path: root/data/samples/wrapped/en/little_brother.cory_doctorow.sst

% SiSU 4.0

@title: Little Brother

@creator:
 :author: Doctorow, Cory |email doctorow@craphound.com
 :illustrator: Wilkinson, Richard
 :cover: Wordle

@date:
 :published: 2008

@rights:
 :copyright: Copyright (C) Cory Doctorow, 2008
 :illustrations: Richard Wilkinson, 2009
 :cover: Wordle & Cory Doctorow
 :license: This book is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. That means: \\ You are free: \\ * to Share - to copy, distribute and transmit the work \\ * to Remix - to adapt the work \\ Under the following conditions: \\ * Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). \\ * Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes. \\ * Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one. \\ * For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link http://craphound.com/littlebrother \\ * Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get my permission \\ More info here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ \\ See the end of this file for the complete legalese. [Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License] \\ Cover image: Wordle, Attribution United States (CC BY) 3.0 \\ Illustration: Richard Wilkinson, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

@classify:
 :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:book:novel;book:novel:fiction:civil rights|counterculture|young adult|science fiction|computer hackers|terrorism;democracy
 :subject: Novel
 :loc: PZ7.D66237 Lit 2008

@identifier:
 :oclc: 176972381
 :isbn: 9780765319852

@notes:
 :description: After being interrogated for days by the Department of Homeland Security in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco, California, seventeen-year-old Marcus, released into what is now a police state, decides to use his expertise in computer hacking to set things right.

@links:
 { Little Brother home }http://craphound.com/littlebrother
 { @ Wikipedia }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Brother_(Cory_Doctorow_novel)
 { @ Amazon.com }http://www.amazon.com/Little-Brother-Cory-Doctorow/dp/B002IT5OMA
 { @ Barnes & Noble}http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Little-Brother/Cory-Doctorow/e/9780765319852

@make:
 :breaks: break=1
 :cover_image: {cover_image_wordle_little_brother.png 494x775 "Little Brother" }image
 :home_button_image: {little_brother_doctorow.png }http://craphound.com/littlebrother
 :home_button_text: {Little Brother}http://craphound.com/littlebrother; {Cory Doctorow}http://www.doctorow.com
 :footer: {Little Brother}http://craphound.com/littlebrother; {Cory Doctorow}http://www.doctorow.com

:A~ @title @author

1~cc READ THIS FIRST

group{

This book is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. That means:

You are free:

_* to Share - to copy, distribute and transmit the work

_* to Remix - to adapt the work

Under the following conditions:

_* Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

_* Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.

_* Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one.

_* For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link http://craphound.com/littlebrother

_* Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get my permission

More info here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

See the end of this file for the complete legalese.

}group

1~intro 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 finished it
(Alice, to whom this book is dedicated, had to put up with me clacking out the
final chapter at 5AM in our hotel in Rome, where we were celebrating our
anniversary). I'd always dreamed of having a book just materialize, fully
formed, and come pouring out of my fingertips, no sweat and fuss -- but it
wasn't nearly as much fun as I'd thought it would be. There were days when I
wrote 10,000 words, hunching over my 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 missed so much sleep and so many meals that friends started to ask
if I was unwell.

When my dad was a young university student in the 1960s, he was one of the few
"counterculture" people who thought computers were a good thing. For most young
people, computers represented the de-humanization of society. University
students were reduced to numbers on a punchcard, each bearing the legend "DO
NOT BEND, SPINDLE, FOLD OR MUTILATE," prompting some of the students to wear
pins that said, "I AM A STUDENT: DO NOT BEND, SPINDLE, FOLD OR MUTILATE ME."
Computers were seen as a means to increase the ability of the authorities to
regiment people and bend them to their will.

When I was a 17, the world seemed like it was just going to get more free. The
Berlin Wall was about to come down. Computers -- which had been geeky and weird
a few years before -- were everywhere, and the modem I'd used to connect to
local bulletin board systems was now connecting me to the entire world through
the Internet and commercial online services like GEnie. My lifelong fascination
with activist causes went into overdrive as I saw how the main difficulty in
activism -- organizing -- was getting easier by leaps and bounds (I still
remember the first time I switched from mailing out a newsletter with
hand-written addresses to using a database with mail-merge). In the Soviet
Union, communications tools were being used to bring information -- and
revolution -- to the farthest-flung corners of the largest authoritarian state
the Earth had ever seen.

But 17 years later, things are very different. The computers I love are being
co-opted, used to spy on us, control us, snitch on us. The National Security
Agency has illegally wiretapped the entire USA and gotten away with it. Car
rental companies and mass transit and traffic authorities are watching where we
go, sending us automated tickets, finking us out to busybodies, cops and bad
guys who gain illicit access to their databases. The Transport Security
Administration maintains a "no-fly" list of people who'd never been convicted
of any crime, but who are nevertheless considered too dangerous to fly. The
list's contents are secret. The rule that makes it enforceable is secret. The
criteria for being added 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 a computer
can be. The authoritarian nightmare of the 1960s has come home for them. The
seductive little boxes on their desks and in their pockets watch their every
move, corral them in, systematically depriving them of those new freedoms I had
enjoyed and made such good use of in my young adulthood.

What's more, kids were clearly being used as guinea-pigs for a new kind of
technological state that all of us were on our way to, a world where taking a
picture was either piracy (in a movie theater or museum or even a Starbucks),
or terrorism (in a public place), but where we could be photographed, tracked
and logged hundreds of times a day by every tin-pot dictator, cop, bureaucrat
and shop-keeper. A world where any measure, including torture, could be
justified just by waving your hands and 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 by privacy,
by the right to be left alone, by the right to explore your weird ideas
provided you don't hurt others, then you have common cause with the kids whose
web-browsers and cell phones are being used to lock them up and follow them
around.

If you believe that the answer to bad speech is more speech -- not censorship
-- then you have a dog in the fight.

If you believe in a society of laws, a land where our rulers have to tell us
the rules, and have to follow them too, then you're part of the same struggle
that kids fight when they argue for the right to live under the same Bill of
Rights that adults have.

This book is meant to be part of the conversation about what an information
society means: does it mean total control, or unheard-of liberty? It's not just
a noun, it's a verb, it's something you do.

2~ DO SOMETHING

This book is meant to be something you do, not just something you read. The
technology in this book is either real or nearly real. You can build a lot of
it. You can share it and remix it (see THE COPYRIGHT THING, below). You can use
the ideas to spark important discussions with your friends and family. You can
use those ideas to defeat censorship and get onto the free Internet, even if
your government, employer or school doesn't want you to.

Making stuff: The folks at Instructables have put up some killer HOWTOs for
building the technology in this book. It's easy and incredibly fun. There's
nothing so rewarding in this world as making stuff, especially stuff that makes
you more free: http://www.instructables.com/member/w1n5t0n/

Discussions: There's an educator's manual for this book that my publisher, Tor,
has put together that has tons of ideas for classroom, reading group and home
discussions of the ideas in it:
http://www.tor-forge.com/static/Little_Brother_Readers_Guide.pdf

Defeat censorship: The afterword for this book has lots of resources for
increasing your online freedom, blocking the snoops and evading the censorware
blocks. The more people who know about this stuff, the better.

Your stories: I'm collecting stories of people who've used technology to get
the upper hand when confronted with abusive authority. I'm going to be
including the best of these in a special afterword to the UK edition (see
below) of the book, and I'll be putting them online as well. Send me your
stories at doctorow@craphound.com, with the subject line "Abuses of Authority".

2~ GREAT BRITAIN

I'm a Canadian, and I've lived in lots of places (including San Francisco, the
setting for Little Brother), and now I live in London, England, with my wife
Alice and our little daughter, Poesy. I've lived here (off and on) for five
years now, and though I love it to tiny pieces, there's one thing that's always
bugged me: my books aren't available here. Some stores carried them as special
items, imported from the USA, but it wasn't published by a British publisher.

That's changed! HarperCollins UK has bought the British rights to this book
(along with my next young adult novel, FOR THE WIN), and they're publishing it
just a few months after the US edition, on November 17, 2008 (the day after I
get back from my honeymoon!).

UPDATE: November 27, 2008: And it's on shelves now! The HarperCollins edition's
a knockout, too!

I'm so glad about this, I could bust, honestly. Not just because they're
finally selling my books in my adopted homeland, but because /{I'm raising a
daughter here, dammit}/, and the surveillance and control mania in this country
is starting to scare me bloodless. It seems like the entire police and
governance system in Britain has fallen in love with DNA-swabbing,
fingerprinting and video-recording everyone, on the off chance that someday you
might do something wrong. In early 2008, the head of Scotland Yard seriously
proposed taking DNA from /{five-year-olds}/ who display "offending traits"
because they'll probably grow up to be criminals. The next week, the London
police put up posters asking us all to turn in people who seem to be taking
pictures of the ubiquitous CCTV spy-cameras because anyone who pays too much
attention to the surveillance machine is probably a terrorist.

America isn't the only country that lost its mind this decade. Britain's right
there in the nuthouse with it, dribbling down its shirt front and pointing its
finger at the invisible bogeymen and screaming until it gets its meds.

We need to be having this conversation all over the planet.

Want to get a copy in the UK? Sure thing!
http://craphound.com/littlebrother/buy/#uk

2~ OTHER EDITIONS

My agent, Russell Galen (and his sub-agent Danny Baror) did an amazing job of
pre-selling rights to Little Brother in many languages and formats. Here's the
list as of today (May 4, 2008). I'll be updating it as more editions are sold,
so feel free to grab another copy of this file
(http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download) if there's an edition you're
hoping to see, or see http://craphound.com/littlebrother/buy/ for links to buy
all the currently shipping editions.

_* Audiobook from Random House:
http://www.randomhouse.com/audio/littlebrotheraudiobook

A condition of my deal with Random House is that they're not allowed to release
this on services that use "DRM" (Digital Rights Management) systems intended to
control use and copying. That means that you won't find this book on Audible or
iTunes, because Audible refuses to sell books without DRM (even if the author
and publisher don't want DRM), and iTunes only carries Audible audiobooks.
However, you can buy the MP3 file direct from RandomHouse or many other fine
etailers, or through this widget:
http://www.zipidee.com/zipidAudioPreview.aspx?aid=c5a8e946-fd2c-4b9e-a748-f297bba17de8

_* My foreign rights agent, Danny Baror, has presold a number of foreign
editions:

_* Greece: Pataki

_* Russia: AST Publishing

_* France: Universe Poche

_* Norway: Det Norske Samlaget

No publication dates yet for these, but I'll keep updating this file as more
information is available. You can also subscribe to my mailing list for more
info.

2~ THE COPYRIGHT THING

The Creative Commons license at the top of this file probably tipped you off to
the fact that I've got some pretty unorthodox views about copyright. Here's
what I think of it, in a nutshell: a little goes a long way, and more than that
is too much.

I like the fact that copyright lets me sell rights to my publishers and film
studios and so on. It's nice that they can't just take my stuff without
permission and get rich on it without cutting me in for a piece of the action.
I'm in a pretty good position when it comes to negotiating with these
companies: I've got a great agent and a decade's experience with copyright law
and licensing (including a stint as a delegate at WIPO, the UN agency that
makes the world's copyright treaties). What's more, there's just not that many
of these negotiations -- even if I sell fifty or a hundred different editions
of Little Brother (which would put it in top millionth of a percentile for
fiction), that's still only a hundred negotiations, which I could just about
manage.

I /{hate}/ the fact that fans who want to do what readers have always done are
expected to play in the same system as all these hotshot agents and lawyers.
It's just /{stupid}/ to say that an elementary school classroom should have to
talk to a lawyer at a giant global publisher before they put on a play based on
one of my books. It's ridiculous to say that people who want to "loan" their
electronic copy of my book to a friend need to get a /{license}/ to do so.
Loaning books has been around longer than any publisher on Earth, and it's a
fine thing.

I recently saw Neil Gaiman give a talk at which someone asked him how he felt
about piracy of his books. He said, "Hands up in the audience if you discovered
your favorite writer for free -- because someone loaned you a copy, or because
someone gave it to you? Now, hands up if you found your favorite writer by
walking into a store and plunking down cash." Overwhelmingly, the audience said
that they'd discovered their favorite writers for free, on a loan or as a gift.
When it comes to my favorite writers, there's no boundaries: I'll buy every
book they publish, just to own it (sometimes I buy two or three, to give away
to friends who /{must}/ read those books). I pay to see them live. I buy
t-shirts with their book-covers on them. I'm a customer for life.

Neil went on to say that he was part of the tribe of readers, the tiny minority
of people in the world who read for pleasure, buying books because they love
them. One thing he knows about everyone who downloads his books on the Internet
without permission is that they're /{readers}/, they're people who love books.

People who study the habits of music-buyers have discovered something curious:
the biggest pirates are also the biggest spenders. If you pirate music all
night long, chances are you're one of the few people left who also goes to the
record store (remember those?) during the day. You probably go to concerts on
the weekend, and you probably check music out of the library too. If you're a
member of the red-hot music-fan tribe, you do lots of /{everything}/ that has
to do with music, from singing in the shower to paying for black-market vinyl
bootlegs of rare Eastern European covers of your favorite death-metal band.

Same with books. I've worked in new bookstores, used bookstores and libraries.
I've hung out in pirate ebook ("bookwarez") places online. I'm a stone used
bookstore junkie, and I go to book fairs for fun. And you know what? It's the
same people at all those places: book fans who do lots of everything that has
to do with books. I buy weird, fugly pirate editions of my favorite books in
China because they're weird and fugly and look great next to the eight or nine
other editions that I paid full-freight for of the same books. I check books
out of the library, google them when I need a quote, carry dozens around on my
phone and hundreds on my laptop, and have (at this writing) more than 10,000 of
them in storage lockers in London, Los Angeles and Toronto.

If I could loan out my physical books without giving up possession of them, I
/{would}/. The fact that I can do so with digital files is not a bug, it's a
feature, and a damned fine one. It's embarrassing to see all these writers and
musicians and artists bemoaning the fact that art just got this wicked new
feature: the ability to be shared without losing access to it in the first
place. It's like watching restaurant owners crying down their shirts about the
new free lunch machine that's feeding the world's starving people because it'll
force them to reconsider their business-models. Yes, that's gonna be tricky,
but let's not lose sight of the main attraction: free lunches!

Universal access to human knowledge is in our grasp, for the first time in the
history of the world. This is not a bad thing.

In case that's not enough for you, here's my pitch on why giving away ebooks
makes sense at this time and place:

Giving away ebooks gives me artistic, moral and commercial satisfaction. The
commercial question is the one that comes up most often: how can you give away
free ebooks and still make money?

For me -- for pretty much every writer -- the big problem isn't piracy, it's
obscurity (thanks to Tim O'Reilly for this great aphorism). Of all the people
who failed to buy this book today, the majority did so because they never heard
of it, not because someone gave them a free copy. Mega-hit best-sellers in
science fiction sell half a million copies -- in a world where 175,000 attend
the San Diego Comic Con alone, you've got to figure that most of the people who
"like science fiction" (and related geeky stuff like comics, games, Linux, and
so on) just don't really buy books. I'm more interested in getting more of that
wider audience into the tent than making sure that everyone who's in the tent
bought a ticket to be there.

Ebooks are verbs, not nouns. You copy them, it's in their nature. And many of
those copies have a destination, a person they're intended for, a hand-wrought
transfer from one person to another, embodying a personal recommendation
between two people who trust each other enough to share bits. That's the kind
of thing that authors (should) dream of, the proverbial sealing of the deal. By
making my books available for free pass-along, I make it easy for people who
love them to help other people love them.

What's more, I don't see ebooks as substitute for paper books for most people.
It's not that the screens aren't good enough, either: if you're anything like
me, you already spend every hour you can get in front of the screen, reading
text. But the more computer-literate you are, the less likely you are to be
reading long-form works on those screens -- that's because computer-literate
people do more things with their computers. We run IM and email and we use the
browser in a million diverse ways. We have games running in the background, and
endless opportunities to tinker with our music libraries. The more you do with
your computer, the more likely it is that you'll be interrupted after five to
seven minutes to do something else. That makes the computer extremely poorly
suited to reading long-form works off of, unless you have the iron
self-discipline of a monk.

The good news (for writers) is that this means that ebooks on computers are
more likely to be an enticement to buy the printed book (which is, after all,
cheap, easily had, and easy to use) than a substitute for it. You can probably
read just enough of the book off the screen to realize you want to be reading
it on paper.

So ebooks sell print books. Every writer I've heard of who's tried giving away
ebooks to promote paper books has come back to do it again. That's the
commercial case for doing free ebooks.

Now, onto the artistic case. It's the twenty-first century. Copying stuff is
never, ever going to get any harder than it is today (or if it does, it'll be
because civilization has collapsed, at which point we'll have other problems).
Hard drives aren't going to get bulkier, more expensive, or less capacious.
Networks won't get slower or harder to access. If you're not making art with
the intention of having it copied, you're not really making art for the
twenty-first century. There's something charming about making work you don't
want to be copied, in the same way that it's nice to go to a Pioneer Village
and see the olde-timey blacksmith shoeing a horse at his traditional forge. But
it's hardly, you know, /{contemporary}/. I'm a science fiction writer. It's my
job to write about the future (on a good day) or at least the present. Art
that's not supposed to be copied is from the past.

Finally, let's look at the moral case. Copying stuff is natural. It's how we
learn (copying our parents and the people around us). My first story, written
when I was six, was an excited re-telling of Star Wars, which I'd just seen in
the theater. Now that the Internet -- the world's most efficient copying
machine -- is pretty much everywhere, our copying instinct is just going to
play out more and more. There's no way I can stop my readers, and if I tried,
I'd be a hypocrite: when I was 17, I was making mix-tapes, photocopying
stories, and generally copying in every way I could imagine. If the Internet
had been around then, I'd have been using it to copy as much as I possibly
could.

There's no way to stop it, and the people who try end up doing more harm than
piracy ever did. The record industry's ridiculous holy war against file-sharers
(more than 20,000 music fans sued and counting!) exemplifies the absurdity of
trying to get the food-coloring out of the swimming pool. If the choice is
between allowing copying or being a frothing bully lashing out at anything he
can reach, I choose the former.

2~ DONATIONS AND A WORD TO TEACHERS AND LIBRARIANS

Every time I put a book online for free, I get emails from readers who want to
send me donations for the book. I appreciate their generous spirit, but I'm not
interested in cash donations, because my publishers are really important to me.
They contribute immeasurably to the book, improving it, introducing it to
audience I could never reach, helping me do more with my work. I have no desire
to cut them out of the loop.

But there has to be some good way to turn that generosity to good use, and I
think I've found it.

Here's the deal: there are lots of teachers and librarians who'd love to get
hard-copies of this book into their kids' hands, but don't have the budget for
it (teachers in the US spend around $1,200 out of pocket each on classroom
supplies that their budgets won't stretch to cover, which is why I sponsor a
classroom at Ivanhoe Elementary in my old neighborhood in Los Angeles; you can
adopt a class yourself here: http://www.adoptaclassroom.org/).

There are generous people who want to send some cash my way to thank me for the
free ebooks.

I'm proposing that we put them together.

If you're a teacher or librarian and you want a free copy of Little Brother,
email freelittlebrother@gmail.com with your name and the name and address of
your school. It'll be posted to
http://craphound.com/littlebrother/category/donate/ by my fantastic helper,
Olga Nunes, so that potential donors can see it.

If you enjoyed the electronic edition of Little Brother and you want to donate
something to say thanks, go to http://craphound.com/littlebrother/donate/ and
find a teacher or librarian you want to support. Then go to Amazon, BN.com, or
your favorite electronic bookseller and order a copy to the classroom, then
email a copy of the receipt (feel free to delete your address and other
personal info first!) to freelittlebrother@gmail.com so that Olga can mark that
copy as sent. If you don't want to be publicly acknowledged for your
generosity, let us know and we'll keep you anonymous, otherwise we'll thank you
on the donate page.

I have no idea if this will end up with hundreds, dozens or just a few copies
going out -- but I have high hopes!

1~dedication DEDICATION

For Alice, who makes me whole

1~quotes QUOTES

group{

"A rousing tale of techno-geek rebellion, as necessary and dangerous as file
sharing, free speech, and bottled water on a plane."

*{Scott Westerfeld}*, author of UGLIES and EXTRAS

}group

group{

"I can talk about Little Brother in terms of its bravura political speculation
or its brilliant uses of technology -- each of which make this book a must-read
-- but, at the end of it all, I'm haunted by the universality of Marcus's
rite-of-passage and struggle, an experience any teen today is going to grasp:
the moment when you choose what your life will mean and how to achieve it."

*{Steven C Gould}*, author of JUMPER and REFLEX

}group

group{

I'd recommend Little Brother over pretty much any book I've read this year, and
I'd want to get it into the hands of as many smart 13 year olds, male and
female, as I can.

Because I think it'll change lives. Because some kids, maybe just a few, won't
be the same after they've read it. Maybe they'll change politically, maybe
technologically. Maybe it'll just be the first book they loved or that spoke to
their inner geek. Maybe they'll want to argue about it and disagree with it.
Maybe they'll want to open their computer and see what's in there. I don't
know. It made me want to be 13 again right now and reading it for the first
time, and then go out and make the world better or stranger or odder. It's a
wonderful, important book, in a way that renders its flaws pretty much
meaningless.

*{Neil Gaiman}*, author of ANANSI BOYS

}group

group{

Little Brother is a scarily realistic adventure about how homeland security
technology could be abused to wrongfully imprison innocent Americans. A teenage
hacker-turned-hero pits himself against the government to fight for his basic
freedoms. This book is action-packed with tales of courage, technology, and
demonstrations of digital disobedience as the technophile's civil protest."

*{Bunnie Huang}*, author of HACKING THE XBOX

}group

group{

Cory Doctorow is a fast and furious storyteller who gets all the details of
alternate reality gaming right, while offering a startling, new vision of how
these games might play out in the high-stakes context of a terrorist attack.
Little Brother is a brilliant novel with a bold argument: hackers and gamers
might just be our country's best hope for the future.

*{Jane McGonical}*, Designer, I Love Bees

}group

group{


The right book at the right time from the right author -- and, not entirely
coincidentally, Cory Doctorow's best novel yet.

*{John Scalzi}*, author of OLD MAN'S WAR

}group

group{

It's about growing up in the near future where things have kept going on the
way they've been going, and it's about hacking as a habit of mind, but mostly
it's about growing up and changing and looking at the world and asking what you
can do about that. The teenage voice is pitch-perfect. I couldn't put it down,
and I loved it.

*{Jo Walton}*, author of FARTHING

}group

group{

A worthy younger sibling to Orwell's 1984, Cory Doctorow's LITTLE BROTHER is
lively, precocious, and most importantly, a little scary.

*{Brian K Vaughn}*, author of Y: THE LAST MAN

}group

group{

"Little Brother" sounds an optimistic warning. It extrapolates from current
events to remind us of the ever-growing threats to liberty. But it also notes
that liberty ultimately resides in our individual attitudes and actions. In our
increasingly authoritarian world, I especially hope that teenagers and young
adults will read it -- and then persuade their peers, parents and teachers to
follow suit.

*{Dan Gillmor}*, author of WE, THE MEDIA

}group

1~bookstores ABOUT THE BOOKSTORE DEDICATIONS

Every chapter of this file has been dedicated to a different bookstore, and in
each case, it's a store that I love, a store that's helped me discover books
that opened my mind, a store that's helped my career along. The stores didn't
pay me anything for this -- I haven't even told them about it -- but it seems
like the right thing to do. After all, I'm hoping that you'll read this ebook
and decide to buy the paper book, so it only makes sense to suggest a few
places you can pick it up!

1~ Chapter 1

_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to BakkaPhoenix Books in Toronto, Canada.~{
BakkaPhoenix Books: http://www.bakkaphoenixbooks.com/ 697 Queen Street West,
Toronto ON Canada M6J1E6, +1 416 963 9993 }~ Bakka is the oldest science
fiction bookstore in the world, and it made me the mutant I am today. I
wandered in for the first time around the age of 10 and asked for some
recommendations. Tanya Huff (yes, _{the}_ Tanya Huff, but she wasn't a famous
writer back then!) took me back into the used section and pressed a copy of H.
Beam Piper's "Little Fuzzy" into my hands, and changed my life forever. By the
time I was 18, I was working at Bakka -- I took over from Tanya when she
retired to write full time -- and I learned life-long lessons about how and why
people buy books. I think every writer should work at a bookstore (and plenty
of writers have worked at Bakka over the years! For the 30th anniversary of the
store, they put together an anthology of stories by Bakka writers that included
work by Michelle Sagara (AKA Michelle West), Tanya Huff, Nalo Hopkinson, Tara
Tallan --and me!)] }/

I'm a senior at Cesar Chavez high in San Francisco's sunny Mission district,
and that makes me one of the most surveilled people in the world. My name is
Marcus Yallow, but back when this story starts, I was going by w1n5t0n.
Pronounced "Winston."

/{Not}/ pronounced "Double-you-one-enn-five-tee-zero-enn" -- unless you're a
clueless disciplinary officer who's far enough behind the curve that you still
call the Internet "the information superhighway."

I know just such a clueless person, and his name is Fred Benson, one of three
vice-principals at Cesar Chavez. He's a sucking chest wound of a human being.
But if you're going to have a jailer, better a clueless one than one who's
really on the ball.

"Marcus Yallow," he said over the PA one Friday morning. The PA isn't very good
to begin with, and when you combine that with Benson's habitual mumble, you get
something that sounds more like someone struggling to digest a bad burrito than
a school announcement. But human beings are good at picking their names out of
audio confusion -- it's a survival trait.

I grabbed my bag and folded my laptop three-quarters shut -- I didn't want 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 I rolled my
eyes back at her. The Man was always coming down on me, just because I go
through school firewalls like wet kleenex, spoof the gait-recognition software,
and nuke the snitch chips they track us with. Galvez is a good type, anyway,
never holds that against me (especially when I'm helping get with her webmail
so she can talk to her brother who's stationed in Iraq).

My boy Darryl gave me a smack on the ass as I walked past. I've known 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 exit from 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 stop me? I ducked into the
toilet and shut myself in the middle stall (the furthest stall is always
grossest because so many people head straight for it, hoping to escape the
smell and the squick -- the smart money and good hygiene is down the middle). I
checked the phone -- my home PC had sent it an email to tell it that there was
something new up on Harajuku Fun Madness, which happens to be the best game
ever invented.

I grinned. Spending Fridays at school was teh suck anyway, and I was glad of
the excuse to make my escape.

I ambled the rest of the way to Benson's office and tossed him a wave as I
sailed through the door.

"If it isn't Double-you-one-enn-five-tee-zero-enn," he said. Fredrick Benson --
Social Security number 545-03-2343, date of birth August 15 1962, mother's
maiden name Di Bona, hometown Petaluma -- is a lot taller than me. I'm a runty
5'8", while he stands 6'7", and his college basketball days are far enough
behind him that his chest muscles have turned into saggy man-boobs that were
painfully obvious through his freebie dot-com polo-shirts. He always looks like
he's about to slam-dunk 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 eyeball and
waited for me to wilt. Of course it was my handle, and had been for years. It
was the identity I used when I was posting on message-boards where I was making
my contributions to the field of applied security research. 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 a small number of people did, and I
trusted them all to the end of the earth.

"Um, not ringing any bells," I said. I'd done some pretty cool stuff around
school using that handle -- I was very proud of my work on snitch-tag killers
-- and if he could link the two identities, I'd be in trouble. No one at school
ever called me w1n5t0n or even Winston. Not even my pals. It was Marcus or
nothing.

Benson settled down behind his desk and tapped his class-ring nervously on his
blotter. He did this whenever things started to go bad for him. Poker players
call stuff like this a "tell" -- something that let you know what was going on
in the other guy's head. I knew Benson's tells backwards 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" to
authority figures when I'm messing with them. It's my own tell.

He shook his head at me and looked down, another tell. Any second now, he was
going to start shouting at me. "Listen, kiddo! It's time you came 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 if you're not expelled before
this meeting is through. Do you want to graduate?"

"Mr Benson, you still haven't explained what the problem is --"

He slammed his hand down on the desk and then pointed his finger at me. "The
/{problem}/, Mr Yallow, is that you've been engaged in criminal conspiracy to
subvert this school's security system, and you have supplied security
countermeasures to your fellow students. You know that we 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-shop near the 16th Street BART station
and it had set off the countermeasures 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 out that the 1 was
an I and the 5 was an S. "We know that this w1n5t0n character is responsible
for the theft of last year's standardized tests." That actually hadn't been me,
but it was a sweet hack, and it was kind of flattering to hear it attributed to
me. "And therefore liable for several years in prison 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 it over
to them. It sounds like this is a very serious matter, and I wouldn't want to
stand in the way of a proper investigation by the duly constituted
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 to fold the
second he dropped the bomb on me. I don't fold. I have a trick for staring down
people like Benson. I look slightly to the left of their heads, and think about
the lyrics to old Irish folk songs, the kinds with three hundred verses. It
makes me look perfectly composed and unworried.

/{And the wing was on the bird and the bird was on the egg and the egg was in
the nest and the nest was on the leaf and the leaf was on the twig and the twig
was on the branch and the branch was on the limb and the limb was in the tree
and the tree was in the bog -- the bog down in the valley-oh! High-ho the
rattlin' bog, the bog down in the valley-oh --}/

"You can return to class now," he said. "I'll call on you once the police are
ready to speak to you."

"Are you going to call them now?"

"The procedure for calling in the police is complicated. I'd hoped that we
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 --"

I got out, keeping my expression neutral. He wasn't going to call the cops. If
he'd had enough evidence to go to the police with, he would have called them in
the first place. He hated my guts. I figured he'd heard some unverified gossip
and hoped to spook me into confirming it.

I moved down the corridor lightly and sprightly, keeping my gait even and
measured for the gait-recognition cameras. These had been installed only a year
before, and I loved them for their sheer idiocy. Beforehand, we'd had
face-recognition cameras covering nearly every public space in school, but a
court ruled that was unconstitutional. So Benson and a lot of other paranoid
school administrators had spent our textbook dollars on these idiot cameras
that were supposed to be able to tell one person's walk from another. Yeah,
right.

I got back to class and sat down again, Ms Galvez warmly welcoming me back. I
unpacked the school's standard-issue machine and got back into classroom mode.
The SchoolBooks were the snitchiest technology of them all, logging every
keystroke, watching all the network traffic for suspicious keywords, counting
every click, keeping track of every fleeting thought you put out over the net.
We'd gotten them in my junior year, and it only took a couple months for the
shininess to wear off. Once people figured out that these "free" laptops worked
for the man -- and showed a never-ending parade of obnoxious ads to boot --
they suddenly started to feel very heavy and burdensome.

Cracking my SchoolBook had been easy. The crack was online within a month of
the machine showing up, and there was nothing to it -- just download a DVD
image, burn it, stick it in the SchoolBook, and boot it while holding down a
bunch of different keys at the same time. The DVD did the rest, installing a
whole bunch of hidden programs on the machine, programs that would stay hidden
even when the Board of Ed did its daily remote integrity checks of the
machines. Every now and again I had to get an update for the software to get
around the Board's latest tests, but it was a small price to pay to get a
little control over the box.

I fired up IMParanoid, the secret instant messenger that I used when I wanted
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 Fun Madness,
dude. You in?

> No. 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. Plenty of time
to run down this clue and get back before anyone misses us. I'll get the whole
team out.

Harajuku Fun Madness is the best game ever made. I know I already said 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 miraculous healing gem
at the temple in Harajuku, which is basically where cool Japanese teenagers
invented every major subculture for the past ten years. They're being hunted by
evil monks, the Yakuza (AKA the Japanese mafia), aliens, tax-inspectors,
parents, and a rogue artificial intelligence. They slip the players coded
messages that we have to decode and use to track down clues that lead to more
coded messages and more clues.

Imagine the best afternoon you've ever spent prowling the streets of a city,
checking out all the weird people, funny hand-bills, street-maniacs, and funky
shops. Now add a scavenger hunt to that, one that requires you to research
crazy old films and songs and teen culture from around the world and across
time and space. And it's a competition, with the winning team of four taking a
grand prize of ten days in Tokyo, chilling on Harajuku bridge, geeking out in
Akihabara, and taking home all the Astro 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 or two, 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 out
without anyone knowing it. You know I can do that, right?

> I know you can do it

> So you're in?

> Hell no

> Come on, Darryl. You're not going to your deathbed wishing you'd spent more
study periods sitting in school

> I'm not going to go to my deathbed wishing I'd spent more time playing ARGs
either

> Yeah but don't you think you might go to your death-bed wishing you'd spent
more time with Vanessa Pak?

Van was part of my team. She went to a private girl's school in the East Bay,
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 puberty endowed her with many
lavish gifts. Darryl had fallen in love with her mind. Sad, really.

> You suck

> You're coming?

He looked at me and shook his head. Then he nodded. I winked at him and 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 a LARPer.
LARPing is Live Action Role Playing, and it's just about what it sounds like:
running around in costume, talking in a funny accent, pretending to be a
super-spy or a vampire or a medieval knight. It's like Capture 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 town in Sonoma or down on the Peninsula.
Those three-day epics could get pretty hairy, with all-day hikes, epic battles
with foam-and-bamboo swords, casting spells by throwing beanbags and shouting
"Fireball!" and so on. Good fun, if a little goofy. Not nearly as geeky as
talking about what your elf planned on doing as you sat around a table loaded
with Diet Coke cans and painted miniatures, and more physically active than
going into a mouse-coma in front of a massively multiplayer game at home.

The thing that got me into trouble were the mini-games in the hotels. Whenever
a science fiction convention came to town, some LARPer would convince them to
let us run a couple of six-hour mini-games at the con, piggybacking on their
rental of the space. Having a bunch of enthusiastic kids running around in
costume lent color to the event, and we got 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 begin and 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 time to prepare.
The first order of business were those pesky gait-recognition cameras. Like I
said, they'd started out as face-recognition cameras, but those had been ruled
unconstitutional. As far as I know, no court has yet determined whether these
gait-cams are any more legal, but until they do, we're stuck with them.

"Gait" is a fancy word for the way you walk. People are pretty good at spotting
gaits -- next time you're on a camping trip, check out the bobbing of the
flashlight as a distant friend approaches you. Chances are you can identify him
just from the movement of the light, the characteristic way it bobs up and down
that tells our monkey brains that this is a person approaching us.

Gait recognition software takes pictures of your motion, tries to isolate you
in the pics as a silhouette, and then tries to match the silhouette to a
database to see if it knows who you are. It's a biometric identifier, like
fingerprints or retina-scans, but it's got a lot more "collisions" than either
of those. A biometric "collision" is when a measurement matches more than one
person. Only you have your fingerprint, but you share your gait with plenty
other people.

Not exactly, of course. Your personal, inch-by-inch walk is yours and yours
alone. The problem is your inch-by-inch walk changes based on how tired you
are, what the floor is made of, whether you pulled your ankle playing
basketball, and whether you've changed your shoes lately. So the system kind of
fuzzes-out your profile, looking for people who walk kind of like you.

There are a lot of people who walk kind of like you. What's more, it's easy 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 cameras will eventually
figure out that it's still you. Which is why I prefer to inject a little
randomness into my attacks on gait-recognition: I put a handful of gravel into
each shoe. Cheap and effective, and no two steps are 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 recognize
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 fixing up the basketball
court. When a student showed up wearing new shoes.

So now it just tries to keep track of who's where and when. If someone leaves
by the school-gates during classes, their gait is checked to see if it
kinda-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 couple handsful of
rocks in my shoulder-bag, just in case. I silently passed Darryl 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 checked the
Harajuku Fun Madness site to see where the next clue was! I'd been a little
hyper-focused on the escape, and hadn't bothered to figure out where we were
escaping /{to}/.

I turned to my SchoolBook and hit the keyboard. The web-browser we used was
supplied with the machine. It was a locked-down spyware version of Internet
Explorer, Microsoft's crashware turd that no one under the age of 40 used
voluntarily.

I had a copy of Firefox on the USB drive built into my watch, but that wasn't
enough -- the SchoolBook ran Windows Vista4Schools, an antique operating system
designed to give school administrators the illusion that they controlled the
programs their students could run.

But Vista4Schools is its own worst enemy. There are a lot of programs that
Vista4Schools doesn't want you to be able to shut down -- keyloggers,
censorware -- and these programs run in a special mode that makes them
invisible to the system. You can't quit them because you can't even see they're
there.

Any program whose name starts with $SYS$ is invisible to the operating system.
it doesn't show up on listings of the hard drive, nor in the process monitor.
So my copy of Firefox was called $SYS$Firefox -- and as I launched it, it
became invisible to Windows, and so invisible to the network's snoopware.

Now I had an indie browser running, I needed an indie network connection. The
school's network logged every click in and out of the system, which was bad
news if you were planning on surfing over to the Harajuku 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 and passes them
onto other onion routers, and on to other onion routers, until one of them
finally decides to fetch the page and pass it back through the 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're asking for, and the layers of
the onion don't know who they're working for. There are millions of nodes --
the program was set up by the US Office of Naval Research to help their people
get around the censorware in countries like Syria and China, which means that
it's perfectly designed for operating in the confines of an average American
high school.

TOR works because the school has a finite blacklist of naughty addresses we
aren't allowed to visit, and the addresses of the nodes change all the time --
no way could the school keep track of them all. Firefox and TOR together made
me into the invisible man, impervious to Board of Ed snooping, free to check
out the Harajuku FM site and see what was up.

There it was, a new clue. Like all Harajuku Fun Madness clues, it had a
physical, online and mental component. The online component was a puzzle you
had to solve, one that required you to research the answers to a bunch of
obscure questions. This batch included a bunch of questions on the plots in
dojinshi -- those are comic books drawn by fans of manga, Japanese comics. They
can be as big as the official comics that inspire them, but they're a lot
weirder, with crossover story-lines and sometimes really silly songs and
action. Lots of love stories, of course. Everyone loves to see their favorite
toons hook up.

I'd have to solve those riddles later, when I got home. They were easiest to
solve with the whole team, downloading tons of dojinshi files and scouring them
for answers to the puzzles.

I'd just finished scrap-booking all the clues when the bell rang and we began
our escape. I surreptitiously slid the gravel down the side of my short boots
-- ankle-high Blundstones from Australia, great for running and climbing, and
the easy slip-on/slip-off laceless design makes them convenient at the
never-ending metal-detectors that are everywhere now.

We also had to evade physical surveillance, of course, but that gets easier
every time they add a new layer of physical snoopery -- all the bells and
whistles lull our beloved faculty into a totally false sense of security. We
surfed the crowd down the hallways, heading for my favorite side-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 we passed.
Library books are bad news. Every one of them has an arphid -- Radio Frequency
ID tag -- glued into its binding, which makes it possible for the librarians to
check out the books by waving them over a reader, and lets a library shelf tell
you if any of the books on it are out of place.

But it also lets the school track where you are at all times. It was another of
those legal loopholes: the courts wouldn't let the schools track /{us}/ with
arphids, but they could track /{library books}/, and use the school records 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 lined with a
mesh of copper wires that effectively block radio energy, silencing arphids.
But the pouches were made for neutralizing ID cards and toll-booth
transponders, not books like --

"Introduction to Physics?" I groaned. The book was the size of a dictionary.

1~ Chapter 2

_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Amazon.com,~{ Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0765319853/downandoutint-20 }~ the
largest Internet bookseller in the world. Amazon is _{amazing}_ -- a "store"
where you can get practically any book ever published (along with practically
everything else, from laptops to cheese-graters), where they've elevated
recommendations to a high art, where they allow customers to directly
communicate with each other, where they are constantly inventing new and better
ways of connecting books with readers. Amazon has always treated me like gold
-- the founder, Jeff Bezos, even posted a reader-review for my first novel! --
and I shop there like crazy (looking at my spreadsheets, it appears that I buy
something from Amazon approximately every _{six days}_). Amazon's in the
process of reinventing what it means to be a bookstore in the twenty-first
century and I can't think of a better group of people to be facing down that
thorny set of problems.] }/

"I'm thinking of majoring in physics when I go to Berkeley," Darryl said. His
dad taught at the University of California at Berkeley, which meant he'd get
free tuition when he went. And there'd never been any question 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 any crimes
today."

"Skipping school isn't a crime. It's an infraction. They're totally different."

"What are we going to do, Marcus?"

"Well, I can't hide it, so I'm going to have to nuke it." Killing arphids is a
dark art. No merchant wants malicious customers going for a walk around the
shop-floor and leaving behind a bunch of lobotomized merchandise that is
missing its invisible bar-code, so the manufacturers have refused to implement
a "kill signal" that you can radio to an arphid to get it to switch off. You
can reprogram arphids with the right box, but I hate doing 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 be shelved and can't be found. It just
becomes a needle in a haystack.

That left me with only one option: nuking the thing. Literally. 30 seconds in a
microwave will do in pretty much every arphid on the market. And because the
arphid wouldn't answer at all when D checked it back in at the library, they'd
just print a fresh one for it and recode it with the book's catalog info, and
it would end up clean and neat back on its shelf.

All we needed was a microwave.

"Give it another two minutes and the teacher's lounge will be empty," I said.

Darryl grabbed his book at headed for the door. "Forget it, no way. I'm going
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 get busted
/{just once more}/, I am /{expelled.}/ You hear that? /{Expelled.}/"

"You won't get caught," I said. The one place a teacher wouldn't be after this
period was the lounge. "We'll go in the back way." The lounge had a little
kitchenette off to one side, with its own entrance for teachers who just wanted
to pop in and get a cup of joe. The microwave -- which always reeked of popcorn
and spilled soup -- was right in there, on top of the miniature fridge.

Darryl groaned. I thought fast. "Look, the bell's /{already rung}/. if you go
to study hall now, you'll get a late-slip. Better not to show at all at this
point. I can infiltrate and exfiltrate any room on this campus, D. You've seen
me do it. I'll keep you safe, bro."

He groaned again. That was one of Darryl's tells: once he starts groaning, 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 the
basement, 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 knob and dragged
Darryl in before silently closing the door.

The book just barely fit in the microwave, which was looking even less sanitary
than it had the last time I'd popped in here to use it. I conscientiously
wrapped it in paper towels before I set it down. "Man, teachers are /{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 a frozen grape, which
has to be seen to be believed).

Now, to exfiltrate the campus in perfect anonymity and make our escape.

Darryl opened the door and began to move out, me on his heels. A second 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, and we've known
each other as long as I've known Darryl, but that's where the resemblance ends.
Charles has always been big for his age, and now that he's playing football and
on the juice, he's even bigger. He's got anger management problems -- I lost a
milk-tooth to him in the third grade, and he's managed to keep from getting in
trouble over them by becoming the most active snitch in school.

It's a bad combination, a bully who also snitches, taking great pleasure in
going to the teachers with whatever infractions he's found. Benson /{loved}/
Charles. Charles liked to let on that he had some kind of unspecified bladder
problem, which gave him a ready-made excuse to prowl the hallways at Chavez,
looking for people to fink on.

The last time Charles had caught some dirt on me, it had ended with me 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 was shaking.

"OK," I said. "OK, time for emergency countermeasures." I got my phone out. I'd
planned this well in advance. Charles would never get me again. I emailed my
server at home, and it got into motion.

A few seconds later, Charles's phone spazzed out spectacularly. I'd had tens of
thousands of simultaneous random calls and text messages sent to it, causing
every chirp and ring it had to go off and keep on going off. The attack was
accomplished by means of a botnet, and for that I felt bad, but it was in the
service of a good cause.

Botnets are where infected computers spend their afterlives. When you get a
worm or a virus, your computer sends a message to a chat channel on IRC -- the
Internet Relay Chat. That message tells the botmaster -- the guy who deployed
the worm -- that the computers are there ready to do his bidding. Botnets are
supremely powerful, since they can comprise thousands, even hundreds of
thousands of computers, scattered all over the Internet, connected to juicy
high-speed connections and running on fast home PCs. Those PCs normally
function on behalf of their owners, but when the botmaster calls them, they
rise like zombies to do his bidding.

There are so many infected PCs on the Internet that the price of hiring an hour
or two on a botnet has crashed. Mostly these things work for spammers as cheap,
distributed spambots, filling your mailbox with come-ons for boner-pills or
with new viruses that can infect you and recruit your machine to join the
botnet.

I'd just rented 10 seconds' time on three thousand PCs and had each of them
send a text message or voice-over-IP call to Charles's phone, whose number I'd
extracted from a sticky note on Benson's desk during one fateful office-visit.

Needless to say, Charles's phone was not equipped to handle this. First the
SMSes filled the memory on his phone, causing it to start choking on the
routine operations it needed to do things like manage the ringer and log all
those incoming calls' bogus return numbers (did you know that it's /{really
easy}/ to fake the return number on a caller ID? There are about fifty ways of
doing it -- just google "spoof caller id").

Charles stared at it dumbfounded, and jabbed at it furiously, his thick
eyebrows knotting and wiggling as he struggled with the demons that had
possessed his most personal of devices. The plan was working so far, but he
wasn't doing what he was supposed to be doing next -- he was supposed to go
find some place to sit down and try to figure out how to get his phone back.
Darryl shook me by the shoulder, and I pulled my eye away from the crack in the
door.

"What's he doing?" Darryl whispered.

"I totaled his phone, but he's just staring at it now instead of moving on." It
wasn't going to be easy to reboot that thing. Once the memory was totally
filled, it would have a hard time loading the code it needed to delete the
bogus messages -- and there was no bulk-erase for texts on his phone, so he'd
have to manually delete all of the thousands of messages.

Darryl shoved me back and stuck his eye up to the door. A moment later, his
shoulders started to shake. I got scared, thinking he was panicking, but when
he pulled back, I saw that he was laughing so hard that tears were streaming
down his cheeks.

"Galvez just totally busted him for being in the halls during class /{and}/ for
having his phone out -- you should have seen her tear into him. She was really
enjoying it."

We shook hands solemnly and snuck back out of the corridor, down the stairs,
around the back, out the door, past the fence and out into the glorious
sunlight of afternoon in the Mission. Valencia Street had never looked so good.
I checked my watch and yelped.

"Let's move! The rest of the gang is meeting us at the cable-cars in twenty
minutes!"

#

Van spotted us first. She was blending in with a group of Korean tourists,
which is one of her favorite ways of camouflaging herself when she's ditching
school. Ever since the truancy moblog went live, our world is full of nosy
shopkeepers and pecksniffs who take it upon themselves to snap our piccies and
put them on the net where they can be perused by school administrators.

She came out of the crowd and bounded toward us. Darryl has had a thing for Van
since forever, and she's sweet enough to pretend she doesn't know it. She gave
me a hug and then moved onto Darryl, giving him a quick sisterly kiss on the
cheek that made him go red to the tops of his 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 goes red in the
cheeks whenever he runs or gets excited. He's been able to grow a beard since
we were 14, but thankfully he started shaving after a brief 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, with straight black
hair that she wears in crazy, elaborate braids that she researches on the net.
She's got pretty coppery skin and dark eyes, and she loves big glass rings the
size of radishes, which click and clack together when she dances.

"Where's Jolu?" she said.

"How are you, Van?" Darryl asked in a choked voice. He always ran a step behind
the conversation when it came to Van.

"I'm great, D. How's your every little thing?" Oh, she was a bad, bad person.
Darryl nearly fainted.

Jolu saved him from social disgrace by showing up just then, in an oversize
leather baseball jacket, sharp sneakers, and a meshback cap advertising our
favorite Mexican masked wrestler, El Santo Junior. Jolu is Jose Luis Torrez,
the completing member of our foursome. He went to a super-strict Catholic
school in the Outer Richmond, so it wasn't easy for him to get out. But he
always did: no one exfiltrated like our Jolu. He liked his jacket because it
hung down low -- which was pretty stylish in parts of the city -- and covered
up all his Catholic school crap, which was like a bulls-eye for nosy jerks with
the truancy moblog bookmarked on their phones.

"Who's ready to go?" I asked, once we'd all said hello. I pulled out my phone
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 one block past it to O'Farrell,
then left up toward Van Ness. Somewhere in there we should find the wireless
signal."

Van made a face. "That's a nasty part of the Tenderloin." I couldn't argue with
her. That part of San Francisco is one of the weird bits -- you go in through
the Hilton's front entrance and it's all touristy stuff like the cable-car
turnaround and family restaurants. Go through to the other side and you're in
the 'Loin, where every tracked out transvestite hooker, hard-case pimp, hissing
drug dealer and cracked up homeless person in town was concentrated. What they
bought and sold, none of us were old enough to be a part of (though there were
plenty of hookers our age plying their trade in the 'Loin.)

"Look on the bright side," I said. "The only time you want to go up around
there is broad daylight. None of the other players are going to go near it
until tomorrow at the earliest. This is what we in the ARG business 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 was hands-down
the most hardcore player in our group. She took winning very, very seriously.

We struck out, four good friends, on our way to decode a clue, win the game --
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 Fun Madness was played
-- where we'd find a WiFi access-point's signal. That signal was being
deliberately jammed by another, nearby WiFi point that was hidden so that it
couldn't be spotted by conventional wifinders, little key-fobs that told you
when you were within range of someone's open access-point, which you could use
for free.

We'd have to track down the location of the "hidden" access point by measuring
the strength of the "visible" one, finding the spot where it was most
mysteriously weakest. There we'd find another clue -- last time it had been in
the special of the day at Anzu, the swanky sushi restaurant in the Nikko hotel
in the Tenderloin. The Nikko was owned by Japan Airlines, one of Harajuku Fun
Madness's sponsors, and the staff had all made a big fuss over us when we
finally tracked down the clue. They'd given us bowls of miso soup and made us
try uni, which is sushi made from sea urchin, with the texture of very runny
cheese and a smell like very runny dog-droppings. But it tasted /{really}/
good. Or so Darryl told me. I wasn't going to eat that stuff.

I picked up the WiFi signal with my phone's wifinder about three blocks up
O'Farrell, just before Hyde Street, in front of a dodgy "Asian Massage Parlor"
with a red blinking CLOSED sign in the window. The network'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, being too cool
to carry a phone bigger than his pinky finger, had a separate little
directional fob.

"OK, fan out and see what we see. You're looking for a sharp drop off in the
signal that gets worse the more you move along it."

I took a step backward and ended up standing on someone's toes. A female voice
said "oof" and I spun around, worried that some crack-ho was going to stab me
for breaking her heels.

Instead, I found myself face to face with another kid my age. She had a shock
of bright pink hair and a sharp, rodent-like face, with big sunglasses that
were practically air-force goggles. She was dressed in striped tights beneath a
black granny dress, with lots of little Japanese decorer 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 thirty seconds
unless you four back off from this clue and let me and my friends here run it
down. You can come back in one hour and it'll be all yours. I think that's more
than fair."

I looked behind her and noticed three other girls in similar garb -- one with
blue hair, one with green, and one with purple. "Who are you supposed to be,
the Popsicle Squad?"

"We're the team that's going to kick your team's ass at Harajuku Fun Madness,"
she said. "And I'm the one who's /{right this second}/ about to upload your
photo and get you in /{so much trouble}/ --"

Behind me I felt Van start forward. Her all-girls school was notorious for its
brawls, and I was pretty sure she was ready to knock this chick's block off.

Then the world changed forever.

We felt it first, that sickening lurch of the cement under your feet that every
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 place we could be,
not in a building that could fall in on us, not out toward the middle of the
road where bits of falling cornice could brain us.

