Let's hear them out (Lea's perspective)

There we were, following a group deeper into the park after we'd just witnessed them beat a man into the hospital. Well Craig had witnessed it, but they weren't shy about admitting it to the rest of us. Call us dumb for trusting them, but they were right about one thing. The Council wasn't going to stop writing decrees to make life harder for blond people, and Craig and I wouldn't be able to shelter Mackenzie from all of them.

So we went with those people, to a secluded section of the park where we could be reasonably sure we wouldn't be caught on any surveillance. Even more people joined us there, everyone who had run in the other direction when the bots showed up I guess. Once everyone was assembled and made sure their friends had evaded capture, Phoenix stood before the crowd and launched into a speech.

"...we're lucky enough to have the protection of friends who won't take advantage of the situation, and the Council's rules haven't been too bad so far. But we're not going to sit around trusting it'll stay that way. By this time next week we might all be crawling on our hands and knees like that poor woman we just helped. And even if we aren't, we can't just leave everyone unfortunate enough to have been claimed by abusive assholes to their fates can we? We have to do something!"

"How?" Someone asked. "We don't have weapons to take it up with the LERs, and they've never been hacked at scale."

We'd intended to listen quietly until we were sure we trusted these people, but Craig gathered the courage to ask his own question. "LERs can be hacked?"

Phoenix shook her head. "Not exactly, but they can be jammed. A strong EM jammer can scramble them for a second and make them lose a minute of memory. I've heard of people doing it, but for obvious reasons that kind of information isn't easy to come by. There are also ways to make yourself harder to track so the LERs don't show up at your door later. A lot of bots don't use the best cameras, even a simple IR emitter can interfere with their facial recognition."

"But that stuff's only good for getting away with petty crimes like theft or beating people to a pulp," someone else interjected. "If we tried to free blonds and hide them in our homes we'd get caught in no time."

"No shit, Donovan. But this pet thing isn't global. We're only a couple dozen miles from the border, any blond who makes it across is home free."

"Are you insane? That's suicide!"

"Staying here is suicide," Phoenix shouted back angrily. "Look, I'm not going to **** you to come with us. I know how risky crossing the border is. But unless you have a plan to overthrow the Council, it's the only chance we have. So we are doing this. We're going to research the fuck out of how the border is secured and what the best routes across are, we're going to make contact with more people who feel the same way we do, we're going to gather jammers and whatever weapons we can, and when the time is right we make a break for it."

There was some more back and forth after this, but eventually a consensus was reached. To avoid suspicion there wouldn't be any more public meetings like this, instead people would work alone or in small groups to gather information and materials at whatever level of risk they were willing to take.

After some debate we decided to give Phoenix our details so she could contact us. Then the crowd dispersed, everyone going their separate ways. The three of us found a quiet spot to hang out in until Mackenzie had gotten her barefoot time in, and then we went home.