Introduction
I wrote Little Brother in a white-hot fury between May 7, 2007 and July 2,2007: exactly eight weeks from the day I thought it up to the day I fin-ished it (Alice, to whom this book is dedicated, had to put up with meclacking out the final chapter at 5AM in our hotel in Rome, where wewere celebrating our anniversary). I'd always dreamed of having a bookjust materialize, fully formed, and come pouring out of my fingertips, nosweat and fuss — but it wasn't nearly as much fun as I'd thought itwould be. There were days when I wrote 10,000 words, hunching overmy keyboard in airports, on subways, in taxis — anywhere I could type.
The book was trying to get out of my head, no matter what, and I missedso much sleep and so many meals that friends started to ask if I wasunwell.
When my dad was a young university student in the 1960s, he was oneof the few "counterculture" people who thought computers were a goodthing. For most young people, computers represented the de-humaniza-tion of society. University students were reduced to numbers on apunchcard, each bearing the legend "DO NOT BEND, SPINDLE, FOLDOR MUTILATE," prompting some of the students to wear pins that said,"I AM A STUDENT: DO NOT BEND, SPINDLE, FOLD OR MUTILATEME." Computers were seen as a means to increase the ability of the au-thorities to regiment people and bend them to their will.
When I was a 17, the world seemed like it was just going to get morefree. The Berlin Wall was about to come down. Computers — which hadbeen geeky and weird a few years before — were everywhere, and themodem I'd used to connect to local bulletin board systems was now con-necting me to the entire world through the Internet and commercial on-line services like GEnie. My lifelong fascination with activist causes wentinto overdrive as I saw how the main difficulty in activism — organizing— was getting easier by leaps and bounds (I still remember the first timeI switched from mailing out a newsletter with hand-written addresses tousing a database with mail-merge). In the Soviet union, communicationstools were being used to bring information — and revolution — to thefarthest-flung corners of the largest authoritarian state the Earth had everseen.
But 17 years later, things are very different. The computers I love arebeing co-opted, used to spy on us, control us, snitch on us. The NationalSecurity Agency has illegally wiretapped the entire USA and gottenaway with it. Car rental companies and mass transit and traffic4authorities are watching where we go, sending us automated tickets,finking us out to busybodies, cops and bad guys who gain illicit access totheir databases. The Transport Security Administration maintains a "no-fly" list of people who'd never been convicted of any crime, but who arenevertheless considered too dangerous to fly. The list's contents aresecret. The rule that makes it enforceable is secret. The criteria for beingadded to the list are secret. It has four-year-olds on it. And US senators.
And decorated veterans — actual war heroes.
The 17 year olds I know understand to a nicety just how dangerous acomputer can be. The authoritarian nightmare of the 1960s has comehome for them. The seductive little boxes on their desks and in theirpockets watch their every move, corral them in, systematically deprivingthem of those new freedoms I had enjoyed and made such good use of inmy young adulthood.
What's more, kids were clearly being used as guinea-pigs for a newkind of technological state that all of us were on our way to, a worldwhere taking a picture was either piracy (in a movie theater or museumor even a Starbucks), or terrorism (in a public place), but where we couldbe photographed, tracked and logged hundreds of times a day by everytin-pot dictator, cop, bureaucrat and shop-keeper. A world where anymeasure, including torture, could be justified just by waving your handsand shouting "Terrorism! 9/11! Terrorism!" until all dissent fell silent.
We don't have to go down that road.
If you love freedom, if you think the human condition is dignified byprivacy, by the right to be left alone, by the right to explore your weirdideas provided you don't hurt others, then you have common cause withthe kids whose web-browsers and cell phones are being used to lockthem up and follow them around.
If you believe that the answer to bad speech is more speech — not cen-sorship — then you have a dog in the fight.
If you believe in a society of laws, a land where our rulers have to tellus the rules, and have to follow them too, then you're part of the samestruggle that kids fight when they argue for the right to live under thesame Bill of Rights that adults have.
This book is meant to be part of the conversation about what an in-formation society means: does it mean total control, or unheard-ofliberty? It's not just a noun, it's a verb, it's something you do.
Chapter 1
This chapter is dedicated to BakkaPhoenix Books in Toronto, Canada.
Bakka is the oldest science fiction bookstore in the world, and it made methe mutant I am today. I wandered in for the first time around the age of10 and asked for some recommendations. Tanya Huff (yes, the TanyaHuff, but she wasn't a famous writer back then!) took me back into theused section and pressed a copy of H. Beam Piper's "Little Fuzzy" intomy hands, and changed my life forever. By the time I was 18, I wasworking at Bakka — I took over from Tanya when she retired to writefull time — and I learned life-long lessons about how and why peoplebuy books. I think every writer should work at a bookstore (and plenty ofwriters have worked at Bakka over the years! For the 30th anniversary ofthe store, they put together an anthology of stories by Bakka writersthan included work by Michelle Sagara (AKA Michelle West), TanyaHuff, Nalo Hopkinson, Tara Tallan —and me!)BakkaPhoenix Books: 697 Queen Street West, Toronto ON CanadaM6J1E6, +1 416 963 9993I'm a senior at Cesar Chavez high in San Francisco's sunny Missiondistrict, and that makes me one of the most surveilled people in theworld. My name is Marcus Yallow, but back when this story starts, I wasgoing by w1n5t0n. Pronounced "Winston."Not pronounced "Double-you-one-enn-five-tee-zero-enn" — unlessyou're a clueless disciplinary officer who's far enough behind the curvethat you still call the Internet "the information superhighway."I know just such a clueless person, and his name is Fred Benson, one ofthree vice-principals at Cesar Chavez. He's a sucking chest wound of ahuman being. But if you're going to have a jailer, better a clueless onethan one who's really on the ball.
"Marcus Yallow," he said over the PA one Friday morning. The PAisn't very good to begin with, and when you combine that with Benson's17habitual mumble, you get something that sounds more like someonestruggling to digest a bad burrito than a school announcement. But hu-man beings are good at picking their names out of audio confusion — it'sa survival trait.
I grabbed my bag and folded my laptop three-quarters shut — I didn'twant to blow my downloads — and got ready for the inevitable.
"Report to the administration office immediately."My social studies teacher, Ms Galvez, rolled her eyes at me and Irolled my eyes back at her. The Man was always coming down on me,just because I go through school firewalls like wet kleenex, spoof thegait-recognition software, and nuke the snitch chips they track us with.
Galvez is a good type, anyway, never holds that against me (especiallywhen I'm helping get with her webmail so she can talk to her brotherwho's stationed in Iraq).
My boy Darryl gave me a smack on the ass as I walked past. I'veknown Darryl since we were still in diapers and escaping from play-school, and I've been getting him into and out of trouble the whole time.
I raised my arms over my head like a prizefighter and made my exitfrom Social Studies and began the perp-walk to the office.
I was halfway there when my phone went. That was another no-no —phones are muy prohibido at Chavez High — but why should that stopme? I ducked into the toilet and shut myself in the middle stall (the fur-thest stall is always grossest because so many people head straight for it,hoping to escape the smell and the squick — the smart money and goodhygiene is down the middle). I checked the phone — my home PC hadsent it an email to tell it that there was something new up on HarajukuFun Madness, which happens to be the best game ever invented.
I grinned. Spending Fridays at school was teh suck anyway, and I wasglad of the excuse to make my escape.
I ambled the rest of the way to Benson's office and tossed him a waveas I sailed through the door.
"If it isn't Double-you-one-enn-five-tee-zero-enn," he said. FredrickBenson — Social Security number 545-03-2343, date of birth August 151962, mother's maiden name Di Bona, hometown Petaluma — is a lottaller than me. I'm a runty 5'8", while he stands 6'7", and his college bas-ketball days are far enough behind him that his chest muscles haveturned into saggy man-boobs that were painfully obvious through hisfreebie dot-com polo-shirts. He always looks like he's about to slam-18dunk your ass, and he's really into raising his voice for dramatic effect.
Both these start to lose their efficacy with repeated application.
"Sorry, nope," I said. "I never heard of this R2D2 character of yours.""W1n5t0n," he said, spelling it out again. He gave me a hairy eyeballand waited for me to wilt. Of course it was my handle, and had been foryears. It was the identity I used when I was posting on message-boardswhere I was making my contributions to the field of applied security re-search. You know, like sneaking out of school and disabling the minder-tracer on my phone. But he didn't know that this was my handle. Only asmall number of people did, and I trusted them all to the end of theearth.
"Um, not ringing any bells," I said. I'd done some pretty cool stuffaround school using that handle — I was very proud of my work onsnitch-tag killers — and if he could link the two identities, I'd be introuble. No one at school ever called me w1n5t0n or even Winston. Noteven my pals. It was Marcus or nothing.
Benson settled down behind his desk and tapped his class-ringnervously on his blotter. He did this whenever things started to go badfor him. Poker players call stuff like this a "tell" — something that let youknow what was going on in the other guy's head. I knew Benson's tellsbackwards and forwards.
"Marcus, I hope you realize how serious this is.""I will just as soon as you explain what this is, sir." I always say "sir" toauthority figures when I'm messing with them. It's my own tell.
He shook his head at me and looked down, another tell. Any secondnow, he was going to start shouting at me. "Listen, kiddo! It's time youcame to grips with the fact that we know about what you've been doing,and that we're not going to be lenient about it. You're going to be lucky ifyou're not expelled before this meeting is through. Do you want tograduate?""Mr Benson, you still haven't explained what the problem is —"He slammed his hand down on the desk and then pointed his finger atme. "The problem, Mr Yallow, is that you've been engaged in criminalconspiracy to subvert this school's security system, and you have sup-plied security countermeasures to your fellow students. You know thatwe expelled Graciella Uriarte last week for using one of your devices."Uriarte had gotten a bad rap. She'd bought a radio-jammer from a head-19shop near the 16th Street BART station and it had set off the counter-measures in the school hallway. Not my doing, but I felt for her.
"And you think I'm involved in that?""We have reliable intelligence indicating that you are w1n5t0n" —again, he spelled it out, and I began to wonder if he hadn't figured outthat the 1 was an I and the 5 was an S. "We know that this w1n5t0n char-acter is reponsible for the theft of last year's standardized tests." That ac-tually hadn't been me, but it was a sweet hack, and it was kind of flatter-ing to hear it attributed to me. "And therefore liable for several years inprison unless you cooperate with me.""You have 'reliable intelligence'? I'd like to see it."He glowered at me. "Your attitude isn't going to help you.""If there's evidence, sir, I think you should call the police and turn itover to them. It sounds like this is a very serious matter, and I wouldn'twant to stand in the way of a proper investigation by the duly consti-tuted authorities.""You want me to call the police.""And my parents, I think. That would be for the best."We stared at each other across the desk. He'd clearly expected me tofold the second he dropped the bomb on me. I don't fold. I have a trickfor staring down people like Benson. I look slightly to the left of theirheads, and think about the lyrics to old Irish folk songs, the kinds withthree hundred verses. It makes me look perfectly composed andunworried.
And the wing was on the bird and the bird was on the egg and the egg was inthe nest and the nest was on the leaf and the leaf was on the twig and the twigwas on the branch and the branch was on the limb and the limb was in the treeand the tree was in the bog — the bog down in the valley-oh! High-ho the rat-tlin' bog, the bog down in the valley-oh —"You can return to class now," he said. "I'll call on you once the policeare ready to speak to you.""Are you going to call them now?""The procedure for calling in the police is complicated. I'd hoped thatwe could settle this fairly and quickly, but since you insist —""I can wait while you call them is all," I said. "I don't mind."He tapped his ring again and I braced for the blast.
"Go!" he yelled. "Get the hell out of my office, you miserable little —"20I got out, keeping my expression neutral. He wasn't going to call thecops. If he'd had enough evidence to go to the police with, he wouldhave called them in the first place. He hated my guts. I figured he'dheard some unverified gossip and hoped to spook me into confirming it.
I moved down the corridor lightly and sprightly, keeping my gait evenand measured for the gait-recognition cameras. These had been installedonly a year before, and I loved them for their sheer idiocy. Beforehand,we'd had face-recognition cameras covering nearly every public space inschool, but a court ruled that was unconstitutional. So Benson and a lotof other paranoid school administrators had spent our textbook dollarson these idiot cameras that were supposed to be able to tell one person'swalk from another. Yeah, right.
I got back to class and sat down again, Ms Galvez warmly welcomingme back. I unpacked the school's standard-issue machine and got backinto classroom mode. The SchoolBooks were the snitchiest technology ofthem all, logging every keystroke, watching all the network traffic forsuspicious keywords, counting every click, keeping track of every fleet-ing thought you put out over the net. We'd gotten them in my junioryear, and it only took a couple months for the shininess to wear off. Oncepeople figured out that these "free" laptops worked for the man — andshowed a never-ending parade of obnoxious ads to boot — they sud-denly started to feel very heavy and burdensome.
Cracking my SchoolBook had been easy. The crack was online within amonth of the machine showing up, and there was nothing to it — justdownload a DVD image, burn it, stick it in the SchoolBook, and boot itwhile holding down a bunch of different keys at the same time. TheDVD did the rest, installing a whole bunch of hidden programs on themachine, programs that would stay hidden even when the Board of Eddid its daily remote integrity checks of the machines. Every now andagain I had to get an update for the software to get around the Board'slatest tests, but it was a small price to pay to get a little control over thebox.
I fired up IMParanoid, the secret instant messenger that I used when Iwanted to have an off-the-record discussion right in the middle of class.
Darryl was already logged in.
>
The game's afoot! Something big is going down with Harajuku FunMadness, dude. You in?
>
21No. Freaking. Way. If I get caught ditching a third time, I'm expelled.
Man, you know that. We'll go after school.
>
You've got lunch and then study-hall, right? That's two hours. Plentyof time to run down this clue and get back before anyone misses us. I'llget the whole team out.
Harajuku Fun Madness is the best game ever made. I know I alreadysaid that, but it bears repeating. It's an ARG, an Alternate Reality Game,and the story goes that a gang of Japanese fashion-teens discovered a mi-raculous healing gem at the temple in Harajuku, which is basicallywhere cool Japanese teenagers invented every major subculture for thepast ten years. They're being hunted by evil monks, the Yakuza (AKAthe Japanese mafia), aliens, tax-inspectors, parents, and a rogue artificialintelligence. They slip the players coded messages that we have to de-code and use to track down clues that lead to more coded messages andmore clues.
Imagine the best afternoon you've ever spent prowling the streets of acity, checking out all the weird people, funny hand-bills, street-maniacs,and funky shops. Now add a scavenger hunt to that, one that requiresyou to research crazy old films and songs and teen culture from aroundthe world and across time and space. And it's a competition, with thewinning team of four taking a grand prize of ten days in Tokyo, chillingon Harajuku bridge, geeking out in Akihabara, and taking home all theAstro Boy merchandise you can eat. Except that he's called "Atom Boy"in Japan.
That's Harajuku Fun Madness, and once you've solved a puzzle ortwo, you'll never look back.
>
No man, just no. NO. Don't even ask.
>
I need you D. You're the best I've got. I swear I'll get us in and outwithout anyone knowing it. You know I can do that, right?
>
I know you can do it>
So you're in?
>
22Hell no>
Come on, Darryl. You're not going to your deathbed wishing you'dspent more study periods sitting in school>
I'm not going to go to my deathbed wishing I'd spent more time play-ing ARGs either>
Yeah but don't you think you might go to your death-bed wishingyou'd spent more time with Vanessa Pak?
Van was part of my team. She went to a private girl's school in the EastBay, but I knew she'd ditch to come out and run the mission with me.
Darryl has had a crush on her literally for years — even before pubertyendowed her with many lavish gifts. Darryl had fallen in love with hermind. Sad, really.
>
You suck>
You're coming?
He looked at me and shook his head. Then he nodded. I winked at himand set to work getting in touch with the rest of my team.
I wasn't always into ARGing. I have a dark secret: I used to be aLARPer. LARPing is Live Action Role Playing, and it's just about what itsounds like: running around in costume, talking in a funny accent, pre-tending to be a super-spy or a vampire or a medieval knight. It's likeCapture the Flag in monster-drag, with a bit of Drama Club thrown in,and the best games were the ones we played in Scout Camps out of townin Sonoma or down on the Peninsula. Those three-day epics could getpretty hairy, with all-day hikes, epic battles with foam-and-bambooswords, casting spells by throwing beanbags and shouting "Fireball!"and so on. Good fun, if a little goofy. Not nearly as geeky as talkingabout what your elf planned on doing as you sat around a table loadedwith Diet Coke cans and painted miniatures, and more physically activethan going into a mouse-coma in front of a massively multiplayer gameat home.
23The thing that got me into trouble were the mini-games in the hotels.
Whenever a science fiction convention came to town, some LARPerwould convince them to let us run a couple of six-hour mini-games at thecon, piggybacking on their rental of the space. Having a bunch of enthu-siastic kids running around in costume lent color to the event, and wegot to have a ball among people even more socially deviant than us.
The problem with hotels is that they have a lot of non-gamers in them,too — and not just sci-fi people. Normal people. From states that beginand end with vowels. On holidays.
And sometimes those people misunderstand the nature of a game.
Let's just leave it at that, OK?
Class ended in ten minutes, and that didn't leave me with much timeto prepare. The first order of business were those pesky gait-recognitioncameras. Like I said, they'd started out as face-recognition cameras, butthose had been ruled unconstitutional. As far as I know, no court has yetdetermined whether these gait-cams are any more legal, but until theydo, we're stuck with them.
"Gait" is a fancy word for the way you walk. People are pretty good atspotting gaits — next time you're on a camping trip, check out the bob-bing of the flashlight as a distant friend approaches you. Chances areyou can identify him just from the movement of the light, the character-istic way it bobs up and down that tells our monkey brains that this is aperson approaching us.
Gait recognition software takes pictures of your motion, tries to isolateyou in the pics as a silhouette, and then tries to match the silhouette to adatabase to see if it knows who you are. It's a biometric identifier, likefingerprints or retina-scans, but it's got a lot more "collisions" than eitherof those. A biometric "collision" is when a measurement matches morethan one person. Only you have your fingerprint, but you share yourgait with plenty other people.
Not exactly, of course. Your personal, inch-by-inch walk is yours andyours alone. The problem is your inch-by-inch walk changes based onhow tired you are, what the floor is made of, whether you pulled yourankle playing basketball, and whether you've changed your shoes lately.
So the system kind of fuzzes-out your profile, looking for people whowalk kind of like you.
24There are a lot of people who walk kind of like you. What's more, it'seasy not to walk kind of like you — just take one shoe off. Of course,you'll always walk like you-with-one-shoe-off in that case, so the camer-as will eventually figure out that it's still you. Which is why I prefer toinject a little randomness into my attacks on gait-recognition: I put ahandful of gravel into each shoe. Cheap and effective, and no two stepsare the same. Plus you get a great reflexology foot massage in the process(I kid. Reflexology is about as scientifically useful as gait-recognition).
The cameras used to set off an alert every time someone they didn't re-cognize stepped onto campus.
This did not work.
The alarm went off every ten minutes. When the mailman came by.
When a parent dropped in. When the grounds-people went to work fix-ing up the basketball court. When a student showed up wearing newshoes.
So now it just tries to keep track of who's where and when. If someoneleaves by the school-gates during classes, their gait is checked to see if itkinda-sorta matches any student gait and if it does, whoop-whoop-whoop, ring the alarm!
Chavez High is ringed with gravel walkways. I like to keep a couplehandsful of rocks in my shoulder-bag, just in case. I silently passedDarryl ten or fifteen pointy little bastards and we both loaded our shoes.
Class was about to finish up — and I realized that I still hadn't checkedthe Harajuku Fun Madness site to see where the next clue was! I'd been alittle hyper-focused on the escape, and hadn't bothered to figure outwhere we were escaping to.
I turned to my SchoolBook and hit the keyboard. The web-browser weused was supplied with the machine. It was a locked-down spyware ver-sion of Internet Explorer, Microsoft's crashware turd that no one underthe age of 40 used voluntarily.
I had a copy of Firefox on the USB drive built into my watch, but thatwasn't enough — the SchoolBook ran Windows Vista4Schools, an an-tique operating system designed to give school administrators the illu-sion that they controlled the programs their students could run.
But Vista4Schools is its own worst enemy. There are a lot of programsthat Vista4Schools doesn't want you to be able to shut down — keylog-gers, censorware — and these programs run in a special mode that25makes them invisible to the system. You can't quit them because youcan't even see they're there.
Any program whose name starts with $SYS$ is invisible to the operat-ing system. it doesn't show up on listings of the hard drive, nor in theprocess monitor. So my copy of Firefox was called $SYS$Firefox — andas I launched it, it became invisible to Windows, and so invisible to thenetwork's snoopware.
Now I had an indie browser running, I needed an indie network con-nection. The school's network logged every click in and out of the sys-tem, which was bad news if you were planning on surfing over to theHarajuku Fun Madness site for some extra-curricular fun.
The answer is something ingenious called TOR — The Onion Router.
An onion router is an Internet site that takes requests for web-pages andpasses them onto other onion routers, and on to other onion routers, un-til one of them finally decides to fetch the page and pass it back throughthe layers of the onion until it reaches you. The traffic to the onion-routers is encrypted, which means that the school can't see what you'reasking for, and the layers of the onion don't know who they're workingfor. There are millions of nodes — the program was set up by the US Of-fice of Naval Research to help their people get around the censorware incountries like Syria and China, which means that it's perfectly designedfor operating in the confines of an average American high school.
TOR works because the school has a finite blacklist of naughty ad-dresses we aren't allowed to visit, and the addresses of the nodes changeall the time — no way could the school keep track of them all. Firefoxand TOR together made me into the invisible man, impervious to Boardof Ed snooping, free to check out the Harajuku FM site and see what wasup.
There it was, a new clue. Like all Harajuku Fun Madness clues, it had aphysical, online and mental component. The online component was apuzzle you had to solve, one that required you to research the answers toa bunch of obscure questions. This batch included a bunch of questionson the plots in d?jinshi — those are comic books drawn by fans ofmanga, Japanese comics. They can be as big as the official comics that in-spire them, but they're a lot weirder, with crossover story-lines andsometimes really silly songs and action. Lots of love stories, of course.
Everyone loves to see their favorite toons hook up.
26I'd have to solve those riddles later, when I got home. They were easi-est to solve with the whole team, downloading tons of d?jinshi files andscouring them for answers to the puzzles.
I'd just finished scrap-booking all the clues when the bell rang and webegan our escape. I surreptitiously slid the gravel down the side of myshort boots — ankle-high Blundstones from Australia, great for runningand climbing, and the easy slip-on/slip-off laceless design makes themconvenient at the never-ending metal-detectors that are everywherenow.
We also had to evade physical surveillance, of course, but that getseasier every time they add a new layer of physical snoopery — all thebells and whistles lull our beloved faculty into a totally false sense of se-curity. We surfed the crowd down the hallways, heading for my favoriteside-exit. We were halfway along when Darryl hissed, "Crap! I forgot,I've got a library book in my bag.""You're kidding me," I said, and hauled him into the next bathroom wepassed. Library books are bad news. Every one of them has an arphid —Radio Frequency ID tag — glued into its binding, which makes it pos-sible for the librarians to check out the books by waving them over areader, and lets a library shelf tell you if any of the books on it are out ofplace.
But it also lets the school track where you are at all times. It was anoth-er of those legal loopholes: the courts wouldn't let the schools track uswith arphids, but they could track library books, and use the school re-cords to tell them who was likely to be carrying which library book.
I had a little Faraday pouch in my bag — these are little wallets linedwith a mesh of copper wires that effectively block radio energy, silencingarphids. But the pouches were made for neutralizing ID cards and toll-book transponders, not books like —"Introduction to Physics?" I groaned. The book was the size of adictionary.
Chapter 2
This chapter is dedicated to Amazon.com, the largest Internet booksellerin the world. Amazon is amazing — a "store" where you can get prac-tically any book ever published (along with practically everything else,from laptops to cheese-graters), where they've elevated recommendationsto a high art, where they allow customers to directly communicate witheach other, where they are constantly invented new and better ways ofconnecting books with readers. Amazon has always treated me like gold— the founder, Jeff Bezos, even posted a reader-review for my first nov-el! — and I shop there like crazy (looking at my spreadsheets, it appearsthat I buy something from Amazon approximately every six days).
Amazon's in the process of reinventing what it means to be a bookstorein the twenty-first century and I can't think of a better group of peopleto be facing down that thorny set of problems.
Amazon"I'm thinking of majoring in physics when I go to Berkeley," Darrylsaid. His dad taught at the University of California at Berkeley, whichmeant he'd get free tuition when he went. And there'd never been anyquestion in Darryl's household about whether he'd go.
"Fine, but couldn't you research it online?""My dad said I should read it. Besides, I didn't plan on committing anycrimes today.""Skipping school isn't a crime. It's an infraction. They're totallydifferent.""What are we going to do, Marcus?""Well, I can't hide it, so I'm going to have to nuke it." Killing arphids isa dark art. No merchant wants malicious customers going for a walkaround the shop-floor and leaving behind a bunch of lobotomized mer-chandise that is missing its invisible bar-code, so the manufacturers have28refused to implement a "kill signal" that you can radio to an arphid to getit to switch off. You can reprogram arphids with the right box, but I hatedoing that to library books. It's not exactly tearing pages out of a book,but it's still bad, since a book with a reprogrammed arphid can't beshelved and can't be found. It just becomes a needle in a haystack.
That left me with only one option: nuking the thing. Literally. 30seconds in a microwave will do in pretty much every arphid on the mar-ket. And because the arphid wouldn't answer at all when D checked itback in at the library, they'd just print a fresh one for it and recode itwith the book's catalog info, and it would end up clean and neat back onits shelf.
All we needed was a microwave.
"Give it another two minutes and the teacher's lounge will be empty," Isaid.
Darryl grabbed his book at headed for the door. "Forget it, no way. I'mgoing to class."I snagged his elbow and dragged him back. "Come on, D, easy now.
It'll be fine.""The teacher's lounge? Maybe you weren't listening, Marcus. If I getbusted just once more, I am expelled. You hear that? Expelled.""You won't get caught," I said. The one place a teacher wouldn't beafter this period was the lounge. "We'll go in the back way." The loungehad a little kitchenette off to one side, with its own entrance for teacherswho just wanted to pop in and get a cup of joe. The microwave — whichalways reeked of popcorn and spilled soup — was right in there, on topof the miniature fridge.
Darryl groaned. I thought fast. "Look, the bell's already rung. if you goto study hall now, you'll get a late-slip. Better not to show at all at thispoint. I can infiltrate and exfiltrate any room on this campus, D. You'veseen me do it. I'll keep you safe, bro."He groaned again. That was one of Darryl's tells: once he starts groan-ing, he's ready to give in.
"Let's roll," I said, and we took off.
It was flawless. We skirted the classrooms, took the back stairs into thebasement, and came up the front stairs right in front of the teachers'
lounge. Not a sound came from the door, and I quietly turned the knoband dragged Darryl in before silently closing the door.
29The book just barely fit in the microwave, which was looking even lesssanitary than it had the last time I'd popped in here to use it. I conscien-tiously wrapped it in paper towels before I set it down. "Man, teachersare pigs," I hissed. Darryl, white faced and tense, said nothing.
The arphid died in a shower of sparks, which was really quite lovely(though not nearly as pretty as the effect you get when you nuke afrozen grape, which has to be seen to be believed).
Now, to exfiltrate the campus in perfect anonymity and make ourescape.
Darryl opened the door and began to move out, me on his heels. Asecond later, he was standing on my toes, elbows jammed into my chest,as he tried to back-pedal into the closet-sized kitchen we'd just left.
"Get back," he whispered urgently. "Quick — it's Charles!"Charles Walker and I don't get along. We're in the same grade, andwe've known each other as long as I've known Darryl, but that's wherethe resemblance ends. Charles has always been big for his age, and nowthat he's playing football and on the juice, he's even bigger. He's got an-ger management problems — I lost a milk-tooth to him in the thirdgrade, and he's managed to keep from getting in trouble over them bybecoming the most active snitch in school.
It's a bad combination, a bully who also snitches, taking great pleasurein going to the teachers with whatever infractions he's found. Bensonloved Charles. Charles liked to let on that he had some kind of unspe-cified bladder problem, which gave him a ready-made excuse to prowlthe hallways at Chavez, looking for people to fink on.
The last time Charles had caught some dirt on me, it had ended withme giving up LARPing. I had no intention of being caught by him again.
"What's he doing?""He's coming this way is what he's doing," Darryl said. He wasshaking.
"OK," I said. "OK, time for emergency countermeasures." I got myphone out. I'd planned this well in advance. Charles would never get meagain. I emailed my server at home, and it got into motion.
A few seconds later, Charles's phone spazzed out spectacularly. I'dhad tens of thousands of simultaneous random calls and text messagessent to it, causing every chirp and ring it had to go off and keep on goingoff. The attack was accomplished by means of a botnet, and for that I feltbad, but it was in the service of a good cause.
30Botnets are where infected computers spend their afterlives. When youget a worm or a virus, your computer sends a message to a chat channelon IRC — the Internet Relay Chat. That message tells the botmaster —the guy who deployed the worm — that the computers in there ready todo his bidding. Botnets are supremely powerful, since they can comprisethousands, even hundreds of thousands of computers, scattered all overthe Internet, connected to juicy high-speed connections and running onfast home PCs. Those PCs normally function on behalf of their owners,but when the botmaster calls them, they rise like zombies to do hisbidding.
There are so many infected PCs on the Internet that the price of hiringan hour or two on a botnet has crashed. Mostly these things work forspammers as cheap, distributed spambots, filling your mailbox withcome-ons for boner-pills or with new viruses that can infect you and re-cruit your machine to join the botnet.
I'd just rented 10 seconds' time on three thousand PCs and had each ofthem send a text message or voice-over-IP call to Charles's phone, whosenumber I'd extracted from a sticky note on Benson's desk during onefateful office-visit.
Needless to say, Charles's phone was not equipped to handle this. Firstthe SMSes filled the memory on his phone, causing it to start choking onthe routine operations it needed to do things like manage the ringer andlog all those incoming calls' bogus return numbers (did you know thatit's really easy to fake the return number on a caller ID? There are aboutfifty ways of doing it — just google "spoof caller id").
Charles stared at it dumbfounded, and jabbed at it furiously, his thickeyebrows knotting and wiggling as he struggled with the demons thathad possessed his most personal of devices. The plan was working sofar, but he wasn't doing what he was supposed to be doing next — hewas supposed to go find some place to sit down and try to figure outhow to get his phone back.
Darryl shook me by the shoulder, and I pulled my eye away from thecrack in the door.
"What's he doing?" Darryl whispered.
"I totaled his phone, but he's just staring at it now instead of movingon." It wasn't going to be easy to reboot that thing. Once the memory wastotally filled, it would have a hard time loading the code it needed to de-lete the bogus messages — and there was no bulk-erase for texts on hisphone, so he'd have to manually delete all of the thousands of messages.
31Darryl shoved me back and stuck his eye up to the door. A momentlater, his shoulders started to shake. I got scared, thinking he was panick-ing, but when he pulled back, I saw that he was laughing so hard thattears were streaming down his cheeks.
"Galvez just totally busted him for being in the halls during class andfor having his phone out — you should have seen her tear into him. Shewas really enjoying it."We shook hands solemnly and snuck back out of the corridor, downthe stairs, around the back, out the door, past the fence and out into theglorious sunlight of afternoon in the Mission. Valencia Street had neverlooked so good. I checked my watch and yelped.
"Let's move! The rest of the gang is meeting us at the cable-cars intwenty minutes!"Van spotted us first. She was blending in with a group of Korean tour-ists, which is one of her favorite ways of camouflaging herself when she'sditching school. Ever since the truancy moblog went live, our world isfull of nosy shopkeepers and pecksniffs who take it upon themselves tosnap our piccies and put them on the net where they can be perused byschool administrators.
She came out of the crowd and bounded toward us. Darryl has had athing for Van since forever, and she's sweet enough to pretend shedoesn't know it. She gave me a hug and then moved onto Darryl, givinghim a quick sisterly kiss on the cheek that made him go red to the tops ofhis ears.
The two of them made a funny pair: Darryl is a little on the heavy side,though he wears it well, and he's got a kind of pink complexion that goesred in the cheeks whenever he runs or gets excited. He's been able togrow a beard since we were 14, but thankfully he started shaving after abrief period known to our gang as "the Lincoln years." And he's tall.
Very, very tall. Like basketball player tall.
Meanwhile, Van is half a head shorter than me, and skinny, withstraight black hair that she wears in crazy, elaborate braids that she re-searches on the net. She's got pretty coppery skin and dark eyes, and sheloves big glass rings the size of radishes, which click and clack togetherwhen she dances.
"Where's Jolu?" she said.
32"How are you, Van?" Darryl asked in a choked voice. He always ran astep behind the conversation when it came to Van.
"I'm great, D. How's your every little thing?" Oh, she was a bad, badperson. Darryl nearly fainted.
Jolu saved him from social disgrace by showing up just then, in anoversize leather baseball jacket, sharp sneakers, and a meshback cap ad-vertising our favorite Mexican masked wrestler, El Santo Junior. Jolu isJose Luis Torrez, the completing member of our foursome. He went to asuper-strict Catholic school in the Outer Richmond, so it wasn't easy forhim to get out. But he always did: no one exfiltrated like our Jolu. Heliked his jacket because it hung down low — which was pretty stylish inparts of the city — and covered up all his Catholic school crap, whichwas like a bulls-eye for nosy jerks with the truancy moblog bookmarkedon their phones.
"Who's ready to go?" I asked, once we'd all said hello. I pulled out myphone and showed them the map I'd downloaded to it on the BART.
"Near as I can work out, we wanna go up to the Nikko again, then oneblock past it to O'Farrell, then left up toward Van Ness. Somewhere inthere we should find the wireless signal."Van made a face. "That's a nasty part of the Tenderloin." I couldn't ar-gue with her. That part of San Francisco is one of the weird bits — yougo in through the Hilton's front entrance and it's all touristy stuff like thecable-car turnaround and family restaurants. Go through to the otherside and you're in the 'Loin, where every tracked out transvestite hooker,hard-case pimp, hissing drug dealer and cracked up homeless person intown was concentrated. What they bought and sold, none of us were oldenough to be a part of (though there were plenty of hookers our age ply-ing their trade in the 'Loin.)"Look on the bright side," I said. "The only time you want to go uparound there is broad daylight. None of the other players are going to gonear it until tomorrow at the earliest. This is what we in the ARG busi-ness call a monster head start."Jolu grinned at me. "You make it sound like a good thing," he said.
"Beats eating uni," I said.
"We going to talk or we going to win?" Van said. After me, she washands-down the most hardcore player in our group. She took winningvery, very seriously.
33We struck out, four good friends, on our way to decode a clue, win thegame — and lose everything we cared about, forever.
The physical component of today's clue was a set of GPS coordinates— there were coordinates for all the major cities where Harajuku FunMadness was played — where we'd find a WiFi access-point's signal.
That signal was being deliberately jammed by another, nearby WiFipoint that was hidden so that it couldn't be spotted by conventionalwifinders, little key-fobs that told you when you were within range ofsomeone's open access-point, which you could use for free.
We'd have to track down the location of the "hidden" access point bymeasuring the strength of the "visible" one, finding the spot where it wasmost mysteriously weakest. There we'd find another clue — last time ithad been in the special of the day at Anzu, the swanky sushi restaurantin the Nikko hotel in the Tenderloin. The Nikko was owned by JapanAirlines, one of Harajuku Fun Madness's sponsors, and the staff had allmade a big fuss over us when we finally tracked down the clue. They'dgiven us bowls of miso soup and made us try uni, which is sushi madefrom sea urchin, with the texture of very runny cheese and a smell likevery runny dog-droppings. But it tasted really good. Or so Darryl toldme. I wasn't going to eat that stuff.
I picked up the WiFi signal with my phone's wifinder about threeblocks up O'Farrell, just before Hyde Street, in front of a dodgy "AsianMassage Parlor" with a red blinking CLOSED sign in the window. Thenetwork's name was HarajukuFM, so we knew we had the right spot.
"If it's in there, I'm not going," Darryl said.
"You all got your wifinders?" I said.
Darryl and Van had phones with built-in wifinders, while Jolu, beingtoo cool to carry a phone bigger than his pinky finger, had a separatelittle directional fob.
"OK, fan out and see what we see. You're looking for a sharp drop offin the signal that gets worse the more you move along it."I took a step backward and ended up standing on someone's toes. Afemale voice said "oof" and I spun around, worried that some crack-howas going to stab me for breaking her heels.
Instead, I found myself face to face with another kid my age. She had ashock of bright pink hair and a sharp, rodent-like face, with bigsunglasses that were practically air-force goggles. She was dressed in34striped tights beneath a black granny dress, with lots of little Japanesedecorer toys safety pinned to it — anime characters, old world leaders,emblems from foreign soda-pop.
She held up a camera and snapped a picture of me and my crew.
"Cheese," she said. "You're on candid snitch-cam.""No way," I said. "You wouldn't —""I will," she said. "I will send this photo to truant watch in thirtyseconds unless you four back off from this clue and let me and myfriends here run it down. You can come back in one hour and it'll be allyours. I think that's more than fair."I looked behind her and noticed three other girls in similar garb — onewith blue hair, one with green, and one with purple. "Who are you sup-posed to be, the Popsicle Squad?""We're the team that's going to kick your team's ass at Harajuku FunMadness," she said. "And I'm the one who's right this second about to up-load your photo and get you in so much trouble —"Behind me I felt Van start forward. Her all-girls school was notoriousfor its brawls, and I was pretty sure she was ready to knock this chick'sblock off.
Then the world changed forever.
We felt it first, that sickening lurch of the cement under your feet thatevery Californian knows instinctively — earthquake. My first inclination,as always, was to get away: "when in trouble or in doubt, run in circles,scream and shout." But the fact was, we were already in the safest placewe could be, not in a building that could fall in on us, not out toward themiddle of the road where bits of falling mortice could brain us.
Earthquakes are eerily quiet — at first, anyway — but this wasn'tquiet. This was loud, an incredible roaring sound that was louder thananything I'd ever heard before. The sound was so punishing it drove meto my knees, and I wasn't the only one. Darryl shook my arm and poin-ted over the buildings and we saw it then: a huge black cloud rising fromthe northeast, from the direction of the Bay.
There was another rumble, and the cloud of smoke spread out, thatspreading black shape we'd all grown up seeing in movies. Someone hadjust blown up something, in a big way.
There were more rumbles and more tremors. Heads appeared at win-dows up and down the street. We all looked at the mushroom cloud insilence.
Then the sirens started.
I'd heard sirens like these before — they test the civil defense sirens atnoon on Tuesdays. But I'd only heard them go off unscheduled in oldwar movies and video games, the kind where someone is bombingsomeone else from above. Air raid sirens. The wooooooo sound made itall less real.
"Report to shelters immediately." It was like the voice of God, comingfrom all places at once. There were speakers on some of the electricpoles, something I'd never noticed before, and they'd all switched on atonce.
"Report to shelters immediately." Shelters? We looked at each other inconfusion. What shelters? The cloud was rising steadily, spreading out.
Was it nuclear? Were we breathing in our last breaths?
The girl with the pink hair grabbed her friends and they tore assdownhill, back toward the BART station and the foot of the hills.
"REPORT TO SHELTERS IMMEDIATELY." There was screaming now,and a lot of running around. Tourists — you can always spot the tourists,they're the ones who think CALIFORNIA = WARM and spend their SanFrancisco holidays freezing in shorts and t-shirts — scattered in everydirection.
"We should go!" Darryl hollered in my ear, just barely audible over theshrieking of the sirens, which had been joined by traditional policesirens. A dozen SFPD cruisers screamed past us.
"REPORT TO SHELTERS IMMEDIATELY.""Down to the BART station," I hollered. My friends nodded. We closedranks and began to move quickly downhill.
Chapter 3
This chapter is dedicated to Borderlands Books, San Francisco's magni-ficent independent science fiction bookstore. Borderlands is basically loc-ated across the street from the fictional Cesar Chavez High depicted inLittle Brother, and it's not just notorious for its brilliant events, sign-ings, book clubs and such, but also for its amazing hairless Egyptian cat,Ripley, who likes to perch like a buzzing gargoyle on the computer at thefront of the store. Borderlands is about the friendliest bookstore youcould ask for, filled with comfy places to sit and read, and staffed by in-credibly knowledgeable clerks who know everything there is to knowabout science fiction. Even better, they've always been willing to takeorders for my book (by net or phone) and hold them for me to sign whenI drop into the store, then they ship them within the US for free!
Borderlands Books: 866 Valencia Ave, San Francisco CA USA 94110+1 888 893 4008We passed a lot of people in the road on the way to the Powell StreetBART. They were running or walking, white-faced and silent or shoutingand panicked. Homeless people cowered in doorways and watched it all,while a tall black tranny hooker shouted at two mustached young menabout something.
The closer we got to the BART, the worse the press of bodies became.
By the time we reached the stairway down into the station, it was a mob-scene, a huge brawl of people trying to crowd their way down a narrowstaircase. I had my face crushed up against someone's back, andsomeone else was pressed into my back.
Darryl was still beside me — he was big enough that he was hard toshove, and Jolu was right behind him, kind of hanging on to his waist. Ispied Vanessa a few yards away, trapped by more people.
"Screw you!" I heard Van yell behind me. "Pervert! Get your hands offof me!"37I strained around against the crowd and saw Van looking with disgustat an older guy in a nice suit who was kind of smirking at her. She wasdigging in her purse and I knew what she was digging for.
"Don't mace him!" I shouted over the din. "You'll get us all too."At the mention of the word mace, the guy looked scared and kind ofmelted back, though the crowd kept him moving forward. Up ahead, Isaw someone, a middle-aged lady in a hippie dress, falter and fall. Shescreamed as she went down, and I saw her thrashing to get up, but shecouldn't, the crowd's pressure was too strong. As I neared her, I bent tohelp her up, and was nearly knocked over her. I ended up stepping onher stomach as the crowd pushed me past her, but by then I don't thinkshe was feeling anything.
I was as scared as I'd ever been. There was screaming everywherenow, and more bodies on the floor, and the press from behind was as re-lentless as a bulldozer. It was all I could do to keep on my feet.
We were in the open concourse where the turnstiles were. It washardly any better here — the enclosed space sent the voices around usechoing back in a roar that made my head ring, and the smell and feelingof all those bodies made me feel a claustrophobia I'd never known I wasprone to.
People were still cramming down the stairs, and more were squeezingpast the turnstiles and down the escalators onto the platforms, but it wasclear to me that this wasn't going to have a happy ending.
"Want to take our chances up top?" I said to Darryl.
"Yes, hell yes," he said. "This is vicious."I looked to Vanessa — there was no way she'd hear me. I managed toget my phone out and I texted her.
>
We're getting out of hereI saw her feel the vibe from her phone, then look down at it and thenback at me and nod vigorously. Darryl, meanwhile, had clued Jolu in.
"What's the plan?" Darryl shouted in my ear.
"We're going to have to go back!" I shouted back, pointing at the re-morseless crush of bodies.
"It's impossible!" he said.
"It's just going to get more impossible the longer we wait!"38He shrugged. Van worked her way over to me and grabbed hold ofmy wrist. I took Darryl and Darryl took Jolu by the other hand and wepushed out.
It wasn't easy. We moved about three inches a minute at first, thenslowed down even more when we reached the stairway. The people wepassed were none too happy about us shoving them out of the way,either. A couple people swore at us and there was a guy who looked likehe'd have punched me if he'd been able to get his arms loose. We passedthree more crushed people beneath us, but there was no way I couldhave helped them. By that point, I wasn't even thinking of helping any-one. All I could think of was finding the spaces in front of us to move in-to, of Darryl's mighty straining on my wrist, of my death-grip on Van be-hind me.
We popped free like Champagne corks an eternity later, blinking inthe grey smoky light. The air raid sirens were still blaring, and the soundof emergency vehicles' sirens as they tore down Market Street was evenlouder. There was almost no one on the streets anymore — just thepeople trying hopelessly to get underground. A lot of them were crying.
I spotted a bunch of empty benches — usually staked out by skanky wi-nos — and pointed toward them.
We moved for them, the sirens and the smoke making us duck andhunch our shoulders. We got as far as the benches before Darryl fellforward.
We all yelled and Vanessa grabbed him and turned him over. The sideof his shirt was stained red, and the stain was spreading. She tugged hisshirt up and revealed a long, deep cut in his pudgy side.
"Someone freaking stabbed him in the crowd," Jolu said, his handsclenching into fists. "Christ, that's vicious."Darryl groaned and looked at us, then down at his side, then hegroaned and his head went back again.
Vanessa took off her jean jacket and then pulled off the cotton hoodieshe was wearing underneath it. She wadded it up and pressed it toDarryl's side. "Take his head," she said to me. "Keep it elevated." To Jolushe said, "Get his feet up — roll up your coat or something." Jolu movedquickly. Vanessa's mother is a nurse and she'd had first aid trainingevery summer at camp. She loved to watch people in movies get theirfirst aid wrong and make fun of them. I was so glad to have her with us.
39We sat there for a long time, holding the hoodie to Darryl's side. Hekept insisting that he was fine and that we should let him up, and Vankept telling him to shut up and lie still before she kicked his ass.
"What about calling 911?" Jolu said.
I felt like an idiot. I whipped my phone out and punched 911. Thesound I got wasn't even a busy signal — it was like a whimper of painfrom the phone system. You don't get sounds like that unless there'sthree million people all dialing the same number at once. Who needs bot-nets when you've got terrorists?
"What about Wikipedia?" Jolu said.
"No phone, no data," I said.
"What about them?" Darryl said, and pointed at the street. I lookedwhere he was pointing, thinking I'd see a cop or an paramedic, but therewas no one there.
"It's OK buddy, you just rest," I said.
"No, you idiot, what about them, the cops in the cars? There!"He was right. Every five seconds, a cop car, an ambulance or afiretruck zoomed past. They could get us some help. I was such an idiot.
"Come on, then," I said, "let's get you where they can see you and flagone down."Vanessa didn't like it, but I figured a cop wasn't going to stop for a kidwaving his hat in the street, not that day. They just might stop if theysaw Darryl bleeding there, though. I argued briefly with her and Darrylsettled it by lurching to his feet and dragging himself down toward Mar-ket Street.
The first vehicle that screamed past — an ambulance — didn't evenslow down. Neither did the cop car that went past, nor the firetruck, northe next three cop-cars. Darryl wasn't in good shape — he was white-faced and panting. Van's sweater was soaked in blood.
I was sick of cars driving right past me. The next time a car appeareddown Market Street, I stepped right out into the road, waving my armsover my head, shouting "STOP." The car slewed to a stop and only thendid I notice that it wasn't a cop car, ambulance or fire-engine.
It was a military-looking Jeep, like an armored Hummer, only it didn'thave any military insignia on it. The car skidded to a stop just in front ofme, and I jumped back and lost my balance and ended up on the road. Ifelt the doors open near me, and then saw a confusion of booted feet40moving close by. I looked up and saw a bunch of military-looking guysin coveralls, holding big, bulky rifles and wearing hooded gas maskswith tinted face-plates.
I barely had time to register them before those rifles were pointed atme. I'd never looked down the barrel of a gun before, but everythingyou've heard about the experience is true. You freeze where you are,time stops, and your heart thunders in your ears. I opened my mouth,then shut it, then, very slowly, I held my hands up in front of me.
The faceless, eyeless armed man above me kept his gun very level. Ididn't even breathe. Van was screaming something and Jolu was shout-ing and I looked at them for a second and that was when someone put acoarse sack over my head and cinched it tight around my windpipe, soquick and so fiercely I barely had time to gasp before it was locked onme. I was pushed roughly but dispassionately onto my stomach andsomething went twice around my wrists and then tightened up as well,feeling like baling wire and biting cruelly. I cried out and my own voicewas muffled by the hood.
I was in total darkness now and I strained my ears to hear what wasgoing on with my friends. I heard them shouting through the mufflingcanvas of the bag, and then I was being impersonally hauled to my feetby my wrists, my arms wrenched up behind my back, my shouldersscreaming.
I stumbled some, then a hand pushed my head down and I was insidethe Hummer. More bodies were roughly shoved in beside me.
"Guys?" I shouted, and earned a hard thump on my head for mytrouble. I heard Jolu respond, then felt the thump he was dealt, too. Myhead rang like a gong.
"Hey," I said to the soldiers. "Hey, listen! We're just high school stu-dents. I wanted to flag you down because my friend was bleeding.
Someone stabbed him." I had no idea how much of this was making itthrough the muffling bag. I kept talking. "Listen — this is some kind ofmisunderstanding. We've got to get my friend to a hospital —"Someone went upside my head again. It felt like they used a baton orsomething — it was harder than anyone had ever hit me in the head be-fore. My eyes swam and watered and I literally couldn't breathe throughthe pain. A moment later, I caught my breath, but I didn't say anything.
I'd learned my lesson.
41Who were these clowns? They weren't wearing insignia. Maybe theywere terrorists! I'd never really believed in terrorists before — I mean, Iknew that in the abstract there were terrorists somewhere in the world,but they didn't really represent any risk to me. There were millions ofways that the world could kill me — starting with getting run down by adrunk burning his way down Valencia — that were infinitely more likelyand immediate than terrorists. Terrorists killed a lot fewer people thanbathroom falls and accidental electrocutions. Worrying about them al-ways struck me as about as useful as worrying about getting hit bylightning.
Sitting in the back of that Hummer, my head in a hood, my handslashed behind my back, lurching back and forth while the bruisesswelled up on my head, terrorism suddenly felt a lot riskier.
The car rocked back and forth and tipped uphill. I gathered we wereheaded over Nob Hill, and from the angle, it seemed we were taking oneof the steeper routes — I guessed Powell Street.
Now we were descending just as steeply. If my mental map was right,we were heading down to Fisherman's Wharf. You could get on a boatthere, get away. That fit with the terrorism hypothesis. Why the hellwould terrorists kidnap a bunch of high school students?
We rocked to a stop still on a downslope. The engine died and then thedoors swung open. Someone dragged me by my arms out onto the road,then shoved me, stumbling, down a paved road. A few seconds later, Itripped over a steel staircase, bashing my shins. The hands behind megave me another shove. I went up the stairs cautiously, not able to usemy hands. I got up the third step and reached for the fourth, but it wasn'tthere. I nearly fell again, but new hands grabbed me from in front anddragged me down a steel floor and then forced me to my knees andlocked my hands to something behind me.
More movement, and the sense of bodies being shackled in alongsideof me. Groans and muffled sounds. Laughter. Then a long, timelesseternity in the muffled gloom, breathing my own breath, hearing myown breath in my ears.
I actually managed a kind of sleep there, kneeling with the circulationcut off to my legs, my head in canvas twilight. My body had squirted ayear's supply of adrenalin into my bloodstream in the space of 30minutes, and while that stuff can give you the strength to lift cars off42your loved ones and leap over tall buildings, the payback's always abitch.
I woke up to someone pulling the hood off my head. They wereneither rough nor careful — just… impersonal. Like someone atMcDonald's putting together burgers.
The light in the room was so bright I had to squeeze my eyes shut, butslowly I was able to open them to slits, then cracks, then all the way andlook around.
We were all in the back of a truck, a big 16-wheeler. I could see thewheel-wells at regular intervals down the length. But the back of thistruck had been turned into some kind of mobile command-post/jail.
Steel desks lined the walls with banks of slick flat-panel displays climb-ing above them on articulated arms that let them be repositioned in ahalo around the operators. Each desk had a gorgeous office-chair in frontof it, festooned with user-interface knobs for adjusting every millimeterof the sitting surface, as well as height, pitch and yaw.
Then there was the jail part — at the front of the truck, furthest awayfrom the doors, there were steel rails bolted into the sides of the vehicle,and attached to these steel rails were the prisoners.
I spotted Van and Jolu right away. Darryl might have been in the re-maining dozen shackled up back here, but it was impossible to say —many of them were slumped over and blocking my view. It stank ofsweat and fear back there.
Vanessa looked at me and bit her lip. She was scared. So was I. So wasJolu, his eyes rolling crazily in their sockets, the whites showing. I wasscared. What's more, I had to piss like a race-horse.
I looked around for our captors. I'd avoided looking at them up untilnow, the same way you don't look into the dark of a closet where yourmind has conjured up a boogey-man. You don't want to know if you'reright.
But I had to get a better look at these jerks who'd kidnapped us. If theywere terrorists, I wanted to know. I didn't know what a terrorist lookedlike, though TV shows had done their best to convince me that they werebrown Arabs with big beards and knit caps and loose cotton dresses thathung down to their ankles.
Not so our captors. They could have been half-time-show cheerleaderson the Super Bowl. They looked American in a way I couldn't exactlydefine. Good jaw-lines, short, neat haircuts that weren't quite military.
43They came in white and brown, male and female, and smiled freely atone another as they sat down at the other end of the truck, joking anddrinking coffees out of go-cups. These weren't Ay-rabs from Afgh-anistan: they looked like tourists from Nebraska.
I stared at one, a young white woman with brown hair who barelylooked older than me, kind of cute in a scary office-power-suit way. Ifyou stare at someone long enough, they'll eventually look back at you.
She did, and her face slammed into a totally different configuration, dis-passionate, even robotic. The smile vanished in an instant.
"Hey," I said. "Look, I don't understand what's going on here, but Ireally need to take a leak, you know?"She looked right through me as if she hadn't heard.
"I'm serious, if I don't get to a can soon, I'm going to have an ugly acci-dent. It's going to get pretty smelly back here, you know?"She turned to her colleagues, a little huddle of three of them, and theyheld a low conversation I couldn't hear over the fans from thecomputers.
She turned back to me. "Hold it for another ten minutes, then you'lleach get a piss-call.""I don't think I've got another ten minutes in me," I said, letting a littlemore urgency than I was really feeling creep into my voice. "Seriously,lady, it's now or never."She shook her head and looked at me like I was some kind of patheticloser. She and her friends conferred some more, then another one cameforward. He was older, in his early thirties, and pretty big across theshoulders, like he worked out. He looked like he was Chinese or Korean— even Van can't tell the difference sometimes — but with that bearingthat said American in a way I couldn't put my finger on.
He pulled his sports-coat aside to let me see the hardware strappedthere: I recognized a pistol, a tazer and a can of either mace or pepper-spray before he let it fall again.
"No trouble," he said.
"None," I agreed.
He touched something at his belt and the shackles behind me let go,my arms dropping suddenly behind me. It was like he was wearingBatman's utility belt — wireless remotes for shackles! I guessed it madesense, though: you wouldn't want to lean over your prisoners with all44that deadly hardware at their eye-level — they might grab your gun withtheir teeth and pull the trigger with their tongues or something.
My hands were still lashed together behind me by the plastic strap-ping, and now that I wasn't supported by the shackles, I found that mylegs had turned into lumps of cork while I was stuck in one position.
Long story short, I basically fell onto my face and kicked my legs weaklyas they went pins-and-needles, trying to get them under me so I couldrock up to my feet.
The guy jerked me to my feet and I clown-walked to the very back ofthe truck, to a little boxed-in porta-john there. I tried to spot Darryl onthe way back, but he could have been any of the five or six slumpedpeople. Or none of them.
"In you go," the guy said.
I jerked my wrists. "Take these off, please?" My fingers felt like purplesausages from the hours of bondage in the plastic cuffs.
The guy didn't move.
"Look," I said, trying not to sound sarcastic or angry (it wasn't easy).
"Look. You either cut my wrists free or you're going to have to aim forme. A toilet visit is not a hands-free experience." Someone in the trucksniggered. The guy didn't like me, I could tell from the way his jawmuscles ground around. Man, these people were wired tight.
He reached down to his belt and came up with a very nice set of multi-pliers. He flicked out a wicked-looking knife and sliced through theplastic cuffs and my hands were my own again.
"Thanks," I said.
He shoved me into the bathroom. My hands were useless, like lumpsof clay on the ends of my wrists. As I wiggled my fingers limply, theytingled, then the tingling turned to a burning feeling that almost mademe cry out. I put the seat down, dropped my pants and sat down. Ididn't trust myself to stay on my feet.
As my bladder cut loose, so did my eyes. I wept, crying silently androcking back and forth while the tears and snot ran down my face. It wasall I could do to keep from sobbing — I covered my mouth and held thesounds in. I didn't want to give them the satisfaction.
Finally, I was peed out and cried out and the guy was pounding on thedoor. I cleaned my face as best as I could with wads of toilet paper, stuckit all down the john and flushed, then looked around for a sink but onlyfound a pump-bottle of heavy-duty hand-sanitizer covered in small-45print lists of the bio-agents it worked on. I rubbed some into my handsand stepped out of the john.
"What were you doing in there?" the guy said.
"Using the facilities," I said. He turned me around and grabbed myhands and I felt a new pair of plastic cuffs go around them. My wristshad swollen since the last pair had come off and the new ones bit cruellyinto my tender skin, but I refused to give him the satisfaction of cryingout.
He shackled me back to my spot and grabbed the next person down,who, I saw now, was Jolu, his face puffy and an ugly bruise on his cheek.
"Are you OK?" I asked him, and my friend with the utility belt ab-ruptly put his hand on my forehead and shoved hard, bouncing the backof my head off the truck's metal wall with a sound like a clock strikingone. "No talking," he said as I struggled to refocus my eyes.
I didn't like these people. I decided right then that they would pay aprice for all this.
One by one, all the prisoners went to the can, and came back, andwhen they were done, my guard went back to his friends and had anoth-er cup of coffee — they were drinking out of a big cardboard urn of Star-bucks, I saw — and they had an indistinct conversation that involved afair bit of laughter.
Then the door at the back of the truck opened and there was fresh air,not smoky the way it had been before, but tinged with ozone. In the sliceof outdoors I saw before the door closed, I caught that it was dark out,and raining, with one of those San Francisco drizzles that's part mist.
The man who came in was wearing a military uniform. A US militaryuniform. He saluted the people in the truck and they saluted him backand that's when I knew that I wasn't a prisoner of some terrorists — Iwas a prisoner of the United States of America.
They set up a little screen at the end of the truck and then came for usone at a time, unshackling us and leading us to the back of the truck. Asclose as I could work it — counting seconds off in my head, one hippo-potami, two hippopotami — the interviews lasted about seven minuteseach. My head throbbed with dehydration and caffeine withdrawal.
I was third, brought back by the woman with the severe haircut. Upclose, she looked tired, with bags under her eyes and grim lines at thecorners of her mouth.
46"Thanks," I said, automatically, as she unlocked me with a remote andthen dragged me to my feet. I hated myself for the automatic politeness,but it had been drilled into me.
She didn't twitch a muscle. I went ahead of her to the back of the truckand behind the screen. There was a single folding chair and I sat in it.
Two of them — Severe Haircut woman and utility belt man — looked atme from their ergonomic super-chairs.
They had a little table between them with the contents of my walletand backpack spread out on it.
"Hello, Marcus," Severe Haircut woman said. "We have some ques-tions for you.""Am I under arrest?" I asked. This wasn't an idle question. If you're notunder arrest, there are limits on what the cops can and can't do to you.
For starters, they can't hold you forever without arresting you, givingyou a phone call, and letting you talk to a lawyer. And hoo-boy, was Iever going to talk to a lawyer.
"What's this for?" she said, holding up my phone. The screen wasshowing the error message you got if you kept trying to get into its datawithout giving the right password. It was a bit of a rude message — ananimated hand giving a certain universally recognized gesture — be-cause I liked to customize my gear.
"Am I under arrest?" I repeated. They can't make you answer anyquestions if you're not under arrest, and when you ask if you're underarrest, they have to answer you. It's the rules.
"You're being detained by the Department of Homeland Security," thewoman snapped.
"Am I under arrest?""You're going to be more cooperative, Marcus, starting right now." Shedidn't say, "or else," but it was implied.
"I would like to contact an attorney," I said. "I would like to knowwhat I've been charged with. I would like to see some form of identifica-tion from both of you."The two agents exchanged looks.
"I think you should really reconsider your approach to this situation,"Severe Haircut woman said. "I think you should do that right now. Wefound a number of suspicious devices on your person. We found youand your confederates near the site of the worst terrorist attack this47country has ever seen. Put those two facts together and things don't lookvery good for you, Marcus. You can cooperate, or you can be very, verysorry. Now, what is this for?""You think I'm a terrorist? I'm seventeen years old!""Just the right age — Al Qaeda loves recruiting impressionable, ideal-istic kids. We googled you, you know. You've posted a lot of very uglystuff on the public Internet.""I would like to speak to an attorney," I said.