Earthquakes are eerily quiet -- at first, anyway -- but this wasn't quiet. This
was loud, an incredible roaring sound that was louder than anything I'd ever
heard before. The sound was so punishing it drove me to my knees, and I wasn't
the only one. Darryl shook my arm and pointed over the buildings and we saw it
then: a huge black cloud rising from the northeast, from the direction of the
Bay.

There was another rumble, and the cloud of smoke spread out, that spreading
black shape we'd all grown up seeing in movies. Someone had just blown up
something, in a big way.

There were more rumbles and more tremors. Heads appeared at windows up and down
the street. We all looked at the mushroom cloud in silence.

Then the sirens started.

I'd heard sirens like these before -- they test the civil defense sirens at
noon on Tuesdays. But I'd only heard them go off unscheduled in old war movies
and video games, the kind where someone is bombing someone else from above. Air
raid sirens. The wooooooo sound made it all less real.

"Report to shelters immediately." It was like the voice of God, coming from all
places at once. There were speakers on some of the electric poles, something
I'd never noticed before, and they'd all switched on at once.

"Report to shelters immediately." Shelters? We looked at each other in
confusion. 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 ass downhill,
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 San Francisco holidays freezing in
shorts and t-shirts -- scattered in every direction.

"We should go!" Darryl hollered in my ear, just barely audible over the
shrieking of the sirens, which had been joined by traditional police sirens. A
dozen SFPD cruisers screamed past us.

"REPORT TO SHELTERS IMMEDIATELY."

"Down to the BART station," I hollered. My friends nodded. We closed ranks and
began to move quickly downhill.

1~ Chapter 3

_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Borderlands Books,~{ Borderland Books:
http://www.borderlands-books.com/ 866 Valencia Ave, San Francisco CA USA 94110
+1 888 893 4008 }~ San Francisco's magnificent independent science fiction
bookstore. Borderlands is basically located across the street from the
fictional Cesar Chavez High depicted in Little Brother, and it's not just
notorious for its brilliant events, signings, 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 the front of the store. Borderlands is about the
friendliest bookstore you could ask for, filled with comfy places to sit and
read, and staffed by incredibly knowledgeable clerks who know everything there
is to know about science fiction. Even better, they've always been willing to
take orders for my book (by net or phone) and hold them for me to sign when I
drop into the store, then they ship them within the US for free!] }/

We passed a lot of people in the road on the way to the Powell Street BART.
They were running or walking, white-faced and silent or shouting and panicked.
Homeless people cowered in doorways and watched it all, while a tall black
tranny hooker shouted at two mustached young men about 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 narrow staircase. I had my
face crushed up against someone's back, and someone else was pressed into my
back.

Darryl was still beside me -- he was big enough that he was hard to shove, and
Jolu was right behind him, kind of hanging on to his waist. I spied Vanessa a
few yards away, trapped by more people.

"Screw you!" I heard Van yell behind me. "Pervert! Get your hands off of me!"

I strained around against the crowd and saw Van looking with disgust at an
older guy in a nice suit who was kind of smirking at her. She was digging 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 of melted back,
though the crowd kept him moving forward. Up ahead, I saw someone, a
middle-aged lady in a hippie dress, falter and fall. She screamed as she went
down, and I saw her thrashing to get up, but she couldn't, the crowd's pressure
was too strong. As I neared her, I bent to help her up, and was nearly knocked
over her. I ended up stepping on her stomach as the crowd pushed me past her,
but by then I don't think she was feeling anything.

I was as scared as I'd ever been. There was screaming everywhere now, and more
bodies on the floor, and the press from behind was as relentless 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 was hardly any
better here -- the enclosed space sent the voices around us echoing back in a
roar that made my head ring, and the smell and feeling of all those bodies made
me feel a claustrophobia I'd never known I was prone to.

People were still cramming down the stairs, and more were squeezing past the
turnstiles and down the escalators onto the platforms, but it was clear 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 to get my
phone out and I texted her.

> We're getting out of here

I saw her feel the vibe from her phone, then look down at it and then back 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 remorseless
crush of bodies.

"It's impossible!" he said.

"It's just going to get more impossible the longer we wait!"

He shrugged. Van worked her way over to me and grabbed hold of my wrist. I took
Darryl and Darryl took Jolu by the other hand and we pushed out.

It wasn't easy. We moved about three inches a minute at first, then slowed down
even more when we reached the stairway. The people we passed 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 like he'd have punched me if he'd been able to
get his arms loose. We passed three more crushed people beneath us, but there
was no way I could have helped them. By that point, I wasn't even thinking of
helping anyone. All I could think of was finding the spaces in front of us to
move into, of Darryl's mighty straining on my wrist, of my death-grip on Van
behind me.

We popped free like Champagne corks an eternity later, blinking in the grey
smoky light. The air raid sirens were still blaring, and the sound of emergency
vehicles' sirens as they tore down Market Street was even louder. There was
almost no one on the streets anymore -- just the people trying hopelessly to
get underground. A lot of them were crying. I spotted a bunch of empty benches
-- usually staked out by skanky winos -- and pointed toward them.

We moved for them, the sirens and the smoke making us duck and hunch our
shoulders. We got as far as the benches before Darryl fell forward.

We all yelled and Vanessa grabbed him and turned him over. The side of his
shirt was stained red, and the stain was spreading. She tugged his shirt up and
revealed a long, deep cut in his pudgy side.

"Someone freaking /{stabbed}/ him in the crowd," Jolu said, his hands clenching
into fists. "Christ, that's vicious."

Darryl groaned and looked at us, then down at his side, then he groaned and his
head went back again.

Vanessa took off her jean jacket and then pulled off the cotton hoodie she was
wearing underneath it. She wadded it up and pressed it to Darryl's side. "Take
his head," she said to me. "Keep it elevated." To Jolu she said, "Get his feet
up -- roll up your coat or something." Jolu moved quickly. Vanessa's mother is
a nurse and she'd had first aid training every summer at camp. She loved to
watch people in movies get their first aid wrong and make fun of them. I was so
glad to have her with us.

We sat there for a long time, holding the hoodie to Darryl's side. He kept
insisting that he was fine and that we should let him up, and Van kept 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. The sound I got
wasn't even a busy signal -- it was like a whimper of pain from the phone
system. You don't get sounds like that unless there's three million people all
dialing the same number at once. Who needs botnets 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 looked where he
was pointing, thinking I'd see a cop or an paramedic, but there was 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 a firetruck 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 flag one
down."

Vanessa didn't like it, but I figured a cop wasn't going to stop for a kid
waving his hat in the street, not that day. They just might stop if they saw
Darryl bleeding there, though. I argued briefly with her and Darryl settled it
by lurching to his feet and dragging himself down toward Market Street.

The first vehicle that screamed past -- an ambulance -- didn't even slow down.
Neither did the cop car that went past, nor the firetruck, nor the 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 appeared down
Market Street, I stepped right out into the road, waving my arms over my head,
shouting "/{STOP}/." The car slewed to a stop and only then did 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't have any
military insignia on it. The car skidded to a stop just in front of me, and I
jumped back and lost my balance and ended up on the road. I felt the doors open
near me, and then saw a confusion of booted feet moving close by. I looked up
and saw a bunch of military-looking guys in coveralls, holding big, bulky
rifles and wearing hooded gas masks with tinted face-plates.

I barely had time to register them before those rifles were pointed at me. I'd
never looked down the barrel of a gun before, but everything you'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. I didn't even
breathe. Van was screaming something and Jolu was shouting and I looked at them
for a second and that was when someone put a coarse sack over my head and
cinched it tight around my windpipe, so quick and so fiercely I barely had time
to gasp before it was locked on me. I was pushed roughly but dispassionately
onto my stomach and something went twice around my wrists and then tightened up
as well, feeling like baling wire and biting cruelly. I cried out and my own
voice was muffled by the hood.

I was in total darkness now and I strained my ears to hear what was going on
with my friends. I heard them shouting through the muffling canvas of the bag,
and then I was being impersonally hauled to my feet by my wrists, my arms
wrenched up behind my back, my shoulders screaming.

I stumbled some, then a hand pushed my head down and I was inside the Hummer.
More bodies were roughly shoved in beside me.

"Guys?" I shouted, and earned a hard thump on my head for my trouble. I heard
Jolu respond, then felt the thump he was dealt, too. My head rang like a gong.

"Hey," I said to the soldiers. "Hey, listen! We're just high school students. I
wanted to flag you down because my friend was bleeding. Someone stabbed him." I
had no idea how much of this was making it through the muffling bag. I kept
talking. "Listen -- this is some kind of misunderstanding. We've got to get my
friend to a hospital --"

Someone went upside my head again. It felt like they used a baton or something
-- it was harder than anyone had ever hit me in the head before. My eyes swam
and watered and I literally couldn't breathe through the pain. A moment later,
I caught my breath, but I didn't say anything. I'd learned my lesson.

Who were these clowns? They weren't wearing insignia. Maybe they were
terrorists! I'd never really believed in terrorists before -- I mean, I knew
that in the abstract there were terrorists somewhere in the world, but they
didn't really represent any risk to me. There were millions of ways that the
world could kill me -- starting with getting run down by a drunk burning his
way down Valencia -- that were infinitely more likely and immediate than
terrorists. Terrorists killed a lot fewer people than bathroom falls and
accidental electrocutions. Worrying about them always struck me as about as
useful as worrying about getting hit by lightning.

Sitting in the back of that Hummer, my head in a hood, my hands lashed behind
my back, lurching back and forth while the bruises swelled up on my head,
terrorism suddenly felt a lot riskier.

The car rocked back and forth and tipped uphill. I gathered we were headed over
Nob Hill, and from the angle, it seemed we were taking one of 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 boat there, get away.
That fit with the terrorism hypothesis. Why the hell would terrorists kidnap a
bunch of high school students?

We rocked to a stop still on a downslope. The engine died and then the doors
swung open. Someone dragged me by my arms out onto the road, then shoved me,
stumbling, down a paved road. A few seconds later, I tripped over a steel
staircase, bashing my shins. The hands behind me gave me another shove. I went
up the stairs cautiously, not able to use my hands. I got up the third step and
reached for the fourth, but it wasn't there. I nearly fell again, but new hands
grabbed me from in front and dragged me down a steel floor and then forced me
to my knees and locked my hands to something behind me.

More movement, and the sense of bodies being shackled in alongside of me.
Groans and muffled sounds. Laughter. Then a long, timeless eternity in the
muffled gloom, breathing my own breath, hearing my own breath in my ears.

#

I actually managed a kind of sleep there, kneeling with the circulation cut off
to my legs, my head in canvas twilight. My body had squirted a year's supply of
adrenalin into my bloodstream in the space of 30 minutes, and while that stuff
can give you the strength to lift cars off your loved ones and leap over tall
buildings, the payback's always a bitch.

I woke up to someone pulling the hood off my head. They were neither rough nor
careful -- just...impersonal. Like someone at McDonald's putting together
burgers.

The light in the room was so bright I had to squeeze my eyes shut, but slowly I
was able to open them to slits, then cracks, then all the way and look around.

We were all in the back of a truck, a big 16-wheeler. I could see the
wheel-wells at regular intervals down the length. But the back of this truck
had been turned into some kind of mobile command-post/jail. Steel desks lined
the walls with banks of slick flat-panel displays climbing above them on
articulated arms that let them be repositioned in a halo around the operators.
Each desk had a gorgeous office-chair in front of it, festooned with
user-interface knobs for adjusting every millimeter of the sitting surface, as
well as height, pitch and yaw.

Then there was the jail part -- at the front of the truck, furthest away from
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 remaining
dozen shackled up back here, but it was impossible to say -- many of them were
slumped over and blocking my view. It stank of sweat and fear back there.

Vanessa looked at me and bit her lip. She was scared. So was I. So was Jolu,
his eyes rolling crazily in their sockets, the whites showing. I was scared.
What's more, I had to piss like a /{race-horse.}/

I looked around for our captors. I'd avoided looking at them up until now, the
same way you don't look into the dark of a closet where your mind has conjured
up a boogey-man. You don't want to know if you're right.

But I had to get a better look at these jerks who'd kidnapped us. If they were
terrorists, I wanted to know. I didn't know what a terrorist looked like,
though TV shows had done their best to convince me that they were brown Arabs
with big beards and knit caps and loose cotton dresses that hung down to their
ankles.

Not so our captors. They could have been half-time-show cheerleaders on the
Super Bowl. They looked /{American}/ in a way I couldn't exactly define. Good
jaw-lines, short, neat haircuts that weren't quite military. They came in white
and brown, male and female, and smiled freely at one another as they sat down
at the other end of the truck, joking and drinking coffees out of go-cups.
These weren't Ay-rabs from Afghanistan: they looked like tourists from
Nebraska.

I stared at one, a young white woman with brown hair who barely looked older
than me, kind of cute in a scary office-power-suit way. If you stare at someone
long enough, they'll eventually look back at you. She did, and her face slammed
into a totally different configuration, dispassionate, even robotic. The smile
vanished in an instant.

"Hey," I said. "Look, I don't understand what's going on here, but I really
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 accident.
It's going to get pretty smelly back here, you know?"

She turned to her colleagues, a little huddle of three of them, and they held a
low conversation I couldn't hear over the fans from the computers.

She turned back to me. "Hold it for another ten minutes, then you'll each get a
piss-call."

"I don't think I've got another ten minutes in me," I said, letting a little
more 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 pathetic loser. She
and her friends conferred some more, then another one came forward. He was
older, in his early thirties, and pretty big across the shoulders, like he
worked out. He looked like he was Chinese or Korean -- even Van can't tell the
difference sometimes -- but with that bearing that said /{American}/ in a way I
couldn't put my finger on.

He pulled his sports-coat aside to let me see the hardware strapped there: 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 wearing Batman's utility belt
-- wireless remotes for shackles! I guessed it made sense, though: you wouldn't
want to lean over your prisoners with all that deadly hardware at their
eye-level -- they might grab your gun with their teeth and pull the trigger
with their tongues or something.

My hands were still lashed together behind me by the plastic strapping, and now
that I wasn't supported by the shackles, I found that my legs 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 weakly as they went pins-and-needles,
trying to get them under me so I could rock up to my feet.

The guy jerked me to my feet and I clown-walked to the very back of the truck,
to a little boxed-in porta-john there. I tried to spot Darryl on the way back,
but he could have been any of the five or six slumped people. Or none of them.

"In you go," the guy said.

I jerked my wrists. "Take these off, please?" My fingers felt like purple
sausages 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 for me. A toilet
visit is not a hands-free experience." Someone in the truck sniggered. The guy
didn't like me, I could tell from the way his jaw muscles 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 the plastic cuffs and
my hands were my own again.

"Thanks," I said.

He shoved me into the bathroom. My hands were useless, like lumps of clay on
the ends of my wrists. As I wiggled my fingers limply, they tingled, then the
tingling turned to a burning feeling that almost made me cry out. I put the
seat down, dropped my pants and sat down. I didn't trust myself to stay on my
feet.

As my bladder cut loose, so did my eyes. I wept, crying silently and rocking
back and forth while the tears and snot ran down my face. It was all I could do
to keep from sobbing -- I covered my mouth and held the sounds in. I didn't
want to give them the satisfaction.

Finally, I was peed out and cried out and the guy was pounding on the door. I
cleaned my face as best as I could with wads of toilet paper, stuck it all down
the john and flushed, then looked around for a sink but only found a
pump-bottle of heavy-duty hand-sanitizer covered in small-print lists of the
bio-agents it worked on. I rubbed some into my hands and 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 my hands and I
felt a new pair of plastic cuffs go around them. My wrists had swollen since
the last pair had come off and the new ones bit cruelly into my tender skin,
but I refused to give him the satisfaction of crying out.

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 abruptly put his
hand on my forehead and shoved hard, bouncing the back of my head off the
truck's metal wall with a sound like a clock striking one. "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 a price
for all this.

One by one, all the prisoners went to the can, and came back, and when they
were done, my guard went back to his friends and had another cup of coffee --
they were drinking out of a big cardboard urn of Starbucks, I saw -- and they
had an indistinct conversation that involved a fair 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 slice of
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 military uniform. He
saluted the people in the truck and they saluted him back and that's when I
knew that I wasn't a prisoner of some terrorists -- I was a prisoner of the
United States of America.

#

They set up a little screen at the end of the truck and then came for us one at
a time, unshackling us and leading us to the back of the truck. As close as I
could work it -- counting seconds off in my head, one hippopotami, two
hippopotami -- the interviews lasted about seven minutes each. My head throbbed
with dehydration and caffeine withdrawal.

I was third, brought back by the woman with the severe haircut. Up close, she
looked tired, with bags under her eyes and grim lines at the corners of her
mouth.

"Thanks," I said, automatically, as she unlocked me with a remote and then
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 truck and
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 at me from their
ergonomic super-chairs.

They had a little table between them with the contents of my wallet and
backpack spread out on it.

"Hello, Marcus," Severe Haircut woman said. "We have some questions for you."

"Am I under arrest?" I asked. This wasn't an idle question. If you're not under
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, giving you a phone
call, and letting you talk to a lawyer. And hoo-boy, was I ever going to talk
to a lawyer.

"What's this for?" she said, holding up my phone. The screen was showing the
error message you got if you kept trying to get into its data without giving
the right password. It was a bit of a rude message -- an animated hand giving a
certain universally recognized gesture -- because I liked to customize my gear.

"Am I under arrest?" I repeated. They can't make you answer any questions if
you're not under arrest, and when you ask if you're under arrest, they have to
answer you. It's the rules.

"You're being detained by the Department of Homeland Security," the woman
snapped.

"Am I under arrest?"

"You're going to be more cooperative, Marcus, starting right now." She didn't
say, "or else," but it was implied.

"I would like to contact an attorney," I said. "I would like to know what I've
been charged with. I would like to see some form of identification 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. We found a number of
suspicious devices on your person. We found you and your confederates near the
site of the worst terrorist attack this country has ever seen. Put those two
facts together and things don't look very good for you, Marcus. You can
cooperate, or you can be very, very sorry. 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, idealistic
kids. We googled you, you know. You've posted a lot of very ugly stuff 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 the mistaken
impression that you've been picked up by the police for a crime. You need to
get past that. You are being detained as a potential enemy 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 an enemy combatant. Very hard. Because
there are dark holes that enemy combatants can disappear into, very dark deep
holes, holes where you can just vanish. Forever. Are you listening to me young
man? I want you to unlock this phone and then decrypt the files in its memory.
I want you to account for yourself: why were you out on the street? What do you
know about the attack on this city?"

"I'm not going to unlock my phone for you," I said, indignant. My phone's
memory had all kinds of private stuff on it: photos, emails, little hacks 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 an
attorney."

"This is your last chance, kid. Honest people don't have anything to hide."

"I want to speak to an attorney." My parents would pay for it. All the FAQs on
getting arrested were clear on this point. Just keep asking to see an attorney,
no matter what they say or do. There's no good that comes of talking to the
cops without your lawyer present. These two said they weren't cops, but if this
wasn't an arrest, what was it?

In hindsight, maybe I should have unlocked my phone for them.

1~ Chapter 4

_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Barnes and Noble,~{ Barnes and Noble,
nationwide:
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Little-Brother/Cory-Doctorow/e/9780765319852/?itm=6
}~ a US national chain of bookstores. As America's mom-and-pop bookstores were
vanishing, Barnes and Noble started to build these gigantic temples to reading
all across the land. Stocking tens of thousands of titles (the mall bookstores
and grocery-store spinner racks had stocked a small fraction of that) and
keeping long hours that were convenient to families, working people and others
potential readers, the B&N stores kept the careers of many writers afloat,
stocking titles that smaller stores couldn't possibly afford to keep on their
limited shelves. B&N has always had strong community outreach programs, and
I've done some of my best-attended, best-organized signings at B&N stores,
including the great events at the (sadly departed) B&N in Union Square, New
York, where the mega-signing after the Nebula Awards took place, and the B&N in
Chicago that hosted the event 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 about the field and it shows in the excellent selection on
display at the stores.] }/

They re-shackled and re-hooded me and left me there. A long time later, the
truck started to move, rolling downhill, and then I was hauled back to my feet.
I immediately fell over. My legs were so asleep they felt like blocks of ice,
all except my knees, which were swollen and tender from all the hours of
kneeling.

Hands grabbed my shoulders and feet and I was picked up like a sack of
potatoes. There were indistinct voices around me. Someone crying. Someone
cursing.

I was carried a short distance, then set down and re-shackled to another
railing. My knees wouldn't support me anymore and I pitched forward, ending up
twisted on the ground like a pretzel, straining against the chains holding my
wrists.

Then we were moving again, and this time, it wasn't like driving in a truck.
The floor beneath me rocked gently and vibrated with heavy diesel engines and I
realized I was on a ship! My stomach turned to ice. I was being taken off
America's shores to somewhere /{else}/, and who the hell knew where that was?
I'd been scared before, but this thought /{terrified}/ me, left me paralyzed
and wordless with fear. I realized that I might never see my parents again and
I actually tasted a little vomit burn up my throat. The bag over my head closed
in on me and I could barely breathe, something that was compounded by the weird
position I was twisted into.

But mercifully we weren't on the water for very long. It felt like an hour, but
I know now that it was a mere fifteen minutes, and then I felt us docking, felt
footsteps on the decking around me and felt other prisoners being unshackled
and carried or led away. When they came for me, I tried to stand again, but
couldn't, and they carried me again, impersonally, 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 one window
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 and closed the solid steel
door behind him.

I gently massaged my legs, hissing as the blood came back into them and into my
hands. Eventually I was able to stand, and then to pace. I heard 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 voices sounded like drunks losing their
minds on a street-corner. Maybe I sounded like that too.

Guards shouted at us to be quiet and that just made everyone yell louder.
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, thirsty and
hungry. Severe haircut lady was in the new questioning party, as were three big
guys who moved me around like a cut of meat. One was black, 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 of Counter-Strike.

They'd taken me from my cell and chained my wrists and ankles together. I paid
attention to my surroundings as we went. I heard water outside 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 place where you went to see where Al
Capone and his gangster contemporaries did their time. But I'd been to Alcatraz
on a school trip. It was old and rusted, 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 of the
cell-doors, and numbers, but other than that, there was no way to tell who or
what might be behind them.

The interrogation room was modern, with fluorescent lights, ergonomic chairs --
not for me, though, I got a folding plastic garden-chair -- and a big wooden
board-room table. A mirror lined one wall, just like in the cop shows, and I
figured someone or other must be watching from behind it. Severe haircut lady
and her friends helped themselves to coffees from an urn on a side-table (I
could have torn her throat out with my teeth and taken her coffee just then),
and then set a styrofoam cup of water down next to me -- without unlocking my
wrists from behind my back, so I couldn't reach it. Hardy har har.

"Hello, Marcus," Severe Haircut woman said. "How's your 'tude doing today?"

I didn't say anything.

"This isn't as bad as it gets you know," she said. "This is as /{good}/ as it
gets from now on. Even once you tell us what we want to know, even if that
convinces us that you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, you're a
marked man now. We'll be watching you everywhere you go and everything you do.
You've acted like you've got something to hide, 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." This was the worst thing
that had ever happened to me. I had never, ever felt this bad or this scared
before. Those words, "wrong place at the wrong time," those six words, they
were like a lifeline dangling before me as I thrashed to stay on the surface.

"Hello, Marcus?" she snapped her fingers in front of my face. "Over here,
Marcus." There was a little smile on her face and I hated myself for letting
her see my fear. "Marcus, it can be a lot worse than this. This isn't the worst
place we can put you, not by a damned sight." She reached down below the table
and came out with a briefcase, which she snapped open. From it, she withdrew my
phone, my arphid sniper/cloner, my wifinder, and my memory keys. She set them
down on the table one after the other.

"Here's what we want from you. You unlock the phone for us today. If you do
that, you'll get outdoor and bathing privileges. You'll get a shower and you'll
be allowed to walk around in the exercise yard. Tomorrow, we'll bring you back
and ask you to decrypt the data on these memory sticks. Do that, and you'll get
to eat in the mess hall. The day after, we're going to want your email
passwords, and that will get you library privileges."

The word "no" was on my lips, like a burp trying to come up, but it wouldn't
come. "Why?" is what came out instead.

"We want to be sure that you're what you seem to be. This is about your
security, Marcus. Say you're innocent. You might be, though why an 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. Your parents could have been. Your
friends. Don't you want us to catch the people who attacked your home?"

It's funny, but when she was talking about my getting "privileges" it scared me
into submission. I felt like I'd done /{something}/ to end up where I was, like
maybe it was partially my fault, like I could do something to change it.

But as soon as she switched to this BS about "safety" and "security," my spine
came back. "Lady," I said, "you're talking about attacking my home, but as far
as I can tell, you're the only one who's attacked me lately. I thought I lived
in a country with a constitution. I thought I lived in a country where I had
/{rights}/. You're talking about defending my freedom by tearing up the Bill of
Rights."

A flicker of annoyance passed over her face, then went away. "So melodramatic,
Marcus. No one's attacked you. You've been detained by your country's
government while we seek details on the worst terrorist attack ever perpetrated
on our nation's soil. You have it within your power to help us fight this war
on our nation's enemies. You want to preserve the Bill of Rights? Help us stop
bad people from blowing up your city. Now, you have exactly thirty seconds to
unlock that phone before I send you back to your cell. We have lots of other
people to interview today."

She looked at her watch. I rattled my wrists, rattled the chains that kept me
from reaching around and unlocking the phone. Yes, I was going 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 to send me away, to take me off that
path, and my hope had crashed and all I could think of was how to get back on
it.

So I rattled my wrists, wanting to get to my phone and unlock it for her, 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, where her pals could
hear it. She didn't want me to just unlock the phone. She wanted me to submit
to her. To put her in charge of me. To give up every secret, all my privacy.
"The password," I said again, and then I told her the password. God help me, I
submitted to her will.

She smiled a little prim smile, which had to be her ice-queen equivalent of a
touchdown dance, and the guards led me away. As the door closed, 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 and created
a fake password that unlocked a completely innocuous partition on my phone, but
I wasn't nearly that paranoid/clever.

You might be wondering at this point what dark secrets I had locked away 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 my phone and
my memory sticks, you could get a pretty good idea of who my 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 carried out and the electronic
reconciliations we'd arrived at.

You see, I don't delete stuff. Why would I? Storage is cheap, and you never
know when you're going to want to go back to that stuff. Especially the stupid
stuff. You know that feeling you get sometimes where you're sitting on the
subway and there's no one to talk to and you suddenly 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 back and see it again is a great way to remind
yourself that you're not as horrible a person as you think you are. Darryl and
I have gotten over more fights that way than I can count.

And even that's not it. I know my phone is private. I know my memory sticks are
private. That's because of cryptography -- message scrambling. The math behind
crypto is good and solid, and you and me get access to the same crypto that
banks and the National Security Agency use. There's only one kind of crypto
that anyone uses: crypto that's public, open and can be deployed by anyone.
That's how you know it works.

There's something really liberating about having some corner of your life
that's /{yours}/, that no one gets to see except you. It's a little like nudity
or taking a dump. Everyone gets naked every once in a while. Everyone has to
squat on the toilet. There's nothing shameful, deviant or weird about either of
them. But what if I decreed that from now on, every time you went to evacuate
some solid waste, you'd have to do it in a glass room 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 -- and how many of us
can say that? -- you'd have to be pretty strange to like that idea. Most of us
would run screaming. Most of us would hold it in until we exploded.

It's not about doing something shameful. It's about doing something
/{private}/. It's about your life belonging to you.

They were taking that from me, piece by piece. As I walked back to my cell,
that feeling of deserving it came back to me. I'd broken a lot of rules all my
life and I'd gotten away with it, by and large. Maybe this was justice. Maybe
this was my past coming back to me. After all, I had been where I was because
I'd snuck out of school.

I got my shower. I got to walk around the yard. There was a patch of sky
overhead, and it smelled like the Bay Area, but beyond that, I had no clue
where I was being held. No other prisoners were visible during my exercise
period, and I got pretty bored with walking in circles. I strained my ears for
any sound that might help me understand what this place was, but all I heard
was the occasional vehicle, some distant conversations, a plane landing
somewhere nearby.

They brought me back to my cell and fed me, a half a pepperoni pie from Goat
Hill Pizza, which I knew well, up on Potrero Hill. The carton with its familiar
graphic and 415 phone number was a reminder that only a day before, I'd been a
free man in a free country and that now I was a prisoner. I worried constantly
about Darryl and fretted about my other friends. Maybe they'd been more
cooperative and had been released. Maybe they'd told my parents and they were
frantically calling around.

Maybe not.

The cell was fantastically spare, empty as my soul. I fantasized that the wall
opposite my bunk was a screen, that I could be hacking right now, opening the
cell-door. I fantasized about my workbench and the projects there -- the old
cans I was turning into a ghetto surround-sound rig, the aerial photography
kite-cam I was building, my homebrew laptop.

I wanted to get out of there. I wanted to go home and have my friends and my
school and my parents and my life back. I wanted to be able to go 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 interesting
messages I'd downloaded from one online discussion group or another, some chat
transcripts, things where people had helped me out with some of the knowledge I
needed to do the things I did. There was nothing on there you couldn't find
with Google, of course, but I didn't think that would count in my favor.

I got exercise again that afternoon, and this time there were others in the
yard when I got there, four other guys and two women, of all ages and racial
backgrounds. I guess lots of people were doing things to earn their
"privileges."

They gave me half an hour, and I tried to make conversation with the most
normal-seeming of the other prisoners, a black guy about my age with 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 of the yard and kept
walking without ever changing his facial expression.

But then, just before they called my name and brought me back into the
building, the door opened and out came -- Vanessa! I'd never been more glad to
see a friendly face. She looked tired and grumpy, but not hurt, and when she
saw me, she shouted my name and ran to me. We hugged each other hard and I
realized I was shaking. Then I realized she was 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 my passwords."

"They keep asking me questions about you and Darryl."

There was a voice blaring over the loudspeaker, shouting at us to stop talking,
to walk, but we ignored it.

"Answer them," I said, instantly. "Anything they ask, answer them. If it'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 me and two took
Vanessa. They forced me to the ground and turned my head away from Vanessa,
though I heard her getting the same treatment. Plastic cuffs went around my
wrists and then I was yanked to my feet and brought back to my cell.

No dinner came that night. No breakfast came the next morning. No one came and
brought me to the interrogation room to extract more of my 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 my hands.

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 gone clammy,
making my already filthy jeans stick to my legs. They came for me and walked me
down the long hall lined with doors, each door with its own bar code, each bar
code a prisoner like me. They walked me down the corridor and brought me to the
interrogation room and it was like a different planet when I entered there, a
world where things were normal, where everything didn't reek of urine. I felt
so dirty and ashamed, and all those feelings of deserving what I got came back
to me.

Severe haircut lady was already sitting. She was perfect: coifed and with just
a little makeup. I smelled her hair stuff. She wrinkled her nose at me. I felt
the shame rise in me.

"Well, you've been a very naughty boy, haven't you? Aren't you a filthy thing?"

Shame. I looked down at the table. I couldn't bear to look up. I wanted to 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. I told her
to cooperate."

"So do you give the orders?"

I felt the blood sing in my ears. "Oh come on," I said. "We play a /{game}/
together, it's called Harajuku Fun Madness. I'm the /{team captain}/. We're not
terrorists, we're high school students. I don't give her orders. I told her
that we needed to be /{honest}/ with you so that we could clear up any
suspicion 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 stabbed him 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}/? You haven't got
him here?"

"Who we have here and who we don't have here is not something we're going to
discuss with you, ever. That's not something you're going to know. Marcus,
you've seen what happens when you don't cooperate with 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 point where you might go free again. If you want to
make that possibility into a 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. I downloaded it all
and kept it on my laptop at home, which downloaded and deleted my mail from the
server every sixty seconds. They wouldn't get anything out of my mail -- it got
cleared off the server and stored on my laptop at home.

Back to the cell, but they cut loose my hands and they gave me a shower and a
pair of orange prison pants to wear. They were too big for me and hung down low
on my hips, like a Mexican gang-kid in the Mission. That's where the
baggy-pants-down-your-ass look comes from you know that? From prison. I tell
you what, it's less fun when it's not a fashion statement.

They took away my jeans, and I spent another day in the cell. The walls were
scratched cement over a steel grid. You could tell, because the steel was
rusting in the salt air, and the grid shone through the green paint 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 password so that
your home computer couldn't fetch it."

Well, of course they had. I would have done the same, now that I thought 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 little gizmos -- "and
the data we recovered from your phone and memory sticks, as well as the
subversive material we'd no doubt find if we raided your house and took your
computer. It's enough to put you away until you're an old man. Do you
understand that?"

I didn't believe it for a second. There's no way a judge would say that all
this stuff constituted any kind of real crime. It was free speech, it was
technological 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 know how you operate
and how you think."

It dawned on me then. They were about to let me go. The room seemed to
brighten. I heard myself breathing, short little breaths.

"We just want to know one thing: what was the delivery mechanism for the bombs
on the bridge?"

I stopped breathing. The room darkened again.

"What?"

"There were ten charges on the bridge, all along its length. They weren'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 were doing
so well until now. Tell us this and you can go home. You can get a lawyer and
defend yourself in a court of law. There are doubtless extenuating
circumstances that you can use to explain your actions. Just tell us this
thing, and you're gone."

"I don't know what you're talking about!" I was crying and I didn't even care.
Sobbing, blubbering. "I have /{no idea what you're talking about}/!"

She shook her head. "Marcus, please. Let us help you. By now you know that we
always get what we're after."

There was a gibbering sound in the back of my mind. They were /{insane}/. 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 seventeen year old
high school student, not a terrorist! You can't seriously think --"

"Marcus, haven't you figured out that we're serious yet?" She shook her head.
"You get pretty good grades. I thought you'd be smarter than that." She made a
flicking gesture and the guards picked me up by the armpits.

Back in my cell, a hundred little speeches occurred to me. The French call this
"esprit d'escalier" -- the spirit of the staircase, the snappy rebuttals 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 who loved 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 when they pulled me
out the next day. All I could think of was freedom. My parents.

"Hello, Marcus," she said. "How are you feeling?"

I looked down at the table. She had a neat pile of documents in front of her,
and her ubiquitous go-cup of Starbucks beside her. I found it comforting
somehow, a reminder that there was a real world out there somewhere, 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 was going 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 serious about this.
Our country has experienced the worst attack ever committed on its soil. How
many 9/11s do you want us to suffer before you're willing to cooperate? The
details of our investigation are secret. We won't stop at anything in our
efforts to bring the perpetrators of these heinous crimes to justice. Do you
understand that?"

"Yes," I mumbled.

"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 releasing you because we're done
questioning you for now. But from now on, you /{belong}/ to us. We will be
watching you. We'll be waiting for you to make a misstep. 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 penalty still 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 with SIGN HERE
printed on them had been stuck throughout them. A guard undid 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 seemed that I was
signing a declaration that I had been voluntarily held and submitted 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 behind me.

I lost it. I wept. I begged to be allowed to sign the papers. To be so close to
freedom and have it snatched away, it made me ready to do anything. I can't
count the number of times I've heard someone say, "Oh, I'd rather die than do
something-or-other" -- I've said it myself now and again. But that was the
first time I understood what it really meant. I would have rather died than go
back to my cell.

I begged as they took me out into the corridor. I told them I'd sign anything.

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.

#

My jeans and t-shirt were back in my cell, laundered and folded. They smelled
of detergent. I put them on and washed my face and sat on my cot and stared at
the wall. They'd taken everything from me. First my privacy, then my dignity.
I'd been ready to sign anything. I would have signed 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 hood I'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 in total
darkness and the air was stifling and stale. I was raised to my feet and walked
down corridors, up stairs, on gravel. Up a gangplank. On a ship's steel deck.
My hands were chained behind me, to a railing. I knelt on 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 was drizzling
and my clothes were heavy with water. I was outside, even if my head was in a
bag. I was outside, in the world, moments from my freedom.

They came for me and led me off the boat and over uneven ground. Up three metal
stairs. My wrists were unshackled. My hood was removed.

I was back in the truck. Severe haircut woman was there, at the little desk
she'd sat at before. She had a ziploc bag with her, and inside it were my phone
and other little devices, my wallet and the change from my pockets. She handed
them to me wordlessly.

I filled my pockets. It felt so weird to have everything back in its familiar
place, to be wearing my familiar clothes. Outside the truck's back door, I
heard the familiar sounds of my familiar city.

A guard passed me my backpack. The woman extended her hand to me. I just looked
at it. She put it down and gave me a wry smile. Then she 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 alley toward
cars and trucks and bikes zipping down the road. I stood transfixed on the
truck's top step, staring at freedom.

My knees shook. I knew now that they were playing with me again. In a moment,
the guards would grab me and drag me back inside, the bag would go over my head
again, and I would be back on the boat and sent off to the prison again, to the
endless, unanswerable questions. I barely held 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, broken glass, a
needle, gravel. I took a step. Another. I reached the mouth of the alley and
stepped onto the sidewalk.

No one grabbed me.

I was free.

Then strong arms threw themselves around me. I nearly cried.

1~ Chapter 5

_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Secret Headquarters in Los Angeles,~{
Secret Headquarters: http://www.thesecretheadquarters.com/ 3817 W. Sunset
Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90026 +1 323 666 2228 }~ my drop-dead all-time
favorite comic store in the world. It's small and selective about what it
stocks, and every time I walk in, I walk out with three or four collections I'd
never heard of under my arm. It's like the owners, Dave and David, have the
uncanny ability to predict exactly what I'm looking for, and they lay it out
for me seconds before I walk into the store. I discovered about three quarters
of my favorite comics by wandering into SHQ, grabbing something interesting,
sinking into one of the comfy chairs, and finding myself transported to another
world. When my second story-collection, OVERCLOCKED, came out, they worked with
local illustrator Martin Cenreda to do a free mini-comic based on Printcrime,
the first story in the book. I left LA about a year ago, and of all the things
I miss about it, Secret Headquarters is right at the top of the list.] }/

But it was Van, and she /{was}/ crying, and hugging me so hard I couldn't
breathe. 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 themselves around me.
It was Jolu! They were both there. He whispered, "You're safe, 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," Jolu said.

We turned and looked at the truck at the alley's end. It was a nondescript
white 18-wheeler. Someone had already brought the little folding staircase
inside. The rear lights glowed red, and the truck rolled backwards towards us,
emitting a steady eep, eep, eep.

"Wait!" I shouted as it accelerated towards us. "Wait! What about Darryl?" 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's mouth and reversed
into the street and pointed itself downhill and drove away. 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 and cried. I cried
and cried and cried, loud sobs of the sort I hadn't done since I 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 the street.
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 I knew we were crying for
Darryl, whom none of us ever expected to see again.

#

We were north of Chinatown, at the part where it starts to become North Beach,
a neighborhood with a bunch of neon strip clubs and the legendary City Lights
counterculture bookstore, where the Beat poetry movement had been founded back
in the 1950s.

I knew this part of town well. My parents' favorite Italian restaurant was here
and they liked to take me here for big plates of linguine and huge Italian
ice-cream mountains with candied figs and lethal little espressos afterward.

Now it was a different place, a place where I was tasting freedom for the first
time in what seemed like an eternity.

We checked our pockets and found enough money to get a table at one of the
Italian restaurants, out on the sidewalk, under an awning. The pretty waitress
lighted a gas-heater with a barbeque lighter, took our orders and went inside.
The sensation of giving orders, of controlling my destiny, 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."

"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 told them
everything, even when I'd been forced to piss myself, and they took it all in
silently. I paused when the waitress delivered our sodas and waited until she
got out of earshot, then finished. In the telling, it receded into the
distance. By the end of it, I couldn't tell if I was embroidering the truth or
if I was making it all seem /{less}/ bad. My memories swam like little fish
that I snatched at, and sometimes they wriggled out of my grasp.

Jolu shook his head. "They were hard on you, dude," he said. He told us about
his stay there. They'd questioned him, mostly about me, and he'd kept on
telling them the truth, sticking to a plain telling of the facts about that day
and about our friendship. They had gotten him to repeat it over and over again,
but they hadn't played games with his head the way they had with me. He'd eaten
his meals in a mess-hall with a bunch of other people, and been given time in a
TV room where they were shown last year's blockbusters on video.

Vanessa's story was only slightly different. After she'd gotten them angry by
talking to me, they'd taken away her clothes and made her wear a set of orange
prison overalls. She'd been left in her cell for two days without contact,
though she'd been fed regularly. But mostly it was the 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 no other
explanation. It had been sheer vindictiveness. My mind reeled at the thought.
They had done all that as a mere punishment for defying their 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 only did when
she was really, really angry.

"I'm going to get them," I whispered, staring at my soda. "I'm going to get
them."

Jolu shook his head. "You can't, you know. You can't fight back against that."

#

None of us much wanted to talk about revenge then. Instead, we talked about
what we would do next. We had to go home. Our phones' batteries were dead and
it had been years since this neighborhood had any payphones. We just needed to
go home. I even thought about taking a 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 San Francisco
Chronicle newspaper box and stopped to read the front section. It had been five
days since the bombs went off, but it was still all over the front cover.

Severe haircut woman had talked about "the bridge" blowing up, and I'd just
assumed that she was talking about the Golden Gate bridge, but I was wrong. The
terrorists had blown up the /{Bay bridge}/.

"Why the hell would they blow up the Bay Bridge?" I said. "The Golden Gate is
the one on all the postcards." Even if you've never been to San Francisco,
chances are you know what the Golden Gate looks like: it's that big orange
suspension bridge that swoops dramatically from the old military base called
the Presidio to Sausalito, where all the cutesy wine-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 of California. 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 in San
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 all those
suicide fences and junk all along it." People have been jumping off the Golden
Gate since it opened in 1937 -- they stopped counting after the thousandth
suicide in 1995.

"Yeah," Vanessa said. "Plus the Bay Bridge actually goes somewhere." The Bay
Bridge goes from downtown San Francisco to Oakland and thence to Berkeley, the
East Bay townships that are home to many of the people who live and work in
town. It's one of the only parts of the Bay Area where a normal person can
afford a house big enough to really stretch out in, and there's also the
university and a bunch of light industry over there. The BART goes under the
Bay and connects the two cities, too, but it's the Bay Bridge that sees most of
the traffic. The Golden Gate was a nice bridge if you were a tourist or a rich
retiree living out in wine 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't
think that's all of it. We keep acting like terrorists attack landmarks because
they hate landmarks. Terrorists don't hate landmarks or bridges or airplanes.
They just want to screw stuff up and make people scared. To make terror. So of
course they went after the Bay Bridge after the Golden Gate got all those
cameras -- after airplanes got all metal-detectored and X-rayed." I thought
about it some more, staring blankly at the cars rolling down the street, at the
people walking down the sidewalks, at the city all around 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 guess that being treated like a
terrorist for a few days was enough to clarify my thinking.

The other two were staring at me. "I'm right, aren't I? All this crap, all the
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. "Because they
ended up with us in prison, with Darryl --" I hadn't thought of Darryl since we
sat down and now it came back to me, my friend, missing, 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 of me. Of
the videos that would no doubt come out, of me weeping, reduced 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 do that.
If we go out there and blab, they'll just say that we're kids, making it 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 other side of
the Bay. I came over to meet you guys there and we got stranded, and just got
loose today. They said in the papers that people were still wandering home from
them."

"I can't do that," Vanessa said. "After what they did to you, how can you even
think of doing that?"

"It happened to /{me}/, that's the point. This is me and them, now. I'll beat
them, I'll get Darryl. I'm not going to take this lying down. But once our
parents are involved, that's it for us. No one will believe us and no one will
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, give me that,
at least." I knew that once they'd kept it a secret for a day, it would have to
be a secret forever. Our parents would be even more skeptical if we suddenly
"remembered" that we'd been held in a secret prison 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 the way,
get it straight. Give me one day, just one day."

The other two nodded glumly and we set off downhill again, heading back towards
home. I lived on Potrero Hill, Vanessa lived in the North Mission and Jolu
lived in Noe Valley -- three wildly different neighborhoods just a few minutes'
walk from one another.

We turned onto Market Street and stopped dead. The street was barricaded at
every corner, the cross-streets reduced to a single lane, and parked down the
whole length of Market Street were big, nondescript 18-wheelers like the one
that had carried us, hooded, away from the ship's docks and to Chinatown.

Each one had three steel steps leading down from the back and they buzzed with
activity as soldiers, people in suits, and cops went in and out of them. The
suits wore little badges on their lapels and the soldiers scanned 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: Department of Homeland Security. The
soldier saw me staring and stared back hard, glaring at me.

I got the message and moved on. I peeled away from the gang at Van Ness. 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, the latter
taking you over some of the steepest hills in the city, the kind of thing that
you see car chases on in action movies, with cars catching air as they soar
over the zenith. I always take the hard way home. It's all residential streets,
and the old Victorian houses they call "painted ladies" for their gaudy,
elaborate paint-jobs, and front gardens with scented flowers and tall grasses.
Housecats stare at you from hedges, and there are hardly any homeless.

It was so quiet on those streets that it made me wish I'd taken the /{other}/
route, through the Mission, which is... /{raucous}/ is probably the best word
for it. Loud and vibrant. Lots of rowdy drunks and angry crack-heads and
unconscious junkies, and also lots of families with strollers, old ladies
gossiping on stoops, lowriders with boom-cars going thumpa-thumpa-thumpa down
the streets. There were hipsters and mopey emo art-students and even a couple
old-school punk-rockers, old guys with pot bellies bulging out beneath their
Dead Kennedys shirts. Also drag queens, angry gang kids, graffiti artists and
bewildered gentrifiers trying not to get killed while their real-estate
investments matured.

I went up Goat Hill and walked past Goat Hill Pizza, which made me think of the
jail I'd been held in, and I had to sit down on the bench out front of the
restaurant until my shakes passed. Then I noticed the truck up the hill from
me, a nondescript 18-wheeler with three metal steps coming down from the back
end. I got up and got moving. I felt the eyes watching me from all directions.

I hurried the rest of the way home. I didn't look at the painted ladies or the
gardens or the housecats. I kept my eyes down.

Both my parents' cars were in the driveway, even though it was the middle of
the day. Of course. Dad works in the East Bay, so he'd be stuck at home while
they worked on the bridge. Mom -- well, who knew why Mom was home.

They were home for me.

Even before I'd finished unlocking the door it had been jerked out of my hand
and flung wide. There were both of my parents, looking gray and haggard,
bug-eyed and staring at me. We stood there in frozen tableau for a moment, then
they both rushed forward and dragged me into the house, nearly tripping me up.
They were both talking so loud and fast all I could hear was a wordless,
roaring gabble and they both hugged me and cried and I cried too and we just
stood there like that in the little foyer, crying and making almost-words until
we ran out of steam and went into the kitchen.

I did what I always did when I came home: got myself a glass of water from the
filter in the fridge and dug a couple cookies out of the "biscuit barrel" that
mom's sister had sent us from England. The normalcy of this made 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 were all
quarantined."

"For five days?"

"Yeah," I said. "Yeah. It was really bad." I'd read about the quarantines in
the Chronicle and I cribbed shamelessly from the quotes they'd published.
"Yeah. Everyone who got caught in the cloud. They thought we had been attacked
with some kind of super-bug and they packed us into shipping containers in the
docklands, like sardines. It was really hot and sticky. Not much food, either."

"Christ," Dad said, his fists balling up on the table. Dad teaches in Berkeley
three days a week, working with a few grad students in the library science
program. The rest of the time he consults for clients in city and down the
Peninsula, third-wave dotcoms that are doing various things with archives. He's
a mild-mannered librarian by profession, but he'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 that angry now and again -- and he could
seriously lose it when he was Hulking out. He once threw a swing-set from Ikea
across my granddad's whole lawn when it fell apart for the fiftieth time while
he was assembling it.

"Barbarians," Mom said. She's been living in America since she was a teenager,
but she still comes over all British when she encounters American cops,
health-care, airport security or homelessness. Then the word is "barbarians,"
and her accent comes back strong. We'd been to London twice to see her family
and I can't say as it felt any more civilized than San 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." We had 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 have been out of
their minds with worry. I was glad for a chance to change the subject. "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 antennae. I
normally have a thing about Goat Hill Pizza -- as in, I can normally eat it
like a goldfish eats his food, gobbling until it either runs out or I pop. I
tried to smile. "I just don't feel like pizza," I said, lamely. "Let's order
some curry, OK?" Thank heaven that San Francisco is take-out central.

Mom went to the drawer of take-out menus (more normalcy, feeling like a drink
of water on a dry, sore throat) and riffled through them. We spent a couple of
distracting minutes going through the menu from the halal Pakistani place on
Valencia. I settled on a mixed tandoori grill and creamed spinach with farmer's
cheese, a salted mango lassi (much better than it sounds) and little fried
pastries in sugar syrup.

Once the food was ordered, the questions started again. They'd heard from
Van's, Jolu's and Darryl's families (of course) and had tried to report us
missing. The police were taking names, but there were so many "displaced
persons" that they weren't going to open files on anyone unless 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 money and saw a new
lease on life from all the attention. After all, some venture capitalists had
missing family in the Bay Area. Maybe if they were recovered, the site would
attract some new investment. I grabbed dad's laptop and looked through them.
They were plastered with advertising, of course, and pictures of missing
people, mostly grad photos, wedding pictures 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 for writing up notes
about other missing people. I filled in the fields for me and Jolu and Van, and
left Darryl blank.

"You forgot Darryl," Dad said. He didn't like Darryl much -- once he'd figured
out that a couple inches were missing out of one of the bottles in his liquor
cabinet, and to my enduring shame I'd blamed it on Darryl. In truth, of course,
it had been both of us, just fooling around, trying out vodka-and-Cokes during
an all-night gaming session.

"He wasn't with us," I said. The lie tasted bitter in my mouth.

"Oh my God," my mom said. She squeezed her hands together. "We just 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 we never met
up. He's probably just stuck over in Berkeley. He was going to take the BART
over."

Mom made a whimpering sound. Dad shook his head and closed his eyes. "Don't you
know about the BART?" he said.

I shook my head. I could see where this was going. I felt like the ground was
rushing up to me.

"They blew it up," Dad said. "The bastards blew it up at the same time as the
bridge."

That hadn't been on the front page of the Chronicle, but then, a BART blowout
under the water wouldn't be nearly as picturesque as the images of the bridge
hanging in tatters and pieces over the Bay. The BART tunnel from the
Embarcadero in San Francisco to the West Oakland station was submerged.

I went back to Dad's computer and surfed the headlines. No one was sure, but
the body count was in the thousands. Between the cars that plummeted 191 feet
to the sea and the people drowned in the trains, the deaths were mounting. One
reporter claimed to have interviewed an "identity counterfeiter" who'd helped
"dozens" of people walk away from their old lives by simply vanishing after the
attacks, getting new ID made up, and slipping away from bad marriages, bad
debts and bad lives.

Dad actually got tears in his eyes, and Mom was openly crying. They each hugged
me again, patting me with their hands as if to assure themselves that I was
really there. They kept telling me they loved me. I told them I loved them too.

We had a weepy dinner and Mom and Dad had each had a couple glasses of wine,
which was a lot for them. I told them that I was getting sleepy, which was
true, and mooched up to my room. I wasn't going to bed, though. I needed to get
online and find out what was going on. I needed to talk to Jolu and Vanessa. I
needed to get working on finding Darryl.

