelled like sweat, oil, leather… and treachery.

A scornful voice cut through the darkness of the hood “You’re coming with us… away from this frigid Socialist backwater, to the land of the free,”.

The PM’s muffled protest: “And the home of the orange-faced buffoo….” A rifle butt slammed into his skull: impact, fracture, blood seeping into the black cloth, making it darker yet. The vehicle door thumped shut. Consciousness fractured, the world shattered, the engine roared. The sky, the roads, Canada itself… all gone.

—

The Premiers of Quebec and Alberta sat opposite one another, the air between them dense with an unspoken gravity, as though the room itself were bearing witness to some whispered heresy.

“At no point in our history,” the Quebec premier said at last, voice low and incredulous, “have we contemplated an alliance with the Americans against the Canadian state itself. This is not merely irregular, it is existential.”

Across the table, Alberta’s premier offered a thin shrug, fingers tapping a steady, insolent and impatient rhythm against the polished surface. “History has a way of shedding its scruples when pressure mounts. Call it pragmatism. Call it survival. We’re operating inside a period of rupture, a break in precedence. Ottawa’s experiment in centralized moralism and socialism has left us all exposed. And perhaps” she hesitated, then allowed the heresy that burned within to surface, “Maybe… maybe Trump’s right. Sort of. In his own grotesque way.”

Quebec’s representative recoiled slightly, as though from something unclean. “Right? He’s a madman. I don’t know if that is leading anywhere good. A man governed by impulse, grievance, ego. I struggle to see how hitching ourselves to that trajectory leads anywhere but catastrophe.”

The Alberta premier smiled, an expression edged with calculation. “Maybe, but madmen often get results. Sometimes, the crazier, the better. History isn’t steered by the well-adjusted. Madmen unsettle the board. They force outcomes. Sometimes the disorder is the strategy. The world rewards audacity now, not restraint. Face reality. Act decisively. Seize the moment before it consumes you.”

Quebec’s premier leaned back, eyes narrowing, the weight of the words settling in. “Yes,” he murmured, “we will soon discover whether we are the ones doing the seizing… or merely the ones being seized.”

The silence returned, now heavier with dark consequence.

—

Behind the Prime Minister’s desk, the Opposition Leader adjusted his tie. The initial tremors had abated, but his fingers still betrayed him, slipping against the silk as though the fabric itself resisted the fiction now being staged.

When they had first approached him with the offer to serve as a cooperative successor under American unification, his instinct had been panic and refusal. That reflex did not survive long. It yielded to calculation and residual ambition. Perhaps he could do some good, perhaps he could soften the landing for Canadians, manage the transition, profit personally while smoothing Canada’s absorption into a larger order. If inevitability could not be resisted, why not monetize it?

He was honest enough, at least privately, to recognize the deeper truth. His entire career had been an exercise in opportunism. He had always sniffed out advantage, seized it with ferocity, and savaged anyone who obstructed him. Hence his admiration for Israel’s leadership, and for Trump’s methods: force uncluttered by scruple. And now history had handed him…a prize? Like the original Richie Rich under Henry VIII, who hitched himself to a volatile erratic monarch and emerged wealthy and intact. Perhaps he would too, though even as the thought surfaced, doubt gnawed at it. He was seeing all around him, right now, the use of force uncluttered by scruples, against Canada.

As he looked around the office, acceptance was giving way to unease and reluctance. The sight of the PM being hauled away shook him. He would protest to the Americans when he got the opportunity. For now, too much was in motion, and he felt caught up in it, his mind a whirl. Though he had always imagined being in this office, he had never imagined it handed to him on a platter by a foreign occupation. Did he want it that way—he could already see how steep the price would be. A thousand thoughts were tugging him in different directions. But fear was surging through him, he had to push on, or be bagged and hauled away himself.

“Minister,” the reporter beside the camera said, “the American administration will shortly announce you as the PM’s replacement, but for this first broadcast from Canada, delayed by several minutes to ensure its correctness before transmission, we want you to outline the new healthcare direction. Just read from the prompter”

Someone went behind the desk and set the ornate but very visible analog clock on the wall forward by a few minutes so the video image would match the time at broadcast, a minor deception and clever trick to compensate for the delay in transmission.

Just then the opposition leader glanced at his phone sitting on the desk and froze, the cell signal was active—he could see bars. One. Two. He had not expected this. If they’re broadcasting his interim leadership announcement across Canada and the States, there’s likely a temporary unblocking of the networks. If so, it must be chaos on social media across Canada. But perhaps here, for him, was a sliver of possibility opening, a way to hedge the outcome.

The crew called action.

The interim PM cleared his throat, smiled, a tiny sheen of sweat glistening on his forehead as he realized what the first thing they wanted him to announce was. Nervous again, knowing how Canadians would react, he began reading. “I have been asked to stand in for our former PM, who, along with much of his staff and cabinet is currently…uh…unavailable. I have accepted reluctantly only to prevent disorder as Canada takes a new direction.”