Severe haircut lady looked at me like I was a bug. "You're under themistaken impression that you've been picked up by the police for acrime. You need to get past that. You are being detained as a potentialenemy combatant by the government of the United States. If I were you,I'd be thinking very hard about how to convince us that you are not anenemy combatant. Very hard. Because there are dark holes that enemycombatants can disappear into, very dark deep holes, holes where youcan just vanish. Forever. Are you listening to me young man? I want youto unlock this phone and then decrypt the files in its memory. I want youto account for yourself: why were you out on the street? What do youknow about the attack on this city?""I'm not going to unlock my phone for you," I said, indignant. Myphone's memory had all kinds of private stuff on it: photos, emails, littlehacks and mods I'd installed. "That's private stuff.""What have you got to hide?""I've got the right to my privacy," I said. "And I want to speak to anattorney.""This is your last chance, kid. Honest people don't have anything tohide.""I want to speak to an attorney." My parents would pay for it. All theFAQs on getting arrested were clear on this point. Just keep asking to seean attorney, no matter what they say or do. There's no good that comesof talking to the cops without your lawyer present. These two said theyweren't cops, but if this wasn't an arrest, what was it?
In hindsight, maybe I should have unlocked my phone for them.

Chapter 4
This chapter is dedicated to Barnes and Noble, a US national chain ofbookstores. As America's mom-and-pop bookstores were vanishing,Barnes and Noble started to build these gigantic temples to reading allacross the land. Stocking tens of thousands of titles (the mall bookstoresand grocery-store spinner racks had stocked a small fraction of that) andkeeping long hours that were convenient to families, working people andothers potential readers, the B&N stores kept the careers of manywriters afloat, stocking titles that smaller stores couldn't possibly affordto keep on their limited shelves. B&N has always had strong communityoutreach programs, and I've done some of my best-attended, best-organ-ized signings at B&N stores, including the great events at the (sadly de-parted) B&N in union Square, New York, where the mega-signing afterthe Nebula Awards took place, and the B&N in Chicago that hosted theevent after the Nebs a few years later. Best of all is that B&N's "geeky"buyers really Get It when it comes to science fiction, comics and manga,games and similar titles. They're passionate and knowledgeable aboutthe field and it shows in the excellent selection on display at the stores.
Barnes and Noble, nationwideThey re-shackled and re-hooded me and left me there. A long timelater, the truck started to move, rolling downhill, and then I was hauledback to my feet. I immediately fell over. My legs were so asleep they feltlike blocks of ice, all except my knees, which were swollen and tenderfrom all the hours of kneeling.
Hands grabbed my shoulders and feet and I was picked up like a sackof potatoes. There were indistinct voices around me. Someone crying.
Someone cursing.
I was carried a short distance, then set down and re-shackled to anoth-er railing. My knees wouldn't support me anymore and I pitched49forward, ending up twisted on the ground like a pretzel, strainingagainst the chains holding my wrists.
Then we were moving again, and this time, it wasn't like driving in atruck. The floor beneath me rocked gently and vibrated with heavy dies-el engines and I realized I was on a ship! My stomach turned to ice. I wasbeing taken off America's shores to somewhere else, and who the hellknew where that was? I'd been scared before, but this thought terrifiedme, left me paralyzed and wordless with fear. I realized that I might nev-er see my parents again and I actually tasted a little vomit burn up mythroat. The bag over my head closed in on me and I could barely breathe,something that was compounded by the weird position I was twistedinto.
But mercifully we weren't on the water for very long. It felt like anhour, but I know now that it was a mere fifteen minutes, and then I feltus docking, felt footsteps on the decking around me and felt other pris-oners being unshackled and carried or led away. When they came forme, I tried to stand again, but couldn't, and they carried me again, im-personally, roughly.
When they took the hood off again, I was in a cell.
The cell was old and crumbled, and smelled of sea air. There was onewindow high up, and rusted bars guarded it. It was still dark outside.
There was a blanket on the floor and a little metal toilet without a seat,set into the wall. The guard who took off my hood grinned at me andclosed the solid steel door behind him.
I gently massaged my legs, hissing as the blood came back into themand into my hands. Eventually I was able to stand, and then to pace. Iheard other people talking, crying, shouting. I did some shouting too:
"Jolu! Darryl! Vanessa!" Other voices on the cell-block took up the cry,shouting out names, too, shouting out obscenities. The nearest voicessounded like drunks losing their minds on a street-corner. Maybe I soun-ded like that too.
Guards shouted at us to be quiet and that just made everyone yelllouder. Eventually we were all howling, screaming our heads off,screaming our throats raw. Why not? What did we have to lose?
The next time they came to question me, I was filthy and tired, thirstyand hungry. Severe haircut lady was in the new questioning party, aswere three big guys who moved me around like a cut of meat. One was50black, the other two were white, though one might have been hispanic.
They all carried guns. It was like a Benneton's ad crossed with a game ofCounter-Strike.
They'd taken me from my cell and chained my wrists and ankles to-gether. I paid attention to my surroundings as we went. I heard wateroutside and thought that maybe we were on Alcatraz — it was a prison,after all, even if it had been a tourist attraction for generations, the placewhere you went to see where Al Capone and his gangster contemporar-ies did their time. But I'd been to Alcatraz on a school trip. It was old andrusted, medieval. This place felt like it dated back to World War Two,not colonial times.
There were bar-codes laser-printed on stickers and placed on each ofthe cell-doors, and numbers, but other than that, there was no way to tellwho or what might be behind them.
The interrogation room was modern, with fluorescent lights, ergonom-ic chairs — not for me, though, I got a folding plastic garden-chair — anda big wooden board-room table. A mirror lined one wall, just like in thecop shows, and I figured someone or other must be watching from be-hind it. Severe haircut lady and her friends helped themselves to coffeesfrom an urn on a side-table (I could have torn her throat out with myteeth and taken her coffee just then), and then set a styrofoam cup of wa-ter down next to me — without unlocking my wrists from behind myback, so I couldn't reach it. Hardy har har.
"Hello, Marcus," Severe Haircut woman said. "How's your 'tude doingtoday?"I didn't say anything.
"This isn't as bad as it gets you know," she said. "This is as good as itgets from now on. Even once you tell us what we want to know, even ifthat convinces us that you were just in the wrong place at the wrongtime, you're a marked man now. We'll be watching you everywhere yougo and everything you do. You've acted like you've got something tohide, and we don't like that."It's pathetic, but all my brain could think about was that phrase,"convince us that you were in the wrong place at the wrong time." Thiswas the worst thing that had ever happened to me. I had never, ever feltthis bad or this scared before. Those words, "wrong place at the wrongtime," those six words, they were like a lifeline dangling before me as Ithrashed to stay on the surface.
51"Hello, Marcus?" she snapped her fingers in front of my face. "Overhere, Marcus." There was a little smile on her face and I hated myself forletting her see my fear. "Marcus, it can be a lot worse than this. This isn'tthe worst place we can put you, not by a damned sight." She reacheddown below the table and came out with a briefcase, which she snappedopen. From it, she withdrew my phone, my arphid sniper/cloner, mywifinder, and my memory keys. She set them down on the table oneafter the other.
"Here's what we want from you. You unlock the phone for us today. Ifyou do that, you'll get outdoor and bathing privileges. You'll get ashower and you'll be allowed to walk around in the exercise yard. To-morrow, we'll bring you back and ask you to decrypt the data on thesememory sticks. Do that, and you'll get to eat in the mess hall. The dayafter, we're going to want your email passwords, and that will get youlibrary privileges."The word "no" was on my lips, like a burp trying to come up, but itwouldn't come. "Why?" is what came out instead.
"We want to be sure that you're what you seem to be. This is aboutyour security, Marcus. Say you're innocent. You might be, though whyan innocent man would act like he's got so much to hide is beyond me.
But say you are: you could have been on that bridge when it blew. Yourparents could have been. Your friends. Don't you want us to catch thepeople who attacked your home?"It's funny, but when she was talking about my getting "privileges" itscared me into submission. I felt like I'd done something to end up whereI was, like maybe it was partially my fault, like I could do something tochange it.
But as soon as she switched to this BS about "safety" and "security," myspine came back. "Lady," I said, "you're talking about attacking myhome, but as far as I can tell, you're the only one who's attacked melately. I thought I lived in a country with a constitution. I thought I livedin a country where I had rights. You're talking about defending my free-dom by tearing up the Bill of Rights."A flicker of annoyance passed over her face, then went away. "So me-lodramatic, Marcus. No one's attacked you. You've been detained byyour country's government while we seek details on the worst terroristattack ever perpetrated on our nation's soil. You have it within yourpower to help us fight this war on our nation's enemies. You want to pre-serve the Bill of Rights? Help us stop bad people from blowing up your52city. Now, you have exactly thirty seconds to unlock that phone before Isend you back to your cell. We have lots of other people to interviewtoday."She looked at her watch. I rattled my wrists, rattled the chains thatkept me from reaching around and unlocking the phone. Yes, I was go-ing to do it. She'd told me what my path was to freedom — to the world,to my parents — and that had given me hope. Now she'd threatened tosend me away, to take me off that path, and my hope had crashed and allI could think of was how to get back on it.
So I rattled my wrists, wanting to get to my phone and unlock it forher, and she just looked at me coldly, checking her watch.
"The password," I said, finally understanding what she wanted of me.
She wanted me to say it out loud, here, where she could record it, whereher pals could hear it. She didn't want me to just unlock the phone. Shewanted me to submit to her. To put her in charge of me. To give upevery secret, all my privacy. "The password," I said again, and then I toldher the password. God help me, I submitted to her will.
She smiled a little prim smile, which had to be her ice-queen equival-ent of a touchdown dance, and the guards led me away. As the doorclosed, I saw her bend down over the phone and key the password in.
I wish I could say that I'd anticipated this possibility in advance andcreated a fake password that unlocked a completely innocuous partitionon my phone, but I wasn't nearly that paranoid/clever.
You might be wondering at this point what dark secrets I had lockedaway on my phone and memory sticks and email. I'm just a kid, after all.
The truth is that I had everything to hide, and nothing. Between myphone and my memory sticks, you could get a pretty good idea of whomy friends were, what I thought of them, all the goofy things we'd done.
You could read the transcripts of the electronic arguments we'd carriedout and the electronic reconciliations we'd arrived at.
You see, I don't delete stuff. Why would I? Storage is cheap, and younever know when you're going to want to go back to that stuff. Espe-cially the stupid stuff. You know that feeling you get sometimes whereyou're sitting on the subway and there's no one to talk to and you sud-denly remember some bitter fight you had, some terrible thing you said?
Well, it's usually never as bad as you remember. Being able to go backand see it again is a great way to remind yourself that you're not as53horrible a person as you think you are. Darryl and I have gotten overmore fights that way than I can count.
And even that's not it. I know my phone is private. I know mymemory sticks are private. That's because of cryptography — messagescrambling. The math behind crypto is good and solid, and you and meget access to the same crypto that banks and the National SecurityAgency use. There's only one kind of crypto that anyone uses: cryptothat's public, open and can be deployed by anyone. That's how youknow it works.
There's something really liberating about having some corner of yourlife that's yours, that no one gets to see except you. It's a little like nudityor taking a dump. Everyone gets naked every once in a while. Everyonehas to squat on the toilet. There's nothing shameful, deviant or weirdabout either of them. But what if I decreed that from now on, every timeyou went to evacuate some solid waste, you'd have to do it in a glassroom perched in the middle of Times Square, and you'd be buck naked?
Even if you've got nothing wrong or weird with your body — andhow many of us can say that? — you'd have to be pretty strange to likethat idea. Most of us would run screaming. Most of us would hold it inuntil we exploded.
It's not about doing something shameful. It's about doing somethingprivate. It's about your life belonging to you.
They were taking that from me, piece by piece. As I walked back to mycell, that feeling of deserving it came back to me. I'd broken a lot of rulesall my life and I'd gotten away with it, by and large. Maybe this wasjustice. Maybe this was my past coming back to me. After all, I had beenwhere I was because I'd snuck out of school.
I got my shower. I got to walk around the yard. There was a patch ofsky overhead, and it smelled like the Bay Area, but beyond that, I had noclue where I was being held. No other prisoners were visible during myexercise period, and I got pretty bored with walking in circles. I strainedmy ears for any sound that might help me understand what this placewas, but all I heard was the occasional vehicle, some distant conversa-tions, a plane landing somewhere nearby.
They brought me back to my cell and fed me, a half a pepperoni piefrom Goat Hill Pizza, which I knew well, up on Potrero Hill. The cartonwith its familiar graphic and 415 phone number was a reminder thatonly a day before, I'd been a free man in a free country and that now Iwas a prisoner. I worried constantly about Darryl and fretted about my54other friends. Maybe they'd been more cooperative and had been re-leased. Maybe they'd told my parents and they were frantically callingaround.
Maybe not.
The cell was fantastically spare, empty as my soul. I fantasized that thewall opposite my bunk was a screen, that I could be hacking right now,opening the cell-door. I fantasized about my workbench and the projectsthere — the old cans I was turning into a ghetto surround-sound rig, theaerial photography kite-cam I was building, my homebrew laptop.
I wanted to get out of there. I wanted to go home and have my friendsand my school and my parents and my life back. I wanted to be able togo where I wanted to go, not be stuck pacing and pacing and pacing.
They took my passwords for my USB keys next. Those held some in-teresting messages I'd downloaded from one online discussion group oranother, some chat transcripts, things where people had helped me outwith some of the knowledge I needed to do the things I did. There wasnothing on there you couldn't find with Google, of course, but I didn'tthink that would count in my favor.
I got exercise again that afternoon, and this time there were others inthe yard when I got there, four other guys and two women, of all agesand racial backgrounds. I guess lots of people were doing things to earntheir "privileges."They gave me half an hour, and I tried to make conversation with themost normal-seeming of the other prisoners, a black guy about my agewith a short afro. But when I introduced myself and stuck my hand out,he cut his eyes toward the cameras mounted ominously in the corners ofthe yard and kept walking without ever changing his facial expression.
But then, just before they called my name and brought me back intothe building, the door opened and out came — Vanessa! I'd never beenmore glad to see a friendly face. She looked tired and grumpy, but nothurt, and when she saw me, she shouted my name and ran to me. Wehugged each other hard and I realized I was shaking. Then I realized shewas shaking, too.
"Are you OK?" she said, holding me at arms' length.
"I'm OK," I said. "They told me they'd let me go if I gave them mypasswords.""They keep asking me questions about you and Darryl."55There was a voice blaring over the loudspeaker, shouting at us to stoptalking, to walk, but we ignored it.
"Answer them," I said, instantly. "Anything they ask, answer them. Ifit'll get you out.""How are Darryl and Jolu?""I haven't seen them."The door banged open and four big guards boiled out. Two took meand two took Vanessa. They forced me to the ground and turned myhead away from Vanessa, though I heard her getting the same treatment.
Plastic cuffs went around my wrists and then I was yanked to my feetand brought back to my cell.
No dinner came that night. No breakfast came the next morning. Noone came and brought me to the interrogation room to extract more ofmy secrets. The plastic cuffs didn't come off, and my shoulders burned,then ached, then went numb, then burned again. I lost all feeling in myhands.
I had to pee. I couldn't undo my pants. I really, really had to pee.
I pissed myself.
They came for me after that, once the hot piss had cooled and goneclammy, making my already filthy jeans stick to my legs. They came forme and walked me down the long hall lined with doors, each door withits own bar code, each bar code a prisoner like me. They walked medown the corridor and brought me to the interrogation room and it waslike a different planet when I entered there, a world where things werenormal, where everything didn't reek of urine. I felt so dirty andashamed, and all those feelings of deserving what I got came back to me.
Severe haircut lady was already sitting. She was perfect: coifed andwith just a little makeup. I smelled her hair stuff. She wrinkled her noseat me. I felt the shame rise in me.
"Well, you've been a very naughty boy, haven't you? Aren't you afilthy thing?"Shame. I looked down at the table. I couldn't bear to look up. I wantedto tell her my email password and get gone.
"What did you and your friend talk about in the yard?"I barked a laugh at the table. "I told her to answer your questions. Itold her to cooperate.""So do you give the orders?"56I felt the blood sing in my ears. "Oh come on," I said. "We play a gametogether, it's called Harajuku Fun Madness. I'm the team captain. We'renot terrorists, we're high school students. I don't give her orders. I toldher that we needed to be honest with you so that we could clear up anysuspicion and get out of here."She didn't say anything for a moment.
"How is Darryl?" I said.
"Who?""Darryl. You picked us up together. My friend. Someone had stabbedhim in the Powell Street BART. That's why we were up on the surface.
To get him help.""I'm sure he's fine, then," she said.
My stomach knotted and I almost threw up. "You don't know? Youhaven't got him here?""Who we have here and who we don't have here is not somethingwe're going to discuss with you, ever. That's not something you're goingto know. Marcus, you've seen what happens when you don't cooperatewith us. You've seen what happens when you disobey our orders.
You've been a little cooperative, and it's gotten you almost to the pointwhere you might go free again. If you want to make that possibility intoa reality, you'll stick to answering my questions."I didn't say anything.
"You're learning, that's good. Now, your email passwords, please."I was ready for this. I gave them everything: server address, login,password. This didn't matter. I didn't keep any email on my server. Idownloaded it all and kept it on my laptop at home, which downloadedand deleted my mail from the server every sixty seconds. They wouldn'tget anything out of my mail — it got cleared off the server and stored onmy laptop at home.
Back to the cell, but they cut loose my hands and they gave me ashower and a pair of orange prison pants to wear. They were too big forme and hung down low on my hips, like a Mexican gang-kid in the Mis-sion. That's where the baggy-pants-down-your-ass look comes from youknow that? From prison. I tell you what, it's less fun when it's not a fash-ion statement.
They took away my jeans, and I spent another day in the cell. Thewalls were scratched cement over a steel grid. You could tell, because the57steel was rusting in the salt air, and the grid shone through the greenpaint in red-orange. My parents were out that window, somewhere.
They came for me again the next day.
"We've been reading your mail for a day now. We changed the pass-word so that your home computer couldn't fetch it."Well, of course they had. I would have done the same, now that Ithought of it.
"We have enough on you now to put you away for a very long time,Marcus. Your possession of these articles —" she gestured at all my littlegizmos — "and the data we recovered from your phone and memorysticks, as well as the subversive material we'd no doubt find if we raidedyour house and took your computer. It's enough to put you away untilyou're an old man. Do you understand that?"I didn't believe it for a second. There's no way a judge would say thatall this stuff constituted any kind of real crime. It was free speech, it wastechnological tinkering. It wasn't a crime.
But who said that these people would ever put me in front of a judge.
"We know where you live, we know who your friends are. We knowhow you operate and how you think."It dawned on me then. They were about to let me go. The roomseemed to brighten. I heard myself breathing, short little breaths.
"We just want to know one thing: what was the delivery mechanismfor the bombs on the bridge?"I stopped breathing. The room darkened again.
"What?""There were ten charges on the bridge, all along its length. Theyweren't in car-trunks. They'd been placed there. Who placed them there,and how did they get there?""What?" I said it again.
"This is your last chance, Marcus," she said. She looked sad. "You weredoing so well until now. Tell us this and you can go home. You can get alawyer and defend yourself in a court of law. There are doubtless exten-uating circumstances that you can use to explain your actions. Just tell usthis thing, and you're gone.""I don't know what you're talking about!" I was crying and I didn'teven care. Sobbing, blubbering. "I have no idea what you're talking about!"58She shook her head. "Marcus, please. Let us help you. By now youknow that we always get what we're after."There was a gibbering sound in the back of my mind. They were in-sane. I pulled myself together, working hard to stop the tears. "Listen,lady, this is nuts. You've been into my stuff, you've seen it all. I'm a sev-enteen year old high school student, not a terrorist! You can't seriouslythink —""Marcus, haven't you figured out that we're serious yet?" She shookher head. "You get pretty good grades. I thought you'd be smarter thanthat." She made a flicking gesture and the guards picked me up by thearmpits.
Back in my cell, a hundred little speeches occurred to me. The Frenchcall this "esprit d'escalier" — the spirit of the staircase, the snappy rebut-tals that come to you after you leave the room and slink down the stairs.
In my mind, I stood and delivered, telling her that I was a citizen wholoved my freedom, which made me the patriot and made her the traitor.
In my mind, I shamed her for turning my country into an armed camp.
In my mind, I was eloquent and brilliant and reduced her to tears.
But you know what? None of those fine words came back to me whenthey pulled me out the next day. All I could think of was freedom. Myparents.
"Hello, Marcus," she said. "How are you feeling?"I looked down at the table. She had a neat pile of documents in front ofher, and her ubiquitous go-cup of Starbucks beside her. I found it com-forting somehow, a reminder that there was a real world out there some-where, beyond the walls.
"We're through investigating you, for now." She let that hang there.
Maybe it meant that she was letting me go. Maybe it meant that she wasgoing to throw me in a pit and forget that I existed.
"And?" I said finally.
"And I want you to impress on you again that we are very seriousabout this. Our country has experienced the worst attack ever committedon its soil. How many 9/11s do you want us to suffer before you're will-ing to cooperate? The details of our investigation are secret. We won'tstop at anything in our efforts to bring the perpetrators of these heinouscrimes to justice. Do you understand that?""Yes," I mumbled.
59"We are going to send you home today, but you are a marked man.
You have not been found to be above suspicion — we're only releasingyou because we're done questioning you for now. But from now on, youbelong to us. We will be watching you. We'll be waiting for you to make amisstep. Do you understand that we can watch you closely, all the time?""Yes," I mumbled.
"Good. You will never speak of what happened here to anyone, ever.
This is a matter of national security. Do you know that the death penaltystill holds for treason in time of war?""Yes," I mumbled.
"Good boy," she purred. "We have some papers here for you to sign."She pushed the stack of papers across the table to me. Little post-its withSIGN HERE printed on them had been stuck throughout them. A guardundid my cuffs.
I paged through the papers and my eyes watered and my head swam.
I couldn't make sense of them. I tried to decipher the legalese. It seemedthat I was signing a declaration that I had been voluntarily held and sub-mitted to voluntary questioning, of my own free will.
"What happens if I don't sign this?" I said.
She snatched the papers back and made that flicking gesture again.
The guards jerked me to my feet.
"Wait!" I cried. "Please! I'll sign them!" They dragged me to the door.
All I could see was that door, all I could think of was it closing behindme.
I lost it. I wept. I begged to be allowed to sign the papers. To be soclose to freedom and have it snatched away, it made me ready to do any-thing. I can't count the number of times I've heard someone say, "Oh, I'drather die than do something-or-other" — I've said it myself now andagain. But that was the first time I understood what it really meant. Iwould have rather died than go back to my cell.
I begged as they took me out into the corridor. I told them I'd signanything.
She called out to the guards and they stopped. They brought me back.
They sat me down. One of them put the pen in my hand.
Of course, I signed, and signed and signed.
60My jeans and t-shirt were back in my cell, laundered and folded. Theysmelled of detergent. I put them on and washed my face and sat on mycot and stared at the wall. They'd taken everything from me. First myprivacy, then my dignity. I'd been ready to sign anything. I would havesigned a confession that said I'd assassinated Abraham Lincoln.
I tried to cry, but it was like my eyes were dry, out of tears.
They got me again. A guard approached me with a hood, like the hoodI'd been put in when they picked us up, whenever that was, days ago,weeks ago.
The hood went over my head and cinched tight at my neck. I was intotal darkness and the air was stifling and stale. I was raised to my feetand walked down corridors, up stairs, on gravel. Up a gangplank. On aship's steel deck. My hands were chained behind me, to a railing. I knelton the deck and listened to the thrum of the diesel engines.
The ship moved. A hint of salt air made its way into the hood. It wasdrizzling and my clothes were heavy with water. I was outside, even ifmy head was in a bag. I was outside, in the world, moments from myfreedom.
They came for me and led me off the boat and over uneven ground.
Up three metal stairs. My wrists were unshackled. My hood wasremoved.
I was back in the truck. Severe haircut woman was there, at the littledesk she'd sat at before. She had a ziploc bag with her, and inside it weremy phone and other little devices, my wallet and the change from mypockets. She handed them to me wordlessly.
I filled my pockets. It felt so weird to have everything back in its famil-iar place, to be wearing my familiar clothes. Outside the truck's backdoor, I heard the familiar sounds of my familiar city.
A guard passed me my backpack. The woman extended her hand tome. I just looked at it. She put it down and gave me a wry smile. Thenshe mimed zipping up her lips and pointed to me, and opened the door.
It was daylight outside, gray and drizzling. I was looking down an al-ley toward cars and trucks and bikes zipping down the road. I stoodtransfixed on the truck's top step, staring at freedom.
My knees shook. I knew now that they were playing with me again. Ina moment, the guards would grab me and drag me back inside, the bagwould go over my head again, and I would be back on the boat and sent61off to the prison again, to the endless, unanswerable questions. I barelyheld myself back from stuffing my fist in my mouth.
Then I forced myself to go down one stair. Another stair. The last stair.
My sneakers crunched down on the crap on the alley's floor, brokenglass, a needle, gravel. I took a step. Another. I reached the mouth of thealley and stepped onto the sidewalk.
No one grabbed me.
I was free.
Then strong arms threw themselves around me. I nearly cried.

Chapter 5
This chapter is dedicated to Secret Headquarters in Los Angeles, mydrop-dead all-time favorite comic store in the world. It's small and se-lective about what it stocks, and every time I walk in, I walk out withthree or four collections I'd never heard of under my arm. It's like theowners, Dave and David, have the uncanny ability to predict exactlywhat I'm looking for, and they lay it out for me seconds before I walk in-to the store. I discovered about three quarters of my favorite comics bywandering into SHQ, grabbing something interesting, sinking into oneof the comfy chairs, and finding myself transported to another world.
When my second story-collection, OVERCLOCKED, came out, theyworked with local illustrator Martin Cenreda to do a free mini-comicbased on Printcrime, the first story in the book. I left LA about a yearago, and of all the things I miss about it, Secret Headquarters is right atthe top of the list.
Secret Headquarters: 3817 W. Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA90026 +1 323 666 2228But it was Van, and she was crying, and hugging me so hard I couldn'tbreathe. I didn't care. I hugged her back, my face buried in her hair.
"You're OK!" she said.
"I'm OK," I managed.
She finally let go of me and another set of arms wrapped themselvesaround me. It was Jolu! They were both there. He whispered, "You'resafe, bro," in my ear and hugged me even tighter than Vanessa had.
When he let go, I looked around. "Where's Darryl?" I asked.
They both looked at each other. "Maybe he's still in the truck," Jolusaid.
We turned and looked at the truck at the alley's end. It was a nondes-cript white 18-wheeler. Someone had already brought the little folding63staircase inside. The rear lights glowed red, and the truck rolled back-wards towards us, emitting a steady eep, eep, eep.
"Wait!" I shouted as it accelerated towards us. "Wait! What aboutDarryl?" The truck drew closer. I kept shouting. "What about Darryl?"Jolu and Vanessa each had me by an arm and were dragging me away.
I struggled against them, shouting. The truck pulled out of the alley'smouth and reversed into the street and pointed itself downhill and droveaway. I tried to run after it, but Van and Jolu wouldn't let me go.
I sat down on the sidewalk and put my arms around my knees andcried. I cried and cried and cried, loud sobs of the sort I hadn't done sinceI was a little kid. They wouldn't stop coming. I couldn't stop shaking.
Vanessa and Jolu got me to my feet and moved me a little ways up thestreet. There was a Muni bus stop with a bench and they sat me on it.
They were both crying too, and we held each other for a while, and Iknew we were crying for Darryl, whom none of us ever expected to seeagain.
We were north of Chinatown, at the part where it starts to becomeNorth Beach, a neighborhood with a bunch of neon strip clubs and thelegendary City Lights counterculture bookstore, where the Beat poetrymovement had been founded back in the 1950s.
I knew this part of town well. My parents' favorite Italian restaurantwas here and they liked to take me here for big plates of linguine andhuge Italian ice-cream mountains with candied figs and lethal little es-pressos afterward.
Now it was a different place, a place where I was tasting freedom forthe first time in what seemed like an enternity.
We checked our pockets and found enough money to get a table at oneof the Italian restaurants, out on the sidewalk, under an awning. Thepretty waitress lighted a gas-heater with a barbeque lighter, took our or-ders and went inside. The sensation of giving orders, of controlling mydestiny, was the most amazing thing I'd ever felt.
"How long were we in there?" I asked.
"Six days," Vanessa said.
"I got five," Jolu said.
"I didn't count."64"What did they do to you?" Vanessa said. I didn't want to talk about it,but they were both looking at me. Once I started, I couldn't stop. I toldthem everything, even when I'd been forced to piss myself, and theytook it all in silently. I paused when the waitress delivered our sodas andwaited until she got out of earshot, then finished. In the telling, it re-ceded into the distance. By the end of it, I couldn't tell if I was embroid-ering the truth or if I was making it all seem less bad. My memoriesswam like little fish that I snatched at, and sometimes they wriggled outof my grasp.
Jolu shook his head. "They were hard on you, dude," he said. He toldus about his stay there. They'd questioned him, mostly about me, andhe'd kept on telling them the truth, sticking to a plain telling of the factsabout that day and about our friendship. They had gotten him to repeatit over and over again, but they hadn't played games with his head theway they had with me. He'd eaten his meals in a mess-hall with a bunchof other people, and been given time in a TV room where they wereshown last year's blockbusters on video.
Vanessa's story was only slightly different. After she'd gotten themangry by talking to me, they'd taken away her clothes and made herwear a set of orange prison overalls. She'd been left in her cell for twodays without contact, though she'd been fed regularly. But mostly it wasthe same as Jolu: the same questions, repeated again and again.
"They really hated you," Jolu said. "Really had it in for you. Why?"I couldn't imagine why. Then I remembered.
You can cooperate, or you can be very, very sorry.
"It was because I wouldn't unlock my phone for them, that first night.
That's why they singled me out." I couldn't believe it, but there was noother explanation. It had been sheer vindictiveness. My mind reeled atthe thought. They had done all that as a mere punishment for defyingtheir authority.
I had been scared. Now I was angry. "Those bastards," I said, softly.
"They did it to get back at me for mouthing off."Jolu swore and then Vanessa cut loose in Korean, something she onlydid when she was really, really angry.
"I'm going to get them," I whispered, staring at my soda. "I'm going toget them."Jolu shook his head. "You can't, you know. You can't fight back againstthat."65None of us much wanted to talk about revenge then. Instead, wetalked about what we would do next. We had to go home. Our phones'
batteries were dead and it had been years since this neighborhood hadany payphones. We just needed to go home. I even thought about takinga taxi, but there wasn't enough money between us to make that possible.
So we walked. On the corner, we pumped some quarters into a SanFrancisco Chronicle newspaper box and stopped to read the front sec-tion. It had been five days since the bombs went off, but it was still allover the front cover.
Severe haircut woman had talked about "the bridge" blowing up, andI'd just assumed that she was talking about the Golden Gate bridge, but Iwas wrong. The terrorists had blown up the Bay bridge.
"Why the hell would they blow up the Bay bridge?" I said. "TheGolden Gate is the one on all the postcards." Even if you've never been toSan Francisco, chances are you know what the Golden Gate looks like:
it's that big orange suspension bridge that swoops dramatically from theold military base called the Presidio to Sausalito, where all the cutesywine-country towns are with their scented candle shops and art galleries.
It's picturesque as hell, and it's practically the symbol for the state ofCalifornia. If you go to the Disneyland California Adventure park,there's a replica of it just past the gates, with a monorail running over it.
So naturally I assumed that if you were going to blow up a bridge inSan Francisco, that's the one you'd blow.
"They probably got scared off by all the cameras and stuff," Jolu said.
"The National Guard's always checking cars at both ends and there's allthose suicide fences and junk all along it." People have been jumping offthe Golden Gate since it opened in 1937 — they stopped counting afterthe thousandth suicide in 1995.
"Yeah," Vanessa said. "Plus the Bay Bridge actually goes somewhere."The Bay Bridge goes from downtown San Francisco to Oakland andthence to Berkeley, the East Bay townships that are home to many of thepeople who live and work in town. It's one of the only parts of the BayArea where a normal person can afford a house big enough to reallystretch out in, and there's also the university and a bunch of light in-dustry over there. The BART goes under the Bay and connects the twocities, too, but it's the Bay Bridge that sees most of the traffic. The GoldenGate was a nice bridge if you were a tourist or a rich retiree living out in66wine country, but it was mostly ornamental. The Bay Bridge is — was —San Francisco's work-horse bridge.
I thought about it for a minute. "You guys are right," I said. "But I don'tthink that's all of it. We keep acting like terrorists attack landmarks be-cause they hate landmarks. Terrorists don't hate landmarks or bridges orairplanes. They just want to screw stuff up and make people scared. Tomake terror. So of course they went after the Bay Bridge after the GoldenGate got all those cameras — after airplanes got all metal-detectored andX-rayed." I thought about it some more, staring blankly at the cars rollingdown the street, at the people walking down the sidewalks, at the city allaround me. "Terrorists don't hate airplanes or bridges. They love terror."It was so obvious I couldn't believe I'd never thought of it before. I guessthat being treated like a terrorist for a few days was enough to clarify mythinking.
The other two were staring at me. "I'm right, aren't I? All this crap, allthe X-rays and ID checks, they're all useless, aren't they?"They nodded slowly.
"Worse than useless," I said, my voice going up and cracking. "Becausethey ended up with us in prison, with Darryl —" I hadn't thought ofDarryl since we sat down and now it came back to me, my friend, miss-ing, disappeared. I stopped talking and ground my jaws together.
"We have to tell our parents," Jolu said.
"We should get a lawyer," Vanessa said.
I thought of telling my story. Of telling the world what had become ofme. Of the videos that would no doubt come out, of me weeping, re-duced to a groveling animal.
"We can't tell them anything," I said, without thinking.
"What do you mean?" Van said.
"We can't tell them anything," I repeated. "You heard her. If we talk,they'll come back for us. They'll do to us what they did to Darryl.""You're joking," Jolu said. "You want us to —""I want us to fight back," I said. "I want to stay free so that I can dothat. If we go out there and blab, they'll just say that we're kids, makingit up. We don't even know where we were held! No one will believe us.
Then, one day, they'll come for us.
"I'm telling my parents that I was in one of those camps on the otherside of the Bay. I came over to meet you guys there and we got stranded,67and just got loose today. They said in the papers that people were stillwandering home from them.""I can't do that," Vanessa said. "After what they did to you, how canyou even think of doing that?""It happened to me, that's the point. This is me and them, now. I'll beatthem, I'll get Darryl. I'm not going to take this lying down. But once ourparents are involved, that's it for us. No one will believe us and no onewill care. If we do it my way, people will care.""What's your way?" Jolu said. "What's your plan?""I don't know yet," I admitted. "Give me until tomorrow morning, giveme that, at least." I knew that once they'd kept it a secret for a day, itwould have to be a secret forever. Our parents would be even moreskeptical if we suddenly "remembered" that we'd been held in a secretprison instead of taken care of in a refugee camp.
Van and Jolu looked at each other.
"I'm just asking for a chance," I said. "We'll work out the story on theway, get it straight. Give me one day, just one day."The other two nodded glumly and we set off downhill again, headingback towards home. I lived on Potrero Hill, Vanessa lived in the NorthMission and Jolu lived in Noe Valley — three wildly different neighbor-hoods just a few minutes' walk from one another.
We turned onto Market Street and stopped dead. The street was barri-caded at every corner, the cross-streets reduced to a single lane, andparked down the whole length of Market Street were big, nondescript18-wheelers like the one that had carried us, hooded, away from theship's docks and to Chinatown.
Each one had three steel steps leading down from the back and theybuzzed with activity as soldiers, people in suits, and cops went in andout of them. The suits wore little badges on their lapels and the soldiersscanned them as they went in and out — wireless authorization badges.
As we walked past one, I got a look at it, and saw the familiar logo: De-partment of Homeland Security. The soldier saw me staring and staredback hard, glaring at me.
I got the message and moved on. I peeled away from the gang at VanNess. We clung to each other and cried and promised to call each other.
The walk back to Potrero Hill has an easy route and a hard route, thelatter taking you over some of the steepest hills in the city, the kind ofthing that you see car chases on in action movies, with cars catching air68as they soar over the zenith. I always take the hard way home. It's all res-idential streets, and the old Victorian houses they call "painted ladies" fortheir gaudy, elaborate paint-jobs, and front gardens with scented flowersand tall grasses. Housecats stare at you from hedges, and there arehardly any homeless.
It was so quiet on those streets that it made me wish I'd taken the otherroute, through the Mission, which is… raucous is probably the best wordfor it. Loud and vibrant. Lots of rowdy drunks and angry crack-headsand unconscious junkies, and also lots of families with strollers, oldladies gossiping on stoops, lowriders with boom-cars going thumpa-thumpa-thumpa down the streets. There were hipsters and mopey emoart-students and even a couple old-school punk-rockers, old guys withpot bellies bulging out beneath their Dead Kennedys shirts. Also dragqueens, angry gang kids, graffiti artists and bewildered gentrifiers tryingnot to get killed while their real-estate investments matured.
I went up Goat Hill and walked past Goat Hill Pizza, which made methink of the jail I'd been held in, and I had to sit down on the bench outfront of the restaurant until my shakes passed. Then I noticed the truckup the hill from me, a nondescript 18-wheeler with three metal stepscoming down from the back end. I got up and got moving. I felt the eyeswatching me from all directions.
I hurried the rest of the way home. I didn't look at the painted ladies orthe gardens or the housecats. I kept my eyes down.
Both my parents' cars were in the driveway, even though it was themiddle of the day. Of course. Dad works in the East Bay, so he'd be stuckat home while they worked on the bridge. Mom — well, who knew whyMom was home.
They were home for me.
Even before I'd finished unlocking the door it had been jerked out ofmy hand and flung wide. There were both of my parents, looking grayand haggard, bug-eyed and staring at me. We stood there in frozentableau for a moment, then they both rushed forward and dragged meinto the house, nearly tripping me up. They were both talking so loudand fast all I could hear was a wordless, roaring gabble and they bothhugged me and cried and I cried too and we just stood there like that inthe little foyer, crying and making almost-words until we ran out ofsteam and went into the kitchen.
I did what I always did when I came home: got myself a glass of waterfrom the filter in the fridge and dug a couple cookies out of the "biscuit69barrel" that mom's sister had sent us from England. The normalcy of thismade my heart stop hammering, my heart catching up with my brain,and soon we were all sitting at the table.
"Where have you been?" they both said, more or less in unison.
I had given this some thought on the way home. "I got trapped," I said.
"In Oakland. I was there with some friends, doing a project, and we wereall quarantined.""For five days?""Yeah," I said. "Yeah. It was really bad." I'd read about the quarantinesin the Chronicle and I cribbed shamelessly from the quotes they'd pub-lished. "Yeah. Everyone who got caught in the cloud. They thought wehad been attacked with some kind of super-bug and they packed us intoshipping containers in the docklands, like sardines. It was really hot andsticky. Not much food, either.""Christ," Dad said, his fists balling up on the table. Dad teaches inBerkeley three days a week, working with a few grad students in the lib-rary science program. The rest of the time he consults for clients in cityand down the Peninsula, third-wave dotcoms that are doing variousthings with archives. He's a mild-mannered librarian by profession, buthe'd been a real radical in the sixties and wrestled a little in high school.
I'd seen him get crazy angry now and again — I'd even made him thatangry now and again — and he could seriously lose it when he wasHulking out. He once threw a swing-set from Ikea across my granddad'swhole lawn when it fell apart for the fiftieth time while he was assem-bling it.
"Barbarians," Mom said. She's been living in America since she was ateenager, but she still comes over all British when she encounters Amer-ican cops, health-care, airport security or homelessness. Then the word is"barbarians," and her accent comes back strong. We'd been to Londontwice to see her family and I can't say as it felt any more civilized thanSan Francisco, just more cramped.
"But they let us go, and ferried us over today." I was improvising now.
"Are you hurt?" Mom said. "Hungry?""Sleepy?""Yeah, a little of all that. Also Dopey, Doc, Sneezy and Bashful." Wehad a family tradition of Seven Dwarfs jokes. They both smiled a little,but their eyes were still wet. I felt really bad for them. They must have70been out of their minds with worry. I was glad for a chance to change thesubject. "I'd totally love to eat.""I'll order a pizza from Goat Hill," Dad said.
"No, not that," I said. They both looked at me like I'd sprouted anten-nae. I normally have a thing about Goat Hill Pizza — as in, I can nor-mally eat it like a goldfish eats his food, gobbling until it either runs outor I pop. I tried to smile. "I just don't feel like pizza," I said, lamely. "Let'sorder some curry, OK?" Thank heaven that San Francisco is take-outcentral.
Mom went to the drawer of take-out menus (more normalcy, feelinglike a drink of water on a dry, sore throat) and riffled through them. Wespent a couple of distracting minutes going through the menu from thehalal Pakistani place on Valencia. I settled on a mixed tandoori grill andcreamed spinach with farmer's cheese, a salted mango lassi (much betterthan it sounds) and little fried pastries in sugar syrup.
Once the food was ordered, the questions started again. They'd heardfrom Van's, Jolu's and Darryl's families (of course) and had tried to re-port us missing. The police were taking names, but there were so many"displaced persons" that they weren't going to open files on anyone un-less they were still missing after seven days.
Meanwhile, millions of have-you-seen sites had popped up on the net.
A couple of the sites were old MySpace clones that had run out of moneyand saw a new lease on life from all the attention. After all, some venturecapitalists had missing family in the Bay Area. Maybe if they were re-covered, the site would attract some new investment. I grabbed dad'slaptop and looked through them. They were plastered with advertising,of course, and pictures of missing people, mostly grad photos, weddingpictures and that sort of thing. It was pretty ghoulish.
I found my pic and saw that it was linked to Van's, Jolu's, and Darryl's.
There was a little form for marking people found and another one forwriting up notes about other missing people. I filled in the fields for meand Jolu and Van, and left Darryl blank.
"You forgot Darryl," Dad said. He didn't like Darryl much — once he'dfigured out that a couple inches were missing out of one of the bottles inhis liquor cabinet, and to my enduring shame I'd blamed it on Darryl. Intruth, of course, it had been both of us, just fooling around, trying outvodka-and-Cokes during an all-night gaming session.
"He wasn't with us," I said. The lie tasted bitter in my mouth.
71"Oh my God," my mom said. She squeezed her hands together. "Wejust assumed when you came home that you'd all been together.""No," I said, the lie growing. "No, he was supposed to meet us but wenever met up. He's probably just stuck over in Berkeley. He was going totake the BART over."Mom made a whimpering sound. Dad shook his head and closed hiseyes. "Don't you know about the BART?" he said.
I shook my head. I could see where this was going. I felt like theground was rushing up to me.
"They blew it up," Dad said. "The bastards blew it up at the same timeas the bridge."That hadn't been on the front page of the Chronicle, but then, a BARTblowout under the water wouldn't be nearly as picturesque as the im-ages of the bridge hanging in tatters and pieces over the Bay. The BARTtunnel from the Embarcadero in San Francisco to the West Oakland sta-tion was submerged.
I went back to Dad's computer and surfed the headlines. No one wassure, but the body count was in the thousands. Between the cars thatplummeted 191 feet to the sea and the people drowned in the trains, thedeaths were mounting. One reporter claimed to have interviewed an"identity counterfeiter" who'd helped "dozens" of people walk awayfrom their old lives by simply vanishing after the attacks, getting new IDmade up, and slipping away from bad marriages, bad debts and badlives.
Dad actually got tears in his eyes, and Mom was openly crying. Theyeach hugged me again, patting me with their hands as if to assure them-selves that I was really there. They kept telling me they loved me. I toldthem I loved them too.
We had a weepy dinner and Mom and Dad had each had a coupleglasses of wine, which was a lot for them. I told them that I was gettingsleepy, which was true, and mooched up to my room. I wasn't going tobed, though. I needed to get online and find out what was going on. Ineeded to talk to Jolu and Vanessa. I needed to get working on findingDarryl.
I crept up to my room and opened the door. I hadn't seen my old bedin what felt like a thousand years. I lay down on it and reached over tomy bedstand to grab my laptop. I must have not plugged it in all the72way — the electrical adapter needed to be jiggled just right — so it hadslowly discharged while I was away. I plugged it back in and gave it aminute or two to charge up before trying to power it up again. I used thetime to get undressed and throw my clothes in the trash — I neverwanted to see them again — and put on a clean pair of boxers and afresh t-shirt. The fresh-laundered clothes, straight out of my drawers, feltso familiar and comfortable, like getting hugged by my parents.
I powered up my laptop and punched a bunch of pillows into placebehind me at the top of the bed. I scooched back and opened mycomputer's lid and settled it onto my thighs. It was still booting, andman, those icons creeping across the screen looked good. It came all theway up and then it started giving me more low-power warnings. Ichecked the power-cable again and wiggled it and they went away. Thepower-jack was really flaking out.
In fact, it was so bad that I couldn't actually get anything done. Everytime I took my hand off the power-cable it lost contact and the computerstarted to complain about its battery. I took a closer look at it.
The whole case of my computer was slightly misaligned, the seamsplit in an angular gape that started narrow and widened toward theback.
Sometimes you look at a piece of equipment and discover somethinglike this and you wonder, "Was it always like that?" Maybe you just nev-er noticed.
But with my laptop, that wasn't possible. You see, I built it. After theBoard of Ed issued us all with SchoolBooks, there was no way my par-ents were going to buy me a computer of my own, even though technic-ally the SchoolBook didn't belong to me, and I wasn't supposed to installsoftware on it or mod it.
I had some money saved — odd jobs, Christmases and birthdays, alittle bit of judicious ebaying. Put it all together and I had enough moneyto buy a totally crappy, five-year-old machine.
So Darryl and I built one instead. You can buy laptop cases just likeyou can buy cases for desktop PCs, though they're a little more special-ized than plain old PCs. I'd built a couple PCs with Darryl over theyears, scavenging parts from Craigslist and garage sales and orderingstuff from cheap cheap Taiwanese vendors we found on the net. Ifigured that building a laptop would be the best way to get the power Iwanted at the price I could afford.
73To build your own laptop, you start by ordering a "barebook" — a ma-chine with just a little hardware in it and all the right slots. The goodnews was, once I was done, I had a machine that was a whole poundlighter than the Dell I'd had my eye on, ran faster, and cost a third ofwhat I would have paid Dell. The bad news was that assembling alaptop is like building one of those ships in a bottle. It's all finicky workwith tweezers and magnifying glasses, trying to get everything to fit inthat little case. Unlike a full-sized PC — which is mostly air — every cu-bic millimeter of space in a laptop is spoken for. Every time I thought Ihad it, I'd go to screw the thing back together and find that somethingwas keeping the case from closing all the way, and it'd be back to thedrawing board.
So I knew exactly how the seam on my laptop was supposed to lookwhen the thing was closed, and it was not supposed to look like this.
I kept jiggling the power-adapter, but it was hopeless. There was noway I was going to get the thing to boot without taking it apart. Igroaned and put it beside the bed. I'd deal with it in the morning.
That was the theory, anyway. Two hours later, I was still staring at theceiling, playing back movies in my head of what they'd done to me, whatI should have done, all regrets and esprit d'escalier.
I rolled out of bed. It had gone midnight and I'd heard my parents hitthe sack at eleven. I grabbed the laptop and cleared some space on mydesk and clipped the little LED lamps to the temples of my magnifyingglasses and pulled out a set of little precision screwdrivers. A minutelater, I had the case open and the keyboard removed and I was staring atthe guts of my laptop. I got a can of compressed air and blew out thedust that the fan had sucked in and looked things over.
Something wasn't right. I couldn't put my finger on it, but then it hadbeen months since I'd had the lid off this thing. Luckily, the third time I'dhad to open it up and struggle to close it again, I'd gotten smart: I'd takena photo of the guts with everything in place. I hadn't been totally smart:
at first, I'd just left that pic on my hard drive, and naturally I couldn't getto it when I had the laptop in parts. But then I'd printed it out and stuckit in my messy drawer of papers, the dead-tree graveyard where I keptall the warranty cards and pin-out diagrams. I shuffled them — theyseemed messier than I remembered — and brought out my photo. I set itdown next to the computer and kind of unfocused my eyes, trying tofind things that looked out of place.
74Then I spotted it. The ribbon cable that connected the keyboard to thelogic-board wasn't connected right. That was a weird one. There was notorque on that part, nothing to dislodge it in the course of normal opera-tions. I tried to press it back down again and discovered that the plugwasn't just badly mounted — there was something between it and theboard. I tweezed it out and shone my light on it.
There was something new in my keyboard. It was a little chunk ofhardware, only a sixteenth of an inch thick, with no markings. The key-board was plugged into it, and it was plugged into the board. It otherwords, it was perfectly situated to capture all the keystrokes I madewhile I typed on my machine.
It was a bug.
My heart thudded in my ears. It was dark and quiet in the house, but itwasn't a comforting dark. There were eyes out there, eyes and ears, andthey were watching me. Surveilling me. The surveillance I faced atschool had followed me home, but this time, it wasn't just the Board ofEducation looking over my shoulder: the Department of Homeland Se-curity had joined them.
I almost took the bug out. Then I figured that who ever put it therewould know that it was gone. I left it in. It made me sick to do it.
I looked around for more tampering. I couldn't find any, but did thatmean there hadn't been any? Someone had broken into my room andplanted this device — had disassembled my laptop and reassembled it.
There were lots of other ways to wiretap a computer. I could never findthem all.
I put the machine together with numb fingers. This time, the casewouldn't snap shut just right, but the power-cable stayed in. I booted itup and set my fingers on the keyboard, thinking that I would run somediagnostics and see what was what.
But I couldn't do it.
Hell, maybe my room was wiretapped. Maybe there was a cameraspying on me now.
I'd been feeling paranoid when I got home. Now I was nearly out ofmy skin. It felt like I was back in jail, back in the interrogation room,stalked by entities who had me utterly in their power. It made me wantto cry.
Only one thing for it.
75I went into the bathroom and took off the toilet-paper roll and re-placed it with a fresh one. Luckily, it was almost empty already. I un-rolled the rest of the paper and dug through my parts box until I found alittle plastic envelope full of ultra-bright white LEDs I'd scavenged out ofa dead bike-lamp. I punched their leads through the cardboard tubecarefully, using a pin to make the holes, then got out some wire and con-nected them all in series with little metal clips. I twisted the wires intothe leads for a nine-volt battery and connected the battery. Now I had atube ringed with ultra-bright, directional LEDs, and I could hold it up tomy eye and look through it.
I'd built one of these last year as a science fair project and had beenthrown out of the fair once I showed that there were hidden cameras inhalf the classrooms at Chavez High. Pinhead video-cameras cost lessthan a good restaurant dinner these days, so they're showing up every-where. Sneaky store clerks put them in changing rooms or tanningsalons and get pervy with the hidden footage they get from their custom-ers — sometimes they just put it on the net. Knowing how to turn atoilet-paper roll and three bucks' worth of parts into a camera-detector isjust good sense.
This is the simplest way to catch a spy-cam. They have tiny lenses, butthey reflect light like the dickens. It works best in a dim room: starethrough the tube and slowly scan all the walls and other places someonemight have put a camera until you see the glint of a reflection. If the re-flection stays still as you move around, that's a lens.
There wasn't a camera in my room — not one I could detect, anyway.
There might have been audio bugs, of course. Or better cameras. Ornothing at all. Can you blame me for feeling paranoid?
I loved that laptop. I called it the Salmagundi, which means anythingmade out of spare parts.
Once you get to naming your laptop, you know that you're really hav-ing a deep relationship with it. Now, though, I felt like I didn't want toever touch it again. I wanted to throw it out the window. Who knewwhat they'd done to it? Who knew how it had been tapped?
I put it in a drawer with the lid shut and looked at the ceiling. It waslate and I should be in bed. There was no way I was going to sleep now,though. I was tapped. Everyone might be tapped. The world hadchanged forever.
"I'll find a way to get them," I said. It was a vow, I knew it when Iheard it, though I'd never made a vow before.
76I couldn't sleep after that. And besides, I had an idea.
Somewhere in my closet was a shrink-wrapped box containing onestill-sealed, mint-in-package Xbox Universal. Every Xbox has been soldway below cost — Microsoft makes most of its money charging gamescompanies money for the right to put out Xbox games — but the Univer-sal was the first Xbox that Microsoft decided to give away entirely forfree.
Last Christmas season, there'd been poor losers on every cornerdressed as warriors from the Halo series, handing out bags of thesegame-machines as fast as they could. I guess it worked — everyone saysthey sold a whole butt-load of games. Naturally, there were counter-measures to make sure you only played games from companies that hadbought licenses from Microsoft to make them.
Hackers blow through those countermeasures. The Xbox was crackedby a kid from MIT who wrote a best-selling book about it, and then the360 went down, and then the short-lived Xbox Portable (which we allcalled the "luggable" — it weighed three pounds!) succumbed. TheUniversal was supposed to be totally bulletproof. The high school kidswho broke it were Brazilian Linux hackers who lived in a favela — a kindof squatter's slum.
Never underestimate the determination of a kid who is time-rich andcash-poor.
Once the Brazilians published their crack, we all went nuts on it. Soonthere were dozens of alternate operating systems for the Xbox Universal.
My favorite was ParanoidXbox, a flavor of Paranoid Linux. ParanoidLinux is an operating system that assumes that its operator is under as-sault from the government (it was intended for use by Chinese and Syri-an dissidents), and it does everything it can to keep your communica-tions and documents a secret. It even throws up a bunch of "chaff" com-munications that are supposed to disguise the fact that you're doing any-thing covert. So while you're receiving a political message one characterat a time, ParanoidLinux is pretending to surf the Web and fill in ques-tionnaires and flirt in chat-rooms. Meanwhile, one in every five hundredcharacters you receive is your real message, a needle buried in a hugehaystack.
I'd burned a ParanoidXbox DVD when they first appeared, but I'dnever gotten around to unpacking the Xbox in my closet, finding a TV tohook it up to and so on. My room is crowded enough as it is without let-ting Microsoft crashware eat up valuable workspace.
77Tonight, I'd make the sacrifice. It took about twenty minutes to get upand running. Not having a TV was the hardest part, but eventually I re-membered that I had a little overhead LCD projector that had standardTV RCA connectors on the back. I connected it to the Xbox and shone iton the back of my door and got ParanoidLinux installed.
Now I was up and running, and ParanoidLinux was looking for otherXbox Universals to talk to. Every Xbox Universal comes with built-inwireless for multiplayer gaming. You can connect to your neighbors onthe wireless link and to the Internet, if you have a wireless Internet con-nection. I found three different sets of neighbors in range. Two of themhad their Xbox Universals also connected to the Internet. ParanoidXboxloved that configuration: it could siphon off some of my neighbors' Inter-net connections and use them to get online through the gaming network.
The neighbors would never miss the packets: they were paying for flat-rate Internet connections, and they weren't exactly doing a lot of surfingat 2AM.
The best part of all this is how it made me feel: in control. My techno-logy was working for me, serving me, protecting me. It wasn't spying onme. This is why I loved technology: if you used it right, it could give youpower and privacy.
My brain was really going now, running like 60. There were lots ofreasons to run ParanoidXbox — the best one was that anyone couldwrite games for it. Already there was a port of MAME, the Multiple Ar-cade Machine Emulator, so you could play practically any game that hadever been written, all the way back to Pong — games for the Apple ][+and games for the Colecovision, games for the NES and the Dreamcast,and so on.
Even better were all the cool multiplayer games being built specificallyfor ParanoidXbox — totally free hobbyist games that anyone could run.
When you combined it all, you had a free console full of free games thatcould get you free Internet access.
And the best part — as far as I was concerned — was that Para-noidXbox was paranoid. Every bit that went over the air was scrambled towithin an inch of its life. You could wiretap it all you wanted, but you'dnever figure out who was talking, what they were talking about, or whothey were talking to. Anonymous web, email and IM. Just what I needed.
All I had to do now was convince everyone I knew to use it too.
Chapter 6
This chapter is dedicated to Powell's Books, the legendary "City ofBooks" in Portland, Oregon. Powell's is the largest bookstore in theworld, an endless, multi-storey universe of papery smells and toweringshelves. They stock new and used books on the same shelves —something I've always loved — and every time I've stopped in, they'vehad a veritable mountain of my books, and they've been incredibly gra-cious about asking me to sign the store-stock. The clerks are friendly, thestock is fabulous, and there's even a Powell's at the Portland airport,making it just about the best airport bookstore in the world for mymoney!
Powell's Books: 1005 W Burnside, Portland, OR 97209 USA +1 800878 7323Believe it or not, my parents made me go to school the next day. I'donly fallen into feverish sleep at three in the morning, but at seven thenext day, my Dad was standing at the foot of my bed, threatening todrag me out by the ankles. I managed to get up — something had died inmy mouth after painting my eyelids shut — and into the shower.
I let my mom force a piece of toast and a banana into me, wishing fer-vently that my parents would let me drink coffee at home. I could sneakone on the way to school, but watching them sip down their black goldwhile I was drag-assing around the house, getting dressed and puttingmy books in my bag — it was awful.
I've walked to school a thousand times, but today it was different. Iwent up and over the hills to get down into the Mission, and everywherethere were trucks. I saw new sensors and traffic cameras installed atmany of the stop-signs. Someone had a lot of surveillance gear lyingaround, waiting to be installed at the first opportunity. The attack on theBay Bridge had been just what they needed.
79It all made the city seem more subdued, like being inside an elevator,embarrassed by the close scrutiny of your neighbors and the ubiquitouscameras.
The Turkish coffee shop on 24th Street fixed me up good with a go-cupof Turkish coffee. Basically, Turkish coffee is mud, pretending to be cof-fee. It's thick enough to stand a spoon up in, and it has way more caf-feine than the kiddee-pops like Red Bull. Take it from someone who'sread the Wikipedia entry: this is how the Ottoman Empire was won:
maddened horsemen fueled by lethal jet-black coffee-mud.
I pulled out my debit card to pay and he made a face. "No more debit,"he said.
"Huh? Why not?" I'd paid for my coffee habit on my card for years atthe Turk's. He used to hassle me all the time, telling me I was too youngto drink the stuff, and he still refused to serve me at all during schoolhours, convinced that I was skipping class. But over the years, the Turkand me have developed a kind of gruff understanding.
He shook his head sadly. "You wouldn't understand. Go to school,kid."There's no surer way to make me want to understand than to tell me Iwon't. I wheedled him, demanding that he tell me. He looked like he wasgoing to throw me out, but when I asked him if he thought I wasn't goodenough to shop there, he opened up.
"The security," he said, looking around his little shop with its tubs ofdried beans and seeds, its shelves of Turkish groceries. "The government.
They monitor it all now, it was in the papers. PATRIOT Act II, the Con-gress passed it yesterday. Now they can monitor every time you useyour card. I say no. I say my shop will not help them spy on mycustomers."My jaw dropped.
"You think it's no big deal maybe? What is the problem with govern-ment knowing when you buy coffee? Because it's one way they knowwhere you are, where you been. Why you think I left Turkey? Whereyou have government always spying on the people, is no good. I movehere twenty years ago for freedom — I no help them take freedomaway.""You're going to lose so many sales," I blurted. I wanted to tell him hewas a hero and shake his hand, but that was what came out. "Everyoneuses debit cards."80"Maybe not so much anymore. Maybe my customers come here be-cause they know I love freedom too. I am making sign for window.
Maybe other stores do the same. I hear the ACLU will sue them for this.""You've got all my business from now on," I said. I meant it. I reachedinto my pocket. "Um, I don't have any cash, though."He pursed his lips and nodded. "Many peoples say the same thing. IsOK. You give today's money to the ACLU."In two minutes, the Turk and I had exchanged more words than wehad in all the time I'd been coming to his shop. I had no idea he had allthese passions. I just thought of him as my friendly neighborhood caf-feine dealer. Now I shook his hand and when I left his store, I felt like heand I had joined a team. A secret team.
I'd missed two days of school but it seemed like I hadn't missed muchclass. They'd shut the school on one of those days while the cityscrambled to recover. The next day had been devoted, it seemed, tomourning those missing and presumed dead. The newspapers publishedbiographies of the lost, personal memorials. The Web was filled withthese capsule obituaries, thousands of them.
Embarrassingly, I was one of those people. I stepped into the school-yard, not knowing this, and then there was a shout and a moment laterthere were a hundred people around me, pounding me on the back,shaking my hand. A couple girls I didn't even know kissed me, and theywere more than friendly kisses. I felt like a rock star.
My teachers were only a little more subdued. Ms Galvez cried as muchas my mother had and hugged me three times before she let me go to mydesk and sit down. There was something new at the front of theclassroom. A camera. Ms Galvez caught me staring at it and handed mea permission slip on smeary Xeroxed school letterhead.
The Board of the San Francisco Unified School District had held anemergency session over the weekend and unanimously voted to ask theparents of every kid in the city for permission to put closed circuit televi-sion cameras in every classroom and corridor. The law said they couldn'tforce us to go to school with cameras all over the place, but it didn't sayanything about us volunteering to give up our Constitutional rights. Theletter said that the Board were sure that they would get complete compli-ance from the City's parents, but that they would make arrangements to81teach those kids' whose parents objected in a separate set of"unprotected" classrooms.
Why did we have cameras in our classrooms now? Terrorists. Ofcourse. Because by blowing up a bridge, terrorists had indicated thatschools were next. Somehow that was the conclusion that the Board hadreached anyway.
