I wrote Little Brother in a white-hot fury between May 7, 2007 and July 2,2007: exactly eight weeks from the day I thought it up to the day I fin-ished it (Alice, to whom this book is dedicated, had to put up with meclacking out the final chapter at 5AM in our hotel in Rome, where wewere celebrating our anniversary). I'd always dreamed of having a bookjust materialize, fully formed, and come pouring out of my fingertips, nosweat and fuss — but it wasn't nearly as much fun as I'd thought itwould be. There were days when I wrote 10,000 words, hunching overmy keyboard in airports, on subways, in taxis — anywhere I could type.
The book was trying to get out of my head, no matter what, and I missedso much sleep and so many meals that friends started to ask if I wasunwell.
When my dad was a young university student in the 1960s, he was oneof the few "counterculture" people who thought computers were a goodthing. For most young people, computers represented the de-humaniza-tion of society. University students were reduced to numbers on apunchcard, each bearing the legend "DO NOT BEND, SPINDLE, FOLDOR MUTILATE," prompting some of the students to wear pins that said,"I AM A STUDENT: DO NOT BEND, SPINDLE, FOLD OR MUTILATEME." Computers were seen as a means to increase the ability of the au-thorities to regiment people and bend them to their will.
When I was a 17, the world seemed like it was just going to get morefree. The Berlin Wall was about to come down. Computers — which hadbeen geeky and weird a few years before — were everywhere, and themodem I'd used to connect to local bulletin board systems was now con-necting me to the entire world through the Internet and commercial on-line services like GEnie. My lifelong fascination with activist causes wentinto overdrive as I saw how the main difficulty in activism — organizing— was getting easier by leaps and bounds (I still remember the first timeI switched from mailing out a newsletter with hand-written addresses tousing a database with mail-merge). In the Soviet union, communicationstools were being used to bring information — and revolution — to thefarthest-flung corners of the largest authoritarian state the Earth had everseen.
But 17 years later, things are very different. The computers I love arebeing co-opted, used to spy on us, control us, snitch on us. The NationalSecurity Agency has illegally wiretapped the entire USA and gottenaway with it. Car rental companies and mass transit and traffic4authorities are watching where we go, sending us automated tickets,finking us out to busybodies, cops and bad guys who gain illicit access totheir databases. The Transport Security Administration maintains a "no-fly" list of people who'd never been convicted of any crime, but who arenevertheless considered too dangerous to fly. The list's contents aresecret. The rule that makes it enforceable is secret. The criteria for beingadded to the list are secret. It has four-year-olds on it. And US senators.
And decorated veterans — actual war heroes.
The 17 year olds I know understand to a nicety just how dangerous acomputer can be. The authoritarian nightmare of the 1960s has comehome for them. The seductive little boxes on their desks and in theirpockets watch their every move, corral them in, systematically deprivingthem of those new freedoms I had enjoyed and made such good use of inmy young adulthood.
What's more, kids were clearly being used as guinea-pigs for a newkind of technological state that all of us were on our way to, a worldwhere taking a picture was either piracy (in a movie theater or museumor even a Starbucks), or terrorism (in a public place), but where we couldbe photographed, tracked and logged hundreds of times a day by everytin-pot dictator, cop, bureaucrat and shop-keeper. A world where anymeasure, including torture, could be justified just by waving your handsand shouting "Terrorism! 9/11! Terrorism!" until all dissent fell silent.
We don't have to go down that road.
If you love freedom, if you think the human condition is dignified byprivacy, by the right to be left alone, by the right to explore your weirdideas provided you don't hurt others, then you have common cause withthe kids whose web-browsers and cell phones are being used to lockthem up and follow them around.
If you believe that the answer to bad speech is more speech — not cen-sorship — then you have a dog in the fight.
If you believe in a society of laws, a land where our rulers have to tellus the rules, and have to follow them too, then you're part of the samestruggle that kids fight when they argue for the right to live under thesame Bill of Rights that adults have.
This book is meant to be part of the conversation about what an in-formation society means: does it mean total control, or unheard-ofliberty? It's not just a noun, it's a verb, it's something you do.
This chapter is dedicated to BakkaPhoenix Books in Toronto, Canada.
Bakka is the oldest science fiction bookstore in the world, and it made methe mutant I am today. I wandered in for the first time around the age of10 and asked for some recommendations. Tanya Huff (yes, the TanyaHuff, but she wasn't a famous writer back then!) took me back into theused section and pressed a copy of H. Beam Piper's "Little Fuzzy" intomy hands, and changed my life forever. By the time I was 18, I wasworking at Bakka — I took over from Tanya when she retired to writefull time — and I learned life-long lessons about how and why peoplebuy books. I think every writer should work at a bookstore (and plenty ofwriters have worked at Bakka over the years! For the 30th anniversary ofthe store, they put together an anthology of stories by Bakka writersthan included work by Michelle Sagara (AKA Michelle West), TanyaHuff, Nalo Hopkinson, Tara Tallan —and me!)BakkaPhoenix Books: 697 Queen Street West, Toronto ON CanadaM6J1E6, +1 416 963 9993I'm a senior at Cesar Chavez high in San Francisco's sunny Missiondistrict, and that makes me one of the most surveilled people in theworld. My name is Marcus Yallow, but back when this story starts, I wasgoing by w1n5t0n. Pronounced "Winston."Not pronounced "Double-you-one-enn-five-tee-zero-enn" — unlessyou're a clueless disciplinary officer who's far enough behind the curvethat you still call the Internet "the information superhighway."I know just such a clueless person, and his name is Fred Benson, one ofthree vice-principals at Cesar Chavez. He's a sucking chest wound of ahuman being. But if you're going to have a jailer, better a clueless onethan one who's really on the ball.
Marcus Yallow, he said over the PA one Friday morning. The PAisn't very good to begin with, and when you combine that with Benson's17habitual mumble, you get something that sounds more like someonestruggling to digest a bad burrito than a school announcement. But hu-man beings are good at picking their names out of audio confusion — it'sa survival trait.
I grabbed my bag and folded my laptop three-quarters shut — I didn'twant to blow my downloads — and got ready for the inevitable.
Report to the administration office immediately.My social studies teacher, Ms Galvez, rolled her eyes at me and Irolled my eyes back at her. The Man was always coming down on me,just because I go through school firewalls like wet kleenex, spoof thegait-recognition software, and nuke the snitch chips they track us with.
Galvez is a good type, anyway, never holds that against me (especiallywhen I'm helping get with her webmail so she can talk to her brotherwho's stationed in Iraq).
My boy Darryl gave me a smack on the ass as I walked past. I'veknown Darryl since we were still in diapers and escaping from play-school, and I've been getting him into and out of trouble the whole time.
I raised my arms over my head like a prizefighter and made my exitfrom Social Studies and began the perp-walk to the office.
I was halfway there when my phone went. That was another no-no —phones are muy prohibido at Chavez High — but why should that stopme? I ducked into the toilet and shut myself in the middle stall (the fur-thest stall is always grossest because so many people head straight for it,hoping to escape the smell and the squick — the smart money and goodhygiene is down the middle). I checked the phone — my home PC hadsent it an email to tell it that there was something new up on HarajukuFun Madness, which happens to be the best game ever invented.
I grinned. Spending Fridays at school was teh suck anyway, and I wasglad of the excuse to make my escape.
I ambled the rest of the way to Benson's office and tossed him a waveas I sailed through the door.
If it isn't Double-you-one-enn-five-tee-zero-enn, he said. FredrickBenson — Social Security number 545-03-2343, date of birth August 151962, mother's maiden name Di Bona, hometown Petaluma — is a lottaller than me. I'm a runty 5'8", while he stands 6'7", and his college bas-ketball days are far enough behind him that his chest muscles haveturned into saggy man-boobs that were painfully obvious through hisfreebie dot-com polo-shirts. He always looks like he's about to slam-18dunk your ass, and he's really into raising his voice for dramatic effect.
Both these start to lose their efficacy with repeated application.
Sorry, nope, I said. "I never heard of this R2D2 character of yours.""W1n5t0n," he said, spelling it out again. He gave me a hairy eyeballand waited for me to wilt. Of course it was my handle, and had been foryears. It was the identity I used when I was posting on message-boardswhere I was making my contributions to the field of applied security re-search. You know, like sneaking out of school and disabling the minder-tracer on my phone. But he didn't know that this was my handle. Only asmall number of people did, and I trusted them all to the end of theearth.
Um, not ringing any bells, I said. I'd done some pretty cool stuffaround school using that handle — I was very proud of my work onsnitch-tag killers — and if he could link the two identities, I'd be introuble. No one at school ever called me w1n5t0n or even Winston. Noteven my pals. It was Marcus or nothing.
Benson settled down behind his desk and tapped his class-ringnervously on his blotter. He did this whenever things started to go badfor him. Poker players call stuff like this a "tell" — something that let youknow what was going on in the other guy's head. I knew Benson's tellsbackwards and forwards.
Marcus, I hope you realize how serious this is."I will just as soon as you explain what this is, sir. I always say "sir" toauthority figures when I'm messing with them. It's my own tell.
He shook his head at me and looked down, another tell. Any secondnow, he was going to start shouting at me. "Listen, kiddo! It's time youcame to grips with the fact that we know about what you've been doing,and that we're not going to be lenient about it. You're going to be lucky ifyou're not expelled before this meeting is through. Do you want tograduate?""Mr Benson, you still haven't explained what the problem is —"He slammed his hand down on the desk and then pointed his finger atme. "The problem, Mr Yallow, is that you've been engaged in criminalconspiracy to subvert this school's security system, and you have sup-plied security countermeasures to your fellow students. You know thatwe expelled Graciella Uriarte last week for using one of your devices."Uriarte had gotten a bad rap. She'd bought a radio-jammer from a head-19shop near the 16th Street BART station and it had set off the counter-measures in the school hallway. Not my doing, but I felt for her.
And you think I'm involved in that?"We have reliable intelligence indicating that you are w1n5t0n —again, he spelled it out, and I began to wonder if he hadn't figured outthat the 1 was an I and the 5 was an S. "We know that this w1n5t0n char-acter is reponsible for the theft of last year's standardized tests." That ac-tually hadn't been me, but it was a sweet hack, and it was kind of flatter-ing to hear it attributed to me. "And therefore liable for several years inprison unless you cooperate with me.""You have 'reliable intelligence'? I'd like to see it."He glowered at me. "Your attitude isn't going to help you.""If there's evidence, sir, I think you should call the police and turn itover to them. It sounds like this is a very serious matter, and I wouldn'twant to stand in the way of a proper investigation by the duly consti-tuted authorities.""You want me to call the police.""And my parents, I think. That would be for the best."We stared at each other across the desk. He'd clearly expected me tofold the second he dropped the bomb on me. I don't fold. I have a trickfor staring down people like Benson. I look slightly to the left of theirheads, and think about the lyrics to old Irish folk songs, the kinds withthree hundred verses. It makes me look perfectly composed andunworried.
And the wing was on the bird and the bird was on the egg and the egg was inthe nest and the nest was on the leaf and the leaf was on the twig and the twigwas on the branch and the branch was on the limb and the limb was in the treeand the tree was in the bog — the bog down in the valley-oh! High-ho the rat-tlin' bog, the bog down in the valley-oh —"You can return to class now," he said. "I'll call on you once the policeare ready to speak to you.""Are you going to call them now?""The procedure for calling in the police is complicated. I'd hoped thatwe could settle this fairly and quickly, but since you insist —""I can wait while you call them is all," I said. "I don't mind."He tapped his ring again and I braced for the blast.
Go! he yelled. "Get the hell out of my office, you miserable little —"20I got out, keeping my expression neutral. He wasn't going to call thecops. If he'd had enough evidence to go to the police with, he wouldhave called them in the first place. He hated my guts. I figured he'dheard some unverified gossip and hoped to spook me into confirming it.
I moved down the corridor lightly and sprightly, keeping my gait evenand measured for the gait-recognition cameras. These had been installedonly a year before, and I loved them for their sheer idiocy. Beforehand,we'd had face-recognition cameras covering nearly every public space inschool, but a court ruled that was unconstitutional. So Benson and a lotof other paranoid school administrators had spent our textbook dollarson these idiot cameras that were supposed to be able to tell one person'swalk from another. Yeah, right.
I got back to class and sat down again, Ms Galvez warmly welcomingme back. I unpacked the school's standard-issue machine and got backinto classroom mode. The SchoolBooks were the snitchiest technology ofthem all, logging every keystroke, watching all the network traffic forsuspicious keywords, counting every click, keeping track of every fleet-ing thought you put out over the net. We'd gotten them in my junioryear, and it only took a couple months for the shininess to wear off. Oncepeople figured out that these "free" laptops worked for the man — andshowed a never-ending parade of obnoxious ads to boot — they sud-denly started to feel very heavy and burdensome.
Cracking my SchoolBook had been easy. The crack was online within amonth of the machine showing up, and there was nothing to it — justdownload a DVD image, burn it, stick it in the SchoolBook, and boot itwhile holding down a bunch of different keys at the same time. TheDVD did the rest, installing a whole bunch of hidden programs on themachine, programs that would stay hidden even when the Board of Eddid its daily remote integrity checks of the machines. Every now andagain I had to get an update for the software to get around the Board'slatest tests, but it was a small price to pay to get a little control over thebox.
I fired up IMParanoid, the secret instant messenger that I used when Iwanted to have an off-the-record discussion right in the middle of class.
Darryl was already logged in.
>
The game's afoot! Something big is going down with Harajuku FunMadness, dude. You in?
>
21No. Freaking. Way. If I get caught ditching a third time, I'm expelled.
Man, you know that. We'll go after school.
>
You've got lunch and then study-hall, right? That's two hours. Plentyof time to run down this clue and get back before anyone misses us. I'llget the whole team out.
Harajuku Fun Madness is the best game ever made. I know I alreadysaid that, but it bears repeating. It's an ARG, an Alternate Reality Game,and the story goes that a gang of Japanese fashion-teens discovered a mi-raculous healing gem at the temple in Harajuku, which is basicallywhere cool Japanese teenagers invented every major subculture for thepast ten years. They're being hunted by evil monks, the Yakuza (AKAthe Japanese mafia), aliens, tax-inspectors, parents, and a rogue artificialintelligence. They slip the players coded messages that we have to de-code and use to track down clues that lead to more coded messages andmore clues.
Imagine the best afternoon you've ever spent prowling the streets of acity, checking out all the weird people, funny hand-bills, street-maniacs,and funky shops. Now add a scavenger hunt to that, one that requiresyou to research crazy old films and songs and teen culture from aroundthe world and across time and space. And it's a competition, with thewinning team of four taking a grand prize of ten days in Tokyo, chillingon Harajuku bridge, geeking out in Akihabara, and taking home all theAstro Boy merchandise you can eat. Except that he's called "Atom Boy"in Japan.
That's Harajuku Fun Madness, and once you've solved a puzzle ortwo, you'll never look back.