That sounded neutral. But it wasn’t fitting with the things he had witnessed. The PM kidnapped, bagged and taken, the way thieves bag stolen goods during a break-in.

“As a first step,” he continued, “we are announcing Canada’s liberation from excessive state dependency. We must wean ourselves from socialist policies. Under American guidance, Canadians will learn self-reliance. No more waste. No more squandering of tax revenue on— he hesitated “…free healthcare!” This is what they were starting with? All hell would break loose across Canada, except in a few small enclaves. This isn’t how it’s supposed to look.

A soldier’s irate gesture snapped him back. “Private insurance, private solutions, private responsibility! This is a first step towards freedom, our neighbour is guiding us to its fulfillment.” Each new line scrolled on the minimalist teleprompter, tightening the leash.

The realization was sharp in his mind now. I am not the beneficiary of this order. I am disposable within it.

He was no longer the boisterous attack dog who attained fame through his tactics, but one on a tight American leash whose choking pull he was feeling. The last lines scrolled up and he took a sharp intake of breath. He may have achieved his goal of becoming PM, but at what astronomical cost?

“God bless the United States of America,” he read in a hollow voice, almost choking on the slavish words, “and the newly acquired territory of Canada. And God Bless President Trump,” he stopped as the words moved across the prompter. The soldiers glared at him. He swallowed heavily and continued. “…the fulfiller of Manifest Destiny.”

He looked helplessly at the news crew and the soldiers, but they were obviously true believers, true propagandists with no independent will or intelligence brought to bear on these matters. They motioned for him to read the oath for his own swearing in.

He looked at it, then feeling more and more like the Judas the PM had called him, he stared at the words, his gorge heaving, his legs trembling again. This oath was not ceremonial, or symbolic, it was not even transactional. It was complete capitulation that they sought. Open betrayal, and he would forever be its public face.

As the lines sat unmoving on the screen, he remained silent, staring at them.

I swear my solemn oath upon forfeiture of my freedom and my life, to be a loyal, willing, and enthusiastic servant of President Trump, and his empire, and to stand against and punish with exemplary punishment…” he felt frozen in place, “…any opposition, private or public, spoken or written, across all media. Resistance will be met with swift and unrelenting penalties. This I swear to enforce.

How could he speak this obscene liturgy, he wondered. He saw it then with brutal simplicity: he would not survive this by obedience. He would only delay his own erasure. There was no way out. He was cornered, trapped.

His head shook involuntarily. A soldier traced a finger across his throat, the gesture telling him to stick to the script, to keep reading it aloud. His silent pause was becoming too long.

He should not let himself be used like this. On the desk, his phone, which he had glanced at to check the formerly dead (now restored) cell signal, was quietly streaming to his social media account (or he desperately hoped it was).

His thoughts churned, thoughts he had never had before in his career. He too had been a true believer like the soldiers and news crew, though now he realized he had been a deluded believer. How long before he was no longer useful? How long before a new face, a new traitor replaced him? The tactics he had once applauded in Gaza, in Venezuela, now stood before him, domesticated, applied to his own country, to his PM. What made him think he could escape.

He saw the future in a flash: a puppet Prime Ministership, resource extraction, water theft, hydro-energy theft, military vehicles and drones everywhere, martial law, capital punishment, segregation into zones, depopulation by attrition. Canada reduced to a land without people.

The soldiers pointed violently at him, telling him to get on with it.

A coward’s thought flickered briefly in his mind. So what if I go along, as long as my family is spared, safe? He had cheered destruction abroad. Why did it feel unbearable now that it was in his home country?

Military drones hummed outside, swarms of them blanketing the area. Parliament was locked down tight. Ottawa was sealed. Who knew how many had died in this takeover. But surely the remaining vast wide open territory of Canada could not be secured so simply.

He could not see any benefit to himself in any of this, no positive outcome, no way to finesse it to his advantage, his interests. Only future ignominy remained. In a moment of mixed impulse and bitterness, bemoaning the absurd and deadly impasse to which his ambitions had brought him, he held his breath, sighed, then inhaled sharply.

“No.” The word escaped from him. The room froze.

“I will not swear this oath,” he said, louder now, the words starting to tumble out. “I reject this illegal annexation. I reject the kidnapping of our Prime Minister and demand his immediate safe return. I reject the theft of our land, our freedom of speech, our sovereignty. Manifest Destiny is a lie. Canada repelled you once in 1812…we will find the means again.”

Silence.

“This is occupation. This is theft. I will not legitimize it.” He prayed that his phone livestream was working…had worked.

Someone shouted. Boots moved.