I read this note three times and then I stuck my hand up.
"Yes, Marcus?""Ms Galvez, about this note?""Yes, Marcus.""Isn't the point of terrorism to make us afraid? That's why it's calledterrorism, right?""I suppose so." The class was staring at me. I wasn't the best student inschool, but I did like a good in-class debate. They were waiting to hearwhat I'd say next.
"So aren't we doing what the terrorists want from us? Don't they win ifwe act all afraid and put cameras in the classrooms and all of that?"There was some nervous tittering. One of the others put his hand up. Itwas Charles. Ms Galvez called on him.
"Putting cameras in makes us safe, which makes us less afraid.""Safe from what?" I said, without waiting to be called on.
"Terrorism," Charles said. The others were nodding their heads.
"How do they do that? If a suicide bomber rushed in here and blew usall up —""Ms Galvez, Marcus is violating school policy. We're not supposed tomake jokes about terrorist attacks —""Who's making jokes?""Thank you, both of you," Ms Galvez said. She looked really unhappy.
I felt kind of bad for hijacking her class. "I think that this is a really inter-esting discussion, but I'd like to hold it over for a future class. I think thatthese issues may be too emotional for us to have a discussion about themtoday. Now, let's get back to the suffragists, shall we?"So we spent the rest of the hour talking about suffragists and the newlobbying strategies they'd devised for getting four women into everycongresscritter's office to lean on him and let him know what it wouldmean for his political future if he kept on denying women the vote. It82was normally the kind of thing I really liked — little guys making the bigand powerful be honest. But today I couldn't concentrate. It must havebeen Darryl's absence. We both liked Social Studies and we would havehad our SchoolBooks out and an IM session up seconds after sittingdown, a back-channel for talking about the lesson.
I'd burned twenty ParanoidXbox discs the night before and I had themall in my bag. I handed them out to people I knew were really, really intogaming. They'd all gotten an Xbox Universal or two the year before, butmost of them had stopped using them. The games were really expensiveand not a lot of fun. I took them aside between periods, at lunch andstudy hall, and sang the praises of the ParanoidXbox games to the sky.
Free and fun — addictive social games with lots of cool people playingthem from all over the world.
Giving away one thing to sell another is what they call a "razor bladebusiness" — companies like Gillette give you free razor-blade handlesand then stiff you by charging you a small fortune for the blades. Printercartridges are the worst for that — the most expensive Champagne in theworld is cheap when compared with inkjet ink, which costs all of apenny a gallon to make wholesale.
Razor-blade businesses depend on you not being able to get the"blades" from someone else. After all, if Gillette can make nine bucks ona ten-dollar replacement blade, why not start a competitor that makesonly four bucks selling an identical blade: an 80 percent profit margin isthe kind of thing that makes your average business-guy go all droolyand round-eyed.
So razor-blade companies like Microsoft pour a lot of effort into mak-ing it hard and/or illegal to compete with them on the blades. InMicrosoft's case, every Xbox has had countermeasures to keep you fromrunning software that was released by people who didn't pay theMicrosoft blood-money for the right to sell Xbox programs.
The people I met didn't think much about this stuff. They perked upwhen I told them that the games were unmonitored. These days, any on-line game you play is filled with all kinds of unsavory sorts. First thereare the pervs who try to get you to come out to some remote location sothey can go all weird and Silence of the Lambs on you. Then there are thecops, who are pretending to be gullible kids so they can bust the pervs.
Worst of all, though, are the monitors who spend all their time spying onour discussions and snitching on us for violating their Terms of Service,83which say, no flirting, no cussing, and no "clear or masked languagewhich insultingly refers to any aspect of sexual orientation or sexuality."I'm no 24/7 horn-dog, but I'm a seventeen year old boy. Sex does comeup in conversation every now and again. But God help you if it came upin chat while you were gaming. It was a real buzz-kill. No one monitoredthe ParanoidXbox games, because they weren't run by a company: theywere just games that hackers had written for the hell of it.
So these game-kids loved the story. They took the discs greedily, andpromised to burn copies for all of their friends — after all, games aremost fun when you're playing them with your buddies.
When I got home, I read that a group of parents were suing the schoolboard over the surveillance cameras in the classrooms, but that they'dalready lost their bid to get a preliminary injunction against them.
I don't know who came up with the name Xnet, but it stuck. You'dhear people talking about it on the Muni. Van called me up to ask me ifI'd heard of it and I nearly choked once I figured out what she was talk-ing about: the discs I'd started distributing last week had been sneaker-netted and copied all the way to Oakland in the space of two weeks. Itmade me look over my shoulder — like I'd broken a rule and now theDHS would come and take me away forever.
They'd been hard weeks. The BART had completely abandoned cashfares now, switching them for arphid "contactless" cards that you wavedat the turnstiles to go through. They were cool and convenient, but everytime I used one, I thought about how I was being tracked. Someone onXnet posted a link to an Electronic Frontier Foundation white paper onthe ways that these things could be used to track people, and the paperhad tiny stories about little groups of people that had protested at theBART stations.
I used the Xnet for almost everything now. I'd set up a fake email ad-dress through the Pirate Party, a Swedish political party that hated Inter-net surveillance and promised to keep their mail accounts a secret fromeveryone, even the cops. I accessed it strictly via Xnet, hopping from oneneighbor's Internet connection to the next, staying anonymous — Ihoped — all the way to Sweden. I wasn't using w1n5ton anymore. IfBenson could figure it out, anyone could. My new handle, come up withon the spur of the moment, was M1k3y, and I got a lot of email frompeople who heard in chat rooms and message boards that I could helpthem troubleshoot their Xnet configurations and connections.
84I missed Harajuku Fun Madness. The company had suspended thegame indefinitely. They said that for "security reasons" they didn't thinkit would be a good idea to hide things and then send people off to findthem. What if someone thought it was a bomb? What if someone put abomb in the same spot?
What if I got hit by lightning while walking with an umbrella? Banumbrellas! Fight the menace of lightning!
I kept on using my laptop, though I got a skin-crawly feeling when Iused it. Whoever had wiretapped it would wonder why I didn't use it. Ifigured I'd just do some random surfing with it every day, a little lesseach day, so that anyone watching would see me slowly changing myhabits, not doing a sudden reversal. Mostly I read those creepy obits —all those thousands of my friends and neighbors dead at the bottom ofthe Bay.
Truth be told, I was doing less and less homework every day. I hadbusiness elsewhere. I burned new stacks of ParanoidXbox every day,fifty or sixty, and took them around the city to people I'd heard werewilling to burn sixty of their own and hand them out to their friends.
I wasn't too worried about getting caught doing this, because I hadgood crypto on my side. Crypto is cryptography, or "secret writing," andit's been around since Roman times (literally: Augustus Caesar was a bigfan and liked to invent his own codes, some of which we use today forscrambling joke punchlines in email).
Crypto is math. Hard math. I'm not going to try to explain it in detailbecause I don't have the math to really get my head around it, either —look it up on Wikipedia if you really want.
But here's the Cliff's Notes version: Some kinds of mathematical func-tions are really easy to do in one direction and really hard to do in theother direction. It's easy to multiply two big prime numbers together andmake a giant number. It's really, really hard to take any given giant num-ber and figure out which primes multiply together to give you thatnumber.
That means that if you can come up with a way of scramblingsomething based on multiplying large primes, unscrambling it withoutknowing those primes will be hard. Wicked hard. Like, a trillion years ofall the computers ever invented working 24/7 won't be able to do it.
There are four parts to any crypto message: the original message,called the "cleartext." The scrambled message, called the "ciphertext." The85scrambling system, called the "cipher." And finally there's the key: secretstuff you feed into the cipher along with the cleartext to make ciphertext.
It used to be that crypto people tried to keep all of this a secret. Everyagency and government had its own ciphers and its own keys. The Nazisand the Allies didn't want the other guys to know how they scrambledtheir messages, let alone the keys that they could use to descramblethem. That sounds like a good idea, right?
Wrong.
The first time anyone told me about all this prime factoring stuff, I im-mediately said, "No way, that's BS. I mean, sure it's hard to do this primefactorization stuff, whatever you say it is. But it used to be impossible tofly or go to the moon or get a hard-drive with more than a few kilobytesof storage. Someone must have invented a way of descrambling the mes-sages." I had visions of a hollow mountain full of National SecurityAgency mathematicians reading every email in the world andsnickering.
In fact, that's pretty much what happened during World War II. That'sthe reason that life isn't more like Castle Wolfenstein, where I've spentmany days hunting Nazis.
The thing is, ciphers are hard to keep secret. There's a lot of math thatgoes into one, and if they're widely used, then everyone who uses themhas to keep them a secret too, and if someone changes sides, you have tofind a new cipher.
The Nazi cipher was called Enigma, and they used a little mechanicalcomputer called an Enigma Machine to scramble and unscramble themessages they got. Every sub and boat and station needed one of these,so it was inevitable that eventually the Allies would get their hands onone.
When they did, they cracked it. That work was led by my personal all-time hero, a guy named Alan Turing, who pretty much invented com-puters as we know them today. Unfortunately for him, he was gay, soafter the war ended, the stupid British government forced him to get shotup with hormones to "cure" his homosexuality and he killed himself.
Darryl gave me a biography of Turing for my 14th birthday — wrappedin twenty layers of paper and in a recycled Batmobile toy, he was likethat with presents — and I've been a Turing junkie ever since.
Now the Allies had the Enigma Machine, and they could intercept lotsof Nazi radio-messages, which shouldn't have been that big a deal, since86every captain had his own secret key. Since the Allies didn't have thekeys, having the machine shouldn't have helped.
Here's where secrecy hurts crypto. The Enigma cipher was flawed.
Once Turing looked hard at it, he figured out that the Nazi cryptograph-ers had made a mathematical mistake. By getting his hands on an En-igma Machine, Turing could figure out how to crack any Nazi message,no matter what key it used.
That cost the Nazis the war. I mean, don't get me wrong. That's goodnews. Take it from a Castle Wolfenstein veteran. You wouldn't want theNazis running the country.
After the war, cryptographers spent a lot of time thinking about this.
The problem had been that Turing was smarter than the guy whothought up Enigma. Any time you had a cipher, you were vulnerable tosomeone smarter than you coming up with a way of breaking it.
And the more they thought about it, the more they realized that anyonecan come up with a security system that he can't figure out how to break.
But no one can figure out what a smarter person might do.
You have to publish a cipher to know that it works. You have to tell asmany people as possible how it works, so that they can thwack on it witheverything they have, testing its security. The longer you go withoutanyone finding a flaw, the more secure you are.
Which is how it stands today. If you want to be safe, you don't usecrypto that some genius thought of last week. You use the stuff thatpeople have been using for as long as possible without anyone figuringout how to break them. Whether you're a bank, a terrorist, a governmentor a teenager, you use the same ciphers.
If you tried to use your own cipher, there'd be the chance thatsomeone out there had found a flaw you missed and was doing a Turingon your butt, deciphering all your "secret" messages and chuckling atyour dumb gossip, financial transactions and military secrets.
So I knew that crypto would keep me safe from eavesdroppers, but Iwasn't ready to deal with histograms.
I got off the BART and waved my card over the turnstile as I headedup to the 24th Street station. As usual, there were lots of weirdoshanging out in the station, drunks and Jesus freaks and intense Mexicanmen staring at the ground and a few gang kids. I looked straight pastthem as I hit the stairs and jogged up to the surface. My bag was empty87now, no longer bulging with the ParanoidXbox discs I'd been distribut-ing, and it made my shoulders feel light and put a spring in my step as Icame up the street. The preachers were at work still, exhorting in Span-ish and English about Jesus and so on.
The counterfeit sunglass sellers were gone, but they'd been replacedby guys selling robot dogs that barked the national anthem and wouldlift their legs if you showed them a picture of Osama bin Laden. Therewas probably some cool stuff going on in their little brains and I made amental note to pick a couple of them up and take them apart later. Face-recognition was pretty new in toys, having only recently made the leapfrom the military to casinos trying to find cheats, to law enforcement.
I started down 24th Street toward Potrero Hill and home, rolling myshoulders and smelling the burrito smells wafting out of the restaurantsand thinking about dinner.
I don't know why I happened to glance back over my shoulder, but Idid. Maybe it was a little bit of subconscious sixth-sense stuff. I knew Iwas being followed.
They were two beefy white guys with little mustaches that made methink of either cops or the gay bikers who rode up and down the Castro,but gay guys usually had better haircuts. They had on windbreakers thecolor of old cement and blue-jeans, with their waistbands concealed. Ithought of all the things a cop might wear on his waistband, of theutility-belt that DHS guy in the truck had worn. Both guys were wearingBluetooth headsets.
I kept walking, my heart thumping in my chest. I'd been expecting thissince I started. I'd been expecting the DHS to figure out what I was do-ing. I took every precaution, but Severe-Haircut woman had told me thatshe'd be watching me. She'd told me I was a marked man. I realized thatI'd been waiting to get picked up and taken back to jail. Why not? Whyshould Darryl be in jail and not me? What did I have going for me? Ihadn't even had the guts to tell my parents — or his — what had reallyhappened to us.
I quickened my steps and took a mental inventory. I didn't have any-thing incriminating in my bag. Not too incriminating, anyway. MySchoolBook was running the crack that let me IM and stuff, but half thepeople in school had that. I'd changed the way I encrypted the stuff onmy phone — now I did have a fake partition that I could turn back intocleartext with one password, but all the good stuff was hidden, andneeded another password to open up. That hidden section looked just88like random junk — when you encrypt data, it becomes indistinguish-able from random noise — and they'd never even know it was there.
There were no discs in my bag. My laptop was free of incriminatingevidence. Of course, if they thought to look hard at my Xbox, it wasgame over. So to speak.
I stopped where I was standing. I'd done as good a job as I could ofcovering myself. It was time to face my fate. I stepped into the nearestburrito joint and ordered one with carnitas — shredded pork — and ex-tra salsa. Might as well go down with a full stomach. I got a bucket ofhorchata, too, an ice-cold rice drink that's like watery, semi-sweet rice-pudding (better than it sounds).
I sat down to eat, and a profound calm fell over me. I was about to goto jail for my "crimes," or I wasn't. My freedom since they'd taken me inhad been just a temporary holiday. My country was not my friend any-more: we were now on different sides and I'd known I could never win.
The two guys came into the restaurant as I was finishing the burritoand going up to order some churros — deep-fried dough with cinnamonsugar — for dessert. I guess they'd been waiting outside and got tired ofmy dawdling.
They stood behind me at the counter, boxing me in. I took my churrofrom the pretty granny and paid her, taking a couple of quick bites of thedough before I turned around. I wanted to eat at least a little of mydessert. It might be the last dessert I got for a long, long time.
Then I turned around. They were both so close I could see the zit onthe cheek of the one on the left, the little booger up the nose of the other.
"'Scuse me," I said, trying to push past them. The one with the boogermoved to block me.
"Sir," he said, "can you step over here with us?" He gestured towardthe restaurant's door.
"Sorry, I'm eating," I said and moved again. This time he put his handon my chest. He was breathing fast through his nose, making the boogerwiggle. I think I was breathing hard too, but it was hard to tell over thehammering of my heart.
The other one flipped down a flap on the front of his windbreaker toreveal a SFPD insignia. "Police," he said. "Please come with us.""Let me just get my stuff," I said.
89"We'll take care of that," he said. The booger one stepped right up closeto me, his foot on the inside of mine. You do that in some martial arts,too. It lets you feel if the other guy is shifting his weight, getting ready tomove.
I wasn't going to run, though. I knew I couldn't outrun fate.
Chapter 7
This chapter is dedicated to New York City's Books of Wonder, the old-est and largest kids' bookstore in Manhattan. They're located just a fewblocks away from Tor Books' offices in the Flatiron Building and everytime I drop in to meet with the Tor people, I always sneak away to Booksof Wonder to peruse their stock of new, used and rare kids' books. I'm aheavy collector of rare editions of Alice in Wonderland, and Books ofWonder never fails to excite me with some beautiful, limited-editionAlice. They have tons of events for kids and one of the most inviting at-mospheres I've ever experienced at a bookstore.
Books of Wonder: 18 West 18th St, New York, NY 10011 USA +1 212989 3270They took me outside and around the corner, to a waiting unmarkedpolice car. It wasn't like anyone in that neighborhood would have had ahard time figuring out that it was a cop-car, though. Only police drivebig Crown Victorias now that gas had hit seven bucks a gallon. What'smore, only cops could double-park in the middle of Van Ness streetwithout getting towed by the schools of predatory tow-operators thatcircled endlessly, ready to enforce San Francisco's incomprehensibleparking regulations and collect a bounty for kidnapping your car.
Booger blew his nose. I was sitting in the back seat, and so was he. Hispartner was sitting in the front, typing with one finger on an ancient,ruggedized laptop that looked like Fred Flintstone had been its originalowner.
Booger looked closely at my ID again. "We just want to ask you a fewroutine questions.""Can I see your badges?" I said. These guys were clearly cops, but itcouldn't hurt to let them know I knew my rights.
Booger flashed his badge at me too fast for me to get a good look at it,but Zit in the front seat gave me a long look at his. I got their division91number and memorized the four-digit badge number. It was easy: 1337is also the way hackers write "leet," or "elite."They were both being very polite and neither of them was trying to in-timidate me the way that the DHS had done when I was in their custody.
"Am I under arrest?""You've been momentarily detained so that we can ensure your safetyand the general public safety," Booger said.
He passed my driver's license up to Zit, who pecked it slowly into hiscomputer. I saw him make a typo and almost corrected him, but figuredit was better to just keep my mouth shut.
"Is there anything you want to tell me, Marcus? Do they call youMarc?""Marcus is fine," I said. Booger looked like he might be a nice guy. Ex-cept for the part about kidnapping me into his car, of course.
"Marcus. Anything you want to tell me?""Like what? Am I under arrest?""You're not under arrest right now," Booger said. "Would you like tobe?""No," I said.
"Good. We've been watching you since you left the BART. Your FastPass says that you've been riding to a lot of strange places at a lot offunny hours."I felt something let go inside my chest. This wasn't about the Xnet atall, then, not really. They'd been watching my subway use and wanted toknow why it had been so freaky lately. How totally stupid.
"So you guys follow everyone who comes out of the BART station witha funny ride-history? You must be busy.""Not everyone, Marcus. We get an alert when anyone with an uncom-mon ride profile comes out and that helps us assess whether we want toinvestigate. In your case, we came along because we wanted to knowwhy a smart-looking kid like you had such a funny ride profile?"Now that I knew I wasn't about to go to jail, I was getting pissed.
These guys had no business spying on me — Christ, the BART had nobusiness helping them to spy on me. Where the hell did my subway passget off on finking me out for having a "nonstandard ride pattern?""I think I'd like to be arrested now," I said.
92Booger sat back and raised his eyebrow at me.
"Really? On what charge?""Oh, you mean riding public transit in a nonstandard way isn't acrime?"Zit closed his eyes and scrubbed them with his thumbs.
Booger sighed a put-upon sigh. "Look, Marcus, we're on your sidehere. We use this system to catch bad guys. To catch terrorists and drugdealers. Maybe you're a drug dealer yourself. Pretty good way to getaround the city, a Fast Pass. Anonymous.""What's wrong with anonymous? It was good enough for Thomas Jef-ferson. And by the way, am I under arrest?""Let's take him home," Zit said. "We can talk to his parents.""I think that's a great idea," I said. "I'm sure my parents will be anxiousto hear how their tax dollars are being spent —"I'd pushed it too far. Booger had been reaching for the door handle butnow he whirled on me, all Hulked out and throbbing veins. "Why don'tyou shut up right now, while it's still an option? After everything that'shappened in the past two weeks, it wouldn't kill you to cooperate withus. You know what, maybe we should arrest you. You can spend a day ortwo in jail while your lawyer looks for you. A lot can happen in thattime. A lot. How'd you like that?"I didn't say anything. I'd been giddy and angry. Now I was scaredwitless.
"I'm sorry," I managed, hating myself again for saying it.
Booger got in the front seat and Zit put the car in gear, cruising up24th Street and over Potrero Hill. They had my address from my ID.
Mom answered the door after they rang the bell, leaving the chain on.
She peeked around it, saw me and said, "Marcus? Who are these men?""Police," Booger said. He showed her his badge, letting her get a goodlook at it — not whipping it away the way he had with me. "Can wecome in?"Mom closed the door and took the chain off and let them in. Theybrought me in and Mom gave the three of us one of her looks.
"What's this about?"93Booger pointed at me. "We wanted to ask your son some routine ques-tions about his movements, but he declined to answer them. We felt itmight be best to bring him here.""Is he under arrest?" Mom's accent was coming on strong. Good oldMom.
"Are you a United States citizen, ma'am?" Zit said.
She gave him a look that could have stripped paint. "I shore am,hyuck," she said, in a broad southern accent. "Am I under arrest?"The two cops exchanged a look.
Zit took the fore. "We seem to have gotten off to a bad start. We identi-fied your son as someone with a nonstandard public transit usage pat-tern, as part of a new pro-active enforcement program. When we spotpeople whose travels are unusual, or that match a suspicious profile, weinvestigate further.""Wait," Mom said. "How do you know how my son uses the Muni?""The Fast Pass," he said. "It tracks voyages.""I see," Mom said, folding her arms. Folding her arms was a bad sign.
It was bad enough she hadn't offered them a cup of tea — in Mom-land,that was practically like making them shout through the mail-slot — butonce she folded her arms, it was not going to end well for them. At thatmoment, I wanted to go and buy her a big bunch of flowers.
"Marcus here declined to tell us why his movements had been whatthey were.""Are you saying you think my son is a terrorist because of how herides the bus?""Terrorists aren't the only bad guys we catch this way," Zit said. "Drugdealers. Gang kids. Even shoplifters smart enough to hit a differentneighborhood with every run.""You think my son is a drug dealer?""We're not saying that —" Zit began. Mom clapped her hands at him toshut him up.
"Marcus, please pass me your backpack."I did.
Mom unzipped it and looked through it, turning her back to us first.
94"Officers, I can now affirm that there are no narcotics, explosives, orshoplifted gewgaws in my son's bag. I think we're done here. I wouldlike your badge numbers before you go, please."Booger sneered at her. "Lady, the ACLU is suing three hundred copson the SFPD, you're going to have to get in line."Mom made me a cup of tea and then chewed me out for eating dinnerwhen I knew that she'd been making falafel. Dad came home while wewere still at the table and Mom and I took turns telling him the story. Heshook his head.
"Lillian, they were just doing their jobs." He was still wearing the blueblazer and khakis he wore on the days that he was consulting in SiliconValley. "The world isn't the same place it was last week."Mom set down her teacup. "Drew, you're being ridiculous. Your son isnot a terrorist. His use of the public transit system is not cause for a po-lice investigation."Dad took off his blazer. "We do this all the time at my work. It's howcomputers can be used to find all kinds of errors, anomalies and out-comes. You ask the computer to create a profile of an average record in adatabase and then ask it to find out which records in the database arefurthest away from average. It's part of something called Bayesian ana-lysis and it's been around for centuries now. Without it, we couldn't dospam-filtering —""So you're saying that you think the police should suck as hard as myspam filter?" I said.
Dad never got angry at me for arguing with him, but tonight I couldsee the strain was running high in him. Still, I couldn't resist. My ownfather, taking the police's side!
"I'm saying that it's perfectly reasonable for the police to conduct theirinvestigations by starting with data-mining, and then following it upwith leg-work where a human being actually intervenes to see why theabnormality exists. I don't think that a computer should be telling the po-lice whom to arrest, just helping them sort through the haystack to find aneedle.""But by taking in all that data from the transit system, they're creatingthe haystack," I said. "That's a gigantic mountain of data and there's al-most nothing worth looking at there, from the police's point of view. It'sa total waste."95"I understand that you don't like that this system caused you some in-convenience, Marcus. But you of all people should appreciate the gravityof the situation. There was no harm done, was there? They even gaveyou a ride home."They threatened to send me to jail, I thought, but I could see there was nopoint in saying it.
"Besides, you still haven't told us where the blazing hells you've beento create such an unusual traffic pattern."That brought me up short.
"I thought you relied on my judgment, that you didn't want to spy onme." He'd said this often enough. "Do you really want me to account forevery trip I've ever taken?"I hooked up my Xbox as soon as I got to my room. I'd bolted the pro-jector to the ceiling so that it could shine on the wall over my bed (I'dhad to take down my awesome mural of punk rock handbills I'd takendown off telephone poles and glued to big sheets of white paper).
I powered up the Xbox and watched as it came onto the screen. I wasgoing to email Van and Jolu to tell them about the hassles with the cops,but as I put my fingers to the keyboard, I stopped again.
A feeling crept over me, one not unlike the feeling I'd had when I real-ized that they'd turned poor old Salmagundi into a traitor. This time, itwas the feeling that my beloved Xnet might be broadcasting the locationof every one of its users to the DHS.
It was what Dad had said: You ask the computer to create a profile of anaverage record in a database and then ask it to find out which records in thedatabase are furthest away from average.
The Xnet was secure because its users weren't directly connected to theInternet. They hopped from Xbox to Xbox until they found one that wasconnected to the Internet, then they injected their material as unde-cipherable, encrypted data. No one could tell which of the Internet'spackets were Xnet and which ones were just plain old banking and e-commerce and other encrypted communication. You couldn't find outwho was tying the Xnet, let alone who was using the Xnet.
But what about Dad's "Bayesian statistics?" I'd played with Bayesianmath before. Darryl and I once tried to write our own better spam filterand when you filter spam, you need Bayesian math. Thomas Bayes wasan 18th century British mathematician that no one care about until a96couple hundred years after he died, when computer scientists realizedthat his technique for statistically analyzing mountains of data would besuper-useful for the modern world's info-Himalayas.
Here's some of how Bayesian stats work. Say you've got a bunch ofspam. You take every word that's in the spam and count how manytimes it appears. This is called a "word frequency histogram" and it tellsyou what the probability is that any bag of words is likely to be spam.
Now, take a ton of email that's not spam — in the biz, they call that"ham" — and do the same.
Wait until a new email arrives and count the words that appear in it.
Then use the word-frequency histogram in the candidate message to cal-culate the probability that it belongs in the "spam" pile or the "ham" pile.
If it turns out to be spam, you adjust the "spam" histogram accordingly.
There are lots of ways to refine the technique — looking at words inpairs, throwing away old data — but this is how it works at core. It's oneof those great, simple ideas that seems obvious after you hear about it.
It's got lots of applications — you can ask a computer to count thelines in a picture and see if it's more like a "dog" line-frequency histo-gram or a "cat" line-frequency histogram. It can find porn, bank fraud,and flamewars. Useful stuff.
And it was bad news for the Xnet. Say you had the whole Internetwiretapped — which, of course, the DHS has. You can't tell who'spassing Xnet packets by looking at the contents of those packets, thanksto crypto.
What you can do is find out who is sending way, way more encryptedtraffic out than everyone else. For a normal Internet surfer, a session on-line is probably about 95 percent cleartext, five percent ciphertext. Ifsomeone is sending out 95 percent ciphertext, maybe you could dispatchthe computer-savvy equivalents of Booger and Zit to ask them if they'reterrorist drug-dealer Xnet users.
This happens all the time in China. Some smart dissident will get theidea of getting around the Great Firewall of China, which is used to cen-sor the whole country's Internet connection, by using an encrypted con-nection to a computer in some other country. Now, the Party there can'ttell what the dissident is surfing: maybe it's porn, or bomb-making in-structions, or dirty letters from his girlfriend in the Philippines, or polit-ical material, or good news about Scientology. They don't have to know.
All they have to know is that this guy gets way more encrypted trafficthan his neighbors. At that point, they send him to a forced labor camp97just to set an example so that everyone can see what happens to smart-asses.
So far, I was willing to bet that the Xnet was under the DHS's radar,but it wouldn't be the case forever. And after tonight, I wasn't sure that Iwas in any better shape than a Chinese dissident. I was putting all thepeople who signed onto the Xnet in jeopardy. The law didn't care if youwere actually doing anything bad; they were willing to put you underthe microscope just for being statistically abnormal. And I couldn't evenstop it — now that the Xnet was running, it had a life of its own.
I was going to have to fix it some other way.
I wished I could talk to Jolu about this. He worked at an Internet Ser-vice Provider called Pigspleen Net that had hired him when he wastwelve, and he knew way more about the net than I did. If anyone knewhow to keep our butts out of jail, it would be him.
Luckily, Van and Jolu and I were planning to meet for coffee the nextnight at our favorite place in the Mission after school. Officially, it wasour weekly Harajuku Fun Madness team meeting, but with the gamecanceled and Darryl gone, it was pretty much just a weekly weep-fest,supplemented by about six phone-calls and IMs a day that went, "Areyou OK? Did it really happen?" It would be good to have something elseto talk about.
"You're out of your mind," Vanessa said. "Are you actually, totally,really, for-real crazy or what?"She had shown up in her girl's school uniform because she'd beenstuck going the long way home, all the way down to the San Mateobridge then back up into the city, on a shuttle-bus service that her schoolwas operating. She hated being seen in public in her gear, which wastotally Sailor Moon — a pleated skirt and a tunic and knee-socks. She'dbeen in a bad mood ever since she turned up at the cafe, which was fullof older, cooler, mopey emo art students who snickered into their latteswhen she turned up.
"What do you want me to do, Van?" I said. I was getting exasperatedmyself. School was unbearable now that the game wasn't on, now thatDarryl was missing. All day long, in my classes, I consoled myself withthe thought of seeing my team, what was left of it. Now we werefighting.
98"I want you to stop putting yourself at risk, M1k3y." The hairs on theback of my neck stood up. Sure, we always used our team handles atteam meetings, but now that my handle was also associated with myXnet use, it scared me to hear it said aloud in a public place.
"Don't use that name in public anymore," I snapped.
Van shook her head. "That's just what I'm taking about. You could endup going to jail for this, Marcus, and not just you. Lots of people. Afterwhat happened to Darryl —""I'm doing this for Darryl!" Art students swiveled to look at us and Ilowered my voice. "I'm doing this because the alternative is to let themget away with it all.""You think you're going to stop them? You're out of your mind.
They're the government.""It's still our country," I said. "We still have the right to do this."Van looked like she was going to cry. She took a couple of deepbreaths and stood up. "I can't do it, I'm sorry. I can't watch you do this.
It's like watching a car-wreck in slow motion. You're going to destroyyourself, and I love you too much to watch it happen."She bent down and gave me a fierce hug and a hard kiss on the cheekthat caught the edge of my mouth. "Take care of yourself, Marcus," shesaid. My mouth burned where her lips had pressed it. She gave Jolu thesame treatment, but square on the cheek. Then she left.
Jolu and I stared at each other after she'd gone.
I put my face in my hands. "Dammit," I said, finally.
Jolu patted me on the back and ordered me another latte. "It'll be OK,"he said.
"You'd think Van, of all people, would understand." Half of Van's fam-ily lived in North Korea. Her parents never forgot that they had all thosepeople living a crazy dictator, not able to escape to America, the way herparents had.
Jolu shrugged. "Maybe that's why she's so freaked out. Because sheknows how dangerous it can get."I knew what he was talking about. Two of Van's uncles had gone tojail and had never reappeared.
"Yeah," I said.
"So how come you weren't on Xnet last night?"99I was grateful for the distraction. I explained it all to him, the Bayesianstuff and my fear that we couldn't go on using Xnet the way we had beenwithout getting nabbed. He listened thoughtfully.
"I see what you're saying. The problem is that if there's too muchcrypto in someone's Internet connection, they'll stand out as unusual. Butif you don't encrypt, you'll make it easy for the bad guys to wiretap you.""Yeah," I said. "I've been trying to figure it out all day. Maybe we couldslow the connection down, spread it out over more peoples' accounts —""Won't work," he said. "To get it slow enough to vanish into the noise,you'd have to basically shut down the network, which isn't an option.""You're right," I said. "But what else can we do?""What if we changed the definition of normal?"And that was why Jolu got hired to work at Pigspleen when he was 12.
Give him a problem with two bad solutions and he'd figure out a thirdtotally different solution based on throwing away all your assumptions. Inodded vigorously. "Go on, tell me.""What if the average San Francisco Internet user had a lot more cryptoin his average day on the Internet? If we could change the split so it'smore like fifty-fifty cleartext to ciphertext, then the users that supply theXnet would just look like normal.""But how do we do that? People just don't care enough about their pri-vacy to surf the net through an encrypted link. They don't see why itmatters if eavesdroppers know what they're googling for.""Yeah, but web-pages are small amounts of traffic. If we got people toroutinely download a few giant encrypted files every day, that wouldcreate as much ciphertext as thousands of web-pages.""You're talking about indienet," I said.
"You got it," he said.
indienet — all lower case, always — was the thing that made Pigs-pleen Net into one of the most successful independent ISPs in the world.
Back when the major record labels started suing their fans for download-ing their music, a lot of the independent labels and their artists wereaghast. How can you make money by suing your customers?
Pigspleen's founder had the answer: she opened up a deal for any actthat wanted to work with their fans instead of fighting them. Give Pigs-pleen a license to distribute your music to its customers and it wouldgive you a share of the subscription fees based on how popular your100music was. For an indie artist, the big problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity:
no one even cares enough about your tunes to steal 'em.
It worked. Hundreds of independent acts and labels signed up withPigspleen, and the more music there was, the more fans switched to get-ting their Internet service from Pigspleen, and the more money there wasfor the artists. Inside of a year, the ISP had a hundred thousand new cus-tomers and now it had a million — more than half the broadband con-nections in the city.
"An overhaul of the indienet code has been on my plate for monthsnow," Jolu said. "The original programs were written really fast and dirtyand they could be made a lot more efficient with a little work. But I justhaven't had the time. One of the high-marked to-do items has been to en-crypt the connections, just because Trudy likes it that way." Trudy Doowas the founder of Pigspleen. She was an old time San Francisco punklegend, the singer/front-woman of the anarcho-feminist band Speed-whores, and she was crazy about privacy. I could totally believe thatshe'd want her music service encrypted on general principles.
"Will it be hard? I mean, how long would it take?""Well, there's tons of crypto code for free online, of course," Jolu said.
He was doing the thing he did when he was digging into a meaty codeproblem — getting that faraway look, drumming his palms on the table,making the coffee slosh into the saucers. I wanted to laugh — everythingmight be destroyed and crap and scary, but Jolu would write that code.
"Can I help?"He looked at me. "What, you don't think I can manage it?""What?""I mean, you did this whole Xnet thing without even telling me.
Without talking to me. I kind of thought that you didn't need my helpwith this stuff."I was brought up short. "What?" I said again. Jolu was looking reallysteamed now. It was clear that this had been eating him for a long time.
"Jolu —"He looked at me and I could see that he was furious. How had Imissed this? God, I was such an idiot sometimes. "Look dude, it's not abig deal —" by which he clearly meant that it was a really big deal "— it'sjust that you know, you never even asked. I hate the DHS. Darryl was myfriend too. I could have really helped with it."101I wanted to stick my head between my knees. "Listen Jolu, that wasreally stupid of me. I did it at like two in the morning. I was just crazywhen it was happening. I —" I couldn't explain it. Yeah, he was right,and that was the problem. It had been two in the morning but I couldhave talked to Jolu about it the next day or the next. I hadn't because I'dknown what he'd say — that it was an ugly hack, that I needed to think itthrough better. Jolu was always figuring out how to turn my 2 AM ideasinto real code, but the stuff that he came out with was always a little dif-ferent from what I'd come up with. I'd wanted the project for myself. I'dgotten totally into being M1k3y.
"I'm sorry," I said at last. "I'm really, really sorry. You're totally right. Ijust got freaked out and did something stupid. I really need your help. Ican't make this work without you.""You mean it?""Of course I mean it," I said. "You're the best coder I know. You're agoddamned genius, Jolu. I would be honored if you'd help me with this."He drummed his fingers some more. "It's just — You know. You're theleader. Van's the smart one. Darryl was… He was your second-in-com-mand, the guy who had it all organized, who watched the details. Beingthe programmer, that was my thing. It felt like you were saying youdidn't need me.""Oh man, I am such an idiot. Jolu, you're the best-qualified person Iknow to do this. I'm really, really, really —""All right, already. Stop. Fine. I believe you. We're all really screwedup right now. So yeah, of course you can help. We can probably evenpay you — I've got a little budget for contract programmers.""Really?" No one had ever paid me for writing code.
"Sure. You're probably good enough to be worth it." He grinned andslugged me in the shoulder. Jolu's really easy-going most of the time,which is why he'd freaked me out so much.
I paid for the coffees and we went out. I called my parents and letthem know what I was doing. Jolu's mom insisted on making us sand-wiches. We locked ourselves in his room with his computer and the codefor indienet and we embarked on one of the great all-time marathon pro-gramming sessions. Once Jolu's family went to bed around 11:30, wewere able to kidnap the coffee-machine up to his room and go IV withour magic coffee bean supply.
102If you've never programmed a computer, you should. There's nothinglike it in the whole world. When you program a computer, it does exactlywhat you tell it to do. It's like designing a machine — any machine, like acar, like a faucet, like a gas-hinge for a door — using math and instruc-tions. It's awesome in the truest sense: it can fill you with awe.
A computer is the most complicated machine you'll ever use. It's madeof billions of micro-miniaturized transistors that can be configured to runany program you can imagine. But when you sit down at the keyboardand write a line of code, those transistors do what you tell them to.
Most of us will never build a car. Pretty much none of us will ever cre-ate an aviation system. Design a building. Lay out a city.
Those are complicated machines, those things, and they're off-limits tothe likes of you and me. But a computer is like, ten times more complic-ated, and it will dance to any tune you play. You can learn to writesimple code in an afternoon. Start with a language like Python, whichwas written to give non-programmers an easier way to make the ma-chine dance to their tune. Even if you only write code for one day, oneafternoon, you have to do it. Computers can control you or they canlighten your work — if you want to be in charge of your machines, youhave to learn to write code.
We wrote a lot of code that night.
Chapter 8
This chapter is dedicated to Borders, the global bookselling giant thatyou can find in cities all over the world — I'll never forget walking intothe gigantic Borders on Orchard Road in Singapore and discovering ashelf loaded with my novels! For many years, the Borders in OxfordStreet in London hosted Pat Cadigan's monthly science fiction evenings,where local and visiting authors would read their work, speak about sci-ence fiction and meet their fans. When I'm in a strange city (which hap-pens a lot) and I need a great book for my next flight, there always seemsto be a Borders brimming with great choices — I'm especially partial tothe Borders on union Square in San Francisco.
Borders worldwideI wasn't the only one who got screwed up by the histograms. There arelots of people who have abnormal traffic patterns, abnormal usage pat-terns. Abnormal is so common, it's practically normal.
The Xnet was full of these stories, and so were the newspapers and theTV news. Husbands were caught cheating on their wives; wives werecaught cheating on their husbands, kids were caught sneaking out withillicit girlfriends and boyfriends. A kid who hadn't told his parents hehad AIDS got caught going to the clinic for his drugs.
Those were the people with something to hide — not guilty people,but people with secrets. There were even more people with nothing tohide at all, but who nevertheless resented being picked up, and ques-tioned. Imagine if someone locked you in the back of a police car and de-manded that you prove that you're not a terrorist.
It wasn't just public transit. Most drivers in the Bay Area have aFasTrak pass clipped to their sun-visors. This is a little radio-based"wallet" that pays your tolls for you when you cross the bridges, savingyou the hassle of sitting in a line for hours at the toll-plazas. They'dtripled the cost of using cash to get across the bridge (though they104always fudged this, saying that FasTrak was cheaper, not that anonym-ous cash was more expensive). Whatever holdouts were left afterwarddisappeared after the number of cash-lanes was reduced to just one perbridge-head, so that the cash lines were even longer.
So if you're a local, or if you're driving a rental car from a local agency,you've got a FasTrak. It turns out that toll-plazas aren't the only placethat your FasTrak gets read, though. The DHS had put FasTrak readersall over town — when you drove past them, they logged the time andyour ID number, building an ever-more perfect picture of who wentwhere, when, in a database that was augmented by "speeding cameras,""red light cameras" and all the other license-plate cameras that hadpopped up like mushrooms.
No one had given it much thought. And now that people were payingattention, we were all starting to notice little things, like the fact that theFasTrak doesn't have an off-switch.
So if you drove a car, you were just as likely to be pulled over by anSFPD cruiser that wanted to know why you were taking so many trips tothe Home Depot lately, and what was that midnight drive up to Sonomalast week about?
The little demonstrations around town on the weekend were growing.
Fifty thousand people marched down Market Street after a week of thismonitoring. I couldn't care less. The people who'd occupied my citydidn't care what the natives wanted. They were a conquering army. Theyknew how we felt about that.
One morning I came down to breakfast just in time to hear Dad tellMom that the two biggest taxi companies were going to give a "discount"to people who used special cards to pay their fares, supposedly to makedrivers safer by reducing the amount of cash they carried. I wonderedwhat would happen to the information about who took which cabswhere.
I realized how close I'd come. The new indienet client had beenpushed out as an automatic update just as this stuff started to get bad,and Jolu told me that 80 percent of the traffic he saw at Pigspleen wasnow encrypted. The Xnet just might have been saved.
Dad was driving me nuts, though.
"You're being paranoid, Marcus," he told me over breakfast one day asI told him about the guys I'd seen the cops shaking down on BART theday before.
105"Dad, it's ridiculous. They're not catching any terrorists, are they? It'sjust making people scared.""They may not have caught any terrorists yet, but they're sure gettinga lot of scumbags off the streets. Look at the drug dealers — it saysthey've put dozens of them away since this all started. Remember whenthose druggies robbed you? If we don't bust their dealers, it'll only getworse." I'd been mugged the year before. They'd been pretty civilizedabout it. One skinny guy who smelled bad told me he had a gun, the oth-er one asked me for my wallet. They even let me keep my ID, thoughthey got my debit card and Fast Pass. It had still scared me witless andleft me paranoid and checking my shoulder for weeks.
"But most of the people they hold up aren't doing anything wrong,Dad," I said. This was getting to me. My own father! "It's crazy. For everyguilty person they catch, they have to punish thousands of innocentpeople. That's just not good.""Innocent? Guys cheating on their wives? Drug dealers? You're de-fending them, but what about all the people who died? If you don't haveanything to hide —""So you wouldn't mind if they pulled you over?" My dad's histogramshad proven to be depressingly normal so far.
"I'd consider it my duty," he said. "I'd be proud. It would make me feelsafer."Easy for him to say.
Vanessa didn't like me talking about this stuff, but she was too smartabout it for me to stay away from the subject for long. We'd get togetherall the time, and talk about the weather and school and stuff, and then,somehow, I'd be back on this subject. Vanessa was cool when ithappened — she didn't Hulk out on me again — but I could see it upsether.
Still.
"So my dad says, 'I'd consider it my duty.' Can you freaking believe it? Imean, God! I almost told him then about going to jail, asking him if hethought that was our 'duty'!"We were sitting in the grass in Dolores Park after school, watching thedogs chase frisbees.
106Van had stopped at home and changed into an old t-shirt for one ofher favorite Brazilian tecno-brega bands, Carioca Proibid?o — the forbid-den guy from Rio. She'd gotten the shirt at a live show we'd all gone totwo years before, sneaking out for a grand adventure down at the CowPalace, and she'd sprouted an inch or two since, so it was tight and rodeup her tummy, showing her flat little belly button.
She lay back in the weak sun with her eyes closed behind her shades,her toes wiggling in her flip-flops. I'd known Van since forever, andwhen I thought of her, I usually saw the little kid I'd known with hun-dreds of jangly bracelets made out of sliced-up soda cans, who playedthe piano and couldn't dance to save her life. Sitting out there in DoloresPark, I suddenly saw her as she was.
She was totally h4wt — that is to say, hot. It was like looking at thatpicture of a vase and noticing that it was also two faces. I could see thatVan was just Van, but I could also see that she was hella pretty,something I'd never noticed.
Of course, Darryl had known it all along, and don't think that I wasn'tbummed out anew when I realized this.
"You can't tell your dad, you know," she said. "You'd put us all at risk."Her eyes were closed and her chest was rising up and down with herbreath, which was distracting in a really embarrassing way.
"Yeah," I said, glumly. "But the problem is that I know he's just totallyfull of it. If you pulled my dad over and made him prove he wasn't achild-molesting, drug-dealing terrorist, he'd go berserk. Totally off-the-rails. He hates being put on hold when he calls about his credit-card bill.
Being locked in the back of a car and questioned for an hour would givehim an aneurism.""They only get away with it because the normals feel smug comparedto the abnormals. If everyone was getting pulled over, it'd be a disaster.
No one would ever get anywhere, they'd all be waiting to get questionedby the cops. Total gridlock."Woah.
"Van, you are a total genius," I said.
"Tell me about it," she said. She had a lazy smile and she looked at methrough half-lidded eyes, almost romantic.
"Seriously. We can do this. We can mess up the profiles easily. Gettingpeople pulled over is easy."107She sat up and pushed her hair off her face and looked at me. I felt alittle flip in my stomach, thinking that she was really impressed with me.
"It's the arphid cloners," I said. "They're totally easy to make. Just flashthe firmware on a ten-dollar Radio Shack reader/writer and you're done.
What we do is go around and randomly swap the tags on people, over-writing their Fast Passes and FasTraks with other people's codes. That'llmake everyone skew all weird and screwy, and make everyone lookguilty. Then: total gridlock."Van pursed her lips and lowered her shades and I realized she was soangry she couldn't speak.
"Good bye, Marcus," she said, and got to her feet. Before I knew it, shewas walking away so fast she was practically running.
"Van!" I called, getting to my feet and chasing after her. "Van! Wait!"She picked up speed, making me run to catch up with her.
"Van, what the hell," I said, catching her arm. She jerked it away sohard I punched myself in the face.
"You're psycho, Marcus. You're going to put all your little Xnet bud-dies in danger for their lives, and on top of it, you're going to turn thewhole city into terrorism suspects. Can't you stop before you hurt thesepeople?"I opened and closed my mouth a couple times. "Van, I'm not the prob-lem, they are. I'm not arresting people, jailing them, making them disap-pear. The Department of Homeland Security are the ones doing that. I'mfighting back to make them stop.""How, by making it worse?""Maybe it has to get worse to get better, Van. Isn't that what you weresaying? If everyone was getting pulled over —""That's not what I meant. I didn't mean you should get everyone arres-ted. If you want to protest, join the protest movement. Do somethingpositive. Didn't you learn anything from Darryl? Anything?""You're damned right I did," I said, losing my cool. "I learned that theycan't be trusted. That if you're not fighting them, you're helping them.
That they'll turn the country into a prison if we let them. What did youlearn, Van? To be scared all the time, to sit tight and keep your headdown and hope you don't get noticed? You think it's going to get better?
If we don't do anything, this is as good as it's going to get. It will only get108worse and worse from now on. You want to help Darryl? Help me bringthem down!"There it was again. My vow. Not to get Darryl free, but to bring downthe entire DHS. That was crazy, even I knew it. But it was what I plannedto do. No question about it.
Van shoved me hard with both hands. She was strong from school ath-letics — fencing, lacrosse, field hockey, all the girls-school sports — and Iended up on my ass on the disgusting San Francisco sidewalk. She tookoff and I didn't follow.
>
The important thing about security systems isn't how they work, it'show they fail.
That was the first line of my first blog post on Open Revolt, my Xnetsite. I was writing as M1k3y, and I was ready to go to war.
>
Maybe all the automatic screening is supposed to catch terrorists.
Maybe it will catch a terrorist sooner or later. The problem is that itcatches us too, even though we're not doing anything wrong.
>
The more people it catches, the more brittle it gets. If it catches toomany people, it dies.
>
Get the idea?
I pasted in my HOWTO for building a arphid cloner, and some tips forgetting close enough to people to read and write their tags. I put my owncloner in the pocket of my vintage black leather motocross jacket withthe armored pockets and left for school. I managed to clone six tagsbetween home and Chavez High.
It was war they wanted. It was war they'd get.
If you ever decide to do something as stupid as build an automatic ter-rorism detector, here's a math lesson you need to learn first. It's called"the paradox of the false positive," and it's a doozy.
Say you have a new disease, called Super-AIDS. Only one in a millionpeople gets Super-AIDS. You develop a test for Super-AIDS that's 99109percent accurate. I mean, 99 percent of the time, it gives the correct result— true if the subject is infected, and false if the subject is healthy. Yougive the test to a million people.
One in a million people have Super-AIDS. One in a hundred peoplethat you test will generate a "false positive" — the test will say he hasSuper-AIDS even though he doesn't. That's what "99 percent accurate"means: one percent wrong.
What's one percent of one million?
1,000,000/100 = 10,000One in a million people has Super-AIDS. If you test a million randompeople, you'll probably only find one case of real Super-AIDS. But yourtest won't identify one person as having Super-AIDS. It will identify10,000 people as having it.
Your 99 percent accurate test will perform with 99.99 percentinaccuracy.
That's the paradox of the false positive. When you try to findsomething really rare, your test's accuracy has to match the rarity of thething you're looking for. If you're trying to point at a single pixel on yourscreen, a sharp pencil is a good pointer: the pencil-tip is a lot smaller(more accurate) than the pixels. But a pencil-tip is no good at pointing ata single atom in your screen. For that, you need a pointer — a test —that's one atom wide or less at the tip.
This is the paradox of the false positive, and here's how it applies toterrorism:
Terrorists are really rare. In a city of twenty million like New York,there might be one or two terrorists. Maybe ten of them at the outside.
10/20,000,000 = 0.00005 percent. One twenty-thousandth of a percent.
That's pretty rare all right. Now, say you've got some software that cansift through all the bank-records, or toll-pass records, or public transit re-cords, or phone-call records in the city and catch terrorists 99 percent ofthe time.
In a pool of twenty million people, a 99 percent accurate test willidentify two hundred thousand people as being terrorists. But only ten ofthem are terrorists. To catch ten bad guys, you have to haul in and in-vestigate two hundred thousand innocent people.
Guess what? Terrorism tests aren't anywhere close to 99 percent accur-ate. More like 60 percent accurate. Even 40 percent accurate, sometimes.
110What this all meant was that the Department of Homeland Securityhad set itself up to fail badly. They were trying to spot incredibly rareevents — a person is a terrorist — with inaccurate systems.
Is it any wonder we were able to make such a mess?
I stepped out the front door whistling on a Tuesday morning one weekinto the Operation False Positive. I was rockin' out to some new musicI'd downloaded from the Xnet the night before — lots of people sentM1k3y little digital gifts to say thank you for giving them hope.
I turned onto 23d Street and carefully took the narrow stone steps cutinto the side of the hill. As I descended, I passed Mr Wiener Dog. I don'tknow Mr Wiener Dog's real name, but I see him nearly every day, walk-ing his three panting wiener dogs up the staircase to the little parkette.
Squeezing past them all on the stairs is pretty much impossible and I al-ways end up tangled in a leash, knocked into someone's front garden, orperched on the bumper of one of the cars parked next to the curb.
Mr Wiener Dog is clearly Someone Important, because he has a fancywatch and always wears a nice suit. I had mentally assumed that heworked down in the financial district.
Today as I brushed up against him, I triggered my arphid cloner,which was already loaded in the pocket of my leather jacket. The clonersucked down the numbers off his credit-cards and his car-keys, his pass-port and the hundred-dollar bills in his wallet.
Even as it was doing that, it was flashing some of them with new num-bers, taken from other people I'd brushed against. It was like switchingthe license-plates on a bunch of cars, but invisible and instantaneous. Ismiled apologetically at Mr Wiener Dog and continued down the stairs. Istopped at three of the cars long enough to swap their FasTrak tags withnumbers taken offall over cars I'd gone past the day before.
You might think I was being a little aggro here, but I was cautious andconservative compared to a lot of the Xnetters. A couple girls in theChemical Engineering program at UC Berkeley had figured out how tomake a harmless substance out of kitchen products that would trip anexplosive sniffer. They'd had a merry time sprinkling it on their profs'
briefcases and jackets, then hiding out and watching the same profs tryto get into the auditoriums and libraries on campus, only to get flying-tackled by the new security squads that had sprung up everywhere.
111Other people wanted to figure out how to dust envelopes with sub-stances that would test positive for anthrax, but everyone else thoughtthey were out of their minds. Luckily, it didn't seem like they'd be able tofigure it out.
I passed by San Francisco General Hospital and nodded with satisfac-tion as I saw the huge lines at the front doors. They had a police check-point too, of course, and there were enough Xnetters working as internsand cafeteria workers and whatnot there that everyone's badges hadbeen snarled up and swapped around. I'd read the security checks hadtacked an hour onto everyone's work day, and the unions were threaten-ing to walk out unless the hospital did something about it.
A few blocks later, I saw an even longer line for the BART. Cops werewalking up and down the line pointing people out and calling themaside for questioning, bag-searches and pat-downs. They kept gettingsued for doing this, but it didn't seem to be slowing them down.
I got to school a little ahead of time and decided to walk down to 22ndStreet to get a coffee — and I passed a police checkpoint where they werepulling over cars for secondary inspection.
School was no less wild — the security guards on the metal detectorswere also wanding our school IDs and pulling out students with oddmovements for questioning. Needless to say, we all had pretty weirdmovements. Needless to say, classes were starting an hour or more later.
Classes were crazy. I don't think anyone was able to concentrate. Ioverheard two teachers talking about how long it had taken them to gethome from work the day before, and planning to sneak out early thatday.
It was all I could do to keep from laughing. The paradox of the falsepositive strikes again!
Sure enough, they let us out of class early and I headed home the longway, circling through the Mission to see the havoc. Long lines of cars.
BART stations lined up around the blocks. People swearing at ATMs thatwouldn't dispense their money because they'd had their accounts frozenfor suspicious activity (that's the danger of wiring your checking accountstraight into your FasTrak and Fast Pass!).
I got home and made myself a sandwich and logged into the Xnet. Ithad been a good day. People from all over town were crowing abouttheir successes. We'd brought the city of San Francisco to a standstill. Thenews-reports confirmed it — they were calling it the DHS gone haywire,112blaming it all on the fake-ass "security" that was supposed to be protect-ing us from terrorism. The Business section of the San Francisco Chron-icle gave its whole front page to an estimate of the economic cost of theDHS security resulting from missed work hours, meetings and so on. Ac-cording to the Chronicle's economist, a week of this crap would cost thecity more than the Bay Bridge bombing had.
Mwa-ha-ha-ha.
The best part: Dad got home that night late. Very late. Three hours late.
Why? Because he'd been pulled over, searched, questioned. Then ithappened again. Twice.
Twice!
Chapter 9
This chapter is dedicated to Compass Books/Books Inc, the oldest inde-pendent bookstore in the western USA. They've got stores up and downCalifornia, in San Francisco, Burlingame, Mountain View and PaloAlto, but coolest of all is that they run a killer bookstore in the middle ofDisneyland's Downtown Disney in Anaheim. I'm a stone Disney parkfreak (see my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom if youdon't believe it), and every time I've lived in California, I've bought my-self an annual Disneyland pass, and on practically every visit, I drop byCompass Books in Downtown Disney. They stock a brilliant selection ofunauthorized (and even critical) books about Disney, as well as a greatvariety of kids books and science fiction, and the cafe next door makes amean cappuccino.
Compass Books/Books IncHe was so angry I thought he was going to pop. You know I said I'donly seen him lose his cool rarely? That night, he lost it more than heever had.
"You wouldn't believe it. This cop, he was like eighteen years old andhe kept saying, 'But sir, why were you in Berkeley yesterday if your cli-ent is in Mountain View?' I kept explaining to him that I teach at Berke-ley and then he'd say, 'I thought you were a consultant,' and we'd startover again. It was like some kind of sitcom where the cops have beentaken over by the stupidity ray.
"What's worse was he kept insisting that I'd been in Berkeley today aswell, and I kept saying no, I hadn't been, and he said I had been. Then heshowed me my FasTrak billing and it said I'd driven the San Mateobridge three times that day!
"That's not all," he said, and drew in a breath that let me know he wasreally steamed. "They had information about where I'd been, places thatdidn't have a toll plaza. They'd been polling my pass just on the street, at114random. And it was wrong! Holy crap, I mean, they're spying on us alland they're not even competent!"I'd drifted down into the kitchen as he railed there, and now I waswatching him from the doorway. Mom met my eye and we both raisedour eyebrows as if to say, Who's going to say 'I told you so' to him? I nod-ded at her. She could use her spousular powers to nullify his rage in away that was out of my reach as a mere filial unit.
"Drew," she said, and grabbed him by the arm to make him stop stalk-ing back and forth in the kitchen, waving his arms like a street-preacher.
"What?" he snapped.
"I think you owe Marcus an apology." She kept her voice even andlevel. Dad and I are the spazzes in the household — Mom's a total rock.
Dad looked at me. His eyes narrowed as he thought for a minute. "Allright," he said at last. "You're right. I was talking about competent sur-veillance. These guys were total amateurs. I'm sorry, son," he said. "Youwere right. That was ridiculous." He stuck his hand out and shook myhand, then gave me a firm, unexpected hug.
"God, what are we doing to this country, Marcus? Your generation de-serves to inherit something better than this." When he let me go, I couldsee the deep wrinkles in his face, lines I'd never noticed.
I went back up to my room and played some Xnet games. There was agood multiplayer thing, a clockwork pirate game where you had to questevery day or two to wind up your whole crew's mainsprings before youcould go plundering and pillaging again. It was the kind of game I hatedbut couldn't stop playing: lots of repetitive quests that weren't all thatsatisfying to complete, a little bit of player-versus-player combat(scrapping to see who would captain the ship) and not that many coolpuzzles that you had to figure out. Mostly, playing this kind of gamemade me homesick for Harajuku Fun Madness, which balanced out run-ning around in the real world, figuring out online puzzles, and strategiz-ing with your team.
But today it was just what I needed. Mindless entertainment.
My poor dad.
I'd done that to him. He'd been happy before, confident that his taxdollars were being spent to keep him safe. I'd destroyed that confidence.
It was false confidence, of course, but it had kept him going. Seeing himnow, miserable and broken, I wondered if it was better to be clear-eyedand hopeless or to live in a fool's paradise. That shame — the shame I'd115felt since I gave up my passwords, since they'd broken me — returned,leaving me listless and wanting to just get away from myself.
My character was a swabbie on the pirate ship Zombie Charger, andhe'd wound down while I'd been offline. I had to IM all the other playerson my ship until I found one willing to wind me up. That kept me occu-pied. I liked it, actually. There was something magic about a totalstranger doing you a favor. And since it was the Xnet, I knew that all thestrangers were friends, in some sense.
>
Where u located?
The character who wound me up was called Lizanator, and it was fe-male, though that didn't mean that it was a girl. Guys had some weirdaffinity for playing female characters.
>
San FranciscoI said.
>
No stupe, where you located in San Fran?
>
Why, you a pervert?
That usually shut down that line of conversation. Of course everygamespace was full of pedos and pervs, and cops pretending to be pedo-and perv-bait (though I sure hoped there weren't any cops on the Xnet!).
An accusation like that was enough to change the subject nine out of tentimes.
>
Mission? Potrero Hill? Noe? East Bay?
>
Just wind me up k thx?
She stopped winding.
>
You scared?
>
Safe — why do you care?
>
116Just curiousI was getting a bad vibe off her. She was clearly more than just curi-ous. Call it paranoia. I logged off and shut down my Xbox.
Dad looked at me over the table the next morning and said, "It lookslike it's going to get better, at least." He handed me a copy of the Chron-icle open to the third page.
>
A Department of Homeland Security spokesman has confirmed thatthe San Francisco office has requested a 300 percent budget and person-nel increase from DCWhat?
>
Major General Graeme Sutherland, the commanding officer for North-ern California DHS operations, confirmed the request at a press confer-ence yesterday, noting that a spike in suspicious activity in the Bay Areaprompted the request. "We are tracking a spike in underground chatterand activity and believe that saboteurs are deliberately manufacturingfalse security alerts to undermine our efforts."My eyes crossed. No freaking way.
>
"These false alarms are potentially 'radar chaff' intended to disguisereal attacks. The only effective way of combatting them is to step upstaffing and analyst levels so that we can fully investigate every lead.">
Sutherland noted the delays experienced all over the city were"unfortunate" and committed to eliminating them.
I had a vision of the city with four or five times as many DHS enfor-cers, brought in to make up for my own stupid ideas. Van was right. Themore I fought them, the worse it was going to get.
Dad pointed at the paper. "These guys may be fools, but they're meth-odical fools. They'll just keep throwing resources at this problem untilthey solve it. It's tractable, you know. Mining all the data in the city, fol-lowing up on every lead. They'll catch the terrorists."I lost it. "Dad! Are you listening to yourself? They're talking about in-vestigating practically every person in the city of San Francisco!"117"Yeah," he said, "that's right. They'll catch every alimony cheat, everydope dealer, every dirt-bag and every terrorist. You just wait. This couldbe the best thing that ever happened to this country.""Tell me you're joking," I said. "I beg you. You think that that's whatthey intended when they wrote the Constitution? What about the Bill ofRights?""The Bill of Rights was written before data-mining," he said. He wasawesomely serene, convinced of his rightness. "The right to freedom ofassociation is fine, but why shouldn't the cops be allowed to mine yoursocial network to figure out if you're hanging out with gangbangers andterrorists?""Because it's an invasion of my privacy!" I said.