>
No man, just no. NO. Don't even ask.
>
I need you D. You're the best I've got. I swear I'll get us in and outwithout anyone knowing it. You know I can do that, right?
>
I know you can do it>
So you're in?
>
22Hell no>
Come on, Darryl. You're not going to your deathbed wishing you'dspent more study periods sitting in school>
I'm not going to go to my deathbed wishing I'd spent more time play-ing ARGs either>
Yeah but don't you think you might go to your death-bed wishingyou'd spent more time with Vanessa Pak?
Van was part of my team. She went to a private girl's school in the EastBay, but I knew she'd ditch to come out and run the mission with me.
Darryl has had a crush on her literally for years — even before pubertyendowed her with many lavish gifts. Darryl had fallen in love with hermind. Sad, really.
>
You suck>
You're coming?
He looked at me and shook his head. Then he nodded. I winked at himand set to work getting in touch with the rest of my team.
I wasn't always into ARGing. I have a dark secret: I used to be aLARPer. LARPing is Live Action Role Playing, and it's just about what itsounds like: running around in costume, talking in a funny accent, pre-tending to be a super-spy or a vampire or a medieval knight. It's likeCapture the Flag in monster-drag, with a bit of Drama Club thrown in,and the best games were the ones we played in Scout Camps out of townin Sonoma or down on the Peninsula. Those three-day epics could getpretty hairy, with all-day hikes, epic battles with foam-and-bambooswords, casting spells by throwing beanbags and shouting "Fireball!"and so on. Good fun, if a little goofy. Not nearly as geeky as talkingabout what your elf planned on doing as you sat around a table loadedwith Diet Coke cans and painted miniatures, and more physically activethan going into a mouse-coma in front of a massively multiplayer gameat home.
23The thing that got me into trouble were the mini-games in the hotels.
Whenever a science fiction convention came to town, some LARPerwould convince them to let us run a couple of six-hour mini-games at thecon, piggybacking on their rental of the space. Having a bunch of enthu-siastic kids running around in costume lent color to the event, and wegot to have a ball among people even more socially deviant than us.
The problem with hotels is that they have a lot of non-gamers in them,too — and not just sci-fi people. Normal people. From states that beginand end with vowels. On holidays.
And sometimes those people misunderstand the nature of a game.
Let's just leave it at that, OK?
Class ended in ten minutes, and that didn't leave me with much timeto prepare. The first order of business were those pesky gait-recognitioncameras. Like I said, they'd started out as face-recognition cameras, butthose had been ruled unconstitutional. As far as I know, no court has yetdetermined whether these gait-cams are any more legal, but until theydo, we're stuck with them.
Gait is a fancy word for the way you walk. People are pretty good atspotting gaits — next time you're on a camping trip, check out the bob-bing of the flashlight as a distant friend approaches you. Chances areyou can identify him just from the movement of the light, the character-istic way it bobs up and down that tells our monkey brains that this is aperson approaching us.
Gait recognition software takes pictures of your motion, tries to isolateyou in the pics as a silhouette, and then tries to match the silhouette to adatabase to see if it knows who you are. It's a biometric identifier, likefingerprints or retina-scans, but it's got a lot more "collisions" than eitherof those. A biometric "collision" is when a measurement matches morethan one person. Only you have your fingerprint, but you share yourgait with plenty other people.
Not exactly, of course. Your personal, inch-by-inch walk is yours andyours alone. The problem is your inch-by-inch walk changes based onhow tired you are, what the floor is made of, whether you pulled yourankle playing basketball, and whether you've changed your shoes lately.
So the system kind of fuzzes-out your profile, looking for people whowalk kind of like you.
24There are a lot of people who walk kind of like you. What's more, it'seasy not to walk kind of like you — just take one shoe off. Of course,you'll always walk like you-with-one-shoe-off in that case, so the camer-as will eventually figure out that it's still you. Which is why I prefer toinject a little randomness into my attacks on gait-recognition: I put ahandful of gravel into each shoe. Cheap and effective, and no two stepsare the same. Plus you get a great reflexology foot massage in the process(I kid. Reflexology is about as scientifically useful as gait-recognition).
The cameras used to set off an alert every time someone they didn't re-cognize stepped onto campus.
This did not work.
The alarm went off every ten minutes. When the mailman came by.
When a parent dropped in. When the grounds-people went to work fix-ing up the basketball court. When a student showed up wearing newshoes.
So now it just tries to keep track of who's where and when. If someoneleaves by the school-gates during classes, their gait is checked to see if itkinda-sorta matches any student gait and if it does, whoop-whoop-whoop, ring the alarm!
Chavez High is ringed with gravel walkways. I like to keep a couplehandsful of rocks in my shoulder-bag, just in case. I silently passedDarryl ten or fifteen pointy little bastards and we both loaded our shoes.
Class was about to finish up — and I realized that I still hadn't checkedthe Harajuku Fun Madness site to see where the next clue was! I'd been alittle hyper-focused on the escape, and hadn't bothered to figure outwhere we were escaping to.
I turned to my SchoolBook and hit the keyboard. The web-browser weused was supplied with the machine. It was a locked-down spyware ver-sion of Internet Explorer, Microsoft's crashware turd that no one underthe age of 40 used voluntarily.
I had a copy of Firefox on the USB drive built into my watch, but thatwasn't enough — the SchoolBook ran Windows Vista4Schools, an an-tique operating system designed to give school administrators the illu-sion that they controlled the programs their students could run.
But Vista4Schools is its own worst enemy. There are a lot of programsthat Vista4Schools doesn't want you to be able to shut down — keylog-gers, censorware — and these programs run in a special mode that25makes them invisible to the system. You can't quit them because youcan't even see they're there.
Any program whose name starts with $SYS$ is invisible to the operat-ing system. it doesn't show up on listings of the hard drive, nor in theprocess monitor. So my copy of Firefox was called $SYS$Firefox — andas I launched it, it became invisible to Windows, and so invisible to thenetwork's snoopware.
Now I had an indie browser running, I needed an indie network con-nection. The school's network logged every click in and out of the sys-tem, which was bad news if you were planning on surfing over to theHarajuku Fun Madness site for some extra-curricular fun.
The answer is something ingenious called TOR — The Onion Router.
An onion router is an Internet site that takes requests for web-pages andpasses them onto other onion routers, and on to other onion routers, un-til one of them finally decides to fetch the page and pass it back throughthe layers of the onion until it reaches you. The traffic to the onion-routers is encrypted, which means that the school can't see what you'reasking for, and the layers of the onion don't know who they're workingfor. There are millions of nodes — the program was set up by the US Of-fice of Naval Research to help their people get around the censorware incountries like Syria and China, which means that it's perfectly designedfor operating in the confines of an average American high school.
TOR works because the school has a finite blacklist of naughty ad-dresses we aren't allowed to visit, and the addresses of the nodes changeall the time — no way could the school keep track of them all. Firefoxand TOR together made me into the invisible man, impervious to Boardof Ed snooping, free to check out the Harajuku FM site and see what wasup.
There it was, a new clue. Like all Harajuku Fun Madness clues, it had aphysical, online and mental component. The online component was apuzzle you had to solve, one that required you to research the answers toa bunch of obscure questions. This batch included a bunch of questionson the plots in d?jinshi — those are comic books drawn by fans ofmanga, Japanese comics. They can be as big as the official comics that in-spire them, but they're a lot weirder, with crossover story-lines andsometimes really silly songs and action. Lots of love stories, of course.
Everyone loves to see their favorite toons hook up.
26I'd have to solve those riddles later, when I got home. They were easi-est to solve with the whole team, downloading tons of d?jinshi files andscouring them for answers to the puzzles.
I'd just finished scrap-booking all the clues when the bell rang and webegan our escape. I surreptitiously slid the gravel down the side of myshort boots — ankle-high Blundstones from Australia, great for runningand climbing, and the easy slip-on/slip-off laceless design makes themconvenient at the never-ending metal-detectors that are everywherenow.
We also had to evade physical surveillance, of course, but that getseasier every time they add a new layer of physical snoopery — all thebells and whistles lull our beloved faculty into a totally false sense of se-curity. We surfed the crowd down the hallways, heading for my favoriteside-exit. We were halfway along when Darryl hissed, "Crap! I forgot,I've got a library book in my bag.""You're kidding me," I said, and hauled him into the next bathroom wepassed. Library books are bad news. Every one of them has an arphid —Radio Frequency ID tag — glued into its binding, which makes it pos-sible for the librarians to check out the books by waving them over areader, and lets a library shelf tell you if any of the books on it are out ofplace.
But it also lets the school track where you are at all times. It was anoth-er of those legal loopholes: the courts wouldn't let the schools track uswith arphids, but they could track library books, and use the school re-cords to tell them who was likely to be carrying which library book.
I had a little Faraday pouch in my bag — these are little wallets linedwith a mesh of copper wires that effectively block radio energy, silencingarphids. But the pouches were made for neutralizing ID cards and toll-book transponders, not books like —"Introduction to Physics?" I groaned. The book was the size of adictionary.
This chapter is dedicated to Amazon.com, the largest Internet booksellerin the world. Amazon is amazing — a "store" where you can get prac-tically any book ever published (along with practically everything else,from laptops to cheese-graters), where they've elevated recommendationsto a high art, where they allow customers to directly communicate witheach other, where they are constantly invented new and better ways ofconnecting books with readers. Amazon has always treated me like gold— the founder, Jeff Bezos, even posted a reader-review for my first nov-el! — and I shop there like crazy (looking at my spreadsheets, it appearsthat I buy something from Amazon approximately every six days).
Amazon's in the process of reinventing what it means to be a bookstorein the twenty-first century and I can't think of a better group of peopleto be facing down that thorny set of problems.
Amazon"I'm thinking of majoring in physics when I go to Berkeley," Darrylsaid. His dad taught at the University of California at Berkeley, whichmeant he'd get free tuition when he went. And there'd never been anyquestion in Darryl's household about whether he'd go.
Fine, but couldn't you research it online?"My dad said I should read it. Besides, I didn't plan on committing anycrimes today."Skipping school isn't a crime. It's an infraction. They're totallydifferent."What are we going to do, Marcus?"Well, I can't hide it, so I'm going to have to nuke it. Killing arphids isa dark art. No merchant wants malicious customers going for a walkaround the shop-floor and leaving behind a bunch of lobotomized mer-chandise that is missing its invisible bar-code, so the manufacturers have28refused to implement a "kill signal" that you can radio to an arphid to getit to switch off. You can reprogram arphids with the right box, but I hatedoing that to library books. It's not exactly tearing pages out of a book,but it's still bad, since a book with a reprogrammed arphid can't beshelved and can't be found. It just becomes a needle in a haystack.
That left me with only one option: nuking the thing. Literally. 30seconds in a microwave will do in pretty much every arphid on the mar-ket. And because the arphid wouldn't answer at all when D checked itback in at the library, they'd just print a fresh one for it and recode itwith the book's catalog info, and it would end up clean and neat back onits shelf.
All we needed was a microwave.
Give it another two minutes and the teacher's lounge will be empty, Isaid.
Darryl grabbed his book at headed for the door. "Forget it, no way. I'mgoing to class."I snagged his elbow and dragged him back. "Come on, D, easy now.
It'll be fine.""The teacher's lounge? Maybe you weren't listening, Marcus. If I getbusted just once more, I am expelled. You hear that? Expelled.""You won't get caught," I said. The one place a teacher wouldn't beafter this period was the lounge. "We'll go in the back way." The loungehad a little kitchenette off to one side, with its own entrance for teacherswho just wanted to pop in and get a cup of joe. The microwave — whichalways reeked of popcorn and spilled soup — was right in there, on topof the miniature fridge.
Darryl groaned. I thought fast. "Look, the bell's already rung. if you goto study hall now, you'll get a late-slip. Better not to show at all at thispoint. I can infiltrate and exfiltrate any room on this campus, D. You'veseen me do it. I'll keep you safe, bro."He groaned again. That was one of Darryl's tells: once he starts groan-ing, he's ready to give in.
Let's roll, I said, and we took off.
It was flawless. We skirted the classrooms, took the back stairs into thebasement, and came up the front stairs right in front of the teachers'
lounge. Not a sound came from the door, and I quietly turned the knoband dragged Darryl in before silently closing the door.
29The book just barely fit in the microwave, which was looking even lesssanitary than it had the last time I'd popped in here to use it. I conscien-tiously wrapped it in paper towels before I set it down. "Man, teachersare pigs," I hissed. Darryl, white faced and tense, said nothing.
The arphid died in a shower of sparks, which was really quite lovely(though not nearly as pretty as the effect you get when you nuke afrozen grape, which has to be seen to be believed).
Now, to exfiltrate the campus in perfect anonymity and make ourescape.
Darryl opened the door and began to move out, me on his heels. Asecond later, he was standing on my toes, elbows jammed into my chest,as he tried to back-pedal into the closet-sized kitchen we'd just left.
Get back, he whispered urgently. "Quick — it's Charles!"Charles Walker and I don't get along. We're in the same grade, andwe've known each other as long as I've known Darryl, but that's wherethe resemblance ends. Charles has always been big for his age, and nowthat he's playing football and on the juice, he's even bigger. He's got an-ger management problems — I lost a milk-tooth to him in the thirdgrade, and he's managed to keep from getting in trouble over them bybecoming the most active snitch in school.
It's a bad combination, a bully who also snitches, taking great pleasurein going to the teachers with whatever infractions he's found. Bensonloved Charles. Charles liked to let on that he had some kind of unspe-cified bladder problem, which gave him a ready-made excuse to prowlthe hallways at Chavez, looking for people to fink on.
The last time Charles had caught some dirt on me, it had ended withme giving up LARPing. I had no intention of being caught by him again.
What's he doing?"He's coming this way is what he's doing, Darryl said. He wasshaking.
OK, I said. "OK, time for emergency countermeasures." I got myphone out. I'd planned this well in advance. Charles would never get meagain. I emailed my server at home, and it got into motion.
A few seconds later, Charles's phone spazzed out spectacularly. I'dhad tens of thousands of simultaneous random calls and text messagessent to it, causing every chirp and ring it had to go off and keep on goingoff. The attack was accomplished by means of a botnet, and for that I feltbad, but it was in the service of a good cause.
30Botnets are where infected computers spend their afterlives. When youget a worm or a virus, your computer sends a message to a chat channelon IRC — the Internet Relay Chat. That message tells the botmaster —the guy who deployed the worm — that the computers in there ready todo his bidding. Botnets are supremely powerful, since they can comprisethousands, even hundreds of thousands of computers, scattered all overthe Internet, connected to juicy high-speed connections and running onfast home PCs. Those PCs normally function on behalf of their owners,but when the botmaster calls them, they rise like zombies to do hisbidding.
There are so many infected PCs on the Internet that the price of hiringan hour or two on a botnet has crashed. Mostly these things work forspammers as cheap, distributed spambots, filling your mailbox withcome-ons for boner-pills or with new viruses that can infect you and re-cruit your machine to join the botnet.