I crept up to my room and opened the door. I hadn't seen my old bed in what
felt like a thousand years. I lay down on it and reached over to my bedstand to
grab my laptop. I must have not plugged it in all the way -- the electrical
adapter needed to be jiggled just right -- so it had slowly discharged while I
was away. I plugged it back in and gave it a minute or two to charge up before
trying to power it up again. I used the time to get undressed and throw my
clothes in the trash -- I never wanted to see them again -- and put on a clean
pair of boxers and a fresh t-shirt. The fresh-laundered clothes, straight out
of my drawers, felt so familiar and comfortable, like getting hugged by my
parents.

I powered up my laptop and punched a bunch of pillows into place behind me at
the top of the bed. I scooched back and opened my computer's lid and settled it
onto my thighs. It was still booting, and man, those icons creeping across the
screen looked /{good}/. It came all the way up and then it started giving me
more low-power warnings. I checked the power-cable again and wiggled it and
they went away. The power-jack was really flaking out.

In fact, it was so bad that I couldn't actually get anything done. Every time I
took my hand off the power-cable it lost contact and the computer started to
complain about its battery. I took a closer look at it.

The whole case of my computer was slightly misaligned, the seam split in an
angular gape that started narrow and widened toward the back.

Sometimes you look at a piece of equipment and discover something like this and
you wonder, "Was it always like that?" Maybe you just never noticed.

But with my laptop, that wasn't possible. You see, I built it. After the Board
of Ed issued us all with SchoolBooks, there was no way my parents were going to
buy me a computer of my own, even though technically the SchoolBook didn't
belong to me, and I wasn't supposed to install software on it or mod it.

I had some money saved -- odd jobs, Christmases and birthdays, a little bit of
judicious ebaying. Put it all together and I had enough money to buy a totally
crappy, five-year-old machine.

So Darryl and I built one instead. You can buy laptop cases just like you can
buy cases for desktop PCs, though they're a little more specialized than plain
old PCs. I'd built a couple PCs with Darryl over the years, scavenging parts
from Craigslist and garage sales and ordering stuff from cheap cheap Taiwanese
vendors we found on the net. I figured that building a laptop would be the best
way to get the power I wanted at the price I could afford.

To build your own laptop, you start by ordering a "barebook" -- a machine with
just a little hardware in it and all the right slots. The good news was, once I
was done, I had a machine that was a whole pound lighter than the Dell I'd had
my eye on, ran faster, and cost a third of what I would have paid Dell. The bad
news was that assembling a laptop is like building one of those ships in a
bottle. It's all finicky work with tweezers and magnifying glasses, trying to
get everything to fit in that little case. Unlike a full-sized PC -- which is
mostly air -- every cubic millimeter of space in a laptop is spoken for. Every
time I thought I had it, I'd go to screw the thing back together and find that
something was keeping the case from closing all the way, and it'd be back to
the drawing board.

So I knew /{exactly}/ how the seam on my laptop was supposed to look when 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 no way I was
going to get the thing to boot without taking it apart. I groaned 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 the
ceiling, playing back movies in my head of what they'd done to me, what I
should have done, all regrets and /{esprit d'escalier.}/

I rolled out of bed. It had gone midnight and I'd heard my parents hit the sack
at eleven. I grabbed the laptop and cleared some space on my desk and clipped
the little LED lamps to the temples of my magnifying glasses and pulled out a
set of little precision screwdrivers. A minute later, I had the case open and
the keyboard removed and I was staring at the guts of my laptop. I got a can of
compressed air and blew out the dust 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 had been
months since I'd had the lid off this thing. Luckily, the third time I'd had to
open it up and struggle to close it again, I'd gotten smart: I'd taken a 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 get to it
when I had the laptop in parts. But then I'd printed it out and stuck it in my
messy drawer of papers, the dead-tree graveyard where I kept all the warranty
cards and pin-out diagrams. I shuffled them -- they seemed messier than I
remembered -- and brought out my photo. I set it down next to the computer and
kind of unfocused my eyes, trying to find things that looked out of place.

Then I spotted it. The ribbon cable that connected the keyboard to the
logic-board wasn't connected right. That was a weird one. There was no torque
on that part, nothing to dislodge it in the course of normal operations. I
tried to press it back down again and discovered that the plug wasn't just
badly mounted -- there was something between it and the board. I tweezed it out
and shone my light on it.

There was something new in my keyboard. It was a little chunk of hardware, only
a sixteenth of an inch thick, with no markings. The keyboard was plugged into
it, and it was plugged into the board. It other words, it was perfectly
situated to capture all the keystrokes I made while I typed on my machine.

It was a bug.

My heart thudded in my ears. It was dark and quiet in the house, but it wasn't
a comforting dark. There were eyes out there, eyes and ears, and they were
watching me. Surveilling me. The surveillance I faced at school had followed me
home, but this time, it wasn't just the Board of Education looking over my
shoulder: the Department of Homeland Security had joined them.

I almost took the bug out. Then I figured that who ever put it there would 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 that mean
there hadn't been any? Someone had broken into my room and planted this device
-- had disassembled my laptop and reassembled it. There were lots of other ways
to wiretap a computer. I could never find them all.

I put the machine together with numb fingers. This time, the case wouldn't snap
shut just right, but the power-cable stayed in. I booted it up and set my
fingers on the keyboard, thinking that I would run some diagnostics and see
what was what.

But I couldn't do it.

Hell, maybe my room was wiretapped. Maybe there was a camera spying on me now.

I'd been feeling paranoid when I got home. Now I was nearly out of my 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 want to cry.

Only one thing for it.

I went into the bathroom and took off the toilet-paper roll and replaced it
with a fresh one. Luckily, it was almost empty already. I unrolled the rest of
the paper and dug through my parts box until I found a little plastic envelope
full of ultra-bright white LEDs I'd scavenged out of a dead bike-lamp. I
punched their leads through the cardboard tube carefully, using a pin to make
the holes, then got out some wire and connected them all in series with little
metal clips. I twisted the wires into the leads for a nine-volt battery and
connected the battery. Now I had a tube ringed with ultra-bright, directional
LEDs, and I could hold it up to my eye and look through it.

I'd built one of these last year as a science fair project and had been thrown
out of the fair once I showed that there were hidden cameras in half the
classrooms at Chavez High. Pinhead video-cameras cost less than a good
restaurant dinner these days, so they're showing up everywhere. Sneaky store
clerks put them in changing rooms or tanning salons and get pervy with the
hidden footage they get from their customers -- sometimes they just put it on
the net. Knowing how to turn a toilet-paper roll and three bucks' worth of
parts into a camera-detector is just good sense.

This is the simplest way to catch a spy-cam. They have tiny lenses, but they
reflect light like the dickens. It works best in a dim room: stare through the
tube and slowly scan all the walls and other places someone might have put a
camera until you see the glint of a reflection. If the reflection 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. Or nothing at all. Can you
blame me for feeling paranoid?

I loved that laptop. I called it the Salmagundi, which means anything made out
of spare parts.

Once you get to naming your laptop, you know that you're really having a deep
relationship with it. Now, though, I felt like I didn't want to ever touch it
again. I wanted to throw it out the window. Who knew what 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 was late
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 had changed forever.

"I'll find a way to get them," I said. It was a vow, I knew it when I heard it,
though I'd never made a vow before.

I couldn't sleep after that. And besides, I had an idea.

Somewhere in my closet was a shrink-wrapped box containing one still-sealed,
mint-in-package Xbox Universal. Every Xbox has been sold way below cost --
Microsoft makes most of its money charging games companies money for the right
to put out Xbox games -- but the Universal was the first Xbox that Microsoft
decided to give away entirely for free.

Last Christmas season, there'd been poor losers on every corner dressed as
warriors from the Halo series, handing out bags of these game-machines as fast
as they could. I guess it worked -- everyone says they sold a whole butt-load
of games. Naturally, there were countermeasures to make sure you only played
games from companies that had bought licenses from Microsoft to make them.

Hackers blow through those countermeasures. The Xbox was cracked by a kid from
MIT who wrote a best-selling book about it, and then the 360 went down, and
then the short-lived Xbox Portable (which we all called the "luggable" -- it
weighed three pounds!) succumbed. The Universal was supposed to be totally
bulletproof. The high school kids who broke it were Brazilian Linux hackers who
lived in a /{favela}/ -- a kind of squatter's slum.

Never underestimate the determination of a kid who is time-rich and cash-poor.

Once the Brazilians published their crack, we all went nuts on it. Soon there
were dozens of alternate operating systems for the Xbox Universal. My favorite
was ParanoidXbox, a flavor of Paranoid Linux. Paranoid Linux is an operating
system that assumes that its operator is under assault from the government (it
was intended for use by Chinese and Syrian dissidents), and it does everything
it can to keep your communications and documents a secret. It even throws up a
bunch of "chaff" communications that are supposed to disguise the fact that
you're doing anything covert. So while you're receiving a political message one
character at a time, ParanoidLinux is pretending to surf the Web and fill in
questionnaires and flirt in chat-rooms. Meanwhile, one in every five hundred
characters you receive is your real message, a needle buried in a huge
haystack.

I'd burned a ParanoidXbox DVD when they first appeared, but I'd never gotten
around to unpacking the Xbox in my closet, finding a TV to hook it up to and so
on. My room is crowded enough as it is without letting Microsoft crashware eat
up valuable workspace.

Tonight, I'd make the sacrifice. It took about twenty minutes to get up and
running. Not having a TV was the hardest part, but eventually I remembered that
I had a little overhead LCD projector that had standard TV RCA connectors on
the back. I connected it to the Xbox and shone it on the back of my door and
got ParanoidLinux installed.

Now I was up and running, and ParanoidLinux was looking for other Xbox
Universals to talk to. Every Xbox Universal comes with built-in wireless for
multiplayer gaming. You can connect to your neighbors on the wireless link and
to the Internet, if you have a wireless Internet connection. I found three
different sets of neighbors in range. Two of them had their Xbox Universals
also connected to the Internet. ParanoidXbox loved that configuration: it could
siphon off some of my neighbors' Internet 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 surfing at 2AM.

The best part of all this is how it made me /{feel}/: in control. My technology
was working for me, serving me, protecting me. It wasn't spying on me. This is
why I loved technology: if you used it right, it could give you power and
privacy.

My brain was really going now, running like 60. There were lots of reasons to
run ParanoidXbox -- the best one was that anyone could write games for it.
Already there was a port of MAME, the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, so you
could play practically any game that had ever 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 specifically for
ParanoidXbox -- totally free hobbyist games that anyone could run. When you
combined it all, you had a free console full of free games that could get you
free Internet access.

And the best part -- as far as I was concerned -- was that ParanoidXbox was
/{paranoid}/. Every bit that went over the air was scrambled to within an inch
of its life. You could wiretap it all you wanted, but you'd never figure out
who was talking, what they were talking about, or who they 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.

1~ Chapter 6

_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Powell's Books,~{ Powell's Books:
http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?isbn=9780765319852 1005 W Burnside,
Portland, OR 97209 USA +1 800 878 7323 }~ the legendary "City of Books" in
Portland, Oregon. Powell's is the largest bookstore in the world, an endless,
multi-storey universe of papery smells and towering shelves. They stock new and
used books on the same shelves -- something I've always loved -- and every time
I've stopped in, they've had a veritable mountain of my books, and they've been
incredibly gracious about asking me to sign the store-stock. The clerks are
friendly, the stock 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 my
money! }/

Believe it or not, my parents made me go to school the next day. I'd only
fallen into feverish sleep at three in the morning, but at seven the next day,
my Dad was standing at the foot of my bed, threatening to drag me out by the
ankles. I managed to get up -- something had died in my 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 fervently
that my parents would let me drink coffee at home. I could sneak one on the way
to school, but watching them sip down their black gold while I was drag-assing
around the house, getting dressed and putting my books in my bag -- it was
awful.

I've walked to school a thousand times, but today it was different. I went up
and over the hills to get down into the Mission, and everywhere there were
trucks. I saw new sensors and traffic cameras installed at many of the
stop-signs. Someone had a lot of surveillance gear lying around, waiting to be
installed at the first opportunity. The attack on the Bay Bridge had been just
what they needed.

It all made the city seem more subdued, like being inside an elevator,
embarrassed by the close scrutiny of your neighbors and the ubiquitous cameras.

The Turkish coffee shop on 24th Street fixed me up good with a go-cup of
Turkish coffee. Basically, Turkish coffee is mud, pretending to be coffee. It's
thick enough to stand a spoon up in, and it has way more caffeine than the
kiddee-pops like Red Bull. Take it from someone who's read 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 at the
Turk's. He used to hassle me all the time, telling me I was too young to drink
the stuff, and he still refused to serve me at all during school hours,
convinced that I was skipping class. But over the years, the Turk and 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 I won't. I
wheedled him, demanding that he tell me. He looked like he was going to throw
me out, but when I asked him if he thought I wasn't good enough to shop there,
he opened up.

"The security," he said, looking around his little shop with its tubs of dried
beans and seeds, its shelves of Turkish groceries. "The government. They
monitor it all now, it was in the papers. PATRIOT Act II, the Congress passed
it yesterday. Now they can monitor every time you use your card. I say no. I
say my shop will not help them spy on my customers."

My jaw dropped.

"You think it's no big deal maybe? What is the problem with government knowing
when you buy coffee? Because it's one way they know where you are, where you
been. Why you think I left Turkey? Where you have government always spying on
the people, is no good. I move here twenty years ago for freedom -- I no help
them take freedom away."

"You're going to lose so many sales," I blurted. I wanted to tell him he was a
hero and shake his hand, but that was what came out. "Everyone uses debit
cards."

"Maybe not so much anymore. Maybe my customers come here because 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 reached into my
pocket. "Um, I don't have any cash, though."

He pursed his lips and nodded. "Many peoples say the same thing. Is OK. You
give today's money to the ACLU."

In two minutes, the Turk and I had exchanged more words than we had in all the
time I'd been coming to his shop. I had no idea he had all these passions. I
just thought of him as my friendly neighborhood caffeine dealer. Now I shook
his hand and when I left his store, I felt like he and I had joined a team. A
secret team.

#

I'd missed two days of school but it seemed like I hadn't missed much class.
They'd shut the school on one of those days while the city scrambled to
recover. The next day had been devoted, it seemed, to mourning those missing
and presumed dead. The newspapers published biographies of the lost, personal
memorials. The Web was filled with these capsule obituaries, thousands of them.

Embarrassingly, I was one of those people. I stepped into the schoolyard, not
knowing this, and then there was a shout and a moment later there 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 they were more than friendly kisses. I
felt like a rock star.

My teachers were only a little more subdued. Ms Galvez cried as much as my
mother had and hugged me three times before she let me go to my desk and sit
down. There was something new at the front of the classroom. A camera. Ms
Galvez caught me staring at it and handed me a permission slip on smeary
Xeroxed school letterhead.

The Board of the San Francisco Unified School District had held an emergency
session over the weekend and unanimously voted to ask the parents of every kid
in the city for permission to put closed circuit television cameras in every
classroom and corridor. The law said they couldn't force us to go to school
with cameras all over the place, but it didn't say anything about us
/{volunteering}/ to give up our Constitutional rights. The letter said that the
Board were sure that they would get complete compliance from the City's
parents, but that they would make arrangements to teach those kids' whose
parents objected in a separate set of "unprotected" classrooms.

Why did we have cameras in our classrooms now? Terrorists. Of course. Because
by blowing up a bridge, terrorists had indicated that schools were next.
Somehow that was the conclusion that the Board had reached 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 called
/{terror}/ism, right?"

"I suppose so." The class was staring at me. I wasn't the best student in
school, but I did like a good in-class debate. They were waiting to hear what
I'd say next.

"So aren't we doing what the terrorists want from us? Don't they win if we 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. It was
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 us all up --"

"Ms Galvez, Marcus is violating school policy. We're not supposed to make 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 interesting
discussion, but I'd like to hold it over for a future class. I think that these
issues may be too emotional for us to have a discussion about them today. Now,
let's get back to the suffragists, shall we?"

So we spent the rest of the hour talking about suffragists and the new lobbying
strategies they'd devised for getting four women into every congresscritter's
office to lean on him and let him know what it would mean for his political
future if he kept on denying women the vote. It was normally the kind of thing
I really liked -- little guys making the big and powerful be honest. But today
I couldn't concentrate. It must have been Darryl's absence. We both liked
Social Studies and we would have had our SchoolBooks out and an IM session up
seconds after sitting down, a back-channel for talking about the lesson.

I'd burned twenty ParanoidXbox discs the night before and I had them all in my
bag. I handed them out to people I knew were really, really into gaming. They'd
all gotten an Xbox Universal or two the year before, but most of them had
stopped using them. The games were really expensive and not a lot of fun. I
took them aside between periods, at lunch and study hall, and sang the praises
of the ParanoidXbox games to the sky. Free and fun -- addictive social games
with lots of cool people playing them from all over the world.

Giving away one thing to sell another is what they call a "razor blade
business" -- companies like Gillette give you free razor-blade handles and then
stiff you by charging you a small fortune for the blades. Printer cartridges
are the worst for that -- the most expensive Champagne in the world is cheap
when compared with inkjet ink, which costs all of a penny 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 on a ten-dollar
replacement blade, why not start a competitor that makes only four bucks
selling an identical blade: an 80 percent profit margin is the kind of thing
that makes your average business-guy go all drooly and round-eyed.

So razor-blade companies like Microsoft pour a lot of effort into making it
hard and/or illegal to compete with them on the blades. In Microsoft's case,
every Xbox has had countermeasures to keep you from running software that was
released by people who didn't pay the Microsoft blood-money for the right to
sell Xbox programs.

The people I met didn't think much about this stuff. They perked up when I told
them that the games were unmonitored. These days, any online game you play is
filled with all kinds of unsavory sorts. First there are the pervs who try to
get you to come out to some remote location so they can go all weird and
Silence of the Lambs on you. Then there are the cops, 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 on our discussions and snitching on us
for violating their Terms of Service, which say, no flirting, no cussing, and
no "clear or masked language which 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 come up in
conversation every now and again. But God help you if it came up in chat while
you were gaming. It was a real buzz-kill. No one monitored the ParanoidXbox
games, because they weren't run by a company: they were just games that hackers
had written for the hell of it.

So these game-kids loved the story. They took the discs greedily, and promised
to burn copies for all of their friends -- after all, games are most fun when
you're playing them with your buddies.

When I got home, I read that a group of parents were suing the school board
over the surveillance cameras in the classrooms, but that they'd already 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'd hear people
talking about it on the Muni. Van called me up to ask me if I'd heard of it and
I nearly choked once I figured out what she was talking about: the discs I'd
started distributing last week had been sneakernetted and copied all the way to
Oakland in the space of two weeks. It made me look over my shoulder -- like I'd
broken a rule and now the DHS would come and take me away forever.

They'd been hard weeks. The BART had completely abandoned cash fares now,
switching them for arphid "contactless" cards that you waved at the turnstiles
to go through. They were cool and convenient, but every time I used one, I
thought about how I was being tracked. Someone on Xnet posted a link to an
Electronic Frontier Foundation white paper on the ways that these things could
be used to track people, and the paper had tiny stories about little groups of
people that had protested at the BART stations.

I used the Xnet for almost everything now. I'd set up a fake email address
through the Pirate Party, a Swedish political party that hated Internet
surveillance and promised to keep their mail accounts a secret from everyone,
even the cops. I accessed it strictly via Xnet, hopping from one neighbor's
Internet connection to the next, staying anonymous -- I hoped -- all the way to
Sweden. I wasn't using w1n5ton anymore. If Benson could figure it out, anyone
could. My new handle, come up with on the spur of the moment, was M1k3y, and I
got a /{lot}/ of email from people who heard in chat rooms and message boards
that I could help them troubleshoot their Xnet configurations and connections.

I missed Harajuku Fun Madness. The company had suspended the game indefinitely.
They said that for "security reasons" they didn't think it would be a good idea
to hide things and then send people off to find them. What if someone thought
it was a bomb? What if someone put a bomb in the same spot?

What if I got hit by lightning while walking with an umbrella? Ban umbrellas!
Fight the menace of lightning!

I kept on using my laptop, though I got a skin-crawly feeling when I used it.
Whoever had wiretapped it would wonder why I didn't use it. I figured I'd just
do some random surfing with it every day, a little less each day, so that
anyone watching would see me slowly changing my habits, not doing a sudden
reversal. Mostly I read those creepy obits -- all those thousands of my friends
and neighbors dead at the bottom of the Bay.

Truth be told, I /{was}/ doing less and less homework every day. I had business
elsewhere. I burned new stacks of ParanoidXbox every day, fifty or sixty, and
took them around the city to people I'd heard were willing 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 had good crypto
on my side. Crypto is cryptography, or "secret writing," and it's been around
since Roman times (literally: Augustus Caesar was a big fan and liked to invent
his own codes, some of which we use today for scrambling joke punchlines in
email).

Crypto is math. Hard math. I'm not going to try to explain it in detail because
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 functions are
really easy to do in one direction and really hard to do in the other
direction. It's easy to multiply two big prime numbers together and make a
giant number. It's really, really hard to take any given giant number and
figure out which primes multiply together to give you that number.

That means that if you can come up with a way of scrambling something based on
multiplying large primes, unscrambling it without knowing those primes will be
hard. Wicked hard. Like, a trillion years of all 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." The scrambling
system, called the "cipher." And finally there's the key: secret stuff 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. Every
agency and government had its own ciphers /{and}/ its own keys. The Nazis and
the Allies didn't want the other guys to know how they scrambled their
messages, let alone the keys that they could use to descramble them. That
sounds like a good idea, right?

Wrong.

The first time anyone told me about all this prime factoring stuff, I
immediately said, "No way, that's BS. I mean, /{sure}/ it's hard to do this
prime factorization stuff, whatever you say it is. But it used to be impossible
to fly or go to the moon or get a hard-drive with more than a few kilobytes of
storage. Someone /{must}/ have invented a way of descrambling the messages." I
had visions of a hollow mountain full of National Security Agency
mathematicians reading every email in the world and snickering.

In fact, that's pretty much what happened during World War II. That's the
reason that life isn't more like Castle Wolfenstein, where I've spent many days
hunting Nazis.

The thing is, ciphers are hard to keep secret. There's a lot of math that goes
into one, and if they're widely used, then everyone who uses them has to keep
them a secret too, and if someone changes sides, you have to find a new cipher.

The Nazi cipher was called Enigma, and they used a little mechanical computer
called an Enigma Machine to scramble and unscramble the messages they got.
Every sub and boat and station needed one of these, so it was inevitable that
eventually the Allies would get their hands on one.

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 computers as we know them
today. Unfortunately for him, he was gay, so after the war ended, the stupid
British government forced him to get shot up with hormones to "cure" his
homosexuality and he killed himself. Darryl gave me a biography of Turing for
my 14th birthday -- wrapped in twenty layers of paper and in a recycled
Batmobile toy, he was like that with presents -- and I've been a Turing junkie
ever since.

Now the Allies had the Enigma Machine, and they could intercept lots of Nazi
radio-messages, which shouldn't have been that big a deal, since every captain
had his own secret key. Since the Allies didn't have the keys, 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 cryptographers had made a
mathematical mistake. By getting his hands on an Enigma 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 good news. Take
it from a Castle Wolfenstein veteran. You wouldn't want the Nazis 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 who thought up Enigma.
Any time you had a cipher, you were vulnerable to someone smarter than you
coming up with a way of breaking it.

And the more they thought about it, the more they realized that /{anyone}/ can
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 /{as many
people as possible}/ how it works, so that they can thwack on it with
everything they have, testing its security. The longer you go without anyone
finding a flaw, the more secure you are.

Which is how it stands today. If you want to be safe, you don't use crypto that
some genius thought of last week. You use the stuff that people have been using
for as long as possible without anyone figuring out how to break them. Whether
you're a bank, a terrorist, a government or a teenager, you use the same
ciphers.

If you tried to use your own cipher, there'd be the chance that someone out
there had found a flaw you missed and was doing a Turing on your butt,
deciphering all your "secret" messages and chuckling at your dumb gossip,
financial transactions and military secrets.

So I knew that crypto would keep me safe from eavesdroppers, but I wasn't ready
to deal with histograms.

#

I got off the BART and waved my card over the turnstile as I headed up to the
24th Street station. As usual, there were lots of weirdos hanging out in the
station, drunks and Jesus freaks and intense Mexican men staring at the ground
and a few gang kids. I looked straight past them as I hit the stairs and jogged
up to the surface. My bag was empty now, no longer bulging with the
ParanoidXbox discs I'd been distributing, and it made my shoulders feel light
and put a spring in my step as I came up the street. The preachers were at work
still, exhorting in Spanish and English about Jesus and so on.

The counterfeit sunglass sellers were gone, but they'd been replaced by guys
selling robot dogs that barked the national anthem and would lift their legs if
you showed them a picture of Osama bin Laden. There was probably some cool
stuff going on in their little brains and I made a mental 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 leap from the military to casinos trying to find
cheats, to law enforcement.

I started down 24th Street toward Potrero Hill and home, rolling my shoulders
and smelling the burrito smells wafting out of the restaurants and thinking
about dinner.

I don't know why I happened to glance back over my shoulder, but I did. Maybe
it was a little bit of subconscious sixth-sense stuff. I knew I was being
followed.

They were two beefy white guys with little mustaches that made me think 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 the color of old cement
and blue-jeans, with their waistbands concealed. I thought of all the things a
cop might wear on his waistband, of the utility-belt that DHS guy in the truck
had worn. Both guys were wearing Bluetooth headsets.

I kept walking, my heart thumping in my chest. I'd been expecting this since I
started. I'd been expecting the DHS to figure out what I was doing. I took
every precaution, but Severe-Haircut woman had told me that she'd be watching
me. She'd told me I was a marked man. I realized that I'd been waiting to get
picked up and taken back to jail. Why not? Why should Darryl be in jail and not
me? What did I have going for me? I hadn't even had the guts to tell my parents
-- or his -- what had really happened to us.

I quickened my steps and took a mental inventory. I didn't have anything
incriminating in my bag. Not too incriminating, anyway. My SchoolBook was
running the crack that let me IM and stuff, but half the people in school had
that. I'd changed the way I encrypted the stuff on my phone -- now I /{did}/
have a fake partition that I could turn back into cleartext with one password,
but all the good stuff was hidden, and needed another password to open up. That
hidden section looked just like random junk -- when you encrypt data, it
becomes indistinguishable from random noise -- and they'd never even know it
was there.

There were no discs in my bag. My laptop was free of incriminating evidence. Of
course, if they thought to look hard at my Xbox, it was game over. So to speak.

I stopped where I was standing. I'd done as good a job as I could of covering
myself. It was time to face my fate. I stepped into the nearest burrito joint
and ordered one with carnitas -- shredded pork -- and extra salsa. Might as
well go down with a full stomach. I got a bucket of horchata, 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 go to jail
for my "crimes," or I wasn't. My freedom since they'd taken me in had been just
a temporary holiday. My country was not my friend anymore: 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 burrito and going
up to order some churros -- deep-fried dough with cinnamon sugar -- for
dessert. I guess they'd been waiting outside and got tired of my dawdling.

They stood behind me at the counter, boxing me in. I took my churro from the
pretty granny and paid her, taking a couple of quick bites of the dough before
I turned around. I wanted to eat at least a little of my dessert. 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 on the 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 booger moved to
block me.

"Sir," he said, "can you step over here with us?" He gestured toward the
restaurant's door.

"Sorry, I'm eating," I said and moved again. This time he put his hand on my
chest. He was breathing fast through his nose, making the booger wiggle. I
think I was breathing hard too, but it was hard to tell over the hammering of
my heart.

The other one flipped down a flap on the front of his windbreaker to reveal a
SFPD insignia. "Police," he said. "Please come with us."

"Let me just get my stuff," I said.

"We'll take care of that," he said. The booger one stepped right up close to
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 to move.

I wasn't going to run, though. I knew I couldn't outrun fate.

1~ Chapter 7

_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to New York City's Books of Wonder,~{ Books of
Wonder http://www.booksofwonder.com/ 18 West 18th St, New York, NY 10011 USA +1
212 989 3270 }~ the oldest and largest kids' bookstore in Manhattan. They're
located just a few blocks away from Tor Books' offices in the Flatiron Building
and every time I drop in to meet with the Tor people, I always sneak away to
Books of Wonder to peruse their stock of new, used and rare kids' books. I'm a
heavy collector of rare editions of Alice in Wonderland, and Books of Wonder
never fails to excite me with some beautiful, limited-edition Alice. They have
tons of events for kids and one of the most inviting atmospheres I've ever
experienced at a bookstore.] }/

They took me outside and around the corner, to a waiting unmarked police car.
It wasn't like anyone in that neighborhood would have had a hard time figuring
out that it was a cop-car, though. Only police drive big Crown Victorias now
that gas had hit seven bucks a gallon. What's more, only cops could double-park
in the middle of Van Ness street without getting towed by the schools of
predatory tow-operators that circled endlessly, ready to enforce San
Francisco's incomprehensible parking regulations and collect a bounty for
kidnapping your car.

Booger blew his nose. I was sitting in the back seat, and so was he. His
partner was sitting in the front, typing with one finger on an ancient,
ruggedized laptop that looked like Fred Flintstone had been its original owner.

Booger looked closely at my ID again. "We just want to ask you a few routine
questions."

"Can I see your badges?" I said. These guys were clearly cops, but it couldn'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 division number
and memorized the four-digit badge number. It was easy: 1337 is also the way
hackers write "leet," or "elite."

They were both being very polite and neither of them was trying to intimidate
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 safety and the
general public safety," Booger said.

He passed my driver's license up to Zit, who pecked it slowly into his
computer. I saw him make a typo and almost corrected him, but figured it was
better to just keep my mouth shut.

"Is there anything you want to tell me, Marcus? Do they call you Marc?"

"Marcus is fine," I said. Booger looked like he might be a nice guy. Except 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 to be?"

"No," I said.

"Good. We've been watching you since you left the BART. Your Fast Pass says
that you've been riding to a lot of strange places at a lot of funny hours."

I felt something let go inside my chest. This wasn't about the Xnet at all,
then, not really. They'd been watching my subway use and wanted to know why it
had been so freaky lately. How totally stupid.

"So you guys follow everyone who comes out of the BART station with a funny
ride-history? You must be busy."

"Not everyone, Marcus. We get an alert when anyone with an uncommon ride
profile comes out and that helps us assess whether we want to investigate. In
your case, we came along because we wanted to know why 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 no business /{helping}/
them to spy on me. Where the hell did my subway pass get off on finking me out
for having a "nonstandard ride pattern?"

"I think I'd like to be arrested now," I said.

Booger sat back and raised his eyebrow at me.

"Really? On what charge?"

"Oh, you mean riding public transit in a nonstandard way isn't a crime?"

Zit closed his eyes and scrubbed them with his thumbs.

Booger sighed a put-upon sigh. "Look, Marcus, we're on your side here. We use
this system to catch bad guys. To catch terrorists and drug dealers. Maybe
you're a drug dealer yourself. Pretty good way to get around the city, a Fast
Pass. Anonymous."

"What's wrong with anonymous? It was good enough for Thomas Jefferson. 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 anxious to
hear how their tax dollars are being spent --"

I'd pushed it too far. Booger had been reaching for the door handle but now he
whirled on me, all Hulked out and throbbing veins. "Why don't you shut up right
now, while it's still an option? After everything that's happened in the past
two weeks, it wouldn't kill you to cooperate with us. You know what, maybe we
/{should}/ arrest you. You can spend a day or two in jail while your lawyer
looks for you. A lot can happen in that time. A /{lot}/. How'd you like that?"

I didn't say anything. I'd been giddy and angry. Now I was scared witless.

"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 up 24th
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 good look at
it -- not whipping it away the way he had with me. "Can we come in?"

Mom closed the door and took the chain off and let them in. They brought me in
and Mom gave the three of us one of her looks.

"What's this about?"

Booger pointed at me. "We wanted to ask your son some routine questions about
his movements, but he declined to answer them. We felt it might be best to
bring him here."

"Is he under arrest?" Mom's accent was coming on strong. Good old Mom.

"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 identified
your son as someone with a nonstandard public transit usage pattern, as part of
a new pro-active enforcement program. When we spot people whose travels are
unusual, or that match a suspicious profile, we investigate 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 -- but once she folded
her arms, it was not going to end well for them. At that moment, I wanted to go
and buy her a big bunch of flowers.

"Marcus here declined to tell us why his movements had been what they were."

"Are you saying you think my son is a terrorist because of how he rides the
bus?"

"Terrorists aren't the only bad guys we catch this way," Zit said. "Drug
dealers. Gang kids. Even shoplifters smart enough to hit a different
neighborhood with every run."

"You think my son is a drug dealer?"

"We're not saying that --" Zit began. Mom clapped her hands at him to shut him
up.

"Marcus, please pass me your backpack."

I did.

Mom unzipped it and looked through it, turning her back to us first.

"Officers, I can now affirm that there are no narcotics, explosives, or
shoplifted gewgaws in my son's bag. I think we're done here. I would like your
badge numbers before you go, please."

Booger sneered at her. "Lady, the ACLU is suing three hundred cops on 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 dinner when I knew
that she'd been making falafel. Dad came home while we were still at the table
and Mom and I took turns telling him the story. He shook his head.

"Lillian, they were just doing their jobs." He was still wearing the blue
blazer and khakis he wore on the days that he was consulting in Silicon Valley.
"The world isn't the same place it was last week."

Mom set down her teacup. "Drew, you're being ridiculous. Your son is not a
terrorist. His use of the public transit system is not cause for a police
investigation."

Dad took off his blazer. "We do this all the time at my work. It's how
computers can be used to find all kinds of errors, anomalies and outcomes. You
ask the computer to create a profile of an average record in a database and
then ask it to find out which records in the database are furthest away from
average. It's part of something called Bayesian analysis and it's been around
for centuries now. Without it, we couldn't do spam-filtering --"

"So you're saying that you think the police should suck as hard as my spam
filter?" I said.

Dad never got angry at me for arguing with him, but tonight I could see the
strain was running high in him. Still, I couldn't resist. My own father, taking
the police's side!

"I'm saying that it's perfectly reasonable for the police to conduct their
investigations by starting with data-mining, and then following it up with
leg-work where a human being actually intervenes to see why the abnormality
exists. I don't think that a computer should be telling the police whom to
arrest, just helping them sort through the haystack to find a needle."

"But by taking in all that data from the transit system, they're /{creating the
haystack}/," I said. "That's a gigantic mountain of data and there's almost
nothing worth looking at there, from the police's point of view. It's a total
waste."

"I understand that you don't like that this system caused you some
inconvenience, Marcus. But you of all people should appreciate the gravity of
the situation. There was no harm done, was there? They even gave you a ride
home."

/{They threatened to send me to jail,}/ I thought, but I could see there was no
point in saying it.

"Besides, you still haven't told us where the blazing hells you've been to
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 on me." He'd
said this often enough. "Do you really want me to account for every trip I've
ever taken?"

#

I hooked up my Xbox as soon as I got to my room. I'd bolted the projector to
the ceiling so that it could shine on the wall over my bed (I'd had to take
down my awesome mural of punk rock handbills I'd taken down 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 was going 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 realized
that they'd turned poor old Salmagundi into a traitor. This time, it was the
feeling that my beloved Xnet might be broadcasting the location of every one of
its users to the DHS.

It was what Dad had said: /{You ask the computer to create a profile of an
average record in a database and then ask it to find out which records in the
database are furthest away from average.}/

The Xnet was secure because its users weren't directly connected to the
Internet. They hopped from Xbox to Xbox until they found one that was connected
to the Internet, then they injected their material as undecipherable, encrypted
data. No one could tell which of the Internet's packets were Xnet and which
ones were just plain old banking and e-commerce and other encrypted
communication. You couldn't find out who was tying the Xnet, let alone who was
using the Xnet.

But what about Dad's "Bayesian statistics?" I'd played with Bayesian math
before. Darryl and I once tried to write our own better spam filter and when
you filter spam, you need Bayesian math. Thomas Bayes was an 18th century
British mathematician that no one cared about until a couple hundred years
after he died, when computer scientists realized that his technique for
statistically analyzing mountains of data would be super-useful for the modern
world's info-Himalayas.

Here's some of how Bayesian stats work. Say you've got a bunch of spam. You
take every word that's in the spam and count how many times it appears. This is
called a "word frequency histogram" and it tells you 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 calculate 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 in pairs, throwing away old
data -- but this is how it works at core. It's one of 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 the lines in a
picture and see if it's more like a "dog" line-frequency histogram 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 Internet wiretapped --
which, of course, the DHS has. You can't tell who's passing Xnet packets by
looking at the contents of those packets, thanks to crypto.

What you /{can}/ do is find out who is sending way, way more encrypted traffic
out than everyone else. For a normal Internet surfer, a session online is
probably about 95 percent cleartext, five percent ciphertext. If someone is
sending out 95 percent ciphertext, maybe you could dispatch the computer-savvy
equivalents of Booger and Zit to ask them if they're terrorist drug-dealer Xnet
users.

This happens all the time in China. Some smart dissident will get the idea of
getting around the Great Firewall of China, which is used to censor the whole
country's Internet connection, by using an encrypted connection to a computer
in some other country. Now, the Party there can't tell what the dissident is
surfing: maybe it's porn, or bomb-making instructions, or dirty letters from
his girlfriend in the Philippines, or political 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 traffic than his neighbors. At that point, they send
him to a forced labor camp just 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 I was in
any better shape than a Chinese dissident. I was putting all the people who
signed onto the Xnet in jeopardy. The law didn't care if you were actually
doing anything bad; they were willing to put you under the microscope just for
being statistically abnormal. And I couldn't even stop 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 Service
Provider called Pigspleen Net that had hired him when he was twelve, and he
knew way more about the net than I did. If anyone knew how to keep our butts
out of jail, it would be him.

Luckily, Van and Jolu and I were planning to meet for coffee the next night at
our favorite place in the Mission after school. Officially, it was our weekly
Harajuku Fun Madness team meeting, but with the game canceled and Darryl gone,
it was pretty much just a weekly weep-fest, supplemented by about six
phone-calls and IMs a day that went, "Are you OK? Did it really happen?" It
would be good to have something else to 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 been stuck going
the long way home, all the way down to the San Mateo bridge then back up into
the city, on a shuttle-bus service that her school was operating. She hated
being seen in public in her gear, which was totally Sailor Moon -- a pleated
skirt and a tunic and knee-socks. She'd been in a bad mood ever since she
turned up at the cafe, which was full of older, cooler, mopey emo art students
who snickered into their lattes when she turned up.

"What do you want me to do, Van?" I said. I was getting exasperated myself.
School was unbearable now that the game wasn't on, now that Darryl was missing.
All day long, in my classes, I consoled myself with the thought of seeing my
team, what was left of it. Now we were fighting.

"I want you to stop putting yourself at risk, M1k3y." The hairs on the back of
my neck stood up. Sure, we always used our team handles at team meetings, but
now that my handle was also associated with my Xnet 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 talking about. You could end up going
to jail for this, Marcus, and not just you. Lots of people. After what happened
to Darryl --"

"I'm doing this for Darryl!" Art students swiveled to look at us and I lowered
my voice. "I'm doing this because the alternative is to let them get 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 deep breaths 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 destroy yourself, 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 cheek that caught
the edge of my mouth. "Take care of yourself, Marcus," she said. My mouth
burned where her lips had pressed it. She gave Jolu the same 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 family lived
in North Korea. Her parents never forgot that they had all those people living
under a crazy dictator, not able to escape to America, the way her parents had.

Jolu shrugged. "Maybe that's why she's so freaked out. Because she knows how
dangerous it can get."

I knew what he was talking about. Two of Van's uncles had gone to jail and had
never reappeared.

"Yeah," I said.

"So how come you weren't on Xnet last night?"

I was grateful for the distraction. I explained it all to him, the Bayesian
stuff and my fear that we couldn't go on using Xnet the way we had been without
getting nabbed. He listened thoughtfully.

"I see what you're saying. The problem is that if there's too much crypto in
someone's Internet connection, they'll stand out as unusual. But if 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 could slow
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 third totally different
solution based on throwing away all your assumptions. I nodded vigorously. "Go
on, tell me."

"What if the average San Francisco Internet user had a /{lot}/ more crypto in
his average day on the Internet? If we could change the split so it's more like
fifty-fifty cleartext to ciphertext, then the users that supply the Xnet would
just look like normal."

"But how do we do that? People just don't care enough about their privacy to
surf the net through an encrypted link. They don't see why it matters if
eavesdroppers know what they're googling for."

"Yeah, but web-pages are small amounts of traffic. If we got people to
routinely download a few giant encrypted files every day, that would create 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 Pigspleen Net
into one of the most successful independent ISPs in the world. Back when the
major record labels started suing their fans for downloading their music, a lot
of the independent labels and their artists were aghast. How can you make money
by suing your customers?

Pigspleen's founder had the answer: she opened up a deal for any act that
wanted to work with their fans instead of fighting them. Give Pigspleen a
license to distribute your music to its customers and it would give you a share
of the subscription fees based on how popular your music 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 with Pigspleen,
and the more music there was, the more fans switched to getting their Internet
service from Pigspleen, and the more money there was for the artists. Inside of
a year, the ISP had a hundred thousand new customers and now it had a million
-- more than half the broadband connections in the city.

"An overhaul of the indienet code has been on my plate for months now," Jolu
said. "The original programs were written really fast and dirty and they could
be made a lot more efficient with a little work. But I just haven't had the
time. One of the high-marked to-do items has been to encrypt the connections,
just because Trudy likes it that way." Trudy Doo was the founder of Pigspleen.
She was an old time San Francisco punk legend, the singer/front-woman of the
anarcho-feminist band Speedwhores, and she was crazy about privacy. I could
totally believe that she'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 code problem --
getting that faraway look, drumming his palms on the table, making the coffee
slosh into the saucers. I wanted to laugh -- everything might 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 help with this stuff."

I was brought up short. "What?" I said again. Jolu was looking really steamed
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 I missed this?
God, I was such an idiot sometimes. "Look dude, it's not a big deal --" by
which he clearly meant that it was a really big deal "-- it's just that you
know, you never even /{asked}/. I hate the DHS. Darryl was my friend too. I
could have really helped with it."

I wanted to stick my head between my knees. "Listen Jolu, that was really
stupid of me. I did it at like two in the morning. I was just crazy when 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 could have talked to Jolu about
it the next day or the next. I hadn't because I'd known what he'd say -- that
it was an ugly hack, that I needed to think it through better. Jolu was always
figuring out how to turn my 2 AM ideas into real code, but the stuff that he
came out with was always a little different from what I'd come up with. I'd
wanted the project for myself. I'd gotten totally into being M1k3y.

"I'm sorry," I said at last. "I'm really, really sorry. You're totally right. I
just got freaked out and did something stupid. I really need your help. I can'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 a
goddamned 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 the leader.
Van's the smart one. Darryl was... He was your second-in-command, the guy who
had it all organized, who watched the details. Being the programmer, that was
/{my}/ thing. It felt like you were saying you didn't need me."

"Oh man, I am such an idiot. Jolu, you're the best-qualified person I know to
do this. I'm really, really, really --"

"All right, already. Stop. Fine. I believe you. We're all really screwed up
right now. So yeah, of course you can help. We can probably even pay 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 and slugged 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 let them know
what I was doing. Jolu's mom insisted on making us sandwiches. We locked
ourselves in his room with his computer and the code for indienet and we
embarked on one of the great all-time marathon programming sessions. Once
Jolu's family went to bed around 11:30, we were able to kidnap the
coffee-machine up to his room and go IV with our magic coffee bean supply.

If you've never programmed a computer, you should. There's nothing like it in
the whole world. When you program a computer, it does /{exactly}/ what you tell
it to do. It's like designing a machine -- any machine, like a car, like a
faucet, like a gas-hinge for a door -- using math and instructions. 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 made of
billions of micro-miniaturized transistors that can be configured to run any
program you can imagine. But when you sit down at the keyboard and 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 create an
aviation system. Design a building. Lay out a city.

Those are complicated machines, those things, and they're off-limits to the
likes of you and me. But a computer is like, ten times more complicated, and it
will dance to any tune you play. You can learn to write simple code in an
afternoon. Start with a language like Python, which was written to give
non-programmers an easier way to make the machine dance to their tune. Even if
you only write code for one day, one afternoon, you have to do it. Computers
can control you or they can lighten your work -- if you want to be in charge of
your machines, you have to learn to write code.

We wrote a lot of code that night.

1~ Chapter 8

_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Borders,~{ Borders worldwide
http://www.bordersstores.com/locator/locator.jsp }~ the global bookselling
giant that you can find in cities all over the world -- I'll never forget
walking into the gigantic Borders on Orchard Road in Singapore and discovering
a shelf loaded with my novels! For many years, the Borders in Oxford Street in
London hosted Pat Cadigan's monthly science fiction evenings, where local and
visiting authors would read their work, speak about science fiction and meet
their fans. When I'm in a strange city (which happens a lot) and I need a great
book for my next flight, there always seems to be a Borders brimming with great
choices -- I'm especially partial to the Borders on Union Square in San
Francisco.] }/

I wasn't the only one who got screwed up by the histograms. There are lots of
people who have abnormal traffic patterns, abnormal usage patterns. Abnormal is
so common, it's practically normal.

The Xnet was full of these stories, and so were the newspapers and the TV news.
Husbands were caught cheating on their wives; wives were caught cheating on
their husbands, kids were caught sneaking out with illicit girlfriends and
boyfriends. A kid who hadn't told his parents he had 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 to hide at all, but who
nevertheless resented being picked up, and questioned. Imagine if someone
locked you in the back of a police car and demanded that you prove that you're
/{not}/ a terrorist.

It wasn't just public transit. Most drivers in the Bay Area have a FasTrak pass
clipped to their sun-visors. This is a little radio-based "wallet" that pays
your tolls for you when you cross the bridges, saving you the hassle of sitting
in a line for hours at the toll-plazas. They'd tripled the cost of using cash
to get across the bridge (though they always fudged this, saying that FasTrak
was cheaper, not that anonymous cash was more expensive). Whatever holdouts
were left afterward disappeared after the number of cash-lanes was reduced to
just one per bridge-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 place that
your FasTrak gets read, though. The DHS had put FasTrak readers all over town
-- when you drove past them, they logged the time and your ID number, building
an ever-more perfect picture of who went where, when, in a database that was
augmented by "speeding cameras," "red light cameras" and all the other
license-plate cameras that had popped up like mushrooms.

No one had given it much thought. And now that people were paying attention, we
were all starting to notice little things, like the fact that the FasTrak
doesn't have an off-switch.

So if you drove a car, you were just as likely to be pulled over by an SFPD
cruiser that wanted to know why you were taking so many trips to the Home Depot
lately, and what was that midnight drive up to Sonoma last week about?

The little demonstrations around town on the weekend were growing. Fifty
thousand people marched down Market Street after a week of this monitoring. I
couldn't care less. The people who'd occupied my city didn't care what the
natives wanted. They were a conquering army. They knew how we felt about that.

One morning I came down to breakfast just in time to hear Dad tell Mom that the
two biggest taxi companies were going to give a "discount" to people who used
special cards to pay their fares, supposedly to make drivers safer by reducing
the amount of cash they carried. I wondered what would happen to the
information about who took which cabs where.

I realized how close I'd come. The new indienet client had been pushed 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 was now 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 as I told
him about the guys I'd seen the cops shaking down on BART the day before.

"Dad, it's ridiculous. They're not catching any terrorists, are they? It's just
making people scared."

"They may not have caught any terrorists yet, but they're sure getting a lot of
scumbags off the streets. Look at the drug dealers -- it says they've put
dozens of them away since this all started. Remember when those druggies robbed
you? If we don't bust their dealers, it'll only get worse." I'd been mugged the
year before. They'd been pretty civilized about it. One skinny guy who smelled
bad told me he had a gun, the other one asked me for my wallet. They even let
me keep my ID, though they got my debit card and Fast Pass. It had still scared
me witless and left 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 every guilty person
they catch, they have to punish thousands of innocent people. That's just not
good."

"Innocent? Guys cheating on their wives? Drug dealers? You're defending them,
but what about all the people who died? If you don't have anything to hide --"

"So you wouldn't mind if they pulled /{you}/ over?" My dad's histograms had
proven to be depressingly normal so far.

"I'd consider it my duty," he said. "I'd be proud. It would make me feel
safer."

Easy for him to say.

#

Vanessa didn't like me talking about this stuff, but she was too smart about it
for me to stay away from the subject for long. We'd get together all 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 it happened -- she didn't Hulk out on me
again -- but I could see it upset her.

Still.

"So my dad says, 'I'd consider it my duty.' Can you freaking /{believe}/ it? I
mean, God! I almost told him then about going to jail, asking him if he thought
that was our 'duty'!"

We were sitting in the grass in Dolores Park after school, watching the dogs
chase frisbees.

Van had stopped at home and changed into an old t-shirt for one of her favorite
Brazilian tecno-brega bands, Carioca Proibidão -- the forbidden guy from Rio.
She'd gotten the shirt at a live show we'd all gone to two years before,
sneaking out for a grand adventure down at the Cow Palace, and she'd sprouted
an inch or two since, so it was tight and rode up 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, and when I thought of
her, I usually saw the little kid I'd known with hundreds of jangly bracelets
made out of sliced-up soda cans, who played the piano and couldn't dance to
save her life. Sitting out there in Dolores Park, I suddenly saw her as she
was.

She was totally h4wt -- that is to say, hot. It was like looking at that
picture of a vase and noticing that it was also two faces. I could see that Van
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't bummed
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 her breath, which
was distracting in a really embarrassing way.

"Yeah," I said, glumly. "But the problem is that I know he's just totally full
of it. If you pulled my dad over and made him prove he wasn't a
child-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 give
him an aneurism."

"They only get away with it because the normals feel smug compared to 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 questioned by 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 me through
half-lidded eyes, almost romantic.

"Seriously. We can do this. We can mess up the profiles easily. Getting people
pulled over is easy."

She sat up and pushed her hair off her face and looked at me. I felt a little
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 flash
the 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, overwriting their Fast
Passes and FasTraks with other people's codes. That'll make /{everyone}/ skew
all weird and screwy, and make everyone look guilty. Then: total gridlock."

Van pursed her lips and lowered her shades and I realized she was so angry she
couldn't speak.

"Good bye, Marcus," she said, and got to her feet. Before I knew it, she was
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 so hard I
punched myself in the face.

"You're psycho, Marcus. You're going to put all your little Xnet buddies in
danger for their lives, and on top of it, you're going to turn the whole city
into terrorism suspects. Can't you stop before you hurt these people?"

I opened and closed my mouth a couple times. "Van, /{I'm}/ not the problem,
/{they}/ are. I'm not arresting people, jailing them, making them disappear.
The Department of Homeland Security are the ones doing that. I'm fighting 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 were saying?
If everyone was getting pulled over --"

"That's not what I meant. I didn't mean you should get everyone arrested. If
you want to protest, join the protest movement. Do something positive. Didn't
you learn /{anything}/ from Darryl? /{Anything?}/"

"You're damned right I did," I said, losing my cool. "I learned that they can'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 you learn, Van? To be
scared all the time, to sit tight and keep your head down 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 get worse and worse from now
on. You want to help Darryl? Help me bring them down!"