He snatched his phone off the table, backing away, “If you can hear this, this is coercion! Canada, resist! However you can, let every person, man, woman and child, resist! Do not consent….” The phone was knocked from his hand. Violently. He was slammed across the desk that symbolized the highest office of the land, his head was bagged, and then driven again and again into the unforgiving wood until consciousness dissolved. His waning thought, “Please…let the stream have worked.”

—

Trump leaned back in a chair, thumbs hooked into his belt. Behind him, a map of Canada bristled with red pins.

“See, we’re doing great,” he said. “All those beautiful red pins. So many pins. Alberta loves me. They helped me. Quebec’s learning. The rest… they’ll get it eventually.”

The General in the situation room frowned. “Sir, public resistance is growing. Protests. Severe economic instability…”

Trump waved him off.

“We’ll absorb them, like a big sponge. All those fresh lakes, trees, oil. We’ll actually make use of them, unlike Canadians. It’s all upside.”

The General was quiet, then: “It didn’t go well with the substitute PM. He managed to push out a livestream that went viral, not just in Canada… across the globe. Protests are spreading worldwide.”

Trump smiled.

“General, you worry too much. Manifest Destiny won’t be quiet or stealthy. And nobody’s going to confront us directly. We’ll follow our agenda, people will shout and cry, we’ll silence them gradually and accomplish what we want. Other takeovers are in the works, this one will lose attention when those happen. Look at Gaza—years of protests, rulings, the UN crying. No one can do anything… no one has the guts. This world is ruled by gutless leaders, all talk and legal papers and all scared to actually act.”

He paused a moment.

“Except Iran, and we’ll fix Iran….”

The General was quiet, very quiet. He knew the truth of the situation and the impact on America because of this man’s policies. He looked around, no one else here, and a loaded gun in his holster. Then he put aside the insidious thought worming its way through his brain. That was not the way….

—

Armour thundered along the highways. Drones stitched the sky into a lattice of surveillance. Provincial banners hung uneasily beside American flags, and the people of Canada, some acquiescent, most unbowed, stood witness as the character of their nation shifted beneath their feet.

Yet in cafés and kitchens, on snow-quiet streets and in shuttered rooms where conspirators and activists spoke in murmurs, another reckoning was already underway. A question surfaced that no occupation, no cartography, no column of steel could suppress. If freedom is imposed by force at gunpoint, and through total domination, isn’t it just slavery by another name?

---

And in the backrooms, disloyal (to put it kindly) politicians who considered siding with Trump, were quietly changing their tune as an undercurrent of resistance grew across the country, and dark looks were cast upon any who even glanced positively at anything connected with America. And they were hoping and praying that the substance of their clandestine meetings never came to light.

—

What Trump’s constellation of red pins failed to register was that Canada had not gone dark. It had gone unnervingly quiet.

Far north of Ottawa, anciently familiar to the indigenous population, beneath Precambrian rock older than any flag on the continent, were ribbons of caves, hideouts invisible to even sophisticated tech. And Americans who were incapable of taking over and controlling protests in their own cities within their own borders, were learning firsthand about the vastness of the Canadian wilderness.

The Canadian Armed Forces had not vanished. They had dispersed. Systems that had never been tethered to civilian networks stirred awake. Grey consoles flickered to life in bunkers built for a Cold War everyone had now forgotten. Orders moved, not by fibre or satellite, but by human couriers, by burst transmissions lasting milliseconds, by redundancies designed to fight exactly this type of situation but long shelved and unpracticed: decapitation, occupation, betrayal from within.

Across the Prairies, rail switches locked up mid-throw. American supply convoys found commandeered fuel depots inexplicably contaminated, not explosively (not yet), not dramatically, but enough to gradually ground engines and strand heavy armour. In Quebec, ports that cooperated with shipping to and from America, were shut down by longshore unions invoking endless emergency safety clauses, cranes were immobilized, shipping schedules collapsed, and cargo tankers mysteriously caught fire. No speeches. No declarations. No manifestos. Just resistance by friction and more friction. Everywhere.

And then the arrests quietly began. Not by Americans. Not on camera (not these trials).

There were quiet knocks at provincial offices at dawn. Warrants signed secretly under the Emergencies Act, still valid, still lawful, still binding—but these warrants were unknown to the occupying Americans. Evidence packages compiled over time, foreign contacts, undeclared meetings, financial trails that had never quite vanished.

Quebec’s premier was taken from a cabin in Charlevoix, pale and silent. Alberta’s was detained en route to a security briefing. Their abandoned accords and secret agreements now evaporated like a mist within hours. Not even the hint of collaboration was tolerated. Every flicker of collaboration was extinguished.

The Governor General, absent from every American briefing, quietly invoked reserve powers no one thought would ever be used outside textbooks. The proclamation was brief, devastatingly formal, and unimpeachable; and delivered through secret networks and couriers.