I'd just rented 10 seconds' time on three thousand PCs and had each ofthem send a text message or voice-over-IP call to Charles's phone, whosenumber I'd extracted from a sticky note on Benson's desk during onefateful office-visit.
Needless to say, Charles's phone was not equipped to handle this. Firstthe SMSes filled the memory on his phone, causing it to start choking onthe routine operations it needed to do things like manage the ringer andlog all those incoming calls' bogus return numbers (did you know thatit's really easy to fake the return number on a caller ID? There are aboutfifty ways of doing it — just google "spoof caller id").
Charles stared at it dumbfounded, and jabbed at it furiously, his thickeyebrows knotting and wiggling as he struggled with the demons thathad possessed his most personal of devices. The plan was working sofar, but he wasn't doing what he was supposed to be doing next — hewas supposed to go find some place to sit down and try to figure outhow to get his phone back.
Darryl shook me by the shoulder, and I pulled my eye away from thecrack in the door.
What's he doing? Darryl whispered.
I totaled his phone, but he's just staring at it now instead of movingon. It wasn't going to be easy to reboot that thing. Once the memory wastotally filled, it would have a hard time loading the code it needed to de-lete the bogus messages — and there was no bulk-erase for texts on hisphone, so he'd have to manually delete all of the thousands of messages.
31Darryl shoved me back and stuck his eye up to the door. A momentlater, his shoulders started to shake. I got scared, thinking he was panick-ing, but when he pulled back, I saw that he was laughing so hard thattears were streaming down his cheeks.
Galvez just totally busted him for being in the halls during class andfor having his phone out — you should have seen her tear into him. Shewas really enjoying it.We shook hands solemnly and snuck back out of the corridor, downthe stairs, around the back, out the door, past the fence and out into theglorious sunlight of afternoon in the Mission. Valencia Street had neverlooked so good. I checked my watch and yelped.
Let's move! The rest of the gang is meeting us at the cable-cars intwenty minutes!Van spotted us first. She was blending in with a group of Korean tour-ists, which is one of her favorite ways of camouflaging herself when she'sditching school. Ever since the truancy moblog went live, our world isfull of nosy shopkeepers and pecksniffs who take it upon themselves tosnap our piccies and put them on the net where they can be perused byschool administrators.
She came out of the crowd and bounded toward us. Darryl has had athing for Van since forever, and she's sweet enough to pretend shedoesn't know it. She gave me a hug and then moved onto Darryl, givinghim a quick sisterly kiss on the cheek that made him go red to the tops ofhis ears.
The two of them made a funny pair: Darryl is a little on the heavy side,though he wears it well, and he's got a kind of pink complexion that goesred in the cheeks whenever he runs or gets excited. He's been able togrow a beard since we were 14, but thankfully he started shaving after abrief period known to our gang as "the Lincoln years." And he's tall.
Very, very tall. Like basketball player tall.
Meanwhile, Van is half a head shorter than me, and skinny, withstraight black hair that she wears in crazy, elaborate braids that she re-searches on the net. She's got pretty coppery skin and dark eyes, and sheloves big glass rings the size of radishes, which click and clack togetherwhen she dances.
Where's Jolu? she said.
32"How are you, Van?" Darryl asked in a choked voice. He always ran astep behind the conversation when it came to Van.
I'm great, D. How's your every little thing? Oh, she was a bad, badperson. Darryl nearly fainted.
Jolu saved him from social disgrace by showing up just then, in anoversize leather baseball jacket, sharp sneakers, and a meshback cap ad-vertising our favorite Mexican masked wrestler, El Santo Junior. Jolu isJose Luis Torrez, the completing member of our foursome. He went to asuper-strict Catholic school in the Outer Richmond, so it wasn't easy forhim to get out. But he always did: no one exfiltrated like our Jolu. Heliked his jacket because it hung down low — which was pretty stylish inparts of the city — and covered up all his Catholic school crap, whichwas like a bulls-eye for nosy jerks with the truancy moblog bookmarkedon their phones.
Who's ready to go? I asked, once we'd all said hello. I pulled out myphone and showed them the map I'd downloaded to it on the BART.
Near as I can work out, we wanna go up to the Nikko again, then oneblock past it to O'Farrell, then left up toward Van Ness. Somewhere inthere we should find the wireless signal.Van made a face. "That's a nasty part of the Tenderloin." I couldn't ar-gue with her. That part of San Francisco is one of the weird bits — yougo in through the Hilton's front entrance and it's all touristy stuff like thecable-car turnaround and family restaurants. Go through to the otherside and you're in the 'Loin, where every tracked out transvestite hooker,hard-case pimp, hissing drug dealer and cracked up homeless person intown was concentrated. What they bought and sold, none of us were oldenough to be a part of (though there were plenty of hookers our age ply-ing their trade in the 'Loin.)"Look on the bright side," I said. "The only time you want to go uparound there is broad daylight. None of the other players are going to gonear it until tomorrow at the earliest. This is what we in the ARG busi-ness call a monster head start."Jolu grinned at me. "You make it sound like a good thing," he said.
Beats eating uni, I said.
We going to talk or we going to win? Van said. After me, she washands-down the most hardcore player in our group. She took winningvery, very seriously.
33We struck out, four good friends, on our way to decode a clue, win thegame — and lose everything we cared about, forever.
The physical component of today's clue was a set of GPS coordinates— there were coordinates for all the major cities where Harajuku FunMadness was played — where we'd find a WiFi access-point's signal.
That signal was being deliberately jammed by another, nearby WiFipoint that was hidden so that it couldn't be spotted by conventionalwifinders, little key-fobs that told you when you were within range ofsomeone's open access-point, which you could use for free.
We'd have to track down the location of the "hidden" access point bymeasuring the strength of the "visible" one, finding the spot where it wasmost mysteriously weakest. There we'd find another clue — last time ithad been in the special of the day at Anzu, the swanky sushi restaurantin the Nikko hotel in the Tenderloin. The Nikko was owned by JapanAirlines, one of Harajuku Fun Madness's sponsors, and the staff had allmade a big fuss over us when we finally tracked down the clue. They'dgiven us bowls of miso soup and made us try uni, which is sushi madefrom sea urchin, with the texture of very runny cheese and a smell likevery runny dog-droppings. But it tasted really good. Or so Darryl toldme. I wasn't going to eat that stuff.
I picked up the WiFi signal with my phone's wifinder about threeblocks up O'Farrell, just before Hyde Street, in front of a dodgy "AsianMassage Parlor" with a red blinking CLOSED sign in the window. Thenetwork's name was HarajukuFM, so we knew we had the right spot.
If it's in there, I'm not going, Darryl said.
You all got your wifinders? I said.
Darryl and Van had phones with built-in wifinders, while Jolu, beingtoo cool to carry a phone bigger than his pinky finger, had a separatelittle directional fob.
OK, fan out and see what we see. You're looking for a sharp drop offin the signal that gets worse the more you move along it.I took a step backward and ended up standing on someone's toes. Afemale voice said "oof" and I spun around, worried that some crack-howas going to stab me for breaking her heels.
Instead, I found myself face to face with another kid my age. She had ashock of bright pink hair and a sharp, rodent-like face, with bigsunglasses that were practically air-force goggles. She was dressed in34striped tights beneath a black granny dress, with lots of little Japanesedecorer toys safety pinned to it — anime characters, old world leaders,emblems from foreign soda-pop.
She held up a camera and snapped a picture of me and my crew.
Cheese, she said. "You're on candid snitch-cam.""No way," I said. "You wouldn't —""I will," she said. "I will send this photo to truant watch in thirtyseconds unless you four back off from this clue and let me and myfriends here run it down. You can come back in one hour and it'll be allyours. I think that's more than fair."I looked behind her and noticed three other girls in similar garb — onewith blue hair, one with green, and one with purple. "Who are you sup-posed to be, the Popsicle Squad?""We're the team that's going to kick your team's ass at Harajuku FunMadness," she said. "And I'm the one who's right this second about to up-load your photo and get you in so much trouble —"Behind me I felt Van start forward. Her all-girls school was notoriousfor its brawls, and I was pretty sure she was ready to knock this chick'sblock off.
Then the world changed forever.
We felt it first, that sickening lurch of the cement under your feet thatevery Californian knows instinctively — earthquake. My first inclination,as always, was to get away: "when in trouble or in doubt, run in circles,scream and shout." But the fact was, we were already in the safest placewe could be, not in a building that could fall in on us, not out toward themiddle of the road where bits of falling mortice could brain us.
Earthquakes are eerily quiet — at first, anyway — but this wasn'tquiet. This was loud, an incredible roaring sound that was louder thananything I'd ever heard before. The sound was so punishing it drove meto my knees, and I wasn't the only one. Darryl shook my arm and poin-ted over the buildings and we saw it then: a huge black cloud rising fromthe northeast, from the direction of the Bay.
There was another rumble, and the cloud of smoke spread out, thatspreading black shape we'd all grown up seeing in movies. Someone hadjust blown up something, in a big way.
There were more rumbles and more tremors. Heads appeared at win-dows up and down the street. We all looked at the mushroom cloud insilence.
Then the sirens started.
I'd heard sirens like these before — they test the civil defense sirens atnoon on Tuesdays. But I'd only heard them go off unscheduled in oldwar movies and video games, the kind where someone is bombingsomeone else from above. Air raid sirens. The wooooooo sound made itall less real.
Report to shelters immediately. It was like the voice of God, comingfrom all places at once. There were speakers on some of the electricpoles, something I'd never noticed before, and they'd all switched on atonce.
Report to shelters immediately. Shelters? We looked at each other inconfusion. What shelters? The cloud was rising steadily, spreading out.
Was it nuclear? Were we breathing in our last breaths?
The girl with the pink hair grabbed her friends and they tore assdownhill, back toward the BART station and the foot of the hills.
REPORT TO SHELTERS IMMEDIATELY. There was screaming now,and a lot of running around. Tourists — you can always spot the tourists,they're the ones who think CALIFORNIA = WARM and spend their SanFrancisco holidays freezing in shorts and t-shirts — scattered in everydirection.
We should go! Darryl hollered in my ear, just barely audible over theshrieking of the sirens, which had been joined by traditional policesirens. A dozen SFPD cruisers screamed past us.
REPORT TO SHELTERS IMMEDIATELY."Down to the BART station, I hollered. My friends nodded. We closedranks and began to move quickly downhill.
This chapter is dedicated to Borderlands Books, San Francisco's magni-ficent independent science fiction bookstore. Borderlands is basically loc-ated across the street from the fictional Cesar Chavez High depicted inLittle Brother, and it's not just notorious for its brilliant events, sign-ings, book clubs and such, but also for its amazing hairless Egyptian cat,Ripley, who likes to perch like a buzzing gargoyle on the computer at thefront of the store. Borderlands is about the friendliest bookstore youcould ask for, filled with comfy places to sit and read, and staffed by in-credibly knowledgeable clerks who know everything there is to knowabout science fiction. Even better, they've always been willing to takeorders for my book (by net or phone) and hold them for me to sign whenI drop into the store, then they ship them within the US for free!
Borderlands Books: 866 Valencia Ave, San Francisco CA USA 94110+1 888 893 4008We passed a lot of people in the road on the way to the Powell StreetBART. They were running or walking, white-faced and silent or shoutingand panicked. Homeless people cowered in doorways and watched it all,while a tall black tranny hooker shouted at two mustached young menabout something.
The closer we got to the BART, the worse the press of bodies became.
By the time we reached the stairway down into the station, it was a mob-scene, a huge brawl of people trying to crowd their way down a narrowstaircase. I had my face crushed up against someone's back, andsomeone else was pressed into my back.
Darryl was still beside me — he was big enough that he was hard toshove, and Jolu was right behind him, kind of hanging on to his waist. Ispied Vanessa a few yards away, trapped by more people.
Screw you! I heard Van yell behind me. "Pervert! Get your hands offof me!"37I strained around against the crowd and saw Van looking with disgustat an older guy in a nice suit who was kind of smirking at her. She wasdigging in her purse and I knew what she was digging for.
Don't mace him! I shouted over the din. "You'll get us all too."At the mention of the word mace, the guy looked scared and kind ofmelted back, though the crowd kept him moving forward. Up ahead, Isaw someone, a middle-aged lady in a hippie dress, falter and fall. Shescreamed as she went down, and I saw her thrashing to get up, but shecouldn't, the crowd's pressure was too strong. As I neared her, I bent tohelp her up, and was nearly knocked over her. I ended up stepping onher stomach as the crowd pushed me past her, but by then I don't thinkshe was feeling anything.
I was as scared as I'd ever been. There was screaming everywherenow, and more bodies on the floor, and the press from behind was as re-lentless as a bulldozer. It was all I could do to keep on my feet.
We were in the open concourse where the turnstiles were. It washardly any better here — the enclosed space sent the voices around usechoing back in a roar that made my head ring, and the smell and feelingof all those bodies made me feel a claustrophobia I'd never known I wasprone to.
People were still cramming down the stairs, and more were squeezingpast the turnstiles and down the escalators onto the platforms, but it wasclear to me that this wasn't going to have a happy ending.
Want to take our chances up top? I said to Darryl.
Yes, hell yes, he said. "This is vicious."I looked to Vanessa — there was no way she'd hear me. I managed toget my phone out and I texted her.
>
We're getting out of hereI saw her feel the vibe from her phone, then look down at it and thenback at me and nod vigorously. Darryl, meanwhile, had clued Jolu in.
What's the plan? Darryl shouted in my ear.
We're going to have to go back! I shouted back, pointing at the re-morseless crush of bodies.
It's impossible! he said.
It's just going to get more impossible the longer we wait!38He shrugged. Van worked her way over to me and grabbed hold ofmy wrist. I took Darryl and Darryl took Jolu by the other hand and wepushed out.
It wasn't easy. We moved about three inches a minute at first, thenslowed down even more when we reached the stairway. The people wepassed were none too happy about us shoving them out of the way,either. A couple people swore at us and there was a guy who looked likehe'd have punched me if he'd been able to get his arms loose. We passedthree more crushed people beneath us, but there was no way I couldhave helped them. By that point, I wasn't even thinking of helping any-one. All I could think of was finding the spaces in front of us to move in-to, of Darryl's mighty straining on my wrist, of my death-grip on Van be-hind me.
We popped free like Champagne corks an eternity later, blinking inthe grey smoky light. The air raid sirens were still blaring, and the soundof emergency vehicles' sirens as they tore down Market Street was evenlouder. There was almost no one on the streets anymore — just thepeople trying hopelessly to get underground. A lot of them were crying.
I spotted a bunch of empty benches — usually staked out by skanky wi-nos — and pointed toward them.
We moved for them, the sirens and the smoke making us duck andhunch our shoulders. We got as far as the benches before Darryl fellforward.
We all yelled and Vanessa grabbed him and turned him over. The sideof his shirt was stained red, and the stain was spreading. She tugged hisshirt up and revealed a long, deep cut in his pudgy side.