There it was again. My vow. Not to get Darryl free, but to bring down the
entire DHS. That was crazy, even I knew it. But it was what I planned to do. No
question about it.

Van shoved me hard with both hands. She was strong from school athletics --
fencing, lacrosse, field hockey, all the girls-school sports -- and I ended up
on my ass on the disgusting San Francisco sidewalk. She took off and I didn't
follow.

#

> The important thing about security systems isn't how they work, it's how they
fail.

That was the first line of my first blog post on Open Revolt, my Xnet site. 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 it catches /{us}/
too, even though we're not doing anything wrong.

> The more people it catches, the more brittle it gets. If it catches too many
people, it dies.

> Get the idea?

I pasted in my HOWTO for building a arphid cloner, and some tips for getting
close enough to people to read and write their tags. I put my own cloner in the
pocket of my vintage black leather motocross jacket with the armored pockets
and left for school. I managed to clone six tags between 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 terrorism
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 million people
gets Super-AIDS. You develop a test for Super-AIDS that's 99 percent 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. You give the test to
a million people.

One in a million people have Super-AIDS. One in a hundred people that you test
will generate a "false positive" -- the test will say he has Super-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 = 10,000

One in a million people has Super-AIDS. If you test a million random people,
you'll probably only find one case of real Super-AIDS. But your test won't
identify /{one}/ person as having Super-AIDS. It will identify /{10,000}/
people as having it.

Your 99 percent accurate test will perform with 99.99 percent /{inaccuracy}/.

That's the paradox of the false positive. When you try to find something really
rare, your test's accuracy has to match the rarity of the thing you're looking
for. If you're trying to point at a single pixel on your screen, 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 at a 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 to
terrorism:

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 can sift
through all the bank-records, or toll-pass records, or public transit records,
or phone-call records in the city and catch terrorists 99 percent of the time.

In a pool of twenty million people, a 99 percent accurate test will identify
two hundred thousand people as being terrorists. But only ten of them are
terrorists. To catch ten bad guys, you have to haul in and investigate two
hundred thousand innocent people.

Guess what? Terrorism tests aren't anywhere /{close}/ to 99 percent accurate.
More like 60 percent accurate. Even 40 percent accurate, sometimes.

What this all meant was that the Department of Homeland Security had set itself
up to fail badly. They were trying to spot incredibly rare events -- 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 week into the
Operation False Positive. I was rockin' out to some new music I'd downloaded
from the Xnet the night before -- lots of people sent M1k3y little digital
gifts to say thank you for giving them hope.

I turned onto 23d Street and carefully took the narrow stone steps cut into the
side of the hill. As I descended, I passed Mr Wiener Dog. I don't know Mr
Wiener Dog's real name, but I see him nearly every day, walking 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 always end up tangled in
a leash, knocked into someone's front garden, or perched on the bumper of one
of the cars parked next to the curb.

Mr Wiener Dog is clearly Someone Important, because he has a fancy watch and
always wears a nice suit. I had mentally assumed that he worked 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 cloner sucked down the
numbers off his credit-cards and his car-keys, his passport and the
hundred-dollar bills in his wallet.

Even as it was doing that, it was flashing some of them with new numbers, taken
from other people I'd brushed against. It was like switching the license-plates
on a bunch of cars, but invisible and instantaneous. I smiled apologetically at
Mr Wiener Dog and continued down the stairs. I stopped at three of the cars
long enough to swap their FasTrak tags with numbers taken off of all the cars
I'd gone past the day before.

You might think I was being a little aggro here, but I was cautious and
conservative compared to a lot of the Xnetters. A couple girls in the Chemical
Engineering program at UC Berkeley had figured out how to make a harmless
substance out of kitchen products that would trip an explosive sniffer. They'd
had a merry time sprinkling it on their profs' briefcases and jackets, then
hiding out and watching the same profs try to get into the auditoriums and
libraries on campus, only to get flying-tackled by the new security squads that
had sprung up everywhere.

Other people wanted to figure out how to dust envelopes with substances that
would test positive for anthrax, but everyone else thought they were out of
their minds. Luckily, it didn't seem like they'd be able to figure it out.

I passed by San Francisco General Hospital and nodded with satisfaction as I
saw the huge lines at the front doors. They had a police checkpoint too, of
course, and there were enough Xnetters working as interns and cafeteria workers
and whatnot there that everyone's badges had been snarled up and swapped
around. I'd read the security checks had tacked an hour onto everyone's work
day, and the unions were threatening to walk out unless the hospital did
something about it.

A few blocks later, I saw an even longer line for the BART. Cops were walking
up and down the line pointing people out and calling them aside for
questioning, bag-searches and pat-downs. They kept getting sued 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 22nd Street
to get a coffee -- and I passed a police checkpoint where they were pulling
over cars for secondary inspection.

School was no less wild -- the security guards on the metal detectors were also
wanding our school IDs and pulling out students with odd movements for
questioning. Needless to say, we all had pretty weird movements. Needless to
say, classes were starting an hour or more later.

Classes were crazy. I don't think anyone was able to concentrate. I overheard
two teachers talking about how long it had taken them to get home from work the
day before, and planning to sneak out early that day.

It was all I could do to keep from laughing. The paradox of the false positive
strikes again!

Sure enough, they let us out of class early and I headed home the long way,
circling through the Mission to see the havoc. Long lines of cars. BART
stations lined up around the blocks. People swearing at ATMs that wouldn't
dispense their money because they'd had their accounts frozen for suspicious
activity (that's the danger of wiring your checking account straight into your
FasTrak and Fast Pass!).

I got home and made myself a sandwich and logged into the Xnet. It had been a
good day. People from all over town were crowing about their successes. We'd
brought the city of San Francisco to a standstill. The news-reports confirmed
it -- they were calling it the DHS gone haywire, blaming it all on the fake-ass
"security" that was supposed to be protecting us from terrorism. The Business
section of the San Francisco Chronicle gave its whole front page to an estimate
of the economic cost of the DHS security resulting from missed work hours,
meetings and so on. According to the Chronicle's economist, a week of this crap
would cost the city 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 it happened
/{again}/. Twice.

Twice!

1~ Chapter 9

_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Compass Books/Books Inc,~{ Compass
Books/Books Inc:
http://www.booksinc.net/NASApp/store/Product;jsessionid=abcF-ch09-pbU6m7ZRrLr?s=showproduct&isbn=0765319853
}~ the oldest independent bookstore in the western USA. They've got stores up
and down California, in San Francisco, Burlingame, Mountain View and Palo Alto,
but coolest of all is that they run a killer bookstore in the middle of
Disneyland's Downtown Disney in Anaheim. I'm a stone Disney park freak (see my
first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom if you don't believe it), and
every time I've lived in California, I've bought myself an annual Disneyland
pass, and on practically every visit, I drop by Compass Books in Downtown
Disney. They stock a brilliant selection of unauthorized (and even critical)
books about Disney, as well as a great variety of kids books and science
fiction, and the cafe next door makes a mean cappuccino.] }/

He was so angry I thought he was going to pop. You know I said I'd only seen
him lose his cool rarely? That night, he lost it more than he ever had.

"You wouldn't believe it. This cop, he was like eighteen years old and he kept
saying, 'But sir, why were you in Berkeley yesterday if your client is in
Mountain View?' I kept explaining to him that I teach at Berkeley and then he'd
say, 'I thought you were a consultant,' and we'd start over again. It was like
some kind of sitcom where the cops have been taken over by the stupidity ray.

"What's worse was he kept insisting that I'd been in Berkeley today as well,
and I kept saying no, I hadn't been, and he said I had been. Then he showed me
my FasTrak billing and it said I'd driven the San Mateo bridge three times that
day!

"That's not all," he said, and drew in a breath that let me know he was really
steamed. "They had information about where I'd been, places that /{didn't have
a toll plaza}/. They'd been polling my pass just on the street, at random. And
it was /{wrong}/! Holy crap, I mean, they're spying on us all and they're not
even competent!"

I'd drifted down into the kitchen as he railed there, and now I was watching
him from the doorway. Mom met my eye and we both raised our eyebrows as if to
say, /{Who's going to say 'I told you so' to him?}/ I nodded at her. She could
use her spousular powers to nullify his rage in a way that was out of my reach
as a mere filial unit.

"Drew," she said, and grabbed him by the arm to make him stop stalking 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 and level. 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. "All right," he
said at last. "You're right. I was talking about competent surveillance. These
guys were total amateurs. I'm sorry, son," he said. "You were right. That was
ridiculous." He stuck his hand out and shook my hand, then gave me a firm,
unexpected hug.

"God, what are we doing to this country, Marcus? Your generation deserves to
inherit something better than this." When he let me go, I could see 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 a good
multiplayer thing, a clockwork pirate game where you had to quest every day or
two to wind up your whole crew's mainsprings before you could go plundering and
pillaging again. It was the kind of game I hated but couldn't stop playing:
lots of repetitive quests that weren't all that satisfying to complete, a
little bit of player-versus-player combat (scrapping to see who would captain
the ship) and not that many cool puzzles that you had to figure out. Mostly,
playing this kind of game made me homesick for Harajuku Fun Madness, which
balanced out running around in the real world, figuring out online puzzles, and
strategizing 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 tax dollars
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 him now, miserable and
broken, I wondered if it was better to be clear-eyed and hopeless or to live in
a fool's paradise. That shame -- the shame I'd felt 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}/, and he'd
wound down while I'd been offline. I had to IM all the other players on my ship
until I found one willing to wind me up. That kept me occupied. I liked it,
actually. There was something magic about a total stranger doing you a favor.
And since it was the Xnet, I knew that all the strangers were friends, in some
sense.

> Where u located?

The character who wound me up was called Lizanator, and it was female, though
that didn't mean that it was a girl. Guys had some weird affinity for playing
female characters.

> San Francisco

I said.

> No stupe, where you located in San Fran?

> Why, you a pervert?

That usually shut down that line of conversation. Of course every gamespace 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 ten times.

> Mission? Potrero Hill? Noe? East Bay?

> Just wind me up k thx?

She stopped winding.

> You scared?

> Safe -- why do you care?

> Just curious

I was getting a bad vibe off her. She was clearly more than just curious. Call
it paranoia. I logged off and shut down my Xbox.

#

Dad looked at me over the table the next morning and said, "It looks like it's
going to get better, at least." He handed me a copy of the /{Chronicle}/ open
to the third page.

> A Department of Homeland Security spokesman has confirmed that the San
Francisco office has requested a 300 percent budget and personnel increase from
DC

What?

> Major General Graeme Sutherland, the commanding officer for Northern
California DHS operations, confirmed the request at a press conference
yesterday, noting that a spike in suspicious activity in the Bay Area prompted
the request. "We are tracking a spike in underground chatter and activity and
believe that saboteurs are deliberately manufacturing false security alerts to
undermine our efforts."

My eyes crossed. No freaking way.

> "These false alarms are potentially 'radar chaff' intended to disguise real
attacks. The only effective way of combatting them is to step up staffing 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 enforcers,
brought in to make up for my own stupid ideas. Van was right. The more I fought
them, the worse it was going to get.

Dad pointed at the paper. "These guys may be fools, but they're methodical
fools. They'll just keep throwing resources at this problem until they solve
it. It's tractable, you know. Mining all the data in the city, following up on
every lead. They'll catch the terrorists."

I lost it. "Dad! Are you /{listening to yourself}/? They're talking about
investigating practically every person in the city of San Francisco!"

"Yeah," he said, "that's right. They'll catch every alimony cheat, every dope
dealer, every dirt-bag and every terrorist. You just wait. This could be the
best thing that ever happened to this country."

"Tell me you're joking," I said. "I beg you. You think that that's what they
intended when they wrote the Constitution? What about the Bill of Rights?"

"The Bill of Rights was written before data-mining," he said. He was awesomely
serene, convinced of his rightness. "The right to freedom of association is
fine, but why shouldn't the cops be allowed to mine your social network to
figure out if you're hanging out with gangbangers and terrorists?"

"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 inconveniencing
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 were ready to go
nuclear on the cops for pulling you over --"

"Don't use that tone with me, Marcus. What's happened since last night is that
I've had the chance to think it over and to read /{this}/." He rattled his
paper. "The reason they caught me is that the bad guys are actively jamming
them. They need to adjust their techniques to overcome the jamming. But they'll
get there. Meanwhile the occasional road stop is a small price to pay. This
isn't the time to be playing lawyer about the Bill of Rights. This is the time
to make some sacrifices to keep our city safe."

I couldn't finish my toast. I put the plate in the dishwasher and left for
school. 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-in show on KQED and
told them that the police were wasting their time, that we could monkeywrench
the system faster than they could untangle it. The recording was a top Xnet
download that night.

"This is California Live and we're talking to an anonymous caller at a payphone
in San Francisco. He has his own information about the slowdowns we've been
facing around town this week. Caller, you're on the air."

"Yeah, yo, this is just the beginning, you know? I mean, like, we're just
getting started. Let them hire a billion pigs and put a checkpoint on every
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 up the system
because we hate the Homeland Security, and because we love our city.
Terrorists? I can't even spell jihad. Peace out."

He sounded like an idiot. Not just the incoherent words, but also his gloating
tone. He sounded like a kid who was indecently proud of himself. He /{was}/ a
kid who was indecently proud of himself.

The Xnet flamed out over this. Lots of people thought he was an idiot for
calling in, while others thought he was a hero. I worried that there was
probably a camera aimed at the payphone he'd used. Or an arphid reader that
might have sniffed his Fast Pass. I hoped he'd had the smarts to wipe his
fingerprints off the quarter, keep his hood up, and leave all his arphids at
home. But I doubted it. I wondered if he'd get a knock on the door sometime
soon.

The way I knew when something big had happened on Xnet was that I'd suddenly
get a million emails from people who wanted M1k3y to know 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 anonymous blogs that were based on the Freenet document
publishing system that was also used by Chinese democracy advocates.

> Close call

> We were jamming at the Embarcadero tonite and goofing around giving everyone
a new car key or door key or Fast Pass or FasTrak, tossing around a little fake
gunpowder. There were cops everywhere but we were smarter than them; we're
there pretty much every night and we never get caught.

> So we got caught tonight. It was a stupid mistake we got sloppy we got
busted. It was an undercover who caught my pal and then got the rest of us.
They'd been watching the crowd for a long time and they had one of those trucks
nearby and they took four of us in but missed the rest.

> The truck was JAMMED like a can of sardines with every kind of person, old
young black white rich poor all suspects, and there were two cops trying to ask
us questions and the undercovers kept bringing in more of us. Most people were
trying to get to the front of the line to get through questioning so we kept on
moving back and it was like hours in there and really hot and it was getting
more crowded not less.

> At like 8PM they changed shifts and two new cops came in and bawled out the
two cops who were there all like wtf? aren't you doing anything here. They had
a real fight and then the two old cops left and the new cops sat down at their
desks and whispered to each other for a while.

> Then one cop stood up and started shouting EVERYONE JUST GO HOME JESUS CHRIST
WE'VE GOT BETTER THINGS TO DO THAN BOTHER YOU WITH MORE QUESTIONS IF YOU'VE
DONE SOMETHING WRONG JUST DON'T DO IT AGAIN AND LET THIS BE A WARNING TO YOU
ALL.

> A bunch of the suits got really pissed which was HILARIOUS because I mean ten
minutes before they were buggin about being held there and now they were wicked
pissed about being let go, like make up your minds!

> We split fast though and got out and came home to write this. There are
undercovers everywhere, believe. If you're jamming, be open-eyed and get ready
to run when problems happen. If you get caught try to wait 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 because
we'd jammed them. So jam on!

I felt like I was going to throw up. Those four people -- kids I'd never met --
they nearly went away forever because of something I'd started.

Because of something I'd told them to do. I was no better than a terrorist.

#

The DHS got their budget requisition approved. The President went on TV with
the Governor to tell us that no price was too high for security. We had to
watch it the next day in school at assembly. My Dad cheered. He'd hated the
President since the day he was elected, saying he wasn't any better than the
last guy and the last guy had been a complete disaster, but now all he could do
was talk about how decisive and dynamic the new guy was.

"You have to take it easy on your father," Mom said to me one night after I got
home from school. She'd been working from home as much as possible. Mom's a
freelance relocation specialist who helps British people get settled in in San
Francisco. The UK High Commission pays her to answer emails from mystified
British people across the country who are totally confused by how freaky we
Americans are. She explains Americans for a living, and she said that these
days it was better to do that from home, where she didn't have to actually see
any Americans or talk to them.

I don't have any illusions about Britain. America may be willing to trash its
Constitution every time some Jihadist looks cross-eyed at us, but as I learned
in my ninth-grade Social Studies independent project, the Brits don't even
/{have}/ a Constitution. They've got laws there that would curl the hair on
your toes: they can put you in jail for an entire year if they're really sure
that you're a terrorist but don't have enough evidence to prove it. Now, how
sure can they be if they don't have enough evidence to prove it? How'd they get
that sure? Did they see you committing terrorist 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 walking around the
streets. Every license plate is photographed at every corner in the country.
Everyone from the banks to the public transit company is enthusiastic about
tracking you and snitching on you if they think you're remotely suspicious.

But Mom didn't see it that way. She'd left Britain halfway through high school
and she'd never felt at home here, no matter that she'd married a boy from
Petaluma and raised a son here. To her, this was always the land of barbarians,
and Britain would always be home.

"Mom, he's just wrong. You of all people should know that. Everything that
makes this country great is being flushed down the toilet and he's going along
with it. Have you noticed that they haven't /{caught any terrorists}/? Dad's
all like, 'We need to be safe,' but he needs to know that 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 happening to
this country. But your father is --" She broke off. "When you didn't come home
after the attacks, he thought --"

She got up and made herself a cup of tea, something she did whenever she was
uncomfortable or disconcerted.

"Marcus," she said. "Marcus, we thought you were dead. Do you understand that?
We were mourning you for days. We were imagining you blown to bits, at the
bottom of the ocean. Dead because some bastard decided 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 estimate -- and
practically everyone knew someone who didn't come home that day. There were two
people from my school who had disappeared.

"Your father was ready to kill someone. Anyone. He was out of his mind. 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 curse and curse. Vile words,
words I'd never heard him say. One day -- the third day -- someone called and
he was sure it was you, but it was a wrong number and he threw the phone so
hard it disintegrated into thousands of pieces." I'd wondered about the new
kitchen phone.

"Something broke in your father. He loves you. We both love you. You are 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 for all that time? Do
you remember?"

I nodded silently.

"We were ready to get a divorce, Marcus. Oh, it doesn't matter why anymore. It
was just a bad patch, the kind of thing that happens when people who love each
other stop paying attention for a few years. He came and got me and convinced
me to come back for you. We couldn't bear the thought of doing that to you. We
fell in love again for you. We're together today because of you."

I had a lump in my throat. I'd never known this. No one had ever told me.

"So your father is having a hard time right now. He's not in his right mind.
It's going to take some time before he comes back to us, before he's the 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 as young, pale,
rosy-cheeked and cheerful, peering shrewdly through her metal-rim glasses. Now
she looked a little like an old woman. I had done that to her. The terrorists
had done that to her. The Department of Homeland Security had done that to her.
In a weird way, we were all on the same side, and Mom and Dad and all those
people we'd spoofed were on the other side.

#

I couldn't sleep that night. Mom's words kept running through my head. 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 he was all wound up over the
latest news, that Al Qaeda was definitely responsible for the bombing. Six
different terrorist groups had claimed responsibility for the attack, but only
Al Qaeda's Internet video disclosed information 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 topic was sex
problems, with this gay guy who I normally loved to listen to, he would give
people such raw advice, but good advice, and he was really funny and campy.

Tonight I couldn't laugh. Most of the callers wanted to ask what to do about
the fact that they were having a hard time getting busy with their partners
ever since the attack. Even on sex-talk radio, I couldn't get away from the
topic.

I switched the radio off and heard a purring engine on the street below.

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 overlooks the whole
Mission, the other looks out into the street in front of our place. There were
often cars cruising at all hours of the night, but there was something
different about this engine noise.

I went to the street-window and pulled up my blinds. Down on the street below
me was a white, unmarked van whose roof was festooned with radio antennas, more
antennas than I'd ever seen on a car. It was cruising very slowly down the
street, a little dish on top spinning around and around.

As I watched, the van stopped and one of the back doors popped open. A guy in a
DHS uniform -- I could spot one from a hundred yards now -- stepped out into
the street. He had some kind of handheld device, and its blue glow lit his
face. He paced back and forth, first scouting 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 let go of the
blinds and dove across my room for my Xbox. I'd left it up while I downloaded
some cool animations one of the Xnetters had made of the President's
no-price-too-high speech. I yanked the plug out of the wall, then scurried back
to the window and cracked the blind a fraction of an inch.

The guy was looking down into his wifinder again, walking back and forth in
front of our house. A moment later, he got back into his van and drove away.

I got out my camera and took as many pictures as I could of the van and its
antennas. Then I opened them in a free image-editor called The GIMP and edited
out everything from the photo except the van, erasing my street and anything
that might identify me.

I posted them to Xnet and wrote down everything I could about the vans. 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 players even at
this hour. The real name for wind-up pirates was Clockwork Plunder, and it was
a hobbyist project that had been created by teenaged death-metal freaks from
Finland. It was totally free to play, and offered just as much fun as any of
the $15/month services like Ender's Universe and Middle Earth Quest and
Discworld Dungeons.

I logged back in and there I was, still on the deck of the Zombie Charger,
waiting for someone to wind me up. I hated this part of the game.

> Hey you

I typed to a passing pirate.

> Wind 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 Francisco

This was starting to feel familiar.

> Where in San Francisco?

I logged out. There was something weird going on in the game. I jumped onto the
livejournals and began to crawl from blog to blog. I got through half a dozen
before I found something that froze my blood.

Livejournallers love quizzes. What kind of hobbit are you? Are you a great
lover? What planet are you most like? Which character from some movie are you?
What's your emotional type? They fill them in and their friends fill them in
and everyone compares their results. Harmless fun.

But the quiz that had taken over the blogs of the Xnet that night was what
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 for schools and
neighborhoods, and made lame recommendations for places to buy pizza and stuff.

But look at those questions. Think about my answers:

* Male

* 12

* Chavez High

* Potrero Hill

There were only two people in my whole school who matched that profile. Most
schools it would be the same. If you wanted to figure out who the Xnetters
were, you could use these quizzes to find them all.

That was bad enough, but what was worse was what it implied: someone from the
DHS was using the Xnet to get at us. The Xnet was compromised by the DHS.

We had spies in our midst.

#

I'd given Xnet discs to hundreds of people, and they'd done the same. I knew
the people I gave the discs to pretty well. Some of them I knew very well. I've
lived in the same house all my life and I've made hundreds and hundreds of
friends over the years, from people who went to daycare with me to people I
played soccer with, people who LARPed with me, people I met clubbing, people I
knew from school. My ARG team were my closest friends, but there were plenty of
people I knew and 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 first ring,
three times in a row. A minute later, he was up on Xnet and we were able to
have a secure chat. I pointed him to my blog-post on the radio 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 totally vouch for
like trust them to the ends of the earth?

> Um 20 or 30 or so

> I want to get a bunch of really trustworthy people together and do a
key-exchange web of trust thing

Web of trust is one of those cool crypto things that I'd read about but never
tried. It was a nearly foolproof way to make sure that you could talk to the
people you trusted, but that no one else could listen in. The problem is that
it requires you to physically meet with the people in the web at least once,
just to get started.

> I get it sure. That's not bad. But how you going to get everyone together for
the key-signing?

> That's what I wanted to ask you about -- how can we do it without getting
busted?

Jolu typed some words and erased them, typed more and erased them.

> Darryl would know

I typed.

> 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 having a
party and that way we'll have a ready-made excuse if anyone shows up asking us
what we're doing there?

> That would totally work! You're a genius, Jolu.

> I know it. And you're going to love this: I know just where to do it, too

> Where?

> Sutro baths!

1~ Chapter 10

_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Anderson's Bookshops,~{ Anderson's
Bookshops
http://www.andersonsbookshop.com/search.php?qkey2=doctorow+little+brother&sid=5156&imageField.x=0&imageField.y=0
123 West Jefferson, Naperville, IL 60540 USA +1 630 355 2665 }~ Chicago's
legendary kids' bookstore. Anderson's is an old, old family-run business, which
started 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 incredibly
innovative bookselling practices that get books and kids together in really
exciting ways. The best of these is the store's mobile book-fairs, in which
they ship huge, rolling bookcases, already stocked with excellent kids' books,
direct to schools on trucks -- voila, instant book-fair!] }/

What 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 new spy would be more careful
than the last one and maybe not get caught quite so readily.

Here's a better idea: start intercepting the spy's communications and feed him
and his masters misinformation. Say his masters instruct him to gather
information on your movements. Let him follow you around and take all the notes
he wants, but steam open the envelopes that he sends back to HQ and replace his
account of your movements with a fictitious one. If you want, you can make him
seem erratic and unreliable so they get rid of him. You can manufacture crises
that might make one side or the 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 communications can trick you
in any of a thousand ways.

Of course, there's a great way to get around the man-in-the-middle attack: use
crypto. With crypto, it doesn't matter if the enemy can see your messages,
because he can't decipher them, change them, and re-send them. That's one of
the main reasons to use crypto.

But remember: for crypto to work, you need to have keys for the people you want
to talk to. You and your partner need to share a secret or two, some keys that
you can use to encrypt and decrypt your messages so that men-in-the-middle get
locked out.

That's where the idea of public keys comes in. This is a little hairy, but it's
so unbelievably elegant too.

In public key crypto, each user gets two keys. They're long strings of
mathematical 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 can unscramble a message
with one key, you /{know}/ it was scrambled with the other (and vice-versa).

So you take either one of these keys (it doesn't matter which one) and you just
/{publish}/ it. You make it a total /{non-secret}/. You want anyone in the
world to know what it is. For obvious reasons, they call this your "public
key."

The other key, you hide in the darkest reaches of your mind. You protect it
with your life. You never let anyone ever know what it is. That's called your
"private key." (Duh.)

Now say you're a spy and you want to talk with your bosses. Their public key is
known by everyone. Your public key is known by everyone. No one knows your
private key but you. No one knows their private key but them.

You want to send them a message. First, you encrypt it with your private key.
You could just send that message along, and it would work pretty well, since
they would know when the message arrived that it came from you. How? Because if
they can decrypt it with your public key, it can /{only}/ have been encrypted
with your private key. This is the equivalent 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 with it or changed it."

Unfortunately, this won't actually keep your message a /{secret}/. That's
because your public key is really well known (it has to be, or you'll be
limited to sending messages to those few people who have your public key).
Anyone who intercepts the message can read it. They can't change it and make it
seem like it came from you, but if you don't want people to know what you're
saying, you need a better solution.

So instead of just encrypting the message with your private key, you /{also}/
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 combined with your boss's
private key. The second lock -- your private key -- only comes 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) you wrote it and b) that only they can read
it.

It's very cool. The day I discovered it, Darryl and I immediately exchanged
keys and spent months cackling and rubbing our hands as we exchanged our
military-grade secret messages about where to meet after school and whether Van
would ever notice him.

But if you want to understand security, you need to consider the most paranoid
possibilities. Like, what if I tricked you into thinking that /{my}/ public key
was your boss's public key? You'd encrypt the message with your private key and
my public key. I'd decrypt it, read it, re-encrypt it with your boss's /{real}/
public key and send it on. As far as your boss knows, no one but you could have
written the message and no one but him could have read it.

And I get to sit in the middle, like a fat spider in a web, and all your
secrets belong to me.

Now, the easiest way to fix this is to really widely advertise your public 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? Making things
well-known is just as hard as keeping them secret. Think about it -- how many
billions of dollars are spent on shampoo ads and other crap, just to make sure
that as many people know about something that some 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 coffee and actually tell
each other your keys. No more man-in-the-middle! You're absolutely certain
whose keys you have, because they were put into your own hands.

So far, so good. But there's a natural limit to this: how many people can you
physically meet with and swap keys? How many hours in the day do you want to
devote to the equivalent of writing your own phone book? How many of those
people are willing to devote that kind of time to you?

Thinking about this like a phonebook helps. The world was once a place with a
lot of phonebooks, and when you needed a number, you could look it up in the
book. But for many of the numbers that you wanted to refer to on a given day,
you would either know it by heart, or you'd be able to ask someone else. Even
today, when I'm out with my cell-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's called "transitive trust" -- trust that moves across the
web of our relationships.

A web of trust is a bigger version of this. Say I meet Jolu and get his key. I
can put it on my "keyring" -- a list of keys that I've signed with my private
key. That means you can unlock it with my public key and know for sure that me
-- or someone with my key, anyway -- says that "this key belongs to this guy."

So I hand you my keyring and provided that you trust me to have actually met
and verified all the keys on it, you can take it and add it to your keyring.
Now, you meet someone else and you hand the whole ring to him. Bigger and
bigger the ring grows, and provided that you trust the next guy in the chain,
and he trusts the next guy in his chain and so on, you're pretty secure.

Which brings me to keysigning parties. These are /{exactly}/ what they sound
like: a party where everyone gets together and signs everyone else'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 with more people, you create the
seed of the web of trust, and the web can expand from there. As everyone on
your keyring goes out into the world and 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 you get from the people in your web is valid.

So that's why web of trust and parties go together like peanut butter and
chocolate.

#

"Just tell them it's a super-private party, invitational only," I said. "Tell
them not to bring anyone along or they won't be admitted."

Jolu looked at me over his coffee. "You're joking, right? You tell people that,
and they'll bring /{extra}/ friends."

"Argh," I said. I spent a night a week at Jolu's these days, keeping the code
up to date on indienet. Pigspleen actually paid me a non-zero sum of money to
do this, which was really weird. I never thought I'd be paid to write code.

"So what do we do? We only want people we really trust there, and we don't want
to mention why until we've got everyone's keys and can send them 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 just call it
"programming." Two people are much better at spotting bugs than one. As the
cliche goes, "With enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."

We were working our way through the bug reports and getting ready to push out
the new rev. It all auto-updated in the background, so our users didn't really
need to do anything, they just woke up once a week or so with a better program.
It was pretty freaky to know that the code I wrote 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 with it."

I thought back to our Harajuku Fun Madness days. There were lots of social
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 that
they can bring a maximum of one person, and it has to be someone they've known
personally for a minimum of five years."

Jolu looked up from the screen. "Hey," he said. "Hey, that would totally work.
I can really see it. I mean, if you told me not to bring anyone, I'd be all,
'Who the hell does he think he is?' But when you put it that way, it sounds
like some awesome 007 stuff."

I found a bug. We drank some coffee. I went home and played a little Clockwork
Plunder, trying not to think about key-winders with nosy questions, and slept
like a baby.

#

Sutro baths are San Francisco's authentic fake Roman ruins. When it opened in
1896, it was the largest indoor bathing house in the world, a huge Victorian
glass solarium filled with pools and tubs and even an early water slide. It
went downhill by the fifties, and the owners torched it for the insurance in
1966. All that's left is a labyrinth of weathered stone set into the sere
cliff-face at Ocean Beach. It looks for all the world like a Roman ruin,
crumbled and mysterious, and just beyond them is a set of caves that let out
into the sea. In rough tides, the waves rush through the caves and over the
ruins -- they've even been known to suck in and drown the occasional tourist.

Ocean Beach is way out past Golden Gate park, a stark cliff lined with
expensive, doomed houses, plunging down to a narrow beach studded with
jellyfish and brave (insane) surfers. There's a giant white rock that juts out
of the shallows off the shore. That's called Seal Rock, and it used to be the
place where the sea lions congregated until they were relocated to the more
tourist-friendly environs of Fisherman's Wharf.

After dark, there's hardly anyone out there. It gets very cold, with a salt
spray that'll soak you to your bones if you let it. The rocks are sharp and
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 my idea. 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 indienet programming money, and the guy showed up
right on time: 8PM, a good hour after sunset, and lugged the six foam
ice-chests out of his pickup truck and down into the ruins of the baths. He
even brought a spare chest for the empties.

"You kids play safe now," he said, tipping his cowboy hat. He was a fat Samoan
guy with a huge smile, and a scary tank-top that you could see his armpit- and
belly- and shoulder-hair escaping from. I peeled twenties off my roll and
handed them to him -- his markup was 150 percent. Not a bad racket.

He looked at my roll. "You know, I could just take that from you," he said,
still smiling. "I'm a criminal, after all."

I put my roll in my pocket and looked him levelly in the eye. I'd been stupid
to show him what I was carrying, but I knew that there were times when you
should just stand your ground.

"I'm just messing with you," he said, at last. "But you be careful with that
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. Those
peckerwoods don't know nothin'."

I looked over at his truck. Prominently displayed in his windscreen was 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 his truck, which he
should have been doing. He eventually got the hint and drove away. His smile
never faltered.

Jolu helped me hide the coolers in the rubble, working with little white LED
torches on headbands. Once the coolers were in place, we threw little white LED
keychains into each one, so it would glow when you took the styrofoam lids off,
making it easier to see what you were doing.

It was a moonless night and overcast, and the distant streetlights barely
illuminated us. I knew we'd stand out like blazes on an infrared scope, but
there was no chance that we'd be able to get a bunch of people together without
being observed. I'd settle for being dismissed as a little drunken beach-party.

I don't really drink much. There's been beer and pot and ecstasy at the parties
I've been going to since I was 14, but I hated smoking (though I'm quite
partial to a hash brownie every now and again), ecstasy took too long -- who's
got a whole weekend to get high and come down -- and beer, well, it was all
right, but I didn't see what the big deal was. My favorite was big, elaborate
cocktails, the kind of thing served in a ceramic volcano, with six layers, on
fire, and a plastic monkey on the rim, but that 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 the kind of drinks
that come in a ceramic volcano.

But you can't throw a party without putting a case or two of beer on ice. It's
expected. It loosens things up. People do stupid things after too many beers,
but it's not like my friends are the kind of people who have cars. And people
do stupid things no matter what -- beer or grass or whatever are all incidental
to that central fact.

Jolu and I each cracked beers -- Anchor Steam for him, a Bud Lite for me -- and
clinked the bottles together, sitting down on a rock.

"You told them 9PM?"

"Yeah," he said.

"Me too."

We drank in silence. The Bud Lite was the least alcoholic thing in the
ice-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've been
scared since the minute the explosions happened. I'm so scared sometimes, 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 know when 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 another month. I
think I'm through. It's too much risk. The DHS, you can't go to war on them.
It's crazy. Really actually crazy."

"You sound like Van," I said. My voice was much more bitter than I'd intended.

"I'm not criticizing you, man. I think it's great that you've got the bravery
to do this all the time. But I haven't got it. I can't live my life in
perpetual terror."

"What are you saying?"

"I'm saying I'm out. I'm going to be one of those people who acts like it's all
OK, like it'll all go back to normal some day. I'm going to use the Internet
like I always did, and only use the Xnet to play games. I'm going to 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 government of the USA.
It's not a fight you're going to win. Watching you try 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 when they
took us away? Do you forget what the country used to be like before they took
it over?}/ But that's not what he wanted me to say. What he wanted me to say
was:

"I understand, Jolu. I respect your choice."

He drank the rest of his bottle and pulled out another one and twisted off the
cap.

"There's something else," he said.

"What?"

"I wasn't going to mention it, but I want you to understand why I have to do
this."

"Jesus, Jolu, /{what}/?"

"I hate to say it, but you're /{white}/. I'm not. White people get caught with
cocaine and do a little rehab time. Brown people get caught with crack and go
to prison for twenty years. White people see cops on the street and feel safer.
Brown people see cops on the street and wonder if they're about to get
searched. The way the DHS is treating you? The law in this country has always
been like that for us."

It was so unfair. I didn't ask to be white. I didn't think I was being braver
just because I'm white. But I knew what Jolu was saying. If the cops stopped
someone in the Mission and asked to see some ID, chances were 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 were friends of
Jolu's, two Mexican guys and a girl I knew from around, short and geeky, always
wearing cute black Buddy Holly glasses that made her look like the outcast
art-student in a teen movie who comes back as the big success.

Jolu introduced me and gave them beers. The girl didn't take one, but instead
produced a small silver flask of vodka from her purse and offered me a drink. I
took a swallow -- warm vodka must be an acquired taste -- and complimented her
on the flask, which was embossed with a repeating motif of Parappa the Rapper
characters.

"It's Japanese," she said as I played another LED keyring over it. "They have
all these great booze-toys based on kids' games. Totally twisted."

I introduced myself and she introduced herself. "Ange," she said, and shook my
hand with hers -- dry, warm, with short nails. Jolu introduced me to his pals,
whom he'd known since computer camp in the fourth grade. More people showed up
-- five, then ten, then twenty. It was a seriously big group now.

We'd told people to arrive by 9:30 sharp, and we gave it until 9:45 to see who
all would show up. About three quarters were Jolu's friends. I'd invited all
the people I really trusted. Either I was more discriminating than Jolu or less
popular. Now that he'd told me he was quitting, it made me think that he was
less discriminating. I was really pissed at him, but trying not to let it show
by concentrating on socializing with other people. But he wasn't stupid. He
knew what was going on. I could see that he was really bummed. Good.

"OK," I said, climbing up on a ruin, "OK, hey, hello?" A few people nearby paid
attention to me, but the ones in the back kept on chatting. I put my arms in
the air like a referee, but it was too dark. Eventually I hit on the idea of
turning my LED keychain on and pointing it at each of the talkers in turn, then
at me. Gradually, the crowd fell quiet.

I welcomed them and thanked them all for coming, then asked them to close in so
I could explain why we were there. I could tell they were into the 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 was
created right after the DHS took over the city. The people who did that are an
organization devoted to personal liberty, who created the network to keep us
safe from DHS spooks and enforcers." Jolu and I had worked this out in advance.
We weren't going to cop to being behind it all, not to anyone. It was way too
risky. Instead, we'd put it out that we were merely lieutenants in "M1k3y"'s
army, acting to organize the local resistance.

"The Xnet isn't pure," I said. "It can be used by the other side just as
readily 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 so that they can
bust us. If the Xnet is going to succeed, we need to figure out how to keep
them from spying on us. We need a network within the network."

I paused and let this sink in. Jolu had suggested that this might be a little
heavy -- learning that you're about to be brought into a revolutionary cell.

"Now, I'm not here to ask you to do anything active. You don't have to go out
jamming or anything. You've been brought here because we know you're cool, we
know you're trustworthy. It's that trustworthiness I want to get you to
contribute tonight. Some of you will already be familiar with the web of trust
and keysigning parties, but for the rest of you, I'll run it down quickly --"
Which I did.

"Now what I want from you tonight is to meet the people here and figure out how
much you can trust them. We're going to help you generate key-pairs and share
them with each other."

This part was tricky. Asking people to bring their own laptops wouldn't have
worked out, but we still needed to do something hella complicated that wouldn't
exactly work with paper and pencil.

I held up a laptop Jolu and I had rebuilt the night before, from the ground up.
"I trust this machine. Every component in it was laid by our own 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 anywhere in the world, this might well
be it.

"I've got a key-generator loaded here. You come up here and give it some random
input -- mash the keys, wiggle the mouse -- and it will use 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 private key with your phone, and hit any
key to make it go away forever -- it's not stored on the disk at all. Then it
will show you your public key. At that 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 they know whose key it is.

"When you get home, you have to convert the photos to keys. This is going 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 and you're screwed. Luckily,
we've got a way to tell if you've got it right: beneath 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 and compare 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 pretty weird,
it's true, but still.


1~ Chapter 11

_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to the University Bookstore~{ The University
Bookstore
http://www4.bookstore.washington.edu/_trade/ShowTitleUBS.taf?ActionArg=Title&ISBN=9780765319852
4326 University Way NE, Seattle, WA 98105 USA +1 800 335 READ }~ at the
University of Washington, whose science fiction section rivals many specialty
stores, thanks to the sharp-eyed, dedicated science fiction buyer, Duane
Wilkins. Duane's a real science fiction fan -- I first met him at the World
Science Fiction Convention in Toronto in 2003 -- and it shows in the eclectic
and informed choices on display at the store. One great predictor of a great
bookstore is the quality of the "shelf review" -- the little 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 from Duane's tutelage, as the shelf reviews at
the University Bookstore are second to none.] }/

Jolu stood up.

"This is where it starts, guys. This is how we know which side you're on. You
might not be willing to take to the streets and get busted for your beliefs,
but if you /{have}/ beliefs, this will let us know it. This will create the web
of trust that tells us who's in and who's out. If we're ever going to get our
country back, we need to do this. We need to do something like this."

Someone in the audience -- it was Ange -- had a hand up, holding a beer bottle.

"So call me stupid but I don't understand this at all. Why do you want us to do
this?"

Jolu looked at me, and I looked back at him. It had all seemed so obvious when
we were organizing it. "The Xnet isn't just a way to play free games. It's the
last open communications network in America. It's the last way to communicate
without being snooped on by the DHS. For it to work 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 messages to are the people we think they are.

"That's where you come in. You're all here because we trust you. I mean, 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 my chest,
something painful. "When the bombs went off, there were four of us caught up by
Market Street. For whatever reason, the DHS decided that made us suspicious.
They put bags over our heads, put us on a ship and interrogated us for days.
They humiliated us. Played games with our minds. Then they let us go.

"All except one person. My best friend. He was with us when they picked us up.
He'd been hurt and he needed medical care. He never came out again. They say
they never saw him. They say that if we ever tell anyone about this, they'll
arrest us and make us disappear.

"Forever."

I was shaking. The shame. The goddamned shame. Jolu had the light on me.

"Oh Christ," I said. "You people are the first ones I've told. If this story
gets around, you can bet they'll know who leaked it. You can bet they'll come
knocking on my door." I took some more deep breaths. "That's why I volunteered
on the Xnet. That's why my life, from now on, is about fighting 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: old people. Our parents.
Grownups. When they think of someone being spied on, they think of someone
/{else}/, a bad guy. When they think of someone 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 suspicion /{all
the time}/! How many times have you gotten on the bus and had every person on
it give you a look like you'd been gargling turds and skinning puppies?

"What's worse, they're turning into adults younger and younger out there. Back
in the day, they used to say 'Never trust anyone over 30.' I say, '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, you know? I mean,
think about it. Who elected these ass-clowns? Who let them invade our city? Who
voted to put the cameras in our classrooms and follow us around with creepy
spyware chips in our transit passes and 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 you in
there and set you up, then you do your thing and take the machine around to
your friends to get photos of your public key so they can sign it when they get
home."

I raised my voice. "Oh! One more thing! Jesus, I can't believe I forgot this.
/{Delete those photos once you've typed in the keys}/! The last thing we want
is a Flickr stream full of pictures of all of us conspiring together."

There was some good-natured, nervous chuckling, then Jolu turned out 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 behind me. Ange. I turned and
smiled at her, and she smiled back, luminous teeth in the dark.

"Thanks for that," I said. "You were great."

"You mean what you said about the bag on your head and everything?"

"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 went by since,
without saying anything, it started to feel like a bad dream. It was real
though." I stopped and climbed up into the cave. "I'm glad I finally told
people. Any longer and I might have started to doubt my own sanity."

I set up the laptop on a dry bit of rock and booted it from the DVD with her
watching. "I'm going to reboot it for every person. This is a standard
ParanoidLinux disc, though I guess you'd have to take my word for it."

"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 her typing
and mousing to create randomness, listening to the crash of the surf, listening
to the party noises from over where the beer was.

She stepped out of the cave, carrying the laptop. On it, in huge white luminous
letters, were her public key and her fingerprint and email address. She held
the screen up beside her face and waited while I got my phone out.

"Cheese," she said. I snapped her pic and dropped the camera back in my pocket.
She wandered off to the revelers and let them each get pics of her 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. And hell, 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 and making
keys. I got to meet everyone there. I knew a lot of them -- some were 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 turned away, 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 together. Van too. No matter what, that would
bind us together forever.

I did my key and did the perp-walk around the gang, letting everyone snap a
pic. Then I climbed up on the high spot I'd spoken from earlier and 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
instructions? What if it's spying on us? What if Jose-Luis and I can't be
trusted?"

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 of us --
all of /{you}/ -- into a heap of trouble. Jail, maybe."

The chuckles turned more nervous.

"So that's why I'm going to do this," I said, and picked up a hammer I'd
brought from my Dad's toolkit. I set the laptop down beside me on the rock and
swung the hammer, Jolu following the swing with his keychain light. Crash --
I'd always dreamt of killing a laptop with a hammer, and here I was doing it.
It felt pornographically good. And bad.

Smash! The screen-panel fell off, shattered into millions of pieces, exposing
the keyboard. I kept hitting it, until the keyboard fell off, exposing the
motherboard and the hard-drive. Crash! I aimed square for the hard-drive,
hitting it with everything I had. It took three blows before the case split,
exposing the fragile media inside. I kept hitting it until there was nothing
bigger than a cigarette lighter, then I put it all in a garbage bag. The crowd
was cheering wildly -- loud enough that I actually got worried that someone far
above us might hear over the surf and call the law.

"All right!" I called. "Now, if you'd like to accompany me, I'm going to march
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 took my arm
in her warm hand and said, "That was beautiful," in my ear and we marched down
to the sea together.

It was perfectly dark by the sea, and treacherous, even with our keychain
lights. Slippery, sharp rocks that were difficult enough to walk on even
without trying to balance six pounds of smashed electronics in a plastic bag. I
slipped once and thought I was going to cut myself up, but she caught me with a
surprisingly strong grip and kept me upright. I was 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 magnified by
her mannish, black-rimmed glasses. I couldn't tell what color they were in the
dark, but I guessed something dark, based on her dark hair and olive
complexion. She looked Mediterranean, maybe Greek or Spanish or Italian.

I crouched down and dipped the bag in the sea, letting it fill with salt water.
I managed to slip a little and soak my shoe, and I swore and she laughed. We'd
hardly said a word since we lit out for the ocean. There was something magical
in our wordless silence.

At that point, I had kissed a total of three girls in my life, not counting
that 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 have reasonable girl
radar, and I think I could have kissed her. She wasn't h4wt in the traditional
sense, but there's something about a girl and a night 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 I can
only describe as spiritual. The surf, the night, the sea and the rocks, and our
breathing. The moment stretched. I sighed. This had been quite a ride. I had a
lot of typing to do tonight, putting all those keys into my keychain, signing
them and publishing the signed keys. Starting the web of 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 his coolers.
I walked with everyone else up the road to the nearest Muni stop and got on
board. Of course, none of us was using an issued Muni pass. By that point,
Xnetters habitually cloned someone else's Muni pass three 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, and looking at
our faces under the bright bus lights was kind of hilarious. We got pretty loud
and the driver used his intercom to tell us to keep it down 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 he did call
the cops. We were in North Beach now, and there were lots of buses, taxis, the
BART at Market Street, neon-lit clubs and cafes to pull apart our grouping, so
we drifted away.

I got home and fired up my Xbox and started typing in keys from my phone's
screen. It was dull, hypnotic work. I was a little drunk, and it lulled 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 who might be
behind it.

> hi

I typed, cautiously.

> it's me, from tonight

Then she paste-bombed a block of crypto. I'd already entered her public key
into my keychain, so I told the IM client to try decrypting the code with the
key.

> it's me, from tonight

It was her!

> Fancy meeting you here

I typed, then encrypted it to my public key and mailed it off.

> It was great meeting you

I typed.

> You too. I don't meet too many smart guys who are also cute and also socially
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 sure dying
here. Don't forget to tip your waitresses, they work hard. I'm here all 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 mighty

Um.

> It was really great to meet you too

> Yeah, it usually is. Where are you taking me?

> Taking you?

> On our next adventure?

> I didn't really have anything planned

> Oki -- then I'll take YOU. Saturday. Dolores Park. Illegal open air concert.
Be there or be a dodecahedron

> Wait what?

> Don't you even read Xnet? It's all over the place. You ever hear of the
Speedwhores?

I nearly choked. That was Trudy Doo's band -- as in Trudy Doo, the woman 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 signed to
play the bill, going to set up on the tennis courts and bring out their own amp
trucks and rock out all night

I felt like I'd been living under a rock. How had I missed that? There was an
anarchist bookstore on Valencia that I sometimes passed on the way to school
that had a poster of an old revolutionary named Emma Goldman with the caption
"If I can't dance, I don't want to be a part of your revolution." I'd been
spending all my energies on figuring out how to 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 do one of those, but I was glad someone
did.

And now that I thought of it, I was damned proud that they were using the Xnet
to do it.

#

The next day I was a zombie. Ange and I had chatted -- flirted -- until 4AM.
Lucky for me, it was a Saturday and I was able to sleep in, but between the
hangover and the sleep-dep, I could barely put two thoughts 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 I was
alone, I always bought my coffee there, like the Turk and I were part of a
secret club.

On the way, I passed a lot of fresh graffiti. I liked Mission graffiti; a lot
of the times, it came in huge, luscious murals, or sarcastic art-student
stencils. I liked that the Mission's taggers kept right on going, under the
nose of the DHS. Another kind of Xnet, I supposed -- they must have all kinds
of ways of knowing what was going on, where to get paint, what cameras worked.
Some of the cameras had been spray-painted over, I noticed.

Maybe they used Xnet!

Painted in ten-foot-high letters on the side of an auto-yard's fence were the
drippy words: DON'T TRUST ANYONE OVER 25.

I stopped. Had someone left my "party" last night and come here with a 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 I should
be calling someone, seeing if they wanted to get a movie or something. That's
how it used to be on a lazy Saturday like this. But who was I going to call?
Van wasn't talking to me, I didn't think I was ready to talk to Jolu, and
Darryl --

Well, I couldn't call Darryl.

I got my coffee and went home and did a little searching around on the Xnet's
blogs. These anonablogs were untraceable to any author -- unless that author
was stupid enough to put her name on it -- and there were a lot of them. Most
of them were apolitical, but a lot of them weren't. They talked about schools
and the unfairness there. They talked about the cops. Tagging.

Turned out there'd been plans for the concert in the park for weeks. It had
hopped from blog to blog, turning into a full-blown movement without my
noticing. And the concert was called Don't Trust Anyone Over 25.

Well, that explained where Ange got it. It was a good slogan.

#

Monday morning, I decided I wanted to check out that anarchist bookstore again,
see about getting one of those Emma Goldman posters. I needed the reminder.

I detoured down to 16th and Mission on my way to school, then up to Valencia
and across. The store was shut, but I got the hours off the door and made sure
they still had that poster up.

As I walked down Valencia, I was amazed to see how much of the DON'T TRUST
ANYONE OVER 25 stuff there was. Half the shops had DON'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-packs made of carbonated water would land in your inbox on Monday and
by Tuesday 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 the head shops.
Distressed designer jeans with the slogan written in careful high school
ball-point ink. Embroidered patches.

Good news travels fast.

It was written on the black-board when I got to Ms Galvez's Social Studies
class. We all sat at our desks, smiling at it. It seemed to smile back. There
was something profoundly cheering about the idea that we could all trust each
other, that the enemy could be identified. I knew it wasn't entirely true, but
it wasn't entirely false either.

Ms Galvez came in and patted her hair and set down her SchoolBook on her desk
and powered it up. She picked up her chalk and turned around to face the board.
We all laughed. Good-naturedly, but we laughed.

She turned around and was laughing too. "Inflation has hit the nation's
slogan-writers, it seems. How many of you know where this phrase comes from?"