"What's the big deal? Would you rather have privacy or terrorists?"Agh. I hated arguing with my dad like this. I needed a coffee. "Dad,come on. Taking away our privacy isn't catching terrorists: it's just incon-veniencing normal people.""How do you know it's not catching terrorists?""Where are the terrorists they've caught?""I'm sure we'll see arrests in good time. You just wait.""Dad, what the hell has happened to you since last night? You wereready to go nuclear on the cops for pulling you over —""Don't use that tone with me, Marcus. What's happened since lastnight is that I've had the chance to think it over and to read this." Herattled his paper. "The reason they caught me is that the bad guys areactively jamming them. They need to adjust their techniques to over-come the jamming. But they'll get there. Meanwhile the occasional roadstop is a small price to pay. This isn't the time to be playing lawyer aboutthe Bill of Rights. This is the time to make some sacrifices to keep our citysafe."I couldn't finish my toast. I put the plate in the dishwasher and left forschool. I had to get out of there.
The Xnetters weren't happy about the stepped up police surveillance,but they weren't going to take it lying down. Someone called a phone-inshow on KQED and told them that the police were wasting their time,that we could monkeywrench the system faster than they could untangleit. The recording was a top Xnet download that night.
118"This is California Live and we're talking to an anonymous caller at apayphone in San Francisco. He has his own information about the slow-downs we've been facing around town this week. Caller, you're on theair.""Yeah, yo, this is just the beginning, you know? I mean, like, we're justgetting started. Let them hire a billion pigs and put a checkpoint onevery corner. We'll jam them all! And like, all this crap about terrorists?
We're not terrorists! Give me a break, I mean, really! We're jamming upthe system because we hate the Homeland Security, and because we loveour city. Terrorists? I can't even spell jihad. Peace out."He sounded like an idiot. Not just the incoherent words, but also hisgloating tone. He sounded like a kid who was indecently proud of him-self. He was a kid who was indecently proud of himself.
The Xnet flamed out over this. Lots of people thought he was an idiotfor calling in, while others thought he was a hero. I worried that therewas probably a camera aimed at the payphone he'd used. Or an arphidreader that might have sniffed his Fast Pass. I hoped he'd had the smartsto wipe his fingerprints off the quarter, keep his hood up, and leave allhis arphids at home. But I doubted it. I wondered if he'd get a knock onthe door sometime soon.
The way I knew when something big had happened on Xnet was thatI'd suddenly get a million emails from people who wanted M1k3y toknow about the latest haps. It was just as I was reading about Mr Can't-Spell-Jihad that my mailbox went crazy. Everyone had a message for me— a link to a livejournal on the Xnet — one of the many anonymousblogs that were based on the Freenet document publishing system thatwas also used by Chinese democracy advocates.
>
Close call>
We were jamming at the Embarcadero tonite and goofing around giv-ing everyone a new car key or door key or Fast Pass or FasTrak, tossingaround a little fake gunpowder. There were cops everywhere but wewere smarter then them; we're there pretty much every night and wenever get caught.
>
So we got caught tonight. It was a stupid mistake we got sloppy wegot busted. It was an undercover who caught my pal and then got the119rest of us. They'd been watching the crowd for a long time and they hadone of those trucks nearby and they took four of us in but missed therest.
>
The truck was JAMMED like a can of sardines with every kind of per-son, old young black white rich poor all suspects, and there were twocops trying to ask us questions and the undercovers kept bringing inmore of us. Most people were trying to get to the front of the line to getthrough questioning so we kept on moving back and it was like hours inthere and really hot and it was getting more crowded not less.
>
At like 8PM they changed shifts and two new cops came in andbawled out the two cops who were there all like wtf? aren't you doinganything here. They had a real fight and then the two old cops left andthe new cops sat down at their desks and whispered to each other for awhile.
>
Then one cop stood up and started shouting EVERYONE JUST GOHOME JESUS CHRIST WE'VE GOT BETTER THINGS TO DO THANBOTHER YOU WITH MORE QUESTIONS IF YOU'VE DONESOMETHING WRONG JUST DON'T DO IT AGAIN AND LET THIS BEA WARNING TO YOU ALL.
>
A bunch of the suits got really pissed which was HILARIOUS becauseI mean ten minutes before they were buggin about being held there andnow they were wicked pissed about being let go, like make up yourminds!
>
We split fast though and got out and came home to write this. Thereare undercovers everywhere, believe. If you're jamming, be open-eyedand get ready to run when problems happen. If you get caught try towait it out they're so busy they'll maybe just let you go.
>
We made them that busy! All those people in that truck were there be-cause we'd jammed them. So jam on!
I felt like I was going to throw up. Those four people — kids I'd nevermet — they nearly went away forever because of something I'd started.
120Because of something I'd told them to do. I was no better than aterrorist.
The DHS got their budget requisition approved. The President wenton TV with the Governor to tell us that no price was too high for secur-ity. We had to watch it the next day in school at assembly. My Dadcheered. He'd hated the President since the day he was elected, saying hewasn't any better than the last guy and the last guy had been a completedisaster, but now all he could do was talk about how decisive and dy-namic the new guy was.
"You have to take it easy on your father," Mom said to me one nightafter I got home from school. She'd been working from home as much aspossible. Mom's a freelance relocation specialist who helps British peopleget settled in in San Francisco. The UK High Commission pays her to an-swer emails from mystified British people across the country who aretotally confused by how freaky we Americans are. She explains Americ-ans for a living, and she said that these days it was better to do that fromhome, where she didn't have to actually see any Americans or talk tothem.
I don't have any illusions about Britain. America may be willing totrash its Constitution every time some Jihadist looks cross-eyed at us, butas I learned in my ninth-grade Social Studies independent project, theBrits don't even have a Constitution. They've got laws there that wouldcurl the hair on your toes: they can put you in jail for an entire year ifthey're really sure that you're a terrorist but don't have enough evidenceto prove it. Now, how sure can they be if they don't have enough evid-ence to prove it? How'd they get that sure? Did they see you committingterrorist acts in a really vivid dream?
And the surveillance in Britain makes America look like amateur hour.
The average Londoner is photographed 500 times a day, just walkingaround the streets. Every license plate is photographed at every corner inthe country. Everyone from the banks to the public transit company isenthusiastic about tracking you and snitching on you if they think you'reremotely suspicious.
But Mom didn't see it that way. She'd left Britain halfway throughhigh school and she'd never felt at home here, no matter that she'd mar-ried a boy from Petaluma and raised a son here. To her, this was alwaysthe land of barbarians, and Britain would always be home.
121"Mom, he's just wrong. You of all people should know that.
Everything that makes this country great is being flushed down the toiletand he's going along with it. Have you noticed that they haven't caughtany terrorists? Dad's all like, 'We need to be safe,' but he needs to knowthat most of us don't feel safe. We feel endangered all the time.""I know this all, Marcus. Believe me, I'm not fan of what's been hap-pening to this country. But your father is —" She broke off. "When youdidn't come home after the attacks, he thought —"She got up and made herself a cup of tea, something she did whenevershe was uncomfortable or disconcerted.
"Marcus," she said. "Marcus, we thought you were dead. Do you un-derstand that? We were mourning you for days. We were imagining youblown to bits, at the bottom of the ocean. Dead because some bastard de-cided to kill hundreds of strangers to make some point."That sank in slowly. I mean, I understood that they'd been worried.
Lots of people died in the bombings — four thousand was the present es-timate — and practically everyone knew someone who didn't comehome that day. There were two people from my school who haddisappeared.
"Your father was ready to kill someone. Anyone. He was out of hismind. You've never seen him like this. I've never seen him like it either.
He was out of his mind. He'd just sit at this table and curse and curseand curse. Vile words, words I'd never heard him say. One day — thethird day — someone called and he was sure it was you, but it was awrong number and he threw the phone so hard it disintegrated intothousands of pieces." I'd wondered about the new kitchen phone.
"Something broke in your father. He loves you. We both love you. Youare the most important thing in our lives. I don't think you realize that.
Do you remember when you were ten, when I went home to London forall that time? Do you remember?"I nodded silently.
"We were ready to get a divorce, Marcus. Oh, it doesn't matter whyanymore. It was just a bad patch, the kind of thing that happens whenpeople who love each other stop paying attention for a few years. Hecame and got me and convinced me to come back for you. We couldn'tbear the thought of doing that to you. We fell in love again for you.
We're together today because of you."122I had a lump in my throat. I'd never known this. No one had ever toldme.
"So your father is having a hard time right now. He's not in his rightmind. It's going to take some time before he comes back to us, before he'sthe man I love again. We need to understand him until then."She gave me a long hug, and I noticed how thin her arms had gotten,how saggy the skin on her neck was. I always thought of my mother asyoung, pale, rosy-cheeked and cheerful, peering shrewdly through hermetal-rim glasses. Now she looked a little like an old woman. I had donethat to her. The terrorists had done that to her. The Department ofHomeland Security had done that to her. In a weird way, we were all onthe same side, and Mom and Dad and all those people we'd spoofedwere on the other side.
I couldn't sleep that night. Mom's words kept running through myhead. Dad had been tense and quiet at dinner and we'd barely spoken,because I didn't trust myself not to say the wrong thing and because hewas all wound up over the latest news, that Al Qaeda was definitely re-sponsible for the bombing. Six different terrorist groups had claimed re-sponsibility for the attack, but only Al Qaeda's Internet video disclosedinformation that the DHS said they hadn't disclosed to anyone.
I lay in bed and listened to a late-night call-in radio show. The topicwas sex problems, with this gay guy who I normally loved to listen to, hewould give people such raw advice, but good advice, and he was reallyfunny and campy.
Tonight I couldn't laugh. Most of the callers wanted to ask what to doabout the fact that they were having a hard time getting busy with theirpartners ever since the attack. Even on sex-talk radio, I couldn't get awayfrom the topic.
I switched the radio off and heard a purring engine on the streetbelow.
My bedroom is in the top floor of our house, one of the painted ladies.
I have a sloping attic ceiling and windows on both sides — one over-looks the whole Mission, the other looks out into the street in front of ourplace. There were often cars cruising at all hours of the night, but therewas something different about this engine noise.
I went to the street-window and pulled up my blinds. Down on thestreet below me was a white, unmarked van whose roof was festooned123with radio antennas, more antennas than I'd ever seen on a car. It wascruising very slowly down the street, a little dish on top spinning aroundand around.
As I watched, the van stopped and one of the back doors poppedopen. A guy in a DHS uniform — I could spot one from a hundred yardsnow — stepped out into the street. He had some kind of handhelddevice, and its blue glow lit his face. He paced back and forth, first scout-ing my neighbors, making notes on his device, then heading for me.
There was something familiar in the way he walked, looking down —He was using a wifinder! The DHS was scouting for Xnet nodes. I letgo of the blinds and dove across my room for my Xbox. I'd left it upwhile I downloaded some cool animations one of the Xnetters had madeof the President's no-price-too-high speech. I yanked the plug out of thewall, then scurried back to the window and cracked the blind a fractionof an inch.
The guy was looking down into his wifinder again, walking back andforth in front of our house. A moment later, he got back into his van anddrove away.
I got out my camera and took as many pictures as I could of the vanand its antennas. Then I opened them in a free image-editor called TheGIMP and edited out everything from the photo except the van, erasingmy street and anything that might identify me.
I posted them to Xnet and wrote down everything I could about thevans. These guys were definitely looking for the Xnet, I could tell.
Now I really couldn't sleep.
Nothing for it but to play wind-up pirates. There'd be lots of playerseven at this hour. The real name for wind-up pirates was ClockworkPlunder, and it was a hobbyist project that had been created by teenageddeath-metal freaks from Finland. It was totally free to play, and offeredjust as much fun as any of the $15/month services like Ender's Universeand Middle Earth Quest and Discworld Dungeons.
I logged back in and there I was, still on the deck of the Zombie Char-ger, waiting for someone to wind me up. I hated this part of the game.
>
Hey youI typed to a passing pirate.
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124Wind me up?
He paused and looked at me.
>
y should i?
>
We're on the same team. Plus you get experience points.
What a jerk.
>
Where are you located?
>
San FranciscoThis was starting to feel familiar.
>
Where in San Francisco?
I logged out. There was something weird going on in the game. Ijumped onto the livejournals and began to crawl from blog to blog. I gotthrough half a dozen before I found something that froze my blood.
Livejournallers love quizzes. What kind of hobbit are you? Are you agreat lover? What planet are you most like? Which character from somemovie are you? What's your emotional type? They fill them in and theirfriends fill them in and everyone compares their results. Harmless fun.
But the quiz that had taken over the blogs of the Xnet that night waswhat scared me, because it was anything but harmless:
? What's your sex? What grade are you in?
? What school do you go to?
? Where in the city do you live?
The quizzes plotted the results on a map with colored pushpins forschools and neighborhoods, and made lame recommendations for placesto buy pizza and stuff.
But look at those questions. Think about my answers:
? Male? 17? Chavez High125? Potrero HillThere were only two people in my whole school who matched thatprofile. Most schools it would be the same. If you wanted to figure outwho the Xnetters were, you could use these quizzes to find them all.
That was bad enough, but what was worse what what it implied:
someone from the DHS was using the Xnet to get at us. The Xnet wascompromised by the DHS.
We had spies in our midst.
I'd given Xnet discs to hundreds of people, and they'd done the same. Iknew the people I gave the discs to pretty well. Some of them I knewvery well. I've lived in the same house all my life and I've made hun-dreds and hundreds of friends over the years, from people who went todaycare with me to people I played soccer with, people who LARPedwith me, people I met clubbing, people I knew from school. My ARGteam were my closest friends, but there were plenty of people I knewand trusted enough to hand an Xnet disc to.
I needed them now.
I woke Jolu up by ringing his cell phone and hanging up after the firstring, three times in a row. A minute later, he was up on Xnet and wewere able to have a secure chat. I pointed him to my blog-post on the ra-dio vans and he came back a minute later all freaked out.
>
You sure they're looking for us?
In response I sent him to the quiz.
>
OMG we're doomed>
No it's not that bad but we need to figure out who we can trust>
How?
>
That's what I wanted to ask you — how many people can you totallyvouch for like trust them to the ends of the earth?
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126Um 20 or 30 or so>
I want to get a bunch of really trustworthy people together and do akey-exchange web of trust thingWeb of trust is one of those cool crypto things that I'd read about butnever tried. It was a nearly foolproof way to make sure that you couldtalk to the people you trusted, but that no one else could listen in. Theproblem is that it requires you to physically meet with the people in theweb at least once, just to get started.
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I get it sure. That's not bad. But how you going to get everyone togeth-er for the key-signing?
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That's what I wanted to ask you about — how can we do it withoutgetting busted?
Jolu typed some words and erased them, typed more and erased them.
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Darryl would knowI typed.
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God, this was the stuff he was great at.
Jolu didn't type anything. Then,>
How about a party?
he typed.
>
How about if we all get together somewhere like we're teenagers hav-ing a party and that way we'll have a ready-made excuse if anyoneshows up asking us what we're doing there?
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That would totally work! You're a genius, Jolu.
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I know it. And you're going to love this: I know just where to do it, too>
127Where?
>
Sutro baths!

Chapter 10
This chapter is dedicated to Anderson's Bookshops, Chicago's legendarykids' bookstore. Anderson's is an old, old family-run business, whichstarted out as an old-timey drug-store selling some books on the side.
Today, it's a booming, multi-location kids' book empire, with some in-credibly innovative bookselling practices that get books and kids togetherin really exciting ways. The best of these is the store's mobile book-fairs,in which they ship huge, rolling bookcases, already stocked with excel-lent kids' books, direct to schools on trucks — voila, instant book-fair!
Anderson's Bookshops: 123 West Jefferson, Naperville, IL 60540 USA+1 630 355 2665What would you do if you found out you had a spy in your midst?
You could denounce him, put him up against the wall and take him out.
But then you might end up with another spy in your midst, and the newspy would be more careful than the last one and maybe not get caughtquite so readily.
Here's a better idea: start intercepting the spy's communications andfeed him and his masters misinformation. Say his masters instruct him togather information on your movements. Let him follow you around andtake all the notes he wants, but steam open the envelopes that he sendsback to HQ and replace his account of your movements with a fictitiousone. If you want, you can make him seem erratic and unreliable so theyget rid of him. You can manufacture crises that might make one side orthe other reveal the identities of other spies. In short, you own them.
This is called the man-in-the-middle attack and if you think about it,it's pretty scary. Someone who man-in-the-middles your communica-tions can trick you in any of a thousand ways.
Of course, there's a great way to get around the man-in-the-middle at-tack: use crypto. With crypto, it doesn't matter if the enemy can see your129messages, because he can't decipher them, change them, and re-sendthem. That's one of the main reasons to use crypto.
But remember: for crypto to work, you need to have keys for thepeople you want to talk to. You and your partner need to share a secretor two, some keys that you can use to encrypt and decrypt your mes-sages so that men-in-the-middle get locked out.
That's where the idea of public keys comes in. This is a little hairy, butit's so unbelievably elegant too.
In public key crypto, each user gets two keys. They're long strings ofmathematical gibberish, and they have an almost magic property.
Whatever you scramble with one key, the other will unlock, and vice-versa. What's more, they're the only keys that can do this — if you canunscramble a message with one key, you know it was scrambled with theother (and vice-versa).
So you take either one of these keys (it doesn't matter which one) andyou just publish it. You make it a total non-secret. You want anyone in theworld to know what it is. For obvious reasons, they call this your "publickey."The other key, you hide in the darkest reaches of your mind. You pro-tect it with your life. You never let anyone ever know what it is. That'scalled your "private key." (Duh.)Now say you're a spy and you want to talk with your bosses. Theirpublic key is known by everyone. Your public key is known by every-one. No one knows your private key but you. No one knows theirprivate key but them.
You want to send them a message. First, you encrypt it with yourprivate key. You could just send that message along, and it would workpretty well, since they would know when the message arrived that itcame from you. How? Because if they can decrypt it with your publickey, it can only have been encrypted with your private key. This is theequivalent of putting your seal or signature on the bottom of a message.
It says, "I wrote this, and no one else. No one could have tampered withit or changed it."Unfortunately, this won't actually keep your message a secret. That'sbecause your public key is really well known (it has to be, or you'll belimited to sending messages to those few people who have your publickey). Anyone who intercepts the message can read it. They can't change130it and make it seem like it came from you, but if you don't want peopleto know what you're saying, you need a better solution.
So instead of just encrypting the message with your private key, youalso encrypt it with your boss's public key. Now it's been locked twice.
The first lock — the boss's public key — only comes off when combinedwith your boss's private key. The second lock — your private key — onlycomes off with your public key. When your bosses receive the message,they unlock it with both keys and now they know for sure that: a) youwrote it and b) that only they can read it.
It's very cool. The day I discovered it, Darryl and I immediately ex-changed keys and spent months cackling and rubbing our hands as weexchanged our military-grade secret messages about where to meet afterschool and whether Van would ever notice him.
But if you want to understand security, you need to consider the mostparanoid possibilities. Like, what if I tricked you into thinking that mypublic key was your boss's public key? You'd encrypt the message withyour private key and my public key. I'd decrypt it, read it, re-encrypt itwith your boss's real public key and send it on. As far as your bossknows, no one but you could have written the message and no one buthim could have read it.
And I get to sit in the middle, like a fat spider in a web, and all yoursecrets belong to me.
Now, the easiest way to fix this is to really widely advertise your pub-lic key. If it's really easy for anyone to know what your real key is, man-in-the-middle gets harder and harder. But you know what? Makingthings well-known is just as hard as keeping them secret. Think about it— how many billions of dollars are spent on shampoo ads and othercrap, just to make sure that as many people know about something thatsome advertiser wants them to know?
There's a cheaper way of fixing man-in-the-middle: the web of trust.
Say that before you leave HQ, you and your bosses sit down over coffeeand actually tell each other your keys. No more man-in-the-middle!
You're absolutely certain whose keys you have, because they were putinto your own hands.
So far, so good. But there's a natural limit to this: how many peoplecan you physically meet with and swap keys? How many hours in theday do you want to devote to the equivalent of writing your own phonebook? How many of those people are willing to devote that kind of timeto you?
131Thinking about this like a phonebook helps. The world was once aplace with a lot of phonebooks, and when you needed a number, youcould look it up in the book. But for many of the numbers that youwanted to refer to on a given day, you would either know it by heart, oryou'd be able to ask someone else. Even today, when I'm out with mycell-phone, I'll ask Jolu or Darryl if they have a number I'm looking for.
It's faster and easier than looking it up online and they're more reliable,too. If Jolu has a number, I trust him, so I trust the number, too. That'scalled "transitive trust" — trust that moves across the web of ourrelationships.
A web of trust is a bigger version of this. Say I meet Jolu and get hiskey. I can put it on my "keyring" — a list of keys that I've signed with myprivate key. That means you can unlock it with my public key and knowfor sure that me — or someone with my key, anyway — says that "thiskey belongs to this guy."So I hand you my keyring and provided that you trust me to have ac-tually met and verified all the keys on it, you can take it and add it toyour keyring. Now, you meet someone else and you hand the whole ringto him. Bigger and bigger the ring grows, and provided that you trustthe next guy in the chain, and he trusts the next guy in his chain and soon, you're pretty secure.
Which brings me to keysigning parties. These are exactly what theysound like: a party where everyone gets together and signs everyoneelse's keys. Darryl and I, when we traded keys, that was kind of a mini-keysigning party, one with only two sad and geeky attendees. But withmore people, you create the seed of the web of trust, and the web can ex-pand from there. As everyone on your keyring goes out into the worldand meets more people, they can add more and more names to the ring.
You don't have to meet the new people, just trust that the signed key youget from the people in your web is valid.
So that's why web of trust and parties go together like peanut butterand chocolate.
"Just tell them it's a super-private party, invitational only," I said. "Tellthem not to bring anyone along or they won't be admitted."Jolu looked at me over his coffee. "You're joking, right? You tell peoplethat, and they'll bring extra friends."132"Argh," I said. I spent a night a week at Jolu's these days, keeping thecode up to date on indienet. Pigspleen actually paid me a non-zero sumof money to do this, which was really weird. I never thought I'd be paidto write code.
"So what do we do? We only want people we really trust there, and wedon't want to mention why until we've got everyone's keys and can sendthem messages in secret."Jolu debugged and I watched over his shoulder. This used to be called"extreme programming," which was a little embarrassing. Now we justcall it "programming." Two people are much better at spotting bugs thanone. As the cliche goes, "With enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."We were working our way through the bug reports and getting readyto push out the new rev. It all auto-updated in the background, so ourusers didn't really need to do anything, they just woke up once a week orso with a better program. It was pretty freaky to know that the code Iwrote would be used by hundreds of thousands of people, tomorrow!
"What do we do? Man, I don't know. I think we just have to live withit."I thought back to our Harajuku Fun Madness days. There were lots ofsocial challenges involving large groups of people as part of that game.
"OK, you're right. But let's at least try to keep this secret. Tell them thatthey can bring a maximum of one person, and it has to be someonethey've known personally for a minimum of five years."Jolu looked up from the screen. "Hey," he said. "Hey, that wouldtotally work. I can really see it. I mean, if you told me not to bring any-one, I'd be all, 'Who the hell does he think he is?' But when you put itthat way, it sounds like some awesome 007 stuff."I found a bug. We drank some coffee. I went home and played a littleClockwork Plunder, trying not to think about key-winders with nosyquestions, and slept like a baby.
Sutro baths are San Francisco's authentic fake Roman ruins. When itopened in 1896, it was the largest indoor bathing house in the world, ahuge Victorian glass solarium filled with pools and tubs and even anearly water slide. It went downhill by the fifties, and the owners torchedit for the insurance in 1966. All that's left is a labyrinth of weatheredstone set into the sere cliff-face at Ocean Beach. It looks for all the worldlike a Roman ruin, crumbled and mysterious, and just beyond them is a133set of caves that let out into the sea. In rough tides, the waves rushthrough the caves and over the ruins — they've even been known to suckin and drown the occasional tourist.
Ocean Beach is way out past Golden Gate park, a stark cliff lined withexpensive, doomed houses, plunging down to a narrow beach studdedwith jellyfish and brave (insane) surfers. There's a giant white rock thatjuts out of the shallows off the shore. That's called Seal Rock, and it usedto be the place where the sea lions congregated until they were relocatedto the more tourist-friendly environs of Fisherman's Wharf.
After dark, there's hardly anyone out there. It gets very cold, with asalt spray that'll soak you to your bones if you let it. The rocks are sharpand there's broken glass and the occasional junkie needle.
It is an awesome place for a party.
Bringing along the tarpaulins and chemical glove-warmers was myidea. Jolu figured out where to get the beer — his older brother, Javier,had a buddy who actually operated a whole underage drinking service:
pay him enough and he'd back up to your secluded party spot with ice-chests and as many brews as you wanted. I blew a bunch of my indienetprogramming money, and the guy showed up right on time: 8PM, agood hour after sunset, and lugged the six foam ice-chests out of hispickup truck and down into the ruins of the baths. He even brought aspare chest for the empties.
"You kids play safe now," he said, tipping his cowboy hat. He was a fatSamoan guy with a huge smile, and a scary tank-top that you could seehis armpit- and belly- and shoulder-hair escaping from. I peeled twentiesoff my roll and handed them to him — his markup was 150 percent. Nota bad racket.
He looked at my roll. "You know, I could just take that from you," hesaid, still smiling. "I'm a criminal, after all."I put my roll in my pocket and looked him levelly in the eye. I'd beenstupid to show him what I was carrying, but I knew that there weretimes when you should just stand your ground.
"I'm just messing with you," he said, at last. "But you be careful withthat money. Don't go showing it around.""Thanks," I said. "Homeland Security'll get my back though."His smile got even bigger. "Ha! They're not even real five-oh. Thosepeckerwoods don't know nothin'."134I looked over at his truck. Prominently displayed in his windscreenwas a FasTrak. I wondered how long it would be until he got busted.
"You got girls coming tonight? That why you got all the beer?"I smiled and waved at him as though he was walking back to histruck, which he should have been doing. He eventually got the hint anddrove away. His smile never faltered.
Jolu helped me hide the coolers in the rubble, working with little whiteLED torches on headbands. Once the coolers were in place, we threwlittle white LED keychains into each one, so it would glow when youtook the styrofoam lids off, making it easier to see what you were doing.
It was a moonless night and overcast, and the distant streetlightsbarely illuminated us. I knew we'd stand out like blazes on an infraredscope, but there was no chance that we'd be able to get a bunch of peopletogether without being observed. I'd settle for being dismissed as a littledrunken beach-party.
I don't really drink much. There's been beer and pot and ecstasy at theparties I've been going to since I was 14, but I hated smoking (though I'mquite partial to a hash brownie every now and again), ecstasy took toolong — who's got a whole weekend to get high and come down — andbeer, well, it was all right, but I didn't see what the big deal was. My fa-vorite was big, elaborate cocktails, the kind of thing served in a ceramicvolcano, with six layers, on fire, and a plastic monkey on the rim, butthat was mostly for the theater of it all.
I actually like being drunk. I just don't like being hungover, and boy,do I ever get hungover. Though again, that might have to do with thekind of drinks that come in a ceramic volcano.
But you can't throw a party without putting a case or two of beer onice. It's expected. It loosens things up. People do stupid things after toomany beers, but it's not like my friends are the kind of people who havecars. And people do stupid things no matter what — beer or grass orwhatever are all incidental to that central fact.
Jolu and I each cracked beers — Anchor Steam for him, a Bud Lite forme — and clinked the bottles together, sitting down on a rock.
"You told them 9PM?""Yeah," he said.
"Me too."135We drank in silence. The Bud Lite was the least alcoholic thing in theice-chest. I'd need a clear head later.
"You ever get scared?" I said, finally.
He turned to me. "No man, I don't get scared. I'm always scared. I'vebeen scared since the minute the explosions happened. I'm so scaredsometimes, I don't want to get out of bed.""Then why do you do it?"He smiled. "About that," he said. "Maybe I won't, not for much longer.
I mean, it's been great helping you. Great. Really excellent. I don't knowwhen I've done anything so important. But Marcus, bro, I have to say… "He trailed off.
"What?" I said, though I knew what was coming next.
"I can't do it forever," he said at last. "Maybe not even for anothermonth. I think I'm through. It's too much risk. The DHS, you can't go towar on them. It's crazy. Really actually crazy.""You sound like Van," I said. My voice was much more bitter than I'dintended.
"I'm not criticizing you, man. I think it's great that you've got thebravery to do this all the time. But I haven't got it. I can't live my life inperpetual terror.""What are you saying?""I'm saying I'm out. I'm going to be one of those people who acts likeit's all OK, like it'll all go back to normal some day. I'm going to use theInternet like I always did, and only use the Xnet to play games. I'm goingto get out is what I'm saying. I won't be a part of your plans anymore."I didn't say anything.
"I know that's leaving you on your own. I don't want that, believe me.
I'd much rather you give up with me. You can't declare war on the gov-ernment of the USA. It's not a fight you're going to win. Watching youtry is like watching a bird fly into a window again and again."He wanted me to say something. What I wanted to say was, Jesus Jolu,thanks so very much for abandoning me! Do you forget what it was like whenthey took us away? Do you forget what the country used to be like before theytook it over? But that's not what he wanted me to say. What he wanted meto say was:
"I understand, Jolu. I respect your choice."136He drank the rest of his bottle and pulled out another one and twistedoff the cap.
"There's something else," he said.
"What?""I wasn't going to mention it, but I want you to understand why I haveto do this.""Jesus, Jolu, what?""I hate to say it, but you're white. I'm not. White people get caught withcocaine and do a little rehab time. Brown people get caught with crackand go to prison for twenty years. White people see cops on the streetand feel safer. Brown people see cops on the street and wonder if they'reabout to get searched. The way the DHS is treating you? The law in thiscountry has always been like that for us."It was so unfair. I didn't ask to be white. I didn't think I was beingbraver just because I'm white. But I knew what Jolu was saying. If thecops stopped someone in the Mission and asked to see some ID, chanceswere that person wasn't white. Whatever risk I ran, Jolu ran more.
Whatever penalty I'd pay, Jolu would pay more.
"I don't know what to say," I said.
"You don't have to say anything," he said. "I just wanted you to know,so you could understand."I could see people walking down the side trail toward us. They werefriends of Jolu's, two Mexican guys and a girl I knew from around, shortand geeky, always wearing cute black Buddy Holly glasses that madeher look like the outcast art-student in a teen movie who comes back asthe big success.
Jolu introduced me and gave them beers. The girl didn't take one, butinstead produced a small silver flask of vodka from her purse andoffered me a drink. I took a swallow — warm vodka must be an acquiredtaste — and complimented her on the flask, which was embossed with arepeating motif of Parappa the Rapper characters.
"It's Japanese," she said as I played another LED keyring over it. "Theyhave all these great booze-toys based on kids' games. Totally twisted."I introduced myself and she introduced herself. "Ange," she said, andshook my hand with hers — dry, warm, with short nails. Jolu introducedme to his pals, whom he'd known since computer camp in the fourth137grade. More people showed up — five, then ten, then twenty. It was aseriously big group now.
We'd told people to arrive by 9:30 sharp, and we gave it until 9:45 tosee who all would show up. About three quarters were Jolu's friends. I'dinvited all the people I really trusted. Either I was more discriminatingthan Jolu or less popular. Now that he'd told me he was quitting, it mademe think that he was less discriminating. I was really pissed at him, buttrying not to let it show by concentrating on socializing with otherpeople. But he wasn't stupid. He knew what was going on. I could seethat he was really bummed. Good.
"OK," I said, climbing up on a ruin, "OK, hey, hello?" A few peoplenearby paid attention to me, but the ones in the back kept on chatting. Iput my arms in the air like a referee, but it was too dark. Eventually I hiton the idea of turning my LED keychain on and pointing it at each of thetalkers in turn, then at me. Gradually, the crowd fell quiet.
I welcomed them and thanked them all for coming, then asked them toclose in so I could explain why we were there. I could tell they were intothe secrecy of it all, intrigued and a little warmed up by the beer.
"So here it is. You all use the Xnet. It's no coincidence that the Xnet wascreated right after the DHS took over the city. The people who did thatare an organization devoted to personal liberty, who created the networkto keep us safe from DHS spooks and enforcers." Jolu and I had workedthis out in advance. We weren't going to cop to being behind it all, not toanyone. It was way too risky. Instead, we'd put it out that we weremerely lieutenants in "M1k3y"'s army, acting to organize the localresistance.
"The Xnet isn't pure," I said. "It can be used by the other side just asreadily as by us. We know that there are DHS spies who use it now.
They use social engineering hacks to try to get us to reveal ourselves sothat they can bust us. If the Xnet is going to succeed, we need to figureout how to keep them from spying on us. We need a network within thenetwork."I paused and let this sink in. Jolu had suggested that this might be alittle heavy — learning that you're about to be brought into a revolution-ary cell.
"Now, I'm not here to ask you to do anything active. You don't have togo out jamming or anything. You've been brought here because we knowyou're cool, we know you're trustworthy. It's that trustworthiness I wantto get you to contribute tonight. Some of you will already be familiar138with the web of trust and keysigning parties, but for the rest of you, I'llrun it down quickly —" Which I did.
"Now what I want from you tonight is to meet the people here and fig-ure out how much you can trust them. We're going to help you generatekey-pairs and share them with each other."This part was tricky. Asking people to bring their own laptopswouldn't have worked out, but we still needed to do something hellacomplicated that wouldn't exactly work with paper and pencil.
I held up a laptop Jolu and I had rebuilt the night before, from theground up. "I trust this machine. Every component in it was laid by ourown hands. It's running a fresh out-of-the-box version of ParanoidLinux,booted off of the DVD. If there's a trustworthy computer left anywherein the world, this might well be it.
"I've got a key-generator loaded here. You come up here and give itsome random input — mash the keys, wiggle the mouse — and it willuse that as the seed to create a random public- and private key for you,which it will display on the screen. You can take a picture of the privatekey with your phone, and hit any key to make it go away forever — it'snot stored on the disk at all. Then it will show you your public key. Atthat point, you call over all the people here you trust and who trust you,and they take a picture of the screen with you standing next to it, so theyknow whose key it is.
"When you get home, you have to convert the photos to keys. This isgoing to be a lot of work, I'm afraid, but you'll only have to do it once.
You have to be super-careful about typing these in — one mistake andyou're screwed. Luckily, we've got a way to tell if you've got it right: be-neath the key will be a much shorter number, called the 'fingerprint'.
Once you've typed in the key, you can generate a fingerprint from it andcompare it to the fingerprint, and if they match, you've got it right."They all boggled at me. OK, so I'd asked them to do something prettyweird, it's true, but still.

Chapter 11
This chapter is dedicated to the University Bookstore at the Universityof Washington, whose science fiction section rivals many specialtystores, thanks to the sharp-eyed, dedicated science fiction buyer, DuaneWilkins. Duance's a real science fiction fan — I first met him at theWorld Science Fiction Convention in Toronto in 2003 — and it showsin the eclectic and informed choices on display at the store. One greatpredictor of a great bookstore is the quality of the "shelf review" — thelittle bits of cardboard stuck to the shelves with (generally hand-lettered)staff-reviews extolling the virtues of books you might otherwise miss.
The staff at the University Bookstore have clearly benefited fromDuane's tutelage, as the shelf reviews at the University Bookstore aresecond to none.
The University Bookstore 4326 University Way NE, Seattle, WA 98105USA +1 800 335 READJolu stood up.
"This is where it starts, guys. This is how we know which side you'reon. You might not be willing to take to the streets and get busted foryour beliefs, but if you have beliefs, this will let us know it. This will cre-ate the web of trust that tells us who's in and who's out. If we're ever go-ing to get our country back, we need to do this. We need to dosomething like this."Someone in the audience — it was Ange — had a hand up, holding abeer bottle.
"So call me stupid but I don't understand this at all. Why do you wantus to do this?"Jolu looked at me, and I looked back at him. It had all seemed so obvi-ous when we were organizing it. "The Xnet isn't just a way to play freegames. It's the last open communications network in America. It's thelast way to communicate without being snooped on by the DHS. For it to140work we need to know that the person we're talking to isn't a snoop.
That means that we need to know that the people we're sending mes-sages to are the people we think they are.
"That's where you come in. You're all here because we trust you. Imean, really trust you. Trust you with our lives."Some of the people groaned. It sounded melodramatic and stupid.
I got back to my feet.
"When the bombs went off," I said, then something welled up in mychest, something painful. "When the bombs went off, there were four ofus caught up by Market Street. For whatever reason, the DHS decidedthat made us suspicious. They put bags over our heads, put us on a shipand interrogated us for days. They humiliated us. Played games with ourminds. Then they let us go.
"All except one person. My best friend. He was with us when theypicked us up. He'd been hurt and he needed medical care. He nevercame out again. They say they never saw him. They say that if we evertell anyone about this, they'll arrest us and make us disappear.
"Forever."I was shaking. The shame. The goddamned shame. Jolu had the lighton me.
"Oh Christ," I said. "You people are the first ones I've told. If this storygets around, you can bet they'll know who leaked it. You can bet they'llcome knocking on my door." I took some more deep breaths. "That's whyI volunteered on the Xnet. That's why my life, from now on, is aboutfighting the DHS. With every breath. Every day. Until we're free again.
Any one of you could put me in jail now, if you wanted to."Ange put her hand up again. "We're not going to rat on you," she said.
"No way. I know pretty much everyone here and I can promise you that.
I don't know how to know who to trust, but I know who not to trust: oldpeople. Our parents. Grownups. When they think of someone beingspied on, they think of someone else, a bad guy. When they think ofsomeone being caught and sent to a secret prison, it's someone else —someone brown, someone young, someone foreign.
"They forget what it's like to be our age. To be the object of suspicionall the time! How many times have you gotten on the bus and had everyperson on it give you a look like you'd been gargling turds and skinningpuppies?
141"What's worse, they're turning into adults younger and younger outthere. Back in the day, they used to say 'Never trust anyone over 30.' Isay, 'Don't trust any bastard over 25!'"That got a laugh, and she laughed too. She was pretty, in a weird,horsey way, with a long face and a long jaw. "I'm not really kidding, youknow? I mean, think about it. Who elected these ass-clowns? Who letthem invade our city? Who voted to put the cameras in our classroomsand follow us around with creepy spyware chips in our transit passesand cars? It wasn't a 16-year-old. We may be dumb, we may be young,but we're not scum.""I want that on a t-shirt," I said.
"It would be a good one," she said. We smiled at each other.
"Where do I go to get my keys?" she said, and pulled out her phone.
"We'll do it over there, in the secluded spot by the caves. I'll take youin there and set you up, then you do your thing and take the machinearound to your friends to get photos of your public key so they can signit when they get home."I raised my voice. "Oh! One more thing! Jesus, I can't believe I forgotthis. delete those photos once you've typed in the keys! The last thing wewant is a Flickr stream full of pictures of all of us conspiring together."There was some good-natured, nervous chuckling, then Jolu turnedout the light and in the sudden darkness I could see nothing. Gradually,my eyes adjusted and I set off for the cave. Someone was walking behindme. Ange. I turned and smiled at her, and she smiled back, luminousteeth in the dark.
"Thanks for that," I said. "You were great.""You mean what you said about the bag on your head andeverything?""I meant it," I said. "It happened. I never told anyone, but it happened."I thought about it for a moment. "You know, with all the time that wentby since, without saying anything, it started to feel like a bad dream. Itwas real though." I stopped and climbed up into the cave. "I'm glad I fi-nally told people. Any longer and I might have started to doubt my ownsanity."I set up the laptop on a dry bit of rock and booted it from the DVDwith her watching. "I'm going to reboot it for every person. This is astandard ParanoidLinux disc, though I guess you'd have to take myword for it."142"Hell," she said. "This is all about trust, right?""Yeah," I said. "Trust."I retreated some distance as she ran the key-generator, listening to hertyping and mousing to create randomness, listening to the crash of thesurf, listening to the party noises from over where the beer was.
She stepped out of the cave, carrying the laptop. On it, in huge whiteluminous letters, were her public key and her fingerprint and email ad-dress. She held the screen up beside her face and waited while I got myphone out.
"Cheese," she said. I snapped her pic and dropped the camera back inmy pocket. She wandered off to the revelers and let them each get pics ofher and the screen. It was festive. Fun. She really had a lot of charisma —you didn't want to laugh at her, you just wanted to laugh with her. Andhell, it was funny! We were declaring a secret war on the secret police.
Who the hell did we think we were?
So it went, through the next hour or so, everyone taking pictures andmaking keys. I got to meet everyone there. I knew a lot of them — somewere my invitees — and the others were friends of my pals or my pals'
pals. We should all be buddies. We were, by the time the night was out.
They were all good people.
Once everyone was done, Jolu went to make a key, and then turnedaway, giving me a sheepish grin. I was past my anger with him, though.
He was doing what he had to do. I knew that no matter what he said,he'd always be there for me. And we'd been through the DHS jail togeth-er. Van too. No matter what, that would bind us together forever.
I did my key and did the perp-walk around the gang, letting everyonesnap a pic. Then I climbed up on the high spot I'd spoken from earlierand called for everyone's attention.
"So a lot of you have noted that there's a vital flaw in this procedure:
what if this laptop can't be trusted? What if it's secretly recording our in-structions? What if it's spying on us? What if Jose-Luis and I can't betrusted?"More good-natured chuckles. A little warmer than before, more beery.
"I mean it," I said. "If we were on the wrong side, this could get all ofus — all of you — into a heap of trouble. Jail, maybe."The chuckles turned more nervous.
143"So that's why I'm going to do this," I said, and picked up a hammerI'd brought from my Dad's toolkit. I set the laptop down beside me onthe rock and swung the hammer, Jolu following the swing with his key-chain light. Crash — I'd always dreamt of killing a laptop with a ham-mer, and here I was doing it. It felt pornographically good. And bad.
Smash! The screen-panel fell off, shattered into millions of pieces, ex-posing the keyboard. I kept hitting it, until the keyboard fell off, expos-ing the motherboard and the hard-drive. Crash! I aimed square for thehard-drive, hitting it with everything I had. It took three blows beforethe case split, exposing the fragile media inside. I kept hitting it untilthere was nothing bigger than a cigarette lighter, then I put it all in agarbage bag. The crowd was cheering wildly — loud enough that I actu-ally got worried that someone far above us might hear over the surf andcall the law.
"All right!" I called. "Now, if you'd like to accompany me, I'm going tomarch this down to the sea and soak it in salt water for ten minutes."I didn't have any takers at first, but then Ange came forward and tookmy arm in her warm hand and said, "That was beautiful," in my ear andwe marched down to the sea together.
It was perfectly dark by the sea, and treacherous, even with our key-chain lights. Slippery, sharp rocks that were difficult enough to walk oneven without trying to balance six pounds of smashed electronics in aplastic bag. I slipped once and thought I was going to cut myself up, butshe caught me with a surprisingly strong grip and kept me upright. Iwas pulled in right close to her, close enough to smell her perfume,which smelled like new cars. I love that smell.
"Thanks," I managed, looking into the big eyes that were further mag-nified by her mannish, black-rimmed glasses. I couldn't tell what colorthey were in the dark, but I guessed something dark, based on her darkhair and olive complexion. She looked Mediterranean, maybe Greek orSpanish or Italian.
I crouched down and dipped the bag in the sea, letting it fill with saltwater. I managed to slip a little and soak my shoe, and I swore and shelaughed. We'd hardly said a word since we lit out for the ocean. Therewas something magical in our wordless silence.
At that point, I had kissed a total of three girls in my life, not countingthat moment when I went back to school and got a hero's welcome.
That's not a gigantic number, but it's not a minuscule one, either. I havereasonable girl radar, and I think I could have kissed her. She wasn't144h4wt in the traditional sense, but there's something about a girl and anight and a beach, plus she was smart and passionate and committed.
But I didn't kiss her, or take her hand. Instead we had a moment that Ican only describe as spiritual. The surf, the night, the sea and the rocks,and our breathing. The moment stretched. I sighed. This had been quitea ride. I had a lot of typing to do tonight, putting all those keys into mykeychain, signing them and publishing the signed keys. Starting the webof trust.
She sighed too.
"Let's go," I said.
"Yeah," she said.
Back we went. It was a good night, that night.
Jolu waited after for his brother's friend to come by and pick up hiscoolers. I walked with everyone else up the road to the nearest Munistop and got on board. Of course, none of us was using an issued Munipass. By that point, Xnetters habitually cloned someone else's Muni passthree or four times a day, assuming a new identity for every ride.
It was hard to stay cool on the bus. We were all a little drunk, andlooking at our faces under the bright bus lights was kind of hilarious. Wegot pretty loud and the driver used his intercom to tell us to keep itdown twice, then told us to shut up right now or he'd call the cops.
That set us to giggling again and we disembarked in a mass before hedid call the cops. We were in North Beach now, and there were lots ofbuses, taxis, the BART at Market Street, neon-lit clubs and cafes to pullapart our grouping, so we drifted away.
I got home and fired up my Xbox and started typing in keys from myphone's screen. It was dull, hypnotic work. I was a little drunk, and itlulled me into a half-sleep.
I was about ready to nod off when a new IM window popped up.
>
herro!
I didn't recognize the handle — spexgril — but I had an idea whomight be behind it.
>
hi145I typed, cautiously.
>
it's me, from tonightThen she paste-bombed a block of crypto. I'd already entered her pub-lic key into my keychain, so I told the IM client to try decrypting thecode with the key.
>
it's me, from tonightIt was her!
>
Fancy meeting you hereI typed, then encrypted it to my public key and mailed it off.
>
It was great meeting youI typed.
>
You too. I don't meet too many smart guys who are also cute and alsosocially aware. Good god, man, you don't give a girl much of a chance.
My heart hammered in my chest.
>
Hello? Tap tap? This thing on? I wasn't born here folks, but I'm suredying here. Don't forget to tip your waitresses, they work hard. I'm hereall week.
I laughed aloud.
>
I'm here, I'm here. Laughing too hard to type is all>
Well at least my IM comedy-fu is still mightyUm.
>
It was really great to meet you too>
Yeah, it usually is. Where are you taking me?
146>
Taking you?
>
On our next adventure?
>
I didn't really have anything planned>
Oki — then I'll take YOU. Friday. Dolores Park. Illegal open air con-cert. Be there or be a dodecahedron>
Wait what?
>
Don't you even read Xnet? It's all over the place. You ever hear of theSpeedwhores?
I nearly choked. That was Trudy Doo's band — as in Trudy Doo, thewoman who had paid me and Jolu to update the indienet code.
>
Yeah I've heard of them>
They're putting on a huge show and they've got like fifty bands signedto play the bill, going to set up on the tennis courts and bring out theirown amp trucks and rock out all nightI felt like I'd been living under a rock. How had I missed that? Therewas an anarchist bookstore on Valencia that I sometimes passed on theway to school that had a poster of an old revolutionary named EmmaGoldman with the caption "If I can't dance, I don't want to be a part ofyour revolution." I'd been spending all my energies on figuring out howto use the Xnet to organize dedicated fighters so they could jam the DHS,but this was so much cooler. A big concert — I had no idea how to doone of those, but I was glad someone did.
And now that I thought of it, I was damned proud that they were us-ing the Xnet to do it.
The next day I was a zombie. Ange and I had chatted — flirted — until4AM. Lucky for me, it was a Saturday and I was able to sleep in, but147between the hangover and the sleep-dep, I could barely put twothoughts together.
By lunchtime, I managed to get up and get my ass out onto the streets.
I staggered down toward the Turk's to buy my coffee — these days, if Iwas alone, I always bought my coffee there, like the Turk and I were partof a secret club.
On the way, I passed a lot of fresh graffiti. I liked Mission graffiti; a lotof the times, it came in huge, luscious murals, or sarcastic art-studentstencils. I liked that the Mission's taggers kept right on going, under thenose of the DHS. Another kind of Xnet, I supposed — they must have allkinds of ways of knowing what was going on, where to get paint, whatcameras worked. Some of the cameras had been spray-painted over, Inoticed.
Maybe they used Xnet!
Painted in ten-foot-high letters on the side of an auto-yard's fence werethe drippy words: DON'T TRUST ANYONE OVER 25.
I stopped. Had someone left my "party" last night and come here witha can of paint? A lot of those people lived in the neighborhood.
I got my coffee and had a little wander around town. I kept thinking Ishould be calling someone, seeing if they wanted to get a movie orsomething. That's how it used to be on a lazy Saturday like this. But whowas I going to call? Van wasn't talking to me, I didn't think I was readyto talk to Jolu, and Darryl —Well, I couldn't call Darryl.
I got my coffee and went home and did a little searching around onthe Xnet's blogs. These anonablogs were untraceable to any author —unless that author was stupid enough to put her name on it — and therewere a lot of them. Most of them were apolitical, but a lot of themweren't. They talked about schools and the unfairness there. They talkedabout the cops. Tagging.
Turned out there'd been plans for the concert in the park for weeks. Ithad hopped from blog to blog, turning into a full-blown movementwithout my noticing. And the concert was called Don't Trust AnyoneOver 25.
Well, that explained where Ange got it. It was a good slogan.
148Monday morning, I decided I wanted to check out that anarchist book-store again, see about getting one of those Emma Goldman posters. Ineeded the reminder.
I detoured down to 16th and Mission on my way to school, then up toValencia and across. The store was shut, but I got the hours off the doorand made sure they still had that poster up.
As I walked down Valencia, I was amazed to see how much of theDON'T TRUST ANYONE OVER 25 stuff there was. Half the shops hadDON'T TRUST merch in the windows: lunchboxes, babydoll tees, pencil-boxes, trucker hats. The hipster stores have been getting faster and faster,of course. As new memes sweep the net in the course of a day or two,stores have gotten better at putting merch in the windows to match.
Some funny little youtube of a guy launching himself with jet-packsmade of carbonated water would land in your inbox on Monday and byTuesday you'd be able to buy t-shirts with stills from the video on it.
But it was amazing to see something make the leap from Xnet to thehead shops. Distressed designer jeans with the slogan written in carefulhigh school ball-point ink. Embroidered patches.
Good news travels fast.
It was written on the black-board when I got to Ms Galvez's SocialStudies class. We all sat at our desks, smiling at it. It seemed to smileback. There was something profoundly cheering about the idea that wecould all trust each other, that the enemy could be identified. I knew itwasn't entirely true, but it wasn't entirely false either.
Ms Galvez came in and patted her hair and set down her SchoolBookon her desk and powered it up. She picked up her chalk and turnedaround to face the board. We all laughed. Good-naturedly, but welaughed.
She turned around and was laughing too. "Inflation has hit the nation'sslogan-writers, it seems. How many of you know where this phrasecomes from?"We looked at each other. "Hippies?" someone said, and we laughed.
Hippies are all over San Francisco, both the old stoner kinds with giantskanky beards and tie-dyes, and the new kind, who are more into dress-up and maybe playing hacky-sack than protesting anything.
"Well, yes, hippies. But when we think of hippies these days, we justthink of the clothes and the music. Clothes and music were incidental tothe main part of what made that era, the sixties, important.
149"You've heard about the civil rights movement to end segregation,white and black kids like you riding buses into the South to sign upblack voters and protest against official state racism. California was oneof the main places where the civil rights leaders came from. We've al-ways been a little more political than the rest of the country, and this isalso a part of the country where black people have been able to get thesame union factory jobs as white people, so they were a little better offthan their cousins in the southland.
"The students at Berkeley sent a steady stream of freedom riders south,and they recruited them from information tables on campus, at Bancroftand Telegraph Avenue. You've probably seen that there are still tablesthere to this day.
"Well, the campus tried to shut them down. The president of the uni-versity banned political organizing on campus, but the civil rights kidswouldn't stop. The police tried to arrest a guy who was handing out lit-erature from one of these tables, and they put him in a van, but 3,000 stu-dents surrounded the van and refused to let it budge. They wouldn't letthem take this kid to jail. They stood on top of the van and gave speechesabout the First Amendment and Free Speech.
"That galvanized the Free Speech Movement. That was the start of thehippies, but it was also where more radical student movements camefrom. Black power groups like the Black Panthers — and later gay rightsgroups like the Pink Panthers, too. Radical women's groups, even'lesbian separatists' who wanted to abolish men altogether! And the Yip-pies. Anyone ever hear of the Yippies?""Didn't they levitate the Pentagon?" I said. I'd once seen a document-ary about this.
She laughed. "I forgot about that, but yes, that was them! Yippies werelike very political hippies, but they weren't serious the way we think ofpolitics these days. They were very playful. Pranksters. They threwmoney into the New York Stock Exchange. They circled the Pentagonwith hundreds of protestors and said a magic spell that was supposed tolevitate it. They invented a fictional kind of LSD that you could sprayonto people with squirt-guns and shot each other with it and pretendedto be stoned. They were funny and they made great TV — one Yippie, aclown called Wavy Gravy, used to get hundreds of protestors to dress uplike Santa Claus so that the cameras would show police officers arrestingand dragging away Santa on the news that night — and they mobilized alot of people.
150"Their big moment was the Democratic National Convention in 1968,where they called for demonstrations to protest the Vietnam War. Thou-sands of demonstrators poured into Chicago, slept in the parks, andpicketed every day. They had lots of bizarre stunts that year, like run-ning a pig called Pigasus for the presidential nomination. The police andthe demonstrators fought in the streets — they'd done that many timesbefore, but the Chicago cops didn't have the smarts to leave the reportersalone. They beat up the reporters, and the reporters retaliated by finallyshowing what really went on at these demonstrations, so the wholecountry watched their kids being really savagely beaten down by the Ch-icago police. They called it a 'police riot.'
"The Yippies loved to say, 'Never trust anyone over 30.' They meantthat people who were born before a certain time, when America hadbeen fighting enemies like the Nazis, could never understand what itmeant to love your country enough to refuse to fight the Vietnamese.
They thought that by the time you hit 30, your attitudes would be frozenand you couldn't ever understand why the kids of the day were taking tothe streets, dropping out, freaking out.
"San Francisco was ground zero for this. Revolutionary armies werefounded here. Some of them blew up buildings or robbed banks for theircause. A lot of those kids grew up to be more or less normal, while oth-ers ended up in jail. Some of the university dropouts did amazing things— for example, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who founded AppleComputers and invented the PC."I was really getting into this. I knew a little of it, but I'd never heard ittold like this. Or maybe it had never mattered as much as it did now.
Suddenly, those lame, solemn, grown-up street demonstrations didn'tseem so lame after all. Maybe there was room for that kind of action inthe Xnet movement.
I put my hand up. "Did they win? Did the Yippies win?"She gave me a long look, like she was thinking it over. No one said aword. We all wanted to hear the answer.
"They didn't lose," she said. "They kind of imploded a little. Some ofthem went to jail for drugs or other things. Some of them changed theirtunes and became yuppies and went on the lecture circuit telling every-one how stupid they'd been, talking about how good greed was and howdumb they'd been.
"But they did change the world. The war in Vietnam ended, and thekind of conformity and unquestioning obedience that people had called151patriotism went out of style in a big way. Black rights, women's rightsand gay rights came a long way. Chicano rights, rights for disabledpeople, the whole tradition of civil liberties was created or strengthenedby these people. Today's protest movement is the direct descendant ofthose struggles.""I can't believe you're talking about them like this," Charles said. Hewas leaning so far in his seat he was half standing, and his sharp, skinnyface had gone red. He had wet, large eyes and big lips, and when he gotexcited he looked a little like a fish.
Ms Galvez stiffened a little, then said, "Go on, Charles.""You've just described terrorists. Actual terrorists. They blew up build-ings, you said. They tried to destroy the stock exchange. They beat upcops, and stopped cops from arresting people who were breaking thelaw. They attacked us!"Ms Galvez nodded slowly. I could tell she was trying to figure outhow to handle Charles, who really seemed like he was ready to pop.
"Charles raises a good point. The Yippies weren't foreign agents, theywere American citizens. When you say 'They attacked us,' you need tofigure out who 'they' and 'us' are. When it's your fellow countrymen —""Crap!" he shouted. He was on his feet now. "We were at war then.
These guys were giving aid and comfort to the enemy. It's easy to tellwho's us and who's them: if you support America, you're us. If you sup-port the people who are shooting at Americans, you're them.""Does anyone else want to comment on this?"Several hands shot up. Ms Galvez called on them. Some people poin-ted out that the reason that the Vietnamese were shooting at Americansis that the Americans had flown to Vietnam and started running aroundthe jungle with guns. Others thought that Charles had a point, thatpeople shouldn't be allowed to do illegal things.
Everyone had a good debate except Charles, who just shouted atpeople, interrupting them when they tried to get their points out. MsGalvez tried to get him to wait for his turn a couple times, but he wasn'thaving any of it.
I was looking something up on my SchoolBook, something I knew I'dread.
I found it. I stood up. Ms Galvez looked expectantly at me. The otherpeople followed her gaze and went quiet. Even Charles looked at meafter a while, his big wet eyes burning with hatred for me.
152"I wanted to read something," I said. "It's short. 'Governments are insti-tuted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of thegoverned, that whenever any form of government becomes destructiveof these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to in-stitute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and or-ganizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to ef-fect their safety and happiness.'"
Chapter 12
This chapter is dedicated to Forbidden Planet, the British chain of sci-ence fiction and fantasy books, comics, toys and videos. Forbidden Plan-et has stores up and down the UK, and also sports outposts in Manhat-tan and Dublin, Ireland. It's dangerous to set foot in a Forbidden Planet— rarely do I escape with my wallet intact. Forbidden Planet reallyleads the pack in bringing the gigantic audience for TV and movie sci-ence fiction into contact with science fiction books — something that'sabsolutely critical to the future of the field.
Forbidden Planet, UK, Dublin and New York CityMs Galvez's smile was wide.
"Does anyone know what that comes from?"A bunch of people chorused, "The Declaration of Independence."I nodded.
"Why did you read that to us, Marcus?""Because it seems to me that the founders of this country said that gov-ernments should only last for so long as we believe that they're workingfor us, and if we stop believing in them, we should overthrow them.
That's what it says, right?"Charles shook his head. "That was hundreds of years ago!" he said.
"Things are different now!""What's different?""Well, for one thing, we don't have a king anymore. They were talkingabout a government that existed because some old jerk's great-great-great-grandfather believed that God put him in charge and killed every-one who disagreed with him. We have a democratically electedgovernment —""I didn't vote for them," I said.
154"So that gives you the right to blow up a building?""What? Who said anything about blowing up a building? The Yippiesand hippies and all those people believed that the government no longerlistened to them — look at the way people who tried to sign up voters inthe South were treated! They were beaten up, arrested —""Some of them were killed," Ms Galvez said. She held up her handsand waited for Charles and me to sit down. "We're almost out of time fortoday, but I want to commend you all on one of the most interestingclasses I've ever taught. This has been an excellent discussion and I'velearned much from you all. I hope you've learned from each other, too.
Thank you all for your contributions.
"I have an extra-credit assignment for those of you who want a littlechallenge. I'd like you to write up a paper comparing the political re-sponse to the anti-war and civil rights movements in the Bay Area to thepresent day civil rights responses to the War on Terror. Three pages min-imum, but take as long as you'd like. I'm interested to see what you comeup with."The bell rang a moment later and everyone filed out of the class. Ihung back and waited for Ms Galvez to notice me.
"Yes, Marcus?""That was amazing," I said. "I never knew all that stuff about thesixties.""The seventies, too. This place has always been an exciting place to livein politically charged times. I really liked your reference to the Declara-tion — that was very clever.""Thanks," I said. "It just came to me. I never really appreciated whatthose words all meant before today.""Well, those are the words every teacher loves to hear, Marcus," shesaid, and shook my hand. "I can't wait to read your paper."I bought the Emma Goldman poster on the way home and stuck it upover my desk, tacked over a vintage black-light poster. I also bought aNEVER TRUST t-shirt that had a photoshop of Grover and Elmo kickingthe grownups Gordon and Susan off Sesame Street. It made me laugh. Ilater found out that there had already been about six photoshop contestsfor the slogan online in places like Fark and Worth1000 and B3ta andthere were hundreds of ready-made pics floating around to go onwhatever merch someone churned out.
155Mom raised an eyebrow at the shirt, and Dad shook his head and lec-tured me about not looking for trouble. I felt a little vindicated by hisreaction.
Ange found me online again and we IM-flirted until late at nightagain. The white van with the antennas came back and I switched off myXbox until it had passed. We'd all gotten used to doing that.
Ange was really excited by this party. It looked like it was going to bemonster. There were so many bands signed up they were talking aboutsetting up a B-stage for the secondary acts.
>
How'd they get a permit to blast sound all night in that park? There'shouses all around there>
Per-mit? What is "per-mit"? Tell me more of your hu-man per-mit.