Someone freaking stabbed him in the crowd, Jolu said, his handsclenching into fists. "Christ, that's vicious."Darryl groaned and looked at us, then down at his side, then hegroaned and his head went back again.
Vanessa took off her jean jacket and then pulled off the cotton hoodieshe was wearing underneath it. She wadded it up and pressed it toDarryl's side. "Take his head," she said to me. "Keep it elevated." To Jolushe said, "Get his feet up — roll up your coat or something." Jolu movedquickly. Vanessa's mother is a nurse and she'd had first aid trainingevery summer at camp. She loved to watch people in movies get theirfirst aid wrong and make fun of them. I was so glad to have her with us.
39We sat there for a long time, holding the hoodie to Darryl's side. Hekept insisting that he was fine and that we should let him up, and Vankept telling him to shut up and lie still before she kicked his ass.
What about calling 911? Jolu said.
I felt like an idiot. I whipped my phone out and punched 911. Thesound I got wasn't even a busy signal — it was like a whimper of painfrom the phone system. You don't get sounds like that unless there'sthree million people all dialing the same number at once. Who needs bot-nets when you've got terrorists?
What about Wikipedia? Jolu said.
No phone, no data, I said.
What about them? Darryl said, and pointed at the street. I lookedwhere he was pointing, thinking I'd see a cop or an paramedic, but therewas no one there.
It's OK buddy, you just rest, I said.
No, you idiot, what about them, the cops in the cars? There!He was right. Every five seconds, a cop car, an ambulance or afiretruck zoomed past. They could get us some help. I was such an idiot.
Come on, then, I said, "let's get you where they can see you and flagone down."Vanessa didn't like it, but I figured a cop wasn't going to stop for a kidwaving his hat in the street, not that day. They just might stop if theysaw Darryl bleeding there, though. I argued briefly with her and Darrylsettled it by lurching to his feet and dragging himself down toward Mar-ket Street.
The first vehicle that screamed past — an ambulance — didn't evenslow down. Neither did the cop car that went past, nor the firetruck, northe next three cop-cars. Darryl wasn't in good shape — he was white-faced and panting. Van's sweater was soaked in blood.
I was sick of cars driving right past me. The next time a car appeareddown Market Street, I stepped right out into the road, waving my armsover my head, shouting "STOP." The car slewed to a stop and only thendid I notice that it wasn't a cop car, ambulance or fire-engine.
It was a military-looking Jeep, like an armored Hummer, only it didn'thave any military insignia on it. The car skidded to a stop just in front ofme, and I jumped back and lost my balance and ended up on the road. Ifelt the doors open near me, and then saw a confusion of booted feet40moving close by. I looked up and saw a bunch of military-looking guysin coveralls, holding big, bulky rifles and wearing hooded gas maskswith tinted face-plates.
I barely had time to register them before those rifles were pointed atme. I'd never looked down the barrel of a gun before, but everythingyou've heard about the experience is true. You freeze where you are,time stops, and your heart thunders in your ears. I opened my mouth,then shut it, then, very slowly, I held my hands up in front of me.
The faceless, eyeless armed man above me kept his gun very level. Ididn't even breathe. Van was screaming something and Jolu was shout-ing and I looked at them for a second and that was when someone put acoarse sack over my head and cinched it tight around my windpipe, soquick and so fiercely I barely had time to gasp before it was locked onme. I was pushed roughly but dispassionately onto my stomach andsomething went twice around my wrists and then tightened up as well,feeling like baling wire and biting cruelly. I cried out and my own voicewas muffled by the hood.
I was in total darkness now and I strained my ears to hear what wasgoing on with my friends. I heard them shouting through the mufflingcanvas of the bag, and then I was being impersonally hauled to my feetby my wrists, my arms wrenched up behind my back, my shouldersscreaming.
I stumbled some, then a hand pushed my head down and I was insidethe Hummer. More bodies were roughly shoved in beside me.
Guys? I shouted, and earned a hard thump on my head for mytrouble. I heard Jolu respond, then felt the thump he was dealt, too. Myhead rang like a gong.
Hey, I said to the soldiers. "Hey, listen! We're just high school stu-dents. I wanted to flag you down because my friend was bleeding.
Someone stabbed him." I had no idea how much of this was making itthrough the muffling bag. I kept talking. "Listen — this is some kind ofmisunderstanding. We've got to get my friend to a hospital —"Someone went upside my head again. It felt like they used a baton orsomething — it was harder than anyone had ever hit me in the head be-fore. My eyes swam and watered and I literally couldn't breathe throughthe pain. A moment later, I caught my breath, but I didn't say anything.
I'd learned my lesson.
41Who were these clowns? They weren't wearing insignia. Maybe theywere terrorists! I'd never really believed in terrorists before — I mean, Iknew that in the abstract there were terrorists somewhere in the world,but they didn't really represent any risk to me. There were millions ofways that the world could kill me — starting with getting run down by adrunk burning his way down Valencia — that were infinitely more likelyand immediate than terrorists. Terrorists killed a lot fewer people thanbathroom falls and accidental electrocutions. Worrying about them al-ways struck me as about as useful as worrying about getting hit bylightning.
Sitting in the back of that Hummer, my head in a hood, my handslashed behind my back, lurching back and forth while the bruisesswelled up on my head, terrorism suddenly felt a lot riskier.
The car rocked back and forth and tipped uphill. I gathered we wereheaded over Nob Hill, and from the angle, it seemed we were taking oneof the steeper routes — I guessed Powell Street.
Now we were descending just as steeply. If my mental map was right,we were heading down to Fisherman's Wharf. You could get on a boatthere, get away. That fit with the terrorism hypothesis. Why the hellwould terrorists kidnap a bunch of high school students?
We rocked to a stop still on a downslope. The engine died and then thedoors swung open. Someone dragged me by my arms out onto the road,then shoved me, stumbling, down a paved road. A few seconds later, Itripped over a steel staircase, bashing my shins. The hands behind megave me another shove. I went up the stairs cautiously, not able to usemy hands. I got up the third step and reached for the fourth, but it wasn'tthere. I nearly fell again, but new hands grabbed me from in front anddragged me down a steel floor and then forced me to my knees andlocked my hands to something behind me.
More movement, and the sense of bodies being shackled in alongsideof me. Groans and muffled sounds. Laughter. Then a long, timelesseternity in the muffled gloom, breathing my own breath, hearing myown breath in my ears.
I actually managed a kind of sleep there, kneeling with the circulationcut off to my legs, my head in canvas twilight. My body had squirted ayear's supply of adrenalin into my bloodstream in the space of 30minutes, and while that stuff can give you the strength to lift cars off42your loved ones and leap over tall buildings, the payback's always abitch.
I woke up to someone pulling the hood off my head. They wereneither rough nor careful — just… impersonal. Like someone atMcDonald's putting together burgers.
The light in the room was so bright I had to squeeze my eyes shut, butslowly I was able to open them to slits, then cracks, then all the way andlook around.
We were all in the back of a truck, a big 16-wheeler. I could see thewheel-wells at regular intervals down the length. But the back of thistruck had been turned into some kind of mobile command-post/jail.
Steel desks lined the walls with banks of slick flat-panel displays climb-ing above them on articulated arms that let them be repositioned in ahalo around the operators. Each desk had a gorgeous office-chair in frontof it, festooned with user-interface knobs for adjusting every millimeterof the sitting surface, as well as height, pitch and yaw.
Then there was the jail part — at the front of the truck, furthest awayfrom the doors, there were steel rails bolted into the sides of the vehicle,and attached to these steel rails were the prisoners.
I spotted Van and Jolu right away. Darryl might have been in the re-maining dozen shackled up back here, but it was impossible to say —many of them were slumped over and blocking my view. It stank ofsweat and fear back there.
Vanessa looked at me and bit her lip. She was scared. So was I. So wasJolu, his eyes rolling crazily in their sockets, the whites showing. I wasscared. What's more, I had to piss like a race-horse.
I looked around for our captors. I'd avoided looking at them up untilnow, the same way you don't look into the dark of a closet where yourmind has conjured up a boogey-man. You don't want to know if you'reright.
But I had to get a better look at these jerks who'd kidnapped us. If theywere terrorists, I wanted to know. I didn't know what a terrorist lookedlike, though TV shows had done their best to convince me that they werebrown Arabs with big beards and knit caps and loose cotton dresses thathung down to their ankles.
Not so our captors. They could have been half-time-show cheerleaderson the Super Bowl. They looked American in a way I couldn't exactlydefine. Good jaw-lines, short, neat haircuts that weren't quite military.
43They came in white and brown, male and female, and smiled freely atone another as they sat down at the other end of the truck, joking anddrinking coffees out of go-cups. These weren't Ay-rabs from Afgh-anistan: they looked like tourists from Nebraska.
I stared at one, a young white woman with brown hair who barelylooked older than me, kind of cute in a scary office-power-suit way. Ifyou stare at someone long enough, they'll eventually look back at you.
She did, and her face slammed into a totally different configuration, dis-passionate, even robotic. The smile vanished in an instant.
Hey, I said. "Look, I don't understand what's going on here, but Ireally need to take a leak, you know?"She looked right through me as if she hadn't heard.
I'm serious, if I don't get to a can soon, I'm going to have an ugly acci-dent. It's going to get pretty smelly back here, you know?She turned to her colleagues, a little huddle of three of them, and theyheld a low conversation I couldn't hear over the fans from thecomputers.
She turned back to me. "Hold it for another ten minutes, then you'lleach get a piss-call.""I don't think I've got another ten minutes in me," I said, letting a littlemore urgency than I was really feeling creep into my voice. "Seriously,lady, it's now or never."She shook her head and looked at me like I was some kind of patheticloser. She and her friends conferred some more, then another one cameforward. He was older, in his early thirties, and pretty big across theshoulders, like he worked out. He looked like he was Chinese or Korean— even Van can't tell the difference sometimes — but with that bearingthat said American in a way I couldn't put my finger on.
He pulled his sports-coat aside to let me see the hardware strappedthere: I recognized a pistol, a tazer and a can of either mace or pepper-spray before he let it fall again.
No trouble, he said.
None, I agreed.
He touched something at his belt and the shackles behind me let go,my arms dropping suddenly behind me. It was like he was wearingBatman's utility belt — wireless remotes for shackles! I guessed it madesense, though: you wouldn't want to lean over your prisoners with all44that deadly hardware at their eye-level — they might grab your gun withtheir teeth and pull the trigger with their tongues or something.
My hands were still lashed together behind me by the plastic strap-ping, and now that I wasn't supported by the shackles, I found that mylegs had turned into lumps of cork while I was stuck in one position.
Long story short, I basically fell onto my face and kicked my legs weaklyas they went pins-and-needles, trying to get them under me so I couldrock up to my feet.
The guy jerked me to my feet and I clown-walked to the very back ofthe truck, to a little boxed-in porta-john there. I tried to spot Darryl onthe way back, but he could have been any of the five or six slumpedpeople. Or none of them.
In you go, the guy said.
I jerked my wrists. "Take these off, please?" My fingers felt like purplesausages from the hours of bondage in the plastic cuffs.
The guy didn't move.
Look, I said, trying not to sound sarcastic or angry (it wasn't easy).
Look. You either cut my wrists free or you're going to have to aim forme. A toilet visit is not a hands-free experience. Someone in the trucksniggered. The guy didn't like me, I could tell from the way his jawmuscles ground around. Man, these people were wired tight.
He reached down to his belt and came up with a very nice set of multi-pliers. He flicked out a wicked-looking knife and sliced through theplastic cuffs and my hands were my own again.
Thanks, I said.
He shoved me into the bathroom. My hands were useless, like lumpsof clay on the ends of my wrists. As I wiggled my fingers limply, theytingled, then the tingling turned to a burning feeling that almost mademe cry out. I put the seat down, dropped my pants and sat down. Ididn't trust myself to stay on my feet.
As my bladder cut loose, so did my eyes. I wept, crying silently androcking back and forth while the tears and snot ran down my face. It wasall I could do to keep from sobbing — I covered my mouth and held thesounds in. I didn't want to give them the satisfaction.
Finally, I was peed out and cried out and the guy was pounding on thedoor. I cleaned my face as best as I could with wads of toilet paper, stuckit all down the john and flushed, then looked around for a sink but onlyfound a pump-bottle of heavy-duty hand-sanitizer covered in small-45print lists of the bio-agents it worked on. I rubbed some into my handsand stepped out of the john.
What were you doing in there? the guy said.
Using the facilities, I said. He turned me around and grabbed myhands and I felt a new pair of plastic cuffs go around them. My wristshad swollen since the last pair had come off and the new ones bit cruellyinto my tender skin, but I refused to give him the satisfaction of cryingout.
He shackled me back to my spot and grabbed the next person down,who, I saw now, was Jolu, his face puffy and an ugly bruise on his cheek.
Are you OK? I asked him, and my friend with the utility belt ab-ruptly put his hand on my forehead and shoved hard, bouncing the backof my head off the truck's metal wall with a sound like a clock strikingone. "No talking," he said as I struggled to refocus my eyes.
I didn't like these people. I decided right then that they would pay aprice for all this.
One by one, all the prisoners went to the can, and came back, andwhen they were done, my guard went back to his friends and had anoth-er cup of coffee — they were drinking out of a big cardboard urn of Star-bucks, I saw — and they had an indistinct conversation that involved afair bit of laughter.
Then the door at the back of the truck opened and there was fresh air,not smoky the way it had been before, but tinged with ozone. In the sliceof outdoors I saw before the door closed, I caught that it was dark out,and raining, with one of those San Francisco drizzles that's part mist.
The man who came in was wearing a military uniform. A US militaryuniform. He saluted the people in the truck and they saluted him backand that's when I knew that I wasn't a prisoner of some terrorists — Iwas a prisoner of the United States of America.
They set up a little screen at the end of the truck and then came for usone at a time, unshackling us and leading us to the back of the truck. Asclose as I could work it — counting seconds off in my head, one hippo-potami, two hippopotami — the interviews lasted about seven minuteseach. My head throbbed with dehydration and caffeine withdrawal.
I was third, brought back by the woman with the severe haircut. Upclose, she looked tired, with bags under her eyes and grim lines at thecorners of her mouth.
46"Thanks," I said, automatically, as she unlocked me with a remote andthen dragged me to my feet. I hated myself for the automatic politeness,but it had been drilled into me.
She didn't twitch a muscle. I went ahead of her to the back of the truckand behind the screen. There was a single folding chair and I sat in it.
Two of them — Severe Haircut woman and utility belt man — looked atme from their ergonomic super-chairs.
They had a little table between them with the contents of my walletand backpack spread out on it.
Hello, Marcus, Severe Haircut woman said. "We have some ques-tions for you.""Am I under arrest?" I asked. This wasn't an idle question. If you're notunder arrest, there are limits on what the cops can and can't do to you.
For starters, they can't hold you forever without arresting you, givingyou a phone call, and letting you talk to a lawyer. And hoo-boy, was Iever going to talk to a lawyer.