We looked at each other. "Hippies?" someone said, and we laughed. Hippies are
all over San Francisco, both the old stoner kinds with giant skanky 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 just think of
the clothes and the music. Clothes and music were incidental to the main part
of what made that era, the sixties, important.

"You've heard about the civil rights movement to end segregation, white and
black kids like you riding buses into the South to sign up black voters and
protest against official state racism. California was one of the main places
where the civil rights leaders came from. We've always been a little more
political than the rest of the country, and this is also a part of the country
where black people have been able to get the same union factory jobs as white
people, so they were a little better off than 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 Bancroft and
Telegraph Avenue. You've probably seen that there are still tables there to
this day.

"Well, the campus tried to shut them down. The president of the university
banned political organizing on campus, but the civil rights kids wouldn't stop.
The police tried to arrest a guy who was handing out literature from one of
these tables, and they put him in a van, but 3,000 students surrounded the van
and refused to let it budge. They wouldn't let them take this kid to jail. They
stood on top of the van and gave speeches about the First Amendment and Free
Speech.

"That galvanized the Free Speech Movement. That was the start of the hippies,
but it was also where more radical student movements came from. Black power
groups like the Black Panthers -- and later gay rights groups like the Pink
Panthers, too. Radical women's groups, even 'lesbian separatists' who wanted to
abolish men altogether! And the Yippies. Anyone ever hear of the Yippies?"

"Didn't they levitate the Pentagon?" I said. I'd once seen a documentary about
this.

She laughed. "I forgot about that, but yes, that was them! Yippies were like
very political hippies, but they weren't serious the way we think of politics
these days. They were very playful. Pranksters. They threw money into the New
York Stock Exchange. They circled the Pentagon with hundreds of protestors and
said a magic spell that was supposed to levitate it. They invented a fictional
kind of LSD that you could spray onto people with squirt-guns and shot each
other with it and pretended to be stoned. They were funny and they made great
TV -- one Yippie, a clown called Wavy Gravy, used to get hundreds of protestors
to dress up like Santa Claus so that the cameras would show police officers
arresting and dragging away Santa on the news that night -- and they mobilized
a lot of people.

"Their big moment was the Democratic National Convention in 1968, where they
called for demonstrations to protest the Vietnam War. Thousands of
demonstrators poured into Chicago, slept in the parks, and picketed every day.
They had lots of bizarre stunts that year, like running a pig called Pigasus
for the presidential nomination. The police and the demonstrators fought in the
streets -- they'd done that many times before, but the Chicago cops didn't have
the smarts to leave the reporters alone. They beat up the reporters, and the
reporters retaliated by finally showing what really went on at these
demonstrations, so the whole country watched their kids being really savagely
beaten down by the Chicago police. They called it a 'police riot.'

"The Yippies loved to say, 'Never trust anyone over 30.' They meant that people
who were born before a certain time, when America had been fighting enemies
like the Nazis, could never understand what it meant to love your country
enough to refuse to fight the Vietnamese. They thought that by the time you hit
30, your attitudes would be frozen and you couldn't ever understand why the
kids of the day were taken to the streets, dropping out, freaking out.

"San Francisco was ground zero for this. Revolutionary armies were founded
here. Some of them blew up buildings or robbed banks for their cause. A lot of
those kids grew up to be more or less normal, while others ended up in jail.
Some of the university dropouts did amazing things -- for example, Steve Jobs
and Steve Wozniak, who founded Apple Computers and invented the PC."

I was really getting into this. I knew a little of it, but I'd never heard it
told like this. Or maybe it had never mattered as much as it did now. Suddenly,
those lame, solemn, grown-up street demonstrations didn't seem so lame after
all. Maybe there was room for that kind of action in the 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 a word. We
all wanted to hear the answer.

"They didn't lose," she said. "They kind of imploded a little. Some of them
went to jail for drugs or other things. Some of them changed their tunes and
became yuppies and went on the lecture circuit telling everyone how stupid
they'd been, talking about how good greed was and how dumb they'd been.

"But they did change the world. The war in Vietnam ended, and the kind of
conformity and unquestioning obedience that people had called patriotism went
out of style in a big way. Black rights, women's rights and gay rights came a
long way. Chicano rights, rights for disabled people, the whole tradition of
civil liberties was created or strengthened by these people. Today's protest
movement is the direct descendant of those struggles."

"I can't believe you're talking about them like this," Charles said. He was
leaning so far in his seat he was half standing, and his sharp, skinny face had
gone red. He had wet, large eyes and big lips, and when he got excited 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 buildings,
you said. They tried to destroy the stock exchange. They beat up cops, and
stopped cops from arresting people who were breaking the law. They attacked
us!"

Ms Galvez nodded slowly. I could tell she was trying to figure out how to
handle Charles, who really seemed like he was ready to pop. "Charles raises a
good point. The Yippies weren't foreign agents, they were American citizens.
When you say 'They attacked us,' you need to figure 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 tell who's us and who's
them: if you support America, you're us. If you support 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 pointed out that
the reason that the Vietnamese were shooting at Americans is that the Americans
had flown to Vietnam and started running around the jungle with guns. Others
thought that Charles had a point, that people shouldn't be allowed to do
illegal things.

Everyone had a good debate except Charles, who just shouted at people,
interrupting them when they tried to get their points out. Ms Galvez tried to
get him to wait for his turn a couple times, but he wasn't having any of it.

I was looking something up on my SchoolBook, something I knew I'd read.

I found it. I stood up. Ms Galvez looked expectantly at me. The other people
followed her gaze and went quiet. Even Charles looked at me after a while, his
big wet eyes burning with hatred for me.

"I wanted to read something," I said. "It's short. 'Governments are instituted
among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that
whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the
right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government,
laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such
form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.'"

1~ Chapter 12

_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Forbidden Planet,~{ Forbidden Planet, UK,
Dublin and New York City: http://www.forbiddenplanet.co.uk }~ the British chain
of science fiction and fantasy books, comics, toys and videos. Forbidden Planet
has stores up and down the UK, and also sports outposts in Manhattan and
Dublin, Ireland. It's dangerous to set foot in a Forbidden Planet -- rarely do
I escape with my wallet intact. Forbidden Planet really leads the pack in
bringing the gigantic audience for TV and movie science fiction into contact
with science fiction books -- something that's absolutely critical to the
future of the field.] }/

Ms 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 governments
should only last for so long as we believe that they're working for 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 talking about a
government that existed because some old jerk's great-great-great-grandfather
believed that God put him in charge and killed everyone who disagreed with him.
We have a democratically elected government --"

"I didn't vote for them," I said.

"So that gives you the right to blow up a building?"

"What? Who said anything about blowing up a building? The Yippies and hippies
and all those people believed that the government no longer listened to them --
look at the way people who tried to sign up voters in the South were treated!
They were beaten up, arrested --"

"Some of them were killed," Ms Galvez said. She held up her hands and waited
for Charles and me to sit down. "We're almost out of time for today, but I want
to commend you all on one of the most interesting classes I've ever taught.
This has been an excellent discussion and I've learned 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 little
challenge. I'd like you to write up a paper comparing the political response to
the anti-war and civil rights movements in the Bay Area to the present day
civil rights responses to the War on Terror. Three pages minimum, but take as
long as you'd like. I'm interested to see what you come up with."

The bell rang a moment later and everyone filed out of the class. I hung back
and waited for Ms Galvez to notice me.

"Yes, Marcus?"

"That was amazing," I said. "I never knew all that stuff about the sixties."

"The seventies, too. This place has always been an exciting place to live in
politically charged times. I really liked your reference to the Declaration --
that was very clever."

"Thanks," I said. "It just came to me. I never really appreciated what those
words all meant before today."

"Well, those are the words every teacher loves to hear, Marcus," she said, 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 up over my desk,
tacked over a vintage black-light poster. I also bought a NEVER TRUST t-shirt
that had a photoshop of Grover and Elmo kicking the grownups Gordon and Susan
off Sesame Street. It made me laugh. I later found out that there had already
been about six photoshop contests for the slogan online in places like Fark and
Worth1000 and B3ta and there were hundreds of ready-made pics floating around
to go on whatever merch someone churned out.

Mom raised an eyebrow at the shirt, and Dad shook his head and lectured me
about not looking for trouble. I felt a little vindicated by his reaction.

Ange found me online again and we IM-flirted until late at night again. The
white van with the antennas came back and I switched off my Xbox 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 be
monster. There were so many bands signed up they were talking about setting up
a B-stage for the secondary acts.

> How'd they get a permit to blast sound all night in that park? There's houses
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

> LOL

I felt a little premonition of nervousness though. I mean, I was taking this
perfectly awesome girl out on a date that weekend -- well, she was taking me,
technically -- to an illegal rave being held in the middle of a busy
neighborhood.

It was bound to be interesting at least.

#

Interesting.

People started to drift into Dolores Park through the long Saturday afternoon,
showing up among the ultimate frisbee players and the dog-walkers. Some of them
played frisbee or walked dogs. It wasn't really clear how the concert was going
to work, but there were a lot of cops and undercovers 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, looking awkward and uncomfortable in their giant shorts and
loose-fitting shirts that no-doubt hung down to cover the chandelier of gear
hung around their midriffs.

Dolores Park is pretty and sunny, with palm trees, tennis courts, and lots of
hills and regular trees to run around on, or hang out on. Homeless people sleep
there at night, but that's true everywhere in San Francisco.

I met Ange down the street, at the anarchist bookstore. That had been my
suggestion. In hindsight, it was a totally transparent move to seem cool and
edgy to this girl, but at the time I would have sworn that I picked it because
it was a convenient place to meet up. She was reading a book called /{Up
Against the Wall Motherf_____r}/ 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 a group of
people like the Yippies, but from New York. They all used that word as their
last names, like 'Ben M-F.' The idea was to have a group out there, making
news, but with a totally unprintable name. Just to screw around with the
news-media. Pretty funny, really." She put the book back on the shelf and now I
wondered if I should hug her. People in California hug to say hello and goodbye
all the time. Except when they 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 head down to her,
kissing me hard on the cheek, then blowing a fart on my neck. 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 TAPPED which were the
right size to put on the receivers on the pay phones that still lined the
streets of the Mission, it being the kind of neighborhood where you got people
who couldn't necessarily afford a cellphone.

We walked out into the night air. I told Ange about the scene at the park 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 something like, 'Aw,
there's no chance they'll do anything about it.'"

"I don't think that's really the idea. The idea is to put a lot of civilians in
a position where the cops have to decide, are we going to treat these ordinary
people like terrorists? It's a little like the jamming, but with music instead
of gadgets. You jam, right?"

Sometimes I forget that all my friends don't know that Marcus and M1k3y 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 delicious.
Imagine a tube the size of a bazooka shell, filled with spicy grilled meat,
guacamole, salsa, tomatoes, refried beans, rice, onions and cilantro. It has
the same relationship to Taco Bell that a Lamborghini has to a Hot Wheels car.

There are about two hundred Mission burrito joints. They're all heroically
ugly, with uncomfortable seats, minimal decor -- faded Mexican tourist 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 authentic places have brains and tongue,
which I never order, but it's nice to know it's there.

The place we went to had both brains and tongue, which we didn't order. I got
carne asada and she got shredded chicken and we each got a big cup of horchata.

As soon as we sat down, she unrolled her burrito and took a little bottle out
of her purse. It was a little stainless-steel aerosol canister that looked for
all the world like a pepper-spray self-defense unit. She aimed it at her
burrito's exposed guts and misted them with a fine red oily spray. 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. "This is
capsaicin oil in a mister."

"Capsaicin --"

"Yeah, the stuff in pepper spray. This is like pepper spray but slightly more
dilute. And way more delicious. Think of it as Spicy Cajun Visine if it helps."

My eyes burned just thinking of it.

"You're kidding," I said. "You are so not going to eat that."

Her eyebrows shot up. "That sounds like a challenge, sonny. You just watch 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 end and 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 going to
do it. I mean, that was basically an anti-personnel weapon she'd just slathered
on her dinner.

She bit into it. Chewed. Swallowed. Gave every impression of having a delicious
dinner.

"Want a bite?" she said, innocently.

"Yeah," I said. I like spicy food. I always order the curries with four chilies
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 horseradish or wasabi
or whatever, and it feels like your sinuses are closing at the same time as
your windpipe, filling your head with trapped, nuclear-hot air that tries to
batter its way out through your watering eyes and nostrils? That feeling like
steam is about to pour out of your ears like a cartoon character?

This was a lot worse.

This was like putting your hand on a hot stove, only it's not your hand, it's
the entire inside of your head, and your esophagus all the way down to your
stomach. My entire body sprang out in a sweat and I choked and choked.

Wordlessly, she passed me my horchata and I managed to get the straw into my
mouth and suck hard on it, gulping down half of it in one go.

"So there's a scale, the Scoville scale, that we chili-fanciers use to talk
about how spicy a pepper is. Pure capsaicin is about 15 million Scovilles.
Tabasco is about 50,000. Pepper spray is a healthy three million. This stuff is
a puny 200,000, about as hot as a mild Scotch Bonnet Pepper. I worked up to it
in about a year. Some of the real hardcore can get up to a million or so,
twenty times hotter than Tabasco. That's pretty freaking hot. At Scoville
temperatures like that, your brain gets totally awash in endorphins. It's a
better body-stone than hash. And it's good for 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 her arm around
my waist and I found that she was just the right height for me to put my arm
around her shoulders. That was new. I'd never been a tall guy, and the girls
I'd dated had all been my height -- teenaged girls grow faster than guys, which
is a cruel trick of nature. It was nice. It felt nice.

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 the hum of a million
bees. There were lots of people streaming toward the park, and when I looked
toward it, I saw that it was about a hundred times 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 and we 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 of cops,
with tense faces, but what the hell were they going to do? There were a /{lot}/
of people in the park. I'm not so good at counting crowds. The papers later
quoted organizers as saying there were 20,000 people; the cops said 5,000.
Maybe that means there were 12,500.

Whatever. It was more people than I'd ever stood among, as part of an
unscheduled, unsanctioned, /{illegal}/ event.

We were among them in an instant. I can't swear to it, but I don't think there
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. No one would do
anything too stupid with kids that little in the crowd. No one wanted to see
little kids get hurt. This was just going to be a glorious spring night of
celebration.

I figured the thing to do was push in towards the tennis courts. We threaded
our way through the crowd, and to stay together we took each other's hands.
Only staying together didn't require us to intertwine fingers. That was
strictly for pleasure. It was very pleasurable.

The bands were all inside the tennis courts, with their guitars and mixers and
keyboards and even a drum kit. Later, on Xnet, I found a Flickr stream of them
smuggling all this stuff in, piece by piece, in gym bags and under their coats.
Along with it all were huge speakers, the kind you see in automotive supply
places, and among them, a stack of...car batteries. I laughed. Genius! That was
how they were going to power their stacks. From where I stood, I could see that
they were cells from a hybrid car, a Prius. Someone had gutted an eco-mobile to
power the night's entertainment. The batteries continued outside the courts,
stacked up against the fence, tethered to the main stack by wires threaded
through the chain-link. I counted -- 200 batteries! Christ! Those things
weighed a ton, too.

There's no way they organized this without email and wikis and mailing lists.
And there's no way people this smart would have done that on the public
Internet. This had all taken place on the Xnet, I'd bet my boots on it.

We just kind of bounced around in the crowd for a while as the bands tuned up
and conferred with one another. I saw Trudy Doo from a distance, in the tennis
courts. She looked like she was in a cage, like a pro wrestler. She was wearing
a torn wife-beater and her hair was in long, fluorescent pink dreads down to
her waist. She was wearing army camouflage 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, and put 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 me and I
kind of looked like a spazz so I stopped. The energy in the crowd was amazing.
You hear people talk about "vibes" and "energy" for big groups of people, but
until you've experienced it, you probably think it's just a figure of speech.

It's not. It's the smiles, infectious and big as watermelons, on every face.
Everyone bopping a little to an unheard rhythm, shoulders rocking. Rolling
walks. Jokes and laughs. The tone of every voice tight and excited, like a
firework about to go off. And you can't help but be a part of 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't figure out
how to dance to. I know how to dance to exactly two kinds of music: trance
(shuffle around and let the music move you) and punk (bash around and mosh
until you get hurt or exhausted or both). The next act was Oakland hip-hoppers,
backed by a thrash metal band, which is better than it sounds. Then some
bubble-gum pop. Then Speedwhores 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 thirty two 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 from me. You're
the first generation to grow up in Gulag America, and you know what your
freedom is worth to the last goddamned cent!"

The crowd roared. She was playing fast little skittery nervous chords on her
guitar and her bass player, a huge fat girl with a dykey haircut and even
bigger boots and a smile you could open beer bottles with was laying it down
fast and hard already. I wanted to bounce. I bounced. Ange bounced with me. We
were sweating freely in the evening, which reeked of perspiration and pot
smoke. Warm bodies crushed in on all sides 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, a little
pixie of a girl whose face bristled with piercings, jammed in, going
wheedle-dee-wheedle-dee-dee up high, past the twelfth fret.

"It's our goddamned city! It's our goddamned country. No terrorist can take it
from us for so long as we're free. Once we're not free, the terrorists win!
Take it back! Take it back! You're young enough and stupid enough not to know
that you can't possibly win, so you're the only ones who can lead 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. Ange danced
alongside of me. Technically, we were rubbing our sweaty bodies against each
other for several hours, but believe it or not, I totally wasn't being a
horn-dog about it. We were dancing, lost in the godbeat and the thrash and the
screaming -- TAKE IT BACK! TAKE IT BACK!

When I couldn't dance anymore, I grabbed her hand and she squeezed mine like I
was keeping her from falling off a building. She dragged me toward 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 our bodies went instantly icy.
We shivered and she threw her arms around my waist. "Warm me," she commanded. I
didn't need a hint. I hugged her back. Her heart was an echo of the fast beats
from the stage -- breakbeats now, fast and furious and wordless.

She smelled of sweat, a sharp tang that smelled great. I knew I smelled of
sweat too. My nose was pointed into the top of her head, and her face was right
at my collarbone. She moved her hands to my neck and tugged.

"Get down here, I didn't bring a stepladder," is what she said and I tried 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 never kissed
anyone before. One had been dating since she was 12. She had issues.

None of them kissed like Ange. She made her whole mouth soft, like the inside
of a ripe piece of fruit, and she didn't jam her tongue in my mouth, but slid
it in there, and sucked my lips into her mouth at the same time, so it was like
my mouth and hers were merging. I heard myself moan and I grabbed her and
squeezed her harder.

Slowly, gently, we lowered ourselves to the grass. We lay on our sides and
clutched each other, kissing and kissing. The world disappeared so there was
only the kiss.

My hands found her butt, her waist. The edge of her t-shirt. Her warm tummy,
her soft navel. They inched higher. She moaned too.

"Not here," she said. "Let's move over there." She pointed across the street at
the big white church that gives Mission Dolores Park and the Mission its name.
Holding hands, moving quickly, we crossed to the church. It had big pillars in
front of it. She put my back up against one of them and pulled my face down to
hers again. My hands went quickly and boldly back to her shirt. I slipped them
up her front.

"It undoes in the back," she whispered into my mouth. I had a boner that could
cut glass. I moved my hands around to her back, which was strong and broad, and
found the hook with my fingers, which were trembling. I fumbled for a while,
thinking of all those jokes about how bad 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 wetness of her armpits -- which was sexy and not at all
gross for some reason -- 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 physical
sensation, like something blowing you off your feet. A sound as loud as your
ears could process, and then louder.

"DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY," a voice said, like God rattling in my skull.

"THIS IS AN ILLEGAL GATHERING. DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY."

The band had stopped playing. The noise of the crowd across the street changed.
It got scared. Angry.

I heard a click as the PA system of car-speakers and car-batteries in the
tennis courts powered up.

"TAKE IT BACK!"

It was a defiant yell, like a sound shouted into the surf or screamed off a
cliff.

"TAKE IT BACK!"

The crowd /{growled}/, a sound that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand
up.

"/{TAKE IT BACK}/!" they chanted. "TAKE IT BACK TAKE IT BACK TAKE IT BACK!"

The police moved in in lines, carrying plastic shields, wearing Darth Vader
helmets that covered their faces. Each one had a black truncheon and infra-red
goggles. They looked like soldiers out of some futuristic war movie. They took
a step forward in unison and every one of them banged his truncheon on his
shield, a cracking noise like the earth splitting. Another step, another crack.
They were all around the park and closing in now.

"DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY," the voice of God said again. There were helicopters
overhead now. No floodlights, though. The infrared goggles, right. Of course.
They'd have infrared scopes in the sky, too. I pulled Ange back against the
doorway of the church, tucking us back from the cops and the choppers.

"TAKE IT BACK!" the PA roared. It was Trudy Doo's rebel yell and I heard 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 the park 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 opposing force,
knowing what's coming, running anyway, screaming, hollering.

"DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY," the voice of God said. It was coming from trucks parked
all around the park, trucks that had swung into place in the last few seconds.

That's when the mist fell. It came out of the choppers, and we just caught the
edge of it. It made the top of my head feel like it was going to come off. It
made my sinuses feel like they were being punctured with ice-picks. It made my
eyes swell and water, and my throat close.

Pepper spray. Not 200 thousand Scovilles. A million and a half. They'd gassed
the crowd.

I didn't see what happened next, but I heard it, over the sound of both me and
Ange choking and holding each other. First the choking, retching sounds. The
guitar and drums and bass crashed to a halt. Then coughing.

Then screaming.

The screaming went on for a long time. When I could see again, the cops had
their scopes up on their foreheads and the choppers were flooding Dolores Park
with so much light it looked like daylight. Everyone was looking at the Park,
which was good news, because when the lights went up like that, we were totally
visible.

"What do we do?" Ange said. Her voice was tight, scared. I didn't trust myself
to speak for a moment. I swallowed a few times.

"We walk away," I said. "That's all we can do. Walk away. Like we were just
passing by. Down to Dolores and turn left and up towards 16th Street. 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 figure we
haven't done anything and let us alone. They have a lot of arrests to make.
They'll be busy for a long time."

The park was rolling with bodies, people and adults clawing at their faces and
gasping. The cops dragged them by the armpits, then lashed their 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 and business-like,
like two people wanting to avoid whatever trouble someone else was making. The
kind of walk you adopt when you want to pretend you can't see a panhandler, or
don't want to get involved in a street-fight.

It worked.

We reached the corner and turned and kept going. Neither of us dared to speak
for two blocks. Then I let out a gasp of air I hadn't know I'd been holding in.

We came to 16th Street and turned down toward Mission Street. Normally that's a
pretty scary neighborhood at 2AM on a Saturday night. That night it was a
relief -- same old druggies and hookers and dealers 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 rolling by and
I hailed it. That was a small miracle -- there are hardly any cabs when you
need them in San Francisco.

"Have you got cabfare home?"

"Yeah," she said. The cab-driver looked at us through his window. I opened the
back door so he wouldn't take off.

"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 somehow more 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 all those Xnetters
to the tender mercies of the DHS and the SFPD, I set off for home.

#

Monday morning, Fred Benson was standing behind Ms Galvez's desk.

"Ms Galvez will no longer be teaching this class," he said, once we'd taken our
seats. He had a self-satisfied note that I recognized immediately. On a hunch,
I checked out Charles. He was smiling like it was his birthday 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 except the
employee and the disciplinary committee," he said, without even bothering to
hide how much he enjoyed saying it.

"We'll be beginning a new unit today, on national security. Your SchoolBooks
have the new texts. Please open them and turn to the first screen."

The opening screen was emblazoned with a DHS logo and the title: WHAT EVERY
AMERICAN SHOULD KNOW ABOUT HOMELAND SECURITY.

I wanted to throw my SchoolBook on the floor.

#

I'd made arrangements to meet Ange at a cafe in her neighborhood after school.
I jumped on the BART and found myself sitting behind two guys in suits. They
were looking at the San Francisco Chronicle, which featured a full-page
post-mortem on the "youth riot" in Mission Dolores Park. 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 that stupid?"

I got up and moved to another seat.

1~ Chapter 13

_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Books-A-Million,~{ Books-A-Million
http://www.booksamillion.com/ncom/books?&isbn=0765319853 }~ a chain of gigantic
bookstores spread across the USA. I first encountered Books-A-Million while
staying at a hotel in Terre Haute, Indiana (I was giving a speech at the Rose
Hulman Institute of Technology later that day). The store was next to my hotel
and I really needed some reading material -- I'd been on the road for a solid
month and I'd read everything in my suitcase, and I had another five cities to
go before I headed home. As I stared intently at the shelves, a clerk asked me
if I needed any help. Now, I've worked at bookstores before, and a
knowledgeable clerk is worth her weight in gold, so I said 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 proceeded to take down a copy of my first
novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. I busted out laughing, introduced
myself, and had an absolutely lovely chat about science fiction that almost
made me late to give my speech!] }/

"They're total whores," Ange said, spitting the word out. "In fact, that's an
insult to hardworking whores everywhere. They're, they're /{profiteers.}/"

We were looking at a stack of newspapers we'd picked up and brought to the
cafe. They all contained "reporting" on the party in Dolores Park and to a one,
they made it sound like a drunken, druggy orgy of kids who'd attacked the cops.
/{USA Today}/ described the cost of the "riot" and included the cost of washing
away the pepper-spray residue from the gas-bombing, the rash of asthma attacks
that clogged the city's emergency 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 the blogs
and videos and photostreams to my phone and I showed them to her. They were
first-hand accounts from people who'd been gassed, and beaten up. The video
showed us all dancing, having fun, showed the peaceful political speeches and
the chant of "Take It Back" and Trudy Doo talking about us being the only
generation that could believe in fighting 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 papers and
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 barely search
regular blogs, let alone keep track of the Xnet. It's not as if that's a real
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 place where
you can go that's intended for the press to find it and get the whole picture.
Link it to the HOWTOs for Xnet. Internet users can get to the Xnet, provided
they don't care about the DHS finding out what they'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 my pocket. I
stood up, turned on my heel, and walked out of the cafe. I picked a direction
at random and kept going. My face felt tight, the blood 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 known that
since they let me go from the DHS truck, that someday they'd come and arrest me
and put me away forever, send me to wherever Darryl had gone.

It was all over.

She nearly tackled me as I reached Market Street. She was out of breath 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 focus on
anything. I had a mad desire to jump into the path of a Muni trolley as it tore
past us, down the middle of the road. Better to die than to go 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 more simply.
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 blackmailed
Jolu. After the party I stalked you a little, trying to figure out if you were
the nice guy you seemed to be or a secret axe-murderer. I've known Jolu for a
long time and when I asked him about you, he gushed like you were the Second
Coming or something, but I could hear that there was something he wasn't
telling me. I've known Jolu for a long time. He dated my older sister at
computer camp when he was a kid. I have some really good dirt on him. I told
him I'd go public with it if he didn't tell me."

"So he told you."

"No," she said. "He told me to go to hell. Then I told him something about me.
Something I'd never told anyone else."

"What?"

She looked at me. Looked around. Looked back at me. "OK. I won't swear you to
secrecy because what's the point? Either I can trust you or I can't.

"Last year, I --" she broke off. "Last year, I stole the standardized tests and
published them on the net. It was just a lark. I happened to be walking past
the principal's office and I saw them in his safe, and the door was hanging
open. I ducked into his office -- there were six sets of copies and I just put
one into my bag and took off again. When I got home, I scanned them all and put
them up on a Pirate Party server in Denmark."

"That was /{you}/?" I said.

She blushed. "Um. Yeah."

"Holy crap!" I said. It had been huge news. The Board of Education said that
its No Child Left Behind tests had cost tens of millions of dollars to produce
and that they'd have to spend it all over again now that they'd had the leak.
They called it "edu-terrorism." The news had speculated endlessly about the
political motivations of the leaker, wondering if it was a teacher's protest,
or a student, or a thief, or a disgruntled government 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 he knew
/{my}/ secret, then he'd have something he could use to put me in jail if I
opened my trap. Give a little, get a little. Quid pro quo, like in Silence of
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 totally make 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. She grabbed
my hands and squeezed them.

"I'm sorry I squeezed it out of him. It was your decision to tell me, if you
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 to calm 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 say it.
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. Sometimes even hate each
other. It's really cold to think about that happening between us, but you know,
we've got to think about it."

"I solemnly promise that there is nothing you could ever do to me that would
cause me to betray your secret. Nothing. Screw a dozen cheerleaders in my bed
while my mother watches. Make me listen to Britney Spears. Rip off my laptop,
smash it with hammers and soak it in sea-water. 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 face up.

#

M1k3y's next big project on the Xnet was putting together the ultimate roundup
of reports of the DON'T TRUST party at Dolores Park. I put together the
biggest, most bad-ass site I could, with sections showing the action by
location, by time, by category -- police violence, dancing, aftermath, singing.
I uploaded the whole concert.

It was pretty much all I worked on for the rest of the night. And the next
night. And the next.

My mailbox overflowed with suggestions from people. They sent me dumps off
their phones and their pocket-cameras. Then I got an email from a name I
recognized -- Dr Eeevil (three "e"s), one of the prime maintainers of
ParanoidLinux.

> M1k3y

> I have been watching your Xnet experiment with great interest. Here in
Germany, we have much experience with what happens with a government that gets
out of control.

> One thing you should know is that every camera has a unique "noise signature"
that can be used to later connect a picture with a camera. That means that the
photos you're republishing on your site could potentially be used to identify
the photographers, should they later be picked up for something else.

> Luckily, it's not hard to strip out the signatures, if you care to. There's a
utility on the ParanoidLinux distro you're using that does this -- it's called
photonomous, and you'll find it in /usr/bin. Just read the man pages for
documentation. It's simple though.

> Good luck with what you're doing. Don't get caught. Stay free. Stay paranoid.

> Dr Eeevil

I 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 everyone 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 could do about the photos that had
already been downloaded and cached, but from now on we'd be smarter.

That was all the thought I gave the matter that night, until I got down to
breakfast the next morning and Mom had the radio on, playing the NPR 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," the announcer
said as I was drinking a glass of orange juice. I managed not to spray it
across the room, but I /{did}/ choke a little.

"Al-Jazeera reporters claim that these accounts were published on the so-called
'Xnet,' a clandestine network used by students and Al-Quaeda sympathizers in
the Bay Area. This network's existence has long been rumored, but today marks
its first mainstream mention."

Mom shook her head. "Just what we need," she said. "As if the police weren't
bad enough. Kids running around, pretending to be guerrillas and giving them
the excuse to really crack down."

"The Xnet weblogs have carried hundreds of reports and multimedia files from
young people who attended the riot and allege that they were gathered
peacefully until the police attacked /{them}/. Here is one of those accounts.

"'All we were doing was dancing. I brought my little brother. Bands played and
we talked about freedom, about how we were losing it to these jerks who say
they hate terrorists but who attack us though we're not terrorists we're
Americans. I think they hate freedom, not us.

"We danced and the bands played and it was all fun and good and then the cops
started shouting at us to disperse. We all shouted take it back! Meaning take
America back. The cops gassed us with pepper spray. My little brother is
twelve. He missed three days of school. My stupid parents say it was my fault.
How about the police? We pay them and they're supposed to protect us but they
gassed us for no good reason, 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 accessing this Xnet on
NPR's homepage."

Dad came down.

"Do you use the Xnet?" he said. He looked intensely at my face. I felt myself
squirm.

"It's for video-games," I said. "That's what most people use it for. It's just
a wireless network. It's what everyone did with those free Xboxes they gave
away last year."

He glowered at me. "Games? Marcus, you don't realize it, but you're providing
cover for people who plan on attacking and destroying this country. I don't
want to see you using this Xnet. Not anymore. Do I make myself clear?"

I wanted to argue. Hell, I wanted to shake him by the shoulders. But I didn'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 to leave Mr
Benson in charge of my social studies class. But the woman they found to
replace him was my worst nightmare.

She was young, just about 28 or 29, and pretty, in a wholesome kind of way. She
was blonde and spoke with a soft southern accent when she introduced herself to
us as Mrs Andersen. That set off alarm bells right away. I didn't know /{any}/
women under the age of sixty that called themselves "Mrs."

But I was prepared to overlook it. She was young, pretty, she sounded nice. She
would be OK.

She wasn't OK.

"Under what circumstances should the federal government be prepared to suspend
the Bill of Rights?" she said, turning to the blackboard and 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."

"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 compelling evidence
that a bad guy killed your father. It's the only evidence that exists. 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 disciplinary
action against the police, not punishing all of society for one cop'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 are many
instances in which the First Amendment is not absolute. Let's list some more of
those."

Charles put his hand up again. "Endangering a law enforcement officer."

"Yes, disclosing the identity of an undercover policeman or intelligence
officer. Very good." She wrote it down. "Others?"

"National security," Charles said, not waiting for her to call on him again.
"Libel. Obscenity. Corruption of minors. Child porn. Bomb-making recipes." Mrs
Andersen wrote these down fast, but stopped at child porn. "Child porn is just
a form of obscenity."

I was feeling sick. This was not what I'd learned or believed about my country.
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 intended it to
be a living document that was revised over time. They understood that the
Republic wouldn't be able to last forever if the government of the day couldn't
govern according to the needs of the day. They never intended 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 who were loyal to
the King until he instituted policies that were against their interests and
enforced them brutally. The religious refugees were way earlier."

"Some of the Framers were descended from religious refugees," she said.

"And the Bill of Rights isn't supposed to be something you pick and choose
from. What the Framers hated was tyranny. That's what the Bill of Rights is
supposed to prevent. They were a revolutionary army and they wanted a set of
principles that everyone could agree to. Life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness. The right of people to throw off their oppressors."

"Yes, yes," she said, waving at me. "They believed in the right of people to
get rid of their Kings, but --" Charles was grinning and when she said that, he
smiled even wider.

"They set out the Bill of Rights because they thought that having absolute
rights was better than the risk that someone would take them away. Like the
First Amendment: it's supposed to protect us by preventing the government from
creating two kinds of speech, allowed speech and criminal speech. They didn't
want to face the risk that some jerk would decide 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 advanced
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 the
government wants to do something that makes us a little unhappy, or takes away
some of our liberty, it's OK, providing they're doing it to save our lives.
That's why the cops can lock you up if they think you're a danger to yourself
or others. You lose your liberty and happiness to protect 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 they can do
anything they want, if they say it's to stop someone from hurting us in the
future?"

"Yeah," another kid said. "This sounds like you're saying that national
security is more important than the Constitution."

I was so proud of my fellow students then. I said, "How can you protect 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't believe in absolute
freedom, not when it threatened the Republic. Now you take these Xnet people
--"

I tried hard not to stiffen.

"-- these so-called jammers who were on the news this morning. After this city
was attacked by people who've declared war on this country, they set about
sabotaging the security measures set up to catch the bad guys and prevent them
from doing it again. They did this by endangering and inconveniencing their
fellow citizens --"

"They did it to show that our rights were being taken away in the name of
protecting them!" I said. OK, I shouted. God, she had me so steamed. "They did
it because the government was treating /{everyone}/ like a 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 committed
terrorism?"

I boiled.

"Oh for Christ's sake. Committed terrorism? They showed that universal
surveillance was more dangerous than terrorism. Look at what happened in the
park last weekend. Those people were dancing and listening to music. How is
/{that}/ terrorism?"

The teacher crossed the room and stood before me, looming over me until I shut
up. "Marcus, you seem to think that nothing has changed in this country. You
need to understand that the bombing of the Bay Bridge changed everything.
Thousands of our friends and relatives lie dead at the bottom of the Bay. This
is a time for national unity in the face of the violent 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 country where dissent is
welcome. We're a country of dissidents and fighters and university dropouts and
free speech people."

I thought of Ms Galvez's last lesson and the thousands of Berkeley students
who'd surrounded the police-van when they tried to arrest a guy for
distributing civil rights literature. No one tried to stop those trucks when
they drove away with all the people who'd been dancing in the park. 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. "You are to
present yourself to him immediately. I will /{not}/ have my classes disrupted
by disrespectful behavior. For someone who claims to love freedom of speech,
you're certainly willing to shout down anyone who disagrees with you."

I picked up my SchoolBook and my bag and stormed out. The door had 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. My gait was
recorded. The arphids in my student ID broadcast my identity to sensors in the
hallway. It was like being in jail.

"Close the door, Marcus," Mr Benson said. He turned his screen around so that I
could see the video feed from the social studies classroom. He'd been watching.

"What do you have to say for yourself?"

"That wasn't teaching, it was /{propaganda}/. She told us that the Constitution
didn't matter!"

"No, she said it wasn't religious doctrine. And you attacked her like some kind
of fundamentalist, proving her point. Marcus, you of all people should
understand that everything changed when the bridge was bombed. Your friend
Darryl --"

"Don't you say a goddamned word about him," I said, the anger bubbling over.
"You're not fit to talk about him. Yeah, I understand that everything's
different now. We used to be a free country. Now we're not."

"Marcus, do you know what 'zero-tolerance' means?"

I backed down. He could expel me for "threatening behavior." It was supposed to
be used against gang kids who tried to intimidate their teachers. But of course
he wouldn't have any compunctions about using it 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 of me
wanted to grovel. It wanted to beg for his forgiveness for all my shame. I
tamped that part down and decided that I would rather get kicked out than
apologize.

"Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the
consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes
destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish
it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles,
and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to
effect their safety and happiness." I remembered it word for word.

He shook his head. "Remembering things isn't the same as understanding them,
sonny." He bent over his computer and made some clicks. His printer purred. He
handed me a sheet of warm Board letterhead that said I'd been suspended for two
weeks.

"I'll email your parents now. If you are still on school property in thirty
minutes, 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.

1~ Chapter 14

_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to the incomparable Mysterious Galaxy in San
Diego, California.~{ Mysterious Galaxy
http://mysteriousgalaxy.booksense.com/NASApp/store/Product?s=showproduct&isbn=9780765319852
7051 Clairemont Mesa Blvd., Suite #302 San Diego, CA USA 92111 +1 858 268 4747
}~ The Mysterious Galaxy folks have had me in to sign books every time I've
been in San Diego for a conference or to teach (the Clarion Writers' Workshop
is based at UC San Diego in nearby 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 that they'll always be able to get great recommendations and great
ideas at the store. In summer 2007, I took my writing class from Clarion down
to the store for the midnight launch of the final Harry Potter book and I've
never seen such a rollicking, awesomely fun party at a store.] }/

The Xnet wasn't much fun in the middle of the school-day, when all the people
who used it were in school. I had the piece of paper folded in the back pocket
of my jeans, and I threw it on the kitchen table when I got home. I sat down in
the living room and switched on the TV. I never watched it, but I knew that my
parents did. The TV and the radio and the 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 help rescue people from
hurricanes, stationed overseas for years and years of a long and endless war.

I flipped around the 24-hour news networks, one after another, a parade of
officials telling us why we should be scared. A parade of photos of bombs going
off around the world.

I kept flipping and found myself looking at a familiar face. It was the guy who
had come into the truck and spoken to Severe-Haircut woman when I was chained
up in the back. Wearing a military uniform. The caption identified him as Major
General Graeme Sutherland, Regional Commander, DHS.

"I hold in my hands actual literature on offer at the so-called concert in
Dolores Park last weekend." He held up a stack of pamphlets. There'd been lots
of pamphleteers there, I remembered. Wherever you got a group 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 GUIDE TO OVERTHROWING THE
STATE. Here's one, DID THE SEPTEMBER 11TH BOMBINGS REALLY HAPPEN? And another,
HOW TO USE THEIR SECURITY AGAINST THEM. This literature shows us the true
purpose of the illegal gathering on Saturday night. This wasn't merely an
unsafe gathering of thousands of people without proper precaution, or even
toilets. It was a recruiting rally for the enemy. It was an attempt to corrupt
children into embracing the idea that America shouldn't protect herself.

"Take this slogan, DON'T TRUST ANYONE OVER 25. What better way to ensure that
no considered, balanced, adult discussion is ever injected into your
pro-terrorist message than to exclude adults, limiting your group to
impressionable young people?

"When police came on the scene, they found a recruitment rally for America's
enemies in progress. The gathering had already disrupted the nights of hundreds
of residents in the area, none of whom had been consulted in the planning of
this all night rave party.

"They ordered these people to disperse -- that much is visible on all the video
-- and when the revelers turned to attack them, egged on by the musicians on
stage, the police subdued them using non-lethal crowd control techniques.

"The arrestees were ring-leaders and provocateurs who had led the thousands of
impressionistic young people there to charge the police lines. 827 of them were
taken into custody. Many of these people had prior offenses. More than 100 of
them had outstanding warrants. They are still in custody.

"Ladies and gentlemen, America is fighting a war on many fronts, but nowhere is
she in more grave danger than she is here, at home. Whether we are being
attacked by terrorists or those who sympathize with them."

A reporter held up a hand and said, "General Sutherland, surely you're not
saying that these children were terrorist sympathizers for attending a party in
a park?"

"Of course not. But when young people are brought under the influence of our
country's enemies, it's easy for them to end up over their heads. Terrorists
would love to recruit a fifth column to fight the war on the home front for
them. If these were my children, I'd be gravely concerned."

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 moving in." He held
them next to his face and paged through them one at a time. They showed people
dancing really rough, some people getting crushed or stepped on. Then they
moved into sex stuff by the trees, a girl with three guys, two guys necking
together. "There were children as young as ten years old at this event. A
deadly cocktail of drugs, propaganda and music resulted in dozens of injuries.
It's a wonder there weren't any deaths."

I switched the TV off. They made it look like it had been a riot. If my parents
thought I'd been there, they'd have strapped me to my bed for a month and only
let me out afterward wearing a tracking collar.

Speaking of which, they were going to be /{pissed}/ when they found out I'd
been suspended.

#

They didn't take it well. Dad wanted to ground me, but Mom and I talked 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 afterward. I think the
word 'asshole' was mentioned repeatedly."

Dad shook his head. "Disrupting a class to argue against the Department 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 me feel
like he'd stopped thinking of me as a person and switched to thinking of me as
a kind of half-formed larva that needed to be guided out of adolescence. I
hated it. "You're going to have to learn to live with the fact that we live in
a different world today. You have every right to speak your mind of course, but
you have to be prepared for the consequences of doing so. You have to face the
fact that there are people who are hurting, who aren't going to want to argue
the finer points of Constitutional law when their lives are at stake. We're in
a lifeboat now, and once you're in the lifeboat, no one wants to hear about how
mean the captain is being."

I barely restrained myself from rolling my eyes.

"I've been assigned two weeks of independent study, writing one paper for each
of my subjects, using the city for my background -- a history paper, a social
studies paper, an English paper, a physics paper. It beats sitting around at
home watching television."

Dad looked hard at me, like he suspected I was up to something, then nodded. I
said goodnight to them and went up to my room. I fired up my Xbox and opened a
word-processor and started to brainstorm ideas for 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 sympathetic
about everything and told me she'd help me with my papers if I wanted to meet
her after school the next night. I knew where her school was -- she went to the
same school as Van -- and it was all the way over in the East Bay, where I
hadn't visited since the bombs went.

I was really excited at the prospect of seeing her again. Every night since the
party, I'd gone to bed thinking of two things: the sight of the crowd charging
the police lines and the feeling of the side of her breast under her shirt as
we leaned against the pillar. She was amazing. I'd never been with a girl
as...aggressive as her before. It had always been me putting the moves on and
them pushing me away. I got the feeling that Ange 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 and what 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 good place to
write about. History? Sure, it's there, from the Gold Rush to the WWII
shipyards, the Japanese internment camps, the invention of the PC. Physics? The
Exploratorium has the coolest exhibits of any museum I've ever been to. I took
a perverse satisfaction in the exhibits on soil liquefaction during big quakes.
English? Jack London, Beat Poets, science fiction writers like Pat Murphy and
Rudy Rucker. Social studies? The Free Speech Movement, Cesar Chavez, gay
rights, feminism, anti-war movement...

I've always loved just learning stuff for its own sake. Just to be smarter
about the world around me. I could do that just by walking around the city. I
decided I'd do an English paper about the Beats first. City Lights books had a
great library in an upstairs room where Alan Ginsberg and his buddies had
created their radical druggy poetry. The one we'd read in 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 hysterical
naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry
dynamo in the machinery of night...

I liked the way he ran those words all together, "starving hysterical naked." I
knew how that felt. And "best minds of my generation" made me think hard too.
It made me remember the park and the police and the gas falling. They busted
Ginsberg for obscenity over Howl -- all about a line about gay sex that would
hardly have caused us to blink an eye today. It made 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 the
books. I got lost in Jack Kerouac's /{On the Road}/, a novel I'd been meaning
to read for a long time, and a clerk who came up to check on me nodded
approvingly and found me a cheap edition that he sold me for six bucks.

I walked into Chinatown and had dim sum buns and noodles with hot-sauce that I
had previously considered to be pretty hot, but which would never seem anything
like hot ever again, not now that I'd had an Ange special.

As the day wore on toward the afternoon, I got on the BART and switched to a
San Mateo bridge shuttle bus to bring me around to the East Bay. I read my copy
of /{On the Road}/ and dug the scenery whizzing past. /{On the Road}/ is a
semi-autobiographical novel about Jack Kerouac, a druggy, hard-drinking writer
who goes hitchhiking around America, working crummy jobs, howling through the
streets at night, meeting people and parting ways. Hipsters, sad-faced hobos,
con-men, muggers, scumbags and angels. There's not really a plot -- Kerouac
supposedly wrote 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. He
makes friends with self-destructing people like Dean Moriarty, who get him
involved in weird schemes that never really work out, but still it works out,
if you know what I mean.

There was a rhythm to the words, it was luscious, I could hear it being read
aloud in my head. It made me want to lie down in the bed of a pickup truck and
wake up in a dusty little town somewhere in the central valley on the way to
LA, one of those places with a gas station and a diner, and just walk out into
the fields and meet people and see stuff and do stuff.

It was a long bus ride and I must have dozed off a little -- staying up late
IMing with Ange was hard on my sleep-schedule, since Mom still expected me down
for breakfast. I woke up and changed buses and before long, I was at Ange's
school.

She came bounding out of the gates in her uniform -- I'd never seen her in it
before, it was kind of cute in a weird way, and reminded me of Van in her
uniform. She gave me a long hug and a hard kiss on the cheek.

"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 as I've been
doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me
are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved,
desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a
commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles
exploding like spiders across the stars and 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 sidewalk back
toward the bus-stop. Once we turned the corner, she put her arm around my waist
and I slung mine around her shoulder. Walking down the street with a girl -- my
girlfriend? Sure, why not? -- talking about this cool book. It was heaven. Made
me forget my troubles for a little while.

"Marcus?"

I turned around. It was Van. In my subconscious I'd expected this. I knew
because my conscious mind wasn't remotely surprised. It wasn't a big school,
and they all got out at the same time. I hadn't spoken to Van in 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's
shoulders. 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 was
suddenly 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 the pace
we were walking, she would have to be jogging to keep up. I resisted 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 we would
get into trouble. That I'd get other people into trouble."

"And that's why you stopped being friends?"

"We just drifted apart."

We walked a few steps. "You weren't, you know, boyfriend/girlfriend friends?"

"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, but Darryl 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 a good friend
and we're not anymore, and that upsets me, but I was never into her that way,
all right?

She slumped a little. "OK, OK. I'm sorry. I don't really get along with her is
all. We've never gotten along in all the years we've known each other."

Oh ho, I thought. This would be how it came to be that Jolu knew her for so
long and I never met her; she had some kind of thing with Van and he didn't
want to bring her around.

She gave me a long hug and we kissed, and a bunch of girls passed us going
/{woooo}/ and we straightened up and headed for the bus-stop. Ahead of us
walked Van, who must have gone past while we were kissing. I felt like a
complete jerk.

Of course, she was at the stop and on the bus and we didn't say a word to each
other, and I tried to make conversation with Ange all the way, but it was
awkward.

The plan was to stop for a coffee and head to Ange's place to hang out and
"study," i.e. take turns on her Xbox looking at the Xnet. Ange's mom got home
late on Tuesdays, which was her night for yoga class and dinner with her girls,
and Ange's sister was going out with her boyfriend, so we'd have the place to
ourselves. I'd been having pervy thoughts about it ever 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 notebooks and parts
of PCs that would dig into your stocking feet like caltrops. Her desk was worse
than the floor, piled high with books and comics, so we ended up sitting on her
bed, which was OK by me.

The awkwardness from seeing Van had gone away somewhat and we got her Xbox up
and running. It was in the center of a nest of wires, some going to a wireless
antenna she'd hacked into it and stuck to the window so she could tune in the
neighbors' WiFi. Some went to a couple of old laptop screens she'd turned into
standalone monitors, balanced on stands and bristling with exposed electronics.
The screens were on both bedside tables, which was an excellent setup for
watching movies or IMing from bed -- she could turn the monitors sidewise and
lie on her side 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 side propped
against the bedside table. I was trembling a little and super-conscious of the
warmth of her leg and shoulder against mine, but I needed to go through the
motions of logging into Xnet and seeing what email I'd gotten and so on.

There was an email from a kid who liked to send in funny phone-cam videos of
the DHS being really crazy -- the last one had been of them disassembling a
baby's stroller after a bomb-sniffing dog had shown an interest in it, taking
it apart with screwdrivers right on the street in the Marina while all these
rich people walked past, staring at them and marveling at how weird it was.

I'd linked to the video and it had been downloaded like crazy. He'd hosted it
on the Internet Archive's Alexandria mirror in Egypt, where they'd host
anything for free so long as you'd put it under the Creative Commons license,
which let anyone remix it and share it. The US archive -- which was down in the
Presidio, only a few minutes away -- had been forced to take down all those
videos in the name of national security, but the Alexandria archive had split
away into its own organization and was hosting anything that embarrassed the
USA.

This kid -- his handle was Kameraspie -- had sent me an even better video this
time around. It was at the doorway to City Hall in Civic Center, a huge wedding
cake of a building covered with statues in little archways and gilt leaves and
trim. The DHS had a secure perimeter around the building, and Kameraspie's
video showed a great shot of their checkpoint as a guy in an officer's uniform
approached and showed his 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 like on the
X-ray. He questioned the General, who rolled his eyes and said something
inaudible (the video had been shot from across the street, apparently with a
homemade concealed zoom lens, so the audio was mostly of people walking past
and traffic noises).

The General and the DHS guys got into an argument, and the longer they argued,
the more DHS guys gathered around them. Finally, the General shook his head
angrily and waved his finger at the DHS guy's chest and picked up his briefcase
and started to walk away. The DHS guys 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. Kameraspie slowed 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 about to tackle me,"
then changing to horror as three of the giant DHS guards slammed into him,
knocking him sideways, then catching him at the middle, like a career-ending
football tackle. The general -- middle aged, steely grey hair, lined and
dignified face -- went down like a sack of potatoes and bounced twice, his face
slamming off the sidewalk and blood starting out of his nose.

The DHS hog-tied the general, strapping him at ankles and wrists. The general
was shouting now, really shouting, his face purpling under the blood 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 the ritual humiliation, the removal of
dignity. The clip ended.

"Oh my dear sweet Buddha," I said looking at the screen as it faded to black,
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'd seen,
adding a note to see if anyone could identify the military man in the 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 peacekeeping mission in Haiti.

I checked the bio. There was a picture of the general at a press conference,
and notes about his role in the difficult Haiti mission. It was clearly the
same guy.

I updated the post.