>
Woah, it's illegal?
>
Um, hello? You're worried about breaking the law?
>
Fair point>
LOLI felt a little premonition of nervousness though. I mean, I was takingthis perfectly awesome girl out on a date that weekend — well, she wastaking me, technically — to an illegal rave being held in the middle of abusy neighborhood.
It was bound to be interesting at least.
Interesting.
People started to drift into Dolores Park through the long Saturday af-ternoon, showing up among the ultimate frisbee players and the dog-walkers. Some of them played frisbee or walked dogs. It wasn't reallyclear how the concert was going to work, but there were a lot of cops andundercovers hanging around. You could tell the undercovers because,like Zit and Booger, they had Castro haircuts and Nebraska physiques:
tubby guys with short hair and untidy mustaches. They drifted around,156looking awkward and uncomfortable in their giant shorts and loose-fit-ting shirts that no-doubt hung down to cover the chandelier of gearhung around their midriffs.
Dolores Park is pretty and sunny, with palm trees, tennis courts, andlots of hills and regular trees to run around on, or hang out on. Homelesspeople sleep there at night, but that's true everywhere in San Francisco.
I met Ange down the street, at the anarchist bookstore. That had beenmy suggestion. In hindsight, it was a totally transparent move to seemcool and edgy to this girl, but at the time I would have sworn that Ipicked it because it was a convenient place to meet up. She was readinga book called Up Against the Wall Motherfucker when I got there.
"Nice," I said. "You kiss your mother with that mouth?""Your mama don't complain," she said. "Actually, it's a history of agroup of people like the Yippies, but from New York. They all used thatword as their last names, like 'Ben M-F.' The idea was to have a groupout there, making news, but with a totally unprintable name. Just toscrew around with the news-media. Pretty funny, really." She put thebook back on the shelf and now I wondered if I should hug her. Peoplein California hug to say hello and goodbye all the time. Except whenthey don't. And sometimes they kiss on the cheek. It's all very confusing.
She settled it for me by grabbing me in a hug and tugging my headdown to her, kissing me hard on the cheek, then blowing a fart on myneck. I laughed and pushed her away.
"You want a burrito?" I asked.
"Is that a question or a statement of the obvious?""Neither. It's an order."I bought some funny stickers that said THIS PHONE IS TAPPEDwhich were the right size to put on the receivers on the pay phones thatstill lined the streets of the Mission, it being the kind of neighborhoodwhere you got people who couldn't necessarily afford a cellphone.
We walked out into the night air. I told Ange about the scene at thepark when I left.
"I bet they have a hundred of those trucks parked around the block,"she said. "The better to bust you with.""Um." I looked around. "I sort of hoped that you would say somethinglike, 'Aw, there's no chance they'll do anything about it.'"157"I don't think that's really the idea. The idea is to put a lot of civiliansin a position where the cops have to decide, are we going to treat theseordinary people like terrorists? It's a little like the jamming, but with mu-sic instead of gadgets. You jam, right?"Sometimes I forget that all my friends don't know that Marcus andM1k3y are the same person. "Yeah, a little," I said.
"This is like jamming with a bunch of awesome bands.""I see."Mission burritos are an institution. They are cheap, giant and deli-cious. Imagine a tube the size of a bazooka shell, filled with spicy grilledmeat, guacamole, salsa, tomatoes, refried beans, rice, onions and cilantro.
It has the same relationship to Taco Bell that a Lamborghini has to a HotWheels car.
There are about two hundred Mission burrito joints. They're all heroic-ally ugly, with uncomfortable seats, minimal decor — faded Mexicantourist office posters and electrified framed Jesus and Mary holograms— and loud mariachi music. The thing that distinguishes them, mostly,is what kind of exotic meat they fill their wares with. The really authenticplaces have brains and tongue, which I never order, but it's nice to knowit's there.
The place we went to had both brains and tongue, which we didn't or-der. I got carne asada and she got shredded chicken and we each got abig cup of horchata.
As soon as we sat down, she unrolled her burrito and took a littlebottle out of her purse. It was a little stainless-steel aerosol canister thatlooked for all the world like a pepper-spray self-defense unit. She aimedit at her burrito's exposed guts and misted them with a fine red oilyspray. I caught a whiff of it and my throat closed and my eyes watered.
"What the hell are you doing to that poor, defenseless burrito?"She gave me a wicked smile. "I'm a spicy food addict," she said. "Thisis capsaicin oil in a mister.""Capsaicin —""Yeah, the stuff in pepper spray. This is like pepper spray but slightlymore dilute. And way more delicious. Think of it as Spicy Cajun Visine ifit helps."My eyes burned just thinking of it.
"You're kidding," I said. "You are so not going to eat that."158Her eyebrows shot up. "That sounds like a challenge, sonny. You justwatch me."She rolled the burrito up as carefully as a stoner rolling up a joint,tucking the ends in, then re-wrapping it in tinfoil. She peeled off one endand brought it up to her mouth, poised with it just before her lips.
Right up to the time she bit into it, I couldn't believe that she was go-ing to do it. I mean, that was basically an anti-personnel weapon she'djust slathered on her dinner.
She bit into it. Chewed. Swallowed. Gave every impression of having adelicious dinner.
"Want a bite?" she said, innocently.
"Yeah," I said. I like spicy food. I always order the curries with fourchilies next to them on the menu at the Pakistani places.
I peeled back more foil and took a big bite.
Big mistake.
You know that feeling you get when you take a big bite of horseradishor wasabi or whatever, and it feels like your sinuses are closing at thesame time as your windpipe, filling your head with trapped, nuclear-hotair that tries to batter its way out through your watering eyes and nos-trils? That feeling like steam is about to pour out of your ears like a car-toon character?
This was a lot worse.
This was like putting your hand on a hot stove, only it's not yourhand, it's the entire inside of your head, and your esophagus all the waydown to your stomach. My entire body sprang out in a sweat and Ichoked and choked.
Wordlessly, she passed me my horchata and I managed to get thestraw into my mouth and suck hard on it, gulping down half of it in onego.
"So there's a scale, the Scoville scale, that we chili-fanciers use to talkabout how spicy a pepper is. Pure capsaicin is about 15 million Scovilles.
Tabasco is about 2,500. Pepper spray is a healthy three million. This stuffis a puny 100,000, about as hot as a mild Scotch Bonnet Pepper. I workedup to it in about a year. Some of the real hardcore can get up to a halfmillion or so, two hundred times hotter than Tabasco. That's prettyfreaking hot. At Scoville temperatures like that, your brain gets totally159awash in endorphins. It's a better body-stone than hash. And it's goodfor you."I was getting my sinuses back now, able to breathe without gasping.
"Of course, you get a ferocious ring of fire when you go to the john,"she said, winking at me.
Yowch.
"You are insane," I said.
"Fine talk from a man whose hobby is building and smashing laptops,"she said.
"Touche," I said and touched my forehead.
"Want some?" She held out her mister.
"Pass," I said, quickly enough that we both laughed.
When we left the restaurant and headed for Dolores park, she put herarm around my waist and I found that she was just the right height forme to put my arm around her shoulders. That was new. I'd never been atall guy, and the girls I'd dated had all been my height — teenaged girlsgrow faster than guys, which is a cruel trick of nature. It was nice. It feltnice.
We turned the corner on 20th Street and walked up toward Dolores.
Before we'd taken a single step, we could feel the buzz. It was like thehum of a million bees. There were lots of people streaming toward thepark, and when I looked toward it, I saw that it was about a hundredtimes more crowded than it had been when I went to meet Ange.
That sight made my blood run hot. It was a beautiful cool night andwe were about to party, really party, party like there was no tomorrow.
"Eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die."Without saying anything we both broke into a trot. There were lots ofcops, with tense faces, but what the hell were they going to do? Therewere a lot of people in the park. I'm not so good at counting crowds. Thepapers later quoted organizers as saying there were 20,000 people; thecops said 5,000. Maybe that means there were 12,500.
Whatever. It was more people than I'd ever stood among, as part of anunscheduled, unsanctioned, illegal event.
We were among them in an instant. I can't swear to it, but I don't thinkthere was anyone over 25 in that press of bodies. Everyone was smiling.
Some young kids were there, 10 or 12, and that made me feel better. Noone would do anything too stupid with kids that little in the crowd. No160one wanted to see little kids get hurt. This was just going to be a gloriousspring night of celebration.
I figured the thing to do was push in towards the tennis courts. Wethreaded our way through the crowd, and to stay together we took eachother's hands. Only staying together didn't require us to intertwine fin-gers. That was strictly for pleasure. It was very pleasurable.
The bands were all inside the tennis courts, with their guitars and mix-ers and keyboards and even a drum kit. Later, on Xnet, I found a Flickrstream of them smuggling all this stuff in, piece by piece, in gym bagsand under their coats. Along with it all were huge speakers, the kind yousee in automotive supply places, and among them, a stack of… car bat-teries. I laughed. Genius! That was how they were going to power theirstacks. From where I stood, I could see that they were cells from a hybridcar, a Prius. Someone had gutted an eco-mobile to power the night's en-tertainment. The batteries continued outside the courts, stacked upagainst the fence, tethered to the main stack by wires threaded throughthe chain-link. I counted — 200 batteries! Christ! Those things weighed aton, too.
There's no way they organized this without email and wikis and mail-ing lists. And there's no way people this smart would have done that onthe public Internet. This had all taken place on the Xnet, I'd bet my bootson it.
We just kind of bounced around in the crowd for a while as the bandstuned up and conferred with one another. I saw Trudy Doo from a dis-tance, in the tennis courts. She looked like she was in a cage, like a prowrestler. She was wearing a torn wife-beater and her hair was in long,fluorescent pink dreads down to her waist. She was wearing army cam-ouflage pants and giant gothy boots with steel over-toes. As I watched,she picked up a heavy motorcycle jacket, worn as a catcher's mitt, andput it on like armor. It probably was armor, I realized.
I tried to wave to her, to impress Ange I guess, but she didn't see meand I kind of looked like a spazz so I stopped. The energy in the crowdwas amazing. You hear people talk about "vibes" and "energy" for biggroups of people, but until you've experienced it, you probably think it'sjust a figure of speech.
It's not. It's the smiles, infectious and big as watermelons, on everyface. Everyone bopping a little to an unheard rhythm, shoulders rocking.
Rolling walks. Jokes and laughs. The tone of every voice tight and161excited, like a firework about to go off. And you can't help but be a partof it. Because you are.
By the time the bands kicked off, I was utterly stoned on crowd-vibe.
The opening act was some kind of Serbian turbo-folk, which I couldn'tfigure out how to dance to. I know how to dance to exactly two kinds ofmusic: trance (shuffle around and let the music move you) and punk(bash around and mosh until you get hurt or exhausted or both). Thenext act was Oakland hip-hoppers, backed by a thrash metal band,which is better than it sounds. Then some bubble-gum pop. Then Speed-whores took the stage, and Trudy Doo stepped up to the mic.
"My name is Trudy Doo and you're an idiot if you trust me. I'm thirtytwo and it's too late for me. I'm lost. I'm stuck in the old way of thinking.
I still take my freedom for granted and let other people take it away fromme. You're the first generation to grow up in Gulag America, and youknow what your freedom is worth to the last goddamned cent!"The crowd roared. She was playing fast little skittery nervous chordson her guitar and her bass player, a huge fat girl with a dykey haircutand even bigger boots and a smile you could open beer bottles with waslaying it down fast and hard already. I wanted to bounce. I bounced.
Ange bounced with me. We were sweating freely in the evening, whichreeked of perspiration and pot smoke. Warm bodies crushed in on allsides of us. They bounced too.
"Don't trust anyone over 25!" she shouted.
We roared. We were one big animal throat, roaring.
"Don't trust anyone over 25!""Don't trust anyone over 25!""Don't trust anyone over 25!""Don't trust anyone over 25!""Don't trust anyone over 25!""Don't trust anyone over 25!"She banged some hard chords on her guitar and the other guitarist, alittle pixie of a girl whose face bristled with piercings, jammed in, goingwheedle-dee-wheedle-dee-dee up high, past the twelfth fret.
"It's our goddamned city! It's our goddamned country. No terrorist cantake it from us for so long as we're free. Once we're not free, the terroristswin! Take it back! Take it back! You're young enough and stupid enough162not to know that you can't possibly win, so you're the only ones who canlead us to victory! Take it back!""TAKE IT BACK!" we roared. She jammed down hard on her guitar.
We roared the note back and then it got really really LOUD.
I danced until I was so tired I couldn't dance another step. Angedanced alongside of me. Technically, we were rubbing our sweaty bod-ies against each other for several hours, but believe it or not, I totallywasn't being a horn-dog about it. We were dancing, lost in the godbeatand the thrash and the screaming — TAKE IT BACK! TAKE IT BACK!
When I couldn't dance anymore, I grabbed her hand and she squeezedmine like I was keeping her from falling off a building. She dragged metoward the edge of the crowd, where it got thinner and cooler. Out there,on the edge of Dolores Park, we were in the cool air and the sweat on ourbodies went instantly icy. We shivered and she threw her arms aroundmy waist. "Warm me," she commanded. I didn't need a hint. I huggedher back. Her heart was an echo of the fast beats from the stage — break-beats now, fast and furious and wordless.
She smelled of sweat, a sharp tang that smelled great. I knew I smelledof sweat too. My nose was pointed into the top of her head, and her facewas right at my collarbone. She moved her hands to my neck andtugged.
"Get down here, I didn't bring a stepladder," is what she said and Itried to smile, but it's hard to smile when you're kissing.
Like I said, I'd kissed three girls in my life. Two of them had neverkissed anyone before. One had been dating since she was 12. She hadissues.
None of them kissed like Ange. She made her whole mouth soft, likethe inside of a ripe piece of fruit, and she didn't jam her tongue in mymouth, but slid it in there, and sucked my lips into her mouth at thesame time, so it was like my mouth and hers were merging. I heard my-self moan and I grabbed her and squeezed her harder.
Slowly, gently, we lowered ourselves to the grass. We lay on our sidesand clutched each other, kissing and kissing. The world disappeared sothere was only the kiss.
My hands found her butt, her waist. The edge of her t-shirt. Her warmtummy, her soft navel. They inched higher. She moaned too.
163"Not here," she said. "Let's move over there." She pointed across thestreet at the big white church that gives Mission Dolores Park and theMission its name. Holding hands, moving quickly, we crossed to thechurch. It had big pillars in front of it. She put my back up against one ofthem and pulled my face down her hers again. My hands went quicklyand boldly back to her shirt. I slipped them up her front.
"It undoes in the back," she whispered into my mouth. I had a bonerthat could cut glass. I moved my hands around to her back, which wasstrong and broad, and found the hook with my fingers, which weretrembling. I fumbled for a while, thinking of all those jokes about howbad guys are at undoing bras. I was bad at it. Then the hook sprang free.
She gasped into my mouth. I slipped my hands around, feeling the wet-ness of her armpits — which was sexy and not at all gross for some reas-on — and then brushed the sides of her breasts.
That's when the sirens started.
They were louder than anything I'd ever heard. A sound like a physic-al sensation, like something blowing you off your feet. A sound as loudas your ears could process, and then louder.
"DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY," a voice said, like God rattling in myskull.
"THIS IS AN ILLEGAL GATHERING. DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY."The band had stopped playing. The noise of the crowd across thestreet changed. It got scared. Angry.
I heard a click as the PA system of car-speakers and car-batteries in thetennis courts powered up.
"TAKE IT BACK!"It was a defiant yell, like a sound shouted into the surf or screamed offa cliff.
"TAKE IT BACK!"The crowd growled, a sound that made the hairs on the back of myneck stand up.
"TAKE IT BACK!" they chanted. "TAKE IT BACK TAKE IT BACKTAKE IT BACK!"The police moved in in lines, carrying plastic shields, wearing DarthVader helmets that covered their faces. Each one had a black truncheonand infra-red goggles. They looked like soldiers out of some futuristicwar movie. They took a step forward in unison and every one of them164banged his truncheon on his shield, a cracking noise like the earth split-ting. Another step, another crack. They were all around the park andclosing in now.
"DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY," the voice of God said again. There werehelicopters overhead now. No floodlights, though. The infrared goggles,right. Of course. They'd have infrared scopes in the sky, too. I pulledAnge back against the doorway of the church, tucking us back from thecops and the choppers.
"TAKE IT BACK!" the PA roared. It was Trudy Doo's rebel yell and Iheard her guitar thrash out some chords, then her drummer playing,then that big deep bass.
"TAKE IT BACK!" the crowd answered, and they boiled out of thepark at the police lines.
I've never been in a war, but now I think I know what it must be like.
What it must be like when scared kids charge across a field at an oppos-ing force, knowing what's coming, running anyway, screaming,hollering.
"DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY," the voice of God said. It was comingfrom trucks parked all around the park, trucks that had swung into placein the last few seconds.
That's when the mist fell. It came out of the choppers, and we justcaught the edge of it. It made the top of my head feel like it was going tocome off. It made my sinuses feel like they were being punctured withice-picks. It made my eyes swell and water, and my throat close.
Pepper spray. Not 100 thousand Scovilles. A million and a half. They'dgassed the crowd.
I didn't see what happened next, but I heard it, over the sound of bothme and Ange choking and holding each other. First the choking, retchingsounds. The guitar and drums and bass crashed to a halt. Thencoughing.
Then screaming.
The screaming went on for a long time. When I could see again, thecops had their scopes up on their foreheads and the choppers wereflooding Dolores Park with so much light it looked like daylight. Every-one was looking at the Park, which was good news, because when thelights went up like that, we were totally visible.
"What do we do?" Ange said. Her voice was tight, scared. I didn't trustmyself to speak for a moment. I swallowed a few times.
165"We walk away," I said. "That's all we can do. Walk away. Like wewere just passing by. Down to Dolores and turn left and up towards 16thStreet. Like we're just passing by. Like this is none of our business.""That'll never work," she said.
"It's all I've got.""You don't think we should try to run for it?""No," I said. "If we run, they'll chase us. Maybe if we walk, they'll fig-ure we haven't done anything and let us alone. They have a lot of arreststo make. They'll be busy for a long time."The park was rolling with bodies, people and adults clawing at theirfaces and gasping. The cops dragged them by the armpits, then lashedtheir wrists with plastic cuffs and tossed them into the trucks like rag-dolls.
"OK?" I said.
"OK," she said.
And that's just what we did. Walked, holding hands, quickly andbusiness-like, like two people wanting to avoid whatever troublesomeone else was making. The kind of walk you adopt when you wantto pretend you can't see a panhandler, or don't want to get involved in astreet-fight.
It worked.
We reached the corner and turned and kept going. Neither of us daredto speak for two blocks. Then I let out a gasp of air I hadn't know I'dbeen holding in.
We came to 16th Street and turned down toward Mission Street.
Normally that's a pretty scary neighborhood at 2AM on a Saturdaynight. That night it was a relief — same old druggies and hookers anddealers and drunks. No cops with truncheons, no gas.
"Um," I said as we breathed in the night air. "Coffee?""Home," she said. "I think home for now. Coffee later.""Yeah," I agreed. She lived up in Hayes Valley. I spotted a taxi rollingby and I hailed it. That was a small miracle — there are hardly any cabswhen you need them in San Francisco.
"Have you got cabfare home?""Yeah," she said. The cab-driver looked at us through his window. Iopened the back door so he wouldn't take off.
166"Good night," I said.
She put her hands behind my head and pulled my face toward her.
She kissed me hard on the mouth, nothing sexual in it, but somehowmore intimate for that.
"Good night," she whispered in my ear, and slipped into the taxi.
Head swimming, eyes running, a burning shame for having left allthose Xnetters to the tender mercies of the DHS and the SFPD, I set offfor home.
Monday morning, Fred Benson was standing behind Ms Galvez'sdesk.
"Ms Galvez will no longer be teaching this class," he said, once we'dtaken our seats. He had a self-satisfied note that I recognized immedi-ately. On a hunch, I checked out Charles. He was smiling like it was hisbirthday and he'd been given the best present in the world.
I put my hand up.
"Why not?""It's Board policy not to discuss employee matters with anyone exceptthe employee and the disciplinary committee," he said, without evenbothering to hide how much he enjoyed saying it.
"We'll be beginning a new unit today, on national security. YourSchoolBooks have the new texts. Please open them and turn to the firstscreen."The opening screen was emblazoned with a DHS logo and the title:
WHAT EVERY AMERICAN SHOULD KNOW ABOUT HOMELANDSECURITY.
I wanted to throw my SchoolBook on the floor.
I'd made arrangements to meet Ange at a cafe in her neighborhoodafter school. I jumped on the BART and found myself sitting behind twoguys in suits. They were looking at the San Francisco Chronicle, whichfeatured a full-page post-mortem on the "youth riot" in Mission DoloresPark. They were tutting and clucking over it. Then one said to the other,"It's like they're brainwashed or something. Christ, were we ever thatstupid?"I got up and moved to another seat.

Chapter 13
This chapter is dedicated to Books-A-Million, a chain of gigantic book-stores spread across the USA. I first encountered Books-A-Million whilestaying at a hotel in Terre Haute, Indiana (I was giving a speech at theRose Hulman Institute of Technology later that day). The store was nextto my hotel and I really needed some reading material — I'd been on theroad for a solid month and I'd read everything in my suitcase, and I hadanother five cities to go before I headed home. As I stared intently at theshelves, a clerk asked me if I needed any help. Now, I've worked at book-stores before, and a knowledgeable clerk is worth her weight in gold, so Isaid sure, and started to describe my tastes, naming authors I'd enjoyed.
The clerk smiled and said, "I've got just the book for you," and pro-ceeded to take down a copy of my first novel, Down and Out in the Ma-gic Kingdom. I busted out laughing, introduced myself, and had an ab-solutely lovely chat about science fiction that almost made me late togive my speech!
Books-A-Million"They're total whores," Ange said, spitting the word out. "In fact, that'san insult to hardworking whores everywhere. They're, they're profiteers."We were looking at a stack of newspapers we'd picked up and broughtto the cafe. They all contained "reporting" on the party in Dolores Parkand to a one, they made it sound like a drunken, druggy orgy of kidswho'd attacked the cops. USA Today described the cost of the "riot" andincluded the cost of washing away the pepper-spray residue from thegas-bombing, the rash of asthma attacks that clogged the city's emer-gency rooms, and the cost of processing the eight hundred arrested"rioters."No one was telling our side.
"Well, the Xnet got it right, anyway," I said. I'd saved a bunch of theblogs and videos and photostreams to my phone and I showed them to168her. They were first-hand accounts from people who'd been gassed, andbeaten up. The video showed us all dancing, having fun, showed thepeaceful political speeches and the chant of "Take It Back" and TrudyDoo talking about us being the only generation that could believe infighting for our freedoms.
"We need to make people know about this," she said.
"Yeah," I said, glumly. "That's a nice theory.""Well, why do you think the press doesn't ever publish our side?""You said it, they're whores.""Yeah, but whores do it for the money. They could sell more papersand commercials if they had a controversy. All they have now is a crime— controversy is much bigger.""OK, point taken. So why don't they do it? Well, reporters can barelysearch regular blogs, let alone keep track of the Xnet. It's not as if that's areal adult-friendly place to be.""Yeah," she said. "Well, we can fix that, right?""Huh?""Write it all up. Put it in one place, with all the links. A single placewhere you can go that's intended for the press to find it and get thewhole picture. Link it to the HOWTOs for Xnet. Internet users can get tothe Xnet, provided they don't care about the DHS finding out whatthey've been surfing.""You think it'll work?""Well, even if it doesn't, it's something positive to do.""Why would they listen to us, anyway?""Who wouldn't listen to M1k3y?"I put down my coffee. I picked up my phone and slipped it into mypocket. I stood up, turned on my heel, and walked out of the cafe. Ipicked a direction at random and kept going. My face felt tight, theblood gone into my stomach, which churned.
They know who you are, I thought. They know who M1k3y is. That was it.
If Ange had figured it out, the DHS had too. I was doomed. I had knownthat since they let me go from the DHS truck, that someday they'd comeand arrest me and put me away forever, send me to wherever Darryl hadgone.
It was all over.
169She nearly tackled me as I reached Market Street. She was out ofbreath and looked furious.
"What the hell is your problem, mister?"I shook her off and kept walking. It was all over.
She grabbed me again. "Stop it, Marcus, you're scaring me. Come on,talk to me."I stopped and looked at her. She blurred before my eyes. I couldn't fo-cus on anything. I had a mad desire to jump into the path of a Muni trol-ley as it tore past us, down the middle of the road. Better to die than togo back.
"Marcus!" She did something I'd only seen people do in the movies.
She slapped me, a hard crack across the face. "Talk to me, dammit!"I looked at her and put my hand to my face, which was stinging hard.
"No one is supposed to know who I am," I said. "I can't put it any moresimply. If you know, it's all over. Once other people know, it's all over.""Oh god, I'm sorry. Look, I only know because, well, because I black-mailed Jolu. After the party I stalked you a little, trying to figure out ifyou were the nice guy you seemed to be or a secret axe-murderer. I'veknown Jolu for a long time and when I asked him about you, he gushedlike you were the Second Coming or something, but I could hear thatthere was something he wasn't telling me. I've known Jolu for a longtime. He dated my older sister at computer camp when he was a kid. Ihave some really good dirt on him. I told him I'd go public with it if hedidn't tell me.""So he told you.""No," she said. "He told me to go to hell. Then I told him somethingabout me. Something I'd never told anyone else.""What?"She looked at me. Looked around. Looked back at me. "OK. I won'tswear you to secrecy because what's the point? Either I can trust you or Ican't.
"Last year, I —" she broke off. "Last year, I stole the standardized testsand published them on the net. It was just a lark. I happened to be walk-ing past the principal's office and I saw them in his safe, and the doorwas hanging open. I ducked into his office — there were six sets of cop-ies and I just put one into my bag and took off again. When I got home, Iscanned them all and put them up on a Pirate Party server in Denmark."170"That was you?" I said.
She blushed. "Um. Yeah.""Holy crap!" I said. It had been huge news. The Board of Educationsaid that its No Child Left Behind tests had cost tens of millions of dol-lars to produce and that they'd have to spend it all over again now thatthey'd had the leak. They called it "edu-terrorism." The news had specu-lated endlessly about the political motivations of the leaker, wondering ifit was a teacher's protest, or a student, or a thief, or a disgruntled govern-ment contractor.
"That was YOU?""It was me," she said.
"And you told Jolu this —""Because I wanted him to be sure that I would keep the secret. If heknew my secret, then he'd have something he could use to put me in jailif I opened my trap. Give a little, get a little. Quid pro quo, like in Silenceof the Lambs.""And he told you.""No," she said. "He didn't.""But —""Then I told him how into you I was. How I was planning to totallymake an idiot of myself and throw myself at you. Then he told me."I couldn't think of anything to say then. I looked down at my toes. Shegrabbed my hands and squeezed them.
"I'm sorry I squeezed it out of him. It was your decision to tell me, ifyou were going to tell me at all. I had no business —""No," I said. Now that I knew how she'd found out, I was starting tocalm down. "No, it's good you know. You.""Me," she said. "Li'l ol' me.""OK, I can live with this. But there's one other thing.""What?""There's no way to say this without sounding like a jerk, so I'll just sayit. People who date each other — or whatever it is we're doing now —they split up. When they split up, they get angry at each other. Some-times even hate each other. It's really cold to think about that happeningbetween us, but you know, we've got to think about it."171"I solemnly promise that there is nothing you could ever do to me thatwould cause me to betray your secret. Nothing. Screw a dozen cheer-leaders in my bed while my mother watches. Make me listen to BritneySpears. Rip off my laptop, smash it with hammers and soak it in sea-wa-ter. I promise. Nothing. Ever."I whooshed out some air.
"Um," I said.
"Now would be a good time to kiss me," she said, and turned her faceup.
M1k3y's next big project on the Xnet was putting together the ultimateroundup of reports of the DON'T TRUST party at Dolores Park. I put to-gether the biggest, most bad-ass site I could, with sections showing theaction by location, by time, by category — police violence, dancing, after-math, singing. I uploaded the whole concert.
It was pretty much all I worked on for the rest of the night. And thenext night. And the next.
My mailbox overflowed with suggestions from people. They sent medumps off their phones and their pocket-cameras. Then I got an emailfrom a name I recognized — Dr Eeevil (three "e"s), one of the primemaintainers of ParanoidLinux.
>
M1k3y>
I have been watching your Xnet experiment with great interest. Herein Germany, we have much experience with what happens with a gov-ernment that gets out of control.
>
One thing you should know is that every camera has a unique "noisesignature" that can be used to later connect a picture with a camera. Thatmeans that the photos you're republishing on your site could potentiallybe used to identify the photographers, should they later be picked up forsomething else.
>
Luckily, it's not hard to strip out the signatures, if you care to. There'sa utility on the ParanoidLinux distro you're using that does this — it's172called photonomous, and you'll find it in /usr/bin. Just read the manpages for documentation. It's simple though.
>
Good luck with what you're doing. Don't get caught. Stay free. Stayparanoid.
>
Dr EeevilI de-fingerprintized all the photos I'd posted and put them back up,along with a note explaining what Dr Eeevil had told me, warning every-one else to do the same. We all had the same basic ParanoidXbox install,so we could all anonymize our pictures. There wasn't anything I coulddo about the photos that had already been downloaded and cached, butfrom now on we'd be smarter.
That was all the thought I gave the matter than night, until I got downto breakfast the next morning and Mom had the radio on, playing theNPR morning news.
"Arabic news agency Al-Jazeera is running pictures, video and first-hand accounts of last weekend's youth riot in Mission Dolores park," theannouncer said as I was drinking a glass of orange juice. I managed notto spray it across the room, but I did choke a little.
"Al-Jazeera reporters claim that these accounts were published on theso-called 'Xnet,' a clandestine network used by students and Al-Quaedasympathizers in the Bay Area. This network's existence has long beenrumored, but today marks its first mainstream mention."Mom shook her head. "Just what we need," she said. "As if the policeweren't bad enough. Kids running around, pretending to be guerillasand giving them the excuse to really crack down.""The Xnet weblogs have carried hundreds of reports and multimediafiles from young people who attended the riot and allege that they weregathered peacefully until the police attacked them. Here is one of thoseaccounts.
"'All we were doing was dancing. I brought my little brother. Bandsplayed and we talked about freedom, about how we were losing it tothese jerks who say they hate terrorists but who attack us though we'renot terrorists we're Americans. I think they hate freedom, not us.
"We danced and the bands played and it was all fun and good andthen the cops started shouting at us to disperse. We all shouted take it173back! Meaning take America back. The cops gassed us with pepperspray. My little brother is twelve. He missed three days of school. Mystupid parents say it was my fault. How about the police? We pay themand they're supposed to protect us but they gassed us for no good reas-on, gassed us like they gas enemy soldiers.'
"Similar accounts, including audio and video, can be found on Al-Jazeera's website and on the Xnet. You can find directions for accessingthis Xnet on NPR's homepage."Dad came down.
"Do you use the Xnet?" he said. He looked intensely at my face. I feltmyself squirm.
"It's for video-games," I said. "That's what most people use it for. It'sjust a wireless network. It's what everyone did with those free Xboxesthey gave away last year."He glowered at me. "Games? Marcus, you don't realize it, but you'reproviding cover for people who plan on attacking and destroying thiscountry. I don't want to see you using this Xnet. Not anymore. Do I makemyself clear?"I wanted to argue. Hell, I wanted to shake him by the shoulders. But Ididn't. I looked away. I said, "Sure, Dad." I went to school.
At first I was relieved when I discovered that they weren't going toleave Mr Benson in charge of my social studies class. But the womanthey found to replace him was my worst nightmare.
She was young, just about 28 or 29, and pretty, in a wholesome kind ofway. She was blonde and spoke with a soft southern accent when she in-troduced herself to us as Mrs Andersen. That set off alarm bells rightaway. I didn't know any women under the age of sixty that called them-selves "Mrs."But I was prepared to overlook it. She was young, pretty, she soundednice. She would be OK.
She wasn't OK.
"Under what circumstances should the federal government be pre-pared to suspend the Bill of Rights?" she said, turning to the blackboardand writing down a row of numbers, one through ten.
"Never," I said, not waiting to be called on. This was easy.
"Constitutional rights are absolute."174"That's not a very sophisticated view." She looked at her seating-plan.
"Marcus. For example, say a policeman conducts an improper search —he goes beyond the stuff specified in his warrant. He discovers compel-ling evidence that a bad guy killed your father. It's the only evidence thatexists. Should the bad guy go free?"I knew the answer to this, but I couldn't really explain it. "Yes," I said,finally. "But the police shouldn't conduct improper searches —""Wrong," she said. "The proper response to police misconduct is dis-ciplinary action against the police, not punishing all of society for onecop's mistake." She wrote "Criminal guilt" under point one on the board.
"Other ways in which the Bill of Rights can be superseded?"Charles put his hand up. "Shouting fire in a crowded theater?""Very good —" she consulted the seating plan — "Charles. There aremany instances in which the First Amendment is not absolute. Let's listsome more of those."Charles put his hand up again. "Endangering a law enforcementofficer.""Yes, disclosing the identity of an undercover policeman or intelli-gence officer. Very good." She wrote it down. "Others?""National security," Charles said, not waiting for her to call on himagain. "Libel. Obscenity. Corruption of minors. Child porn. Bomb-mak-ing recipes." Mrs Andersen wrote these down fast, but stopped at childporn. "Child porn is just a form of obscenity."I was feeling sick. This was not what I'd learned or believed about mycountry. I put my hand up.
"Yes, Marcus?""I don't get it. You're making it sound like the Bill of Rights is optional.
It's the Constitution. We're supposed to follow it absolutely.""That's a common oversimplification," she said, giving me a fake smile.
"But the fact of the matter is that the framers of the Constitution intendedit to be a living document that was revised over time. They understoodthat the Republic wouldn't be able to last forever if the government ofthe day couldn't govern according to the needs of the day. They never in-tended the Constitution to be looked on like religious doctrine. After all,they came here fleeing religious doctrine."I shook my head. "What? No. They were merchants and artisans whowere loyal to the King until he instituted policies that were against their175interests and enforced them brutally. The religious refugees were wayearlier.""Some of the Framers were descended from religious refugees," shesaid.
"And the Bill of Rights isn't supposed to be something you pick andchoose from. What the Framers hated was tyranny. That's what the Billof Rights is supposed to prevent. They were a revolutionary army andthey wanted a set of principles that everyone could agree to. Life, libertyand the pursuit of happiness. The right of people to throw off theiroppressors.""Yes, yes," she said, waving at me. "They believed in the right ofpeople to get rid of their Kings, but —" Charles was grinning and whenshe said that, he smiled even wider.
"They set out the Bill of Rights because they thought that having abso-lute rights was better than the risk that someone would take them away.
Like the First Amendment: it's supposed to protect us by preventing thegovernment from creating two kinds of speech, allowed speech andcriminal speech. They didn't want to face the risk that some jerk woulddecide that the things that he found unpleasant were illegal."She turned and wrote, "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" on it.
"We're getting a little ahead of the lesson, but you seem like an ad-vanced group." The others laughed at this, nervously.
"The role of government is to secure for citizens the rights of life,liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In that order. It's like a filter. If thegovernment wants to do something that makes us a little unhappy, ortakes away some of our liberty, it's OK, providing they're doing it to saveour lives. That's why the cops can lock you up if they think you're adanger to yourself or others. You lose your liberty and happiness to pro-tect life. If you've got life, you might get liberty and happiness later."Some of the others had their hands up. "Doesn't that mean that theycan do anything they want, if they say it's to stop someone from hurtingus in the future?""Yeah," another kid said. "This sounds like you're saying that nationalsecurity is more important than the Constitution."I was so proud of my fellow students then. I said, "How can you pro-tect freedom by suspending the Bill of Rights?"She shook her head at us like we were being very stupid. "The'revolutionary' founding fathers shot traitors and spies. They didn't176believe in absolute freedom, not when it threatened the Republic. Nowyou take these Xnet people —"I tried hard not to stiffen.
"— these so-called jammers who were on the news this morning. Afterthis city was attacked by people who've declared war on this country,they set about sabotaging the security measures set up to catch the badguys and prevent them from doing it again. They did this by endanger-ing and inconveniencing their fellow citizens —""They did it to show that our rights were being taken away in thename of protecting them!" I said. OK, I shouted. God, she had me sosteamed. "They did it because the government was treating everyone likea suspected terrorist.""So they wanted to prove that they shouldn't be treated like terrorists,"Charles shouted back, "so they acted like terrorists? So they committedterrorism?"I boiled.
"Oh for Christ's sake. Committed terrorism? They showed that univer-sal surveillance was more dangerous than terrorism. Look at whathappened in the park last weekend. Those people were dancing andlistening to music. How is that terrorism?"The teacher crossed the room and stood before me, looming over meuntil I shut up. "Marcus, you seem to think that nothing has changed inthis country. You need to understand that the bombing of the Bay Bridgechanged everything. Thousands of our friends and relatives lie dead atthe bottom of the Bay. This is a time for national unity in the face of theviolent insult our country has suffered —"I stood up. I'd had enough of this "everything has changed" crapola.
"National unity? The whole point of America is that we're the countrywhere dissent is welcome. We're a country of dissidents and fighters anduniversity dropouts and free speech people."I thought of Ms Galvez's last lesson and the thousands of Berkeley stu-dents who'd surrounded the police-van when they tried to arrest a guyfor distributing civil rights literature. No one tried to stop those truckswhen they drove away with all the people who'd been dancing in thepark. I didn't try. I was running away.
Maybe everything had changed.
"I believe you know where Mr Benson's office is," she said to me. "Youare to present yourself to him immediately. I will not have my classes177disrupted by disrespectful behavior. For someone who claims to lovefreedom of speech, you're certainly willing to shout down anyone whodisagrees with you."I picked up my SchoolBook and my bag and stormed out. The doorhad a gas-lift, so it was impossible to slam, or I would have slammed it.
I went fast to Mr Benson's office. Cameras filmed me as I went. Mygait was recorded. The arphids in my student ID broadcast my identityto sensors in the hallway. It was like being in jail.
"Close the door, Marcus," Mr Benson said. He turned his screenaround so that I could see the video feed from the social studiesclassroom. He'd been watching.
"What do you have to say for yourself?""That wasn't teaching, it was propaganda. She told us that the Constitu-tion didn't matter!""No, she said it wasn't religious doctrine. And you attacked her likesome kind of fundamentalist, proving her point. Marcus, you of allpeople should understand that everything changed when the bridge wasbombed. Your friend Darryl —""Don't you say a goddamned word about him," I said, the anger bub-bling over. "You're not fit to talk about him. Yeah, I understand thateverything's different now. We used to be a free country. Now we'renot.""Marcus, do you know what 'zero-tolerance' means?"I backed down. He could expel me for "threatening behavior." It wassupposed to be used against gang kids who tried to intimidate theirteachers. But of course he wouldn't have any compunctions about usingit on me.
"Yes," I said. "I know what it means.""I think you owe me an apology," he said.
I looked at him. He was barely suppressing his sadistic smile. A part ofme wanted to grovel. It wanted to beg for his forgiveness for all myshame. I tamped that part down and decided that I would rather getkicked out than apologize.
"Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powersfrom the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of govern-ment becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to al-ter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation178on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to themshall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness." I re-membered it word for word.
He shook his head. "Remembering things isn't the same as under-standing them, sonny." He bent over his computer and made someclicks. His printer purred. He handed me a sheet of warm Board letter-head that said I'd been suspended for two weeks.
"I'll email your parents now. If you are still on school property in thirtyminutes, you'll be arrested for trespassing."I looked at him.
"You don't want to declare war on me in my own school," he said.
"You can't win that war. GO!"I left.
Chapter 14
This chapter is dedicated to the incomparable Mysterious Galaxy in SanDiego, California. The Mysterious Galaxy folks have had me in to signbooks every time I've been in San Diego for a conference or to teach (theClarion Writers' Workshop is based at San Diego State University innearby La Jolla, CA), and every time I show up, they pack the house.
This is a store with a loyal following of die-hard fans who know thatthey'll always be able to get great recommendations and great ideas atthe store. In summer 2007, I took my writing class from Clarion downto the store for the midnight launch of the final Harry Potter book andI've never seen such a rollicking, awesomely fun party at a store.
Mysterious Galaxy: 7051 Clairemont Mesa Blvd., Suite #302 SanDiego, CA USA 92111 +1 858 268 4747The Xnet wasn't much fun in the middle of the school-day, when allthe people who used it were in school. I had the piece of paper folded inthe back pocket of my jeans, and I threw it on the kitchen table when Igot home. I sat down in the living room and switched on the TV. I neverwatched it, but I knew that my parents did. The TV and the radio andthe newspapers were where they got all their ideas about the world.
The news was terrible. There were so many reasons to be scared.
American soldiers were dying all over the world. Not just soldiers,either. National guardsmen, who thought they were signing up to helprescue people from hurricanes, stationed overseas for years and years ofa long and endless war.
I flipped around the 24-hour news networks, one after another, aparade of officials telling us why we should be scared. A parade of pho-tos of bombs going off around the world.
I kept flipping and found myself looking at a familiar face. It was theguy who had come into the truck and spoken to Severe-Haircut womanwhen I was chained up in the back. Wearing a military uniform. The180caption identified him as Major General Graeme Sutherland, RegionalCommander, DHS.
"I hold in my hands actual literature on offer at the so-called concert inDolores Park last weekend." He held up a stack of pamphlets. There'dbeen lots of pamphleteers there, I remembered. Wherever you got agroup of people in San Francisco, you got pamphlets.
"I want you to look at these for a moment. Let me read you their titles.
WITHOUT THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED: A CITIZEN'S GUIDETO OVERTHROWING THE STATE. Here's one, DID THE SEPTEMBER11TH BOMBINGS REALLY HAPPEN? And another, HOW TO USETHEIR SECURITY AGAINST THEM. This literature shows us the truepurpose of the illegal gathering on Saturday night. This wasn't merely anunsafe gathering of thousands of people without proper precaution, oreven toilets. It was a recruiting rally for the enemy. It was an attempt tocorrupt children into embracing the idea that America shouldn't protectherself.
"Take this slogan, DON'T TRUST ANYONE OVER 25. What betterway to ensure that no considered, balanced, adult discussion is ever in-jected into your pro-terrorist message than to exclude adults, limitingyour group to impressionable young people?
"When police came on the scene, they found a recruitment rally forAmerica's enemies in progress. The gathering had already disrupted thenights of hundreds of residents in the area, none of whom had been con-sulted in the planning of this all night rave party.
"They ordered these people to disperse — that much is visible on allthe video — and when the revelers turned to attack them, egged on bythe musicians on stage, the police subdued them using non-lethal crowdcontrol techniques.
"The arrestees were ring-leaders and provocateurs who had led thethousands of impressionistic young people there to charge the policelines. 827 of them were taken into custody. Many of these people hadprior offenses. More than 100 of them had outstanding warrants. Theyare still in custody.
"Ladies and gentlemen, America is fighting a war on many fronts, butnowhere is she in more grave danger than she is here, at home. Whetherwe are being attacked by terrorists or those who sympathize with them."181A reporter held up a hand and said, "General Sutherland, surely you'renot saying that these children were terrorist sympathizers for attending aparty in a park?""Of course not. But when young people are brought under the influ-ence of our country's enemies, it's easy for them to end up over theirheads. Terrorists would love to recruit a fifth column to fight the war onthe home front for them. If these were my children, I'd be gravelyconcerned."Another reporter chimed in. "Surely this is just an open air concert,General? They were hardly drilling with rifles."The General produced a stack of photos and began to hold them up.
"These are pictures that officers took with infra-red cameras before mov-ing in." He held them next to his face and paged through them one at atime. They showed people dancing really rough, some people gettingcrushed or stepped on. Then they moved into sex stuff by the trees, a girlwith three guys, two guys necking together. "There were children asyoung as ten years old at this event. A deadly cocktail of drugs, propa-ganda and music resulted in dozens of injuries. It's a wonder thereweren't any deaths."I switched the TV off. They made it look like it had been a riot. If myparents thought I'd been there, they'd have strapped me to my bed for amonth and only let me out afterward wearing a tracking collar.
Speaking of which, they were going to be pissed when they found outI'd been suspended.
They didn't take it well. Dad wanted to ground me, but Mom and Italked him out of it.
"You know that vice-principal has had it in for Marcus for years,"Mom said. "The last time we met him you cursed him for an hour after-ward. I think the word 'asshole' was mentioned repeatedly."Dad shook his head. "Disrupting a class to argue against the Depart-ment of Homeland Security —""It's a social studies class, Dad," I said. I was beyond caring anymore,but I felt like if Mom was going to stick up for me, I should help her out.
"We were talking about the DHS. Isn't debate supposed to be healthy?""Look, son," he said. He'd taking to calling me "son" a lot. It made mefeel like he'd stopped thinking of me as a person and switched to think-ing of me as a kind of half-formed larva that needed to be guided out of182adolescence. I hated it. "You're going to have to learn to live with the factthat we live in a different world today. You have every right to speakyour mind of course, but you have to be prepared for the consequencesof doing so. You have to face the fact that there are people who are hurt-ing, who aren't going to want to argue the finer points of Constitutionallaw when their lives are at stakes. We're in a lifeboat now, and onceyou're in the lifeboat, no one wants to hear about how mean the captainis being."I barely restrained myself from rolling my eyes.
"I've been assigned two weeks of independent study, writing one pa-per for each of my subjects, using the city for my background — a his-tory paper, a social studies paper, an English paper, a physics paper. Itbeats sitting around at home watching television."Dad looked hard at me, like he suspected I was up to something, thennodded. I said goodnight to them and went up to my room. I fired upmy Xbox and opened a word-processor and started to brainstorm ideasfor my papers. Why not? It really was better than sitting around at home.
I ended up IMing with Ange for quite a while that night. She was sym-pathetic about everything and told me she'd help me with my papers if Iwanted to meet her after school the next night. I knew where her schoolwas — she went to the same school as Van — and it was all the way overin the East Bay, where I hadn't visited since the bombs went.
I was really excited at the prospect of seeing her again. Every nightsince the party, I'd gone to bed thinking of two things: the sight of thecrowd charging the police lines and the feeling of the side of her breastunder her shirt as we leaned against the pillar. She was amazing. I'd nev-er been with a girl as… aggressive as her before. It had always been meputting the moves on and them pushing me away. I got the feeling thatAnge was as much of a horn-dog as I was. It was a tantalizing notion.
I slept soundly that night, with exciting dreams of me and Ange andwhat we might do if we found ourselves in a secluded spot somewhere.
The next day, I set out to work on my papers. San Francisco is a goodplace to write about. History? Sure, it's there, from the Gold Rush to theWWII shipyards, the Japanese internment camps, the invention of thePC. Physics? The Exploratorium has the coolest exhibits of any museumI've ever been to. I took a perverse satisfaction in the exhibits on soil li-quefaction during big quakes. English? Jack London, Beat Poets, science183fiction writers like Pat Murphy and Rudy Rucker. Social studies? TheFree Speech Movement, Cesar Chavez, gay rights, feminism, anti-warmovement…I've always loved just learning stuff for its own sake. Just to be smarterabout the world around me. I could do that just by walking around thecity. I decided I'd do an English paper about the Beats first. City Lightsbooks had a great library in an upstairs room where Alan Ginsberg andhis buddies had created their radical druggy poetry. The one we'd readin English class was Howl and I would never forget the opening lines,they gave me shivers down my back:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hyster-ical naked,dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angryfix,angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to thestarry dynamo in the machinery of night…I liked the way he ran those words all together, "starving hysterical na-ked." I knew how that felt. And "best minds of my generation" made methink hard too. It made me remember the park and the police and the gasfalling. They busted Ginsberg for obscenity over Howl — all about a lineabout gay sex that would hardly have caused us to blink an eye today. Itmade me happy somehow, knowing that we'd made some progress.
That things had been even more restrictive than this before.
I lost myself in the library, reading these beautiful old editions of thebooks. I got lost in Jack Kerouac's On the Road, a novel I'd been meaningto read for a long time, and a clerk who came up to check on me noddedapprovingly and found me a cheap edition that he sold me for six bucks.
I walked into Chinatown and had dim sum buns and noodles withhot-sauce that I had previously considered to be pretty hot, but whichwould never seem anything like hot ever again, not now that I'd had anAnge special.
As the day wore on toward the afternoon, I got on the BART andswitched to a San Mateo bridge shuttle bus to bring me around to theEast Bay. I read my copy of On the Road and dug the scenery whizzingpast. On the Road is a semi-autobiographical novel about Jack Kerouac, adruggy, hard-drinking writer who goes hitchhiking around America,working crummy jobs, howling through the streets at night, meetingpeople and parting ways. Hipsters, sad-faced hobos, con-men, muggers,184scumbags and angels. There's not really a plot — Kerouac supposedlywrote it in three weeks on a long roll of paper, stoned out of his mind —only a bunch of amazing things, one thing happening after another. Hemakes friends with self-destructing people like Dean Moriarty, who gethim involved in weird schemes that never really work out, but still itworks out, if you know what I mean.
There was a rhythm to the words, it was luscious, I could hear it beingread aloud in my head. It made me want to lie down in the bed of apickup truck and wake up in a dusty little town somewhere in the cent-ral valley on the way to LA, one of those places with a gas station and adiner, and just walk out into the fields and meet people and see stuff anddo stuff.
It was a long bus ride and I must have dozed off a little — staying uplate IMing with Ange was hard on my sleep-schedule, since Mom stillexpected me down for breakfast. I woke up and changed buses and be-fore long, I was at Ange's school.
She came bounding out of the gates in her uniform — I'd never seenher in it before, it was kind of cute in a weird way, and reminded me ofVan in her uniform. She gave me a long hug and a hard kiss on thecheek.
"Hello you!" she said.
"Hiya!""Whatcha reading?"I'd been waiting for this. I'd marked the passage with a finger. "Listen:
'They danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after asI've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the onlypeople for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad totalk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the onesthat never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn likefabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the starsand in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes"Awww!"'"She took the book and read the passage again for herself. "Wow,dingledodies! I love it! Is it all like this?"I told her about the parts I'd read, walking slowly down the sidewalkback toward the bus-stop. Once we turned the corner, she put her armaround my waist and I slung mine around her shoulder. Walking downthe street with a girl — my girlfriend? Sure, why not? — talking about185this cool book. It was heaven. Made me forget my troubles for a littlewhile.
"Marcus?"I turned around. It was Van. In my subconscious I'd expected this. Iknew because my conscious mind wasn't remotely surprised. It wasn't abig school, and they all got out at the same time. I hadn't spoken to Vanin weeks, and those weeks felt like months. We used to talk every day.
"Hey, Van," I said. I suppressed the urge to take my arm off of Ange'sshoulders. Van seemed surprised, but not angry, more ashen, shaken.
She looked closely at the two of us.
"Angela?""Hey, Vanessa," Ange said.
"What are you doing here?""I came out to get Ange," I said, trying to keep my tone neutral. I wassuddenly embarrassed to be seen with another girl.
"Oh," Van said. "Well, it was nice to see you.""Nice to see you too, Vanessa," Ange said, swinging me around,marching me back toward the bus-stop.
"You know her?" Ange said.
"Yeah, since forever.""Was she your girlfriend?""What? No! No way! We were just friends.""You were friends?"I felt like Van was walking right behind us, listening in, though at thepace we were walking, she would have to be jogging to keep up. I res-isted the temptation to look over my shoulder for as long as possible,then I did. There were lots of girls from the school behind us, but no Van.
"She was with me and Jose-Luis and Darryl when we were arrested.
We used to ARG together. The four of us, we were kind of best friends.""And what happened?"I dropped my voice. "She didn't like the Xnet," I said. "She thought wewould get into trouble. That I'd get other people into trouble.""And that's why you stopped being friends?""We just drifted apart."186We walked a few steps. "You weren't, you know, boyfriend/girlfriendfriends?""No!" I said. My face was hot. I felt like I sounded like I was lying,even though I was telling the truth.
Ange jerked us to a halt and studied my face.
"Were you?""No! Seriously! Just friends. Darryl and her — well, not quite, butDarryl was so into her. There was no way —""But if Darryl hadn't been into her, you would have, huh?""No, Ange, no. Please, just believe me and let it go. Vanessa was agood friend and we're not anymore, and that upsets me, but I was neverinto her that way, all right?
She slumped a little. "OK, OK. I'm sorry. I don't really get along withher is all. We've never gotten along in all the years we've known eachother."Oh ho, I thought. This would be how it came to be that Jolu knew herfor so long and I never met her; she had some kind of thing with Vanand he didn't want to bring her around.
She gave me a long hug and we kissed, and a bunch of girls passed usgoing woooo and we straightened up and headed for the bus-stop. Aheadof us walked Van, who must have gone past while we were kissing. I feltlike a complete jerk.
Of course, she was at the stop and on the bus and we didn't say aword to each other, and I tried to make conversation with Ange all theway, but it was awkward.
The plan was to stop for a coffee and head to Ange's place to hang outand "study," i.e. take turns on her Xbox looking at the Xnet. Ange's momgot home late on Tuesdays, which was her night for yoga class and din-ner with her girls, and Ange's sister was going out with her boyfriend, sowe'd have the place to ourselves. I'd been having pervy thoughts about itever since we'd made the plan.
We got to her place and went straight to her room and shut the door.
Her room was kind of a disaster, covered with layers of clothes and note-books and parts of PCs that would dig into your stocking feet like cal-trops. Her desk was worse than the floor, piled high with books andcomics, so we ended up sitting on her bed, which was OK by me.
187The awkwardness from seeing Van had gone away somewhat and wegot her Xbox up and running. It was in the center of a nest of wires, somegoing to a wireless antenna she'd hacked into it and stuck to the windowso she could tune in the neighbors' WiFi. Some went to a couple of oldlaptop screens she'd turned into standalone monitors, balanced onstands and bristling with exposed electronics. The screens were on bothbedside tables, which was an excellent setup for watching movies orIMing from bed — she could turn the monitors sidewise and lie on herside and they'd be right-side-up, no matter which side she lay on.
We both knew what we were really there for, sitting side by sidepropped against the bedside table. I was trembling a little and super-con-scious of the warmth of her leg and shoulder against mine, but I neededto go through the motions of logging into Xnet and seeing what email I'dgotten and so on.
There was an email from a kid who liked to send in funny phone-camvideos of the DHS being really crazy — the last one had been of themdisassembling a baby's stroller after a bomb-sniffing dog had shown aninterest in it, taking it apart with screwdrivers right on the street in theMarina while all these rich people walked past, staring at them and mar-veling at how weird it was.
I'd linked to the video and it had been downloaded like crazy. He'dhosted it on the Internet Archive's Alexandria mirror in Egypt, wherethey'd host anything for free so long as you'd put it under the CreativeCommons license, which let anyone remix it and share it. The US archive— which was down in the Presidio, only a few minutes away — hadbeen forced to take down all those videos in the name of national secur-ity, but the Alexandria archive had split away into its own organizationand was hosting anything that embarrassed the USA.
This kid — his handle was Kameraspie — had sent me an even bettervideo this time around. It was at the doorway to City Hall in CivicCenter, a huge wedding cake of a building covered with statues in littlearchways and gilt leaves and trim. The DHS had a secure perimeteraround the building, and Kameraspie's video showed a great shot oftheir checkpoint as a guy in an officer's uniform approached and showedhis ID and put his briefcase on the X-ray belt.
It was all OK until one of the DHS people saw something he didn't likeon the X-ray. He questioned the General, who rolled his eyes and saidsomething inaudible (the video had been shot from across the street,188apparently with a homemade concealed zoom lens, so the audio wasmostly of people walking past and traffic noises).
The General and the DHS guys got into an argument, and the longerthey argued, the more DHS guys gathered around them. Finally, theGeneral shook his head angrily and waved his finger at the DHS guy'schest and picked up his briefcase and started to walk away. The DHSguys shouted at him, but he didn't slow. His body language really said,"I am totally, utterly pissed."Then it happened. The DHS guys ran after the general. Kameraspieslowed the video down here, so we could see, in frame-by-frame slo-mo,the general half-turning, his face all like, "No freaking way are you aboutto tackle me," then changing to horror as three of the giant DHS guardsslammed into him, knocking him sideways, then catching him at themiddle, like a career-ending football tackle. The general — middle aged,steely grey hair, lined and dignified face — went down like a sack ofpotatoes and bounced twice, his face slamming off the sidewalk andblood starting out of his nose.
The DHS hog-tied the general, strapping him at ankles and wrists. Thegeneral was shouting now, really shouting, his face purpling under theblood streaming from his nose. Legs swished by in the tight zoom.
Passing pedestrians looked at this guy in his uniform, getting tied up,and you could see from his face that this was the worst part, this was theritual humiliation, the removal of dignity. The clip ended.
"Oh my dear sweet Buddha," I said looking at the screen as it faded toblack, starting the video again. I nudged Ange and showed her the clip.
She watched wordless, jaw hanging down to her chest.
"Post that," she said. "Post that post that post that post that!"I posted it. I could barely type as I wrote it up, describing what I'dseen, adding a note to see if anyone could identify the military man inthe video, if anyone knew anything about this.
I hit publish.
We watched the video. We watched it again.
My email pinged.
>
I totally recognize that dude — you can find his bio on Wikipedia.
He's General Claude Geist. He commanded the joint UN peacekeepingmission in Haiti.
189I checked the bio. There was a picture of the general at a press confer-ence, and notes about his role in the difficult Haiti mission. It was clearlythe same guy.
I updated the post.
Theoretically, this was Ange's and my chance to make out, but thatwasn't what we ended up doing. We crawled the Xnet blogs, looking formore accounts of the DHS searching people, tackling people, invadingthem. This was a familiar task, the same thing I'd done with all the foot-age and accounts from the riots in the park. I started a new category onmy blog for this, AbusesOfAuthority, and filed them away. Ange keptcoming up with new search terms for me to try and by the time her momgot home, my new category had seventy posts, headlined by GeneralGeist's City Hall takedown.
I worked on my Beat paper all the next day at home, reading the Ker-ouac and surfing the Xnet. I was planning on meeting Ange at school,but I totally wimped out at the thought of seeing Van again, so I textedher an excuse about working on the paper.
There were all kinds of great suggestions for AbusesOfAuthority com-ing in; hundreds of little and big ones, pictures and audio. The memewas spreading.
It spread. The next morning there were even more. Someone started anew blog called AbusesOfAuthority that collected hundreds more. Thepile grew. We competed to find the juiciest stories, the craziest pictures.
The deal with my parents was that I'd eat breakfast with them everymorning and talk about the projects I was doing. They liked that I wasreading Kerouac. It had been a favorite book of both of theirs and itturned out there was already a copy on the bookcase in my parents'
room. My dad brought it down and I flipped through it. There were pas-sages marked up with pen, dog-eared pages, notes in the margin. Mydad had really loved this book.
It made me remember a better time, when my Dad and I had been ableto talk for five minutes without shouting at each other about terrorism,and we had a great breakfast talking about the way that the novel wasplotted, all the crazy adventures.
But the next morning at breakfast they were both glued to the radio.
"Abuses of Authority — it's the latest craze on San Francisco's notori-ous Xnet, and it's captured the world's attention. Called A-oh-A, the190movement is composed of 'Little Brothers' who watch back against theDepartment of Homeland Security's anti-terrorism measures, document-ing the failures and excesses. The rallying cry is a popular viral videoclip of a General Claude Geist, a retired three-star general, being tackledby DHS officers on the sidewalk in front of City Hall. Geist hasn't made astatement on the incident, but commentary from young people who areupset with their own treatment has been fast and furious.
"Most notable has been the global attention the movement has re-ceived. Stills from the Geist video have appeared on the front pages ofnewspapers in Korea, Great Britain, Germany, Egypt and Japan, andbroadcasters around the world have aired the clip on prime-time news.
The issue came to a head last night, when the British BroadcastingCorporation's National News Evening program ran a special report onthe fact that no American broadcaster or news agency has covered thisstory. Commenters on the BBC's website noted that BBC America's ver-sion of the news did not carry the report."They brought on a couple of interviews: British media watchdogs, aSwedish Pirate Party kid who made jeering remarks about America'scorrupt press, a retired American newscaster living in Tokyo, then theyaired a short clip from Al-Jazeera, comparing the American press recordand the record of the national news-media in Syria.
I felt like my parents were staring at me, that they knew what I wasdoing. But when I cleared away my dishes, I saw that they were lookingat each other.
Dad was holding his coffee cup so hard his hands were shaking. Momwas looking at him.
"They're trying to discredit us," Dad said finally. "They're trying tosabotage the efforts to keep us safe."I opened my mouth, but my mom caught my eye and shook her head.
Instead I went up to my room and worked on my Kerouac paper. OnceI'd heard the door slam twice, I fired up my Xbox and got online.
>
Hello M1k3y. This is Colin Brown. I'm a producer with the CanadianBroadcasting Corporation's news programme The National. We're doinga story on Xnet and have sent a reporter to San Francisco to cover it fromthere. Would you be interested in doing an interview to discuss yourgroup and its actions?