What's this for? she said, holding up my phone. The screen wasshowing the error message you got if you kept trying to get into its datawithout giving the right password. It was a bit of a rude message — ananimated hand giving a certain universally recognized gesture — be-cause I liked to customize my gear.
Am I under arrest? I repeated. They can't make you answer anyquestions if you're not under arrest, and when you ask if you're underarrest, they have to answer you. It's the rules.
You're being detained by the Department of Homeland Security, thewoman snapped.
Am I under arrest?"You're going to be more cooperative, Marcus, starting right now. Shedidn't say, "or else," but it was implied.
I would like to contact an attorney, I said. "I would like to knowwhat I've been charged with. I would like to see some form of identifica-tion from both of you."The two agents exchanged looks.
I think you should really reconsider your approach to this situation,Severe Haircut woman said. "I think you should do that right now. Wefound a number of suspicious devices on your person. We found youand your confederates near the site of the worst terrorist attack this47country has ever seen. Put those two facts together and things don't lookvery good for you, Marcus. You can cooperate, or you can be very, verysorry. Now, what is this for?""You think I'm a terrorist? I'm seventeen years old!""Just the right age — Al Qaeda loves recruiting impressionable, ideal-istic kids. We googled you, you know. You've posted a lot of very uglystuff on the public Internet.""I would like to speak to an attorney," I said.
Severe haircut lady looked at me like I was a bug. "You're under themistaken impression that you've been picked up by the police for acrime. You need to get past that. You are being detained as a potentialenemy combatant by the government of the United States. If I were you,I'd be thinking very hard about how to convince us that you are not anenemy combatant. Very hard. Because there are dark holes that enemycombatants can disappear into, very dark deep holes, holes where youcan just vanish. Forever. Are you listening to me young man? I want youto unlock this phone and then decrypt the files in its memory. I want youto account for yourself: why were you out on the street? What do youknow about the attack on this city?""I'm not going to unlock my phone for you," I said, indignant. Myphone's memory had all kinds of private stuff on it: photos, emails, littlehacks and mods I'd installed. "That's private stuff.""What have you got to hide?""I've got the right to my privacy," I said. "And I want to speak to anattorney.""This is your last chance, kid. Honest people don't have anything tohide.""I want to speak to an attorney." My parents would pay for it. All theFAQs on getting arrested were clear on this point. Just keep asking to seean attorney, no matter what they say or do. There's no good that comesof talking to the cops without your lawyer present. These two said theyweren't cops, but if this wasn't an arrest, what was it?
In hindsight, maybe I should have unlocked my phone for them.
This chapter is dedicated to Barnes and Noble, a US national chain ofbookstores. As America's mom-and-pop bookstores were vanishing,Barnes and Noble started to build these gigantic temples to reading allacross the land. Stocking tens of thousands of titles (the mall bookstoresand grocery-store spinner racks had stocked a small fraction of that) andkeeping long hours that were convenient to families, working people andothers potential readers, the B&N stores kept the careers of manywriters afloat, stocking titles that smaller stores couldn't possibly affordto keep on their limited shelves. B&N has always had strong communityoutreach programs, and I've done some of my best-attended, best-organ-ized signings at B&N stores, including the great events at the (sadly de-parted) B&N in union Square, New York, where the mega-signing afterthe Nebula Awards took place, and the B&N in Chicago that hosted theevent after the Nebs a few years later. Best of all is that B&N's "geeky"buyers really Get It when it comes to science fiction, comics and manga,games and similar titles. They're passionate and knowledgeable aboutthe field and it shows in the excellent selection on display at the stores.
Barnes and Noble, nationwideThey re-shackled and re-hooded me and left me there. A long timelater, the truck started to move, rolling downhill, and then I was hauledback to my feet. I immediately fell over. My legs were so asleep they feltlike blocks of ice, all except my knees, which were swollen and tenderfrom all the hours of kneeling.
Hands grabbed my shoulders and feet and I was picked up like a sackof potatoes. There were indistinct voices around me. Someone crying.
Someone cursing.
I was carried a short distance, then set down and re-shackled to anoth-er railing. My knees wouldn't support me anymore and I pitched49forward, ending up twisted on the ground like a pretzel, strainingagainst the chains holding my wrists.
Then we were moving again, and this time, it wasn't like driving in atruck. The floor beneath me rocked gently and vibrated with heavy dies-el engines and I realized I was on a ship! My stomach turned to ice. I wasbeing taken off America's shores to somewhere else, and who the hellknew where that was? I'd been scared before, but this thought terrifiedme, left me paralyzed and wordless with fear. I realized that I might nev-er see my parents again and I actually tasted a little vomit burn up mythroat. The bag over my head closed in on me and I could barely breathe,something that was compounded by the weird position I was twistedinto.
But mercifully we weren't on the water for very long. It felt like anhour, but I know now that it was a mere fifteen minutes, and then I feltus docking, felt footsteps on the decking around me and felt other pris-oners being unshackled and carried or led away. When they came forme, I tried to stand again, but couldn't, and they carried me again, im-personally, roughly.
When they took the hood off again, I was in a cell.
The cell was old and crumbled, and smelled of sea air. There was onewindow high up, and rusted bars guarded it. It was still dark outside.
There was a blanket on the floor and a little metal toilet without a seat,set into the wall. The guard who took off my hood grinned at me andclosed the solid steel door behind him.
I gently massaged my legs, hissing as the blood came back into themand into my hands. Eventually I was able to stand, and then to pace. Iheard other people talking, crying, shouting. I did some shouting too:
Jolu! Darryl! Vanessa! Other voices on the cell-block took up the cry,shouting out names, too, shouting out obscenities. The nearest voicessounded like drunks losing their minds on a street-corner. Maybe I soun-ded like that too.
Guards shouted at us to be quiet and that just made everyone yelllouder. Eventually we were all howling, screaming our heads off,screaming our throats raw. Why not? What did we have to lose?
The next time they came to question me, I was filthy and tired, thirstyand hungry. Severe haircut lady was in the new questioning party, aswere three big guys who moved me around like a cut of meat. One was50black, the other two were white, though one might have been hispanic.
They all carried guns. It was like a Benneton's ad crossed with a game ofCounter-Strike.
They'd taken me from my cell and chained my wrists and ankles to-gether. I paid attention to my surroundings as we went. I heard wateroutside and thought that maybe we were on Alcatraz — it was a prison,after all, even if it had been a tourist attraction for generations, the placewhere you went to see where Al Capone and his gangster contemporar-ies did their time. But I'd been to Alcatraz on a school trip. It was old andrusted, medieval. This place felt like it dated back to World War Two,not colonial times.
There were bar-codes laser-printed on stickers and placed on each ofthe cell-doors, and numbers, but other than that, there was no way to tellwho or what might be behind them.
The interrogation room was modern, with fluorescent lights, ergonom-ic chairs — not for me, though, I got a folding plastic garden-chair — anda big wooden board-room table. A mirror lined one wall, just like in thecop shows, and I figured someone or other must be watching from be-hind it. Severe haircut lady and her friends helped themselves to coffeesfrom an urn on a side-table (I could have torn her throat out with myteeth and taken her coffee just then), and then set a styrofoam cup of wa-ter down next to me — without unlocking my wrists from behind myback, so I couldn't reach it. Hardy har har.
Hello, Marcus, Severe Haircut woman said. "How's your 'tude doingtoday?"I didn't say anything.
This isn't as bad as it gets you know, she said. "This is as good as itgets from now on. Even once you tell us what we want to know, even ifthat convinces us that you were just in the wrong place at the wrongtime, you're a marked man now. We'll be watching you everywhere yougo and everything you do. You've acted like you've got something tohide, and we don't like that."It's pathetic, but all my brain could think about was that phrase,"convince us that you were in the wrong place at the wrong time." Thiswas the worst thing that had ever happened to me. I had never, ever feltthis bad or this scared before. Those words, "wrong place at the wrongtime," those six words, they were like a lifeline dangling before me as Ithrashed to stay on the surface.
51"Hello, Marcus?" she snapped her fingers in front of my face. "Overhere, Marcus." There was a little smile on her face and I hated myself forletting her see my fear. "Marcus, it can be a lot worse than this. This isn'tthe worst place we can put you, not by a damned sight." She reacheddown below the table and came out with a briefcase, which she snappedopen. From it, she withdrew my phone, my arphid sniper/cloner, mywifinder, and my memory keys. She set them down on the table oneafter the other.
Here's what we want from you. You unlock the phone for us today. Ifyou do that, you'll get outdoor and bathing privileges. You'll get ashower and you'll be allowed to walk around in the exercise yard. To-morrow, we'll bring you back and ask you to decrypt the data on thesememory sticks. Do that, and you'll get to eat in the mess hall. The dayafter, we're going to want your email passwords, and that will get youlibrary privileges.The word "no" was on my lips, like a burp trying to come up, but itwouldn't come. "Why?" is what came out instead.
"We want to be sure that you're what you seem to be. This is aboutyour security, Marcus. Say you're innocent. You might be, though whyan innocent man would act like he's got so much to hide is beyond me. But say you are: you could have been on that bridge when it blew. Yourparents could have been. Your friends. Don't you want us to catch thepeople who attacked your home?It's funny, but when she was talking about my getting ""privileges"" itscared me into submission. I felt like I'd done something to end up whereI was, like maybe it was partially my fault, like I could do something tochange it.
"But as soon as she switched to this BS about "safety" and "security," myspine came back. "Lady," I said, "you're talking about attacking myhome, but as far as I can tell, you're the only one who's attacked melately. I thought I lived in a country with a constitution. I thought I livedin a country where I had rights. You're talking about defending my free-dom by tearing up the Bill of Rights."A flicker of annoyance passed over her face, then went away. "So me-lodramatic, Marcus. No one's attacked you. You've been detained byyour country's government while we seek details on the worst terroristattack ever perpetrated on our nation's soil. You have it within yourpower to help us fight this war on our nation's enemies. You want to pre-serve the Bill of Rights? Help us stop bad people from blowing up your52city. Now, you have exactly thirty seconds to unlock that phone before Isend you back to your cell. We have lots of other people to interviewtoday."She looked at her watch. I rattled my wrists, rattled the chains thatkept me from reaching around and unlocking the phone. Yes, I was go-ing to do it. She'd told me what my path was to freedom — to the world,to my parents — and that had given me hope. Now she'd threatened tosend me away, to take me off that path, and my hope had crashed and allI could think of was how to get back on it.
So I rattled my wrists, wanting to get to my phone and unlock it forher, and she just looked at me coldly, checking her watch.
The password, I said, finally understanding what she wanted of me.
She wanted me to say it out loud, here, where she could record it, whereher pals could hear it. She didn't want me to just unlock the phone. Shewanted me to submit to her. To put her in charge of me. To give upevery secret, all my privacy. "The password," I said again, and then I toldher the password. God help me, I submitted to her will.
She smiled a little prim smile, which had to be her ice-queen equival-ent of a touchdown dance, and the guards led me away. As the doorclosed, I saw her bend down over the phone and key the password in.
I wish I could say that I'd anticipated this possibility in advance andcreated a fake password that unlocked a completely innocuous partitionon my phone, but I wasn't nearly that paranoid/clever.
You might be wondering at this point what dark secrets I had lockedaway on my phone and memory sticks and email. I'm just a kid, after all.
The truth is that I had everything to hide, and nothing. Between myphone and my memory sticks, you could get a pretty good idea of whomy friends were, what I thought of them, all the goofy things we'd done.
You could read the transcripts of the electronic arguments we'd carriedout and the electronic reconciliations we'd arrived at.
You see, I don't delete stuff. Why would I? Storage is cheap, and younever know when you're going to want to go back to that stuff. Espe-cially the stupid stuff. You know that feeling you get sometimes whereyou're sitting on the subway and there's no one to talk to and you sud-denly remember some bitter fight you had, some terrible thing you said?
Well, it's usually never as bad as you remember. Being able to go backand see it again is a great way to remind yourself that you're not as53horrible a person as you think you are. Darryl and I have gotten overmore fights that way than I can count.
And even that's not it. I know my phone is private. I know mymemory sticks are private. That's because of cryptography — messagescrambling. The math behind crypto is good and solid, and you and meget access to the same crypto that banks and the National SecurityAgency use. There's only one kind of crypto that anyone uses: cryptothat's public, open and can be deployed by anyone. That's how youknow it works.
There's something really liberating about having some corner of yourlife that's yours, that no one gets to see except you. It's a little like nudityor taking a dump. Everyone gets naked every once in a while. Everyonehas to squat on the toilet. There's nothing shameful, deviant or weirdabout either of them. But what if I decreed that from now on, every timeyou went to evacuate some solid waste, you'd have to do it in a glassroom perched in the middle of Times Square, and you'd be buck naked?
Even if you've got nothing wrong or weird with your body — andhow many of us can say that? — you'd have to be pretty strange to likethat idea. Most of us would run screaming. Most of us would hold it inuntil we exploded.
It's not about doing something shameful. It's about doing somethingprivate. It's about your life belonging to you.
They were taking that from me, piece by piece. As I walked back to mycell, that feeling of deserving it came back to me. I'd broken a lot of rulesall my life and I'd gotten away with it, by and large. Maybe this wasjustice. Maybe this was my past coming back to me. After all, I had beenwhere I was because I'd snuck out of school.
I got my shower. I got to walk around the yard. There was a patch ofsky overhead, and it smelled like the Bay Area, but beyond that, I had noclue where I was being held. No other prisoners were visible during myexercise period, and I got pretty bored with walking in circles. I strainedmy ears for any sound that might help me understand what this placewas, but all I heard was the occasional vehicle, some distant conversa-tions, a plane landing somewhere nearby.
They brought me back to my cell and fed me, a half a pepperoni piefrom Goat Hill Pizza, which I knew well, up on Potrero Hill. The cartonwith its familiar graphic and 415 phone number was a reminder thatonly a day before, I'd been a free man in a free country and that now Iwas a prisoner. I worried constantly about Darryl and fretted about my54other friends. Maybe they'd been more cooperative and had been re-leased. Maybe they'd told my parents and they were frantically callingaround.
Maybe not.
The cell was fantastically spare, empty as my soul. I fantasized that thewall opposite my bunk was a screen, that I could be hacking right now,opening the cell-door. I fantasized about my workbench and the projectsthere — the old cans I was turning into a ghetto surround-sound rig, theaerial photography kite-cam I was building, my homebrew laptop.
I wanted to get out of there. I wanted to go home and have my friendsand my school and my parents and my life back. I wanted to be able togo where I wanted to go, not be stuck pacing and pacing and pacing.
They took my passwords for my USB keys next. Those held some in-teresting messages I'd downloaded from one online discussion group oranother, some chat transcripts, things where people had helped me outwith some of the knowledge I needed to do the things I did. There wasnothing on there you couldn't find with Google, of course, but I didn'tthink that would count in my favor.