Theoretically, this was Ange's and my chance to make out, but that wasn't what
we ended up doing. We crawled the Xnet blogs, looking for more accounts of the
DHS searching people, tackling people, invading them. This was a familiar task,
the same thing I'd done with all the footage and accounts from the riots in the
park. I started a new category on my blog for this, AbusesOfAuthority, and
filed them away. Ange kept coming up with new search terms for me to try and by
the time her mom got home, my new category had seventy posts, headlined by
General Geist's City Hall takedown.

#

I worked on my Beat paper all the next day at home, reading the Kerouac 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 texted her an excuse about
working on the paper.

There were all kinds of great suggestions for AbusesOfAuthority coming in;
hundreds of little and big ones, pictures and audio. The meme was spreading.

It spread. The next morning there were even more. Someone started a new blog
called AbusesOfAuthority that collected hundreds more. The pile grew. We
competed to find the juiciest stories, the craziest pictures.

The deal with my parents was that I'd eat breakfast with them every morning and
talk about the projects I was doing. They liked that I was reading Kerouac. It
had been a favorite book of both of theirs and it turned 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 passages marked up with pen, dog-eared pages,
notes in the margin. My dad had really loved this book.

It made me remember a better time, when my Dad and I had been able to talk for
five minutes without shouting at each other about terrorism, and we had a great
breakfast talking about the way that the novel was plotted, 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 notorious
Xnet, and it's captured the world's attention. Called A-oh-A, the movement is
composed of 'Little Brothers' who watch back against the Department of Homeland
Security's anti-terrorism measures, documenting the failures and excesses. The
rallying cry is a popular viral video clip of a General Claude Geist, a retired
three-star general, being tackled by DHS officers on the sidewalk in front of
City Hall. Geist hasn't made a statement on the incident, but commentary from
young people who are upset with their own treatment has been fast and furious.

"Most notable has been the global attention the movement has received. Stills
from the Geist video have appeared on the front pages of newspapers in Korea,
Great Britain, Germany, Egypt and Japan, and broadcasters around the world have
aired the clip on prime-time news. The issue came to a head last night, when
the British Broadcasting Corporation's National News Evening program ran a
special report on the fact that no American broadcaster or news agency has
covered this story. Commenters on the BBC's website noted that BBC America's
version of the news did not carry the report."

They brought on a couple of interviews: British media watchdogs, a Swedish
Pirate Party kid who made jeering remarks about America's corrupt press, a
retired American newscaster living in Tokyo, then they aired a short clip from
Al-Jazeera, comparing the American press record and the record of the national
news-media in Syria.

I felt like my parents were staring at me, that they knew what I was doing. But
when I cleared away my dishes, I saw that they were looking at each other.

Dad was holding his coffee cup so hard his hands were shaking. Mom was looking
at him.

"They're trying to discredit us," Dad said finally. "They're trying to sabotage
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. Once I'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 Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation's news programme The National. We're doing a story on
Xnet and have sent a reporter to San Francisco to cover it from there. Would
you be interested in doing an interview to discuss your group and its actions?

I stared at the screen. Jesus. They wanted to /{interview}/ me about "my
group"?

> Um thanks no. I'm all about privacy. And it's not "my group." But thanks for
doing the story!

A minute later, another email.

> We can mask you and ensure your anonymity. You know that the Department of
Homeland Security will be happy to provide their own spokesperson. I'm
interested in getting your side.

I filed the email. He was right, but I'd be crazy to do this. For all I knew,
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 interview. A station in
Brazil. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Deutsche Welle. All day, the
press requests came in. All day, I politely turned 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 near her
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 no PvP
allowed and name a time. You can login from here."

PvP is player-versus-player combat. Parts of Clockwork Plunder were neutral
ground, which meant that we could theoretically bring in a ton of noob
reporters without worrying about gamers killing them in the middle 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 a
successful 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.

"That too," I said.

1~ Chapter 15

_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Chapters/Indigo,~{ Chapters/Indigo:
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/Little-Brother-Cory-Doctorow/9780765319852-item.html
}~ the national Canadian megachain. I was working at Bakka, the independent
science fiction bookstore, when Chapters opened its first store in Toronto and
I knew that something big was going on right away, because two of our smartest,
best-informed customers stopped in to tell me that they'd been hired to run the
science fiction section. From the start, Chapters raised the bar on what a big
corporate bookstore could be, extending its hours, adding a friendly cafe and
lots of seating, installing in-store self-service terminals and stocking the
most amazing variety of titles.] }/

I blogged the press-conference even before I'd sent out the invitations to the
press. I could tell that all these writers wanted to make me into a leader or a
general or a supreme guerrilla commandant, and I figured one way of solving
that would be to have a bunch of Xnetters running around answering questions
too.

Then I emailed the press. The responses ranged from puzzled to enthusiastic --
only the Fox reporter was "outraged" that I had the gall to ask her to play a
game in order to appear on her TV show. The rest of them seemed to think that
it would make a pretty cool story, though plenty of them wanted lots of tech
support for signing onto the game

I picked 8PM, after dinner. Mom had been bugging me about all the evenings I'd
been spending out of the house until I finally spilled the beans about Ange,
whereupon she came over all misty and kept looking at me like,
my-little-boy's-growing-up. She wanted to meet Ange, and I used that as
leverage, promising to bring her over the next night if I could "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 and mine. I unplugged
one of her bedside screens and attached my Xbox to it so 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. "Patcheye Pete's
Market has 600 players in it now!" We'd picked Patcheye Pete's because it was
the market closest to the village square where new players spawned. If the
reporters weren't already Clockwork Plunder players -- ha! -- then that's where
they'd show up. In my blog post I'd asked people generally to hang out on the
route between Patcheye Pete's and the spawn-gate and direct anyone who looked
like a disoriented reporter over 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, ignore
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 have to
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 stroked my hair.
I'd been playing around with different haircuts before the bombing, dying it
all kinds of funny colors, but since I'd gotten out of jail I couldn't be
bothered. It had gotten long and stupid and shaggy and I'd gone into the
bathroom and grabbed my clippers and buzzed it down to half an inch all around,
which took zero effort to take care of and helped me to be invisible when I was
out jamming and cloning arphids.

I opened my eyes and stared into her big brown eyes behind her glasses. They
were round and liquid and expressive. She could make them bug out when she
wanted to make me laugh, or make them soft and sad, or lazy and sleepy in a way
that made me melt into a puddle of horniness.

That's what she was doing right now.

I sat up slowly and hugged her. She hugged me back. We kissed. She was an
amazing kisser. I know I've already said that, but it bears repeating. We
kissed a lot, but for one reason or another we always stopped before 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 knew that she'd do
that. I'd known since the night in the park. Maybe that's why 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 fights with my
parents, the international attention, the sense that there was a movement that
was careening around the city like a wild pinball -- it made my skin tingle and
my blood sing.

And she was beautiful, and smart, and clever and funny, and I was falling in
love with her.

Her shirt slid off, her arching her back to help me get it over her shoulders.
She reached behind her and did something and her bra fell away. I stared
goggle-eyed, motionless and breathless, and then she grabbed /{my}/ shirt and
pulled it over my head, grabbing me and pulling my bare chest to hers.

We rolled on the bed and touched each other and ground our bodies together and
groaned. She kissed all over my chest and I did the same to her. I couldn't
breathe, I couldn't think, I could only move and kiss and lick 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 off hers. A moment
later we were both naked, except for my socks, which I peeled off with my toes.

It was then that I caught sight of the bedside clock, which had long ago rolled
onto the floor and lay there, glowing up at us.

"Crap!" I yelped. "It starts in two minutes!" I couldn't freaking believe that
I was about to stop what I was about to stop doing, when I was about to stop
doing it. I mean, if you'd asked me, "Marcus, you are about to get laid for the
firstest time EVAR, will you stop if I let off this nuclear bomb in the same
room as you?" the answer would have been a resounding and unequivocal /{NO}/.

And yet we stopped for this.

She grabbed me and pulled my face to hers and kissed me until I thought I would
pass out, then we both grabbed our clothes and more or less dressed, grabbing
our keyboards and mice and heading for Patcheye Pete's.

#

You could easily tell who the press were: they were the noobs who played their
characters like staggering drunks, weaving back and forth and up and down,
trying to get the hang of it all, occasionally hitting the wrong key and
offering strangers all or part of their inventory, or giving them accidental
hugs and kicks.

The Xnetters were easy to spot, too: we all played Clockwork Plunder whenever
we had some spare time (or didn't feel like doing our homework), and we had
pretty tricked-out characters with cool weapons and booby-traps on the keys
sticking out of our backs that would cream anyone who tried to snatch them and
leave us to wind down.

When I appeared, a system status message displayed M1K3Y HAS ENTERED PATCHEYE
PETE'S -- WELCOME SWABBIE WE OFFER FAIR TRADE FOR FINE BOOTY. All the players
on the screen froze, then they crowded around me. The chat exploded. I thought
about turning on my voice-paging and grabbing a headset, but seeing how many
people were trying to talk at once, I realized how confusing that would be.
Text was much easier to follow and they couldn't misquote me (heh heh).

I'd scouted the location before with Ange -- it was great campaigning with her,
since we could both keep each other wound up. There was a high-spot on a pile
of boxes of salt-rations that I could stand on and be seen from anywhere in the
market.

> Good evening and thank you all for coming. My name is M1k3y and I'm not the
leader of anything. All around you are Xnetters who have as much to say about
why we're here as I do. I use the Xnet because I believe in freedom and the
Constitution of the United States of America. I use Xnet because the DHS has
turned my city into a police-state where we're all suspected terrorists. I use
Xnet because I think you can't defend freedom by tearing up the Bill of Rights.
I learned about the Constitution in a California school and I was raised to
love my country for its freedom. If I have a philosophy, it is this:

> Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the
consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes
destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish
it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles,
and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to
effect their safety and happiness.

> I didn't write that, but I believe it. The DHS does not govern with my
consent.

> Thank you

I'd written this the day before, bouncing drafts back and forth with Ange.
Pasting it in only took a second, though it took everyone in the game a moment
to read it. A lot of the Xnetters cheered, big showy pirate "Hurrah"s with
raised sabers and pet parrots squawking and flying overhead.

Gradually, the journalists digested it too. The chat was running past fast, 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 Xnet blogosphere.

> M1k3y, this is Priya Rajneesh from the BBC. You say you're not the leader of
any movement, but do you believe there is a movement? Is it called the Xnet?

Lots of answers. Some people said there wasn't a movement, some said there was
and lots of people had ideas about what it was called: Xnet, Little Brothers,
Little Sisters, and my personal favorite, the United States 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 be one 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 attack on San Francisco, if
what they're doing isn't successful.

More chatter. Lots of people said that the terrorists and the government were
the same -- either literally, or just meaning that they were equally bad. Some
said the government knew how to catch terrorists but preferred not to because
"war presidents" got re-elected.

> I don't know

I typed finally.

> I really don't. I ask myself this question a lot because I don't want to get
blown up and I don't want my city to get blown up. Here's what I've figured
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 being blown 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. The DHS terrifies me.

> I don't have any say in what the terrorists do to me, but if this is a free
country 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 terrorists? 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, I
figured out how to make an Internet that they can't wiretap. I figured out how
to jam their person-tracking technology. I can turn innocent people into
suspects and turn guilty people into innocents in their eyes. I could get metal
onto an airplane or beat a no-fly list. I figured this stuff out by looking at
the web and by thinking about it. If I can do it, terrorists can do it. They
told us they took away our freedom to make us safe. Do you feel safe?

> In Australia? Why yes I do

The pirates all laughed.

More journalists asked questions. Some were sympathetic, some were hostile.
When I got tired, I handed my keyboard to Ange and let her be M1k3y for a
while. It didn't really feel like M1k3y and me were the same person anymore
anyway. M1k3y was the kind of kid who talked to international journalists and
inspired a movement. Marcus got suspended from school and fought with his dad
and wondered if he was good enough for his kick-ass girlfriend.

By 11PM I'd had enough. Besides, my parents would be expecting me home soon. I
logged out of the game and so did Ange and we lay there for 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 a telegram?"

"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 to
it."

"You still haven't said it, you know. Don't think I haven't noticed. We girls
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't you?"

"Yes, mother," she said, and mimed swinging an axe. As I put my socks and shoes
on, she muttered, "They'll say, that Angela, she was such a good girl, who
would have thought it, all the time she was in the back yard, helping her
mother out by sharpening that hatchet."

I laughed. "You don't know how easy you have it. There is /{no way}/ my folks
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.

"Go," she said, "run and be free! Look both ways before crossing the road!
Write if you get work! Don't even stop for a hug! If you're not out of 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 her until she
stopped trying to count. Satisfied with my victory, I pounded down 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 father was the short one
-- with contacts instead of glasses. She seemed to have tentatively classed me
as a good guy, and I appreciated it.

"Good night, Mrs Carvelli," I said.

"Good night, Mr Yallow," she said. It was one of our little rituals, ever since
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. But she
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, thought about her mother smiling
and showing me the door.

My mom was waiting up for me. She asked me about the movie and I gave her the
response I'd worked out in advance, cribbing from the review it had gotten in
the /{Bay Guardian}/.

As I fell asleep, the press-conference came back. I was really proud of it. It
had been so cool, to have all these big-shot journos show up in the game, to
have them listen to me and to have them listen to all the people who believed
in the same things as me. I dropped off with a smile on my lips.

#

I should have known better.

XNET LEADER: I COULD GET METAL ONTO AN AIRPLANE

DHS DOESN'T HAVE MY CONSENT TO GOVERN

XNET KIDS: USA OUT OF SAN FRANCISCO

Those 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-conference and concluded
that we were terrorists or terrorist dupes. The worst was the reporter on Fox
News, who had apparently shown up anyway, and who 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 call these
spoiled children Cal-Quaeda. They do the terrorists' work on the home 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 by the DHS to discredit
them.

The DHS had their own press-conference announcing that they would double the
security in San Francisco. They held up an arphid cloner they'd found somewhere
and demonstrated it in action, using it to stage a car-theft, and warned
everyone to be on their alert for young people behaving suspiciously,
especially those whose hands were out of sight.

They weren't kidding. I finished my Kerouac paper and started in on a paper
about the Summer of Love, the summer of 1967 when the anti-war movement and the
hippies converged on San Francisco. The guys who founded Ben and Jerry's -- old
hippies themselves -- had founded a hippie museum in the Haight, and there were
other archives and exhibits to see around town.

But it wasn't easy getting around. By the end of the week, I was getting
frisked an average of four times a day. Cops checked my ID and questioned me
about why I was out in the street, carefully eyeballing the letter from Chavez
saying that I was suspended.

I got lucky. No one arrested me. But the rest of the Xnet weren't so lucky.
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 had been in their pockets. They
announced that the people were "naming names," compromising the "Xnet network"
and that more arrests were expected soon. The name "M1k3y" was often heard.

Dad loved this. He and I watched the news together, him gloating, me shrinking
away, quietly freaking out. "You should see the stuff they're going to use on
these kids," Dad said. "I've seen it in action. They'll get a couple of these
kids and check out their friends lists on IM and the speed-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 them like an old sweater."

I canceled Ange's dinner at our place and started spending even more time
there. Ange's little sister Tina started to call me "the house-guest," as in
"is the house-guest eating dinner with me tonight?" I liked Tina. All she cared
about was going out and partying and meeting guys, but she was funny and
utterly devoted to Ange. One night as we were doing the dishes, she dried her
hands and said, conversationally, "You know, you seem like a nice guy, Marcus.
My sister's just crazy about you and I like you too. But I have to tell you
something: if you break her heart, I will track you down and pull your scrotum
over your head. It's not a pretty sight."

I assured her that I would sooner pull my own scrotum over my head than 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 at Xnet
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. She just
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
this weekend in what they say will be the largest coordinated raid on Xnet
dissidents to date."

I felt like throwing up.

"We've got to stop this," I said. "You know there are people who are doing
/{more}/ jamming to show that they're not intimidated? Isn't that just
/{crazy?}/"

"I think it's brave," she said. "We can't let them scare us into submission."

"What? No, Ange, no. We can't let hundreds of people go to /{jail}/. You
haven't been there. I have. It's worse than you think. It's worse than you can
imagine."

"I have a pretty fertile imagination," she said.

"Stop it, OK? Be serious for a second. I won't do this. I won't send those
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 know they 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 you to 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 for
guidance. And so long as they do, I have a responsibility to help them stay
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 think you'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 he thought 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
guy who 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, no
matter what Fox News thinks.

> But I am going to tell you what /{I}/ plan on doing. If you think that's the
right thing to do, maybe you'll do it too.

> I'm not jamming. Not this week. Maybe not next. It's not because I'm scared.
It's because I'm smart enough to know that I'm better free than in prison. They
figured out how to stop our tactic, so we need to come up with a new tactic. I
don't care what the tactic is, but I want it to work. It's /{stupid}/ 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 use you to
catch your friends, and their friends, and their friends. They might bust your
friends even if they're not on Xnet, because the DHS is like a maddened bull
and they don't exactly worry if they've got the right guy.

> I'm not telling you what to do.

> But the DHS is dumb and we're smart. Jamming proves that they can't fight
terrorism because it proves that they can't even stop a bunch of kids. 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's be smart. Let's
figure out how to jam them, no matter how many goons they 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 million times,
written a thousand unsent emails and IMs.

Now I was back in Social Studies class, and Mrs Andersen greeted me with
voluble, sarcastic courtesy, asking me sweetly how my "holiday" had been. I sat
down and mumbled nothing. I could hear Charles snicker.

She taught us a class on Manifest Destiny, the idea that the Americans were
destined to take over the whole world (or at least that's how she made it seem)
and seemed to be trying to provoke me into saying something so she could throw
me out.

I felt the eyes of the class on me, and it reminded me of M1k3y and the people
who looked up to him. I was sick of being looked up to. I missed Ange.

I got through the rest of the day without anything making any kind of mark on
me. I don't think I said eight words.

Finally it was over and I hit the doors, heading for the gates and the stupid
Mission and my pointless house.

I was barely out the gate when someone crashed into me. He was a young homeless
guy, maybe my age, maybe a little older. He wore a long, greasy overcoat, a
pair of baggy jeans, and rotting sneakers that looked like they'd been through
a wood-chipper. His long hair hung over his face, and he had a pubic beard that
straggled down his throat into the collar of a no-color knit sweater.

I took this all in as we lay next to each other on the sidewalk, people passing
us and giving us weird looks. It seemed that he'd crashed into me while
hurrying down Valencia, bent over with the burden of a split backpack that lay
beside him on the pavement, covered in tight geometric doodles in magic-marker.

He got to his knees and rocked back and forth, like he was drunk or had 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 his grip was
strong and firm.

"I'm really sorry." His voice was also clear and intelligent. I'd expected him
to sound like the drunks who talked to themselves as they roamed the Mission
late at night, but he sounded like a knowledgeable bookstore clerk.

"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!"

Laughing, he picked up his backpack, turned on his heel and hurried away.

#

I walked the rest of the way home in a bemused fug. Mom was at the kitchen
table and we had a little chat about nothing at all, the way we used to do,
before everything changed.

I took the stairs up to my room and flopped down in my chair. For once, I
didn't want to login to the Xnet. I'd checked in that morning before school to
discover that my note had created a gigantic controversy among people who
agreed with me and people who were righteously pissed 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 all
started. I was building a pinhole camera out of legos, I'd been playing with
aerial kite photography using an old digital camera with a trigger hacked out
of silly putty that was stretched out at launch and slowly snapped back to its
original shape, triggering the shutter at regular intervals. 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 was done, I'd planned to build in
a dock for my phone and a set of 5.1 surround-sound speakers out of tuna-fish
cans.

I looked over my workbench and finally picked up the pinhole camera.
Methodically snapping legos together was just about my speed.

I took off my watch and the chunky silver two-finger ring that showed a monkey
and a ninja squaring off to fight and dropped them into the little box I used
for all the crap I load into my pockets and around my neck 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 there in the first place.

It was a piece of paper, grey and soft as flannel, furry at the edges where it
had been torn away from some larger piece of paper. It was covered in the
tiniest, most careful handwriting I'd ever seen. I unfolded it and held it up.
The writing covered both sides, running down from the top left corner of one
side to a crabbed signature at the bottom right corner of the other side.

The signature read, simply: ZEB.

I picked it up and started to read.

> Dear Marcus

> You don't know me but I know you. For the past three months, since the Bay
Bridge was blown up, I have been imprisoned on Treasure Island. I was in the
yard on the day you talked to that Asian girl and got tackled. You were brave.
Good on you.

> I had a burst appendix the day afterward and ended up in the infirmary. In
the next bed was a guy named Darryl. We were both in recovery for a long time
and by the time we got well, we were too much of an embarrassment to them to
let go.

> So they decided we must really be guilty. They questioned us every day.
You've been through their questioning, I know. Imagine it for months. Darryl
and I ended up cell-mates. We knew we were bugged, so we only talked about
inconsequentialities. But at night, when we were in our 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 did it,
how'd they do it. But after a little while, they switched to asking us about
the Xnet. Of course, we'd never heard of it. That didn't stop them asking.

> Darryl told me that they brought him arphid cloners, Xboxes, all kinds of
technology and demanded that he tell them who used them, where they learned to
mod them. Darryl told me about your games and the things 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 in trouble at
school? With the law?

> We call the prison Gitmo-by-the-Bay. It's been a week since I got out and I
don't think that anyone knows that their sons and daughters are imprisoned in
the middle of the Bay. At night we could hear people laughing and partying on
the mainland.

> I got out last week. I won't tell you how, in case this falls into the wrong
hands. Maybe others will take my route.

> Darryl told me how to find you and made me promise to tell you what I knew
when I got back. Now that I've done that I'm out of here like last year. 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.

> Zeb

There were tears in my eyes as I finished the note. I had a disposable lighter
somewhere on my desk that I sometimes used to melt the insulation off of wires,
and I dug it out and held it to the note. I knew I owed it to Zeb to destroy it
and make sure no one else ever saw it, in case it might 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 forgotten he
existed. He'd become a ghost, like an old friend who'd moved away or gone on an
exchange program. All that time, they'd been questioning him, demanding that he
rat me out, explain the Xnet, the jammers. He'd been on Treasure Island, the
abandoned military base that was halfway along the demolished span of the Bay
Bridge. He'd been so close I could have swam to him.

I put the lighter down and re-read the note. By the time it was done, I was
weeping, sobbing. It all came back to me, the lady with the severe haircut and
the questions she'd asked and the reek of piss and the stiffness of my pants as
the urine dried them into coarse canvas.

"Marcus?"

My door was ajar and my mother was standing in it, watching me with 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 to talk?"

The 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 Ange and
she'd leave my room and leave me alone. I opened my mouth to do just 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 like an animal
noise, maybe a donkey or some kind of big cat noise in the night. I sobbed so
my throat burned and ached with it, so my chest heaved.

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 the edge of my
bed and she sat in my desk chair and I told her everything.

Everything.

Well, most of it.

1~ Chapter 16

_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to San Francisco's Booksmith,~{ Booksmith
http://thebooksmith.booksense.com 1644 Haight St. San Francisco CA 94117 USA +1
415 863 8688 }~ ensconced in the storied Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, just a
few doors down from the Ben and Jerry's at the exact corner of Haight and
Ashbury. The Booksmith folks really know how to run an author event -- when I
lived in San Francisco, I used to go down all the time to hear incredible
writers speak (William Gibson was unforgettable). They also produce little
baseball-card-style trading cards for each author -- I have two from my own
appearances there.] }/

At first Mom looked shocked, then outraged, and finally she gave up altogether
and just let her jaw hang open as I took her through the interrogation, pissing
myself, the bag over my head, Darryl. I showed her the note.

"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 was really
about, why I was really fighting, what had really inspired the Xnet.

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, "What about
Darryl's father?"

She might as well have stuck a knitting needle in my chest. Darryl's father. 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?

But Zeb got out. Maybe Darryl would get out. Maybe me and the Xnet could 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. It made 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 his consulting
clients -- who had lots of work now that the DHS was shopping for data-mining
startups on the peninsula -- and the long commute to 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 with the note
between us on the coffee table.

It was easier to tell, the second time. The secret was getting lighter. I
didn't embellish, I didn't hide anything. I came clean.

I'd heard of coming clean before but I'd never understood what it meant until I
did it. Holding in the secret had dirtied me, soiled my spirit. It had made me
afraid and ashamed. It had made me into all the things 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 down carefully.

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 him to come home.
I tried to imagine what was going on in his head. He'd been such a different
man after the bombings and I knew from Mom that what had changed him were the
days of thinking I was dead. He'd come to believe that the terrorists had
nearly killed his son and it had made him crazy.

Crazy enough to do whatever the DHS asked, to line up like a good little sheep
and let them control him, drive him.

Now he knew that it was the DHS that had imprisoned me, the DHS that had taken
San Francisco's children hostage in Gitmo-by-the-Bay. It made perfect sense,
now that I thought of it. Of course it had been Treasure Island where I'd been
kept. Where else was a ten-minute boat-ride from 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 the wrong person,"
she said. "It wasn't Marcus who did the kidnapping and the intimidation."

He shook his head and stamped. "I'm not blaming Marcus. I know /{exactly}/
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 remember
where. I thought that maybe she was an old friend of my parents, but I couldn't
exactly place her.

Meantime, I was headed for Darryl's father's place. I'd never really felt
comfortable around the old man, who'd been a Navy radio operator and ran his
household like a tight ship. He'd taught Darryl Morse code when he was a kid,
which I'd always thought was cool. It was one of the ways I knew that I could
trust Zeb's letter. But for every cool thing like Morse code, Darryl's father
had some crazy military discipline that seemed to be for its own sake, like
insisting on hospital corners on the beds and shaving twice a day. It drove
Darryl up the wall.

Darryl's mother hadn't liked it much either, and had taken off back to her
family in Minnesota when Darryl was ten -- Darryl spent his summers and
Christmases there.

I was sitting in the back of the car, and I could see the back of Dad's head as
he drove. The muscles in his neck were tense and kept jumping around as he
ground his jaws.

Mom 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 day was done.

"He must have buried his son in his mind," Dad said, as we whipped up through
the hairpin curves leading up Twin Peaks to the little cottage that Darryl and
his father shared. The fog was on Twin Peaks, the way it often was at night in
San Francisco, making the headlamps reflect back on us. Each time we swung
around a corner, I saw the valleys of the city laid 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'd spent
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 see who
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 it
again. Darryl's father's car was in the driveway, and we'd seen a light burning
in the living room. I was about to ring a third time when the door opened.

"Marcus?" Darryl's father wasn't anything like I remembered him. Unshaven, 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 military 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 show about
abandoned kids who spend a month locked in before they're rescued by the
neighbors: frozen meal boxes, empty beer cans and juice bottles, moldy cereal
bowls and piles of newspapers. There was a reek of cat piss and litter crunched
underneath our feet. Even without the cat piss, the smell was incredible, like
a bus-station toilet.

The couch was made up with a grimy sheet and a couple of greasy pillows and the
cushions had a dented, much-slept-upon look.

We all stood there for a long silent moment, embarrassment overwhelming every
other emotion. Darryl's father looked like he wanted to die.

Slowly, he moved aside the sheets from the sofa and cleared the stacked, greasy
food-trays off of a couple of the chairs, carrying them into 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 and sat down
too.

"I'm sorry," he said vaguely. "I don't really have any coffee to offer you. 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 it without
seeming to understand it, then read it again. He handed it back to me.

He was trembling.

"He's --"

"Darryl is alive," I said. "Darryl is alive and being held prisoner on Treasure
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}/ often lost its
reporters to bigger daily papers and the Internet, but Barbara Stratford had
been there forever. I had a dim memory of having dinner with 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 his hand 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 and gelled his hair
back, and had put on a crisp military dress uniform with a row of campaign
ribbons on the breast. He stopped at the foot of the stairs and kind of
gestured at it.

"I don't have much clean stuff that's presentable at the moment. And this
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 driveway. She
lived out of town, down in Mountain View, and as we sped down the 101, none of
us said a word. The high-tech buildings alongside the highway streamed past us.

This was a different Bay Area to the one I lived in, more like the suburban
America I sometimes saw on TV. Lots of freeways and subdivisions of identical
houses, towns where there weren't any homeless people pushing shopping carts
down the sidewalk -- there weren't even sidewalks!

Mom had phoned Barbara Stratford while we were waiting for Mr Glover to come
downstairs. The journalist had been sleeping, but Mom had been so wound up she
forgot to be all British and embarrassed about waking her up. Instead, she just
told her, tensely, that she had something to talk about and that it had to be
in person.

When we rolled up to Barbara Stratford's house, my first thought was of the
Brady Bunch place -- a low ranch house with a brick baffle in front of it and a
neat, perfectly square lawn. There was a kind of abstract tile pattern on the
baffle, and an old-fashioned UHF TV antenna rising from behind it. We wandered
around to the entrance and saw that there were 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 nose and shrewd eyes
with a lot of laugh-lines. She was wearing a pair of jeans that were hip enough
to be seen at one of the boutiques on Valencia Street, 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. Mr Glover stepped
from behind Dad.

"And you called in the Navy?"

"All in good time."

We were introduced one at a time to her. She had a firm handshake and long
fingers.

Her place was furnished in Japanese minimalist style, just a few precisely
proportioned, low pieces of furniture, large clay pots of bamboo that brushed
the ceiling, and what looked like a large, rusted piece of a diesel engine
perched on top of a polished marble plinth. I decided I liked it. The floors
were old wood, sanded and stained, but not filled, so you 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 later bearing a rough
bamboo tray with a half-gallon thermos jug and six cups of 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 see you all
again. Marcus, I think the last time I saw you, you were maybe seven years old.
As I recall, you were very excited about your new video games, which you showed
me."

I didn't remember it at all, but that sounded like what I'd been into at seven.
I guessed it was my Sega Dreamcast.

She produced a tape-recorder and a yellow pad and a pen, and twirled the pen.
"I'm here to listen to whatever you tell me, and I can promise you that I'll
take it all in confidence. But I can't promise that I'll do anything with it,
or that it's going to get published." The way she said it made me realize that
my Mom had called in a pretty big favor getting this lady out of bed, friend or
no friend. It must be kind of a pain in the ass to be a big-shot investigative
reporter. There were probably a million people who would have liked her to take
up their cause.

Mom nodded at me. Even though I'd told the story three times that night, I
found myself tongue-tied. This was different from telling my parents. Different
from telling Darryl's father. This -- this would start a new move in the game.

I started slowly, and watched Barbara take notes. I drank a whole cup of coffee
just explaining what ARGing was and how I got out of school to play. Mom and
Dad and Mr Glover all listened intently to this part. I poured myself another
cup and drank it on the way to explaining how we were taken in. By the time I'd
run through the whole story, I'd drained the pot and I needed a piss like a
race-horse.

Her bathroom was just as stark as the living-room, with a brown, organic soap
that smelled like clean mud. I came back in and found the adults quietly
watching me.

Mr Glover told his story next. He didn't have anything to say about what had
happened, but he explained that he was a veteran and that his son was a good
kid. He talked about what it felt like to believe that his son had died, about
how his ex-wife had had a collapse when she found out and ended up in a
hospital. He cried a little, unashamed, the tears streaming down his lined face
and darkening the collar of his dress-uniform.

When it was all done, Barbara went into a different room and came back with a
bottle of Irish whiskey. "It's a Bushmills 15 year old rum-cask aged blend,"
she said, setting down four small cups. None for me. "It hasn't been sold in
ten years. I think this is probably an appropriate time to break it out."

She poured them each a small glass of the liquor, then raised hers and sipped
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 believe you.
Not just because I know you, Lillian. The story sounds right, and it ties in
with other rumors I've heard. But I'm not going to be able to just take your
word for it. I'm going to have to investigate every aspect of this, and every
element of your lives and stories. I need to know if there's anything you're
not telling me, anything that could be used to discredit you after this comes
to light. I need everything. It could take weeks before I'm ready to publish.

"You also need to think about your safety and this Darryl's safety. If he's
really an 'un-person' then bringing pressure to bear on the DHS could cause
them to move him somewhere much further away. Think Syria. They could also do
something much worse." She let that hang in the 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 two of
you, now and later -- we can send out a photographer, but I want to document
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-bedroom/office was crammed with top-of-the-line PCs, big flat-panel
monitors, 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 was running
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 rat out
a source."

"OK, OK. Good. Wow. Jail. Wow. OK." I took a deep breath. "You've heard of
Xnet? Of M1k3y?"

"Yes?"

"I'm M1k3y."

"Oh," she said. She worked the scanner and flipped the note over to get the
reverse. She was scanning at some unbelievable resolution, 10,000 dots per inch
or higher, and on-screen it was like the output of an electron-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 think about this.
Can you come by my office? I'd like to talk to you about what this 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 receptionist
that you're Mr Brown, to see me. They know what that means. No note will be
taken of you coming, and all the security camera footage for the day will be
automatically scrubbed and the cameras deactivated until you leave."

"Wow," I said. "You think like I do."

She smiled and socked me in the shoulder. "Kiddo, I've been at this game for a
hell of a long time. So far, I've managed to spend more time free than behind
bars. Paranoia is my friend."

#

I was like a zombie the next day in school. I'd totaled about three hours of
sleep, and even three cups of the Turk's caffeine mud failed to jump-start my
brain. The problem with caffeine is that it's too easy to get acclimated to it,
so you have to take higher and higher doses just to get above normal.

I'd spent the night thinking over what I had to do. It was like running though
a maze of twisty little passages, all alike, every one leading to the same dead
end. When I went to Barbara, it would be over for me. That was the outcome, no
matter how I thought about it.

By the time the school day was over, all I wanted was to go home and crawl into
bed. But I had an appointment at the /{Bay Guardian}/, down on the waterfront.
I kept my eyes on my feet as I wobbled out the gate, and as I turned into 24th
Street, another pair of feet fell into step with me. I recognized the shoes and
stopped.

"Ange?"

She looked like I felt. Sleep-deprived and raccoon-eyed, with sad brackets 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 of
myself 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 not
jamming. I can respect it. What have you done about finding a way to jam them
without getting caught?"

"I'm on my way to meet an investigative journalist who's going to publish a
story about how I got sent to jail, how I started Xnet, and how Darryl is being
illegally held by the DHS at a secret prison on Treasure Island."

"Oh." She looked around for a moment. "Couldn't you think of anything, you
know, ambitious?"

"Want to come?"

"I am coming, yes. And I would like you to explain this in detail if you don't
mind."

After all the re-tellings, this one, told as we walked to Potrero Avenue and
down to 15th Street, was the easiest. She held my hand and squeezed it often.

We took the stairs up to the /{Bay Guardian}/'s offices two at a time. My heart
was pounding. I got to the reception desk and told the bored girl behind 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. Barbara will be out
in a minute. Can I get you anything?"

"Coffee," we both said in unison. Another reason to love Ange: we were addicted
to the same drug.

The receptionist -- a pretty latina woman only a few years older than us,
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 bearing the 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 same thing as the night
before. It suited her. She quirked an eyebrow at me when 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 identities were
supposed to be a secret. "I work with Mr Green." She elbowed me lightly.

"Let's go then," Barbara said, and led us back to a board-room with long glass
walls with their blinds drawn shut. She set down a tray of Whole Foods organic
Oreo clones, a digital recorder, and another yellow pad.

"Do you want to record this too?" she asked.

Hadn't actually thought of that. I could see why it would be useful if I wanted
to dispute what Barbara printed, though. Still, if I couldn't trust her to do
right by me, I was doomed anyway.

"No, that's OK," I said.

"Right, let's go. Young lady, my name is Barbara Stratford and I'm an
investigative reporter. I gather you know why I'm here, and I'm curious to know
why you're here."

"I work with Marcus on the Xnet," she said. "Do you need to know my name?"

"Not right now, I don't," Barbara said. "You can be anonymous if you'd like.
Marcus, I asked you to tell me this story because I need to know how it plays
with the story you told me about your friend Darryl and the note you showed me.
I can see how it would be a good adjunct; I could pitch this as the origin of
the Xnet. 'They made an enemy they'll never forget,' that sort of thing. But to
be honest, I'd rather not have to tell that story if I don't have to.

"I'd rather have a nice clean tale about the secret prison on our doorstep,
without having to argue about whether the prisoners there are the sort of
people likely to walk out the doors and establish an underground movement bent
on destabilizing the federal government. I'm sure you can 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 about Darryl.
When you do that, it's going to tell the DHS that I've gone public and they're
going to go after me. Maybe they'll figure out then that I'm involved with the
Xnet. Maybe they'll connect me to M1k3y. I guess what I'm saying is, once you
publish about Darryl, it's all over for me no matter 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 about the founding
and operation of the Xnet, and then I want a demonstration. What do you use it
for? Who else uses it? How did it spread? Who wrote the software? Everything."

"This'll take a while," Ange said.

"I've got a while," Barbara said. She drank some coffee and ate a fake Oreo.
"This could be the most important story of the War on Terror. This could be the
story that topples the government. When you have a story like this, you take it
very carefully."

1~ Chapter 17

_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Waterstone's,~{ Waterstones
http://www.waterstones.com }~ the national UK bookselling chain. Waterstone's
is a chain of stores, but each one has the feel of a great independent store,
with tons of personality, great stock (especially audiobooks!), and
knowledgeable staff.] }/

So we told her. I found it really fun, actually. Teaching people how to use
technology is always exciting. It's so cool to watch people figure out how 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 explaining how it all worked.
Barbara was pretty good at this stuff to begin with, of course.

It turned out that she'd covered the crypto wars, the period in the early
nineties when civil liberties groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation
fought for the right of Americans to use strong crypto. I dimly knew about that
period, but Barbara explained it in a way that made me get goose-pimples.

It's unbelievable today, but there was a time when the government classed
crypto as a munition and made it illegal for anyone to export or use it on
national security grounds. Get that? We used to have illegal /{math}/ 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 for bankers and their
customers to use, but not so strong that the mafia would 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 in two hours.

Still the NSA argued that it should be able to keep American citizens from
possessing secrets it couldn't pry into. Then EFF dealt its death-blow. In
1995, they represented a Berkeley mathematics grad student called Dan Bernstein
in court. Bernstein had written a crypto tutorial that contained computer code
that could be used to make a cipher stronger than DES-56. Millions of times
stronger. As far as the NSA was concerned, that made his article into a weapon,
and therefore unpublishable.

Well, it may be hard to get a judge to understand crypto and what it means, but
it turned out that the average Appeals Court judge isn't real enthusiastic
about telling grad students what kind of articles they're allowed to write. The
crypto wars ended with a victory for the good guys when the 9th Circuit
Appellate Division Court ruled that code was a form of expression protected
under the First Amendment -- "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom
of speech." If you've ever bought something on the Internet, or sent a secret
message, or checked your 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
can be sure that terrorists and mobsters can get around too.

Barbara had been one of the reporters who'd made her reputation from covering
the issue. She'd cut her teeth covering the tail end of the civil rights
movement in San Francisco, and she recognized the similarity between the fight
for the Constitution in the real world and the fight in cyberspace.

So she got it. I don't think I could have explained this stuff to my parents,
but with Barbara it was easy. She asked smart questions about our cryptographic
protocols and security procedures, sometimes asking stuff I didn't know the
answer to -- sometimes pointing out potential breaks in our procedure.

We plugged in the Xbox and got it online. There were four open WiFi nodes
visible from the board room and I told it to change between them at random
intervals. She got this too -- once you were actually plugged into the Xnet, it
was just like being on the Internet, only some stuff was a little slower, and
it was all anonymous and unsniffable.

"So now what?" I said as we wound down. I'd talked myself dry and I had a
terrible acid feeling from the coffee. Besides, Ange kept squeezing my hand
under the table in a way that made me want to break away and find somewhere
private to finish making up for our first fight.

"Now I do journalism. You go away and I research all the things you've told me
and try to confirm them to the extent that I can. I'll let you see what I'm
going to publish and I'll let you know when it's going to go live. I'd prefer
that you /{not}/ talk about this with anyone else now, because I want the scoop
and because I want to make sure that I get the story 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 do
that in a way that protects you to whatever extent possible. I'll also be sure
to let you know before that happens.

"One thing I need to be clear on: this isn't your story anymore. It's mine. You
were very generous to give it to me and I'll try to repay the gift, but you
don't get the right to edit anything out, to change it, or to stop me. This is
now in motion and it won't stop. Do you understand that?"

I hadn't thought about it in those terms but once she said it, it was obvious.
It meant that I had launched and I wouldn't be able to recall the rocket. 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 near future, I would stop
being Marcus -- I would be a public figure. I'd be the 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 a color
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 decide where we
were going for the evening. It was past supper time, but my parents had known
that I was meeting with Barbara and wouldn't give me any grief if I came home
late.

When we got to Ange's, I had no urge to plug in my Xbox. I had had all the Xnet
I could handle for one day. All I could think about was Ange, Ange, Ange.
Living without Ange. Knowing Ange was angry with me. Ange never going to talk
to me again. Ange never going to kiss me again.

She'd been thinking the same. I could see it in her eyes as we shut the door to
her bedroom and looked at each other. I was hungry for her, like you'd hunger
for dinner after not eating for days. Like you'd thirst for a glass of water
after playing soccer for three hours straight.

Like none of that. It was more. It was something I'd never felt before. I
wanted to eat her whole, devour her.

Up until now, she'd been the sexual one in our relationship. I'd let her set
and control the pace. It was amazingly erotic to have /{her}/ grab /{me}/ and
take 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 and yanked,
barely giving her time to lift her arms as I pulled it over her head. I tore my
own shirt over my head, listening to the cotton crackle as the stitches came
loose.

Her eyes were shining, her mouth open, her breathing fast and shallow. Mine was
too, my breath and my heart and my blood all roaring in my ears.

I took off the rest of our clothes with equal zest, throwing them into the
piles of dirty and clean laundry on the floor. There were books and papers all
over the bed and I swept them aside. We landed on the unmade bedclothes a
second later, arms around one another, squeezing like we would pull ourselves
right through one another. She moaned into my mouth and I made the sound back,
and I felt her voice buzz in my vocal chords, a feeling more intimate than
anything I'd ever felt before.

She broke away and reached for the bedstand. She yanked open the drawer and
threw a white pharmacy bag on the bed before me. I looked inside. Condoms.
Trojans. One dozen spermicidal. Still sealed. I smiled at her and she smiled
back and I opened the box.

#

I'd thought about what it would be like for years. A hundred times a day 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 were lots
worse. While it was going on, it felt like an eternity. Afterwards, it seemed
to be over in the blink of an eye.

Afterwards, I felt the same. But I also felt different. Something had changed
between us.

It was weird. We were both shy as we put our clothes on and puttered around the
room, looking away, not meeting each other's eyes. I wrapped the condom in a
kleenex from a box beside the bed and took it into the bathroom and wound it
with toilet paper and stuck it deep into the trash-can.

When I came back in, Ange was sitting up in bed and playing with her Xbox. I
sat down carefully beside her and took her hand. She turned to face me and
smiled. We were both worn out, trembly.

"Thanks," I said.

She didn't say anything. She turned her face to me. She was grinning hugely,
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. I picked
it up and plugged it in and logged in.

Same old same old. Lots of email. The new posts on the blogs I read streamed
in. Spam. God did I get a lot of spam. My Swedish mailbox was repeatedly
"joe-jobbed" -- used as the return address for spams sent to hundreds of
millions of Internet accounts, so that all the bounces and angry messages came
back to me. I didn't know who was behind it. Maybe the DHS trying to overwhelm
my mailbox. Maybe it was just people pranking. The Pirate Party had pretty good
filters, though, and they gave anyone who wanted it 500 gigabytes of email
storage, so I wasn't likely to be drowned any time soon.

I filtered it all out, hammering on the delete key. I had a separate mailbox
for stuff that came in encrypted to my public key, since that was likely to be
Xnet-related and possibly sensitive. Spammers hadn't figured out that using
public keys would make their junk mail more plausible yet, so for now this
worked well.

There were a couple dozen encrypted messages from people in the web of trust. I
skimmed them -- links to videos and pics of new abuses from the DHS, horror
stories about near-escapes, rants about stuff I'd blogged. The usual.

Then I came to one that was only encrypted to my public key. That meant that no
one else could read it, but I had no idea who had written it. 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.

> I was arrested the day that the bridge blew. They questioned me. They decided
I was innocent. They offered me a job: help them hunt down the terrorists who'd
killed my neighbors.

> It sounded like a good deal at the time. Little did I realize that my actual
job would turn out to be spying on kids who resented their city being turned
into a police state.

> I infiltrated Xnet on the day it launched. I am in your web of trust. If I
wanted to spill my identity, I could send you email from an address you'd
trust. Three addresses, actually. I'm totally inside your network as only
another 17-year-old can be. Some of the email you've gotten has been carefully
chosen misinformation from me and my handlers.

> They don't know who you are, but they're coming close. They continue to turn
people, to compromise them. They mine the social network sites and use threats
to turn kids into informants. There are hundreds of people 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 ParanoidLinux.
The exploits so far have been small and insubstantial, but a break 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 ParanoidXbox
distros floating around. They don't match the checksums, but how many people
look at the checksums? Besides me and you? Plenty of kids are already dead,
though they don't know it.

> All that remains is for my handlers to figure out the best time to bust you
to make the biggest impact in the media. That time will be sooner, not later.
Believe.

> You'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'm
spying on Americans who believe things that the DHS doesn't like. Not people
who plan on blowing up bridges, but protestors. I can't do it anymore.

> But neither can you, whether or not you know it. Like I say, it's only a
matter 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 than a
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.

> Masha

#

When 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 follow. I
leapt off the bed and paced back and forth. My heart thudded and my 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?"

I pointed at the screen on my side of the bed. She rolled over and grabbed 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 your head."

I looked at her. She was biting her lip. She didn't look like she believed it.

"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 new intimacy
between us. She hit reply and typed,

> Nice try.

She was writing as M1k3y now, too. We were together in a way that was 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 better ones. I
signed it and encrypted it with my private key and the public key Masha 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 video over
DNS. Here are some links to clips you might want to look at before you decide
I'm full of it. These people are all recording each other, all the time, as
insurance against a back-stab. It's pretty easy to snoop off them as they snoop
on each other.

> Masha

Attached was source-code for a little program that appeared to do exactly what
Masha claimed: pull video over the Domain Name Service protocol.

Let me back up a moment here and explain something. At the end of the day,
every Internet protocol is just a sequence of text sent back and forth in a
prescribed order. It's kind of like getting a truck and putting a car in it,
then putting a motorcycle in the car's trunk, then attaching a bicycle to the
back of the motorcycle, then hanging a pair of Rollerblades on the back of the
bike. Except that then, if you want, you can attach the truck to the
Rollerblades.

For example, take Simple Mail Transport Protocol, or SMTP, which is used for
sending email.

Here's a sample conversation between me and my mail server, sending a message
to myself:

> HELO littlebrother.com.se

250 mail.pirateparty.org.se Hello mail.pirateparty.org.se, pleased to meet you

> MAIL FROM:m1k3y@littlebrother.com.se

250 2.1.0 m1k3y@littlebrother.com.se... Sender ok

> RCPT TO:m1k3y@littlebrother.com.se

250 2.1.5 m1k3y@littlebrother.com.se... Recipient ok

> DATA

354 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 delivery

QUIT

221 2.0.0 mail.pirateparty.org.se closing connection

Connection closed by foreign host.

This conversation's grammar was defined in 1982 by Jon Postel, one of the
Internet's heroic forefathers, who used to literally run the most important
servers on the net under his desk at the University of Southern California,
back in the paleolithic era.

Now, imagine that you hooked up a mail-server to an IM session. You could send
an IM to the server that said "HELO littlebrother.com.se" and it would reply
with "250 mail.pirateparty.org.se Hello mail.pirateparty.org.se, pleased to
meet you." In other words, you could have the same conversation over IM as you
do over SMTP. With the right tweaks, the whole mail-server business could take
place inside of a chat. 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 to be 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, you can
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 protocols -- over
it.

Domain Name Service is an interesting and ancient Internet protocol, dating
back to 1983. It's the way that your computer converts a computer's name --
like pirateparty.org.se -- to the IP number that computers actually use to talk
to each other over the net, like 204.11.50.136. It generally works like magic,
even though it's got millions of moving parts -- every ISP runs a DNS server,
as do most governments and lots of private operators. These DNS boxes all talk
to each other all the time, making and filling requests to each other so no
matter how obscure the name is you feed to your computer, it will be able to
turn it into a number.

Before DNS, there was the HOSTS file. Believe it or not, this was a single
document that listed the name and address of /{every single computer}/
connected to the Internet. Every computer had a copy of it. This file was
eventually too big to move around, so DNS was invented, and ran on a server
that used to live under Jon Postel's desk. If the cleaners knocked out the
plug, the entire Internet lost its ability to find itself. Seriously.

The thing about DNS today is that it's everywhere. Every network has a DNS
server living on it, and all of those servers are configured to talk to each
other and to random people all over the Internet.

What Masha had done was figure out a way to tunnel a video-streaming system
over DNS. She was breaking up the video into billions of pieces and hiding each
of them in a normal message to a DNS server. By running her code, I was able to
pull the video from all those DNS servers, all over the Internet, at incredible
speed. It must have looked bizarre on the network histograms, like I was
looking up the address of every computer in the world.

But it had two advantages I appreciated at once: I was able to get the video
with blinding speed -- as soon as I clicked the first link, I started to
receive full-screen pictures, without any jitter or stuttering -- and I had no
idea where it was hosted. It was totally anonymous.

At first I didn't even clock the content of the video. I was totally floored by
the cleverness of this hack. Streaming video from DNS? That was 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 one wall. I knew
that room. I'd sat in that room, while Severe-Haircut woman had made me speak
my password aloud. There were five comfortable chairs around the table, each
with a comfortable person, all in DHS uniform. I recognized Major General
Graeme Sutherland, the DHS Bay Area commander, along with Severe Haircut. The
others were new to me. They all watched a video screen at the end of the table,
on which there 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 steaming towards a
fourth. They called him "Ruthless" and I'd seen a news report once about how
tight a rein he kept his staffers on, calling them, IMing them, watching their
every motion, controlling every step. He was old, 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 smelling something bad all the time.

He was the man on the screen. He was talking, and everyone else was focused 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 the country 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 as they're concerned, it is a
Sodom and Gomorrah of fags and atheists who deserve to rot in hell. The only
reason the country cares what they think in San Francisco is that they had the
good fortune to have been blown to hell by some Islamic terrorists.

"These Xnet children are getting to the point where they might start to be
useful to us. The more radical they get, the more the rest of the nation
understands that there are threats everywhere."

His audience finished typing.

"We can control that, I think," Severe Haircut Lady said. "Our people in the
Xnet have built up a lot of influence. The Manchurian Bloggers are running as
many as fifty blogs each, flooding the chat channels, linking to each other,
mostly just taking the party line set by this M1k3y. But they've already shown
that they can provoke radical action, even when M1k3y is putting the brakes
on."

Major General Sutherland nodded. "We have been planning to leave them
underground until about a month before the midterms." I guessed that meant the
mid-term elections, not my exams. "That's per the original plan. 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 for the month before.
Cut the Xnet loose now, as soon as you can. So long as they'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. Ange reached out
and started the video again. We watched it. It was worse the second time.

I tossed the keyboard aside and got up.