“To the members of the Canadian Armed Forces: your orders stand, act as secrecy requires. To public servants: continue your duties, serve Canadians only; disrupt or delay all American requests. To Premiers and Ministers tempted by fear or ambition: history will remember what you choose and will not forgive the wrong choice.”

—

In Washington, Generals stared at the map as aides whispered urgently. Red pins remained, but they no longer meant control. Entire regions had gone grey. Compliance reports contradicted one another. Convoys, spread too thin in the vastness of Canada, vanished. Pipelines entered maintenance mode and never recovered. Snowplows, by accident, always by accident, blocked armoured routes and depots. Power flickered off at precisely the wrong moments. Hydro exports south became sporadic, unreliable. When troops were sent to secure dams, gates malfunctioned, and generators stalled or burned out, software crashed, again and again.

Trump’s smile curdled. He began to scowl more and more frequently. This made Canadians happy.

—

When the cellphone struck the floor in the PM’s office, the livestream did not cut out cleanly.

For eight seconds after the phone struck the floor, the camera kept recording. It showed the desk’s carved maple leaves smeared with blood. It caught the sound of boots scrambling, a curse, the dull animal thud of flesh on wood. Then, most dangerously, it captured the moment a soldier bent to shut the stream and hesitated, fractionally too long. Enough for his face to fill the frame. Name patch visible. Unit insignia clear.

Eight seconds was enough.

By dawn, the clip had been mirrored, encrypted, broken into fragments, stitched back together and rebroadcast by servers that did not answer to Washington or occupied Ottawa or Silicon Valley. It ran through amateur radio relays, satellite links, old infrastructure no one had bothered to fully dismantle. The phrase Canada Resist became a meme, then a rallying call, then a code embedded in weather reports, in Church, Mosque, and Gurdwara bulletins, in prayer apps. It was everywhere!

—

In a detention facility in Maine, the Prime Minister sat under fluorescent light and surrounded by the steady hum of generators. He was in a cage in the middle of a warehouse. His wrists and feet were shackled to an iron ring set into the floor. Time had dissolved. Only light and noise and hopelessness remained for him.

A guard lingered beyond the bars, young, pale, eyes averted. After a long silence, he spoke without turning, “My mother watched your replacement’s speech.”

The PM did not respond.

“She cried,” the guard added. “She hasn’t cried since my dad died. Some of us here in Maine think differently than Washington.”

The PM remained quiet.

There was a long pause, “You don’t know about it do you?”

“About what?” His voice was weak, hoarse, but curiosity was aroused.

“How could you, isolated in here. I can’t show you, this building is a faraday cage, no service of any kind works here. But I can tell you….”

Then with his back still to the cage, seemingly not paying attention to the prisoner, his voice a low cautious murmur, he related the events, the defiance, the interruption, the eight final seconds caught on the fallen phone. The Canada Resist meme that had captured the world. The PM felt the story within him as if it was revelation. It was genuine hope.

The guard added, almost clinically, that the soldier from the video had vanished. No one knew his whereabouts. Another soldier amongst so many who just disappeared, just as entire convoys vanished into the winter wilderness. No expectation of return.

As for the opposition leader, he survived but just barely, and was being held nearby, similarly erased.

The PM considered this. Two fierce political opponents, the PM and the opposition leader, once at each other’s throats, now united in a single cause. The PM smiled to himself. This is how hope returns.

—

That night, somewhere in Montreal, a woman covered head to toe in heavy generic winter gear, spray-painted a maple leaf over an American flag and was not arrested because the patrol car called for, never came. In Winnipeg, rail workers rerouted a train carrying armoured vehicles into a dead spur, damaged the tracks and the carriage wheels, and walked away. In Vancouver, an American forces data center unexpectedly went dark for eleven minutes, long enough for a worm to be planted and the data to be hopelessly corrupted after the eleven minutes were over and the systems woke up.

None of it resembled open violent rebellion. Yet the attrition mounted. Hundreds of thousands, acting independently, opportunistically, invisibly, imposed a grinding demoralization. The occupiers were watching for crowds, for speeches, for leaders, for declarations, for centralized open resistance. Instead they found resistance as invisible as the clear winter air. Unceasing, ubiquitous, a thousand pinpricks without an identifiable center.

Weeks later, an internal Pentagon memo used a phrase that would endure and become infamous. The territory is not secured. The population is not secured. Economic blowback is accelerating. The cost of occupation is unsustainable.

The last image to circulate before the occupiers restricted the networks in a failed attempt to weaken its impact, was not a tank, not a flag, not a politician, or a leader.

It was a still frame from that first, broken livestream. The Prime Minister’s desk, the maple leaves carved deep into the wood, and a single drop of blood resting in one vein of the grain, bright and unmistakably red.

Beneath it, an anonymous caption.

This land remembers. Canada will rise!

-Irshaad

—