I got exercise again that afternoon, and this time there were others inthe yard when I got there, four other guys and two women, of all agesand racial backgrounds. I guess lots of people were doing things to earntheir "privileges."They gave me half an hour, and I tried to make conversation with themost normal-seeming of the other prisoners, a black guy about my agewith a short afro. But when I introduced myself and stuck my hand out,he cut his eyes toward the cameras mounted ominously in the corners ofthe yard and kept walking without ever changing his facial expression.
But then, just before they called my name and brought me back intothe building, the door opened and out came — Vanessa! I'd never beenmore glad to see a friendly face. She looked tired and grumpy, but nothurt, and when she saw me, she shouted my name and ran to me. Wehugged each other hard and I realized I was shaking. Then I realized shewas shaking, too.
Are you OK? she said, holding me at arms' length.
I'm OK, I said. "They told me they'd let me go if I gave them mypasswords.""They keep asking me questions about you and Darryl."55There was a voice blaring over the loudspeaker, shouting at us to stoptalking, to walk, but we ignored it.
Answer them, I said, instantly. "Anything they ask, answer them. Ifit'll get you out.""How are Darryl and Jolu?""I haven't seen them."The door banged open and four big guards boiled out. Two took meand two took Vanessa. They forced me to the ground and turned myhead away from Vanessa, though I heard her getting the same treatment.
Plastic cuffs went around my wrists and then I was yanked to my feetand brought back to my cell.
No dinner came that night. No breakfast came the next morning. Noone came and brought me to the interrogation room to extract more ofmy secrets. The plastic cuffs didn't come off, and my shoulders burned,then ached, then went numb, then burned again. I lost all feeling in myhands.
I had to pee. I couldn't undo my pants. I really, really had to pee.
I pissed myself.
They came for me after that, once the hot piss had cooled and goneclammy, making my already filthy jeans stick to my legs. They came forme and walked me down the long hall lined with doors, each door withits own bar code, each bar code a prisoner like me. They walked medown the corridor and brought me to the interrogation room and it waslike a different planet when I entered there, a world where things werenormal, where everything didn't reek of urine. I felt so dirty andashamed, and all those feelings of deserving what I got came back to me.
Severe haircut lady was already sitting. She was perfect: coifed andwith just a little makeup. I smelled her hair stuff. She wrinkled her noseat me. I felt the shame rise in me.
Well, you've been a very naughty boy, haven't you? Aren't you afilthy thing?Shame. I looked down at the table. I couldn't bear to look up. I wantedto tell her my email password and get gone.
What did you and your friend talk about in the yard?I barked a laugh at the table. "I told her to answer your questions. Itold her to cooperate.""So do you give the orders?"56I felt the blood sing in my ears. "Oh come on," I said. "We play a gametogether, it's called Harajuku Fun Madness. I'm the team captain. We'renot terrorists, we're high school students. I don't give her orders. I toldher that we needed to be honest with you so that we could clear up anysuspicion and get out of here."She didn't say anything for a moment.
How is Darryl? I said.
"Who?""Darryl. You picked us up together. My friend. Someone had stabbedhim in the Powell Street BART. That's why we were up on the surface. To get him help.""I'm sure he's fine, then, she said.
"My stomach knotted and I almost threw up. "You don't know? Youhaven't got him here?""Who we have here and who we don't have here is not somethingwe're going to discuss with you, ever. That's not something you're goingto know. Marcus, you've seen what happens when you don't cooperatewith us. You've seen what happens when you disobey our orders.
You've been a little cooperative, and it's gotten you almost to the pointwhere you might go free again. If you want to make that possibility intoa reality, you'll stick to answering my questions."I didn't say anything.
You're learning, that's good. Now, your email passwords, please.I was ready for this. I gave them everything: server address, login,password. This didn't matter. I didn't keep any email on my server. Idownloaded it all and kept it on my laptop at home, which downloadedand deleted my mail from the server every sixty seconds. They wouldn'tget anything out of my mail — it got cleared off the server and stored onmy laptop at home.
Back to the cell, but they cut loose my hands and they gave me ashower and a pair of orange prison pants to wear. They were too big forme and hung down low on my hips, like a Mexican gang-kid in the Mis-sion. That's where the baggy-pants-down-your-ass look comes from youknow that? From prison. I tell you what, it's less fun when it's not a fash-ion statement.
They took away my jeans, and I spent another day in the cell. Thewalls were scratched cement over a steel grid. You could tell, because the57steel was rusting in the salt air, and the grid shone through the greenpaint in red-orange. My parents were out that window, somewhere.
They came for me again the next day.
We've been reading your mail for a day now. We changed the pass-word so that your home computer couldn't fetch it.Well, of course they had. I would have done the same, now that Ithought of it.
We have enough on you now to put you away for a very long time,Marcus. Your possession of these articles — she gestured at all my littlegizmos — "and the data we recovered from your phone and memorysticks, as well as the subversive material we'd no doubt find if we raidedyour house and took your computer. It's enough to put you away untilyou're an old man. Do you understand that?"I didn't believe it for a second. There's no way a judge would say thatall this stuff constituted any kind of real crime. It was free speech, it wastechnological tinkering. It wasn't a crime.
But who said that these people would ever put me in front of a judge.
We know where you live, we know who your friends are. We knowhow you operate and how you think.It dawned on me then. They were about to let me go. The roomseemed to brighten. I heard myself breathing, short little breaths.
We just want to know one thing: what was the delivery mechanismfor the bombs on the bridge?I stopped breathing. The room darkened again.
What?"There were ten charges on the bridge, all along its length. Theyweren't in car-trunks. They'd been placed there. Who placed them there,and how did they get there?"What? I said it again.
This is your last chance, Marcus, she said. She looked sad. "You weredoing so well until now. Tell us this and you can go home. You can get alawyer and defend yourself in a court of law. There are doubtless exten-uating circumstances that you can use to explain your actions. Just tell usthis thing, and you're gone.""I don't know what you're talking about!" I was crying and I didn'teven care. Sobbing, blubbering. "I have no idea what you're talking about!"58She shook her head. "Marcus, please. Let us help you. By now youknow that we always get what we're after."There was a gibbering sound in the back of my mind. They were in-sane. I pulled myself together, working hard to stop the tears. "Listen,lady, this is nuts. You've been into my stuff, you've seen it all. I'm a sev-enteen year old high school student, not a terrorist! You can't seriouslythink —""Marcus, haven't you figured out that we're serious yet?" She shookher head. "You get pretty good grades. I thought you'd be smarter thanthat." She made a flicking gesture and the guards picked me up by thearmpits.
Back in my cell, a hundred little speeches occurred to me. The Frenchcall this "esprit d'escalier" — the spirit of the staircase, the snappy rebut-tals that come to you after you leave the room and slink down the stairs.
In my mind, I stood and delivered, telling her that I was a citizen wholoved my freedom, which made me the patriot and made her the traitor.
In my mind, I shamed her for turning my country into an armed camp.
In my mind, I was eloquent and brilliant and reduced her to tears.
But you know what? None of those fine words came back to me whenthey pulled me out the next day. All I could think of was freedom. Myparents.
Hello, Marcus, she said. "How are you feeling?"I looked down at the table. She had a neat pile of documents in front ofher, and her ubiquitous go-cup of Starbucks beside her. I found it com-forting somehow, a reminder that there was a real world out there some-where, beyond the walls.
We're through investigating you, for now. She let that hang there.
Maybe it meant that she was letting me go. Maybe it meant that she wasgoing to throw me in a pit and forget that I existed.
And? I said finally.
And I want you to impress on you again that we are very seriousabout this. Our country has experienced the worst attack ever committedon its soil. How many 9/11s do you want us to suffer before you're will-ing to cooperate? The details of our investigation are secret. We won'tstop at anything in our efforts to bring the perpetrators of these heinouscrimes to justice. Do you understand that?"Yes, I mumbled.
59"We are going to send you home today, but you are a marked man.
You have not been found to be above suspicion — we're only releasingyou because we're done questioning you for now. But from now on, youbelong to us. We will be watching you. We'll be waiting for you to make amisstep. Do you understand that we can watch you closely, all the time?""Yes," I mumbled.
"Good. You will never speak of what happened here to anyone, ever. This is a matter of national security. Do you know that the death penaltystill holds for treason in time of war?""Yes, I mumbled.
"Good boy, she purred. "We have some papers here for you to sign."She pushed the stack of papers across the table to me. Little post-its withSIGN HERE printed on them had been stuck throughout them. A guardundid my cuffs.
I paged through the papers and my eyes watered and my head swam.
I couldn't make sense of them. I tried to decipher the legalese. It seemedthat I was signing a declaration that I had been voluntarily held and sub-mitted to voluntary questioning, of my own free will.
What happens if I don't sign this? I said.
She snatched the papers back and made that flicking gesture again.
The guards jerked me to my feet.
Wait! I cried. "Please! I'll sign them!" They dragged me to the door.
All I could see was that door, all I could think of was it closing behindme.
I lost it. I wept. I begged to be allowed to sign the papers. To be soclose to freedom and have it snatched away, it made me ready to do any-thing. I can't count the number of times I've heard someone say, "Oh, I'drather die than do something-or-other" — I've said it myself now andagain. But that was the first time I understood what it really meant. Iwould have rather died than go back to my cell.
I begged as they took me out into the corridor. I told them I'd signanything.
She called out to the guards and they stopped. They brought me back.
They sat me down. One of them put the pen in my hand.
Of course, I signed, and signed and signed.
60My jeans and t-shirt were back in my cell, laundered and folded. Theysmelled of detergent. I put them on and washed my face and sat on mycot and stared at the wall. They'd taken everything from me. First myprivacy, then my dignity. I'd been ready to sign anything. I would havesigned a confession that said I'd assassinated Abraham Lincoln.
I tried to cry, but it was like my eyes were dry, out of tears.
They got me again. A guard approached me with a hood, like the hoodI'd been put in when they picked us up, whenever that was, days ago,weeks ago.
The hood went over my head and cinched tight at my neck. I was intotal darkness and the air was stifling and stale. I was raised to my feetand walked down corridors, up stairs, on gravel. Up a gangplank. On aship's steel deck. My hands were chained behind me, to a railing. I knelton the deck and listened to the thrum of the diesel engines.
The ship moved. A hint of salt air made its way into the hood. It wasdrizzling and my clothes were heavy with water. I was outside, even ifmy head was in a bag. I was outside, in the world, moments from myfreedom.
They came for me and led me off the boat and over uneven ground.
Up three metal stairs. My wrists were unshackled. My hood wasremoved.
I was back in the truck. Severe haircut woman was there, at the littledesk she'd sat at before. She had a ziploc bag with her, and inside it weremy phone and other little devices, my wallet and the change from mypockets. She handed them to me wordlessly.
I filled my pockets. It felt so weird to have everything back in its famil-iar place, to be wearing my familiar clothes. Outside the truck's backdoor, I heard the familiar sounds of my familiar city.
A guard passed me my backpack. The woman extended her hand tome. I just looked at it. She put it down and gave me a wry smile. Thenshe mimed zipping up her lips and pointed to me, and opened the door.
It was daylight outside, gray and drizzling. I was looking down an al-ley toward cars and trucks and bikes zipping down the road. I stoodtransfixed on the truck's top step, staring at freedom.
My knees shook. I knew now that they were playing with me again. Ina moment, the guards would grab me and drag me back inside, the bagwould go over my head again, and I would be back on the boat and sent61off to the prison again, to the endless, unanswerable questions. I barelyheld myself back from stuffing my fist in my mouth.
Then I forced myself to go down one stair. Another stair. The last stair.
My sneakers crunched down on the crap on the alley's floor, brokenglass, a needle, gravel. I took a step. Another. I reached the mouth of thealley and stepped onto the sidewalk.
No one grabbed me.
I was free.
Then strong arms threw themselves around me. I nearly cried.
This chapter is dedicated to Secret Headquarters in Los Angeles, mydrop-dead all-time favorite comic store in the world. It's small and se-lective about what it stocks, and every time I walk in, I walk out withthree or four collections I'd never heard of under my arm. It's like theowners, Dave and David, have the uncanny ability to predict exactlywhat I'm looking for, and they lay it out for me seconds before I walk in-to the store. I discovered about three quarters of my favorite comics bywandering into SHQ, grabbing something interesting, sinking into oneof the comfy chairs, and finding myself transported to another world.
When my second story-collection, OVERCLOCKED, came out, theyworked with local illustrator Martin Cenreda to do a free mini-comicbased on Printcrime, the first story in the book. I left LA about a yearago, and of all the things I miss about it, Secret Headquarters is right atthe top of the list.
Secret Headquarters: 3817 W. Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA90026 +1 323 666 2228But it was Van, and she was crying, and hugging me so hard I couldn'tbreathe. I didn't care. I hugged her back, my face buried in her hair.
You're OK! she said.
I'm OK, I managed.
She finally let go of me and another set of arms wrapped themselvesaround me. It was Jolu! They were both there. He whispered, "You'resafe, bro," in my ear and hugged me even tighter than Vanessa had.
When he let go, I looked around. "Where's Darryl?" I asked.
They both looked at each other. "Maybe he's still in the truck," Jolusaid.
We turned and looked at the truck at the alley's end. It was a nondes-cript white 18-wheeler. Someone had already brought the little folding63staircase inside. The rear lights glowed red, and the truck rolled back-wards towards us, emitting a steady eep, eep, eep.
Wait! I shouted as it accelerated towards us. "Wait! What aboutDarryl?" The truck drew closer. I kept shouting. "What about Darryl?"Jolu and Vanessa each had me by an arm and were dragging me away.
I struggled against them, shouting. The truck pulled out of the alley'smouth and reversed into the street and pointed itself downhill and droveaway. I tried to run after it, but Van and Jolu wouldn't let me go.
I sat down on the sidewalk and put my arms around my knees andcried. I cried and cried and cried, loud sobs of the sort I hadn't done sinceI was a little kid. They wouldn't stop coming. I couldn't stop shaking.
Vanessa and Jolu got me to my feet and moved me a little ways up thestreet. There was a Muni bus stop with a bench and they sat me on it.
They were both crying too, and we held each other for a while, and Iknew we were crying for Darryl, whom none of us ever expected to seeagain.
We were north of Chinatown, at the part where it starts to becomeNorth Beach, a neighborhood with a bunch of neon strip clubs and thelegendary City Lights counterculture bookstore, where the Beat poetrymovement had been founded back in the 1950s.
I knew this part of town well. My parents' favorite Italian restaurantwas here and they liked to take me here for big plates of linguine andhuge Italian ice-cream mountains with candied figs and lethal little es-pressos afterward.
Now it was a different place, a place where I was tasting freedom forthe first time in what seemed like an enternity.
We checked our pockets and found enough money to get a table at oneof the Italian restaurants, out on the sidewalk, under an awning. Thepretty waitress lighted a gas-heater with a barbeque lighter, took our or-ders and went inside. The sensation of giving orders, of controlling mydestiny, was the most amazing thing I'd ever felt.