"I am /{so sick}/ of being scared," I said. "Let's take this to Barbara and
have her publish it all. Put it all on the net. Let them take me away. At least
I'll know what's going to happen then. At least then I'll have a little
/{certainty}/ 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 the good stuff.
You've created a movement. You've outflanked the jerks in the White House, the
crooks in DHS uniforms. You've put yourself in a position where you could be
responsible for blowing the lid off of the entire rotten DHS thing.

"Sure they're out to get you. Course they are. Have you ever doubted it for a
moment? I always figured they were. But Marcus, /{they don't know who you
are}/. Think about that. All those people, money, guns and spies, and you, a
seventeen year old high school kid -- you're still beating them. They don't
know about Barbara. They don't know about Zeb. You've jammed them in the
streets of San Francisco and humiliated them before the world. So stop moping,
all right? You're winning."

"They're coming for me, though. You see that. They're going to put me in 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 as I'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 tears rolling down
her cheeks. "No! You're out of your mind. You think I'm going 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 to her
some more."

"You talk to her," Ange said. "You tell her you and your girlfriend are getting
out."

"What?"

"Shut up, dickhead. You think you're in danger? I'm in just as much danger,
Marcus. It's called guilt by association. When you go, I go." She had her jaw
thrust out at a mutinous angle. "You and I -- we're together now. 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 could never 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. Ange nuzzled me a
little and I kissed her and we necked. Something about the danger and the pact
to go together -- it made me forget the awkwardness 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 leash when
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? They watch
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're
wondering. 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. Your girlie too.

> Masha

My phone rang, making us both jump. It was my mom wanting to know when I was
coming home. I told her I was on my way. She didn't mention Barbara. We'd
agreed that we wouldn't talk about any of this stuff on the phone. That was my
dad's idea. He could be as paranoid as me.

"I have to go," I said.

"Our parents will be --"

"I know," I said. "I saw what happened to my parents when they thought I was
dead. Knowing that I'm a fugitive isn't going to be much better. But they'd
rather I be a fugitive than a prisoner. That's what I think. Anyway, once we
disappear, Barbara can publish without worrying about getting us into trouble."

We kissed at the door of her room. Not one of the hot, sloppy numbers we
usually did when parting ways. A sweet kiss this time. A slow kiss. A goodbye
kind of kiss.

#

BART rides are introspective. When the train rocks back and forth and you try
not to make eye contact with the other riders and you try not to read the ads
for plastic surgery, bail bondsmen and AIDS testing, when you try to ignore the
graffiti and not look too closely at the stuff in the carpeting. 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've
overlooked, 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 the
open, panic him into leading some kind of big, public Xnet event? Wouldn't that
be worth the chance of a compromising video leaking?}/

Your brain comes up with stuff like that even when the train ride only lasts
two or three stops. When you get off, and you start moving, the blood gets
running and sometimes your brain helps you out again.

Sometimes your brain gives you solutions in addition to problems.

1~ Chapter 18

_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Vancouver's multilingual Sophia Books,~{
Sophia Books http://www.sophiabooks.com/ 450 West Hastings St., Vancouver, BC
Canada V6B1L1 +1 604 684 0484 }~ a diverse and exciting store filled with the
best of the strange and exciting pop culture worlds of many lands. Sophia was
around the corner from my 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 and sign their stock while I was in the neighborhood. When I got there, I
discovered a treasure-trove of never-before-seen works in a dizzying array of
languages, from graphic novels to thick academic treatises, presided over by
good-natured (even slapstick) staff who so palpably enjoyed their jobs that it
spread to every customer who stepped through the door.] }/

There was a time when my favorite thing in the world was putting on a cape and
hanging out in hotels, pretending to be an invisible vampire whom everyone
stared at.

It's complicated, and not nearly as weird as it sounds. The Live Action Role
Playing scene combines the best aspects of D&D with drama club with going to
sci-fi cons.

I understand that this might not make it sound as appealing to you as it was to
me when I was 14.

The best games were the ones at the Scout Camps out of town: a hundred
teenagers, boys and girls, fighting the Friday night traffic, swapping stories,
playing handheld games, showing off for hours. Then debarking to stand in the
grass before a group of older men and women in bad-ass, home-made armor, dented
and scarred, like armor must have been in the old days, not like it's portrayed
in the movies, but like a soldier's uniform after a month in the bush.

These people were nominally paid to run the games, but you didn't get the job
unless you were the kind of person who'd do it for free. They'd have already
divided us into teams based on the questionnaires we'd filled in beforehand,
and we'd get our team assignments then, like being called up for baseball
sides.

Then you'd get your briefing packages. These were like the briefings the 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 on spits, tofu
sizzling on skillets (it's northern California, a vegetarian option is not
optional), and a style of eating and drinking that can only be described 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 I threw 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 at would keel over if I
connected. Or not -- sometimes we had to call in a ref to mediate, but for the
most part, we were all pretty good about playing fair. No one liked a dice
lawyer.

By bedtime, we were all in character. At 14, I wasn't super-sure what a wizard
was supposed to sound like, but I could take my cues from the movies and
novels. I spoke in slow, measured tones, keeping my face composed in a suitably
mystical expression, and thinking mystical thoughts.

The mission was complicated, retrieving a sacred relic that had been stolen by
an ogre who was bent on subjugating the people of the land to his will. It
didn't really matter a whole lot. What mattered was that I had a private
mission, to capture a certain kind of imp to serve as my familiar, and that I
had a secret nemesis, another player on the team who had taken part in a raid
that killed my family when I was a boy, a player who didn'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 even as I was enjoying the camaraderie of
the team, I'd always have to keep an eye 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 weekend that
were like hide-and-seek, some that were like wilderness survival exercises,
some that were like solving crossword puzzles. The game-masters had done a
great job. And you really got to be friends with the other 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. Shame I'd have to kill him.

I fireballed him as he was seeking out treasure after we wiped out a band of
orcs, playing rock-papers-scissors with each orc to determine who 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 night in
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 the kind of kid
who really enjoyed that kind of thing. He was more the pulling-wings-off-flies
type. Oh, maybe not. But he just was not into being in costume in the woods. He
spent the whole time mooching around, sneering at everyone and everything,
trying to convince us all that we weren't having the good time we all felt like
we were having. You've no doubt found that kind of person before, the kind of
person who is compelled to ensure that everyone else has a rotten time.

The other thing about Charles was that he couldn't get the hang of simulated
combat. Once you start running around the woods and playing these elaborate,
semi-military games, it's easy to get totally adrenalized to the point where
you're ready to tear out someone's throat. This is not a good state to be in
when you're carrying a prop sword, club, pike or other utensil. This is why no
one is ever allowed to hit anyone, under any circumstances, in these games.
Instead, when you get close enough to someone to fight, you play a quick couple
rounds of rock-paper-scissors, with modifiers based on your experience,
armaments, and condition. 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 perfectly capable
of understanding that the rule was no contact, but he was simultaneously
capable of deciding that the rule didn't matter, and that he wasn't going to
abide by it. The refs called him on it a bunch of times over the weekend, and
he kept on promising to stick by it, and kept on going back. He was one of the
bigger kids there already, and he was fond of "accidentally" tackling you at
the end of a chase. Not fun when you get tackled into the rocky forest floor.

I had just mightily smote Darryl in a little clearing where he'd been
treasure-hunting, and we were having a little laugh over my extreme sneakiness.
He was going to go monstering -- killed players could switch to playing
monsters, which meant that the longer the game wore on, the more monsters there
were coming after you, meaning that everyone got to keep on playing and the
game's battles just got more and more epic.

That was when Charles came out of the woods behind me and tackled me, throwing
me to the ground so hard that I couldn't breathe for a moment. "Gotcha!" he
yelled. I only knew him slightly before this, and I'd never thought much of
him, but now I was ready for murder. I climbed slowly to my feet and looked at
him, his chest heaving, grinning. "You're so dead," he said. "I totally got
you."

I smiled and something felt wrong and sore in my face. I touched my upper lip.
It was bloody. My nose was bleeding and my lip was split, cut on 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 thought that 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 into the
woods. Darryl moved to flank him. I took the other flank. Abruptly, he turned
and ran. Darryl's foot hooked his ankle and sent him 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 that weekend.
He sent Charles back to the camp entrance and told him he was out of the game.
Charles complained mightily, but to our satisfaction, the ref wasn't having any
of it. Once Charles had gone, he gave /{us}/ both a lecture, too, telling us
that our retaliation was no more justified than Charles's attack.

It was OK. That night, once the games had ended, we all got hot showers in the
scout dorms. Darryl and I stole Charles's clothes and towel. We tied them in
knots and dropped them in the urinal. A lot of the boys were happy to
contribute to the effort of soaking them. Charles had been very enthusiastic
about his tackles.

I wish I could have watched him when he got out of his shower and discovered
his clothes. It's a hard decision: do you run naked across the camp, or pick
apart the tight, piss-soaked knots in your clothes and then put them on?

He chose nudity. I probably would have chosen the same. We lined up along the
route from the showers to the shed where the packs were stored and applauded
him. I was at the front of the line, leading the applause.

#

The Scout Camp weekends only came three or four times a year, which left Darryl
and me -- and lots of other LARPers -- with a serious LARP deficiency in our
lives.

Luckily, there were the Wretched Daylight games in the city hotels. Wretched
Daylight is another LARP, rival vampire clans and vampire hunters, and it's got
its own quirky rules. Players get cards to help them resolve combat skirmishes,
so each skirmish involves playing a little hand of a strategic card game.
Vampires can become invisible by cloaking themselves, crossing their arms over
their chests, and all the other players have to pretend they don't see them,
continuing on with their conversations about their plans and so on. The true
test of a good player is whether you're honest enough to go on spilling your
secrets in front of an "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 hotels and they let it be
known that they'd take ten unbooked rooms on Friday night and fill them with
players who'd run around the hotel, playing low-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 close the booking on Friday afternoon, email
us, and we'd go straight from school to whichever hotel it was, bringing our
knapsacks, sleeping six or eight to a room for the weekend, living on
junk-food, playing until three AM. It was good, safe fun that our parents could
get behind.

The organizers were a well-known literacy charity that ran kids' writing
workshops, drama workshops and so on. They had been running the games for ten
years without incident. Everything was strictly booze- and drug-free, to keep
the organizers from getting busted on some kind of corruption of minors rap.
We'd draw between ten and a hundred players, depending on the weekend, and for
the cost of a couple movies, you could have two and a half days' worth of solid
fun.

One day, though, they lucked into a block of rooms at the Monaco, a hotel in
the Tenderloin that catered to arty older tourists, the kind of place where
every room came with a goldfish bowl, where the lobby was full of beautiful old
people in fine clothes, showing off their plastic surgery results.

Normally, the mundanes -- our word for non-players -- just ignored us, figuring
that we were skylarking kids. But that weekend there happened to be an editor
for an Italian travel magazine staying, and he took an interest in things. He
cornered me as I skulked in the lobby, hoping to spot the clan-master of my
rivals and swoop in on him and draw his blood. I was standing against the wall
with my arms folded over my chest, being invisible, when he came up to me and
asked me, in accented English, what me and my friends were doing in the hotel
that weekend?

I tried to brush him off, but he wouldn't be put off. So I figured I'd just
make something up and he'd go away.

I didn't imagine that he'd print it. I really didn't imagine that it would get
picked up by the American press.

"We're here because our prince has died, and so we've had to come in search of
a new ruler."

"A prince?"

"Yes," I said, getting into it. "We're the Old People. We came to America in
the 16th Century and have had our own royal family in the wilds of Pennsylvania
ever since. We live simply in the woods. We don't use modern technology. But
the prince was the last of the line and he died last week. Some terrible
wasting disease took him. The young men of my clan have left to find the
descendants of his great-uncle, who went away to join the modern people in the
time of my grandfather. He is said to have multiplied, and we will find the
last of his bloodline and bring them 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 one was staying in
this hotel, and we've come to find him. But we've been tracked here by a rival
clan who would keep us from bringing home our prince, to keep us weak and easy
to dominate. Thus it is vital we keep to ourselves. We do not talk to the New
People when we can help it. Talking to you now causes me great discomfort."

He was watching me shrewdly. I had uncrossed my arms, which meant that I was
now "visible" to rival vampires, one of whom had been slowly 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 the lobby,
hopping over a leather sofa and deking around a potted plant, making her chase
me. I'd scouted an escape route down through the stairwell to the basement
health-club and I took it, shaking her off.

I didn't see him again that weekend, but I /{did}/ relate the story to some of
my fellow LARPers, who embroidered the tale and found lots of opportunities to
tell it over the weekend.

The Italian magazine had a staffer who'd done her master's degree on Amish
anti-technology communities in rural Pennsylvania, and she thought we sounded
awfully interesting. Based on the notes and taped interviews of her boss from
his trip to San Francisco, she wrote a fascinating, heart-wrenching article
about these weird, juvenile cultists who were crisscrossing America in search
of their "prince." Hell, people will print anything these days.

But the thing was, stories like that get picked up and republished. First it
was Italian bloggers, then a few American bloggers. People across the country
reported "sightings" of the Old People, though whether they were making it up,
or whether others were playing the same game, I didn't know.

It worked its way up the media food-chain all the way to the /{New York
Times}/, who, unfortunately, have an unhealthy appetite for fact-checking. The
reporter they put on the story eventually tracked it down to the Monaco Hotel,
who put them in touch with the LARP organizers, who laughingly spilled the
whole story.

Well, at that point, LARPing got a lot less cool. We became known as the
nation's foremost hoaxers, as weird, pathological liars. The press who we'd
inadvertently tricked into covering the story of the Old People were now
interested in redeeming themselves by reporting on how unbelievably weird we
LARPers were, and that was when Charles let everyone in school know that Darryl
and I were the biggest LARPing weenies in the city.

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 vampire, or
they'd talk with fake Transylvanian accents when I was around.

We switched to ARGing pretty soon afterwards. It was more fun in some ways, and
it was a lot less weird. Every now and again, though, I missed my cape and
those weekends in the hotel.

#

The opposite of esprit d'escalier is the way that life's embarrassments come
back to haunt us even after they're long past. I could remember every stupid
thing I'd ever said or done, recall them with picture-perfect clarity. Any time
I was feeling low, I'd naturally start to remember other times I felt that way,
a hit-parade of humiliations coming one after another to my mind.

As I tried to concentrate on Masha and my impending doom, the Old People
incident kept coming back to haunt me. There'd been a similar, sick, sinking
doomed feeling then, as more and more press outlets picked up the story, as the
likelihood increased of someone figuring out that it had been me who'd sprung
the story on the stupid Italian editor in the designer jeans with crooked
seams, the starched collarless shirt, and the oversized metal-rimmed glasses.

There's an alternative to dwelling on your mistakes. You can learn from them.

It's a good theory, anyway. Maybe the reason your subconscious dredges up all
these miserable ghosts is that they need to get closure before they can rest
peacefully in humiliation afterlife. My subconscious kept visiting me with
ghosts in the hopes that I would do something to let them rest in peace.

All the way home, I turned over this memory and the thought of what I would do
about "Masha," in case she was playing me. I needed some insurance.

And by the time I reached my house -- to be swept up into melancholy hugs from
Mom and Dad -- I had it.

#

The trick was to time this so that it happened fast enough that the DHS
couldn't prepare for it, but with a long enough lead time that the Xnet would
have time to turn out in force.

The trick was to stage this so that there were too many present to arrest us
all, but to put it somewhere that the press could see it and the grownups, so
the DHS wouldn't just gas us again.

The trick was to come up with something with the media friendliness of the
levitation of the Pentagon. The trick was to stage something that we could
rally around, like 3,000 Berkeley students refusing to let one of their 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.

I cut out of school an hour early the next day, using my customary techniques
for getting out, not caring if it would trigger some kind of new DHS checker
that would result in my parents getting a note.

One way or another, my parents' last problem after tomorrow would be whether I
was in trouble at school.

I met Ange at her place. She'd had to cut out of school even earlier, but she'd
just made a big deal out of her cramps and pretended she was going to keel over
and they sent her home.

We started to spread the word on Xnet. We sent it in email to trusted friends,
and IMmed it to our buddy lists. We roamed the decks and towns of Clockwork
Plunder and told our team-mates. Giving everyone enough information to get them
to show up but not so much as to tip our hand 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 and
borrow some clothes. Think vampire.

> The game starts at 8:00AM sharp. SHARP. Be there and ready to be divided into
teams. The game lasts 30 minutes, so you'll have plenty of time to get to
school afterward.

> Location will be revealed tomorrow. Email your public key to
m1k3y@littlebrother.pirateparty.org.se and check your messages at 7AM for the
update. If that's too early for you, stay up all night. That's what we're going
to do.

> This is the most fun you will have all year, guaranteed.

> Believe.

> M1k3y

Then I sent a short message to Masha.

> Tomorrow

> M1k3y

A minute later, she emailed back:

> I thought so. VampMob, huh? You work fast. Wear a red hat. Travel light.

#

What do you bring along when you go fugitive? I'd carried enough heavy packs
around enough scout camps to know that every ounce you add cuts into your
shoulders with all the crushing force of gravity with every step you take --
it's not just one ounce, it's one ounce that you carry 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 have a spot on
your t-shirt than a suitcase that's too big and heavy to stash under a
plane-seat."

She'd pulled out a ballistic nylon courier bag that went across her chest,
between her breasts -- something that made me get a little sweaty -- and slung
diagonally across her back. It was roomy inside, and she'd set 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, three changes
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 to
remember to stick my toothbrush in tomorrow morning before I head down to Civic
Center."

Watching her pack was impressive. She was ruthless about it all. It was also
freaky -- it made me realize that the next day, I was going to go away. 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 the wrong hands."

"It's all encrypted," I said. "That's standard with ParanoidXbox. But leave the
Xbox behind, there'll be plenty of them in LA. Just create a Pirate Party
account and email an image of your hard-drive to yourself. I'm going to do the
same when I get home."

She did so, and queued up the email. It was going to take a couple hours for
all the data to squeeze through her neighbor's WiFi network and wing its way to
Sweden.

Then she closed the flap on the bag and tightened the compression straps. She
had something the size of a soccer-ball slung over her back now, and I stared
admiringly at it. She could walk down the street with that under her shoulder
and no one would look twice -- she looked like she was on her way to school.

"One more thing," she said, and went to her bedside table and took out the
condoms. She took the strips of rubbers out of the box and opened the 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 parents, 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 on the kitchen
table and was answering email while talking into a headset connected to it,
helping some poor Yorkshireman and his family acclimate to living in Louisiana.

I came through the door and Ange followed, grinning like mad, but holding my
hand so tight I could feel the bones grinding together. I didn't know what she
was so worried about. It wasn't like she was going to end up spending a lot of
time hanging around with my parents after this, 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 is this?"

"Mom, meet Ange. Ange, this is my Mom, Lillian." Mom stood up and gave Ange a
hug.

"It's very good to meet you, darling," she said, looking her over from top 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 at her.

"A pleasure to meet you, Mrs Yallow," she said. She sounded very confident 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 you
staying 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 and she'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, getting us
glasses of juice and a plate of biscuits and asking three times if we wanted
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 Ange sort
through it while I went through my clothes. I was only going as far as LA. They
had stores there, all the clothing I could need. I just needed to get together
three or four favorite tees and a favorite pair of jeans, a tube of deodorant,
a roll of dental floss.

"Money!" I said.

"Yeah," she said. "I was going to clean out my bank account on the way 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, I haven'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 the morning."

I had a big book-bag I used when I was hauling lots of gear around town. It was
less conspicuous than my camping pack. Ange went through my piles mercilessly
and culled them down to her favorites.

Once it was packed and under my bed, we both sat down.

"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 locations
tomorrow, sending people out to secluded spots within a few minutes' walk of
Civic Center. We'd cut out a spray-paint stencil that just said VAMPMOB CIVIC
CENTER -> -> that we would spray-paint at those spots around 5AM. That would
keep the DHS from locking down the Civic Center before we got there. I had the
mailbot ready to send out the 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'd queued an
email to her for the next morning, too -- "and all, maybe we'll be 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 unshaved and worried,
the way he had since we'd gone to see Barbara, but on meeting Ange, a little of
the old Dad came back. She kissed him on the cheek and he insisted that she
call him Drew.

Dinner was actually really good. The ice broke when Ange took out her hot-sauce
mister and treated her plate, and explained about Scoville units. Dad tried a
forkful of her food and went reeling into the kitchen to drink a gallon of
milk. Believe it or not, Mom still tried it after that and gave every
impression of loving it. Mom, it turned out, was an undiscovered spicy food
prodigy, a natural.

Before she left, Ange pressed the hot-sauce mister on Mom. "I have a spare at
home," she said. I'd watched her pack it in her backpack. "You seem like the
kind of woman who should have one of these."

1~ Chapter 19

/{ [This chapter is dedicated to the MIT Press Bookshop,~{ MIT Press Bookstore
http://web.mit.edu/bookstore/www/ Building E38, 77 Massachusetts Ave.,
Cambridge, MA USA 02139-4307 +1 617 253 5249 }~ a store I've visited on every
single trip to Boston over the past ten years. MIT, of course, is one of the
legendary origin nodes for global nerd culture, and the campus bookstore lives
up to the incredible expectations I had when I first set foot in it. In
addition to the wonderful titles published by the MIT press, the bookshop is a
tour through the most exciting high-tech publications in the world, from hacker
zines like 2600 to fat academic anthologies on video-game design. This is one
of those stores where I have to ask them to ship my purchases home because they
don't fit in my suitcase.] }/

Here's the email that went out at 7AM the next day, while Ange and I were
spray-painting VAMP-MOB CIVIC CENTER -> -> at strategic locations around town.

> RULES FOR VAMPMOB

> You are part of a clan of daylight vampires. You've discovered the secret of
surviving the terrible light of the sun. The secret was cannibalism: the blood
of another vampire can give you the strength to walk among the living.

> You need to bite as many other vampires as you can in order to stay in the
game. If one minute goes by without a bite, you're out. Once you're out, turn
your shirt around backwards and go referee -- watch two or three vamps to see
if they're getting their bites in.

> To 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 bite bite!"
and if you get it out before she does, you live and she crumbles to dust.

> 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 over your
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 and get
your vamp on, not to win.

> There is an end-game that will be passed by word of mouth as winners begin to
emerge. The game-masters will start a whisper campaign among the players when
the time comes. Spread the whisper as quickly as you can and watch for the
sign.

> M1k3y

> bite bite bite bite bite!

We'd hoped that a hundred people would be willing to play VampMob. We'd sent
out about two hundred invites each. But when I sat bolt upright at 4AM and
grabbed my Xbox, there were /{400}/ replies there. Four /{hundred}/.

I fed the addresses to the bot and stole out of the house. I descended the
stairs, listening to my father snore and my mom rolling over in their bed. I
locked the door behind me.

At 4:15 AM, Potrero Hill was as quiet as the countryside. There were some
distant traffic rumbles, and once, a car crawled past me. I stopped at an ATM
and drew out $320 in twenties, rolled them up and put a rubber-band around
them, and stuck the roll in a zip-up pocket low on the thigh of my vampire
pants.

I was wearing my cape again, and a ruffled shirt, and tuxedo pants that had
been modded to have enough pockets to carry all my little bits and pieces. I
had on pointed boots with silver-skull buckles, and I'd teased my hair into a
black dandelion clock around my head. Ange was bringing the white makeup and
had promised to do my eyeliner and black nail-polish. Why the hell not? When
was the next time I was going to get to play dressup like this?

Ange met me in front of her house. She had her backpack on too, and fishnet
tights, a ruffled gothic lolita maid's dress, white face-paint, elaborate
kabuki eye-makeup, and her fingers and throat dripped with silver jewelry.

"You look /{great}/!" we said to each other in unison, then laughed quietly and
stole off through the streets, spray-paint cans in our pockets.

#

As I surveyed Civic Center, I thought about what it would look like once 400
VampMobbers converged on it. I expected them in ten minutes, out front of City
Hall. Already the big plaza teemed with commuters who neatly sidestepped the
homeless people begging there.

I've always hated Civic Center. It's a collection of huge wedding-cake
buildings: court houses, museums, and civic buildings like City Hall. The
sidewalks are wide, the buildings are white. In the tourist guides to San
Francisco, they manage to photograph it so that it looks like Epcot Center,
futuristic and austere.

But on the ground, it's grimy and gross. Homeless people sleep on all the
benches. The district is empty by 6PM except for drunks and druggies, because
with only one kind of building there, there's no legit reason for people to
hang around after the sun goes down. It's more like a mall than a neighborhood,
and the only businesses there are bail-bondsmen and liquor stores, places that
cater to the families of crooks on trial and the bums who make it their
nighttime home.

I really came to understand all of this when I read an interview with an
amazing old urban planner, a woman called Jane Jacobs who was the first person
to really nail why it was wrong to slice cities up with freeways, stick all the
poor people in housing projects, and use zoning laws to tightly control who got
to do what where.

Jacobs explained that real cities are organic and they have a lot of variety --
rich and poor, white and brown, Anglo and Mex, retail and residential and even
industrial. A neighborhood like that has all kinds of people passing through it
at all hours of the day or night, so you get businesses 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 older part 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 funky cafes, a little movie
theater maybe, houses with elaborate paint-jobs. Sure, there might be a
Starbucks too, but there's also a neat-looking fruit market and a florist who
appears to be three hundred years old as she snips carefully at the flowers in
her windows. It's the opposite of a planned 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 interview
with Jacobs where she talked about the great old neighborhood they knocked down
to build it. It had been just that kind of neighborhood, the kind of place that
happened without permission or rhyme or reason.

Jacobs said that she predicted that within a few years, Civic Center would be
one of the worst neighborhoods in the city, a ghost-town at night, 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 vindicated; she sounded like
she was talking about a dead friend when she described what Civic Center had
become.

Now it was rush hour and Civic Center was as busy as it could be. The Civic
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. At 8AM, there were
thousands of people coming up the stairs, going down the stairs, getting into
and out of taxis and on and off buses. They got squeezed by DHS checkpoints by
the different civic buildings, and routed around aggressive panhandlers. They
all smelled like their shampoos and colognes, fresh out of the shower and
armored in their work suits, swinging laptop bags and briefcases. At 8AM, Civic
Center was business central.

And here came the vamps. A couple dozen coming down Van Ness, a couple dozen
coming up Market. More coming from the other side of Market. More coming up
from Van Ness. They slipped around the side of the buildings, wearing the white
face-paint and the black eyeliner, black clothes, leather jackets, huge stompy
boots. Fishnet fingerless gloves.

They began to fill up the plaza. A few of the business people gave them passing
glances and then looked away, not wanting to let these weirdos into their
personal realities as they thought about whatever crap they were about to wade
through for another eight hours. The vamps milled around, not sure when the
game was on. They pooled together in large groups, like an oil spill in
reverse, all this black gathering in one place. A lot of them sported old-timey
hats, bowlers and toppers. Many of the girls were in full-on elegant gothic
lolita maid costumes with huge platforms.

I tried to estimate the numbers. 200. Then, five minutes later, it was 300.
400. They were still streaming in. The vamps had brought friends.

Someone grabbed my ass. I spun around and saw Ange, laughing so hard she had to
hold her thighs, bent double.

"Look at them all, man, look at them all!" she gasped. The square was twice as
crowded as it had been a few minutes ago. I had no idea how many Xnetters there
were, but easily 1000 of them had just showed up to my little party. Christ.

The DHS and SFPD cops were starting to mill around, talking into their 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 our first
vamp, we both said, loudly, "Bite bite bite bite bite!" My victim was a stunned
-- but cute -- girl with spider-webs drawn on her hands and smudged mascara
running down her cheeks. She said, "Crap," and moved away, acknowledging that
I'd gotten her.

The call of "bite bite bite bite bite" had scrambled the other nearby vamps.
Some of them were attacking each other, others were moving for cover, hiding
out. I had my victim for the minute, so I skulked away, using mundanes for
cover. All around me, the cry of "bite bite bite bite bite!" and shouts and
laughs and curses.

The sound spread like a virus through the crowd. All the vamps knew the game
was on now, and the ones who were clustered together were dropping like flies.
They laughed and cussed and moved away, clueing the still-in vamps that the
game was on. And more vamps were arriving by the second.

8:16. It was time to bag another vamp. I crouched low and moved through the
legs of the straights as they headed for the BART stairs. They jerked back with
surprise and swerved to avoid me. I had my eyes laser-locked 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 PVC Marilyn Manson jacket draped with
necklaces of fake tusks carved with intricate symbols.

"Bite bite bite --" he began, when one of the mundanes tripped over him and
they both went sprawling. I leapt over to him and shouted "bite bite bite bite
bite!" before he could untangle himself again.

More vamps were arriving. The suits were really freaking out. The game
overflowed the sidewalk and moved into Van Ness, spreading up toward Market
Street. Drivers honked, the trolleys made angry /{ding}/s. I heard 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 vamps there, playing so
furiously, it was like a roar. I risked standing up and looking around and
found that I was right in the middle of a giant crowd of 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 been angry and
rockin', but this was -- well, it was just /{fun}/. It was like going back to
the playground, to the epic games of tag we'd play on lunch breaks when the sun
was out, hundreds of people chasing each other around. 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. Any second now,
it would be over. Time for the endgame.

I grabbed a vamp.

"Endgame: when the cops order us to disperse, pretend you've been gassed. Pass
it on. What did I just say?"

The vamp was a girl, tiny, so short I thought she was really young, but she
must have been 17 or 18 from her face and the smile. "Oh, that's wicked," she
said.

"What did I say?"

"Endgame: when the cops order us to disperse, pretend you've been gassed. Pass
it on. What did I just say?"

"Right," I said. "Pass it on."

She melted into the crowd. I grabbed another vamp. I passed it on. He went off
to pass it on.

Somewhere in the crowd, I knew Ange was doing this too. Somewhere in the crowd,
there might be infiltrators, fake Xnetters, but what could they do with this
knowledge? It's not like the cops had a choice. They were 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 in the
Plaza, but reaching it was going to be hard. The crowd wasn't moving anymore,
it was /{surging}/, like the mob had in the way down to the BART station on the
day the bombs went off. I struggled to make my way through it just as the PA
underneath the helicopter switched on.

"THIS IS THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY. YOU ARE ORDERED TO DISPERSE
IMMEDIATELY."

Around me, hundreds of vamps fell to the ground, clutching their throats,
clawing at their eyes, gasping for breath. It was easy to fake being gassed,
we'd all had plenty of time to study the footage of the partiers 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 red baseball
hat folded into the waistband of my pants. I jammed it on my head and then
grabbed my throat and made horrendous retching noises.

The only ones still standing were the mundanes, the salarymen who'd been just
trying to get to their jobs. I looked around as best as I could at them as I
choked and gasped.

"THIS IS THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY. YOU ARE ORDERED TO DISPERSE
IMMEDIATELY. DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY." The voice of god made my bowels ache. I
felt it in my molars 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 overhead no matter
where you stood. The cops were wading into the crowd now, and they'd put on
their helmets. Some had shields. Some had gas masks. I gasped harder.

Then the salarymen were running. I probably would have run too. I watched a guy
whip a $500 jacket off and wrap it around his face before heading south toward
Mission, only to trip up and go sprawling. His curses joined the choking
sounds.

This wasn't supposed to happen -- the choking was just supposed to freak people
out and get them confused, not panic them into a stampede.

There were screams now, screams I recognized all too well from the night in the
park. That was the sound of people who were scared spitless, 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 never forget
it. It sliced through me and went straight into my balls, turning my legs into
jelly on the way. It made me want to run away in a panic. I got 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. I pushed
people out of my way, holding onto my pack and my hat, heading for Founders'
Statue. Masha was looking for me, I was looking for Ange. Ange was out there.

I pushed and cursed. Elbowed someone. Someone came down on my foot so hard I
felt something go /{crunch}/ and I shoved him so he went down. He tried to get
up and someone stepped on him. I shoved and pushed.

Then I reached out my arm to shove someone else and strong hands grabbed my
wrist and my elbow in one fluid motion and brought my arm back around behind my
back. It felt like my shoulder was about to wrench out of its socket, and I
instantly doubled over, hollering, a sound that was barely audible over the din
of the crowd, the thrum of the choppers, the wail of the sirens.

I was brought back upright by the strong hands behind me, which steered me like
a marionette. The hold was so perfect I couldn't even think of squirming. I
couldn't think of the noise or the helicopter or Ange. All I could think of was
moving the way that the person who had me wanted me to move. I was brought
around so that I was face-to-face with the person.

It was a girl whose face was sharp and rodent-like, half-hidden by a giant 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 to rat me
out to truant watch. That had been five minutes before the alarms started.
She'd been the one, ruthless and cunning. We'd both run from that spot in the
Tenderloin as the klaxon sounded behind us, and we'd both been picked up by the
cops. I'd been hostile and they'd decided that I was an enemy.

She -- Masha -- became their ally.

"Hello, M1k3y," she hissed in my ear, close as a lover. A shiver went up 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 two minutes. Let's
haul ass."

"Ange -- my girlfriend -- is by the Founders' Statue."

Masha looked over the crowd. "No chance," she said. "We try to make it there,
we're doomed. The gas is coming down in two minutes, in case you 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, toward downtown. 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 and propelled forward.

"You know too much, jerk-off," she said. "You've seen my face. You're coming
with me."

I screamed at her, struggled till it felt like my arm would break, but she 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 through the crowd.
The whine of the helicopters changed and she gave me a harder push. "RUN!" she
yelled. "Here comes the gas!"

The crowd noise changed, too. The choking sounds and scream sounds got much,
much louder. I'd heard that pitch of sound before. We were back in the park.
The gas was raining down. I held my breath and /{ran}/.

We cleared the crowd and she let go of my arm. I shook it out. I limped as fast
as I could up the sidewalk as the crowd thinned and thinned. We were heading
towards a group of DHS cops with riot shields and helmets and masks. As we drew
near them, they moved to block us, but Masha held up a badge and they melted
away like she was Obi Wan Kenobi, saying "These aren't the droids you're
looking for."

"You goddamned /{bitch}/," I said as we sped up Market Street. "We have to go
back for Ange."

She pursed her lips and shook her head. "I feel for you, buddy. I haven't seen
my boyfriend in months. He probably thinks I'm dead. Fortunes of war. We go
back for your Ange, we're dead. If we push on, we have a chance. So long as we
have a chance, she has a chance. Those kids aren't all going to Gitmo. They'll
probably take a few hundred in for questioning and send the rest home."

We were moving up Market Street now, past the strip joints where the little
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 strip places. She stripped
off her jacket and turned it inside out -- the lining was a muted stripe
pattern, and with the jacket's seams reversed, it hung differently. She
produced a wool hat from her pocket and pulled it over her hair, letting it
form a jaunty, off-center peak. Then she took out some make-up remover wipes
and went to work on her face and fingernails. In a minute, she was a different
woman.

"Wardrobe change," she said. "Now you. Lose the shoes, lose the jacket, lose
the hat." I could see her point. The cops would be looking very carefully 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 the jacket into my pack
and got out a long-sleeved tee with a picture of Rosa Luxembourg on it and
pulled it over my black tee. I let Masha wipe my makeup 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 into a silvered
bag she held out, which I recognized as a radio-proof Faraday pouch. But as she
put them in her pocket, I realized I'd just turned my ID over to her. If she
was on the other side...

The magnitude of what had just happened began to sink in. In my mind, I'd
pictured having Ange with me at this point. Ange would make it two against one.
Ange would help me see if there was something amiss. 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 me now."

She nodded once, one pro to another, and slung her pack. I picked up mine and
we moved. The total time for the changeover was less than a minute. We looked
and walked like two different people.

She looked at her watch and shook her head. "Come on," she said. "We have to
make our rendezvous. Don't think of running, either. You've got two choices
now. Me, or jail. They'll be analyzing the footage from that mob for days, but
once they're done, every face in it will go in a database. Our departure will
be noted. We are both wanted criminals now."

#

She got us off Market Street on the next block, swinging back into the
Tenderloin. I knew this neighborhood. This was where we'd gone hunting for an
open WiFi access-point back on the day, playing Harajuku Fun Madness.

"Where are we going?" I said.

"We're about to catch a ride," she said. "Shut up and let me concentrate."

We moved fast, and sweat streamed down my face from under my hair, coursed down
my back and slid down the crack of my ass and my thighs. My foot was /{really}/
hurting and I was seeing the streets of San Francisco race by, maybe for the
last time, ever.

It didn't help that we were ploughing straight uphill, moving for the zone
where the seedy Tenderloin gives way to the nosebleed real-estate values of Nob
Hill. My breath came in ragged gasps. She moved us mostly up narrow alleys,
using the big streets just to get from one alley to the next.

We were just stepping into one such alley, Sabin Place, when someone fell 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 halfhearted VampMob 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 spotted 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 you showed up and what you did.
You know what I saw?"

I 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 now
I'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 his hand, reaching
behind her with her other hand and bringing it out holding a wallet open.

"DHS, dick-head," she said. "I'm DHS. I've been running this twerp back to his
masters to see where he went. I /{was}/ doing that. Now you've blown it. We
have a name for that. We call it 'Obstruction of National Security.' 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'd gone 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 and twisted him
into the same judo hold she'd had me in back at Civic Center. Her hand dipped
back to her pockets and came out holding a strip of plastic, a handcuff strip,
which she quickly wound around his wrists.

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 with me,
tackling me from behind and sending me sprawling. I couldn't move very fast,
not with my hurt foot and the weight of my pack. I went down in a hard
face-plant and skidded, grinding my cheek into the grimy asphalt.

"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 she let me up.

"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 up on 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 a tall apartment
building with a green awning. They were carrying crated furniture, neatly
labeled boxes, loading them one at a time onto the truck and carefully packing
them there.

She walked us around the block once, apparently unsatisfied with something,
then, on the next pass, she made eye-contact with the man who was watching the
van, an older black guy with a kidney-belt and heavy gloves. He had a kind face
and he smiled at us as she led us quickly, casually up the truck's three stairs
and into its depth. "Under the big table," he said. "We left you some space
there."

The truck was more than half full, but there was a narrow corridor around 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 under there,
and I suppressed a sneeze as we scrunched in among the boxes. The space was so
tight that we were on top of each other. I didn't think that Ange would have
fit in there.

"Bitch," I said, looking at Masha.

"Shut up. You should be licking my boots thanking me. You would have 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 to disappear."

I put my head on my knees and tried to breathe deeply.

"Why would you do something so stupid as declaring war on the DHS anyway?"

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 and the 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. It was the
picture of Jolu and Van and me and --

Darryl.

I was holding in my hand proof that Darryl had been with us minutes before we'd
all gone into DHS custody. Proof that he'd been alive and well 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. "Once you've been
briefed on how to be a fugitive without getting both our asses caught and
shipped to Syria. I don't want you getting rescue ideas about 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 already
demonstrated her physical skill. She must have been a black-belt or something.

We sat there in the dark, listening to the three guys load the truck with box
after box, tying things down, grunting with the effort of it. I tried to sleep,
but couldn't. Masha had no such problem. She snored.

There was still light shining through the narrow, obstructed corridor that led
to the fresh air outside. I stared at it, through the gloom, and thought of
Ange.

My Ange. Her hair brushing her shoulders as she turned her head from side to
side, laughing at something I'd done. Her face when I'd seen her last, falling
down in the crowd at VampMob. All those people at VampMob, like the people in
the park, down and writhing, the DHS moving in with truncheons. The ones who
disappeared.

Darryl. Stuck on Treasure Island, his side stitched up, taken out of his cell
for endless rounds of questioning about the terrorists.

Darryl's father, ruined and boozy, unshaven. Washed up and in his uniform, "for
the photos." Weeping like a little boy.

My own father, and the way that he had been changed by my disappearance 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.

#

Masha's breathing was deep and regular, but when I reached with glacial
slowness into her pocket for her phone, she snuffled a little and shifted. I
froze and didn't even breathe for a full two minutes, counting one hippopotami,
two hippopotami.

Slowly, her breath deepened again. I tugged the phone free of her jacket-pocket
one millimeter at a time, my fingers and arm trembling with 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 a candy-bar-shaped
phone, silver, plastered in the logos of a dozen companies that had subsidized
the cost of the handset through the phone company. It was the kind of phone
where you had to listen to a commercial 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 stolen /{Charles's}/
phone from Masha.

I turned back around slowly, slowly, and slowly, slowly, /{slowly}/, I reached
back into her pocket. /{Her}/ phone was bigger and bulkier, with a better
camera and who knew what else?

I'd been through this once before -- that made it a little easier. Millimeter
by millimeter again, I teased it free of her pocket, stopping twice when she
snuffled and twitched.

I had the phone free of her pocket and I was beginning to back away when her
hand shot out, fast as a snake, and grabbed my wrist, hard, fingertips 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 phone from me,
punching at its keypad with her other hand. "How did you plan on unlocking this
again?"

I swallowed. I felt bones grind against each other in my wrist. I bit my lip to
keep from crying out.

She continued to punch away with her other hand. "Is this what you thought
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.

"Maybe I should just delete it, take temptation out of your way." Her free hand
moved some more. Her phone asked her if she was sure and she 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, and I
brought it down on her crushing hand as hard as I could, banging my knuckles on
the table overhead. I hit her hand so hard the phone shattered and she yelped
and her hand went slack. I was still moving, reaching for her other hand, for
her now-unlocked phone with her thumb still poised over the OK key. Her fingers
spasmed on the empty air as I snatched the phone out of her hand.

I moved down the narrow corridor on hands and knees, heading for the light. I
felt her hands slap at my feet and ankles twice, and I had to shove aside some
of the boxes that had walled us in like a Pharaoh in a tomb. A few of them fell
down behind me, and I heard Masha grunt again.

The rolling truck door was open a crack and I dove for it, slithering out under
it. The steps had been removed and I found myself hanging over the road,
sliding headfirst into it, clanging my head off the blacktop with a thump that
rang my ears like a gong. I scrambled to my feet, holding the bumper, and
desperately dragged down on the door-handle, slamming it shut. Masha screamed
inside -- I must have caught her fingertips. I felt like throwing up, but I
didn't.

I padlocked the truck instead.

1~ Chapter 20

_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to The Tattered Cover,~{ The Tattered Cover
http://www.tatteredcover.com/NASApp/store/Product?s=showproduct&isbn=9780765319852
1628 16th St., Denver, CO USA 80202 +1 303 436 1070 }~ Denver's legendary
independent bookstore. I happened upon The Tattered Cover quite by accident:
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 aimless rental-car circles, and
that's when I spotted it, the Tattered Cover's sign. Something about it tingled
in my hindbrain -- I knew I'd heard of this place. We pulled in (got a coffee)
and stepped into the store -- a wonderland of dark wood, homey reading nooks,
and miles and miles of bookshelves.] }/

None of the three guys were around at the moment, so I took off. My head hurt
so much I thought I must be bleeding, but my hands came away dry. My twisted
ankle had frozen up in the truck so that I ran like a broken marionette, and I
stopped only once, to cancel the photo-deletion on Masha's phone. I turned off
its radio -- both to save battery and to keep it from being used to track me --
and set the sleep timer to two hours, the longest setting available. I tried to
set it to not require a password to wake from sleep, but that required a
password itself. I was just going to have to tap the keypad at least once every
two hours until I could figure out how to get the photo off of the phone. I
would need a charger, 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 other people do
my planning for me. I didn't want to be acting because of what Masha did, or
because of the DHS, or because of my dad. Or because of Ange? Well, maybe I'd
act because of Ange. That would be just fine, in fact.

I'd just been slipping downhill, taking alleys when I could, merging with the
Tenderloin crowds. I didn't have any destination in mind. Every few minutes, I
put my hand in my pocket and nudged one of the keys on Masha'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 me back to
where the photo on Masha's phone had been taken, seconds before the Bay Bridge
blew, before my life changed forever.

I wanted to sit down on the sidewalk and bawl, but that wouldn't solve my
problems. I had to call Barbara Stratford, tell her what had happened. Show her
the photo of Darryl.

What was I thinking? I had to show her the video, the one that Masha had sent
me -- the one where the President's Chief of Staff gloated at the attacks on
San Francisco and admitted that he knew when and where the next attacks would
happen and that he wouldn't stop them because they'd help his man get
re-elected.

That was a plan, then: get in touch with Barbara, give her the documents, and
get them into print. The VampMob had to have really freaked people out, made
them think that we really were a bunch of terrorists. Of course, when I'd been
planning it, I had been thinking of how good a distraction it would be, not how
it would look to some NASCAR Dad in Nebraska.

I'd call Barbara, and I'd do it smart, from a payphone, putting my hood up so
that the inevitable CCTV wouldn't get a photo of me. I dug a quarter out of my
pocket and polished it on my shirt-tail, getting the fingerprints off it.

I headed downhill, down and down to the BART station and the payphones there. I
made it to the trolley-car stop when I spotted the cover of the week's /{Bay
Guardian}/, stacked in a high pile next to a homeless black 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-BAY

Beneath it, in slightly smaller type:

"How the DHS has kept our children and friends in secret prisons on our
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 have
cornered the local market for copies of it. I had a quarter in my hand. I
dropped it into his cup and fished for another one. I didn't bother polishing
the fingerprints off of it this time.

"We're told that the world changed forever when the Bay Bridge was blown up by
parties unknown. Thousands of our friends and neighbors died on that day.
Almost none of them have been recovered; their remains are presumed to be
resting in the city's harbor.

"But an extraordinary story told to this reporter by a young man who was
arrested by the DHS minutes after the explosion suggests that our own
government has illegally held many of those thought dead on Treasure Island,
which had been evacuated and declared off-limits to civilians 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 the BART
station -- and read the article all the way through. It took a huge effort not
to burst into tears right there. Barbara had found some photos of me and Darryl
goofing around together and they ran alongside the text. The photos were maybe
a year old, but I looked so much /{younger}/ in them, like I was 10 or 11. I'd
done a lot of growing up in the past couple months.

The piece was beautifully written. I kept feeling outraged on behalf of the
poor kids she was writing about, then remembering that she was writing about
/{me}/. Zeb's note was there, his crabbed handwriting reproduced in large, a
half-sheet of the newspaper. Barbara had dug up more info on other kids who
were missing and presumed dead, a long list, and asked how many had been stuck
there on the island, just a few miles from their parents' doorsteps.

I dug another quarter out of my pocket, then changed my mind. What was the
chance that Barbara's phone wasn't tapped? There was no way I was going to be
able to call her now, not directly. I needed some intermediary to get in touch
with her and get her to meet me somewhere south. So much for plans.

What I really, really needed was the Xnet.

How the hell was I going to get online? My phone's wifinder was blinking like
crazy -- there was wireless all around me, but I didn't have an Xbox and a TV
and a ParanoidXbox DVD to boot from. WiFi, WiFi everywhere...

That's when I spotted them. Two kids, about my age, moving among the 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 in his pocket, and
whenever they met one another's eye, they snickered. They couldn't have been
more obvious jammers, but the crowd was oblivious to them. Being down in that
neighborhood, you expect to be dodging 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 been any
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 way you would a
homeless person.

"Come on," I said. "I don't have a lot of time." I grabbed his shoulder and
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 was moving
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 were going to
bolt.

I grabbed my copy of the /{Bay Guardian}/ from under my arm and rattled it 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 at me
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?"

I brought them back to my bench. I noticed that there was something old and
brown staining the sidewalk underneath it. Darryl's blood? It made my skin
pucker up. We sat down.

"I'm Marcus," I said, swallowing hard as I gave my real name to these two who
already knew me as M1k3y. I was blowing my cover, but the /{Bay Guardian}/ had
already made the connection for me.

"Nate," the small one said. "Liam," the bigger one said. "Dude, it is /{such}/
an 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
advertisement 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." He
brightened up again. What was becoming weirdly clear was that these two really
/{did}/ idolize M1k3y, and that they'd do anything I said. They were grinning
like idiots. It made me uncomfortable, sick to my stomach.

"Listen, I need to get on Xnet, now, without going home or anywhere near 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 somewhere 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't have to
worry about gait-recognition, not with my ankle throbbing the way 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, and he touched his
cap and called Nate, "Mr Nate" and welcomed us all there. The place was
spotless and smelled of furniture polish. I tried not to 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 insurance.
He died when I was 14 and we got it all. They'd been divorced for years, but he
left my mom as beneficiary."

From the floor-to-ceiling window, you could see a stunning view of the other
side of Nob Hill, all the way down to Fisherman's Wharf, to the ugly stub of
the Bay Bridge, the crowd of cranes and trucks. Through the mist, 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 living room. He
showed me how many open WiFi networks were visible from his high vantage point
-- twenty, thirty of them. This was a good spot to be an Xnetter.

There was a /{lot}/ of email in my M1k3y account. 20,000 new messages since
Ange and I had left her place that morning. Lots of it was from the press,
asking for followup interviews, but most of it was from the Xnetters, people
who'd seen the /{Guardian}/ story and wanted to tell me that they'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. I was
sobbing now. Nate went to an oak book-case on one wall and swung a bar out of
one of its shelves, revealing gleaming rows of bottles. He poured 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't
really 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 watched in
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 that chance.

I was an idiot to even hope. There was nothing from her. I started going
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 I thought you
would destroy in the pages of the newspaper. Not nice at all. Made me feel --
hunted.

"But I've come to understand why you did it. I don't know if I can approve of
your tactics, but it's easy to see that your motives were sound.

"If you're reading this, that means that there's a good chance you've gone
underground. It's not easy. I've been learning that. I've been learning a lot
more.

"I can help you. I should do that for you. You're doing what you can for 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're in
custody, being run by our friends on Gitmo, looking for a way to make the pain
stop. If they've got you, you'll do what they tell you. I know that. I'll take
that risk.

"For you, M1k3y."

"Wooooah," Liam breathed. "Duuuuude." I wanted to smack him. I turned to say
something awful and cutting to him, but he was staring at me with eyes as big
as saucers, looking like he wanted to drop to his knees and worship me.

"Can I just say," Nate said, "can I just say that it is the biggest honor of my
entire life to help you? Can I just say that?"

I was blushing now. There was nothing for it. These two were totally
star-struck, even though I wasn't any kind of star, not in my own mind at
least.

"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. I typed
fast.

"I got away, Zeb. And I'm on the run. I need all the help I can get. I want to
end this now." I remembered to take Masha's phone out of my pocket and tickle
it to keep it from going to sleep.

They let me use the shower, gave me a change of clothes, a new backpack with
half their earthquake kit in it -- energy bars, medicine, hot and cold packs,
and an old sleeping-bag. They even slipped a spare Xbox Universal already
loaded with ParanoidXbox on it into there. That was a nice touch. I had to draw
the line at a flaregun.

I kept on checking my email to see if Zeb had replied. I answered the fan mail.
I answered the mail from the press. I deleted the hate mail. I was
half-expecting to see something from Masha, but chances were she was halfway to
LA by now, her fingers hurt, and in no position to type. I tickled her phone
again.

They encouraged me to take a nap and for a brief, shameful moment, I got all
paranoid like maybe these guys were thinking of turning me in once I was
asleep. Which was idiotic -- they could have turned me in just as easily when I
was awake. I just couldn't compute the fact that they thought /{so much}/ of
me. I had known, intellectually, that there were people who would follow M1k3y.
I'd met some of those people that morning, shouting BITE BITE BITE and vamping
it up at Civic Center. But these two were more personal. They were just nice,
goofy guys, they coulda been any of my friends back in the days before the
Xnet, just two pals who palled around having teenage adventures. They'd
volunteered to join an army, my army. I had a responsibility to them. Left to
themselves, they'd get caught, it was only a matter of time. They were too
trusting.