191I stared at the screen. Jesus. They wanted to interview me about "mygroup"?
>
Um thanks no. I'm all about privacy. And it's not "my group." Butthanks for doing the story!
A minute later, another email.
>
We can mask you and ensure your anonymity. You know that the De-partment of Homeland Security will be happy to provide their ownspokesperson. I'm interested in getting your side.
I filed the email. He was right, but I'd be crazy to do this. For all Iknew, he was the DHS.
I picked up more Kerouac. Another email came in. Same request,different news-agency: KQED wanted to meet me and record a radio in-terview. A station in Brazil. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Deutsche Welle. All day, the press requests came in. All day, I politelyturned them down.
I didn't get much Kerouac read that day.
"Hold a press-conference," is what Ange said, as we sat in the cafe nearher place that evening. I wasn't keen on going out to her school anymore,getting stuck on a bus with Van again.
"What? Are you crazy?""Do it in Clockwork Plunder. Just pick a trading post where there's noPvP allowed and name a time. You can login from here."PvP is player-versus-player combat. Parts of Clockwork Plunder wereneutral ground, which meant that we could theoretically bring in a ton ofnoob reporters without worrying about gamers killing them in themiddle of the press-conference.
"I don't know anything about press conferences.""Oh, just google it. I'm sure someone's written an article on holding asuccessful one. I mean, if the President can manage it, I'm sure you can.
He looks like he can barely tie his shoes without help."We ordered more coffee.
"You are a very smart woman," I said.
"And I'm beautiful," she said.
192"That too," I said.
Chapter 15
This chapter is dedicated to Chapters/Indigo, the national Canadianmegachain. I was working at Bakka, the independent science fictionbookstore, when Chapters opened its first store in Toronto and I knewthat something big was going on right away, because two of oursmartest, best-informed customers stopped in to tell me that they'd beenhired to run the science fiction section. From the start, Chapters raisedthe bar on what a big corporate bookstore could be, extending its hours,adding a friendly cafe and lots of seating, installing in-store self-serviceterminals and stocking the most amazing variety of titles.
Chapters/IndigoI blogged the press-conference even before I'd sent out the invitationsto the press. I could tell that all these writers wanted to make me into aleader or a general or a supreme guerrilla commandant, and I figuredone way of solving that would be to have a bunch of Xnetters runningaround answering questions too.
Then I emailed the press. The responses ranged from puzzled to en-thusiastic — only the Fox reporter was "outraged" that I had the gall toask her to play a game in order to appear on her TV show. The rest ofthem seemed to think that it would make a pretty cool story, thoughplenty of them wanted lots of tech support for signing onto the gameI picked 8PM, after dinner. Mom had been bugging me about all theevenings I'd been spending out of the house until I finally spilled thebeans about Ange, whereupon she came over all misty and kept lookingat me like, my-little-boy's-growing-up. She wanted to meet Ange, and Iused that as leverage, promising to bring her over the next night if Icould "go to the movies" with Ange tonight.
Ange's mom and sister were out again — they weren't real stay-at-homes — which left me and Ange alone in her room with her Xbox and194mine. I unplugged one of her bedside screens and attached my Xbox to itso that we could both login at once.
Both Xboxes were idle, logged into Clockwork Plunder. I was pacing.
"It's going to be fine," she said. She glanced at her screen. "PatcheyePete's Market has 600 players in it now!" We'd picked Patcheye Pete's be-cause it was the market closest to the village square where new playersspawned. If the reporters weren't already Clockwork Plunder players —ha! — then that's where they'd show up. In my blog post I'd askedpeople generally to hang out on the route between Patcheye Pete's andthe spawn-gate and direct anyone who looked like a disoriented reporterover to Pete's.
"What the hell am I going to tell them?""You just answer their questions — and if you don't like a question, ig-nore it. Someone else can answer it. It'll be fine.""This is insane.""This is perfect, Marcus. If you want to really screw the DHS, you haveto embarrass them. It's not like you're going to be able to out-shoot them.
Your only weapon is your ability to make them look like morons."I flopped on the bed and she pulled my head into her lap and strokedmy hair. I'd been playing around with different haircuts before thebombing, dying it all kinds of funny colors, but since I'd gotten out of jailI couldn't be bothered. It had gotten long and stupid and shaggy and I'dgone into the bathroom and grabbed my clippers and buzzed it down tohalf an inch all around, which took zero effort to take care of and helpedme to be invisible when I was out jamming and cloning arphids.
I opened my eyes and stared into her big brown eyes behind herglasses. They were round and liquid and expressive. She could makethem bug out when she wanted to make me laugh, or make them softand sad, or lazy and sleepy in a way that made me melt into a puddle ofhorniness.
That's what she was doing right now.
I sat up slowly and hugged her. She hugged me back. We kissed. Shewas an amazing kisser. I know I've already said that, but it bears repeat-ing. We kissed a lot, but for one reason or another we always stopped be-fore it got too heavy.
Now I wanted to go farther. I found the hem of her t-shirt and tugged.
She put her hands over her head and pulled back a few inches. I knewthat she'd do that. I'd known since the night in the park. Maybe that's195why we hadn't gone farther — I knew I couldn't rely on her to back off,which scared me a little.
But I wasn't scared then. The impending press-conference, the fightswith my parents, the international attention, the sense that there was amovement that was careening around the city like a wild pinball — itmade my skin tingle and my blood sing.
And she was beautiful, and smart, and clever and funny, and I wasfalling in love with her.
Her shirt slid off, her arching her back to help me get it over hershoulders. She reached behind her and did something and her bra fellaway. I stared goggle-eyed, motionless and breathless, and then shegrabbed my shirt and pulled it over my head, grabbing me and pullingmy bare chest to hers.
We rolled on the bed and touched each other and ground our bodiestogether and groaned. She kissed all over my chest and I did the same toher. I couldn't breathe, I couldn't think, I could only move and kiss andlick and touch.
We dared each other to go forward. I undid her jeans. She undid mine.
I lowered her zipper, she did mine, and tugged my jeans off. I tugged offhers. A moment later we were both naked, except for my socks, which Ipeeled off with my toes.
It was then that I caught sight of the bedside clock, which had longago rolled onto the floor and lay there, glowing up at us.
"Crap!" I yelped. "It starts in two minutes!" I couldn't freaking believethat I was about to stop what I was about to stop doing, when I wasabout to stop doing it. I mean, if you'd asked me, "Marcus, you are aboutto get laid for the firstest time EVAR, will you stop if I let off this nuclearbomb in the same room as you?" the answer would have been a resound-ing and unequivical NO.
And yet we stopped for this.
She grabbed me and pulled my face to hers and kissed me until Ithought I would pass out, then we both grabbed our clothes and more orless dressed, grabbing our keyboards and mice and heading for PatcheyePete's.
You could easily tell who the press were: they were the noobs whoplayed their characters like staggering drunks, weaving back and forthand up and down, trying to get the hang of it all, occasionally hitting the196wrong key and offering strangers all or part of their inventory, or givingthem accidental hugs and kicks.
The Xnetters were easy to spot, too: we all played Clockwork Plunderwhenever we had some spare time (or didn't feel like doing our home-work), and we had pretty tricked-out characters with cool weapons andbooby-traps on the keys sticking out of our backs that would cream any-one who tried to snatch them and leave us to wind down.
When I appeared, a system status message displayed M1K3Y HASENTERED PATCHEYE PETE'S — WELCOME SWABBIE WE OFFERFAIR TRADE FOR FINE BOOTY. All the players on the screen froze,then they crowded around me. The chat exploded. I thought about turn-ing on my voice-paging and grabbing a headset, but seeing how manypeople were trying to talk at once, I realized how confusing that wouldbe. Text was much easier to follow and they couldn't misquote me (hehheh).
I'd scouted the location before with Ange — it was great campaigningwith her, since we could both keep each other wound up. There was ahigh-spot on a pile of boxes of salt-rations that I could stand on and beseen from anywhere in the market.
>
Good evening and thank you all for coming. My name is M1k3y andI'm not the leader of anything. All around you are Xnetters who have asmuch to say about why we're here as I do. I use the Xnet because I be-lieve in freedom and the Constitution of the United States of America. Iuse Xnet because the DHS has turned my city into a police-state wherewe're all suspected terrorists. I use Xnet because I think you can't defendfreedom by tearing up the Bill of Rights. I learned about the Constitutionin a California school and I was raised to love my country for its free-dom. If I have a philosophy, it is this:
>
Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powersfrom the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of govern-ment becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to al-ter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundationon such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to themshall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
>
197I didn't write that, but I believe it. The DHS does not govern with myconsent.
>
Thank youI'd written this the day before, bouncing drafts back and forth withAnge. Pasting it in only took a second, though it took everyone in thegame a moment to read it. A lot of the Xnetters cheered, big showy pirate"Hurrah"s with raised sabers and pet parrots squawking and flyingoverhead.
Gradually, the journalists digested it too. The chat was running pastfast, so fast you could barely read it, lots of Xnetters saying things like"Right on" and "America, love it or leave it" and "DHS go home" and"America out of San Francisco," all slogans that had been big on the Xnetblogosphere.
>
M1k3y, this is Priya Rajneesh from the BBC. You say you're not theleader of any movement, but do you believe there is a movement? Is itcalled the Xnet?
Lots of answers. Some people said there wasn't a movement, somesaid there was and lots of people had ideas about what it was called:
Xnet, Little Brothers, Little Sisters, and my personal favorite, the UnitedStates of America.
They were really cooking. I let them go, thinking of what I could say.
Once I had it, I typed,>
I think that kind of answers your question, doesn't it? There may beone or more movements and they may be called Xnet or not.
>
M1k3y, I'm Doug Christensen from the Washington Internet Daily.
What do you think the DHS should be doing to prevent another attackon San Francisco, if what they're doing isn't successful.
More chatter. Lots of people said that the terrorists and the govern-ment were the same — either literally, or just meaning that they wereequally bad. Some said the government knew how to catch terrorists butpreferred not to because "war presidents" got re-elected.
>
I don't know198I typed finally.
>
I really don't. I ask myself this question a lot because I don't want toget blown up and I don't want my city to get blown up. Here's what I'vefigured out, though: if it's the DHS's job to keep us safe, they're failing.
All the crap they've done, none of it would stop the bridge from beingblown up again. Tracing us around the city? Taking away our freedom?
Making us suspicious of each other, turning us against each other?
Calling dissenters traitors? The point of terrorism is to terrify us. TheDHS terrifies me.
>
I don't have any say in what the terrorists do to me, but if this is a freecountry then I should be able to at least say what my own cops do to me.
I should be able to keep them from terrorizing me.
>
I know that's not a good answer. Sorry.
>
What do you mean when you say that the DHS wouldn't stop terror-ists? How do you know?
>
Who are you?
>
I'm with the Sydney Morning Herald.
>
I'm 17 years old. I'm not a straight-A student or anything. Even so, Ifigured out how to make an Internet that they can't wiretap. I figured outhow to jam their person-tracking technology. I can turn innocent peopleinto suspects and turn guilty people into innocents in their eyes. I couldget metal onto an airplane or beat a no-fly list. I figured this stuff out bylooking at the web and by thinking about it. If I can do it, terrorists cando it. They told us they took away our freedom to make us safe. Do youfeel safe?
>
In Australia? Why yes I doThe pirates all laughed.
199More journalists asked questions. Some were sympathetic, some werehostile. When I got tired, I handed my keyboard to Ange and let her beM1k3y for a while. It didn't really feel like M1k3y and me were the sameperson anymore anyway. M1k3y was the kind of kid who talked to inter-national journalists and inspired a movement. Marcus got suspendedfrom school and fought with his dad and wondered if he was goodenough for his kick-ass girlfriend.
By 11PM I'd had enough. Besides, my parents would be expecting mehome soon. I logged out of the game and so did Ange and we lay therefor a moment. I took her hand and she squeezed hard. We hugged.
She kissed my neck and murmured something.
"What?""I said I love you," she said. "What, you want me to send you atelegram?""Wow," I said.
"You're that surprised, huh?""No. Um. It's just — I was going to say that to you.""Sure you were," she said, and bit the tip of my nose.
"It's just that I've never said it before," I said. "So I was working up toit.""You still haven't said it, you know. Don't think I haven't noticed. Wegirls pick upon these things.""I love you, Ange Carvelli," I said.
"I love you too, Marcus Yallow."We kissed and nuzzled and I started to breathe hard and so did she.
That's when her mom knocked on the door.
"Angela," she said, "I think it's time your friend went home, don'tyou?""Yes, mother," she said, and mimed swinging an axe. As I put mysocks and shoes on, she muttered, "They'll say, that Angela, she was sucha good girl, who would have thought it, all the time she was in the backyard, helping her mother out by sharpening that hatchet."I laughed. "You don't know how easy you have it. There is no way myfolks would leave us alone in my bedroom until 11 o'clock.""11:45," she said, checking her clock.
"Crap!" I yelped and tied my shoes.
200"Go," she said, "run and be free! Look both ways before crossing theroad! Write if you get work! Don't even stop for a hug! If you're not outof here by the count of ten, there's going to be trouble, mister. One. Two.
Three."I shut her up by leaping onto the bed, landing on her and kissing heruntil she stopped trying to count. Satisfied with my victory, I poundeddown the stairs, my Xbox under my arm.
Her mom was at the foot of the stairs. We'd only met a couple times.
She looked like an older, taller version of Ange — Ange said her fatherwas the short one — with contacts instead of glasses. She seemed to havetentatively classed me as a good guy, I and appreciated it.
"Good night, Mrs Carvelli," I said.
"Good night, Mr Yallow," she said. It was one of our little rituals, eversince I'd called her Mrs Carvelli when we first met.
I found myself standing awkwardly by the door.
"Yes?" she said.
"Um," I said. "Thanks for having me over.""You're always welcome in our home, young man," she said.
"And thanks for Ange," I said finally, hating how lame it sounded. Butshe smiled broadly and gave me a brief hug.
"You're very welcome," she said.
The whole bus ride home, I thought over the press-conference,thought about Ange naked and writhing with me on her bed, thoughtabout her mother smiling and showing me the door.
My mom was waiting up for me. She asked me about the movie and Igave her the response I'd worked out in advance, cribbing from the re-view it had gotten in the Bay Guardian.
As I fell asleep, the press-conference came back. I was really proud ofit. It had been so cool, to have all these big-shot journos show up in thegame, to have them listen to me and to have them listen to all the peoplewho believed in the same things as me. I dropped off with a smile on mylips.
I should have known better.
XNET LEADER: I COULD GET METAL ONTO AN AIRPLANEDHS DOESN'T HAVE MY CONSENT TO GOVERN201XNET KIDS: USA OUT OF SAN FRANCISCOThose were the good headlines. Everyone sent me the articles to blog,but it was the last thing I wanted to do.
I'd blown it, somehow. The press had come to my press-conferenceand concluded that we were terrorists or terrorist dupes. The worst wasthe reporter on Fox News, who had apparently shown up anyway, andwho devoted a ten-minute commentary to us, talking about our"criminal treason." Her killer line, repeated on every news-outlet I found,was:
"They say they don't have a name. I've got one for them. Let's callthese spoiled children Cal-Quaeda. They do the terrorists' work on thehome front. When — not if, but when — California gets attacked again,these brats will be as much to blame as the House of Saud."Leaders of the anti-war movement denounced us as fringe elements.
One guy went on TV to say that he believed we had been fabricated bythe DHS to discredit them.
The DHS had their own press-conference announcing that they woulddouble the security in San Francisco. They held up an arphid clonerthey'd found somewhere and demonstrated it in action, using it to stagea car-theft, and warned everyone to be on their alert for young peoplebehaving suspiciously, especially those whose hands were out of sight.
They weren't kidding. I finished my Kerouac paper and started in on apaper about the Summer of Love, the summer of 1967 when the anti-warmovement and the hippies converged on San Francisco. The guys whofounded Ben and Jerry's — old hippies themselves — had founded a hip-pie museum in the Haight, and there were other archives and exhibits tosee around town.
But it wasn't easy getting around. By the end of the week, I was gettingfrisked an average of four times a day. Cops checked my ID and ques-tioned me about why I was out in the street, carefully eyeballing the let-ter from Chavez saying that I was suspended.
I got lucky. No one arrested me. But the rest of the Xnet weren't solucky. Every night the DHS announced more arrests, "ringleaders" and"operatives" of Xnet, people I didn't know and had never heard of,paraded on TV along with the arphid sniffers and other devices that hadbeen in their pockets. They announced that the people were "namingnames," compromising the "Xnet network" and that more arrests wereexpected soon. The name "M1k3y" was often heard.
202Dad loved this. He and I watched the news together, him gloating, meshrinking away, quietly freaking out. "You should see the stuff they'regoing to use on these kids," Dad said. "I've seen it in action. They'll get acouple of these kids and check out their friends lists on IM and thespeed-dials on their phones, look for names that come up over and over,look for patterns, bringing in more kids. They're going to unravel themlike an old sweater."I canceled Ange's dinner at our place and started spending even moretime there. Ange's little sister Tina started to call me "the house-guest," asin "is the house-guest eating dinner with me tonight?" I liked Tina. Allshe cared about was going out and partying and meeting guys, but shewas funny and utterly devoted to Ange. One night as we were doing thedishes, she dried her hands and said, conversationally, "You know, youseem like a nice guy, Marcus. My sister's just crazy about you and I likeyou too. But I have to tell you something: if you break her heart, I willtrack you down and pull your scrotum over your head. It's not a prettysight."I assured her that I would sooner pull my own scrotum over my headthan break Ange's heart and she nodded. "So long as we're clear on that.""Your sister is a nut," I said as we lay on Ange's bed again, looking atXnet blogs. That is pretty much all we did: fool around and read Xnet.
"Did she use the scrotum line on you? I hate it when she does that. Shejust loves the word 'scrotum,' you know. It's nothing personal."I kissed her. We read some more.
"Listen to this," she said. "Police project four to six hundred arrests thisweekend in what they say will be the largest coordinated raid on Xnetdissidents to date."I felt like throwing up.
"We've got to stop this," I said. "You know there are people who aredoing more jamming to show that they're not intimidated? Isn't that justcrazy?""I think it's brave," she said. "We can't let them scare us intosubmission.""What? No, Ange, no. We can't let hundreds of people go to jail. Youhaven't been there. I have. It's worse than you think. It's worse than youcan imagine.""I have a pretty fertile imagination," she said.
203"Stop it, OK? Be serious for a second. I won't do this. I won't sendthose people to jail. If I do, I'm the guy that Van thinks I am.""Marcus, I'm being serious. You think that these people don't knowthey could go to jail? They believe in the cause. You believe in it too.
Give them the credit to know what they're getting into. It's not up to youto decide what risks they can or can't take.""It's my responsibility because if I tell them to stop, they'll stop.""I thought you weren't the leader?""I'm not, of course I'm not. But I can't help it if they look to me forguidance. And so long as they do, I have a responsibility to help themstay safe. You see that, right?""All I see is you getting ready to cut and run at the first sign of trouble.
I think you're afraid they're going to figure out who you are. I thinkyou're afraid for you.""That's not fair," I said, sitting up, pulling away from her.
"Really? Who's the guy who nearly had a heart attack when hethought that his secret identity was out?""That was different," I said. "This isn't about me. You know it isn't.
Why are you being like this?""Why are you like this?" she said. "Why aren't you willing to be the guywho was brave enough to get all this started?""This isn't brave, it's suicide.""Cheap teenage melodrama, M1k3y.""Don't call me that!""What, 'M1k3y'? Why not, M1k3y?"I put my shoes on. I picked up my bag. I walked home.
>
Why I'm not jamming>
I won't tell anyone else what to do, because I'm not anyone's leader, nomatter what Fox News thinks.
>
But I am going to tell you what I plan on doing. If you think that's theright thing to do, maybe you'll do it too.
204>
I'm not jamming. Not this week. Maybe not next. It's not because I'mscared. It's because I'm smart enough to know that I'm better free than inprison. They figured out how to stop our tactic, so we need to come upwith a new tactic. I don't care what the tactic is, but I want it to work. It'sstupid to get arrested. It's only jamming if you get away with it.
>
There's another reason not to jam. If you get caught, they might useyou to catch your friends, and their friends, and their friends. Theymight bust your friends even if they're not on Xnet, because the DHS islike a maddened bull and they don't exactly worry if they've got the rightguy.
>
I'm not telling you what to do.
>
But the DHS is dumb and we're smart. Jamming proves that they can'tfight terrorism because it proves that they can't even stop a bunch ofkids. If you get caught, it makes them look like they're smarter than us.
>
THEY AREN'T SMARTER THAN US! We are smarter than them. Let'sbe smart. Let's figure out how to jam them, no matter how many goonsthey put on the streets of our city.
I posted it. I went to bed.
I missed Ange.
Ange and I didn't speak for the next four days, including the weekend,and then it was time to go back to school. I'd almost called her a milliontimes, written a thousand unsent emails and IMs.
Now I was back in Social Studies class, and Mrs Andersen greeted mewith voluble, sarcastic courtesy, asking me sweetly how my "holiday"had been. I sat down and mumbled nothing. I could hear Charlessnicker.
She taught us a class on Manifest Destiny, the idea that the Americanswere destined to take over the whole world (or at least that's how shemade it seem) and seemed to be trying to provoke me into sayingsomething so she could throw me out.
205I felt the eyes of the class on me, and it reminded me of M1k3y and thepeople who looked up to him. I was sick of being looked up to. I missedAnge.
I got through the rest of the day without anything making any kind ofmark on me. I don't think I said eight words.
Finally it was over and I hit the doors, heading for the gates and thestupid Mission and my pointless house.
I was barely out the gate when someone crashed into me. He was ayoung homeless guy, maybe my age, maybe a little older. He wore along, greasy overcoat, a pair of baggy jeans, and rotting sneakers thatlooked like they'd been through a wood-chipper. His long hair hungover his face, and he had a pubic beard that straggled down his throat in-to the collar of a no-color knit sweater.
I took this all in as we lay next to each other on the sidewalk, peoplepassing us and giving us weird looks. It seemed that he'd crashed intome while hurrying down Valencia, bent over with the burden of a splitbackpack that lay beside him on the pavement, covered in tight geomet-ric doodles in magic-marker.
He got to his knees and rocked back and forth, like he was drunk orhad hit his head.
"Sorry buddy," he said. "Didn't see you. You hurt?"I sat up too. Nothing felt hurt.
"Um. No, it's OK."He stood up and smiled. His teeth were shockingly white and straight,like an ad for an orthodontic clinic. He held his hand out to me and hisgrip was strong and firm.
"I'm really sorry." His voice was also clear and intelligent. I'd expectedhim to sound like the drunks who talked to themselves as they roamedthe Mission late at night, but he sounded like a knowledgeable bookstoreclerk.
"It's no problem," I said.
He stuck out his hand again.
"Zeb," he said.
"Marcus," I said.
"A pleasure, Marcus," he said. "Hope to run into you again sometime!"206Laughing, he picked up his backpack, turned on his heel and hurriedaway.
I walked the rest of the way home in a bemused fug. Mom was at thekitchen table and we had a little chat about nothing at all, the way weused to do, before everything changed.
I took the stairs up to my room and flopped down in my chair. Foronce, I didn't want to login to the Xnet. I'd checked in that morning be-fore school to discover that my note had created a gigantic controversyamong people who agreed with me and people who were righteouslypissed that I was telling them to back off from their beloved sport.
I had three thousand projects I'd been in the middle of when it had allstarted. I was building a pinhole camera out of legos, I'd been playingwith aerial kite photography using an old digital camera with a triggerhacked out of silly putty that was stretched out at launch and slowlysnapped back to its original shape, triggering the shutter at regular inter-vals. I had a vacuum tube amp I'd been building into an ancient, rusted,dented olive-oil tin that looked like an archaeological find — once it wasdone, I'd planned to build in a dock for my phone and a set of 5.1surround-sound speakers out of tuna-fish cans.
I looked over my workbench and finally picked up the pinhole cam-era. Methodically snapping legos together was just about my speed.
I took off my watch and the chunky silver two-finger ring that showeda monkey and a ninja squaring off to fight and dropped them into thelittle box I used for all the crap I load into my pockets and around myneck before stepping out for the day: phone, wallet, keys, wifinder,change, batteries, retractable cables… I dumped it all out into the box,and found myself holding something I didn't remember putting in therein the first place.
It was a piece of paper, grey and soft as flannel, furry at the edgeswhere it had been torn away from some larger piece of paper. It wascovered in the tiniest, most careful handwriting I'd ever seen. I unfoldedit and held it up. The writing covered both sides, running down from thetop left corner of one side to a crabbed signature at the bottom rightcorner of the other side.
The signature read, simply: ZEB.
I picked it up and started to read.
>
207Dear Marcus>
You don't know me but I know you. For the past three months, sincethe Bay Bridge was blown up, I have been imprisoned on Treasure Is-land. I was in the yard on the day you talked to that Asian girl and gottackled. You were brave. Good on you.
>
I had a burst appendix the day afterward and ended up in the infirm-ary. In the next bed was a guy named Darryl. We were both in recoveryfor a long time and by the time we got well, we were too much of an em-barrassment to them to let go.
>
So they decided we must really be guilty. They questioned us everyday. You've been through their questioning, I know. Imagine it formonths. Darryl and I ended up cell-mates. We knew we were bugged, sowe only talked about inconsequentialities. But at night, when we were inour cots, we would softly tap out messages to each other in Morse code(I knew my HAM radio days would come in useful sometime).
>
At first, their questions to us were just the same crap as ever, who didit, how'd they do it. But after a little while, they switched to asking usabout the Xnet. Of course, we'd never heard of it. That didn't stop themasking.
>
Darryl told me that they brought him arphid cloners, Xboxes, all kindsof technology and demanded that he tell them who used them, wherethey learned to mod them. Darryl told me about your games and thethings you learned.
>
Especially: The DHS asked us about our friends. Who did we know?
What were they like? Did they have political feelings? Had they been introuble at school? With the law?
>
We call the prison Gitmo-by-the-Bay. It's been a week since I got outand I don't think that anyone knows that their sons and daughters areimprisoned in the middle of the Bay. At night we could hear peoplelaughing and partying on the mainland.
208>
I got out last week. I won't tell you how, in case this falls into thewrong hands. Maybe others will take my route.
>
Darryl told me how to find you and made me promise to tell you whatI knew when I got back. Now that I've done that I'm out of here like lastyear. One way or another, I'm leaving this country. Screw America.
>
Stay strong. They're scared of you. Kick them for me. Don't get caught.
>
ZebThere were tears in my eyes as I finished the note. I had a disposablelighter somewhere on my desk that I sometimes used to melt the insula-tion off of wires, and I dug it out and held it to the note. I knew I owed itto Zeb to destroy it and make sure no one else ever saw it, in case itmight lead them back to him, wherever he was going.
I held the flame and the note, but I couldn't do it.
Darryl.
With all the crap with the Xnet and Ange and the DHS, I'd almost for-gotten he existed. He'd become a ghost, like an old friend who'd movedaway or gone on an exchange program. All that time, they'd been ques-tioning him, demanding that he rat me out, explain the Xnet, the jam-mers. He'd been on Treasure Island, the abandoned military base thatwas halfway along the demolished span of the Bay Bridge. He'd been soclose I could have swam to him.
I put the lighter down and re-read the note. By the time it was done, Iwas weeping, sobbing. It all came back to me, the lady with the severehaircut and the questions she'd asked and the reek of piss and the stiff-ness of my pants as the urine dried them into coarse canvas.
"Marcus?"My door was ajar and my mother was standing in it, watching mewith a worried look. How long had she been there?
I armed the tears away from my face and snorted up the snot. "Mom,"I said. "Hi."She came into my room and hugged me. "What is it? Do you need totalk?"209The note lay on the table.
"Is that from your girlfriend? Is everything all right?"She'd given me an out. I could just blame it all on problems with Angeand she'd leave my room and leave me alone. I opened my mouth to dojust that, and then this came out:
"I was in jail. After the bridge blew. I was in jail for that whole time."The sobs that came then didn't sound like my voice. They sounded likean animal noise, maybe a donkey or some kind of big cat noise in thenight. I sobbed so my throat burned and ached with it, so my chestheaved.
Mom took me in her arms, the way she used to when I was a little boy,and she stroked my hair, and she murmured in my ear, and rocked me,and gradually, slowly, the sobs dissipated.
I took a deep breath and Mom got me a glass of water. I sat on theedge of my bed and she sat in my desk chair and I told her everything.
Everything.
Well, most of it.
Chapter 16
This chapter is dedicated to San Francisco's Booksmith, ensconced in thestoried Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, just a few doors down from theBen and Jerry's at the exact corner of Haight and Ashbury. The Book-smith folks really know how to run an author event — when I lived inSan Francisco, I used to go down all the time to hear incredible writersspeak (William Gibson was unforgettable). They also produce littlebaseball-card-style trading cards for each author — I have two from myown appearances there.
Booksmith: 1644 Haight St. San Francisco CA 94117 USA +1 415 8638688At first Mom looked shocked, then outraged, and finally she gave upaltogether and just let her jaw hang open as I took her through the inter-rogation, pissing myself, the bag over my head, Darryl. I showed her thenote.
"Why —?"In that single syllable, every recrimination I'd dealt myself in the night,every moment that I'd lacked the bravery to tell the world what it wasreally about, why I was really fighting, what had really inspired theXnet.
I sucked in a breath.
"They told me I'd go to jail if I talked about it. Not just for a few days.
Forever. I was — I was scared."Mom sat with me for a long time, not saying anything. Then, "Whatabout Darryl's father?"She might as well have stuck a knitting needle in my chest. Darryl'sfather. He must have assumed that Darryl was dead, long dead.
And wasn't he? After the DHS has held you illegally for three months,would they ever let you go?
211But Zeb got out. Maybe Darryl would get out. Maybe me and the Xnetcould help get Darryl out.
"I haven't told him," I said.
Now Mom was crying. She didn't cry easily. It was a British thing. Itmade her little hiccoughing sobs much worse to hear.
"You will tell him," she managed. "You will.""I will.""But first we have to tell your father."Dad no longer had any regular time when he came home. Between hisconsulting clients — who had lots of work now that the DHS was shop-ping for data-mining startups on the peninsula — and the long commuteto Berkeley, he might get home any time between 6PM and midnight.
Tonight Mom called him and told him he was coming home right now.
He said something and she just repeated it: right now.
When he got there, we had arranged ourselves in the living room withthe note between us on the coffee table.
It was easier to tell, the second time. The secret was getting lighter. Ididn't embellish, I didn't hide anything. I came clean.
I'd heard of coming clean before but I'd never understood what itmeant until I did it. Holding in the secret had dirtied me, soiled my spir-it. It had made me afraid and ashamed. It had made me into all thethings that Ange said I was.
Dad sat stiff as a ramrod the whole time, his face carved of stone.
When I handed him the note, he read it twice and then set it downcarefully.
He shook his head and stood up and headed for the front door.
"Where are you going?" Mom asked, alarmed.
"I need a walk," was all he managed to gasp, his voice breaking.
We stared awkwardly at each other, Mom and me, and waited for himto come home. I tried to imagine what was going on in his head. He'dbeen such a different man after the bombings and I knew from Mom thatwhat had changed him were the days of thinking I was dead. He'd cometo believe that the terrorists had nearly killed his son and it had madehim crazy.
212Crazy enough to do whatever the DHS asked, to line up like a goodlittle sheep and let them control him, drive him.
Now he knew that it was the DHS that had imprisoned me, the DHSthat had taken San Francisco's children hostage in Gitmo-by-the-Bay. Itmade perfect sense, now that I thought of it. Of course it had been Treas-ure Island where I'd been kept. Where else was a ten-minute boat-ridefrom San Francisco?
When Dad came back, he looked angrier than he ever had in his life.
"You should have told me!" he roared.
Mom interposed herself between him and me. "You're blaming thewrong person," she said. "It wasn't Marcus who did the kidnapping andthe intimidation."He shook his head and stamped. "I'm not blaming Marcus. I know ex-actly who's to blame. Me. Me and the stupid DHS. Get your shoes on,grab your coats.""Where are we going?""To see Darryl's father. Then we're going to Barbara Stratford's place."I knew the name Barbara Stratford from somewhere, but I couldn't re-member where. I thought that maybe she was an old friend of my par-ents, but I couldn't exactly place her.
Meantime, I was headed for Darryl's father's place. I'd never really feltcomfortable around the old man, who'd been a Navy radio operator andran his household like a tight ship. He'd taught Darryl Morse code whenhe was a kid, which I'd always thought was cool. It was one of the ways Iknew that I could trust Zeb's letter. But for every cool thing like Morsecode, Darryl's father had some crazy military discipline that seemed tobe for its own sake, like insisting on hospital corners on the beds andshaving twice a day. It drove Darryl up the wall.
Darryl's mother hadn't liked it much either, and had taken off back toher family in Minnesota when Darryl was ten — Darryl spent his sum-mers and Christmases there.
I was sitting in the back of the car, and I could see the back of Dad'shead as he drove. The muscles in his neck were tense and kept jumpingaround as he ground his jaws.
213Mom kept her hand on his arm, but no one was around to comfort me.
If only I could call Ange. Or Jolu. Or Van. Maybe I would when the daywas done.
"He must have buried his son in his mind," Dad said, as we whippedup through the hairpin curves leading up Twin Peaks to the little cottagethat Darryl and his father shared. The fog was on Twin Peaks, the way itoften was at night in San Francisco, making the headlamps reflect backon is. Each time we swung around a corner, I saw the valleys of the citylaid out below us, bowls of twinkling lights that shifted in the mist.
"Is this the one?""Yes," I said. "This is it." I hadn't been to Darryl's in months, but I'dspent enough time here over the years to recognize it right off.
The three of us stood around the car for a long moment, waiting to seewho would go and ring the doorbell. To my surprise, it was me.
I rang it and we all waited in held-breath silence for a minute. I rang itagain. Darryl's father's car was in the driveway, and we'd seen a lightburning in the living room. I was about to ring a third time when thedoor opened.
"Marcus?" Darryl's father wasn't anything like I remembered him. Un-shaven, in a housecoat and bare feet, with long toenails and red eyes.
He'd gained weight, and a soft extra chin wobbled beneath the firm mil-itary jaw. His thin hair was wispy and disordered.
"Mr Glover," I said. My parents crowded into the door behind me.
"Hello, Ron," my mother said.
"Ron," my father said.
"You too? What's going on?""Can we come in?"His living room looked like one of those news-segments they showabout abandoned kids who spend a month locked in before they're res-cued by the neighbors: frozen meal boxes, empty beer cans and juicebottles, moldy cereal bowls and piles of newspapers. There was a reek ofcat piss and litter crunched underneath our feet. Even without the catpiss, the smell was incredible, like a bus-station toilet.
The couch was made up with a grimy sheet and a couple of greasy pil-lows and the cushions had a dented, much-slept-upon look.
214We all stood there for a long silent moment, embarrassment over-whelming every other emotion. Darryl's father looked like he wanted todie.
Slowly, he moved aside the sheets from the sofa and cleared thestacked, greasy food-trays off of a couple of the chairs, carrying them in-to the kitchen, and, from the sound of it, tossing them on the floor.
We sat gingerly in the places he'd cleared, and then he came back andsat down too.
"I'm sorry," he said vaguely. "I don't really have any coffee to offeryou. I'm having more groceries delivered tomorrow so I'm running low—""Ron," my father said. "Listen to us. We have something to tell you,and it's not going to be easy to hear."He sat like a statue as I talked. He glanced down at the note, read itwithout seeming to understand it, then read it again. He handed it backto me.
He was trembling.
"He's —""Darryl is alive," I said. "Darryl is alive and being held prisoner onTreasure Island."He stuffed his fist in his mouth and made a horrible groaning sound.
"We have a friend," my father said. "She writes for the Bay Guardian.
An investigative reporter."That's where I knew the name from. The free weekly Guardian oftenlost its reporters to bigger daily papers and the Internet, but BarbaraStratford had been there forever. I had a dim memory of having dinnerwith her when I was a kid.
"We're going there now," my mother said. "Will you come with us,Ron? Will you tell her Darryl's story?"He put his face in his hands and breathed deeply. Dad tried to put hishand on his shoulders, but Mr Glover shook it off violently.
"I need to clean myself up," he said. "Give me a minute."Mr Glover came back downstairs a changed man. He'd shaved andgelled his hair back, and had put on a crisp military dress uniform with arow of campaign ribbons on the breast. He stopped at the foot of thestairs and kind of gestured at it.
215"I don't have much clean stuff that's presentable at the moment. Andthis seemed appropriate. You know, if she wanted to take pictures."He and Dad rode up front and I got in the back, behind him. Up close,he smelled a little of beer, like it was coming through his pores.
It was midnight by the time we rolled into Barbara Stratford's drive-way. She lived out of town, down in Mountain View, and as we speddown the 101, none of us said a word. The high-tech buildings alongsidethe highway streamed past us.
This was a different Bay Area to the one I lived in, more like the sub-urban America I sometimes saw on TV. Lots of freeways and subdivi-sions of identical houses, towns where there weren't any homelesspeople pushing shopping carts down the sidewalk — there weren't evensidewalks!
Mom had phoned Barbara Stratford while we were waiting for MrGlover to come downstairs. The journalist had been sleeping, but Momhad been so wound up she forgot to be all British and embarrassed aboutwaking her up. Instead, she just told her, tensely, that she had somethingto talk about and that it had to be in person.
When we rolled up to Barbara Stratford's house, my first thought wasof the Brady Bunch place — a low ranch house with a brick baffle infront of it and a neat, perfectly square lawn. There was a kind of abstracttile pattern on the baffle, and an old-fashioned UHF TV antenna risingfrom behind it. We wandered around to the entrance and saw that therewere lights on inside already.
The writer opened the door before we had a chance to ring the bell.
She was about my parents' age, a tall thin woman with a hawk-like noseand shrewd eyes with a lot of laugh-lines. She was wearing a pair ofjeans that were hip enough to be seen at one of the boutiques on ValenciaStreet, and a loose Indian cotton blouse that hung down to her thighs.
She had small round glasses that flashed in her hallway light.
She smiled a tight little smile at us.
"You brought the whole clan, I see," she said.
Mom nodded. "You'll understand why in a minute," she said. MrGlover stepped from behind Dad.
"And you called in the Navy?""All in good time."216We were introduced one at a time to her. She had a firm handshakeand long fingers.
Her place was furnished in Japanese minimalist style, just a few pre-cisely proportioned, low pieces of furniture, large clay pots of bamboothat brushed the ceiling, and what looked like a large, rusted piece of adiesel engine perched on top of a polished marble plinth. I decided Iliked it. The floors were old wood, sanded and stained, but not filled, soyou could see cracks and pits underneath the varnish. I really liked that,especially as I walked over it in my stocking feet.
"I have coffee on," she said. "Who wants some?"We all put up our hands. I glared defiantly at my parents.
"Right," she said.
She disappeared into another room and came back a moment laterbearing a rough bamboo tray with a half-gallon thermos jug and six cupsof precise design but with rough, sloppy decorations. I liked those too.
"Now," she said, once she'd poured and served. "It's very good to seeyou all again. Marcus, I think the last time I saw you, you were maybeseven years old. As I recall, you were very excited about your new videogames, which you showed me."I didn't remember it at all, but that sounded like what I'd been into atseven. I guessed it was my Sega Dreamcast.
She produced a tape-recorder and a yellow pad and a pen, and twirledthe pen. "I'm here to listen to whatever you tell me, and I can promiseyou that I'll take it all in confidence. But I can't promise that I'll do any-thing with it, or that it's going to get published." The way she said itmade me realize that my Mom had called in a pretty big favor gettingthis lady out of bed, friend or no friend. It must be kind of a pain in theass to be a big-shot investigative reporter. There were probably a millionpeople who would have liked her to take up her cause.
Mom nodded at me. Even though I'd told the story three times thatnight, I found myself tongue-tied. This was different from telling myparents. Different from telling Darryl's father. This — this would start anew move in the game.
I started slowly, and watched Barbara take notes. I drank a whole cupof coffee just explaining what ARGing was and how I got out of school toplay. Mom and Dad and Mr Glover all listened intently to this part. Ipoured myself another cup and drank it on the way to explaining how217we were taken in. By the time I'd run through the whole story, I'ddrained the pot and I needed a piss like a race-horse.
Her bathroom was just as stark as the living-room, with a brown, or-ganic soap that smelled like clean mud. I came back in and found theadults quietly watching me.
Mr Glover told his story next. He didn't have anything to say aboutwhat had happened, but he explained that he was a veteran and that hisson was a good kid. He talked about what it felt like to believe that hisson had died, about how his ex-wife had had a collapse when she foundout and ended up in a hospital. He cried a little, unashamed, the tearsstreaming down his lined face and darkening the collar of his dress-uniform.
When it was all done, Barbara went into a different room and cameback with a bottle of Irish whiskey. "It's a Bushmills 15 year old rum-caskaged blend," she said, setting down four small cups. None for me. "Ithasn't been sold in ten years. I think this is probably an appropriate timeto break it out."She poured them each a small glass of the liquor, then raised hers andsipped at it, draining half the glass. The rest of the adults followed suit.
They drank again, and finished the glasses. She poured them new shots.
"All right," she said. "Here's what I can tell you right now. I believeyou. Not just because I know you, Lillian. The story sounds right, and itties in with other rumors I've heard. But I'm not going to be able to justtake your word for it. I'm going to have to investigate every aspect ofthis, and every element of your lives and stories. I need to know if there'sanything you're not telling me, anything that could be used to discredityou after this comes to light. I need everything. It could take weeks be-fore I'm ready to publish.
"You also need to think about your safety and this Darryl's safety. Ifhe's really an 'un-person' then bringing pressure to bear on the DHScould cause them to move him somewhere much further away. ThinkSyria. They could also do something much worse." She let that hang inthe air. I knew she meant that they might kill him.
"I'm going to take this letter and scan it now. I want pictures of the twoof you, now and later — we can send out a photographer, but I want todocument this as thoroughly as I can tonight, too."I went with her into her office to do the scan. I'd expected a stylish,low-powered computer that fit in with her decor, but instead, her spare-218bedroom/office was crammed with top-of-the-line PCs, big flat-panelmonitors, and a scanner big enough to lay a whole sheet of newsprint on.
She was fast with it all, too. I noted with some approval that she wasrunning ParanoidLinux. This lady took her job seriously.
The computers' fans set up an effective white-noise shield, but even so,I closed the door and moved in close to her.
"Um, Barbara?""Yes?""About what you said, about what might be used to discredit me?""Yes?""What I tell you, you can't be forced to tell anyone else, right?""In theory. Let me put it this way. I've gone to jail twice rather than ratout a source.""OK, OK. Good. Wow. Jail. Wow. OK." I took a deep breath. "You'veheard of Xnet? Of M1k3y?""Yes?""I'm M1k3y.""Oh," she said. She worked the scanner and flipped the note over toget the reverse. She was scanning at some unbelievable resolution, 10,000dots per inch or higher, and on-screen it was like the output of anelectron-tunneling microscope.
"Well, that does put a different complexion on this.""Yeah," I said. "I guess it does.""Your parents don't know.""Nope. And I don't know if I want them to.""That's something you're going to have to work out. I need to thinkabout this. Can you come by my office? I'd like to talk to you about whatthis means, exactly.""Do you have an Xbox Universal? I could bring over an installer.""Yes, I'm sure that can be arranged. When you come by, tell the recep-tionist that you're Mr Brown, to see me. They know what that means. Nonote will be taken of you coming, and all the security camera footage forthe day will be automatically scrubbed and the cameras deactivated untilyou leave.""Wow," I said. "You think like I do."219She smiled and socked me in the shoulder. "Kiddo, I've been at thisgame for a hell of a long time. So far, I've managed to spend more timefree than behind bars. Paranoia is my friend."I was like a zombie the next day in school. I'd totaled about threehours of sleep, and even three cups of the Turk's caffeine mud failed tojump-start my brain. The problem with caffeine is that it's too easy to getacclimated to it, so you have to take higher and higher doses just to getabove normal.
I'd spent the night thinking over what I had to do. It was like runninthough a maze of twisty little passages, all alike, every one leading to thesame dead end. When I went to Barbara, it would be over for me. Thatwas the outcome, no matter how I thought about it.
By the time the school day was over, all I wanted was to go home andcrawl into bed. But I had an appointment at the Bay Guardian, down onthe waterfront. I kept my eyes on my feet as I wobbled out the gate, andas I turned into 24th Street, another pair of feet fell into step with me. Irecognized the shoes and stopped.
"Ange?"She looked like I felt. Sleep-deprived and raccoon-eyed, with sadbrackets in the corners of her mouth.
"Hi there," she said. "Surprise. I gave myself French Leave from school.
I couldn't concentrate anyway.""Um," I said.
"Shut up and give me a hug, you idiot."I did. It felt good. Better than good. It felt like I'd amputated part ofmyself and it had been reattached.
"I love you, Marcus Yallow.""I love you, Angela Carvelli.""OK," she said breaking it off. "I liked your post about why you're notjamming. I can respect it. What have you done about finding a way tojam them without getting caught?""I'm on my way to meet an investigative journalist who's going to pub-lish a story about how I got sent to jail, how I started Xnet, and howDarryl is being illegally held by the DHS at a secret prison on TreasureIsland."220"Oh." She looked around for a moment. "Couldn't you think of any-thing, you know, ambitious?""Want to come?""I am coming, yes. And I would like you to explain this in detail if youdon't mind."After all the re-tellings, this one, told as we walked to Potrero Avenueand down to 15th Street, was the easiest. She held my hand andsqueezed it often.
We took the stairs up to the Bay Guardian's offices two at a time. Myheart was pounding. I got to the reception desk and told the bored girlbehind it, "I'm here to see Barbara Stratford. My name is Mr Green.""I think you mean Mr Brown?""Yeah," I said, and blushed. "Mr Brown."She did something at her computer, then said, "Have a seat. Barbarawill be out in a minute. Can I get you anything?""Coffee," we both said in unison. Another reason to love Ange: wewere addicted to the same drug.
The receptionist — a pretty latina woman only a few years older thanus, dressed in Gap styles so old they were actually kind of hipster-retro— nodded and stepped out and came back with a couple of cups bearingthe newspaper's masthead.
We sipped in silence, watching visitors and reporters come and go.
Finally, Barbara came to get us. She was wearing practically the samething as the night before. It suited her. She quirked an eyebrow at mewhen she saw that I'd brought a date.
"Hello," I said. "Um, this is —""Ms Brown," Ange said, extending a hand. Oh, yeah, right, our identit-ies were supposed to be a secret. "I work with Mr Green." She elbowedme lightly.
"Let's go then," Barbara said, and led us back to a board-room withlong glass walls with their blinds drawn shut. She set down a tray ofWhole Foods organic Oreo clones, a digital recorder, and another yellowpad.
"Do you want to record this too?" she asked.
Hadn't actually thought of that. I could see why it would be useful if Iwanted to dispute what Barbara printed, though. Still, if I couldn't trusther to do right by me, I was doomed anyway.
221"No, that's OK," I said.
"Right, let's go. Young lady, my name is Barbara Stratford and I'm aninvestigative reporter. I gather you know why I'm here, and I'm curiousto know why you're here.""I work with Marcus on the Xnet," she said. "Do you need to know myname?""Not right now, I don't," Barbara said. "You can be anonymous if you'dlike. Marcus, I asked you to tell me this story because I need to knowhow it plays with the story you told me about your friend Darryl and thenote you showed me. I can see how it would be a good adjunct; I couldpitch this as the origin of the Xnet. 'They made an enemy they'll neverforget,' that sort of thing. But to be honest, I'd rather not have to tell thatstory if I don't have to.
"I'd rather have a nice clean tale about the secret prison on our door-step, without having to argue about whether the prisoners there are thesort of people likely to walk out the doors and establish an undergroundmovement bent on destabilizing the federal government. I'm sure youcan understand that."I did. If the Xnet was part of the story, some people would say, see,they need to put guys like that in jail or they'll start a riot.
"This is your show," I said. "I think you need to tell the world aboutDarryl. When you do that, it's going to tell the DHS that I've gone publicand they're going to go after me. Maybe they'll figure out then that I'minvolved with the Xnet. Maybe they'll connect me to M1k3y. I guesswhat I'm saying is, once you publish about Darryl, it's all over for me nomatter what. I've made my peace with that.""As good be hanged for a sheep as a lamb," she said. "Right. Well,that's settled. I want the two of you to tell me everything you can aboutthe founding and operation of the Xnet, and then I want a demonstra-tion. What do you use it for? Who else uses it? How did it spread? Whowrote the software? Everything.""This'll take a while," Ange said.
"I've got a while," Barbara said. She drank some coffee and ate a fakeOreo. "This could be the most important story of the War on Terror. Thiscould be the story that topples the government. When you have a storylike this, you take it very carefully."
Chapter 17
This chapter is dedicated to Waterstone's, the national UK booksellingchain. Waterstone's is a chain of stores, but each one has the feel of agreat independent store, with tons of personality, great stock (especiallyaudiobooks!), and knowledgeable staff.
WaterstonesSo we told her. I found it really fun, actually. Teaching people how touse technology is always exciting. It's so cool to watch people figure outhow the technology around them can be used to make their lives better.
Ange was great too — we made an excellent team. We'd trade off ex-plaining how it all worked. Barbara was pretty good at this stuff to beginwith, of course.
It turned out that she'd covered the crypto wars, the period in the earlynineties when civil liberties groups like the Electronic Frontier Founda-tion fought for the right of Americans to use strong crypto. I dimly knewabout that period, but Barabara explained it in a way that made me getgoose-pimples.
It's unbelievable today, but there was a time when the governmentclassed crypto as a munition and made it illegal for anyone to export oruse it on national security grounds. Get that? We used to have illegalmath in this country.
The National Security Agency were the real movers behind the ban.
They had a crypto standard that they said was strong enough forbankers and their customers to use, but not so strong that the mafiawould be able to keep its books secret from them. The standard, DES-56,was said to be practically unbreakable. Then one of EFF's millionaire co-founders built a $250,000 DES-56 cracker that could break the cipher intwo hours.
Still the NSA argued that it should be able to keep American citizensfrom possessing secrets it couldn't pry into. Then EFF dealt its death-223blow. In 1995, they represented a Berkeley mathematics grad studentcalled Dan Bernstein in court. Bernstein had written a crypto tutorial thatcontained computer code that could be used to make a cipher strongerthan DES-56. Millions of times stronger. As far as the NSA was con-cerned, that made his article into a weapon, and therefore unpublishable.
Well, it may be hard to get a judge to understand crypto and what itmeans, but it turned out that the average Appeals Court judge isn't realenthusiastic about telling grad students what kind of articles they're al-lowed to write. The crypto wars ended with a victory for the good guyswhen the 9th Circuit Appellate Division Court ruled that code was aform of expression protected under the First Amendment — "Congressshall make no law abridging the freedom of speech." If you've everbought something on the Internet, or sent a secret message, or checkedyour bank-balance, you used crypto that EFF legalized. Good thing, too:
the NSA just isn't that smart. Anything they know how to crack, you canbe sure that terrorists and mobsters can get around too.
Barbara had been one of the reporters who'd made her reputationfrom covering the issue. She'd cut her teeth covering the tail end of thecivil rights movement in San Francisco, and she recognized the similaritybetween the fight for the Constitution in the real world and the fight incyberspace.
So she got it. I don't think I could have explained this stuff to my par-ents, but with Barbara it was easy. She asked smart questions about ourcryptographic protocols and security procedures, sometimes asking stuffI didn't know the answer to — sometimes pointing out potential breaksin our procedure.
We plugged in the Xbox and got it online. There were four open WiFinodes visible from the board room and I told it to change between themat random intervals. She got this too — once you were actually pluggedinto the Xnet, it was just like being on the Internet, only some stuff was alittle slower, and it was all anonymous and unsniffable.
"So now what?" I said as we wound down. I'd talked myself dry and Ihad a terrible acid feeling from the coffee. Besides, Ange kept squeezingmy hand under the table in a way that made me want to break away andfind somewhere private to finish making up for our first fight.
"Now I do journalism. You go away and I research all the thingsyou've told me and try to confirm them to the extent that I can. I'll letyou see what I'm going to publish and I'll let you know when it's goingto go live. I'd prefer that you not talk about this with anyone else now,224because I want the scoop and because I want to make sure that I get thestory before it goes all muddy from press speculation and DHS spin.
"I will have to call the DHS for comment before I go to press, but I'll dothat in a way that protects you to whatever extent possible. I'll also besure to let you know before that happens.
"One thing I need to be clear on: this isn't your story anymore. It'smine. You were very generous to give it to me and I'll try to repay thegift, but you don't get the right to edit anything out, to change it, or tostop me. This is now in motion and it won't stop. Do you understandthat?"I hadn't thought about it in those terms but once she said it, it was ob-vious. It meant that I had launched and I wouldn't be able to recall therocket. It was going to fall where it was aimed, or it would go off course,but it was in the air and couldn't be changed now. Sometime in the nearfuture, I would stop being Marcus — I would be a public figure. I'd bethe guy who blew the whistle on the DHS.
I'd be a dead man walking.
I guess Ange was thinking along the same lines, because she'd gone acolor between white and green.
"Let's get out of here," she said.
Ange's mom and sister were out again, which made it easy to decidewhere we were going for the evening. It was past supper time, but myparents had known that I was meeting with Barbara and wouldn't giveme any grief if I came home late.
When we got to Ange's, I had no urge to plug in my Xbox. I had hadall the Xnet I could handle for one day. All I could think about wasAnge, Ange, Ange. Living without Ange. Knowing Ange was angry withme. Ange never going to talk to me again. Ange never going to kiss meagain.
She'd been thinking the same. I could see it in her eyes as we shut thedoor to her bedroom and looked at each other. I was hungry for her, likeyou'd hunger for dinner after not eating for days. Like you'd thirst for aglass of water after playing soccer for three hours straight.
Like none of that. It was more. It was something I'd never felt before. Iwanted to eat her whole, devour her.
225Up until now, she'd been the sexual one in our relationship. I'd let herset and control the pace. It was amazingly erotic to have her grab me andtake off my shirt, drag my face to hers.
But tonight I couldn't hold back. I wouldn't hold back.
The door clicked shut and I reached for the hem of her t-shirt andyanked, barely giving her time to lift her arms as I pulled it over herhead. I tore my own shirt over my head, listening to the cotton crackle asthe stitches came loose.
Her eyes were shining, her mouth open, her breathing fast and shal-low. Mine was too, my breath and my heart and my blood all roaring inmy ears.
I took off the rest of our clothes with equal zest, throwing them intothe piles of dirty and clean laundry on the floor. There were books andpapers all over the bed and I swept them aside. We landed on the un-made bedclothes a second later, arms around one another, squeezing likewe would pull ourselves right through one another. She moaned into mymouth and I made the sound back, and I felt her voice buzz in my vocalchords, a feeling more intimate than anything I'd ever felt before.
She broke away and reached for the bedstand. She yanked open thedrawer and threw a white pharmacy bag on the bed before me. I lookedinside. Condoms. Trojans. One dozen spermicidal. Still sealed. I smiledat her and she smiled back and I opened the box.
I'd thought about what it would be like for years. A hundred times aday I'd imagined it. Some days, I'd thought of practically nothing else.
It was nothing like I expected. Parts of it were better. Parts of it werelots worse. While it was going on, it felt like an eternity. Afterwards, itseemed to be over in the blink of an eye.
Afterwards, I felt the same. But I also felt different. Something hadchanged between us.
It was weird. We were both shy as we put our clothes on and putteredaround the room, looking away, not meeting each other's eyes. Iwrapped the condom in a kleenex from a box beside the bed and took itinto the bathroom and wound it with toilet paper and stuck it deep intothe trash-can.
When I came back in, Ange was sitting up in bed and playing with herXbox. I sat down carefully beside her and took her hand. She turned toface me and smiled. We were both worn out, trembly.
226"Thanks," I said.
She didn't say anything. She turned her face to me. She was grinninghugely, but fat tears were rolling down her cheeks.
I hugged her and she grabbed tightly onto me. "You're a good man,Marcus Yallow," she whispered. "Thank you."I didn't know what to say, but I squeezed her back. Finally, we parted.
She wasn't crying any more, but she was still smiling.
She pointed at my Xbox, on the floor beside the bed. I took the hint. Ipicked it up and plugged it in and logged in.
Same old same old. Lots of email. The new posts on the blogs I readstreamed in. Spam. God did I get a lot of spam. My Swedish mailbox wasrepeatedly "joe-jobbed" — used as the return address for spams sent tohundreds of millions of Internet accounts, so that all the bounces andangry messages came back to me. I didn't know who was behind it.
Maybe the DHS trying to overwhelm my mailbox. Maybe it was justpeople pranking. The Pirate Party had pretty good filters, though, andthey gave anyone who wanted it 500 gigabytes of email storage, so Iwasn't likely to be drowned any time soon.
I filtered it all out, hammering on the delete key. I had a separate mail-box for stuff that came in encrypted to my public key, since that waslikely to be Xnet-related and possibly sensitive. Spammers hadn't figuredout that using public keys would make their junk mail more plausibleyet, so for now this worked well.
There were a couple dozen encrypted messages from people in theweb of trust. I skimmed them — links to videos and pics of new abusesfrom the DHS, horror stories about near-escapes, rants about stuff I'dblogged. The usual.
Then I came to one that was only encrypted to my public key. Thatmeant that no one else could read it, but I had no idea who had writtenit. It said it came from Masha, which could either be a handle or a name— I couldn't tell which.
>
M1k3y>
You don't know me, but I know you.
>
227I was arrested the day that the bridge blew. They questioned me. Theydecided I was innocent. They offered me a job: help them hunt down theterrorists who'd killed my neighbors.
>
It sounded like a good deal at the time. Little did I realize that my ac-tual job would turn out to be spying on kids who resented their city be-ing turned into a police state.
>
I infiltrated Xnet on the day it launched. I am in your web of trust. If Iwanted to spill my identity, I could send you email from an addressyou'd trust. Three addresses, actually. I'm totally inside your network asonly another 17-year-old can be. Some of the email you've gotten hasbeen carefully chosen misinformation from me and my handlers.
>
They don't know who you are, but they're coming close. They continueto turn people, to compromise them. They mine the social network sitesand use threats to turn kids into informants. There are hundreds ofpeople working for the DHS on Xnet right now. I have their names,handles and keys. Private and public.
>
Within days of the Xnet launch, we went to work on exploiting Para-noidLinux. The exploits so far have been small and insubstantial, but abreak is inevitable. Once we have a zero-day break, you're dead.
>
I think it's safe to say that if my handlers knew that I was typing this,my ass would be stuck in Gitmo-by-the-Bay until I was an old woman.
>
Even if they don't break ParanoidLinux, there are poisoned Para-noidXbox distros floating around. They don't match the checksums, buthow many people look at the checksums? Besides me and you? Plenty ofkids are already dead, though they don't know it.
>
All that remains is for my handlers to figure out the best time to bustyou to make the biggest impact in the media. That time will be sooner,not later. Believe.
>
228You're probably wondering why I'm telling you this.
>
I am too.
>
Here's where I come from. I signed up to fight terrorists. Instead, I'mspying on Americans who believe things that the DHS doesn't like. Notpeople who plan on blowing up bridges, but protestors. I can't do itanymore.
>
But neither can you, whether or not you know it. Like I say, it's only amatter of time until you're in chains on Treasure Island. That's not if,that's when.
>
So I'm through here. Down in Los Angeles, there are some people.
They say they can keep me safe if I want to get out.
>
I want to get out.
>
I will take you with me, if you want to come. Better to be a fighter thana martyr. If you come with me, we can figure out how to win together.
I'm as smart as you. Believe.
>
What do you say?
>
Here's my public key.
>
MashaWhen in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.
Ever hear that rhyme? It's not good advice, but at least it's easy to fol-low. I leapt off the bed and paced back and forth. My heart thudded andmy blood sang in a cruel parody of the way I'd felt when we got home.
This wasn't sexual excitement, it was raw terror.
"What?" Ange said. "What?"229I pointed at the screen on my side of the bed. She rolled over andgrabbed my keyboard and scribed on the touchpad with her fingertip.
She read in silence.
I paced.
"This has to be lies," she said. "The DHS is playing games with yourhead."I looked at her. She was biting her lip. She didn't look like she believedit.
"You think?""Sure. They can't beat you, so they're coming after you using Xnet.""Yeah."I sat back down on the bed. I was breathing fast again.
"Chill out," she said. "It's just head-games. Here."She never took my keyboard from me before, but now there was a newintimacy between us. She hit reply and typed,>
Nice try.
She was writing as M1k3y now, too. We were together in a way thatwas different from before.
"Go ahead and sign it. We'll see what she says."I didn't know if that was the best idea, but I didn't have any betterones. I signed it and encrypted it with my private key and the public keyMasha had provided.
The reply was instant.
>
I thought you'd say something like that.