How long were we in there? I asked.
Six days, Vanessa said.
I got five, Jolu said.
I didn't count.64"What did they do to you?" Vanessa said. I didn't want to talk about it,but they were both looking at me. Once I started, I couldn't stop. I toldthem everything, even when I'd been forced to piss myself, and theytook it all in silently. I paused when the waitress delivered our sodas andwaited until she got out of earshot, then finished. In the telling, it re-ceded into the distance. By the end of it, I couldn't tell if I was embroid-ering the truth or if I was making it all seem less bad. My memoriesswam like little fish that I snatched at, and sometimes they wriggled outof my grasp.
Jolu shook his head. "They were hard on you, dude," he said. He toldus about his stay there. They'd questioned him, mostly about me, andhe'd kept on telling them the truth, sticking to a plain telling of the factsabout that day and about our friendship. They had gotten him to repeatit over and over again, but they hadn't played games with his head theway they had with me. He'd eaten his meals in a mess-hall with a bunchof other people, and been given time in a TV room where they wereshown last year's blockbusters on video.
Vanessa's story was only slightly different. After she'd gotten themangry by talking to me, they'd taken away her clothes and made herwear a set of orange prison overalls. She'd been left in her cell for twodays without contact, though she'd been fed regularly. But mostly it wasthe same as Jolu: the same questions, repeated again and again.
They really hated you, Jolu said. "Really had it in for you. Why?"I couldn't imagine why. Then I remembered.
You can cooperate, or you can be very, very sorry.
"It was because I wouldn't unlock my phone for them, that first night. That's why they singled me out. I couldn't believe it, but there was noother explanation. It had been sheer vindictiveness. My mind reeled atthe thought. They had done all that as a mere punishment for defyingtheir authority.
"I had been scared. Now I was angry. "Those bastards," I said, softly.
They did it to get back at me for mouthing off.Jolu swore and then Vanessa cut loose in Korean, something she onlydid when she was really, really angry.
I'm going to get them, I whispered, staring at my soda. "I'm going toget them."Jolu shook his head. "You can't, you know. You can't fight back againstthat."65None of us much wanted to talk about revenge then. Instead, wetalked about what we would do next. We had to go home. Our phones'
batteries were dead and it had been years since this neighborhood hadany payphones. We just needed to go home. I even thought about takinga taxi, but there wasn't enough money between us to make that possible.
So we walked. On the corner, we pumped some quarters into a SanFrancisco Chronicle newspaper box and stopped to read the front sec-tion. It had been five days since the bombs went off, but it was still allover the front cover.
Severe haircut woman had talked about "the bridge" blowing up, andI'd just assumed that she was talking about the Golden Gate bridge, but Iwas wrong. The terrorists had blown up the Bay bridge.
Why the hell would they blow up the Bay bridge? I said. "TheGolden Gate is the one on all the postcards." Even if you've never been toSan Francisco, chances are you know what the Golden Gate looks like:
it's that big orange suspension bridge that swoops dramatically from theold military base called the Presidio to Sausalito, where all the cutesywine-country towns are with their scented candle shops and art galleries.
It's picturesque as hell, and it's practically the symbol for the state ofCalifornia. If you go to the Disneyland California Adventure park,there's a replica of it just past the gates, with a monorail running over it.
So naturally I assumed that if you were going to blow up a bridge inSan Francisco, that's the one you'd blow.
They probably got scared off by all the cameras and stuff, Jolu said.
The National Guard's always checking cars at both ends and there's allthose suicide fences and junk all along it. People have been jumping offthe Golden Gate since it opened in 1937 — they stopped counting afterthe thousandth suicide in 1995.
Yeah, Vanessa said. "Plus the Bay Bridge actually goes somewhere."The Bay Bridge goes from downtown San Francisco to Oakland andthence to Berkeley, the East Bay townships that are home to many of thepeople who live and work in town. It's one of the only parts of the BayArea where a normal person can afford a house big enough to reallystretch out in, and there's also the university and a bunch of light in-dustry over there. The BART goes under the Bay and connects the twocities, too, but it's the Bay Bridge that sees most of the traffic. The GoldenGate was a nice bridge if you were a tourist or a rich retiree living out in66wine country, but it was mostly ornamental. The Bay Bridge is — was —San Francisco's work-horse bridge.
I thought about it for a minute. "You guys are right," I said. "But I don'tthink that's all of it. We keep acting like terrorists attack landmarks be-cause they hate landmarks. Terrorists don't hate landmarks or bridges orairplanes. They just want to screw stuff up and make people scared. Tomake terror. So of course they went after the Bay Bridge after the GoldenGate got all those cameras — after airplanes got all metal-detectored andX-rayed." I thought about it some more, staring blankly at the cars rollingdown the street, at the people walking down the sidewalks, at the city allaround me. "Terrorists don't hate airplanes or bridges. They love terror."It was so obvious I couldn't believe I'd never thought of it before. I guessthat being treated like a terrorist for a few days was enough to clarify mythinking.
The other two were staring at me. "I'm right, aren't I? All this crap, allthe X-rays and ID checks, they're all useless, aren't they?"They nodded slowly.
Worse than useless, I said, my voice going up and cracking. "Becausethey ended up with us in prison, with Darryl —" I hadn't thought ofDarryl since we sat down and now it came back to me, my friend, miss-ing, disappeared. I stopped talking and ground my jaws together.
We have to tell our parents, Jolu said.
We should get a lawyer, Vanessa said.
I thought of telling my story. Of telling the world what had become ofme. Of the videos that would no doubt come out, of me weeping, re-duced to a groveling animal.
We can't tell them anything, I said, without thinking.
What do you mean? Van said.
We can't tell them anything, I repeated. "You heard her. If we talk,they'll come back for us. They'll do to us what they did to Darryl.""You're joking," Jolu said. "You want us to —""I want us to fight back," I said. "I want to stay free so that I can dothat. If we go out there and blab, they'll just say that we're kids, makingit up. We don't even know where we were held! No one will believe us.
Then, one day, they'll come for us.
I'm telling my parents that I was in one of those camps on the otherside of the Bay. I came over to meet you guys there and we got stranded,67and just got loose today. They said in the papers that people were stillwandering home from them."I can't do that, Vanessa said. "After what they did to you, how canyou even think of doing that?""It happened to me, that's the point. This is me and them, now. I'll beatthem, I'll get Darryl. I'm not going to take this lying down. But once ourparents are involved, that's it for us. No one will believe us and no onewill care. If we do it my way, people will care.""What's your way?" Jolu said. "What's your plan?""I don't know yet," I admitted. "Give me until tomorrow morning, giveme that, at least." I knew that once they'd kept it a secret for a day, itwould have to be a secret forever. Our parents would be even moreskeptical if we suddenly "remembered" that we'd been held in a secretprison instead of taken care of in a refugee camp.
Van and Jolu looked at each other.
I'm just asking for a chance, I said. "We'll work out the story on theway, get it straight. Give me one day, just one day."The other two nodded glumly and we set off downhill again, headingback towards home. I lived on Potrero Hill, Vanessa lived in the NorthMission and Jolu lived in Noe Valley — three wildly different neighbor-hoods just a few minutes' walk from one another.
We turned onto Market Street and stopped dead. The street was barri-caded at every corner, the cross-streets reduced to a single lane, andparked down the whole length of Market Street were big, nondescript18-wheelers like the one that had carried us, hooded, away from theship's docks and to Chinatown.
Each one had three steel steps leading down from the back and theybuzzed with activity as soldiers, people in suits, and cops went in andout of them. The suits wore little badges on their lapels and the soldiersscanned them as they went in and out — wireless authorization badges.
As we walked past one, I got a look at it, and saw the familiar logo: De-partment of Homeland Security. The soldier saw me staring and staredback hard, glaring at me.
I got the message and moved on. I peeled away from the gang at VanNess. We clung to each other and cried and promised to call each other.
The walk back to Potrero Hill has an easy route and a hard route, thelatter taking you over some of the steepest hills in the city, the kind ofthing that you see car chases on in action movies, with cars catching air68as they soar over the zenith. I always take the hard way home. It's all res-idential streets, and the old Victorian houses they call "painted ladies" fortheir gaudy, elaborate paint-jobs, and front gardens with scented flowersand tall grasses. Housecats stare at you from hedges, and there arehardly any homeless.
It was so quiet on those streets that it made me wish I'd taken the otherroute, through the Mission, which is… raucous is probably the best wordfor it. Loud and vibrant. Lots of rowdy drunks and angry crack-headsand unconscious junkies, and also lots of families with strollers, oldladies gossiping on stoops, lowriders with boom-cars going thumpa-thumpa-thumpa down the streets. There were hipsters and mopey emoart-students and even a couple old-school punk-rockers, old guys withpot bellies bulging out beneath their Dead Kennedys shirts. Also dragqueens, angry gang kids, graffiti artists and bewildered gentrifiers tryingnot to get killed while their real-estate investments matured.
I went up Goat Hill and walked past Goat Hill Pizza, which made methink of the jail I'd been held in, and I had to sit down on the bench outfront of the restaurant until my shakes passed. Then I noticed the truckup the hill from me, a nondescript 18-wheeler with three metal stepscoming down from the back end. I got up and got moving. I felt the eyeswatching me from all directions.
I hurried the rest of the way home. I didn't look at the painted ladies orthe gardens or the housecats. I kept my eyes down.
Both my parents' cars were in the driveway, even though it was themiddle of the day. Of course. Dad works in the East Bay, so he'd be stuckat home while they worked on the bridge. Mom — well, who knew whyMom was home.
They were home for me.
Even before I'd finished unlocking the door it had been jerked out ofmy hand and flung wide. There were both of my parents, looking grayand haggard, bug-eyed and staring at me. We stood there in frozentableau for a moment, then they both rushed forward and dragged meinto the house, nearly tripping me up. They were both talking so loudand fast all I could hear was a wordless, roaring gabble and they bothhugged me and cried and I cried too and we just stood there like that inthe little foyer, crying and making almost-words until we ran out ofsteam and went into the kitchen.
I did what I always did when I came home: got myself a glass of waterfrom the filter in the fridge and dug a couple cookies out of the "biscuit69barrel" that mom's sister had sent us from England. The normalcy of thismade my heart stop hammering, my heart catching up with my brain,and soon we were all sitting at the table.
Where have you been? they both said, more or less in unison.
I had given this some thought on the way home. "I got trapped," I said.
In Oakland. I was there with some friends, doing a project, and we wereall quarantined."For five days?"Yeah, I said. "Yeah. It was really bad." I'd read about the quarantinesin the Chronicle and I cribbed shamelessly from the quotes they'd pub-lished. "Yeah. Everyone who got caught in the cloud. They thought wehad been attacked with some kind of super-bug and they packed us intoshipping containers in the docklands, like sardines. It was really hot andsticky. Not much food, either.""Christ," Dad said, his fists balling up on the table. Dad teaches inBerkeley three days a week, working with a few grad students in the lib-rary science program. The rest of the time he consults for clients in cityand down the Peninsula, third-wave dotcoms that are doing variousthings with archives. He's a mild-mannered librarian by profession, buthe'd been a real radical in the sixties and wrestled a little in high school.
I'd seen him get crazy angry now and again — I'd even made him thatangry now and again — and he could seriously lose it when he wasHulking out. He once threw a swing-set from Ikea across my granddad'swhole lawn when it fell apart for the fiftieth time while he was assem-bling it.
Barbarians, Mom said. She's been living in America since she was ateenager, but she still comes over all British when she encounters Amer-ican cops, health-care, airport security or homelessness. Then the word is"barbarians," and her accent comes back strong. We'd been to Londontwice to see her family and I can't say as it felt any more civilized thanSan Francisco, just more cramped.
But they let us go, and ferried us over today. I was improvising now.
Are you hurt? Mom said. "Hungry?""Sleepy?""Yeah, a little of all that. Also Dopey, Doc, Sneezy and Bashful." Wehad a family tradition of Seven Dwarfs jokes. They both smiled a little,but their eyes were still wet. I felt really bad for them. They must have70been out of their minds with worry. I was glad for a chance to change thesubject. "I'd totally love to eat.""I'll order a pizza from Goat Hill," Dad said.
No, not that, I said. They both looked at me like I'd sprouted anten-nae. I normally have a thing about Goat Hill Pizza — as in, I can nor-mally eat it like a goldfish eats his food, gobbling until it either runs outor I pop. I tried to smile. "I just don't feel like pizza," I said, lamely. "Let'sorder some curry, OK?" Thank heaven that San Francisco is take-outcentral.
Mom went to the drawer of take-out menus (more normalcy, feelinglike a drink of water on a dry, sore throat) and riffled through them. Wespent a couple of distracting minutes going through the menu from thehalal Pakistani place on Valencia. I settled on a mixed tandoori grill andcreamed spinach with farmer's cheese, a salted mango lassi (much betterthan it sounds) and little fried pastries in sugar syrup.
Once the food was ordered, the questions started again. They'd heardfrom Van's, Jolu's and Darryl's families (of course) and had tried to re-port us missing. The police were taking names, but there were so many"displaced persons" that they weren't going to open files on anyone un-less they were still missing after seven days.
Meanwhile, millions of have-you-seen sites had popped up on the net.
A couple of the sites were old MySpace clones that had run out of moneyand saw a new lease on life from all the attention. After all, some venturecapitalists had missing family in the Bay Area. Maybe if they were re-covered, the site would attract some new investment. I grabbed dad'slaptop and looked through them. They were plastered with advertising,of course, and pictures of missing people, mostly grad photos, weddingpictures and that sort of thing. It was pretty ghoulish.
I found my pic and saw that it was linked to Van's, Jolu's, and Darryl's.
There was a little form for marking people found and another one forwriting up notes about other missing people. I filled in the fields for meand Jolu and Van, and left Darryl blank.
You forgot Darryl, Dad said. He didn't like Darryl much — once he'dfigured out that a couple inches were missing out of one of the bottles inhis liquor cabinet, and to my enduring shame I'd blamed it on Darryl. Intruth, of course, it had been both of us, just fooling around, trying outvodka-and-Cokes during an all-night gaming session.
He wasn't with us, I said. The lie tasted bitter in my mouth.
71"Oh my God," my mom said. She squeezed her hands together. "Wejust assumed when you came home that you'd all been together.""No," I said, the lie growing. "No, he was supposed to meet us but wenever met up. He's probably just stuck over in Berkeley. He was going totake the BART over."Mom made a whimpering sound. Dad shook his head and closed hiseyes. "Don't you know about the BART?" he said.
I shook my head. I could see where this was going. I felt like theground was rushing up to me.
They blew it up, Dad said. "The bastards blew it up at the same timeas the bridge."That hadn't been on the front page of the Chronicle, but then, a BARTblowout under the water wouldn't be nearly as picturesque as the im-ages of the bridge hanging in tatters and pieces over the Bay. The BARTtunnel from the Embarcadero in San Francisco to the West Oakland sta-tion was submerged.