"Guys, listen to me for a second. I have something serious I need to talk to
you about."

They almost stood at attention. It would have been funny if it wasn't so scary.

"Here's the thing. Now that you've helped me, it's really dangerous. If you 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't been 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 you can. 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 anymore. You are
retired from active duty. You're a --" I fished in my memory for vocabulary
words culled from spy thrillers -- "you're a sleeper cell. Stand down. Go back
to being normal kids. One way or another, I'm going to break this thing, break
it wide open, end it. Or it will get me, finally, do me in. If you don't hear
from me within 72 hours, assume that they got me. Do whatever you want then.
But for the next three 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, but made
them swear to rouse me once an hour. I'd have to tickle Masha's phone 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're full of
cameras. But Zeb knew what he was doing. He had me meet him in the last car of
a certain train departing from Powell Street Station, at a time when that car
was filled with the press of bodies. He sidled up to me in the crowd, and the
good commuters of San Francisco cleared a space for him, the hollow that always
surrounds homeless people.

"Nice to see you again," he muttered, facing into the doorway. Looking into the
dark glass, I could see that there was no one close enough to eavesdrop -- not
without some kind of high-efficiency mic rig, and if they knew enough to show
up here with one of those, we were dead anyway.

"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 to go
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 /{proves}/
something." I reached into my pocket and tickled Masha's phone. I'd bought a
charger for it in Union Square on the way down, and had stopped and plugged it
in at a cafe for long enough to get the battery up to four out of five bars. "I
need to get it to Barbara Stratford, the woman from the /{Guardian}/. But
they're going to be watching her -- watching to see if I show up."

"You don't think that they'll be watching for me, too? If your plan involves 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 you about 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. And Van has
totally clean hands. She never cooperated with any of my --" I swallowed. "With
my projects. So they might be a little more relaxed about her. If she calls the
Bay Guardian to make an appointment to explain 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 a question.

I nodded.

"Are you sure? Some of the people that were on Treasure Island with us got
taken away in helicopters. They got taken /{offshore}/. There are countries
where America can outsource its torture. Countries where you will rot 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 you stand over it."

I swallowed and nodded.

"Is it worth the risk? We can go underground for a long, long time here.
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's our
/{country}/. They've taken it from us. The terrorists who attack us are still
free -- but /{we're not}/. I can't go underground for a year, ten years, my
whole life, waiting for freedom to be handed to me. Freedom is something you
have to take for yourself."

#

That afternoon, Van left school as usual, sitting in the back of the bus with a
tight knot of her friends, laughing and joking the way she always did. 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, something that looked like a
piece out of a school play about Renaissance sword fighters. At one point they
all huddled together, then turned away to look out the back of the bus,
pointing and giggling. The girl who wore the hat now was the same height as
Van, and from behind, it could be her.

No one paid any attention to the mousy little Asian girl who got off a few
stops before the BART. She was dressed in a plain old school uniform, and
looking down shyly as she stepped off. Besides, at that moment, the loud Korean
girl let out a whoop and her friends followed along, laughing so loudly that
even the bus driver slowed down, twisted in his seat and gave them a dirty
look.

Van hurried away down the street with her head down, her hair tied back and
dropped down the collar of her out-of-style bubble jacket. She had slipped
lifts into her shoes that made her two wobbly, awkward inches taller, and had
taken her contacts out and put on her least-favored glasses, with huge lenses
that took up half her face. Although I'd been waiting in the bus-shelter for
her and knew when to expect her, I hardly recognized her. I got up and walked
along behind her, across the street, trailing by half a block.

The people who passed me looked away as quickly as possible. I looked like a
homeless kid, with a grubby cardboard sign, street-grimy overcoat, huge,
overstuffed knapsack with duct-tape over its rips. No one wants to look at a
street-kid, because if you meet his eye, he might ask you for some spare
change. I'd walked around Oakland all afternoon and the only person who'd
spoken to me was a Jehovah's Witness and a Scientologist, both trying to
convert me. It felt gross, like being hit on by a pervert.

Van followed the directions I'd written down carefully. Zeb had passed 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'd written the note plainly and
simply, just laying it out for her: I know you don't approve. I understand. But
this is it, this is the most important favor I've ever asked of you. Please.
Please.

She'd come. I knew she would. We had a lot of history, Van and I. She didn't
like what had happened to the world, either. Besides, an evil, chuckling voice
in my head had pointed out, she was under suspicion now that Barbara's article
was out.

We walked like that for six or seven blocks, looking at who was near us, what
cars went past. Zeb told me about five-person trails, where five different
undercovers traded off duties following you, making it nearly impossible 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 Coliseum BART station,
and even with all the circling Van did, it didn't take long to reach it. The
noise from overhead was nearly deafening. No one else was around, not that I
could tell. I'd visited the site before I suggested it to Van in the note,
taking care to check for places where someone could hide. There weren't any.

Once she stopped at the appointed place, I moved quickly to catch up to her.
She blinked owlishly at me from behind her glasses.

"Marcus," she breathed, and tears swam in her eyes. I found that I was crying
too. I'd make a really rotten fugitive. Too sentimental.

She hugged me so hard I couldn't breathe. I hugged her back even harder.

Then she kissed me.

Not on the cheek, not like a sister. Full on the lips, a hot, wet, steamy kiss
that seemed to go on forever. I was so overcome with emotion --

No, 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," I gasped.

"Oops," she said.

"Van," I said again.

"Sorry," she said. "I --"

Something occurred to me just then, something I guess I should have seen 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 whole time she
was looking at me, secretly wanting me. And then I ended up with Ange. Ange
said that she'd always fought with Van. And I was running 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 to do
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 need you to
meet with the journalist from the Bay Guardian, Barbara Stratford, the one who
wrote the article. I need you to give her something." I explained about Masha's
phone, told her about the video that Masha had sent 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 putting other
people at risk. I need to solve the problem by telling what I know. I should
have done that from the start. Should have walked straight out of their 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 a life that I don't spend
underground, hiding from the cops. And you're the 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 can trust.
That's why you."

"Why not your friend Angie?" She said the name without any inflection 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 trying not to think
about this, not to think about what might be happening to her. Now I couldn't
stop myself and I started to sob. I felt a pain in my stomach, like I'd been
kicked, and I pushed my hands into my middle to hold myself in. I folded there,
and the next thing I knew, I was on my side in the rubble under the freeway,
holding myself and crying.

Van knelt down by my side. "Give me the phone," she said, her voice an 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 running down my
face. Van was giving me a look of pure revulsion. "You need to keep it from
going to sleep," I said. "I have a charger here." I rummaged in my pack. I
hadn't slept all the way through the night since I acquired it. I set the
phone's alarm to go off every 90 minutes and wake me 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 onto the
Xnet anymore." In a pinch, I could have gone back to Nate and Liam and used
their Xbox again, but I didn't want to risk it. "Look, I'm going to 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 be scanning 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 the end
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 me more. It was
like another kick in the stomach. What a waste, all of it, futile. 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, irrational shrieking freak-out
where anything could be done in the name of stopping terrorism.

Van looked like she was waiting for me to say something, but I had nothing to
say to that. She left me there.

#

Zeb had a pizza for me when I got back "home" -- to the tent under a freeway
overpass in the Mission that he'd staked out for the night. He had a pup tent,
military surplus, stenciled with SAN FRANCISCO LOCAL HOMELESS COORDINATING
BOARD.

The pizza was a Dominos, cold and clabbered, but delicious for all that. "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 the store?
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 /{see}/ your face.
Dude, it's OK. It's not like it was rotten. It was fresh -- just a screwed up
order. They threw it out in the box. They sprinkle rat poison over 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'm going to make you a fruit
salad you won't believe. As soon as one strawberry 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 dumpster
would infect it or something. If it was gross, that was only because it came
from Domino's -- the worst pizza in town. I'd never liked their food, and I'd
given it up altogether when I found out that they bankrolled a bunch of
ultra-crazy politicians who thought that global warming and evolution were
satanic plots.

It was hard to shake the feeling of grossness, though.

But 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 out there, a way
of getting by without participating in the system.

"Freegans, huh?"

"Yogurt, too," he said, nodding vigorously. "For the fruit salad. They throw it
out the day after the best-before date, but it's not as if it goes green at
midnight. It's yogurt, I mean, it's basically just rotten milk to begin with."

I swallowed. The pizza tasted funny. Rat poison. Spoiled yogurt. Furry
strawberries. This would take some getting used to.

I ate another bite. Actually, Domino's pizza sucked a little less when you got
it for free.

Liam's sleeping bag was warm and welcoming after a long, emotionally exhausting
day. Van would have made contact with Barbara by now. She'd have the video and
the picture. I'd call her in the morning and find out what she thought I should
do next. I'd have to come in once she published, to back it all up.

I thought about that as I closed my eyes, thought about what it would be like
to turn myself in, the cameras all rolling, following the infamous M1k3y into
one of those big, columnated buildings in Civic Center.

The sound of the cars screaming by overhead turned into a kind of ocean sound
as I drifted away. There were other tents nearby, homeless people. I'd met a
few of them that afternoon, before it got dark and we all retreated to huddle
near our own tents. They were 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 until a
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 over and
over again in my dreams, lecturing to me, demanding my passwords.
Severe-haircut-woman.

The bag went over my head quickly and was cinched so tight at the throat that I
choked and threw up my freegan pizza. As I spasmed and choked, hard hands bound
my wrists, then my ankles. I was rolled onto a stretcher and hoisted, then
carried into a vehicle, up a couple of clanging metal steps. They dropped me
into a padded floor. There was no sound at all in the back of the vehicle once
they closed the doors. The padding deadened everything except my own choking.

"Well, hello again," she said. I felt the van rock as she crawled in with me. I
was still choking, trying to gasp in a breath. Vomit filled my mouth and
trickled down my windpipe.

"We won't let you die," she said. "If you stop breathing, we'll make sure 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 the puke. More breath.

"See?" she said. "Not so bad. Welcome home, M1k3y. We've got somewhere very
special to take you."

I relaxed onto my back, feeling the van rock. The smell of used pizza was
overwhelming at first, but as with all strong stimuli, my brain gradually grew
accustomed to it, filtered it out until it was just a faint aroma. The rocking
of the van was almost comforting.

That's when it happened. An incredible, deep calm that swept over me like I was
lying on the beach and the ocean had swept in and lifted me as gently as a
parent, held me aloft and swept me out onto a warm sea under a warm sun. After
everything that had happened, I was caught, but it didn't matter. I had gotten
the information to Barbara. I had organized the Xnet. I had won. And if I
hadn't won, I had done everything I could have done. More than I ever thought I
could do. I took a mental inventory as I rode, thinking of everything that I
had accomplished, that /{we}/ had accomplished. The city, the country, the
world was full of people who wouldn't live the way DHS wanted us to live. We'd
fight forever. They couldn't jail us all.

I sighed and smiled.

She'd been talking all along, I realized. I'd been so far into my happy place
that she'd just gone away.

"-- smart kid like you. You'd think that you'd know better than to mess 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 lesbo journalist traitor. I just
don't get it -- we had an understanding, you and me..."

We rumbled over a metal plate, the van's shocks rocking, and then the rocking
changed. We were on water. Heading to Treasure Island. Hey, Ange was there.
Darryl, too. Maybe.

#

The hood didn't come off until I was in my cell. They didn't bother with the
cuffs at my wrists and ankles, just rolled me off the stretcher and 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 the cot. The room contained me,
a toilet, a bed-frame, and a sink, and nothing 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 was being left to
piss myself. Again. I knew what that was like. I'd pissed myself 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 they could throw at me,
and I'd survived it, and I'd /{beaten them}/, beaten them for 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 time like the
present.

The ocean swept me away.

#

When morning came, two efficient, impersonal guards cut the bindings off of my
wrists and ankles. I still couldn't walk -- when I stood, my legs gave way like
a stringless marionette's. Too much time in one position. The guards pulled my
arms over their shoulders and half-dragged/half-carried me down the familiar
corridor. The bar codes on the doors were curling up and dangling now, attacked
by the salt air.

I got an idea. "Ange!" I yelled. "Darryl!" I yelled. My guards yanked me 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 in what sounded
like Arabic. Then it was cacophony, a thousand different shouting voices.

They brought me to a new room. It was an old shower-room, with the shower-heads
still present in the mould tiles.

"Hello, M1k3y," Severe Haircut said. "You seem to have had an eventful
morning." She wrinkled her nose pointedly.

"I pissed myself," I said, cheerfully. "You should try it."

"Maybe we should give you a bath, then," she said. She nodded, and my guards
carried me to another stretcher. This one had restraining straps running its
length. They dropped me onto it and it was ice-cold and soaked through. Before
I knew it, they had the straps across my shoulders, hips and ankles. A minute
later, three more straps were tied down. A man's hands grabbed the railings by
my head and released some catches, and a moment later I was tilted down, my
head below my feet.

"Let's start with something simple," she said. I craned my head to see her. She
had turned to a desk with an Xbox on it, connected to an expensive-looking
flat-panel TV. "I'd like you to tell me your login and password 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 me in. "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 side of the room, that's a fair
assessment. You won't be able to fight the feeling 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 a
tightness in my chest, my eyelids fluttered. I could feel clammy piss on my
legs and clammy sweat in my hair. My skin itched from the dried puke.

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 over my 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 into my lungs. I held
onto my breath and squeezed my eyes harder.

There was a commotion from outside the room, a sound of chaotic boots stamping,
angry, outraged shouts. The dipper was emptied into my face.

I heard her mutter something to someone in the room, then to me she said, "Just
the login, Marcus. It's a simple request. What could I do with your 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 the water
into my lungs, coughed and took more water in. I knew they wouldn't kill me,
but I couldn't convince my body of that. In every fiber of my being, I knew I
was going to die. I couldn't even cry -- the water was still pouring over me.

Then it stopped. I coughed and coughed and coughed, but at the angle I was at,
the water I coughed up dribbled back into my nose and burned down my sinuses.

The coughs were so deep they hurt, hurt my ribs and my hips as I twisted
against them. I hated how my body was betraying me, how my mind couldn't
control my body, but there was nothing for it.

Finally, the coughing subsided enough for me to take in what was going on
around me. People were shouting and it sounded like someone was scuffling,
wrestling. I opened my eyes and blinked into the bright light, 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, who were shouting back, necks
corded with veins.

"Stand down!" one of the body-armors said. "Stand down and put your hands in
the air. You are under arrest!"

Severe haircut woman was talking on her phone. One of the body armors noticed
her and he moved swiftly to her and batted her phone away with a gloved hand.
Everyone fell silent as it sailed through the air in an arc that spanned the
small room, clattering to the ground in a shower of parts.

The silence broke and the body-armors moved into the room. Two grabbed each of
my torturers. I almost managed a smile at the look on Severe Haircut's face
when two men grabbed her by the shoulders, turned her around, and yanked a set
of plastic handcuffs around her wrists.

One of the body-armors moved forward from the doorway. He had a video camera on
his shoulder, a serious rig with blinding white light. He got the whole room,
circling me twice while he got me. I found myself staying 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 it all out
with only a little choking.

Two more body armors moved up to me, one a woman, and began to unstrap me. They
flipped their visors up and smiled at me. They had red crosses on their
shoulders and helmets.

Beneath the red crosses was another insignia: CHP. California Highway Patrol.
They were State Troopers.

I started to ask what they were doing there, and that's when I saw Barbara
Stratford. She'd evidently been held back in the corridor, but now she came in
pushing and shoving. "There you are," she said, kneeling beside 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 of its enemies.
I was saved.

1~ Chapter 21

_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Pages Books in Toronto, Canada.~{ Pages
Books http://pagesbooks.ca/ 256 Queen St W, Toronto, ON M5V 1Z8 Canada +1 416
598 1447 }~ Long a fixture on the bleedingly trendy Queen Street West strip,
Pages is located over the road from CityTV and just a few doors down from the
old Bakka store where I worked. We at Bakka loved having Pages down the street
from us: what we were to science fiction, they were to everything else:
hand-picked material representing the stuff you'd never find elsewhere, the
stuff you didn't know you were looking for until you saw it there. Pages also
has one of the best news-stands I've ever seen, row on row of incredible
magazines and zines from all over the world.] }/

They left me and Barbara alone in the room then, and I used the working shower
head to rinse off -- I was suddenly embarrassed to be covered 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 must have
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 just sweep in
and throw open the doors. Everyone here is going to have to be processed
through the criminal justice system. It could take, well, it could 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 you arraigned
and released on bail pretty fast. But pretty fast is a relative term. I
wouldn't expect anything to happen today. And it's not going to be like those
people had it. It will be humane. There will be real food. No interrogations.
Visits from your family.

"Just because the DHS is out, it doesn't mean that you get to just walk out 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 with the old
system. The system with judges, open trials and lawyers.

"So we can try to get you transferred to a juvie facility on the mainland, 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 was practically
illegal just to think impure thoughts about the government.

She gave my hands another squeeze. "It sucks, but this is how it has to be. The
point is, it's /{over}/. The Governor has thrown the DHS out of the State,
dismantled every checkpoint. The Attorney General has issued warrants for any
law-enforcement officers involved in 'stress interrogations' and secret
imprisonments. They'll go to jail, Marcus, and it's because of what you did."

I was numb. I heard the words, but they hardly made sense. Somehow, it was
over, but it wasn't over.

"Look," she said. "We probably have an hour or two before this all settles
down, before they come back and put you away again. What do you want to do?
Walk on the beach? Get a meal? These people had an incredible 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 find
Darryl."

#

I tried to use a computer I found to look up their cell-numbers, but it wanted
a password, so we were reduced to walking the corridors, calling out their
names. Behind the cell-doors, prisoners screamed back at us, or cried, or
begged us to let them go. They didn't understand what had just happened,
couldn't see their former guards being herded onto the docks in plastic
handcuffs, taken away by California state SWAT teams.

"Ange!" I called over the din, "Ange Carvelli! Darryl Glover! It's Marcus!"

We'd walked the whole length of the cell-block and they hadn't answered. I felt
like crying. They'd been shipped overseas -- they were in Syria or worse. I'd
never see them again.

I sat down and leaned against the corridor wall and put my face in my hands. I
saw Severe Haircut Woman's face, saw her smirk as she asked me for my login.
She had done this. She would go to jail for it, but that wasn't enough. I
thought that when I saw her again, I might kill her. She deserved it.

"Come on," Barbara said, "Come on, Marcus. Don't give up. There's more 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 the very end of
the corridor, sagging open, was a new high-security door as thick as a
dictionary. We pulled it open and ventured into the dark corridor within.

There were four more cell-doors here, doors without bar codes. Each had a small
electronic keypad mounted on it.

"Darryl?" I said. "Ange?"

"Marcus?"

It was Ange, calling out from behind the furthest door. Ange, my Ange, 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'm very,
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 -- they
arrested the guards. They kicked the Department of Homeland Security out. 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 their camera
rolling. "Ms Stratford?" one said. He had his faceplate up and he looked like
any other cop, not like my savior. Like someone come to lock me up.

"Captain Sanchez," she said. "We've located two of the prisoners of interest
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.

She held up her hand. "That wasn't the arrangement. I was to have complete
access to this facility. That came direct from the Governor, sir. We aren't
budging until you open these cells." Her face was perfectly smooth, without a
single hint of give or flex. She meant it.

The Captain looked like he needed sleep. He grimaced. "I'll see what I can do,"
he said.

#

They did manage to open the cells, finally, about half an hour later. It took
three tries, but they eventually got the right codes entered, matching them to
the arphids on the ID badges they'd taken off the guards they'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 into the corridor and
the police camera was on her, its bright lights in her face. Barbara stepped
protectively between us and it. Ange stepped tentatively out of her cell,
shuffling a little. There was something wrong with her eyes, with her face. She
was crying, but that wasn't it.

"They drugged me," she said. "When I wouldn't stop screaming for a lawyer."

That's when I hugged her. She sagged against me, but she squeezed back, too.
She smelled stale and sweaty, and I smelled no better. I never wanted 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. I ran to him.

"D," I whispered in his ear. "D, it's me. It's Marcus. It's over. The guards
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 me back 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 me chained to
five other prisoners, all of whom had been in for a lot longer than me. One
only spoke Arabic -- he was an old man, and he trembled. The others were all
young. I was the only white one. Once we had been gathered on the deck of the
ferry, I saw that nearly everyone on Treasure Island had been one shade of
brown or another.

I had only been inside for one night, but it was too long. There was a light
drizzle coming down, normally the sort of thing that would make me hunch my
shoulders and look down, but today I joined everyone else in craning my head
back at the infinite gray sky, reveling in the stinging wet as we raced across
the bay to the ferry-docks.

They took us away in buses. The shackles made climbing into the buses awkward,
and it took a long time for everyone to load. No one cared. When we weren't
struggling to solve the geometry problem of six people, one chain, narrow
bus-aisle, we were just looking around at the city around us, up the hill at
the buildings.

All I could think of was finding Darryl and Ange, but neither were in evidence.
It was a big crowd and we weren't allowed to move freely through it. The state
troopers who handled us were gentle enough, but they were still big, armored
and armed. I kept thinking I saw Darryl in the 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 our shackle group.
An ACLU lawyer took our information and asked us a few questions -- when she
got to me, she smiled and greeted me by name -- and then led us into the
courtroom before the judge. He wore an actual robe, and seemed to be in a good
mood.

The deal seemed to be that anyone who had a family member to post bail could go
free, and everyone else got sent to prison. The ACLU lawyer did a lot of
talking to the judge, asking for a few more hours while the prisoners' families
were rounded up and brought to the court-house. The judge was pretty good about
it, but when I realized that some of these people had been locked up since the
bridge blew, taken for dead by their 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 took off his
glasses. He looked tired. The ACLU lawyer looked tired. The bailiffs looked
tired. Behind me, I could hear a sudden buzz of conversation as my name was
called by the bailiff. The judge rapped his gavel once, without looking away
from me. He scrubbed at his eyes.

"Mr Yallow," he said, "the prosecution has identified you as a flight risk. I
think they have a point. You certainly have more, shall we say, /{history}/,
than the other people here. I am tempted to hold you over for trial, no matter
how much bail your parents are prepared to post."

My lawyer started to say something, but the judge silenced her with a look. He
scrubbed at his eyes.

"Do you have anything to say?"

"I had the chance to run," I said. "Last week. Someone offered to take me away,
get me out of town, help me build a new identity. Instead I stole her phone,
escaped from our truck, and ran away. I turned over her phone -- which had
evidence about my friend, Darryl Glover, on it -- to a 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 freedom
wasn't worth anything if I was a wanted man, or if the city was still under the
DHS. If my friends were still locked up. That freedom for me wasn'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 woman in
question."

"Well, thank you for that speech, Mr Yallow. You are a very well spoken young
man." He glared at the prosecutor. "Some would say a very brave man, too. There
was a certain video on the news this morning. It suggested that you had some
legitimate reason to evade the authorities. 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 Petty Theft to the count, as regards the matter of
the phone. For this, I expect another $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 had dandruff, there on
the shoulders of his robe. A little more rained down as 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 lifted me off
my feet, hugging me so hard my ribs creaked. He hugged me the way I remembered
him hugging me when I was a little boy, when he'd spin me around and around in
hilarious, vomitous games of airplane that ended with him tossing me in the air
and catching me and squeezing me like that, so hard it almost hurt.

A set of softer hands pried me gently out of his arms. Mom. She held me at
arm's length for a moment, searching my face for something, not saying
anything, tears streaming down her face. She smiled and it turned into a sob
and then she was holding me too, and Dad's arm encircled us both.

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 --" He stopped. "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 families of all
the people who'd been locked away must feel. The courtroom was full 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 keeping Darryl -- San
Francisco General, just down the street from us -- and arranged to see her
after dinner. She talked in a hurried whisper. Her mom wasn't sure whether to
punish her or not, but Ange didn't want to tempt fate.

There were two state troopers in the corridor where Darryl was being held. They
were holding off a legion of reporters who stood on tiptoe to see around them
and get pictures. The flashes popped in our eyes like strobes, and I shook my
head to clear it. My parents had brought me clean clothes and I'd changed in
the back seat, but I still felt gross, even after scrubbing myself in the
court-house bathrooms.

Some of the reporters called my name. Oh yeah, that's right, I was famous now.
The state troopers gave me a look, too -- either they'd recognized 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 a whisper
too low for the reporters to hear. He was in civvies, the jeans and sweater I
normally thought of him wearing, but he had his service ribbons pinned to his
breast.

"He's sleeping," he said. "He woke up a little while ago and he started crying.
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, sleeping with
his mouth open. There was white stuff at the corners of his mouth. He had a
semi-private room, and in the other bed there was an older Arab-looking guy, in
his 40s. I realized it was the guy I'd been chained to on the way off of
Treasure Island. We exchanged embarrassed waves.

Then I turned back to Darryl. I took his hand. His nails had been chewed to the
quick. He'd been a nail-biter when he was a kid, but he'd kicked the habit when
we got to high school. I think Van talked him out of it, telling him how gross
it was for him to have his fingers in his mouth all the time.

I heard my parents and Darryl's dad take a step away, drawing the curtains
around us. I put my face down next to his on the pillow. He had a 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 to one
non-family-member ever, a phrase that was weird to say to another guy. In the
end, I just gave his hand another squeeze. Poor Darryl.

1~epilogue Epilogue

_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Hudson Booksellers,~{ Hudson Booksellers
http://www.hudsongroup.com/HudsonBooksellers_s.html }~ the booksellers that are
in practically every airport in the USA. Most of the Hudson stands have just a
few titles (though those are often surprisingly diverse), but the big ones,
like the one in the AA terminal at Chicago's O'Hare, are as good as any
neighborhood store. It takes something special to bring a personal touch to an
airport, and Hudson's has saved my mind on more than one long Chicago layover.]
}/

Barbara called me at the office on July 4th weekend. I wasn't the only one
who'd come into work on the holiday weekend, but I was the only one whose
excuse was that my day-release program wouldn't let me leave town.

In the end, they convicted me of stealing Masha's phone. Can you believe that?
The prosecution had done a deal with my lawyer to drop all charges related to
"Electronic terrorism" and "inciting riots" in exchange for my pleading guilty
to the misdemeanor petty theft charge. I got three months in a day-release
program with a half-way house for juvenile offenders in the Mission. I slept at
the halfway house, sharing a dorm with a bunch of actual criminals, gang kids
and druggie kids, a couple of real nuts. 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 tribunal cleared
her of any wrongdoing. The file is sealed. She's being returned to active duty.
They're sending her to Iraq."

Carrie Johnstone was Severe Haircut Woman's name. It came out in the
preliminary hearings at the California Superior Court, but that was just about
all that came out. She wouldn't say a word about who she took orders from, what
she'd done, who had been imprisoned and why. She just 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 the
Mayor's eviction of fed cops from San Francisco. A lot of those cops had ended
up in state prisons, along with the guards from Gitmo-by-the-Bay.

Then, one day, there was no statement from the White House, nothing from the
state capitol. And the next day, there was a dry, tense press-conference held
jointly on the steps of the Governor's mansion, where the 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 Bay Bridge. The tribunal would
use every tool at its disposal to ensure that criminal acts were properly
punished. In return, control over DHS operations in California would go through
the State Senate, which would have the power to shut down, inspect, or
re-prioritize all homeland security in the state.

The roar of the reporters had been deafening and Barbara had gotten the first
question in. "Mr Governor, with all due respect: we have incontrovertible video
evidence that Marcus Yallow, a citizen of this state, native born, was
subjected to a simulated execution by DHS officers, apparently acting on orders
from the White House. Is the State really willing to abandon any pretense of
justice for its citizens in the face of illegal, barbaric /{torture}/?" Her
voice trembled, but didn't crack.

The Governor spread his hands. "The military tribunals will accomplish justice.
If Mr Yallow -- or any other person who has cause to fault the Department of
Homeland Security -- wants further justice, he is, of course, entitled to sue
for such damages as may be owing to him from the federal government."

That's what I was doing. Over twenty thousand civil lawsuits were filed 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 at the results of the closed
military tribunals. So far, the courts were pretty sympathetic 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 of the
events in San Francisco and in the special anti-terror detention center on
Treasure Island, it is the finding of this tribunal that Ms Johnstone's actions
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 I was
released from Gitmo-by-the-Bay. I'd seen her face looming over mine, that
little snarly smile as she told the man to give me a "drink."

"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 the
weekend. Mondays are big days for viral video. Everyone'll be coming back from
the holiday weekend, looking for something funny to forward around 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 been good. He'd
helped me focus on doing constructive things when I was upset, instead of
letting it eat me up. The videos helped.

"I have to go," I said, swallowing hard to keep the emotion out of my voice.

"Take care of yourself, Marcus," Barbara said.

Ange hugged me from behind as I hung up the phone. "I just read about it
online," she said. She read a million newsfeeds, pulling them with a headline
reader that sucked up stories as fast as they ended up on the wire. She was our
official blogger, and she was good at it, snipping out the interesting stories
and throwing them online like a short order cook 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 allowed to be out
of the halfway house after dinner time, and she couldn't visit me there. We saw
each other around the office, but there were usually a lot of other people
around, which kind of put a crimp in our cuddling. Being alone in the office
for a day was too much temptation. It was hot and sultry, too, which meant we
were both in tank-tops and shorts, a lot 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 over that famous
footage of me on the water-board, eyes wild in the harsh light of the camera,
tears streaming down my face, hair matted and flecked with barf.

"This is me. I am on a waterboard. I am being tortured in a simulated
execution. The torture is supervised by a woman called Carrie Johnstone. She
works for the government. You might remember her from this video."

I cut in the video of Johnstone and Kurt Rooney. "That's Johnstone and
Secretary of State Kurt Rooney, the president's chief strategist."

/{"The nation does not love that city. As far as they're concerned, it is a
Sodom and Gomorrah of fags and atheists who deserve to rot in hell. The only
reason the country cares what they think in San Francisco is that they had the
good fortune 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 my neighbors
were killed on the day he's talking about. But some of them may not have been
killed. Some of them disappeared into the same prison where I was tortured.
Some mothers and fathers, children and lovers, brothers and sisters will never
see their loved ones again -- because they were secretly imprisoned in an
illegal jail right here in the San Francisco Bay. They were shipped overseas.
The records were meticulous, but Carrie Johnstone has the encryption keys." I
cut back to Carrie Johnstone, the footage of her sitting at the board table
with Rooney, laughing.

I cut in the footage of Johnstone being arrested. "When they arrested her, 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 on one of his
many holidays "-- and his Chief Strategist --" now a still of Rooney shaking
hands with an infamous terrorist leader who used to be on "our side" "--
intervened. They sent her to a secret military tribunal and now that tribunal
has cleared her. Somehow, they saw nothing wrong with all of this."

I cut in a photomontage of the hundreds of shots of prisoners in their cells
that Barbara had published on the Bay Guardian's site the day we were released.
"We elected these people. We pay their salaries. They're supposed 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'd been sent to the tribunal "-- betrayed
our trust. The election is four months away. That's a lot of time. Enough for
you to go out and find five of your neighbors -- five people who've given up on
voting because their choice is 'none of the above.'

"Talk to your neighbors. Make them promise to vote. Make them promise to take
the country back from the torturers and thugs. The people who laughed at my
friends as they lay fresh in their graves at the bottom 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 to choose --
choose freedom.

"My name is Marcus Yallow. I was tortured by my country, but I still love it
here. I'm seventeen years old. I want to grow up in a free country. I want to
live in a free country."

I faded out to the logo of the website. Ange had built it, with help from Jolu,
who got us all the free hosting we could ever need on Pigspleen.

The office was an interesting place. Technically we were called Coalition of
Voters for a Free America, but everyone called us the Xnetters. The
organization -- a charitable nonprofit -- had been co-founded by Barbara and
some of her lawyer friends right after the liberation of Treasure Island. The
funding was kicked off by some tech millionaires who couldn't believe that a
bunch of hacker kids had kicked the DHS's ass. Sometimes, they'd ask us to go
down the peninsula to Sand Hill Road, where all the venture capitalists were,
and give a little presentation on Xnet technology. There were about a zillion
startups who were trying to make a buck on the Xnet.

Whatever -- I didn't have to have anything to do with it, and I got a desk and
an office with a storefront, right there on Valencia Street, where we gave away
ParanoidXbox CDs and held workshops on building better WiFi antennas. A
surprising number of average people dropped in to make personal donations, both
of hardware (you can run ParanoidLinux on just about anything, not just Xbox
Universals) and cash money. They loved us.

The big plan was to launch our own ARG in September, just in time for the
election, and to really tie it in with signing up voters and getting them to
the polls. Only 42 percent of Americans showed up at the polls for the last
election -- nonvoters had a huge majority. I kept trying to get Darryl and Van
to one of our planning sessions, but they kept on declining. They were spending
a lot of time together, and Van insisted that it was totally nonromantic.
Darryl wouldn't talk to me much at all, though he sent me long emails about
just about everything that wasn't about Van 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," I said. "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 had gotten a hearing
for her before the board of the Unified School District to argue for getting
her old job back. They said that Fred Benson was coming out of (early)
retirement to testify against her. I was looking forward 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 still got a
dribble of messages from old Xnetters who hadn't found my Coalition of Voters
address yet.

The latest message was from a throwaway email address from one of the 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 address. I
figured, if they're both underground, might as well introduce them to one
another."

"He thinks Masha is /{cute}/?"

"Give the guy a break, he's clearly had his mind warped by circumstances."

"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 up and down. I
held her cheeks and stared through her thick-framed glasses into 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 before we went
out for that burrito.

1~afterword_1 Afterword by Bruce Schneier

I'm a security technologist. My job is making people secure.

I think about security systems and how to break them. Then, how to make them
more secure. Computer security systems. Surveillance systems. Airplane security
systems and voting machines and RFID chips and everything else.

Cory invited me into the last few pages of his book because he wanted me to
tell you that security is fun. It's incredibly fun. It's cat and mouse, who can
outsmart whom, hunter versus hunted fun. I think it's the most fun job you can
possibly have. If you thought it was fun to read about Marcus outsmarting the
gait-recognition cameras with rocks in his shoes, think of how much more fun it
would be if you were the first person in the world to think of that.

Working in security means knowing a lot about technology. It might mean knowing
about computers and networks, or cameras and how they work, or the chemistry of
bomb detection. But really, security is a mindset. It's a way of thinking.
Marcus is a great example of that way of thinking. He's always looking for ways
a security system fails. I'll bet he couldn't walk into a store without
figuring out a way to shoplift. Not that he'd do it -- there's a difference
between knowing how to defeat a security system and actually defeating it --
but he'd know he could.

It's how security people think. We're constantly looking at security systems
and how to get around them; we can't help it.

This kind of thinking is important no matter what side of security you're on.
If you've been hired to build a shoplift-proof store, you'd better know how to
shoplift. If you're designing a camera system that detects individual gaits,
you'd better plan for people putting rocks in their shoes. Because if you
don't, you're not going to design anything good.

So when you're wandering through your day, take a moment to look at the
security systems around you. Look at the cameras in the stores you shop at. (Do
they prevent crime, or just move it next door?) See how a restaurant operates.
(If you pay after you eat, why don't more people just leave without paying?)
Pay attention at airport security. (How could you get a weapon onto an
airplane?) Watch what the teller does at a bank. (Bank security is designed to
prevent tellers from stealing just as much as it is to prevent you from
stealing.) Stare at an anthill. (Insects are all about security.) Read the
Constitution, and notice all the ways it provides people with security against
government. Look at traffic lights and door locks and all the security systems
on television and in the movies. Figure out how they work, what threats they
protect against and what threats they don't, how they fail, and how they can be
exploited.

Spend enough time doing this, and you'll find yourself thinking differently
about the world. You'll start noticing that many of the security systems out
there don't actually do what they claim to, and that much of our national
security is a waste of money. You'll understand privacy as essential to
security, not in opposition. You'll stop worrying about things other people
worry about, and start worrying about things other people don't even think
about.

Sometimes you'll notice something about security that no one has ever thought
about before. And maybe you'll figure out a new way to break a security system.

It was only a few years ago that someone invented phishing.

I'm frequently amazed how easy it is to break some pretty big-name security
systems. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the big one is that it's
impossible to prove that something is secure. All you can do is try to break it
-- if you fail, you know that it's secure enough to keep /{you}/ out, but what
about someone who's smarter than you? Anyone can design a security system so
strong he himself can't break it.

Think about that for a second, because it's not obvious. No one is qualified to
analyze their own security designs, because the designer and the analyzer will
be the same person, with the same limits. Someone else has to analyze the
security, because it has to be secure against things the designers didn't think
of.

This means that all of us have to analyze the security that other people
design. And surprisingly often, one of us breaks it. Marcus's exploits aren't
far-fetched; that kind of thing happens all the time. Go onto the net and look
up "bump key" or "Bic pen Kryptonite lock"; you'll find a couple of really
interesting stories about seemingly strong security defeated by pretty basic
technology.

And when that happens, be sure to publish it on the Internet somewhere. Secrecy
and security aren't the same, even though it may seem that way. Only bad
security relies on secrecy; good security works even if all the details of it
are public.

And publishing vulnerabilities forces security designers to design better
security, and makes us all better consumers of security. If you buy a
Kryptonite bike lock and it can be defeated with a Bic pen, you're not getting
very good security for your money. And, likewise, if a bunch of smart kids can
defeat the DHS's antiterrorist technologies, then it's not going to do a very
good job against real terrorists.

Trading privacy for security is stupid enough; not getting any actual security
in the bargain is even stupider.

So close the book and go. The world is full of security systems. Hack one of
them.

Bruce Schneier http://www.schneier.com

1~afterword_2 Afterword by Andrew "bunnie" Huang, Xbox Hacker

Hackers are explorers, digital pioneers. It's in a hacker's nature to question
conventions and be tempted by intricate problems. Any complex system is sport
for a hacker; a side effect of this is the hacker's natural affinity for
problems involving security. Society is a large and complex system, and is
certainly not off limits to a little hacking. As a result, hackers are often
stereotyped as iconoclasts and social misfits, people who defy social norms for
the sake of defiance. When I hacked the Xbox in 2002 while at MIT, I wasn’t
doing it to rebel or to cause harm; I was just following a natural impulse, the
same impulse that leads to fixing a broken iPod or exploring the roofs and
tunnels at MIT.    Unfortunately, the combination of not complying with social
norms and knowing “threatening” things like how to read the arphid on your
credit card or how to pick locks causes some people to fear hackers. However,
the motivations of a hacker are typically as simple as “I’m an engineer because
I like to design things.” People often ask me, “Why did you hack the Xbox
security system?” And my answer is simple: First, I own the things that I buy.
If someone can tell me what I can and can’t run on my hardware, then I don’t
own it. Second, because it’s there. It’s a system of sufficient complexity to
make good sport. It was a great diversion from the late nights working on my
PhD.    I was lucky. The fact that I was a graduate student at MIT when I
hacked the Xbox legitimized the activity in the eyes of the right people.
However, the right to hack shouldn’t only be extended to academics. I got my
start on hacking when I was just a boy in elementary school, taking apart every
electronic appliance I could get my hands on, much to my parents’ chagrin. My
reading collection included books on model rocketry, artillery, nuclear
weaponry and explosives manufacture -- books that I borrowed from my school
library (I think the Cold War influenced the reading selection in public
schools). I also played with my fair share of ad-hoc fireworks and roamed the
open construction sites of houses being raised in my Midwestern neighborhood.
While not the wisest of things to do, these were important experiences in my
coming of age and I grew up to be a free thinker because of the social
tolerance and trust of my community.    Current events have not been so kind to
aspiring hackers. Little Brother shows how we can get from where we are today
to a world where social tolerance for new and different thoughts dies
altogether. A recent event highlights exactly how close we are to crossing the
line into the world of Little Brother. I had the fortune of reading an early
draft of Little Brother back in November 2006. Fast forward two months to the
end of January 2007, when Boston police found suspected explosive devices and
shut down the city for a day. These devices turned out to be nothing more than
circuit boards with flashing LEDs, promoting a show for the Cartoon Network.
The artists who placed this urban graffiti were taken in as suspected
terrorists and ultimately charged with felony; the network producers had to
shell out a $2 million settlement, and the head of the Cartoon Network resigned
over the fallout. 

Have the terrorists already won? Have we given in to fear, such that artists,
hobbyists, hackers, iconoclasts, or perhaps an unassuming group of kids playing
Harajuku Fun Madness, could be so trivially implicated as terrorists?

There is a term for this dysfunction -- it is called an autoimmune disease,
where an organism's defense system goes into overdrive so much that it fails to
recognize itself and attacks its own cells. Ultimately, the organism
self-destructs. Right now, America is on the verge of going into anaphylactic
shock over its own freedoms, and we need to inoculate ourselves against this.
Technology is no cure for this paranoia; in fact, it may enhance the paranoia:
it turns us into prisoners of our own device. Coercing millions of people to
strip off their outer garments and walk barefoot through metal detectors every
day is no solution either. It only serves to remind the population every day
that they have a reason to be afraid, while in practice providing only a flimsy
barrier to a determined adversary.

The truth is that we can't count on someone else to make us feel free, and
M1k3y won’t come and save us the day our freedoms are lost to paranoia. That's
because M1k3y is in you and in me--Little Brother is a reminder that no matter
how unpredictable the future may be, we don't win freedom through security
systems, cryptography, interrogations and spot searches. We win freedom by
having the courage and the conviction to live every day freely and to act as a
free society, no matter how great the threats are on the horizon.

Be like M1k3y: step out the door and dare to be free.

1~bibliogrphy Bibliography

No writer creates from scratch -- we all engage in what Isaac Newton called
"standing on the shoulders of giants." We borrow, plunder and remix the art and
culture created by those around us and by our literary forebears.

If you liked this book and want to learn more, there are plenty of sources to
turn to, online and at your local library or bookstore.

Hacking is a great subject. All science relies on telling other people what
you've done so that they can verify it, learn from it, and improve on it, and
hacking is all about that process, so there's plenty published on the subject.

Start with Andrew "Bunnie" Huang's "Hacking the Xbox," (No Starch Press, 2003)
a wonderful book that tells the story of how Bunnie, then a student at MIT,
reverse-engineered the Xbox's anti-tampering mechanisms and opened the way for
all the subsequent cool hacks for the platform. In telling the story, Bunnie
has also created a kind of Bible for reverse engineering and hardware hacking.

Bruce Schneier's "Secrets and Lies" (Wiley, 2000) and "Beyond Fear"
(Copernicus, 2003) are the definitive lay-person's texts on understanding
security and thinking critically about it, while his "Applied Cryptography"
(Wiley, 1995) remains the authoritative source for understanding crypto. Bruce
maintains an excellent blog and mailing list at schneier.com/blog. Crypto and
security are the realm of the talented amateur, and the "cypherpunk" movement
is full of kids, home-makers, parents, lawyers, and every other stripe of
person, hammering away on security protocols and ciphers.

There are several great magazines devoted to this subject, but the two best
ones are 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, which is full of pseudonymous, boasting
accounts of hacks accomplished, and O'Reilly's MAKE magazine, which features
solid HOWTOs for making your own hardware projects at home.

The online world overflows with material on this subject, of course. Ed Felten
and Alex J Halderman's Freedom to Tinker (www.freedom-to-tinker.com) is a blog
maintained by two fantastic Princeton engineering profs who write lucidly about
security, wiretapping, anti-copying technology and crypto.

Don't miss Natalie Jeremijenko's "Feral Robotics" at UC San Diego
(xdesign.ucsd.edu/feralrobots/). Natalie and her students rewire toy robot dogs
from Toys R Us and turn them into bad-ass toxic-waste detectors. They unleash
them on public parks where big corporations have dumped their waste and
demonstrate in media-friendly fashion how toxic the ground is.

Like many of the hacks in this book, the tunneling-over-DNS stuff is real. Dan
Kaminsky, a tunneling expert of the first water, published details in 2004
(www.doxpara.com/bo2004.ppt).

The guru of "citizen journalism" is Dan Gillmor, who is presently running
Center for Citizen Media at Harvard and UC Berkeley -- he also wrote a hell of
a book on the subject, "We, the Media" (O'Reilly, 2004).

If you want to learn more about hacking arphids, start with Annalee Newitz's
Wired Magazine article "The RFID Hacking Underground"
(www.wirednews.com/wired/archive/14.05/rfid.html). Adam Greenfield's
"Everyware" (New Riders Press, 2006) is a chilling look at the dangers of a
world of arphids.

Neal Gershenfeld's Fab Lab at MIT (fab.cba.mit.edu) is hacking out the world's
first real, cheap "3D printers" that can pump out any object you can dream of.
This is documented in Gershenfeld's excellent book on the subject, "Fab" (Basic
Books, 2005).

Bruce Sterling's "Shaping Things" (MIT Press, 2005) shows how arphids and fabs
could be used to force companies to build products that don't poison the world.

Speaking of Bruce Sterling, he wrote the first great book on hackers and the
law, "The Hacker Crackdown" (Bantam, 1993), which is also the first book
published by a major publisher that was released on the Internet at the same
time (copies abound; see stuff.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html for one). It was
reading this book that turned me on to the Electronic Frontier Foundation,
where I was privileged to work for four years.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org) is a charitable membership
organization with a student rate. They spend the money that private individuals
give them to keep the Internet safe for personal liberty, free speech, due
process, and the rest of the Bill of Rights. They're the Internet's most
effective freedom fighters, and you can join the struggle just by signing up
for their mailing list and writing to your elected officials when they're
considering selling you out in the name of fighting terrorism, piracy, the
mafia, or whatever bogeyman has caught their attention today. EFF also helps
maintain TOR, The Onion Router, which is a real technology you can use /{right
now}/ to get out of your government, school or library's censoring firewall
(tor.eff.org).

EFF has a huge, deep website with amazing information aimed at a general
audience, as do the American Civil Liberties Union (aclu.org), Public Knowledge
(publicknowledge.org), FreeCulture (freeculture.org), Creative Commons
(creativecommons.org) -- all of which also are worthy of your support.
FreeCulture is an international student movement that actively recruits kids to
found their own local chapters at their high schools and universities. It's a
great way to get involved and make a difference.

A lot of websites chronicle the fight for cyberliberties, but few go at it with
the verve of Slashdot, "News for Nerds, Stuff That Matters" (slashdot.org).

And of course, you /{have to}/ visit Wikipedia, the collaborative, net-authored
encyclopedia that anyone can edit, with more than 1,000,000 entries in English
alone. Wikipedia covers hacking and counterculture in astonishing depth and
with amazing, up-to-the-nanosecond currency. One caution: you can't just look
at the entries in Wikipedia. It's really important to look at the "History" and
"Discussion" links at the top of every Wikipedia page to see how the current
version of the truth was arrived at, get an appreciation for the competing
points-of-view there, and decide for yourself whom you trust.

If you want to get at some /{real}/ forbidden knowledge, have a skim around
Cryptome (cryptome.org), the world's most amazing archive of secret, suppressed
and liberated information. Cryptome's brave publishers collect material that's
been pried out of the state by Freedom of Information Act requests or leaked by
whistle-blowers and publishes it.

The best fictional account of the history of crypto is, hands-down, Neal
Stephenson's Cryptonomicon (Avon, 2002). Stephenson tells the story of Alan
Turing and the Nazi Enigma Machine, turning it into a gripping war-novel that
you won't be able to put down.

The Pirate Party mentioned in Little Brother is real and thriving in Sweden
(www.piratpartiet.se), Denmark, the USA and France at the time of this writing
(July, 2006). They're a little out-there, but a movement takes all kinds.

Speaking of out-there, Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies did indeed try to levitate
the Pentagon, throw money into the stock exchange, and work with a group called
the Up Against the Wall Motherf_____ers. Abbie Hoffman's classic book on
ripping off the system, "Steal This Book," is back in print (Four Walls Eight
Windows, 2002) and it's also online as a collaborative wiki for people who want
to try to update it (stealthiswiki.nine9pages.com).

Hoffman's autobiography, "Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture" (also in print
from Four Walls Eight Windows) is one of my favorite memoirs ever, even if it
is highly fictionalized. Hoffman was an incredible storyteller and had great
activist instincts. If you want to know how he really lived his life, though,
try Larry Sloman's "Steal This Dream" (Doubleday, 1998).

More counterculture fun: Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" can be had in practically
any used bookstore for a buck or two. Allan Ginsberg's "HOWL" is online in many
places, and you can hear him read it if you search for the MP3 at archive.org.
For bonus points, track down the album "Tenderness Junction" by the Fugs, which
includes the audio of Allan Ginsberg and Abbie Hoffman's levitation ceremony at
the Pentagon.

This book couldn't have been written if not for George Orwell's magnificent,
world-changing "1984," the best novel ever published on how societies go wrong.
I read this book when I was 12 and have read it 30 or 40 times since, and every
time, I get something new out of it. Orwell was a master of storytelling and
was clearly sick over the totalitarian state that emerged in the Soviet Union.
1984 holds up today as a genuinely frightening work of science fiction, and it
is one of the novels that literally changed the world. Today, "Orwellian" is
synonymous with a state of ubiquitous surveillance, doublethink, and torture.

Many novelists have tackled parts of the story in Little Brother. Daniel
Pinkwater's towering comic masterpiece, "Alan Mendelsohn: The Boy From Mars"
(presently in print as part of the omnibus "5 Novels," Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1997) is a book that every geek needs to read. If you've ever felt like
an outcast for being too smart or weird, READ THIS BOOK. It changed my life.

On a more contemporary front, there's Scott Westerfeld's "So Yesterday"
(Razorbill, 2004), which follows the adventures of cool hunters and
counterculture jammers. Scott and his wife Justine Larbalestier were my partial
inspiration to write a book for young adults -- as was Kathe Koja. Thanks,
guys.

1~acknowledgements Acknowledgments

This book owes a tremendous debt to many writers, friends, mentors, and heroes
who made it possible.

For the hackers and cypherpunks: Bunnie Huang, Seth Schoen, Ed Felten, Alex
Halderman, Gweeds, Natalie Jeremijenko, Emmanuel Goldstein, Aaron Swartz

For the heroes: Mitch Kapor, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Larry Lessig,
Shari Steele, Cindy Cohn, Fred von Lohmann, Jamie Boyle, George Orwell, Abbie
Hoffman, Joe Trippi, Bruce Schneier, Ross Dowson, Harry Kopyto, Tim O'Reilly

For the writers: Bruce Sterling, Kathe Koja, Scott Westerfeld, Justine
Larbalestier, Pat York, Annalee Newitz, Dan Gillmor, Daniel Pinkwater, Kevin
Pouslen, Wendy Grossman, Jay Lake, Ben Rosenbaum

For the friends: Fiona Romeo, Quinn Norton, Danny O'Brien, Jon Gilbert, danah
boyd, Zak Hanna, Emily Hurson, Grad Conn, John Henson, Amanda Foubister, Xeni
Jardin, Mark Frauenfelder, David Pescovitz, John Battelle, Karl Levesque, Kate
Miles, Neil and Tara-Lee Doctorow, Rael Dornfest, Ken Snider

For the mentors: Judy Merril, Roz and Gord Doctorow, Harriet Wolff, Jim Kelly,
Damon Knight, Scott Edelman

Thank you all for giving me the tools to think and write about these ideas.

1~cc_a_nc_sa Creative Commons

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