>
Here's a hack you haven't thought of. I can anonymously tunnel videoover DNS. Here are some links to clips you might want to look at beforeyou decide I'm full of it. These people are all recording each other, all thetime, as insurance against a back-stab. It's pretty easy to snoop off themas they snoop on each other.
>
Masha230Attached was source-code for a little program that appeared to do ex-actly what Masha claimed: pull video over the Domain Name Serviceprotocol.
Let me back up a moment here and explain something. At the end ofthe day, every Internet protocol is just a sequence of text sent back andforth in a proscribed order. It's kind of like getting a truck and putting acar in it, then putting a motorcycle in the car's trunk, then attaching a bi-cycle to the back of the motorcycle, then hanging a pair of Rollerbladeson the back of the bike. Except that then, if you want, you can attach thetruck to the Rollerblades.
For example, take Simple Mail Transport Protocol, or SMTP, which isused for sending email.
Here's a sample conversation between me and my mail server, sendinga message to myself:
>
HELO littlebrother.com.se250 mail.pirateparty.org.se Hello mail.pirateparty.org.se, pleased tomeet you>
MAIL FROM:m1k3y@littlebrother.com.se250 2.1.0 m1k3y@littlebrother.com.se… Sender ok>
RCPT TO:m1k3y@littlebrother.com.se250 2.1.5 m1k3y@littlebrother.com.se… Recipient ok>
DATA354 Enter mail, end with "." on a line by itself>
When in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout>
.
250 2.0.0 k5SMW0xQ006174 Message accepted for deliveryQUIT221 2.0.0 mail.pirateparty.org.se closing connectionConnection closed by foreign host.
231This conversation's grammar was defined in 1982 by Jon Postel, one ofthe Internet's heroic forefathers, who used to literally run the most im-portant servers on the net under his desk at the University of SouthernCalifornia, back in the paleolithic era.
Now, imagine that you hooked up a mail-server to an IM session. Youcould send an IM to the server that said "HELO littlebrother.com.se" andit would reply with "250 mail.pirateparty.org.se Hellomail.pirateparty.org.se, pleased to meet you." In other words, you couldhave the same conversation over IM as you do over SMTP. With theright tweaks, the whole mail-server business could take place inside of achat. Or a web-session. Or anything else.
This is called "tunneling." You put the SMTP inside a chat "tunnel."You could then put the chat back into an SMTP tunnel if you wanted tobe really weird, tunneling the tunnel in another tunnel.
In fact, every Internet protocol is susceptible to this process. It's cool,because it means that if you're on a network with only Web access, youcan tunnel your mail over it. You can tunnel your favorite P2P over it.
You can even tunnel Xnet — which itself is a tunnel for dozens of proto-cols — over it.
Domain Name Service is an interesting and ancient Internet protocol,dating back to 1983. It's the way that your computer converts acomputer's name — like pirateparty.org.se — to the IP number that com-puters actually use to talk to each other over the net, like 204.11.50.136. Itgenerally works like magic, even though it's got millions of moving parts— every ISP runs a DNS server, as do most governments and lots ofprivate operators. These DNS boxes all talk to each other all the time,making and filling requests to each other so no matter how obscure thename is you feed to your computer, it will be able to turn it into anumber.
Before DNS, there was the HOSTS file. Believe it or not, this was asingle document that listed the name and address of every single computerconnected to the Internet. Every computer had a copy of it. This file waseventually too big to move around, so DNS was invented, and ran on aserver that used to live under Jon Postel's desk. If the cleaners knockedout the plug, the entire Internet lost its ability to find itself. Seriously.
The thing about DNS today is that it's everywhere. Every network hasa DNS server living on it, and all of those servers are configured to talkto each other and to random people all over the Internet.
232What Masha had done was figure out a way to tunnel a video-stream-ing system over DNS. She was breaking up the video into billions ofpieces and hiding each of them in a normal message to a DNS server. Byrunning her code, I was able to pull the video from all those DNS serv-ers, all over the Internet, at incredible speed. It must have looked bizarreon the network histograms, like I was looking up the address of everycomputer in the world.
But it had two advantages I appreciated at once: I was able to get thevideo with blinding speed — as soon as I clicked the first link, I startedto receive full-screen pictures, without any jitter or stuttering — and Ihad no idea where it was hosted. It was totally anonymous.
At first I didn't even clock the content of the video. I was totallyfloored by the cleverness of this hack. Streaming video from DNS? Thatwas so smart and weird, it was practically perverted.
Gradually, what I was seeing began to sink in.
It was a board-room table in a small room with a mirror down onewall. I knew that room. I'd sat in that room, while Severe-Haircut wo-man had made me speak my password aloud. There were five comfort-able chairs around the table, each with a comfortable person, all in DHSuniform. I recognized Major General Graeme Sutherland, the DHS BayArea commander, along with Severe Haircut. The others were new tome. They all watched a video screen at the end of the table, on whichthere was an infinitely more familiar face.
Kurt Rooney was known nationally as the President's chief strategist,the man who returned the party for its third term, and who was steam-ing towards a fourth. They called him "Ruthless" and I'd seen a news re-port once about how tight a rein he kept his staffers on, calling them,IMing them, watching their every motion, controlling every step. He wasold, with a lined face and pale gray eyes and a flat nose with broad,flared nostrils and thin lips, a man who looked like he was smellingsomething bad all the time.
He was the man on the screen. He was talking, and everyone else wasfocused on his screen, everyone taking notes as fast as they could type,trying to look smart.
"— say that they're angry with authority, but we need to show thecountry that it's terrorists, not the government, that they need to blame.
Do you understand me? The nation does not love that city. As far asthey're concerned, it is a Sodom and Gomorrah of fags and atheists whodeserve to rot in hell. The only reason the country cares what they think233in San Francisco is that they had the good fortune to have been blown tohell by some Islamic terrorists.
"These Xnet children are getting to the point where they might start tobe useful to us. The more radical they get, the more the rest of the nationunderstands that there are threats everywhere."His audience finished typing.
"We can control that, I think," Severe Haircut Lady said. "Our peoplein the Xnet have built up a lot of influence. The Manchurian Bloggers arerunning as many as fifty blogs each, flooding the chat channels, linkingto each other, mostly just taking the party line set by this M1k3y. Butthey've already shown that they can provoke radical action, even whenM1k3y is putting the brakes on."Major General Sutherland nodded. "We have been planning to leavethem underground until about a month before the midterms." I guessedthat meant the mid-term elections, not my exams. "That's per the originalplan. But it sounds like —""We've got another plan for the midterms," Rooney said. "Need-to-know, of course, but you should all probably not plan on traveling forthe month before. Cut the Xnet loose now, as soon as you can. So long asthey're moderates, they're a liability. Keep them radical."The video cut off.
Ange and I sat on the edge of the bed, looking at the screen. Angereached out and started the video again. We watched it. It was worse thesecond time.
I tossed the keyboard aside and got up.
"I am so sick of being scared," I said. "Let's take this to Barbara andhave her publish it all. Put it all on the net. Let them take me away. Atleast I'll know what's going to happen then. At least then I'll have a littlecertainty in my life."Ange grabbed me and hugged me, soothed me. "I know baby, I know.
It's all terrible. But you're focusing on the bad stuff and ignoring thegood stuff. You've created a movement. You've outflanked the jerks inthe White House, the crooks in DHS uniforms. You've put yourself in aposition where you could be responsible for blowing the lid off of the en-tire rotten DHS thing.
"Sure they're out to get you. Course they are. Have you ever doubted itfor a moment? I always figured they were. But Marcus, they don't knowwho you are. Think about that. All those people, money, guns and spies,234and you, a seventeen year old high school kid — you're still beatingthem. They don't know about Barbara. They don't know about Zeb.
You've jammed them in the streets of San Francisco and humiliated thembefore the world. So stop moping, all right? You're winning.""They're coming for me, though. You see that. They're going to put mein jail forever. Not even jail. I'll just disappear, like Darryl. Maybe worse.
Maybe Syria. Why leave me in San Francisco? I'm a liability as long asI'm in the USA."She sat down on the bed with me.
"Yeah," she said. "That.""That.""Well, you know what you have to do, right?""What?" She looked pointedly at my keyboard. I could see the tearsrolling down her cheeks. "No! You're out of your mind. You think I'mgoing to run off with some nut off the Internet? Some spy?""You got a better idea?"I kicked a pile of her laundry into the air. "Whatever. Fine. I'll talk toher some more.""You talk to her," Ange said. "You tell her you and your girlfriend aregetting out.""What?""Shut up, dickhead. You think you're in danger? I'm in just as muchdanger, Marcus. It's called guilt by association. When you go, I go." Shehad her jaw thrust out at a mutinous angle. "You and I — we're togethernow. You have to understand that."We sat down on the bed together.
"Unless you don't want me," she said, finally, in a small voice.
"You're kidding me, right?""Do I look like I'm kidding?""There's no way I would voluntarily go without you, Ange. I couldnever have asked you to come, but I'm ecstatic that you offered."She smiled and tossed me my keyboard.
"Email this Masha creature. Let's see what this chick can do for us."I emailed her, encrypting the message, waiting for a reply. Angenuzzled me a little and I kissed her and we necked. Something about the235danger and the pact to go together — it made me forget the awkward-ness of having sex, made me freaking horny as hell.
We were half naked again when Masha's email arrived.
>
Two of you? Jesus, like it won't be hard enough already.
>
I don't get to leave except to do field intelligence after a big Xnet hit.
You get me? The handlers watch my every move, but I go off the leashwhen something big happens with Xnetters. I get sent into the field then.
>
You do something big. I get sent to it. I get us both out. All three of us,if you insist.
>
Make it fast, though. I can't send you a lot of email, understand? Theywatch me. They're closing in on you. You don't have a lot of time.
Weeks? Maybe just days.
>
I need you to get me out. That's why I'm doing this, in case you'rewondering. I can't escape on my own. I need a big Xnet distraction.
That's your department. Don't fail me, M1k3y, or we're both dead. Yourgirlie too.
>
MashaMy phone rang, making us both jump. It was my mom wanting toknow when I was coming home. I told her I was on my way. She didn'tmention Barbara. We'd agreed that we wouldn't talk about any of thisstuff on the phone. That was my dad's idea. He could be as paranoid asme.
"I have to go," I said.
"Our parents will be —""I know," I said. "I saw what happened to my parents when theythought I was dead. Knowing that I'm a fugitive isn't going to be muchbetter. But they'd rather I be a fugitive than a prisoner. That's what Ithink. Anyway, once we disappear, Barbara can publish without worry-ing about getting us into trouble."236We kissed at the door of her room. Not one of the hot, sloppy numberswe usually did when parting ways. A sweet kiss this time. A slow kiss. Agoodbye kind of kiss.
BART rides are introspective. When the train rocks back and forth andyou try not to make eye contact with the other riders and you try not toread the ads for plastic surgery, bail bondsmen and AIDS testing, whenyou try to ignore the graffiti and not look too closely at the stuff in thecarpeting. That's when your mind starts to really churn and churn.
You rock back and forth and your mind goes over all the things you'veoverlooked, plays back all the movies of your life where you're no hero,where you're a chump or a sucker.
Your brain comes up with theories like this one:
If the DHS wanted to catch M1k3y, what better way than to lure him into theopen, panic him into leading some kind of big, public Xnet event? Wouldn't thatbe worth the chance of a compromising video leaking?
Your brain comes up with stuff like that even when the train ride onlylasts two or three stops. When you get off, and you start moving, theblood gets running and sometimes your brain helps you out again.
Sometimes your brain gives you solutions in addition to problems.
Chapter 18
This chapter is dedicated to Vancouver's multilingual Sophia Books, adiverse and exciting store filled with the best of the strange and excitingpop culture worlds of many lands. Sophia was around the corner frommy hotel when I went to Van to give a talk at Simon Fraser University,and the Sophia folks emailed me in advance to ask me to drop in andsign their stock while I was in the neighborhood. When I got there, I dis-covered a treasure-trove of never-before-seen works in a dizzying arrayof languages, from graphic novels to thick academic treatises, presidedover by good-natured (even slapstick) staff who so palpably enjoyed theirjobs that it spread to every customer who stepped through the door.
Sophia Books: 450 West Hastings St., Vancouver, BC Canada V6B1L1+1 604 684 0484There was a time when my favorite thing in the world was putting ona cape and hanging out in hotels, pretending to be an invisible vampirewhom everyone stared at.
It's complicated, and not nearly as weird as it sounds. The Live ActionRole Playing scene combines the best aspects of D&D with drama clubwith going to sci-fi cons.
I understand that this might not make it sound as appealing to you asit was to me when I was 14.
The best games were the ones at the Scout Camps out of town: a hun-dred teenagers, boys and girls, fighting the Friday night traffic, swap-ping stories, playing handheld games, showing off for hours. Then de-barking to stand in the grass before a group of older men and women inbad-ass, home-made armor, dented and scarred, like armor must havebeen in the old days, not like it's portrayed in the movies, but like asoldier's uniform after a month in the bush.
These people were nominally paid to run the games, but you didn't getthe job unless you were the kind of person who'd do it for free. They'd238have already divided us into teams based on the questionnaires we'dfilled in beforehand, and we'd get our team assignments then, like beingcalled up for baseball sides.
Then you'd get your briefing packages. These were like the briefingsthe spies get in the movies: here's your identity, here's your mission,here's the secrets you know about the group.
From there, it was time for dinner: roaring fires, meat popping onspits, tofu sizzling on skillets (it's northern California, a vegetarian op-tion is not optional), and a style of eating and drinking that can only bedescribed as quaffing.
Already, the keen kids would be getting into character. My first game,I was a wizard. I had a bag of beanbags that represented spells — when Ithrew one, I would shout the name of the spell I was casting — fireball,magic missile, cone of light — and the player or "monster" I threw it atwould keel over if I connected. Or not — sometimes we had to call in aref to mediate, but for the most part, we were all pretty good about play-ing fair. No one liked a dice lawyer.
By bedtime, we were all in character. At 14, I wasn't super-sure what awizard was supposed to sound like, but I could take my cues from themovies and novels. I spoke in slow, measured tones, keeping my facecomposed in a suitably mystical expression, and thinking mysticalthoughts.
The mission was complicated, retrieving a sacred relic that had beenstolen by an ogre who was bent on subjugating the people of the land tohis will. It didn't really matter a whole lot. What mattered was that I hada private mission, to capture a certain kind of imp to serve as my famili-ar, and that I had a secret nemesis, another player on the team who hadtaken part in a raid that killed my family when I was a boy, a player whodidn't know that I'd come back, bent on revenge. Somewhere, of course,there was another player with a similar grudge against me, so that evenas I was enjoying the camaraderie of the team, I'd always have to keep aneye open for a knife in the back, poison in the food.
For the next two days, we played it out. There were parts of the week-end that were like hide-and-seek, some that were like wilderness surviv-al exercises, some that were like solving crossword puzzles. The game-masters had done a great job. And you really got to be friends with theother people on the mission. Darryl was the target of my first murder,and I put my back into it, even though he was my pal. Nice guy. ShameI'd have to kill him.
239I fireballed him as he was seeking out treasure after we wiped out aband of orcs, playing rock-papers-scissors with each orc to determinewho would prevail in combat. This is a lot more exciting than it sounds.
It was like summer camp for drama geeks. We talked until late at nightin tents, looked at the stars, jumped in the river when we got hot,slapped away mosquitos. Became best friends, or lifelong enemies.
I don't know why Charles's parents sent him LARPing. He wasn't thekind of kid who really enjoyed that kind of thing. He was more thepulling-wings-off-flies type. Oh, maybe not. But he just was not into be-ing in costume in the woods. He spent the whole time mooching around,sneering at everyone and everything, trying to convince us all that weweren't having the good time we all felt like we were having. You've nodoubt found that kind of person before, the kind of person who is com-pelled to ensure that everyone else has a rotten time.
The other thing about Charles was that he couldn't get the hang ofsimulated combat. Once you start running around the woods and play-ing these elaborate, semi-military games, it's easy to get totally adrenal-ized to the point where you're ready to tear out someone's throat. This isnot a good state to be in when you're carrying a prop sword, club, pikeor other utensil. This is why no one is ever allowed to hit anyone, underany circumstances, in these games. Instead, when you get close enoughto someone to fight, you play a quick couple rounds of rock-paper-scis-sors, with modifiers based on your experience, armaments, and condi-tion. The referees mediate disputes. It's quite civilized, and a little weird.
You go running after someone through the woods, catch up with him,bare your teeth, and sit down to play a little roshambo. But it works —and it keeps everything safe and fun.
Charles couldn't really get the hang of this. I think he was perfectlycapable of understanding that the rule was no contact, but he was simul-taneously capable of deciding that the rule didn't matter, and that hewasn't going to abide by it. The refs called him on it a bunch of timesover the weekend, and he kept on promising to stick by it, and kept ongoing back. He was one of the bigger kids there already, and he wasfond of "accidentally" tackling you at the end of a chase. Not fun whenyou get tackled into the rocky forest floor.
I had just mightily smote Darryl in a little clearing where he'd beentreasure-hunting, and we were having a little laugh over my extremesneakiness. He was going to go monstering — killed players couldswitch to playing monsters, which meant that the longer the game wore240on, the more monsters there were coming after you, meaning that every-one got to keep on playing and the game's battles just got more and moreepic.
That was when Charles came out of the woods behind me and tackledme, throwing me to the ground so hard that I couldn't breathe for a mo-ment. "Gotcha!" he yelled. I only knew him slightly before this, and I'dnever thought much of him, but now I was ready for murder. I climbedslowly to my feet and looked at him, his chest heaving, grinning. "You'reso dead," he said. "I totally got you."I smiled and something felt wrong and sore in my face. I touched myupper lip. It was bloody. My nose was bleeding and my lip was split, cuton a root I'd face-planted into when he tackled me.
I wiped the blood on my pants-leg and smiled. I made like I thoughtthat it was all in fun. I laughed a little. I moved towards him.
Charles wasn't fooled. He was already backing away, trying to fade in-to the woods. Darryl moved to flank him. I took the other flank.
Abruptly, he turned and ran. Darryl's foot hooked his ankle and senthim sprawling. We rushed him, just in time to hear a ref's whistle.
The ref hadn't seen Charles foul me, but he'd seen Charles's play thatweekend. He sent Charles back to the camp entrance and told him hewas out of the game. Charles complained mightily, but to our satisfac-tion, the ref wasn't having any of it. Once Charles had gone, he gave usboth a lecture, too, telling us that our retaliation was no more justifiedthan Charles's attack.
It was OK. That night, once the games had ended, we all got hotshowers in the scout dorms. Darryl and I stole Charles's clothes and tow-el. We tied them in knots and dropped them in the urinal. A lot of theboys were happy to contribute to the effort of soaking them. Charles hadbeen very enthusiastic about his tackles.
I wish I could have watched him when he got out of his shower anddiscovered his clothes. It's a hard decision: do you run naked across thecamp, or pick apart the tight, piss-soaked knots in your clothes and thenput them on?
He chose nudity. I probably would have chosen the same. We lined upalong the route from the showers to the shed where the packs werestored and applauded him. I was at the front of the line, leading theapplause.
241The Scout Camp weekends only came three or four times a year,which left Darryl and me — and lots of other LARPers — with a seriousLARP deficiency in our lives.
Luckily, there were the Wretched Daylight games in the city hotels.
Wretched Daylight is another LARP, rival vampire clans and vampirehunters, and it's got its own quirky rules. Players get cards to help themresolve combat skirmishes, so each skirmish involves playing a littlehand of a strategic card game. Vampires can become invisible by cloak-ing themselves, crossing their arms over their chests, and all the otherplayers have to pretend they don't see them, continuing on with theirconversations about their plans and so on. The true test of a good playeris whether you're honest enough to go on spilling your secrets in front ofan "invisible" rival without acting as though he was in the room.
There were a couple of big Wretched Daylight games every month.
The organizers of the games had a good relationship with the city's ho-tels and they let it be known that they'd take ten unbooked rooms on Fri-day night and fill them with players who'd run around the hotel, playinglow-key Wretched Daylight in the corridors, around the pool, and so on,eating at the hotel restaurant and paying for the hotel WiFi. They'd closethe booking on Friday afternoon, email us, and we'd go straight fromschool to whichever hotel it was, bringing our knapsacks, sleeping six oreight to a room for the weekend, living on junk-food, playing until threeAM. It was good, safe fun that our parents could get behind.
The organizers were a well-known literacy charity that ran kids' writ-ing workshops, drama workshops and so on. They had been running thegames for ten years without incident. Everything was strictly booze- anddrug-free, to keep the organizers from getting busted on some kind ofcorruption of minors rap. We'd draw between ten and a hundred play-ers, depending on the weekend, and for the cost of a couple movies, youcould have two and a half days' worth of solid fun.
One day, though, they lucked into a block of rooms at the Monaco, ahotel in the Tenderloin that catered to arty older tourists, the kind ofplace where every room came with a goldfish bowl, where the lobby wasfull of beautiful old people in fine clothes, showing off their plastic sur-gery results.
Normally, the mundanes — our word for non-players — just ignoredus, figuring that we were skylarking kids. But that weekend therehappened to be an editor for an Italian travel magazine staying, and hetook an interest in things. He cornered me as I skulked in the lobby,242hoping to spot the clan-master of my rivals and swoop in on him anddraw his blood. I was standing against the wall with my arms foldedover my chest, being invisible, when he came up to me and asked me, inaccented English, what me and my friends were doing in the hotel thatweekend?
I tried to brush him off, but he wouldn't be put off. So I figured I'd justmake something up and he'd go away.
I didn't imagine that he'd print it. I really didn't imagine that it wouldget picked up by the American press.
"We're here because our prince has died, and so we've had to come insearch of a new ruler.""A prince?""Yes," I said, getting into it. "We're the Old People. We came to Amer-ica in the 16th Century and have had our own royal family in the wildsof Pennsylvania ever since. We live simply in the woods. We don't usemodern technology. But the prince was the last of the line and he diedlast week. Some terrible wasting disease took him. The young men of myclan have left to find the descendants of his great-uncle, who went awayto join the modern people in the time of my grandfather. He is said tohave multiplied, and we will find the last of his bloodline and bringthem back to their rightful home."I read a lot of fantasy novels. This kind of thing came easily to me.
"We found a woman who knew of these descendants. She told us onewas staying in this hotel, and we've come to find him. But we've beentracked here by a rival clan who would keep us from bringing home ourprince, to keep us weak and easy to dominate. Thus it is vital we keep toourselves. We do not talk to the New People when we can help it. Talk-ing to you now causes me great discomfort."He was watching me shrewdly. I had uncrossed my arms, whichmeant that I was now "visible" to rival vampires, one of whom had beenslowly sneaking up on us. At the last moment, I turned and saw her,arms spread, hissing at us, vamping it up in high style.
I threw my arms wide and hissed back at her, then pelted through thelobby, hopping over a leather sofa and deking around a potted plant,making her chase me. I'd scouted an escape route down through thestairwell to the basement health-club and I took it, shaking her off.
243I didn't see him again that weekend, but I did relate the story to someof my fellow LARPers, who embroidered the tale and found lots of op-portunities to tell it over the weekend.
The Italian magazine had a staffer who'd done her master's degree onAmish anti-technology communities in rural Pennsylvania, and shethought we sounded awfully interesting. Based on the notes and tapedinterviews of her boss from his trip to San Francisco, she wrote afascinating, heart-wrenching article about these weird, juvenile cultistswho were crisscrossing America in search of their "prince." Hell, peoplewill print anything these days.
But the thing was, stories like that get picked up and republished. Firstit was Italian bloggers, then a few American bloggers. People across thecountry reported "sightings" of the Old People, though whether theywere making it up, or whether others were playing the same game, Ididn't know.
It worked its way up the media food-chain all the way to the New YorkTimes, who, unfortunately, have an unhealthy appetite for fact-checking.
The reporter they put on the story eventually tracked it down to theMonaco Hotel, who put them in touch with the LARP organizers, wholaughingly spilled the whole story.
Well, at that point, LARPing got a lot less cool. We became known asthe nation's foremost hoaxers, as weird, pathological liars. The press whowe'd inadvertently tricked into covering the story of the Old People werenow interested in redeeming themselves by reporting on how unbeliev-ably weird we LARPers were, and that was when Charles let everyone inschool know that Darryl and I were the biggest LARPing weenies in thecity.
That was not a good season. Some of the gang didn't mind, but we did.
The teasing was merciless. Charles led it. I'd find plastic fangs in my bag,and kids I passed in the hall would go "bleh, bleh" like a cartoon vam-pire, or they'd talk with fake Transylvanian accents when I was around.
We switched to ARGing pretty soon afterwards. It was more fun insome ways, and it was a lot less weird. Every now and again, though, Imissed my cape and those weekends in the hotel.
The opposite of esprit d'escalier is the way that life's embarrassmentscome back to haunt us even after they're long past. I could rememberevery stupid thing I'd ever said or done, recall them with picture-perfect244clarity. Any time I was feeling low, I'd naturally start to remember othertimes I felt that way, a hit-parade of humiliations coming one after an-other to my mind.
As I tried to concentrate on Masha and my impending doom, the OldPeople incident kept coming back to haunt me. There'd been a similar,sick, sinking doomed feeling then, as more and more press outletspicked up the story, as the likelihood of someone figuring out that it hadbeen me who'd sprung the story on the stupid Italian editor in the de-signer jeans with crooked seams, the starched collarless shirt, and theoversized metal-rimmed glasses.
There's an alternative to dwelling on your mistakes. You can learnfrom them.
It's a good theory, anyway. Maybe the reason your subconsciousdredges up all these miserable ghosts is that they need to get closure be-fore they can rest peacefully in humiliation afterlife. My subconsciouskept visiting me with ghosts in the hopes that I would do something tolet them rest in peace.
All the way home, I turned over this memory and the thought of whatI would do about "Masha," in case she was playing me. I needed someinsurance.
And by the time I reached my house — to be swept up into melan-choly hugs from Mom and Dad — I had it.
The trick was to time this so that it happened fast enough that the DHScouldn't prepare for it, but with a long enough lead time that the Xnetwould have time to turn out in force.
The trick was to stage this so that there were too many present to ar-rest us all, but to put it somewhere that the press could see it and thegrownups, so the DHS wouldn't just gas us again.
The trick was to come up with something with the media friendlinessof the levitation of the Pentagon. The trick was to to stage something thatwe could rally around, like 3,000 Berkeley students refusing to let one oftheir number be taken away in a police van.
The trick was to put the press there, ready to say what the police did,the way they had in 1968 in Chicago.
It was going to be some trick.
245I cut out of school an hour early the next day, using my customarytechniques for getting out, not caring if it would trigger some kind ofnew DHS checker that would result in my parents getting a note.
One way or another, my parents' last problem after tomorrow wouldbe whether I was in trouble at school.
I met Ange at her place. She'd had to cut out of school even earlier, butshe'd just made a big deal out of her cramps and pretended she was go-ing to keel over and they sent her home.
We started to spread the word on Xnet. We sent it in email to trustedfriends, and IMmed it to our buddy lists. We roamed the decks andtowns of Clockwork Plunder and told our team-mates. Giving everyoneenough information to get them to show up but not so much as to tip ourhand to the DHS was tricky, but I thought I had just the right balance:
>
VAMPMOB TOMORROW>
If you're a goth, dress to impress. If you're not a goth, find a goth andborrow some clothes. Think vampire.
>
The game starts at 8:00AM sharp. SHARP. Be there and ready to be di-vided into teams. The game lasts 30 minutes, so you'll have plenty oftime to get to school afterward.
>
Location will be revealed tomorrow. Email your public key tom1k3y@littlebrother.pirateparty.org.se and check your messages at 7AMfor the update. If that's too early for you, stay up all night. That's whatwe're going to do.
>
This is the most fun you will have all year, guaranteed.
>
Believe.
>
M1k3yThen I sent a short message to Masha.
>
246Tomorrow>
M1k3yA minute later, she emailed back:
>
I thought so. VampMob, huh? You work fast. Wear a red hat. Travellight.
What do you bring along when you go fugitive? I'd carried enoughheavy packs around enough scout camps to know that every ounce youadd cuts into your shoulders with all the crushing force of gravity withevery step you take — it's not just one ounce, it's one ounce that youcarry for a million steps. It's a ton.
"Right," Ange said. "Smart. And you never take more than three days'
worth of clothes, either. You can rinse stuff out in the sink. Better to havea spot on your t-shirt than a suitcase that's too big and heavy to stash un-der a plane-seat."She'd pulled out a ballistic nylon courier bag that went across herchest, between her breasts — something that made me get a little sweaty— and slung diagonally across her back. It was roomy inside, and she'dset it down on the bed. Now she was piling clothes next to it.
"I figure that three t-shirts, a pair of pants, a pair of shorts, threechanges of underwear, three pairs of socks and a sweater will do it."She dumped out her gym bag and picked out her toiletries. "I'll have toremember to stick my toothbrush in tomorrow morning before I headdown to Civic Center."Watching her pack was impressive. She was ruthless about it all. Itwas also freaky — it made me realize that the next day, I was going to goaway. Maybe for a long time. Maybe forever.
"Do I bring my Xbox?" she asked. "I've got a ton of stuff on the hard-drive, notes and sketches and email. I wouldn't want it to fall into thewrong hands.""It's all encrypted," I said. "That's standard with ParanoidXbox. Butleave the Xbox behind, there'll be plenty of them in LA. Just create a Pir-ate Party account and email an image of your hard-drive to yourself. I'mgoing to do the same when I get home."247She did so, and queued up the email. It was going to take a couplehours for all the data to squeeze through her neighbor's WiFi networkand wing its way to Sweden.
Then she closed the flap on the bag and tightened the compressionstraps. She had something the size of a soccer-ball slung over her backnow, and I stared admiringly at it. She could walk down the street withthat under her shoulder and no one would look twice — she looked likeshe was on her way to school.
"One more thing," she said, and went to her bedside table and took outthe condoms. She took the strips of rubbers out of the box and openedthe bag and stuck them inside, then gave me a slap on the ass.
"Now what?" I said.
"Now we go to your place and do your stuff. It's time I met your par-ents, no?"She left the bag amid the piles of clothes and junk all over the floor.
She was ready to turn her back on all of it, walk away, just to be with me.
Just to support the cause. It made me feel brave, too.
Mom was already home when I got there. She had her laptop open onthe kitchen table and was answering email while talking into a headsetconnected to it, helping some poor Yorkshireman and his family accli-mate to living in Louisiana.
I came through the door and Ange followed, grinning like mad, butholding my hand so tight I could feel the bones grinding together. Ididn't know what she was so worried about. It wasn't like she was goingto end up spending a lot of time hanging around with my parents afterthis, even if it went badly.
Mom hung up on the Yorkshireman when we got in.
"Hello, Marcus," she said, giving me a kiss on the cheek. "And who isthis?""Mom, meet Ange. Ange, this is my Mom, Lillian." Mom stood up andgave Ange a hug.
"It's very good to meet you, darling," she said, looking her over fromtop to bottom. Ange looked pretty acceptable, I think. She dressed well,and low-key, and you could tell how smart she was just by looking ather.
248"A pleasure to meet you, Mrs Yallow," she said. She sounded very con-fident and self-assured. Much better than I had when I'd met her mom.
"It's Lillian, love," she said. She was taking in every detail. "Are youstaying for dinner?""I'd love that," she said.
"Do you eat meat?" Mom's pretty acclimated to living in California.
"I eat anything that doesn't eat me first," she said.
"She's a hot-sauce junkie," I said. "You could serve her old tires andshe'd eat 'em if she could smother them in salsa."Ange socked me gently in the shoulder.
"I was going to order Thai," Mom said. "I'll add a couple of their five-chili dishes to the order."Ange thanked her politely and Mom bustled around the kitchen, get-ting us glasses of juice and a plate of biscuits and asking three times if wewanted any tea. I squirmed a little.
"Thanks, Mom," I said. "We're going to go upstairs for a while."Mom's eyes narrowed for a second, then she smiled again. "Of course,"she said. "Your father will be home in an hour, we'll eat then."I had my vampire stuff all stashed in the back of my closet. I let Angesort through it while I went through my clothes. I was only going as faras LA. They had stores there, all the clothing I could need. I just neededto get together three or four favorite tees and a favorite pair of jeans, atube of deodorant, a roll of dental floss.
"Money!" I said.
"Yeah," she said. "I was going to clean out my bank account on theway home at an ATM. I've got maybe five hundred saved up.""Really?""What am I going to spend it on?" she said. "Ever since the Xnet, Ihaven't had to even pay any service charges.""I think I've got three hundred or so.""Well, there you go. Grab it on the way to Civic Center in themorning."I had a big book-bag I used when I was hauling lots of gear aroundtown. It was less conspicuous than my camping pack. Ange wentthrough my piles mercilessly and culled them down to her favorites.
Once it was packed and under my bed, we both sat down.
249"We're going to have to get up really early tomorrow," she said.
"Yeah, big day."The plan was to get messages out with a bunch of fake VampMob loc-ations tomorrow, sending people out to secluded spots within a fewminutes' walk of Civic Center. We'd cut out a spray-paint stencil that justsaid VAMPMOB CIVIC CENTER -> -> that I we would spray-paint atthose spots around 5AM. That would keep the DHS from locking downthe Civic Center before we got there. I had the mailbot ready to send outthe messages at 7AM — I'd just leave my Xbox running when I went out.
"How long… " She trailed off.
"That's what I've been wondering, too," I said. "It could be a long time,I suppose. But who knows? With Barbara's article coming out —" I'dqueued an email to her for the next morning, too — "and all, maybe we'llbe heroes in two weeks.""Maybe," she said and sighed.
I put my arm around her. Her shoulders were shaking.
"I'm terrified," I said. "I think that it would be crazy not to be terrified.""Yeah," she said. "Yeah."Mom called us to dinner. Dad shook Ange's hand. He looked un-shaved and worried, the way he had since we'd gone to see Barbara, buton meeting Ange, a little of the old Dad came back. She kissed him onthe cheek and he insisted that she call him Drew.
Dinner was actually really good. The ice broke when Ange took outher hot-sauce mister and treated her plate, and explained about Scovilleunits. Dad tried a forkful of her food and went reeling into the kitchen todrink a gallon of milk. Believe it or not, Mom still tried it after that andgave every impression of loving it. Mom, it turned out, was an undis-covered spicy food prodigy, a natural.
Before she left, Ange pressed the hot-sauce mister on Mom. "I have aspare at home," she said. I'd watched her pack it in her backpack. "Youseem like the kind of woman who should have one of these."
Chapter 19
This chapter is dedicated to the MIT Press Bookshop, a store I've visitedon every single trip to Boston over the past ten years. MIT, of course, isone of the legendary origin nodes for global nerd culture, and the cam-pus bookstore lives up to the incredible expectations I had when I firstset foot in it. In addition to the wonderful titles published by the MITpress, the bookshop is a tour through the most exciting high-tech public-ations in the world, from hacker zines like 2600 to fat academic antholo-gies on video-game design. This is one of those stores where I have to askthem to ship my purchases home because they don't fit in my suitcase.
MIT Press Bookstore: Building E38, 77 Massachusetts Ave., Cam-bridge, MA USA 02139-4307 +1 617 253 5249Here's the email that went out at 7AM the next day, while Ange and Iwere spray-painting VAMP-MOB CIVIC CENTER -> -> at strategic loca-tions around town.
>
RULES FOR VAMPMOB>
You are part of a clan of daylight vampires. You've discovered thesecret of surviving the terrible light of the sun. The secret was cannibal-ism: the blood of another vampire can give you the strength to walkamong the living.
>
You need to bite as many other vampires as you can in order to stay inthe game. If one minute goes by without a bite, you're out. Once you'reout, turn your shirt around backwards and go referee — watch two orthree vamps to see if they're getting their bites in.
>
251To bite another vamp, you have to say "Bite!" five times before they do.
So you run up to a vamp, make eye-contact, and shout "bite bite bite bitebite!" and if you get it out before she does, you live and she crumbles todust.
>
You and the other vamps you meet at your rendezvous are a team.
They are your clan. You derive no nourishment from their blood.
>
You can "go invisible" by standing still and folding your arms overyour chest. You can't bite invisible vamps, and they can't bite you.
>
This game is played on the honor system. The point is to have fun andget your vamp on, not to win.
>
There is an end-game that will be passed by word of mouth as winnersbegin to emerge. The game-masters will start a whisper campaignamong the players when the time comes. Spread the whisper as quicklyas you can and watch for the sign.
>
M1k3y>
bite bite bite bite bite!
We'd hoped that a hundred people would be willing to playVampMob. We'd sent out about two hundred invites each. But when Isat bolt upright at 4AM and grabbed my Xbox, there were 400 repliesthere. Four hundred.
I fed the addresses to the bot and stole out of the house. I descendedthe stairs, listening to my father snore and my mom rolling over in theirbed. I locked the door behind me.
At 4:15 AM, Potrero Hill was as quiet as the countryside. There weresome distant traffic rumbles, and once, a car crawled past me. I stoppedat an ATM and drew out $320 in twenties, rolled them up and put arubber-band around them, and stuck the roll in a zip-up pocket low onthe thigh of my vampire pants.
I was wearing my cape again, and a ruffled shirt, and tuxedo pantsthat had been modded to have enough pockets to carry all my little bits252and pieces. I had on pointed boots with silver-skull buckles, and I'dteased my hair into a black dandelion clock around my head. Ange wasbringing the white makeup and had promised to do my eyeliner andblack nail-polish. Why the hell not? When was the next time I was goingto get to play dressup like this?
Ange met me in front of her house. She had her backpack on too, andfishnet tights, a ruffled gothic lolita maid's dress, white face-paint, elab-orate kabuki eye-makeup, and her fingers and throat dripped with silverjewelry.
"You look great!" we said to each other in unison, then laughed quietlyand stole off through the streets, spray-paint cans in our pockets.
As I surveyed Civic Center, I thought about what it would look likeonce 400 VampMobbers converged on it. I expected them in ten minutes,out front of City Hall. Already the big plaza teemed with commuterswho neatly sidestepped the homeless people begging there.
I've always hated Civic Center. It's a collection of huge wedding-cakebuildings: court houses, museums, and civic buildings like City Hall. Thesidewalks are wide, the buildings are white. In the tourist guides to SanFrancisco, they manage to photograph it so that it looks like EpcotCenter, futuristic and austere.
But on the ground, it's grimy and gross. Homeless people sleep on allthe benches. The district is empty by 6PM except for drunks and drug-gies, because with only one kind of building there, there's no legit reasonfor people to hang around after the sun goes down. It's more like a mallthan a neighborhood, and the only businesses there are bail-bondsmenand liquor stores, places that cater to the families of crooks on trial andthe bums who make it their nighttime home.
I really came to understand all of this when I read an interview withan amazing old urban planner, a woman called Jane Jacobs who was thefirst person to really nail why it was wrong to slice cities up with free-ways, stick all the poor people in housing projects, and use zoning lawsto tightly control who got to do what where.
Jacobs explained that real cities are organic and they have a lot of vari-ety — rich and poor, white and brown, Anglo and Mex, retail and resid-ential and even industrial. A neighborhood like that has all kinds ofpeople passing through it at all hours of the day or night, so you get253businesses that cater to every need, you get people around all the time,acting like eyes on the street.
You've encountered this before. You go walking around some olderpart of some city and you find that it's full of the coolest looking stores,guys in suits and people in fashion-rags, upscale restaurants and funkycafes, a little movie theater maybe, houses with elaborate paint-jobs.
Sure, there might be a Starbucks too, but there's also a neat-looking fruitmarket and a florist who appears to be three hundred years old as shesnips carefully at the flowers in her windows. It's the opposite of aplanned space, like a mall. It feels like a wild garden or even a woods:
like it grew.
You couldn't get any further from that than Civic Center. I read an in-terview with Jacobs where she talked about the great old neighborhoodthey knocked down to build it. It had been just that kind of neighbor-hood, the kind of place that happened without permission or rhyme orreason.
Jacobs said that she predicted that within a few years, Civic Centerwould be one of the worst neighborhoods in the city, a ghost-town atnight, a place that sustained a thin crop of weedy booze shops and flea-pit motels. In the interview, she didn't seem very glad to have been vin-dicated; she sounded like she was talking about a dead friend when shedescribed what Civic Center had become.
Now it was rush hour and Civic Center was as busy at it could be. TheCivic Center BART also serves as the major station for Muni trolley lines,and if you need to switch from one to another, that's where you do it. At8AM, there were thousands of people coming up the stairs, going downthe stairs, getting into and out of taxis and on and off buses. They gotsqueezed by DHS checkpoints by the different civic buildings, androuted around aggressive panhandlers. They all smelled like their sham-poos and colognes, fresh out of the shower and armored in their worksuits, swinging laptop bags and briefcases. At 8AM, Civic Center wasbusiness central.
And here came the vamps. A couple dozen coming down Van Ness, acouple dozen coming up Market. More coming from the other side ofMarket. More coming up from Van Ness. They slipped around the sideof the buildings, wearing the white face-paint and the black eyeliner,black clothes, leather jackets, huge stompy boots. Fishnet fingerlessgloves.
254They began to fill up the plaza. A few of the business people gavethem passing glances and then looked away, not wanting to let theseweirdos into their personal realities as they thought about whatever crapthey were about to wade through for another eight hours. The vampsmilled around, not sure when the game was on. They pooled together inlarge groups, like an oil spill in reverse, all this black gathering in oneplace. A lot of them sported old-timey hats, bowlers and toppers. Manyof the girls were in full-on elegant gothic lolita maid costumes with hugeplatforms.
I tried to estimate the numbers. 200. Then, five minutes later, it was300. 400. They were still streaming in. The vamps had brought friends.
Someone grabbed my ass. I spun around and saw Ange, laughing sohard she had to hold her thighs, bent double.
"Look at them all, man, look at them all!" she gasped. The square wastwice as crowded as it had been a few minutes ago. I had no idea howmany Xnetters there were, but easily 1000 of them had just showed up tomy little party. Christ.
The DHS and SFPD cops were starting to mill around, talking intotheir radios and clustering together. I heard a far-away siren.
"All right," I said, shaking Ange by the arm. "All right, let's go."We both slipped off into the crowd and as soon as we encountered ourfirst vamp, we both said, loudly, "Bite bite bite bite bite!" My victim wasa stunned — but cute — girl with spider-webs drawn on her hands andsmudged mascara running down her cheeks. She said, "Crap," andmoved away, acknowledging that I'd gotten her.
The call of "bite bite bite bite bite" had scrambled the other nearbyvamps. Some of them were attacking each other, others were moving forcover, hiding out. I had my victim for the minute, so I skulked away, us-ing mundanes for cover. All around me, the cry of "bite bite bite bitebite!" and shouts and laughs and curses.
The sound spread like a virus through the crowd. All the vamps knewthe game was on now, and the ones who were clustered together weredropping like flies. They laughed and cussed and moved away, clueingthe still-in vamps that the game was on. And more vamps were arrivingby the second.
8:16. It was time to bag another vamp. I crouched low and movedthrough the legs of the straights as they headed for the BART stairs. Theyjerked back with surprise and swerved to avoid me. I had my eyes laser-255locked on a set of black platform boots with steel dragons over the toes,and so I wasn't expecting it when I came face to face with another vamp,a guy of about 15 or 16, hair gelled straight back and wearing a PVCMarilyn Manson jacket draped with necklaces of fake tusks carved withintricate symbols.
"Bite bite bite —" he began, when one of the mundanes tripped overhim and they both went sprawling. I leapt over to him and shouted "bitebite bite bite bite!" before he could untangle himself again.
More vamps were arriving. The suits were really freaking out. Thegame overflowed the sidewalk and moved into Van Ness, spreading uptoward Market Street. Drivers honked, the trolleys made angry dings. Iheard more sirens, but now traffic was snarled in every direction.
It was freaking glorious.
BITE BITE BITE BITE BITE!
The sound came from all around me. There were so many vampsthere, playing so furiously, it was like a roar. I risked standing up andlooking around and found that I was right in the middle of a giant crowdof vamps that went as far as I could see in every direction.
BITE BITE BITE BITE BITE!
This was even better than the concert in Dolores Park. That had beenangry and rockin', but this was — well, it was just fun. It was like goingback to the playground, to the epic games of tag we'd play on lunchbreaks when the sun was out, hundreds of people chasing each otheraround. The adults and the cars just made it more fun, more funny.
That's what it was: it was funny. We were all laughing now.
But the cops were really mobilizing now. I heard helicopters. Anysecond now, it would be over. Time for the endgame.
I grabbed a vamp.
"Endgame: when the cops order us to disperse, pretend you've beengassed. Pass it on. What did I just say?"The vamp was a girl, tiny, so short I thought she was really young, butshe must have been 17 or 18 from her face and the smile. "Oh, that'swicked," she said.
"What did I say?""Endgame: when the cops order us to disperse, pretend you've beengassed. Pass it on. What did I just say?""Right," I said. "Pass it on."256She melted into the crowd. I grabbed another vamp. I passed it on. Hewent off to pass it on.
Somewhere in the crowd, I knew Ange was doing this too. Somewherein the crowd, there might be infiltrators, fake Xnetters, but what couldthey do with this knowledge? It's not like the cops had a choice. Theywere going to order us to disperse. That was guaranteed.
I had to get to Ange. The plan was to meet at the Founder's Statue inthe Plaza, but reaching it was going to be hard. The crowd wasn't mov-ing anymore, it was surging, like the mob had in the way down to theBART station on the day the bombs went off. I struggled to make myway through it just as the PA underneath the helicopter switched on.
"THIS IS THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY. YOUARE ORDERED TO DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY."Around me, hundreds of vamps fell to the ground, clutching theirthroats, clawing at their eyes, gasping for breath. It was easy to fake be-ing gassed, we'd all had plenty of time to study the footage of the parti-ers in Mission Dolores Park going down under the pepper-spray clouds.
"DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY."I fell to the ground, protecting my pack, reaching around to the redbaseball hat folded into the waistband of my pants. I jammed it on myhead and then grabbed my throat and made horrendous retching noises.
The only ones still standing were the mundanes, the salarymen who'dbeen just trying to get to their jobs. I looked around as best as I could atthem as I choked and gasped.
"THIS IS THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY. YOUARE ORDERED TO DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY. DISPERSEIMMEDIATELY." The voice of god made my bowels ache. I felt it in mymolars and in my femurs and my spine.
The salarymen were scared. They were moving as fast as they could,but in no particular direction. The helicopters seemed to be directly over-head no matter where you stood. The cops were wading into the crowdnow, and they'd put on their helmets. Some had shields. Some had gasmasks. I gasped harder.
Then the salarymen were running. I probably would have run too. Iwatched a guy whip a $500 jacket off and wrap it around his face beforeheading south toward Mission, only to trip up and go sprawling. Hiscurses joined the choking sounds.
257This wasn't supposed to happen — the choking was just supposed tofreak people out and get them confused, not panic them into a stampede.
There were screams now, screams I recognized all too well from thenight in the park. That was the sound of people who were scared spit-less, running into each other as they tried like hell to get away.
And then the air-raid sirens began.
I hadn't heard that sound since the bombs went off, but I would neverforget it. It sliced through me and went straight into my balls, turningmy legs into jelly on the way. It made me want to run away in a panic. Igot to my feet, red cap on my head, thinking of only one thing: Ange.
Ange and the Founders' Statue.
Everyone was on their feet now, running in all directions, screaming. Ipushed people out of my way, holding onto my pack and my hat, head-ing for Founders' Statue. Masha was looking for me, I was looking forAnge. Ange was out there.
I pushed and cursed. Elbowed someone. Someone came down on myfoot so hard I felt something go crunch and I shoved him so he wentdown. He tried to get up and someone stepped on him. I shoved andpushed.
Then I reached out my arm to shove someone else and strong handsgrabbed my wrist and my elbow in one fluid motion and brought myarm back around behind my back. It felt like my shoulder was about towrench out of its socket, and I instantly doubled over, hollering, a soundthat was barely audible over the din of the crowd, the thrum of the chop-pers, the wail of the sirens.
I was brought back upright by the strong hands behind me, whichsteered me like a marionette. The hold was so perfect I couldn't eventhink of squirming. I couldn't think of the noise or the helicopter orAnge. All I could think of was moving the way that the person who hadme wanted me to move. I was brought around so that I was face-to-facewith the person.
It was a girl whose face was sharp and rodent-like, half-hidden by agiant pair of sunglasses. Over the sunglasses, a mop of bright pink hair,spiked out in all directions.
"You!" I said. I knew her. She'd taken a picture of me and threatened torat me out to truant watch. That had been five minutes before the alarmsstarted. She'd been the one, ruthless and cunning. We'd both run fromthat spot in the Tenderloin as the klaxon sounded behind us, and we'd258both been picked up by the cops. I'd been hostile and they'd decided thatI was an enemy.
She — Masha — became their ally.
"Hello, M1k3y," she hissed in my ear, close as a lover. A shiver wentup my back. She let go of my arm and I shook it out.
"Christ," I said. "You!""Yes, me," she said. "The gas is gonna come down in about twominutes. Let's haul ass.""Ange — my girlfriend — is by the Founders' Statue."Masha looked over the crowd. "No chance," she said. "We try to makeit there, we're doomed. The gas is coming down in two minutes, in caseyou missed it the first time."I stopped moving. "I don't go without Ange," I said.
She shrugged. "Suit yourself," she shouted in my ear. "Your funeral."She began to push through the crowd, moving away, north, towarddowntown. I continued to push for the Founders' Statue. A second later,my arm was back in the terrible lock and I was being swung around andpropelled forward.
"You know too much, jerk-off," she said. "You've seen my face. You'recoming with me."I screamed at her, struggled till it felt like my arm would break, butshe was pushing me forward. My sore foot was agony with every step,my shoulder felt like it would break.
With her using me as a battering ram, we made good progress throughthe crowd. The whine of the helicopters changed and she gave me aharder push. "RUN!" she yelled. "Here comes the gas!"The crowd noise changed, too. The choking sounds and screamsounds got much, much louder. I'd heard that pitch of sound before. Wewere back in the park. The gas was raining down. I held my breath andran.
We cleared the crowd and she let go of my arm. I shook it out. Ilimped as fast as I could up the sidewalk as the crowd thinned andthinned. We were heading towards a group of DHS cops with riotshields and helmets and masks. As we drew near them, they moved toblock us, but Masha held up a badge and they melted away like she wasObi Wan Kenobi, saying "These aren't the droids you're looking for."259"You goddamned bitch," I said as we sped up Market Street. "We haveto go back for Ange."She pursed her lips and shook her head. "I feel for you, buddy. Ihaven't seen my boyfriend in months. He probably thinks I'm dead. For-tunes of war. We go back for your Ange, we're dead. If we push on, wehave a chance. So long as we have a chance, she has a chance. Those kidsaren't all going to Gitmo. They'll probably take a few hundred in forquestioning and send the rest home."We were moving up Market Street now, past the strip joints where thelittle encampments of bums and junkies sat, stinking like open toilets.
Masha guided me to a little alcove in the shut door of one of the stripplaces. She stripped off her jacket and turned it inside out — the liningwas a muted stripe pattern, and with the jacket's seams reversed, it hungdifferently. She produced a wool hat from her pocket and pulled it overher hair, letting it form a jaunty, off-center peak. Then she took out somemake-up remover wipes and went to work on her face and fingernails. Ina minute, she was a different woman.
"Wardrobe change," she said. "Now you. Lose the shoes, lose the jack-et, lose the hat." I could see her point. The cops would be looking verycarefully at anyone who looked like they'd been a part of the VampMob.
I ditched the hat entirely — I'd never liked ball caps. Then I jammed thejacket into my pack and got out a long-sleeved tee with a picture of RosaLuxembourg on it and pulled it over my black tee. I let Masha wipe mymakeup off and clean my nails and a minute later, I was clean.
"Switch off your phone," she said. "You carrying any arphids?"I had my student card, my ATM card, my Fast Pass. They all went intoa silvered bag she held out, which I recognized as a radio-proof Faradaypouch. But as she put them in her pocket, I realized I'd just turned my IDover to her. If she was on the other side…The magnitude of what had just happened began to sink in. In mymind, I'd pictured having Ange with me at this point. Ange would makeit two against one. Ange would help me see if there was somethingamiss. If Masha wasn't all she said she was.
"Put these pebbles in your shoes before you put them on —""It's OK. I sprained my foot. No gait recognition program will spot menow."260She nodded once, one pro to another, and slung her pack. I picked upmine and we moved. The total time for the changeover was less than aminute. We looked and walked like two different people.
She looked at her watch and shook her head. "Come on," she said. "Wehave to make our rendezvous. Don't think of running, either. You've gottwo choices now. Me, or jail. They'll be analyzing the footage from thatmob for days, but once they're done, every face in it will go in a data-base. Our departure will be noted. We are both wanted criminals now."She got us off Market Street on the next block, swinging back into theTenderloin. I knew this neighborhood. This was where we'd gone hunt-ing for an open WiFi access-point back on the day, playing Harajuku FunMadness.
"Where are we going?" I said.
"We're about to catch a ride," she said. "Shut up and let meconcentrate."We moved fast, and sweat streamed down my face from under myhair, coursed down my back and slid down the crack of my ass and mythighs. My foot was really hurting and I was seeing the streets of SanFrancisco race by, maybe for the last time, ever.
It didn't help that we were ploughing straight uphill, moving for thezone where the seedy Tenderloin gives way to the nosebleed real-estatevalues of Nob Hill. My breath came in ragged gasps. She moved usmostly up narrow alleys, using the big streets just to get from one alleyto the next.
We were just stepping into one such alley, Sabin Place, when someonefell in behind us and said, "Freeze right there." It was full of evil mirth.
We stopped and turned around.
At the mouth of the alley stood Charles, wearing a halfheartedVampMob outfit of black t-shirt and jeans and white face-paint. "Hello,Marcus," he said. "You going somewhere?" He smiled a huge, wet grin.
"Who's your girlfriend?""What do you want, Charles?""Well, I've been hanging out on that traitorous Xnet ever since I spot-ted you giving out DVDs at school. When I heard about your VampMob,I thought I'd go along and hang around the edges, just to see if youshowed up and what you did. You know what I saw?"261I said nothing. He had his phone in his hand, pointed at us. Recording.
Maybe ready to dial 911. Beside me, Masha had gone still as a board.
"I saw you leading the damned thing. And I recorded it, Marcus. So nowI'm going to call the cops and we're going to wait right here for them.
And then you're going to go to pound-you-in-the-ass prison, for a long,long time."Masha stepped forward.
"Stop right there, chickie," he said. "I saw you get him away. I saw it all—"She took another step forward and snatched the phone out of hishand, reaching behind her with her other hand and bringing it out hold-ing a wallet open.
"DHS, dick-head," she said. "I'm DHS. I've been running this twerpback to his masters to see where he went. I was doing that. Now you'veblown it. We have a name for that. We call it 'Obstruction of National Se-curity.' You're about to hear that phrase a lot more often."Charles took a step backward, his hands held up in front of him. He'dgone even paler under his makeup. "What? No! I mean — I didn't know!
I was trying to help!""The last thing we need is a bunch of high school Junior G-men'helping' buddy. You can tell it to the judge."He moved back again, but Masha was fast. She grabbed his wrist andtwisted him into the same judo hold she'd had me in back at CivicCenter. Her hand dipped back to her pockets and came out holding astrip of plastic, a handcuff strip, which she quickly wound around hiswrists.
That was the last thing I saw as I took off running.
I made it as far as the other end of the alley before she caught up withme, tackling me from behind and sending me sprawling. I couldn't movevery fast, not with my hurt foot and the weight of my pack. I went downin a hard face-plant and skidded, grinding my cheek into the grimyasphalt.
"Jesus," she said. "You're a goddamned idiot. You didn't believe that,did you?"My heart thudded in my chest. She was on top of me and slowly shelet me up.
262"Do I need to cuff you, Marcus?"I got to my feet. I hurt all over. I wanted to die.
"Come on," she said. "It's not far now."'It' turned out to be a moving van on a Nob Hill side-street, a sixteen-wheeler the size of one of the ubiquitous DHS trucks that still turned upon San Francisco's street corners, bristling with antennas.
This one, though, said "Three Guys and a Truck Moving" on the side,and the three guys were very much in evidence, trekking in and out of atall apartment building with a green awning. They were carrying cratedfurniture, neatly labeled boxes, loading them one at a time onto the truckand carefully packing them there.
She walked us around the block once, apparently unsatisfied withsomething, then, on the next pass, she made eye-contact with the manwho was watching the van, an older black guy with a kidney-belt andheavy gloves. He had a kind face and he smiled at us as she led usquickly, casually up the truck's three stairs and into its depth. "Under thebig table," he said. "We left you some space there."The truck was more than half full, but there was a narrow corridoraround a huge table with a quilted blanket thrown over it and bubble-wrap wound around its legs.
Masha pulled me under the table. It was stuffy and still and dusty un-der there, and I suppressed a sneeze as we scrunched in among theboxes. The space was so tight that we were on top of each other. I didn'tthink that Ange would have fit in there.
"Bitch," I said, looking at Masha.
"Shut up. You should be licking my boots thanking me. You wouldhave ended up in jail in a week, two tops. Not Gitmo-by-the-Bay. Syria,maybe. I think that's where they sent the ones they really wanted todisappear."I put my head on my knees and tried to breathe deeply.
"Why would you do something so stupid as declaring war on the DHSanyway?"I told her. I told her about being busted and I told her about Darryl.
She patted her pockets and came up with a phone. It was Charles's.
"Wrong phone." She came up with another phone. She turned it on and263the glow from its screen filled our little fort. After fiddling for a second,she showed it to me.
It was the picture she'd snapped of us, just before the bombs blew. Itwas the picture of Jolu and Van and me and —Darryl.
I was holding in my hand proof that Darryl had been with us minutesbefore we'd all gone into DHS custody. Proof that he'd been alive andwell and in our company.
"You need to give me a copy of this," I said. "I need it.""When we get to LA," she said, snatching the phone back. "Onceyou've been briefed on how to be a fugitive without getting both ourasses caught and shipped to Syria. I don't want you getting rescue ideasabout this guy. He's safe enough where he is — for now."I thought about trying to take it from her by force, but she'd alreadydemonstrated her physical skill. She must have been a black-belt orsomething.
We sat there in the dark, listening to the three guys load the truck withbox after box, tying things down, grunting with the effort of it. I tried tosleep, but couldn't. Masha had no such problem. She snored.
There was still light shining through the narrow, obstructed corridorthat led to the fresh air outside. I stared at it, through the gloom, andthought of Ange.
My Ange. Her hair brushing her shoulders as she turned her headfrom side to side, laughing at something I'd done. Her face when I'd seenher last, falling down in the crowd at VampMob. All those people atVampMob, like the people in the park, down and writhing, the DHSmoving in with truncheons. The ones who disappeared.
Darryl. Stuck on Treasure Island, his side stitched up, taken out of hiscell for endless rounds of questioning about the terrorists.
Darry's father, ruined and boozy, unshaven. Washed up and in hisuniform, "for the photos." Weeping like a little boy.
My own father, and the way that he had been changed by my disap-pearance to Treasure Island. He'd been just as broken as Darryl's father,but in his own way. And his face, when I told him where I'd been.
That was when I knew that I couldn't run.
That was when I knew that I had to stay and fight.
264Masha's breathing was deep and regular, but when I reached with gla-cial slowness into her pocket for her phone, she snuffled a little and shif-ted. I froze and didn't even breathe for a full two minutes, counting onehippopotami, two hippopotami.
Slowly, her breath deepened again. I tugged the phone free of herjacket-pocket one millimeter at a time, my fingers and arm tremblingwith the effort of moving so slowly.
Then I had it, a little candy-bar shaped thing.
I turned to head for the light, when I had a flash of memory: Charles,holding out his phone, waggling it at us, taunting us. It had been acandy-bar-shaped phone, silver, plastered in the logos of a dozen com-panies that had subsidized the cost of the handset through the phonecompany. It was the kind of phone where you had to listen to a commer-cial every time you made a call.
It was too dim to see the phone clearly in the truck, but I could feel it.
Were those company decals on its sides? Yes? Yes. I had just stolenCharles's phone from Masha.
I turned back around slowly, slowly, and slowly, slowly, slowly, Ireached back into her pocket. Her phone was bigger and bulkier, with abetter camera and who knew what else?
I'd been through this once before — that made it a little easier. Milli-meter by millimeter again, I teased it free of her pocket, stopping twicewhen she snuffled and twitched.
I had the phone free of her pocket and I was beginning to back awaywhen her hand shot out, fast as a snake, and grabbed my wrist, hard, fin-gertips grinding away at the small, tender bones below my hand.
I gasped and stared into Masha's wide-open, staring eyes.
"You are such an idiot," she said, conversationally, taking the phonefrom me, punching at its keypad with her other hand. "How did youplan on unlocking this again?"I swallowed. I felt bones grind against each other in my wrist. I bit mylip to keep from crying out.
