The conference channel was filling up. Perry checked off names as
reps from all the rides came online. There was a lot of tight,
tense chatter, jokes about the fuzz.

"OK," Perry said. "Let's get it started. There's cops blockading
every ride, right? Use the poll please." He posted a poll to the
conference page and it quickly got to 100 percent green. "So I
just found the cops outside of mine, too, and I'm not sure what
to do about it. I've got some dough for a lawyer, but I can't
afford lawyers for everyone. To make that work, we'd have to fly
attorneys to every city with a ride in it, and that's not
practical as I'm sure you can tell."

A half-dozen flags went up in the conference page. "I need
someone to play moderator, 'cause I can't talk and mod at the
same time. How about you, Hilda?"

"OK," she said. "I'm Hilda Hammersen, from the Madison group.
Post one-line summaries of your points and I'll set a speaker's
order."

The conference page filled up. There was the official back
channel at the bottom where the text was spilling by too fast for
Perry to parse, and he knew that there were lots of unofficial
back-channels in use too. He covered the mic and sighed. He had
nothing to say to these people. He didn't have any answers.

"Right. So who knows what we should do?" The back-channel went
crazy. Hilda started green-lighting speakers with their flags up.

"Why are you asking us, Perry? You've got to run this." The voice
was petulant and Perry saw that it was one of the Boston crew,
which made him wonder what Tjan was going to do when he
discovered that Perry was doing this.

The page pinkened and then sank into red. The other people on the
call clearly thought this was BS, which was a relief to Perry.
Hilda cued up the next speaker.

"We could set up information pickets at the gates to each ride
hitting people up for donations for our legal defense -- get the
press to cover it and maybe we could bring in enough to fight all
the injuntions."

The pink lightened a little, went back to neutral white, turned a
little green. Perry slowed down the back-channel a little and
skimmed it:

> No way could we bring in enough, that's like 30 grand each I
get a couple hundred people here in the morning and that would
mean a hundred and fifty bucks each

> No no it's totally do-able we can raise that easy just set up
some paypals and publicize the shit out of it

The next speaker was talking. "What if we got the maintenance
bots to break open the doors and carry the ride outside where
everyone can see it?"

Bright red. Dumb idea.

Perry broke in. "I'm worried that when people show up it'll
provoke some kind of confrontation with the law. It could get
ugly here. How can we keep that cooled out?"

Green.