She continued to punch away with her other hand. "Is this what youthought you'd get away with?" She showed me the picture of all of us,Darryl and Jolu, Van and me. "This picture?"I didn't say anything. My wrist felt like it would shatter.
265"Maybe I should just delete it, take temptation out of your way." Herfree hand moved some more. Her phone asked her if she was sure andshe had to look at it to find the right button.
That's when I moved. I had Charles's phone in my other hand still, andI brought it down on her crushing hand as hard as I could, banging myknuckles on the table overhead. I hit her hand so hard the phoneshattered and she yelped and her hand went slack. I was still moving,reaching for her other hand, for her now-unlocked phone with herthumb still poised over the OK key. Her fingers spasmed on the emptyair as I snatched the phone out of her hand.
I moved down the narrow corridor on hands and knees, heading forthe light. I felt her hands slap at my feet and ankles twice, and I had toshove aside some of the boxes that had walled us in like a Pharaoh in atomb. A few of them fell down behind me, and I heard Masha gruntagain.
The rolling truck door was open a crack and I dove for it, slitheringout under it. The steps had been removed and I found myself hangingover the road, sliding headfirst into it, clanging my head off the blacktopwith a thump that rang my ears like a gong. I scrambled to my feet, hold-ing the bumper, and desperately dragged down on the door-handle,slamming it shut. Masha screamed inside — I must have caught her fin-gertips. I felt like throwing up, but I didn't.
I padlocked the truck instead.
Chapter 20
This chapter is dedicated to The Tattered Cover, Denver's legendary in-dependent bookstore. I happened upon The Tattered Cover quite by acci-dent: Alice and I had just landed in Denver, coming in from London,and it was early and cold and we needed coffee. We drove in aimlessrental-car circles, and that's when I spotted it, the Tattered Cover'ssign. Something about it tingled in my hindbrain — I knew I'd heard ofthis place. We pulled in (got a coffee) and stepped into the store — awonderland of dark wood, homey reading nooks, and miles and miles ofbookshelves.
The Tattered Cover 1628 16th St., Denver, CO USA 80202 +1 303 4361070None of the three guys were around at the moment, so I took off. Myhead hurt so much I thought I must be bleeding, but my hands cameaway dry. My twisted ankle had frozen up in the truck so that I ran like abroken marionette, and I stopped only once, to cancel the photo-deletionon Masha's phone. I turned off its radio — both to save battery and tokeep it from being used to track me — and set the sleep timer to twohours, the longest setting available. I tried to set it to not require a pass-word to wake from sleep, but that required a password itself. I was justgoing to have to tap the keypad at least once every two hours until Icould figure out how to get the photo off of the phone. I would need acharger, then.
I didn't have a plan. I needed one. I needed to sit down, to get online— to figure out what I was going to do next. I was sick of letting otherpeople do my planning for me. I didn't want to be acting because of whatMasha did, or because of the DHS, or because of my dad. Or because ofAnge? Well, maybe I'd act because of Ange. That would be just fine, infact.
267I'd just been slipping downhill, taking alleys when I could, mergingwith the Tenderloin crowds. I didn't have any destination in mind. Everyfew minutes, I put my hand in my pocket and nudged one of the keys onMasha's phone to keep it from going asleep. It made an awkward bulge,unfolded there in my jacket.
I stopped and leaned against a building. My ankle was killing me.
Where was I, anyway?
O'Farrell, at Hyde Street. In front of a dodgy "Asian Massage Parlor."My traitorous feet had taken me right back to the beginning — taken meback to where the photo on Masha's phone had been taken, seconds be-fore the Bay Bridge blew, before my life changed forever.
I wanted to sit down on the sidewalk and bawl, but that wouldn'tsolve my problems. I had to call Barbara Stratford, tell her what hadhappened. Show her the photo of Darryl.
What was I thinking? I had to show her the video, the one that Mashahad sent me — the one where the President's Chief of Staff gloated at theattacks on San Francisco and admitted that he knew when and where thenext attacks would happen and that he wouldn't stop them becausethey'd help his man get re-elected.
That was a plan, then: get in touch with Barbara, give her the docu-ments, and get them into print. The VampMob had to have reallyfreaked people out, made them think that we really were a bunch of ter-rorists. Of course, when I'd been planning it, I had been thinking of howgood a distraction it would be, not how it would look to some NASCARDad in Nebraska.
I'd call Barbara, and I'd do it smart, from a payphone, putting myhood up so that the inevitable CCTV wouldn't get a photo of me. I dug aquarter out of my pocket and polished it on my shirt-tail, getting the fin-gerprints off it.
I headed downhill, down and down to the BART station and thepayphones there. I made it to the trolley-car stop when I spotted the cov-er of the week's Bay Guardian, stacked in a high pile next to a homelessblack guy who smiled at me. "Go ahead and read the cover, it's free —it'll cost you fifty cents to look inside, though."The headline was set in the biggest type I'd seen since 9/11:
INSIDE GITMO-BY-THE-BAYBeneath it, in slightly smaller type:
268"How the DHS has kept our children and friends in secret prisons onour doorstep.
"By Barbara Stratford, Special to the Bay Guardian"The newspaper seller shook his head. "Can you believe that?" he said.
"Right here in San Francisco. Man, the government sucks."Theoretically, the Guardian was free, but this guy appeared to havecornered the local market for copies of it. I had a quarter in my hand. Idropped it into his cup and fished for another one. I didn't bother polish-ing the fingerprints off of it this time.
"We're told that the world changed forever when the Bay Bridge wasblown up by parties unknown. Thousands of our friends and neighborsdied on that day. Almost none of them have been recovered; their re-mains are presumed to be resting in the city's harbor.
"But an extraordinary story told to this reporter by a young man whowas arrested by the DHS minutes after the explosion suggests that ourown government has illegally held many of those thought dead onTreasure Island, which had been evacuated and declared off-limits to ci-vilians shortly after the bombing… "I sat down on a bench — the same bench, I noted with a prickly hair-up-the-neck feeling, where we'd rested Darryl after escaping from theBART station — and read the article all the way through. It took a hugeeffort not to burst into tears right there. Barbara had found some photosof me and Darryl goofing around together and they ran alongside thetext. The photos were maybe a year old, but I looked so much younger inthem, like I was 10 or 11. I'd done a lot of growing up in the past couplemonths.
The piece was beautifully written. I kept feeling outraged on behalf ofthe poor kids she was writing about, then remembering that she waswriting about me. Zeb's note was there, his crabbed handwriting repro-duced in large, a half-sheet of the newspaper. Barbara had dug up moreinfo on other kids who were missing and presumed dead, a long list, andasked how many had been stuck there on the island, just a few milesfrom their parents' doorsteps.
I dug another quarter out of my pocket, then changed my mind. Whatwas the chance that Barbara's phone wasn't tapped? There was no way Iwas going to be able to call her now, not directly. I needed some interme-diary to get in touch with her and get her to meet me somewhere south.
So much for plans.
269What I really, really needed was the Xnet.
How the hell was I going to get online? My phone's wifinder wasblinking like crazy — there was wireless all around me, but I didn't havean Xbox and a TV and a ParanoidXbox DVD to boot from. WiFi, WiFieverywhere…That's when I spotted them. Two kids, about my age, moving amongthe crowd at the top of the stairs down into the BART.
What caught my eye was the way they were moving, kind of clumsy,nudging up against the commuters and the tourists. Each had a hand inhis pocket, and whenever they met one another's eye, they snickered.
They couldn't have been more obvious jammers, but the crowd was obli-vious to them. Being down in that neighborhood, you expect to bedodging homeless people and crazies, so you don't make eye contact,don't look around at all if you can help it.
I sidled up to one. He seemed really young, but he couldn't have beenany younger than me.
"Hey," I said. "Hey, can you guys come over here for a second?"He pretended not to hear me. He looked right through me, the wayyou would a homeless person.
"Come on," I said. "I don't have a lot of time." I grabbed his shoulderand hissed in his ear. "The cops are after me. I'm from Xnet."He looked scared now, like he wanted to run away, and his friend wasmoving toward us. "I'm serious," I said. "Just hear me out."His friend came over. He was taller, and beefy — like Darryl. "Hey,"he said. "Something wrong?"His friend whispered in his ear. The two of them looked like they weregoing to bolt.
I grabbed my copy of the Bay Guardian from under my arm and rattledit in front of them. "Just turn to page 5, OK?"They did. They looked at the headline. The photo. Me.
"Oh, dude," the first one said. "We are so not worthy." He grinned atme like crazy, and the beefier one slapped me on the back.
"No way —" he said. "You're M —"I put a hand over his mouth. "Come over here, OK?"270I brought them back to my bench. I noticed that there was somethingold and brown staining the sidewalk underneath it. Darryl's blood? Itmade my skin pucker up. We sat down.
"I'm Marcus," I said, swallowing hard as I gave my real name to thesetwo who already knew me as M1k3y. I was blowing my cover, but theBay Guardian had already made the connection for me.
"Nate," the small one said. "Liam," the bigger one said. "Dude, it is suchan honor to meet you. You're like our all-time hero —""Don't say that," I said. "Don't say that. You two are like a flashing ad-vertisement that says, 'I am jamming, please put my ass in Gitmo-by-the-Bay. You couldn't be more obvious."Liam looked like he might cry.
"Don't worry, you didn't get busted. I'll give you some tips, later." Hebrightened up again. What was becoming weirdly clear was that thesetwo really did idolize M1k3y, and that they'd do anything I said. Theywere grinning like idiots. It made me uncomfortable, sick to my stomach.
"Listen, I need to get on Xnet, now, without going home or anywherenear home. Do you two live near here?""I do," Nate said. "Up at the top of California Street. It's a bit of a walk— steep hills." I'd just walked all the way down them. Masha was some-where up there. But still, it was better than I had any right to expect.
"Let's go," I said.
Nate loaned me his baseball hat and traded jackets with me. I didn'thave to worry about gait-recognition, not with my ankle throbbing theway it was — I limped like an extra in a cowboy movie.
Nate lived in a huge four-bedroom apartment at the top of Nob Hill.
The building had a doorman, in a red overcoat with gold brocade, andhe touched his cap and called Nate, "Mr Nate" and welcomed us allthere. The place was spotless and smelled of furniture polish. I tried notto gawp at what must have been a couple million bucks' worth of condo.
"My dad," he explained. "He was an investment banker. Lots of life in-surance. He died when I was 14 and we got it all. They'd been divorcedfor years, but he left my mom as beneficiary."From the floor-to-ceiling window, you could see a stunning view ofthe other side of Nob Hill, all the way down to Fisherman's Wharf, to theugly stub of the Bay Bridge, the crowd of cranes and trucks. Through the271mist, I could just make out Treasure Island. Looking down all that way,it gave me a crazy urge to jump.
I got online with his Xbox and a huge plasma screen in the livingroom. He showed me how many open WiFi networks were visible fromhis high vantage point — twenty, thirty of them. This was a good spot tobe an Xnetter.
There was a lot of email in my M1k3y account. 20,000 new messagessince Ange and I had left her place that morning. Lots of it was from thepress, asking for followup interviews, but most of it was from the Xnet-ters, people who'd seen the Guardian story and wanted to tell me thatthey'd do anything to help me, anything I needed.
That did it. Tears started to roll down my cheeks.
Nate and Liam exchanged glances. I tried to stop, but it was no good. Iwas sobbing now. Nate went to an oak book-case on one wall and swunga bar out of one of its shelves, revealing gleaming rows of bottles. Hepoured me a shot of something golden brown and brought it to me.
"Rare Irish whiskey," he said. "Mom's favorite."It tasted like fire, like gold. I sipped at it, trying not to choke. I didn'treally like hard liquor, but this was different. I took several deep breaths.
"Thanks, Nate," I said. He looked like I'd just pinned a medal on him.
He was a good kid.
"All right," I said, and picked up the keyboard. The two boys watchedin fascination as I paged through my mail on the gigantic screen.
What I was looking for, first and foremost, was email from Ange.
There was a chance that she'd just gotten away. There was always thatchance.
I was an idiot to even hope. There was nothing from her. I started go-ing through the mail as fast as I could, picking apart the press requests,the fan mail, the hate mail, the spam…And that's when I found it: a letter from Zeb.
"It wasn't nice to wake up this morning and find the letter that Ithought you would destroy in the pages of the newspaper. Not nice atall. Made me feel — hunted.
"But I've come to understand why you did it. I don't know if I can ap-prove of your tactics, but it's easy to see that your motives were sound.
272"If you're reading this, that means that there's a good chance you'vegone underground. It's not easy. I've been learning that. I've been learn-ing a lot more.
"I can help you. I should do that for you. You're doing what you canfor me. (Even if you're not doing it with my permission.)"Reply if you get this, if you're on the run and alone. Or reply if you'rein custody, being run by our friends on Gitmo, looking for a way tomake the pain stop. If they've got you, you'll do what they tell you. Iknow that. I'll take that risk.
"For you, M1k3y.""Wooooah," Liam breathed. "Duuuuude." I wanted to smack him. Iturned to say something awful and cutting to him, but he was staring atme with eyes as big as saucers, looking like he wanted to drop to hisknees and worship me.
"Can I just say," Nate said, "can I just say that it is the biggest honor ofmy entire life to help you? Can I just say that?"I was blushing now. There was nothing for it. These two were totallystar-struck, even though I wasn't any kind of star, not in my own mind atleast.
"Can you guys —" I swallowed. "Can I have some privacy here?"They slunk out of the room like bad puppies and I felt like a tool. Ityped fast.
"I got away, Zeb. And I'm on the run. I need all the help I can get. Iwant to end this now." I remembered to take Masha's phone out of mypocket and tickle it to keep it from going to sleep.
They let me use the shower, gave me a change of clothes, a new back-pack with half their earthquake kit in it — energy bars, medicine, hotand cold packs, and an old sleeping-bag. They even slipped a spare XboxUniversal already loaded with ParanoidXbox on it into there. That was anice touch. I had to draw the line at a flaregun.
I kept on checking my email to see if Zeb had replied. I answered thefan mail. I answered the mail from the press. I deleted the hate mail. Iwas half-expecting to see something from Masha, but chances were shewas halfway to LA by now, her fingers hurt, and in no position to type. Itickled her phone again.
They encouraged me to take a nap and for a brief, shameful moment, Igot all paranoid like maybe these guys were thinking of turning me in273once I was asleep. Which was idiotic — they could have turned me injust as easily when I was awake. I just couldn't compute the fact that theythought so much of me. I had known, intellectually, that there werepeople who would follow M1k3y. I'd met some of those people thatmorning, shouting BITE BITE BITE and vamping it up at Civic Center.
But these two were more personal. They were just nice, goofy guys, theycoulda been any of my friends back in the days before the Xnet, just twopals who palled around having teenage adventures. They'd volunteeredto join an army, my army. I had a responsibility to them. Left to them-selves, they'd get caught, it was only a matter of time. They were tootrusting.
"Guys, listen to me for a second. I have something serious I need totalk to you about."They almost stood at attention. It would have been funny if it wasn'tso scary.
"Here's the thing. Now that you've helped me, it's really dangerous. Ifyou get caught, I'll get caught. They'll get anything you know out of you—" I held up my hand to forestall their protests. "No, stop. You haven'tbeen through it. Everyone talks. Everyone breaks. If you're ever caught,you tell them everything, right away, as fast as you can, as much as youcan. They'll get it all eventually anyway. That's how they work.
"But you won't get caught, and here's why: you're not jammers any-more. You are retired from active duty. You're a —" I fished in mymemory for vocabulary words culled from spy thrillers — "you're asleeper cell. Stand down. Go back to being normal kids. One way or an-other, I'm going to break this thing, break it wide open, end it. Or it willget me, finally, do me in. If you don't hear from me within 72 hours, as-sume that they got me. Do whatever you want then. But for the nextthree days — and forever, if I do what I'm trying to do — stand down.
Will you promise me that?"They promised with all solemnity. I let them talk me into napping, butmade them swear to rouse me once an hour. I'd have to tickle Masha'sphone and I wanted to know as soon as Zeb got back in touch with me.
The rendezvous was on a BART car, which made me nervous. They'refull of cameras. But Zeb knew what he was doing. He had me meet himin the last car of a certain train departing from Powell Street Station, at atime when that car was filled with the press of bodies. He sidled up to274me in the crowd, and the good commuters of San Francisco cleared aspace for him, the hollow that always surrounds homeless people.
"Nice to see you again," he muttered, facing into the doorway. Lookinginto the dark glass, I could see that there was no one close enough toeavesdrop — not without some kind of high-efficiency mic rig, and ifthey knew enough to show up here with one of those, we were deadanyway.
"You too, brother," I said. "I'm — I'm sorry, you know?""Shut up. Don't be sorry. You were braver than I am. Are you ready togo underground now? Ready to disappear?""About that.""Yes?""That's not the plan.""Oh," he said.
"Listen, OK? I have — I have pictures, video. Stuff that really provessomething." I reached into my pocket and tickled Masha's phone. I'dbought a charger for it in union Square on the way down, and hadstopped and plugged it in at a cafe for long enough to get the battery upto four out of five bars. "I need to get it to Barbara Stratford, the womanfrom the Guardian. But they're going to be watching her — watching tosee if I show up.""You don't think that they'll be watching for me, too? If your plan in-volves me going within a mile of that woman's home or office —""I want you to get Van to come and meet me. Did Darryl ever tell youabout Van? The girl —""He told me. Yes, he told me. You don't think they'll be watching her?
All of you who were arrested?""I think they will. I don't think they'll be watching her as hard. AndVan has totally clean hands. She never cooperated with any of my —" Iswallowed. "With my projects. So they might be a little more relaxedabout her. If she calls the Bay Guardian to make an appointment to ex-plain why I'm just full of crap, maybe they'll let her keep it."He stared at the door for a long time.
"You know what happens when they catch us again." It wasn't aquestion.
I nodded.
275"Are you sure? Some of the people that were on Treasure Island withus got taken away in helicopters. They got taken offshore. There are coun-tries where America can outsource its torture. Countries where you willrot forever. Countries where you wish they would just get it over with,have you dig a trench and then shoot you in the back of the head as youstand over it."I swallowed and nodded.
"Is it worth the risk? We can go underground for a long, long timehere. Someday we might get our country back. We can wait it out."I shook my head. "You can't get anything done by doing nothing. It'sour country. They've taken it from us. The terrorists who attack us arestill free — but we're not. I can't go underground for a year, ten years, mywhole life, waiting for freedom to be handed to me. Freedom issomething you have to take for yourself."That afternoon, Van left school as usual, sitting in the back of the buswith a tight knot of her friends, laughing and joking the way she alwaysdid. The other riders on the bus took special note of her, she was so loud,and besides, she was wearing that stupid, giant floppy hat, somethingthat looked like a piece out of a school play about Renaissance swordfighters. At one point they all huddled together, then turned away tolook out the back of the bus, pointing and giggling. The girl who worethe hat now was the same height as Van, and from behind, it could beher.
No one paid any attention to the mousy little Asian girl who got off afew stops before the BART. She was dressed in a plain old school uni-form, and looking down shyly as she stepped off. Besides, at that mo-ment, the loud Korean girl let out a whoop and her friends followedalong, laughing so loudly that even the bus driver slowed down, twistedin his seat and gave them a dirty look.
Van hurried away down the street with her head down, her hair tiedback and dropped down the collar of her out-of-style bubble jacket. Shehad slipped lifts into her shoes that made her two wobbly, awkwardinches taller, and had taken her contacts out and put on her least-favoredglasses, with huge lenses that took up half her face. Although I'd beenwaiting in the bus-shelter for her and knew when to expect her, I hardlyrecognized her. I got up and walked along behind her, across the street,trailing by half a block.
276The people who passed me looked away as quickly as possible. Ilooked like a homeless kid, with a grubby cardboard sign, street-grimyovercoat, huge, overstuffed knapsack with duct-tape over its rips. Noone wants to look at a street-kid, because if you meet his eye, he mightask you for some spare change. I'd walked around Oakland all afternoonand the only person who'd spoken to me was a Jehovah's Witness and aScientologist, both trying to convert me. It felt gross, like being hit on bya pervert.
Van followed the directions I'd written down carefully. Zeb hadpassed them to her the same way he'd given me the note outside school— bumping into her as she waited for the bus, apologizing profusely. I'dwritten the note plainly and simply, just laying it out for her: I know youdon't approve. I understand. But this is it, this is the most important fa-vor I've ever asked of you. Please. Please.
She'd come. I knew she would. We had a lot of history, Van and I. Shedidn't like what had happened to the world, either. Besides, an evil,chuckling voice in my head had pointed out, she was under suspicionnow that Barbara's article was out.
We walked like that for six or seven blocks, looking at who was nearus, what cars went past. Zeb told me about five-person trails, where fivedifferent undercovers traded off duties following you, making it nearlyimpossible to spot them. You had to go somewhere totally desolate,where anyone at all would stand out like a sore thumb.
The overpass for the 880 was just a few blocks from the ColiseumBART station, and even with all the circling Van did, it didn't take longto reach it. The noise from overhead was nearly deafening. No one elsewas around, not that I could tell. I'd visited the site before I suggested itto Van in the note, taking care to check for places where someone couldhide. There weren't any.
Once she stopped at the appointed place, I moved quickly to catch upto her. She blinked owlishly at me from behind her glasses.
"Marcus," she breathed, and tears swam in her eyes. I found that I wascrying too. I'd make a really rotten fugitive. Too sentimental.
She hugged me so hard I couldn't breathe. I hugged her back evenharder.
Then she kissed me.
Not on the cheek, not like a sister. Full on the lips, a hot, wet, steamykiss that seemed to go on forever. I was so overcome with emotion —277No, that's bull. I knew exactly what I was doing. I kissed her back.
Then I stopped and pulled away, nearly shoved her away. "Van," Igasped.
"Oops," she said.
"Van," I said again.
"Sorry," she said. "I —"Something occurred to me just then, something I guess I should haveseen a long, long time before.
"You like me, don't you?"She nodded miserably. "For years," she said.
Oh, God. Darryl, all these years, so in love with her, and the wholetime she was looking at me, secretly wanting me. And then I ended upwith Ange. Ange said that she'd always fought with Van. And I was run-ning around, getting into so much trouble.
"Van," I said. "Van, I'm so sorry.""Forget it," she said, looking away. "I know it can't be. I just wanted todo that once, just in case I never —" She bit down on the words.
"Van, I need you to do something for me. Something important. I needyou to meet with the journalist from the Bay Guardian, Barbara Strat-ford, the one who wrote the article. I need you to give her something." Iexplained about Masha's phone, told her about the video that Masha hadsent me.
"What good will this do, Marcus? What's the point?""Van, you were right, at least partly. We can't fix the world by puttingother people at risk. I need to solve the problem by telling what I know. Ishould have done that from the start. Should have walked straight out oftheir custody and to Darryl's father's house and told him what I knew.
Now, though, I have evidence. This stuff — it could change the world.
This is my last hope. The only hope for getting Darryl out, for getting alife that I don't spend underground, hiding from the cops. And you'rethe only person I can trust to do this.""Why me?""You're kidding, right? Look at how well you handled getting here.
You're a pro. You're the best at this of any of us. You're the only one I cantrust. That's why you."278"Why not your friend Angie?" She said the name without any inflec-tion at all, like it was a block of cement.
I looked down. "I thought you knew. They arrested her. She's in Gitmo— on Treasure Island. She's been there for days now." I had been tryingnot to think about this, not to think about what might be happening toher. Now I couldn't stop myself and I started to sob. I felt a pain in mystomach, like I'd been kicked, and I pushed my hands into my middle tohold myself in. I folded there, and the next thing I knew, I was on myside in the rubble under the freeway, holding myself and crying.
Van knelt down by my side. "Give me the phone," she said, her voicean angry hiss. I fished it out of my pocket and passed it to her.
Embarrassed, I stopped crying and sat up. I knew that snot was run-ning down my face. Van was giving me a look of pure revulsion. "Youneed to keep it from going to sleep," I said. "I have a charger here." Irummaged in my pack. I hadn't slept all the way through the night sinceI acquired it. I set the phone's alarm to go off every 90 minutes and wakeme up so that I could keep it from going to sleep. "Don't fold it shut,either.""And the video?""That's harder," I said. "I emailed a copy to myself, but I can't get ontothe Xnet anymore." In a pinch, I could have gone back to Nate and Liamand used their Xbox again, but I didn't want to risk it. "Look, I'm goingto give you my login and password for the Pirate Party's mail-server.
You'll have to use Tor to access it — Homeland Security is bound to bescanning for people logging into p-party mail.""Your login and password," she said, looking a little surprised.
"I trust you, Van. I know I can trust you."She shook her head. "You never give out your passwords, Marcus.""I don't think it matters anymore. Either you succeed or I — or it's theend of Marcus Yallow. Maybe I'll get a new identity, but I don't think so.
I think they'll catch me. I guess I've known all along that they'd catch me,some day."She looked at me, furious now. "What a waste. What was it all for,anyway?"Of all the things she could have said, nothing could have hurt memore. It was like another kick in the stomach. What a waste, all of it, fu-tile. Darryl and Ange, gone. I might never see my family again. And still,Homeland Security had my city and my country caught in a massive,279irrational shrieking freak-out where anything could be done in the nameof stopping terrorism.
Van looked like she was waiting for me to say something, but I hadnothing to say to that. She left me there.
Zeb had a pizza for me when I got back "home" — to the tent under afreeway overpass in the Mission that he'd staked out for the night. Hehad a pup tent, military surplus, stenciled with SAN FRANCISCOLOCAL HOMELESS COORDINATING BOARD.
The pizza was a Dominos, cold and clabbered, but delicious for allthat. "You like pineapple on your pizza?"Zeb smiled condescendingly at me. "Freegans can't be choosy," he said.
"Freegans?""Like vegans, but we only eat free food.""Free food?"He grinned again. "You know — free food. From the free food store?""You stole this?""No, dummy. It's from the other store. The little one out behind thestore? Made of blue steel? Kind of funky smelling?""You got this out of the garbage?"He flung his head back and cackled. "Yes indeedy. You should seeyour face. Dude, it's OK. It's not like it was rotten. It was fresh — just ascrewed up order. They threw it out in the box. They sprinkle rat poisonover everything at closing-time, but if you get there quick, you're OK.
You should see what grocery stores throw out! Wait until breakfast. I'mgoing to make you a fruit salad you won't believe. As soon as one straw-berry in the box goes a little green and fuzzy, the whole thing is out —"I tuned him out. The pizza was fine. It wasn't as if sitting in the dump-ster would infect it or something. If it was gross, that was only because itcame from Domino's — the worst pizza in town. I'd never liked theirfood, and I'd given it up altogether when I found out that they bank-rolled a bunch of ultra-crazy politicians who thought that global warm-ing and evolution were satanic plots.
It was hard to shake the feeling of grossness, though.
280But there was another way to look at it. Zeb had showed me a secret,something I hadn't anticipated: there was a whole hidden world outthere, a way of getting by without participating in the system.
"Freegans, huh?""Yogurt, too," he said, nodding vigorously. "For the fruit salad. Theythrow it out the day after the best-before date, but it's not as if it goesgreen at midnight. It's yogurt, I mean, it's basically just rotten milk to be-gin with."I swallowed. The pizza tasted funny. Rat poison. Spoiled yogurt. Furrystrawberries. This would take some getting used to.
I ate another bite. Actually, Domino's pizza sucked a little less whenyou got it for free.
Liam's sleeping bag was warm and welcoming after a long, emotion-ally exhausting day. Van would have made contact with Barbara bynow. She'd have the video and the picture. I'd call her in the morningand find out what she thought I should do next. I'd have to come in onceshe published, to back it all up.
I thought about that as I closed my eyes, thought about what it wouldbe like to turn myself in, the cameras all rolling, following the infamousM1k3y into one of those big, columnated buildings in Civic Center.
The sound of the cars screaming by overhead turned into a kind ofocean sound as I drifted away. There were other tents nearby, homelesspeople. I'd met a few of them that afternoon, before it got dark and we allretreated to huddle near our own tents. They were all all older than me,rough looking and gruff. None of them looked crazy or violent, though.
Just like people who'd had bad luck, or made bad decisions, or both.
I must have fallen asleep, because I don't remember anything else untila bright light was shined into my face, so bright it was blinding.
"That's him," said a voice behind the light.
"Bag him," said another voice, one I'd heard before, one I'd heard overand over again in my dreams, lecturing to me, demanding mypasswords. Severe-haircut-woman.
The bag went over my head quickly and was cinched so tight at thethroat that I choked and threw up my freegan pizza. As I spasmed andchoked, hard hands bound my wrists, then my ankles. I was rolled ontoa stretcher and hoisted, then carried into a vehicle, up a couple ofclanging metal steps. They dropped me into a padded floor. There was281no sound at all in the back of the vehicle once they closed the doors. Thepadding deadened everything except my own choking.
"Well, hello again," she said. I felt the van rock as she crawled in withme. I was still choking, trying to gasp in a breath. Vomit filled my mouthand trickled down my windpipe.
"We won't let you die," she said. "If you stop breathing, we'll makesure you start again. So don't worry about it."I choked harder. I sipped at air. Some was getting through. Deep,wracking coughs shook my chest and back, dislodging some more of thepuke. More breath.
"See?" she said. "Not so bad. Welcome home, M1k3y. We've got some-where very special to take you."I relaxed onto my back, feeling the van rock. The smell of used pizzawas overwhelming at first, but as with all strong stimuli, my braingradually grew accustomed to it, filtered it out until it was just a faintaroma. The rocking of the van was almost comforting.
That's when it happened. An incredible, deep calm that swept over melike I was lying on the beach and the ocean had swept in and lifted me asgently as a parent, held me aloft and swept me out onto a warm sea un-der a warm sun. After everything that had happened, I was caught, but itdidn't matter. I had gotten the information to Barbara. I had organizedthe Xnet. I had won. And if I hadn't won, I had done everything I couldhave done. More than I ever thought I could do. I took a mental invent-ory as I rode, thinking of everything that I had accomplished, that we hadaccomplished. The city, the country, the world was full of people whowouldn't live the way DHS wanted us to live. We'd fight forever. Theycouldn't jail us all.
I sighed and smiled.
She'd been talking all along, I realized. I'd been so far into my happyplace that she'd just gone away.
"— smart kid like you. You'd think that you'd know better than tomess with us. We've had an eye on you since the day you walked out.
We would have caught you even if you hadn't gone crying to your lesbojournalist traitor. I just don't get it — we had an understanding, you andme… "We rumbled over a metal plate, the van's shocks rocking, and then therocking changed. We were on water. Heading to Treasure Island. Hey,Ange was there. Darryl, too. Maybe.
282The hood didn't come off until I was in my cell. They didn't botherwith the cuffs at my wrists and ankles, just rolled me off the stretcherand onto the floor. It was dark, but by the moonlight from the single,tiny, high window, I could see that the mattress had been taken off thecot. The room contained me, a toilet, a bed-frame, and a sink, and noth-ing else.
I closed my eyes and let the ocean lift me. I floated away. Somewhere,far below me, was my body. I could tell what would happen next. I wasbeing left to piss myself. Again. I knew what that was like. I'd pissed my-self before. It smelled bad. It itched. It was humiliating, like being a baby.
But I'd survived it.
I laughed. The sound was weird, and it drew me back into my body,back to the present. I laughed and laughed. I'd had the worst that theycould throw at me, and I'd survived it, and I'd beaten them, beaten themfor months, showed them up as chumps and despots. I'd won.
I let my bladder cut loose. It was sore and full anyway, and no timelike the present.
The ocean swept me away.
When morning came, two efficient, impersonal guards cut the bind-ings off of my wrists and ankles. I still couldn't walk — when I stood, mylegs gave way like a stringless marionette's. Too much time in one posi-tion. The guards pulled my arms over their shoulders and half-dragged/half-carried me down the familiar corridor. The bar codes on the doorswere curling up and dangling now, attacked by the salt air.
I got an idea. "Ange!" I yelled. "Darryl!" I yelled. My guards yankedme along faster, clearly disturbed but not sure what to do about it.
"Guys, it's me, Marcus! Stay free!"Behind one of the doors, someone sobbed. Someone else cried out inwhat sounded like Arabic. Then it was cacophony, a thousand differentshouting voices.
They brought me to a new room. It was an old shower-room, with theshower-heads still present in the mould tiles.
"Hello, M1k3y," Severe Haircut said. "You seem to have had an event-ful morning." She wrinkled her nose pointedly.
"I pissed myself," I said, cheerfully. "You should try it."283"Maybe we should give you a bath, then," she said. She nodded, andmy guards carried me to another stretcher. This one had restrainingstraps running its length. They dropped me onto it and it was ice-coldand soaked through. Before I knew it, they had the straps across myshoulders, hips and ankles. A minute later, three more straps were tieddown. A man's hands grabbed the railings by my head and releasedsome catches, and a moment later I was tilted down, my head below myfeet.
"Let's start with something simple," she said. I craned my head to seeher. She had turned to a desk with an Xbox on it, connected to anexpensive-looking flat-panel TV. "I'd like you to tell me your login andpassword for your Pirate Party email, please?"I closed my eyes and let the ocean carry me off the beach.
"Do you know what waterboarding is, M1k3y?" Her voice reeled mein. "You get strapped down like this, and we pour water over your head,up your nose and down your mouth. You can't suppress the gag reflex.
They call it a simulated execution, and from what I can tell from this sideof the room, that's a fair assessment. You won't be able to fight the feel-ing that you're dying."I tried to go away. I'd heard of waterboarding. This was it, real torture.
And this was just the beginning.
I couldn't go away. The ocean didn't sweep in and lift me. There was atightness in my chest, my eyelids fluttered. I could feel clammy piss onmy legs and clammy sweat in my hair. My skin itched from the driedpuke.
She swam into view above me. "Let's start with the login," she said.
I closed my eyes, squeezed them shut.
"Give him a drink," she said.
I heard people moving. I took a deep breath and held it.
The water started as a trickle, a ladleful of water gently poured overmy chin, my lips. Up my upturned nostrils. It went back into my throat,starting to choke me, but I wouldn't cough, wouldn't gasp and suck it in-to my lungs. I held onto my breath and squeezed my eyes harder.
There was a commotion from outside the room, a sound of chaoticboots stamping, angry, outraged shouts. The dipper was emptied intomy face.
284I heard her mutter something to someone in the room, then to me shesaid, "Just the login, Marcus. It's a simple request. What could I do withyour login, anyway?"This time, it was a bucket of water, all at once, a flood that didn't stop,it must have been gigantic. I couldn't help it. I gasped and aspirated thewater into my lungs, coughed and took more water in. I knew theywouldn't kill me, but I couldn't convince my body of that. In every fiberof my being, I knew I was going to die. I couldn't even cry — the waterwas still pouring over me.
Then it stopped. I coughed and coughed and coughed, but at the angleI was at, the water I coughed up dribbled back into my nose and burneddown my sinuses.
The coughs were so deep they hurt, hurt my ribs and my hips as Itwisted against them. I hated how my body was betraying me, how mymind couldn't control my body, but there was nothing for it.
Finally, the coughing subsided enough for me to take in what was go-ing on around me. People were shouting and it sounded like someonewas scuffling, wrestling. I opened my eyes and blinked into the brightlight, then craned my neck, still coughing a little.
The room had a lot more people in it than it had had when we started.
Most of them seemed to be wearing body armor, helmets, and smoked-plastic visors. They were shouting at the Treasure Island guards, whowere shouting back, necks corded with veins.
"Stand down!" one of the body-armors said. "Stand down and put yourhands in the air. You are under arrest!"Severe haircut woman was talking on her phone. One of the body ar-mors noticed her and he moved swiftly to her and batted her phoneaway with a gloved hand. Everyone fell silent as it sailed through the airin an arc that spanned the small room, clattering to the ground in ashower of parts.
The silence broke and the body-armors moved into the room. Twograbbed each of my torturers. I almost managed a smile at the look onSevere Haircut's face when two men grabbed her by the shoulders,turned her around, and yanked a set of plastic handcuffs around herwrists.
One of the body-armors moved forward from the doorway. He had avideo camera on his shoulder, a serious rig with blinding white light. He285got the whole room, circling me twice while he got me. I found myselfstaying perfectly still, as though I was sitting for a portrait.
It was ridiculous.
"Do you think you could get me off of this thing?" I managed to get itall out with only a little choking.
Two more body armors moved up to me, one a woman, and began tounstrap me. They flipped their visors up and smiled at me. They had redcrosses on their shoulders and helmets.
Beneath the red crosses was another insignia: CHP. California High-way Patrol. They were State Troopers.
I started to ask what they were doing there, and that's when I saw Bar-bara Stratford. She'd evidently been held back in the corridor, but nowshe came in pushing and shoving. "There you are," she said, kneeling be-side me and grabbing me in the longest, hardest hug of my life.
That's when I knew it — Guantanamo by the Bay was in the hands ofits enemies. I was saved.
Chapter 21
This chapter is dedicated to Pages Books in Toronto, Canada. Long a fix-ture on the bleedingly trendy Queen Street West strip, Pages is locatedover the road from CityTV and just a few doors down from the oldBakka store where I worked. We at Bakka loved having Pages down thestreet from us: what we were to science fiction, they were to everythingelse: hand-picked material representing the stuff you'd never find else-where, the stuff you didn't know you were looking for until you saw itthere. Pages also has one of the best news-stands I've ever seen, row onrow of incredible magazines and zines from all over the world.
Pages Books: 256 Queen St W, Toronto, ON M5V 1Z8 Canada +1 416598 1447They left me and Barbara alone in the room then, and I used the work-ing shower head to rinse off — I was suddenly embarrassed to becovered in piss and barf. When I finished, Barbara was in tears.
"Your parents —" she began.
I felt like I might throw up again. God, my poor folks. What they musthave gone through.
"Are they here?""No," she said. "It's complicated," she said.
"What?""You're still under arrest, Marcus. Everyone here is. They can't justsweep in and throw open the doors. Everyone here is going to have to beprocessed through the criminal justice system. It could take, well, itcould take months.""I'm going to have to stay here for months?"She grabbed my hands. "No, I think we're going to be able to get youarraigned and released on bail pretty fast. But pretty fast is a relativeterm. I wouldn't expect anything to happen today. And it's not going to287be like those people had it. It will be humane. There will be real food. Nointerrogations. Visits from your family.
"Just because the DHS is out, it doesn't mean that you get to just walkout of here. What's happened here is that we're getting rid of the bizarro-world version of the justice system they'd instituted and replacing it withthe old system. The system with judges, open trials and lawyers.
"So we can try to get you transferred to a juvie facility on the main-land, but Marcus, those places can be really rough. Really, really rough.
This might be the best place for you until we get you bailed out."Bailed out. Of course. I was a criminal — I hadn't been charged yet,but there were bound to be plenty of charges they could think of. It waspractically illegal just to think impure thoughts about the government.
She gave my hands another squeeze. "It sucks, but this is how it has tobe. The point is, it's over. The Governor has thrown the DHS out of theState, dismantled every checkpoint. The Attorney General has issuedwarrants for any law-enforcement officers involved in 'stress interroga-tions' and secret imprisonments. They'll go to jail, Marcus, and it's be-cause of what you did."I was numb. I heard the words, but they hardly made sense. Some-how, it was over, but it wasn't over.
"Look," she said. "We probably have an hour or two before this allsettles down, before they come back and put you away again. What doyou want to do? Walk on the beach? Get a meal? These people had an in-credible staff room — we raided it on the way in. Gourmet all the way."At last a question I could answer. "I want to find Ange. I want to findDarryl."I tried to use a computer I found to look up their cell-numbers, but itwanted a password, so we were reduced to walking the corridors, callingout their names. Behind the cell-doors, prisoners screamed back at us, orcried, or begged us to let them go. They didn't understand what had justhappened, couldn't see their former guards being herded onto the docksin plastic handcuffs, taken away by California state SWAT teams.
"Ange!" I called over the din, "Ange Carvelli! Darryl Glover! It'sMarcus!"We'd walked the whole length of the cell-block and they hadn'tanswered. I felt like crying. They'd been shipped overseas — they werein Syria or worse. I'd never see them again.
288I sat down and leaned against the corridor wall and put my face in myhands. I saw Severe Haircut Woman's face, saw her smirk as she askedme for my login. She had done this. She would go to jail for it, but thatwasn't enough. I thought that when I saw her again, I might kill her. Shedeserved it.
"Come on," Barbara said, "Come on, Marcus. Don't give up. There'smore around here, come on."She was right. All the doors we'd passed in the cellblock were old,rusting things that dated back to when the base was first built. But at thevery end of the corridor, sagging open, was a new high-security door asthick as a dictionary. We pulled it open and ventured into the dark cor-ridor within.
There were four more cell-doors here, doors without bar codes. Eachhad a small electronic keypad mounted on it.
"Darryl?" I said. "Ange?""Marcus?"It was Ange, calling out from behind the furthest door. Ange, myAnge, my angel.
"Ange!" I cried. "It's me, it's me!""Oh God, Marcus," she choked out, and then it was all sobs.
I pounded on the other doors. "Darryl! Darryl, are you here?""I'm here." The voice was very small, and very hoarse. "I'm here. I'mvery, very sorry. Please. I'm very sorry."He sounded… broken. Shattered.
"It's me, D," I said, leaning on his door. "It's Marcus. It's over — theyarrested the guards. They kicked the Department of Homeland Securityout. We're getting trials, open trials. And we get to testify against them.""I'm sorry," he said. "Please, I'm so sorry."The California patrolmen came to the door then. They still had theircamera rolling. "Ms Stratford?" one said. He had his faceplate up and helooked like any other cop, not like my savior. Like someone come to lockme up.
"Captain Sanchez," she said. "We've located two of the prisoners of in-terest here. I'd like to see them released and inspect them for myself.""Ma'am, we don't have access codes for those doors yet," he said.
289She held up her hand. "That wasn't the arrangement. I was to havecomplete access to this facility. That came direct from the Governor, sir.
We aren't budging until you open these cells." Her face was perfectlysmooth, without a single hint of give or flex. She meant it.
The Captain looked like he needed sleep. He grimaced. "I'll see what Ican do," he said.
They did manage to open the cells, finally, about half an hour later. Ittook three tries, but they eventually got the right codes entered, match-ing them to the arphids on the ID badges they'd taken off the guardsthey'd arrested.
They got into Ange's cell first. She was dressed in a hospital gown,open at the back, and her cell was even more bare than mine had been —just padding all over, no sink or bed, no light. She emerged blinking intothe corridor and the police camera was on her, its bright lights in herface. Barbara stepped protectively between us and it. Ange stepped tent-atively out of her cell, shuffling a little. There was something wrong withher eyes, with her face. She was crying, but that wasn't it.
"They drugged me," she said. "When I wouldn't stop screaming for alawyer."That's when I hugged her. She sagged against me, but she squeezedback, too. She smelled stale and sweaty, and I smelled no better. I neverwanted to let go.
That's when they opened Darryl's cell.
He had shredded his paper hospital gown. He was curled up, naked,in the back of the cell, shielding himself from the camera and our stares. Iran to him.
"D," I whispered in his ear. "D, it's me. It's Marcus. It's over. Theguards have been arrested. We're going to get bail, we're going home."He trembled and squeezed his eyes shut. "I'm sorry," he whispered,and turned his face away.
They took me away then, a cop in body-armor and Barbara, took meback to my cell and locked the door, and that's where I spent the night.
I don't remember much about the trip to the courthouse. They had mechained to five other prisoners, all of whom had been in for a lot longerthan me. One only spoke Arabic — he was an old man, and he trembled.
290The others were all young. I was the only white one. Once we had beengathered on the deck of the ferry, I saw that nearly everyone on TreasureIsland had been one shade of brown or another.
I had only been inside for one night, but it was too long. There was alight drizzle coming down, normally the sort of thing that would makeme hunch my shoulders and look down, but today I joined everyone elsein craning my head back at the infinite gray sky, reveling in the stingingwet as we raced across the bay to the ferry-docks.
They took us away in buses. The shackles made climbing into thebuses awkward, and it took a long time for everyone to load. No onecared. When we weren't struggling to solve the geometry problem of sixpeople, one chain, narrow bus-aisle, we were just looking around at thecity around us, up the hill at the buildings.
All I could think of was finding Darryl and Ange, but neither were inevidence. It was a big crowd and we weren't allowed to move freelythrough it. The state troopers who handled us were gentle enough, butthey were still big, armored and armed. I kept thinking I saw Darryl inthe crowd, but it was always someone else with that same beaten,hunched look that he'd had in his cell. He wasn't the only broken one.
At the courthouse, they marched us into interview rooms in ourshackle group. An ACLU lawyer took our information and asked us afew questions — when she got to me, she smiled and greeted me byname — and then led us into the courtroom before the judge. He wore anactual robe, and seemed to be a in a good mood.
The deal seemed to be that anyone who had a family member to postbail could go free, and everyone else got sent to prison. The ACLU law-yer did a lot of talking to the judge, asking for a few more hours whilethe prisoners' families were rounded up and brought to the court-house.
The judge was pretty good about it, but when I realized that some ofthese people had been locked up since the bridge blew, taken for dead bytheir families, without trial, subjected to interrogation, isolation, torture— I wanted to just break the chains myself and set everyone free.
When I was brought before the judge, he looked down at me and tookoff his glasses. He looked tired. The ACLU lawyer looked tired. Thebailiffs looked tired. Behind me, I could hear a sudden buzz of conversa-tion as my name was called by the bailiff. The judge rapped his gavelonce, without looking away from me. He scrubbed at his eyes.
"Mr Yallow," he said, "the prosecution has identified you as a flightrisk. I think they have a point. You certainly have more, shall we say,291history, than the other people here. I am tempted to hold you over for tri-al, no matter how much bail your parents are prepared to post."My lawyer started to say something, but the judge silenced her with alook. He scrubbed at his eyes.
"Do you have anything to say?""I had the chance to run," I said. "Last week. Someone offered to takeme away, get me out of town, help me build a new identity. Instead Istole her phone, escaped from our truck, and ran away. I turned over herphone — which had evidence about my friend, Darryl Glover, on it — toa journalist and hid out here, in town.""You stole a phone?""I decided that I couldn't run. That I had to face justice — that my free-dom wasn't worth anything if I was a wanted man, or if the city was stillunder the DHS. If my friends were still locked up. That freedom for mewasn't as important as a free country.""But you did steal a phone."I nodded. "I did. I plan on giving it back, if I ever find the young wo-man in question.""Well, thank you for that speech, Mr Yallow. You are a very wellspoken young man." He glared at the prosecutor. "Some would say avery brave man, too. There was a certain video on the news this morn-ing. It suggested that you had some legitimate reason to evade the au-thorities. In light of that, and of your little speech here, I will grant bail,but I will also ask the prosecutor to add a charge of Misdemeanor PettyTheft to the count, as regards the matter of the phone. For this, I expectanother $50,000 in bail."He banged his gavel again, and my lawyer gave my hand a squeeze.
He looked down at me again and re-seated his glasses. He haddandruff, there on the shoulders of his robe. A little more rained downas his glasses touched his wiry, curly hair.
"You can go now, young man. Stay out of trouble."I turned to go and someone tackled me. It was Dad. He literally liftedme off my feet, hugging me so hard my ribs creaked. He hugged me theway I remembered him hugging me when I was a little boy, when he'dspin me around and around in hilarious, vomitous games of airplane292that ended with him tossing me in the air and catching me and squeez-ing me like that, so hard it almost hurt.
A set of softer hands pried me gently out of his arms. Mom. She heldme at arm's length for a moment, searching my face for something, notsaying anything, tears streaming down her face. She smiled and it turnedinto a sob and then she was holding me too, and Dad's arm encircled usboth.
When they let go, I managed to finally say something. "Darryl?""His father met me somewhere else. He's in the hospital.""When can I see him?""It's our next stop," Dad said. He was grim. "He doesn't —" Hestopped. "They say he'll be OK," he said. His voice was choked.
"How about Ange?""Her mother took her home. She wanted to wait here for you, but… "I understood. I felt full of understanding now, for how all the familiesof all the people who'd been locked away must feel. The courtroom wasfull of tears and hugs, and even the bailiffs couldn't stop it.
"Let's go see Darryl," I said. "And let me borrow your phone?"I called Ange on the way to the hospital where they were keepingDarryl — San Francisco General, just down the street from us — and ar-ranged to see her after dinner. She talked in a hurried whisper. Her momwasn't sure whether to punish her or not, but Ange didn't want to temptfate.
There were two state troopers in the corridor where Darryl was beingheld. They were holding off a legion of reporters who stood on tiptoe tosee around them and get pictures. The flashes popped in our eyes likestrobes, and I shook my head to clear it. My parents had brought meclean clothes and I'd changed in the back seat, but I still felt gross, evenafter scrubbing myself in the court-house bathrooms.
Some of the reporters called my name. Oh yeah, that's right, I was fam-ous now. The state troopers gave me a look, too — either they'd recog-nized my face or my name when the reporters called it out.
Darryl's father met us at the door of his hospital room, speaking in awhisper too low for the reporters to hear. He was in civvies, the jeansand sweater I normally thought of him wearing, but he had his serviceribbons pinned to his breast.
293"He's sleeping," he said. "He woke up a little while ago and he startedcrying. He couldn't stop. They gave him something to help him sleep."He led us in, and there was Darryl, his hair clean and combed, sleep-ing with his mouth open. There was white stuff at the corners of hismouth. He had a semi-private room, and in the other bed there was anolder Arab-looking guy, in his 40s. I realized it was the guy I'd beenchained to on the way off of Treasure Island. We exchanged embarrassedwaves.
Then I turned back to Darryl. I took his hand. His nails had beenchewed to the quick. He'd been a nail-biter when he was a kid, but he'dkicked the habit when we got to high school. I think Van talked him outof it, telling him how gross it was for him to have his fingers in hismouth all the time.
I heard my parents and Darryl's dad take a step away, drawing thecurtains around us. I put my face down next to his on the pillow. He hada straggly, patchy beard that reminded me of Zeb.
"Hey, D," I said. "You made it. You're going to be OK."He snored a little. I almost said, "I love you," a phrase I'd only said toone non-family-member ever, a phrase that was weird to say to anotherguy. In the end, I just gave his hand another squeeze. Poor Darryl.
Epilogue
This chapter is dedicated to Hudson Booksellers, the booksellers that arein practically every airport in the USA. Most of the Hudson stands havejust a few titles (though those are often surprisingly diverse), but the bigones, like the one in the AA terminal at Chicago's O'Hare, are as goodas any neighborhood store. It takes something special to bring a personaltouch to an airport, and Hudson's has saved my mind on more than onelong Chicago layover.
Hudson BooksellersBarbara called me at the office on July 4th weekend. I wasn't the onlyone who'd come into work on the holiday weekend, but I was the onlyone whose excuse was that my day-release program wouldn't let meleave town.
In the end, they convicted me of stealing Masha's phone. Can you be-lieve that? The prosecution had done a deal with my lawyer to drop allcharges related to "Electronic terrorism" and "inciting riots" in exchangefor my pleading guilty to the misdemeanor petty theft charge. I got threemonths in a day-release program with a half-way house for juvenile de-fenders in the Mission. I slept at the halfway house, sharing a dorm witha bunch of actual criminals, gang kids and druggie kids, a couple of realnuts. During the day, I was "free" to go out and work at my "job.""Marcus, they're letting her go," she said.
"Who?""Johnstone, Carrie Johnstone," she said. "The closed military tribunalcleared her of any wrongdoing. The file is sealed. She's being returned toactive duty. They're sending her to Iraq."Carrie Johnstone was Severe Haircut Woman's name. It came out inthe preliminary hearings at the California Superior Court, but that wasjust about all that came out. She wouldn't say a word about who she tookorders from, what she'd done, who had been imprisoned and why. Shejust sat, perfectly silent, day after day, in the courthouse.
The Feds, meanwhile, had blustered and shouted about the Governor's"unilateral, illegal" shut-down of the Treasure Island facility, and theMayor's eviction of fed cops from San Francisco. A lot of those cops hadended up in state prisons, along with the guards from Gitmo-by-the-Bay.
295Then, one day, there was no statement from the White House, nothingfrom the state capitol. And the next day, there was a dry, tense press-conference held jointly on the steps of the Governor's mansion, wherethe head of the DHS and the governor announced their "understanding."The DHS would hold a closed, military tribunal to investigate"possible errors in judgment" committed after the attack on the BayBridge. The tribunal would use every tool at its disposal to ensure thatcriminal acts were properly punished. In return, control over DHS opera-tions in California would go through the State Senate, which would havethe power to shut down, inspect, or re-prioritize all homeland security inthe state.
The roar of the reporters had been deafening and Barbara had gottenthe first question in. "Mr Governor, with all due respect: we have incon-trovertible video evidence that Marcus Yallow, a citizen of this state, nat-ive born, was subjected to a simulated execution by DHS officers, appar-ently acting on orders from the White House. Is the State really willing toabandon any pretense of justice for its citizens in the face of illegal, bar-baric torture?" Her voice trembled, but didn't crack.
The Governor spread his hands. "The military tribunals will accom-plish justice. If Mr Yallow — or any other person who has cause to faultthe Department of Homeland Security — wants further justice, he is, ofcourse, entitled to sue for such damages as may be owing to him fromthe federal government."That's what I was doing. Over twenty thousand civil lawsuits werefiled against the DHS in the week after the Governor's announcement.
Mine was being handled by the ACLU, and they'd filed motions to get atthe results of the closed military tribunals. So far, the courts were prettysympathetic to this.
But I hadn't expected this.
"She got off totally Scot-free?""The press release doesn't say much. 'After a thorough examination ofthe events in San Francisco and in the special anti-terror detention centeron Treasure Island, it is the finding of this tribunal that Ms Johnstone'sactions do not warrant further discipline.' There's that word, 'further' —like they've already punished her."I snorted. I'd dreamed of Carrie Johnstone nearly every night since Iwas released from Gitmo-by-the-Bay. I'd seen her face looming overmine, that little snarly smile as she told the man to give me a "drink."296"Marcus —" Barbara said, but I cut her off.
"It's fine. It's fine. I'm going to do a video about this. Get it out over theweekend. Mondays are big days for viral video. Everyone'll be comingback from the holiday weekend, looking for something funny to forwardaround school or the office."I saw a shrink twice a week as part of my deal at the halfway house.
Once I'd gotten over seeing that as some kind of punishment, it had beengood. He'd helped me focus on doing constructive things when I wasupset, instead of letting it eat me up. The videos helped.
"I have to go," I said, swallowing hard to keep the emotion out of myvoice.
"Take care of yourself, Marcus," Barbara said.
Ange hugged me from behind as I hung up the phone. "I just readabout it online," she said. She read a million newsfeeds, pulling themwith a headline reader that sucked up stories as fast as they ended up onthe wire. She was our official blogger, and she was good at it, snippingout the interesting stories and throwing them online like a short ordercook turning around breakfast orders.
I turned around in her arms so that I was hugging her from in front.
Truth be told, we hadn't gotten a lot of work done that day. I wasn't al-lowed to be out of the halfway house after dinner time, and she couldn'tvisit me there. We saw each other around the office, but there were usu-ally a lot of other people around, which kind of put a crimp in our cud-dling. Being alone in the office for a day was too much temptation. It washot and sultry, too, which meant we were both in tank-tops and shorts, alot of skin-to-skin contact as we worked next to each other.
"I'm going to make a video," I said. "I want to release it today.""Good," she said. "Let's do it."Ange read the press-release. I did a little monologue, synched overthat famous footage of me on the water-board, eyes wild in the harshlight of the camera, tears streaming down my face, hair matted andflecked with barf.
"This is me. I am on a waterboard. I am being tortured in a simulatedexecution. The torture is supervised by a woman called Carrie Johnstone.
She works for the government. You might remember her from thisvideo."I cut in the video of Johnstone and Kurt Rooney. "That's Johnstone andSecretary of State Kurt Rooney, the president's chief strategist."297"The nation does not love that city. As far as they're concerned, it is a Sodomand Gomorrah of fags and atheists who deserve to rot in hell. The only reasonthe country cares what they think in San Francisco is that they had the good for-tune to have been blown to hell by some Islamic terrorists.""He's talking about the city where I live. At last count, 4,215 of myneighbors were killed on the day he's talking about. But some of themmay not have been killed. Some of them disappeared into the same pris-on where I was tortured. Some mothers and fathers, children and lovers,brothers and sisters will never see their loved ones again — because theywere secretly imprisoned in an illegal jail right here in the San FranciscoBay. They were shipped overseas. The records were meticulous, but Car-rie Johnstone has the encryption keys." I cut back to Carrie Johnstone, thefootage of her sitting at the board table with Rooney, laughing.
I cut in the footage of Johnstone being arrested. "When they arrestedher, I thought we'd get justice. All the people she broke and disappeared.
But the president —" I cut to a still of him laughing and playing golf onone of his many holidays "— and his Chief Strategist —" now a still ofRooney shaking hands with an infamous terrorist leader who used to beon "our side" "— intervened. They sent her to a secret military tribunaland now that tribunal has cleared her. Somehow, they saw nothingwrong with all of this."I cut in a photomontage of the hundreds of shots of prisoners in theircells that Barbara had published on the Bay Guardian's site the day wewere released. "We elected these people. We pay their salaries. They'resupposed to be on our side. They're supposed to defend our freedoms.
But these people —" a series of shots of Johnstone and the others who'dbeen sent to the tribunal "— betrayed our trust. The election is fourmonths away. That's a lot of time. Enough for you to go out and find fiveof your neighbors — five people who've given up on voting becausetheir choice is 'none of the above.'
"Talk to your neighbors. Make them promise to vote. Make thempromise to take the country back from the torturers and thugs. Thepeople who laughed at my friends as they lay fresh in their graves at thebottom of the harbor. Make them promise to talk to their neighbors.
"Most of us choose none of the above. It's not working. You have tochoose — choose freedom.
"My name is Marcus Yallow. I was tortured by my country, but I stilllove it here. I'm seventeen years old. I want to grow up in a free country.
I want to live in a free country."298I faded out to the logo of the website. Ange had built it, with help fromJolu, who got us all the free hosting we could ever need on Pigspleen.
The office was an interesting place. Technically we were called Coali-tion of Voters for a Free America, but everyone called us the Xnetters.
The organization — a charitable nonprofit — had been co-founded byBarbara and some of her lawyer friends right after the liberation ofTreasure Island. The funding was kicked off by some tech millionaireswho couldn't believe that a bunch of hacker kids had kicked the DHS'sass. Sometimes, they'd ask us to go down the peninsula to Sand HillRoad, where all the venture capitalists were, and give a little presenta-tion on Xnet technology. There were about a zillion startups who weretrying to make a buck on the Xnet.
Whatever — I didn't have to have anything to do with it, and I got adesk and an office with a storefront, right there on Valencia Street, wherewe gave away ParanoidXbox CDs and held workshops on building bet-ter WiFi antennas. A surprising number of average people dropped in tomake personal donations, both of hardware (you can run ParanoidLinuxon just about anything, not just Xbox Universals) and cash money. Theyloved us.
The big plan was to launch our own ARG in September, just in timefor the election, and to really tie it in with signing up voters and gettingthem to the polls. Only 42 percent of Americans showed up at the pollsfor the last election — nonvoters had a huge majority. I kept trying to getDarryl and Van to one of our planning sessions, but they kept on declin-ing. They were spending a lot of time together, and Van insisted that itwas totally nonromantic. Darryl wouldn't talk to me much at all, thoughhe sent me long emails about just about everything that wasn't aboutVan or terrorism or prison.
Ange squeezed my hand. "God, I hate that woman," she said.
I nodded. "Just one more rotten thing this country's done to Iraq," Isaid. "If they sent her to my town, I'd probably become a terrorist.""You did become a terrorist when they sent her to your town.""So I did," I said.
"Are you going to Ms Galvez's hearing on Monday?""Totally." I'd introduced Ange to Ms Galvez a couple weeks before,when my old teacher invited me over for dinner. The teacher's union hadgotten a hearing for her before the board of the Unified School District toargue for getting her old job back. They said that Fred Benson was299coming out of (early) retirement to testify against her. I was looking for-ward to seeing her again.
"Do you want to go get a burrito?""Totally.""Let me get my hot-sauce," she said.
I checked my email one more time — my PirateParty email, which stillgot a dribble of messages from old Xnetters who hadn't found my Coali-tion of Voters address yet.
The latest message was from a throwaway email address from one ofthe new Brazilian anonymizers.
>
Found her, thanks. You didn't tell me she was so h4wt.
"Who's that from?"I laughed. "Zeb," I said. "Remember Zeb? I gave him Masha's email ad-dress. I figured, if they're both underground, might as well introducethem to one another.""He thinks Masha is cute?""Give the guy a break, he's clearly had his mind warped bycircumstances.""And you?""Me?""Yeah — was your mind warped by circumstances?"I held Ange out at arm's length and looked her up and down and upand down. I held her cheeks and stared through her thick-framed glassesinto her big, mischievous tilted eyes. I ran my fingers through her hair.
"Ange, I've never thought more clearly in my whole life."She kissed me then, and I kissed her back, and it was some time beforewe went out for that burrito.

The End