I went back to Dad's computer and surfed the headlines. No one wassure, but the body count was in the thousands. Between the cars thatplummeted 191 feet to the sea and the people drowned in the trains, thedeaths were mounting. One reporter claimed to have interviewed an"identity counterfeiter" who'd helped "dozens" of people walk awayfrom their old lives by simply vanishing after the attacks, getting new IDmade up, and slipping away from bad marriages, bad debts and badlives.
Dad actually got tears in his eyes, and Mom was openly crying. Theyeach hugged me again, patting me with their hands as if to assure them-selves that I was really there. They kept telling me they loved me. I toldthem I loved them too.
We had a weepy dinner and Mom and Dad had each had a coupleglasses of wine, which was a lot for them. I told them that I was gettingsleepy, which was true, and mooched up to my room. I wasn't going tobed, though. I needed to get online and find out what was going on. Ineeded to talk to Jolu and Vanessa. I needed to get working on findingDarryl.
I crept up to my room and opened the door. I hadn't seen my old bedin what felt like a thousand years. I lay down on it and reached over tomy bedstand to grab my laptop. I must have not plugged it in all the72way — the electrical adapter needed to be jiggled just right — so it hadslowly discharged while I was away. I plugged it back in and gave it aminute or two to charge up before trying to power it up again. I used thetime to get undressed and throw my clothes in the trash — I neverwanted to see them again — and put on a clean pair of boxers and afresh t-shirt. The fresh-laundered clothes, straight out of my drawers, feltso familiar and comfortable, like getting hugged by my parents.
I powered up my laptop and punched a bunch of pillows into placebehind me at the top of the bed. I scooched back and opened mycomputer's lid and settled it onto my thighs. It was still booting, andman, those icons creeping across the screen looked good. It came all theway up and then it started giving me more low-power warnings. Ichecked the power-cable again and wiggled it and they went away. Thepower-jack was really flaking out.
In fact, it was so bad that I couldn't actually get anything done. Everytime I took my hand off the power-cable it lost contact and the computerstarted to complain about its battery. I took a closer look at it.
The whole case of my computer was slightly misaligned, the seamsplit in an angular gape that started narrow and widened toward theback.
Sometimes you look at a piece of equipment and discover somethinglike this and you wonder, "Was it always like that?" Maybe you just nev-er noticed.
But with my laptop, that wasn't possible. You see, I built it. After theBoard of Ed issued us all with SchoolBooks, there was no way my par-ents were going to buy me a computer of my own, even though technic-ally the SchoolBook didn't belong to me, and I wasn't supposed to installsoftware on it or mod it.
I had some money saved — odd jobs, Christmases and birthdays, alittle bit of judicious ebaying. Put it all together and I had enough moneyto buy a totally crappy, five-year-old machine.
So Darryl and I built one instead. You can buy laptop cases just likeyou can buy cases for desktop PCs, though they're a little more special-ized than plain old PCs. I'd built a couple PCs with Darryl over theyears, scavenging parts from Craigslist and garage sales and orderingstuff from cheap cheap Taiwanese vendors we found on the net. Ifigured that building a laptop would be the best way to get the power Iwanted at the price I could afford.
73To build your own laptop, you start by ordering a "barebook" — a ma-chine with just a little hardware in it and all the right slots. The goodnews was, once I was done, I had a machine that was a whole poundlighter than the Dell I'd had my eye on, ran faster, and cost a third ofwhat I would have paid Dell. The bad news was that assembling alaptop is like building one of those ships in a bottle. It's all finicky workwith tweezers and magnifying glasses, trying to get everything to fit inthat little case. Unlike a full-sized PC — which is mostly air — every cu-bic millimeter of space in a laptop is spoken for. Every time I thought Ihad it, I'd go to screw the thing back together and find that somethingwas keeping the case from closing all the way, and it'd be back to thedrawing board.
So I knew exactly how the seam on my laptop was supposed to lookwhen the thing was closed, and it was not supposed to look like this.
I kept jiggling the power-adapter, but it was hopeless. There was noway I was going to get the thing to boot without taking it apart. Igroaned and put it beside the bed. I'd deal with it in the morning.
That was the theory, anyway. Two hours later, I was still staring at theceiling, playing back movies in my head of what they'd done to me, whatI should have done, all regrets and esprit d'escalier.
I rolled out of bed. It had gone midnight and I'd heard my parents hitthe sack at eleven. I grabbed the laptop and cleared some space on mydesk and clipped the little LED lamps to the temples of my magnifyingglasses and pulled out a set of little precision screwdrivers. A minutelater, I had the case open and the keyboard removed and I was staring atthe guts of my laptop. I got a can of compressed air and blew out thedust that the fan had sucked in and looked things over.
Something wasn't right. I couldn't put my finger on it, but then it hadbeen months since I'd had the lid off this thing. Luckily, the third time I'dhad to open it up and struggle to close it again, I'd gotten smart: I'd takena photo of the guts with everything in place. I hadn't been totally smart:
at first, I'd just left that pic on my hard drive, and naturally I couldn't getto it when I had the laptop in parts. But then I'd printed it out and stuckit in my messy drawer of papers, the dead-tree graveyard where I keptall the warranty cards and pin-out diagrams. I shuffled them — theyseemed messier than I remembered — and brought out my photo. I set itdown next to the computer and kind of unfocused my eyes, trying tofind things that looked out of place.
74Then I spotted it. The ribbon cable that connected the keyboard to thelogic-board wasn't connected right. That was a weird one. There was notorque on that part, nothing to dislodge it in the course of normal opera-tions. I tried to press it back down again and discovered that the plugwasn't just badly mounted — there was something between it and theboard. I tweezed it out and shone my light on it.
There was something new in my keyboard. It was a little chunk ofhardware, only a sixteenth of an inch thick, with no markings. The key-board was plugged into it, and it was plugged into the board. It otherwords, it was perfectly situated to capture all the keystrokes I madewhile I typed on my machine.
It was a bug.
My heart thudded in my ears. It was dark and quiet in the house, but itwasn't a comforting dark. There were eyes out there, eyes and ears, andthey were watching me. Surveilling me. The surveillance I faced atschool had followed me home, but this time, it wasn't just the Board ofEducation looking over my shoulder: the Department of Homeland Se-curity had joined them.
I almost took the bug out. Then I figured that who ever put it therewould know that it was gone. I left it in. It made me sick to do it.
I looked around for more tampering. I couldn't find any, but did thatmean there hadn't been any? Someone had broken into my room andplanted this device — had disassembled my laptop and reassembled it.
There were lots of other ways to wiretap a computer. I could never findthem all.
I put the machine together with numb fingers. This time, the casewouldn't snap shut just right, but the power-cable stayed in. I booted itup and set my fingers on the keyboard, thinking that I would run somediagnostics and see what was what.
But I couldn't do it.
Hell, maybe my room was wiretapped. Maybe there was a cameraspying on me now.
I'd been feeling paranoid when I got home. Now I was nearly out ofmy skin. It felt like I was back in jail, back in the interrogation room,stalked by entities who had me utterly in their power. It made me wantto cry.
Only one thing for it.
75I went into the bathroom and took off the toilet-paper roll and re-placed it with a fresh one. Luckily, it was almost empty already. I un-rolled the rest of the paper and dug through my parts box until I found alittle plastic envelope full of ultra-bright white LEDs I'd scavenged out ofa dead bike-lamp. I punched their leads through the cardboard tubecarefully, using a pin to make the holes, then got out some wire and con-nected them all in series with little metal clips. I twisted the wires intothe leads for a nine-volt battery and connected the battery. Now I had atube ringed with ultra-bright, directional LEDs, and I could hold it up tomy eye and look through it.
I'd built one of these last year as a science fair project and had beenthrown out of the fair once I showed that there were hidden cameras inhalf the classrooms at Chavez High. Pinhead video-cameras cost lessthan a good restaurant dinner these days, so they're showing up every-where. Sneaky store clerks put them in changing rooms or tanningsalons and get pervy with the hidden footage they get from their custom-ers — sometimes they just put it on the net. Knowing how to turn atoilet-paper roll and three bucks' worth of parts into a camera-detector isjust good sense.
This is the simplest way to catch a spy-cam. They have tiny lenses, butthey reflect light like the dickens. It works best in a dim room: starethrough the tube and slowly scan all the walls and other places someonemight have put a camera until you see the glint of a reflection. If the re-flection stays still as you move around, that's a lens.
There wasn't a camera in my room — not one I could detect, anyway.
There might have been audio bugs, of course. Or better cameras. Ornothing at all. Can you blame me for feeling paranoid?
I loved that laptop. I called it the Salmagundi, which means anythingmade out of spare parts.
Once you get to naming your laptop, you know that you're really hav-ing a deep relationship with it. Now, though, I felt like I didn't want toever touch it again. I wanted to throw it out the window. Who knewwhat they'd done to it? Who knew how it had been tapped?
I put it in a drawer with the lid shut and looked at the ceiling. It waslate and I should be in bed. There was no way I was going to sleep now,though. I was tapped. Everyone might be tapped. The world hadchanged forever.
I'll find a way to get them, I said. It was a vow, I knew it when Iheard it, though I'd never made a vow before.
76I couldn't sleep after that. And besides, I had an idea.
Somewhere in my closet was a shrink-wrapped box containing onestill-sealed, mint-in-package Xbox Universal. Every Xbox has been soldway below cost — Microsoft makes most of its money charging gamescompanies money for the right to put out Xbox games — but the Univer-sal was the first Xbox that Microsoft decided to give away entirely forfree.
Last Christmas season, there'd been poor losers on every cornerdressed as warriors from the Halo series, handing out bags of thesegame-machines as fast as they could. I guess it worked — everyone saysthey sold a whole butt-load of games. Naturally, there were counter-measures to make sure you only played games from companies that hadbought licenses from Microsoft to make them.
Hackers blow through those countermeasures. The Xbox was crackedby a kid from MIT who wrote a best-selling book about it, and then the360 went down, and then the short-lived Xbox Portable (which we allcalled the "luggable" — it weighed three pounds!) succumbed. TheUniversal was supposed to be totally bulletproof. The high school kidswho broke it were Brazilian Linux hackers who lived in a favela — a kindof squatter's slum.
Never underestimate the determination of a kid who is time-rich andcash-poor.
Once the Brazilians published their crack, we all went nuts on it. Soonthere were dozens of alternate operating systems for the Xbox Universal.
My favorite was ParanoidXbox, a flavor of Paranoid Linux. ParanoidLinux is an operating system that assumes that its operator is under as-sault from the government (it was intended for use by Chinese and Syri-an dissidents), and it does everything it can to keep your communica-tions and documents a secret. It even throws up a bunch of "chaff" com-munications that are supposed to disguise the fact that you're doing any-thing covert. So while you're receiving a political message one characterat a time, ParanoidLinux is pretending to surf the Web and fill in ques-tionnaires and flirt in chat-rooms. Meanwhile, one in every five hundredcharacters you receive is your real message, a needle buried in a hugehaystack.
I'd burned a ParanoidXbox DVD when they first appeared, but I'dnever gotten around to unpacking the Xbox in my closet, finding a TV tohook it up to and so on. My room is crowded enough as it is without let-ting Microsoft crashware eat up valuable workspace.
77Tonight, I'd make the sacrifice. It took about twenty minutes to get upand running. Not having a TV was the hardest part, but eventually I re-membered that I had a little overhead LCD projector that had standardTV RCA connectors on the back. I connected it to the Xbox and shone iton the back of my door and got ParanoidLinux installed.
Now I was up and running, and ParanoidLinux was looking for otherXbox Universals to talk to. Every Xbox Universal comes with built-inwireless for multiplayer gaming. You can connect to your neighbors onthe wireless link and to the Internet, if you have a wireless Internet con-nection. I found three different sets of neighbors in range. Two of themhad their Xbox Universals also connected to the Internet. ParanoidXboxloved that configuration: it could siphon off some of my neighbors' Inter-net connections and use them to get online through the gaming network.
The neighbors would never miss the packets: they were paying for flat-rate Internet connections, and they weren't exactly doing a lot of surfingat 2AM.
The best part of all this is how it made me feel: in control. My techno-logy was working for me, serving me, protecting me. It wasn't spying onme. This is why I loved technology: if you used it right, it could give youpower and privacy.
My brain was really going now, running like 60. There were lots ofreasons to run ParanoidXbox — the best one was that anyone couldwrite games for it. Already there was a port of MAME, the Multiple Ar-cade Machine Emulator, so you could play practically any game that hadever been written, all the way back to Pong — games for the Apple ][+and games for the Colecovision, games for the NES and the Dreamcast,and so on.
Even better were all the cool multiplayer games being built specificallyfor ParanoidXbox — totally free hobbyist games that anyone could run.
When you combined it all, you had a free console full of free games thatcould get you free Internet access.
And the best part — as far as I was concerned — was that Para-noidXbox was paranoid. Every bit that went over the air was scrambled towithin an inch of its life. You could wiretap it all you wanted, but you'dnever figure out who was talking, what they were talking about, or whothey were talking to. Anonymous web, email and IM. Just what I needed.
All I had to do now was convince everyone I knew to use it too.
This chapter is dedicated to Powell's Books, the legendary "City ofBooks" in Portland, Oregon. Powell's is the largest bookstore in theworld, an endless, multi-storey universe of papery smells and toweringshelves. They stock new and used books on the same shelves —something I've always loved — and every time I've stopped in, they'vehad a veritable mountain of my books, and they've been incredibly gra-cious about asking me to sign the store-stock. The clerks are friendly, thestock is fabulous, and there's even a Powell's at the Portland airport,making it just about the best airport bookstore in the world for mymoney!
Powell's Books: 1005 W Burnside, Portland, OR 97209 USA +1 800878 7323Believe it or not, my parents made me go to school the next day. I'donly fallen into feverish sleep at three in the morning, but at seven thenext day, my Dad was standing at the foot of my bed, threatening todrag me out by the ankles. I managed to get up — something had died inmy mouth after painting my eyelids shut — and into the shower.
I let my mom force a piece of toast and a banana into me, wishing fer-vently that my parents would let me drink coffee at home. I could sneakone on the way to school, but watching them sip down their black goldwhile I was drag-assing around the house, getting dressed and puttingmy books in my bag — it was awful.
I've walked to school a thousand times, but today it was different. Iwent up and over the hills to get down into the Mission, and everywherethere were trucks. I saw new sensors and traffic cameras installed atmany of the stop-signs. Someone had a lot of surveillance gear lyingaround, waiting to be installed at the first opportunity. The attack on theBay Bridge had been just what they needed.
79It all made the city seem more subdued, like being inside an elevator,embarrassed by the close scrutiny of your neighbors and the ubiquitouscameras.
The Turkish coffee shop on 24th Street fixed me up good with a go-cupof Turkish coffee. Basically, Turkish coffee is mud, pretending to be cof-fee. It's thick enough to stand a spoon up in, and it has way more caf-feine than the kiddee-pops like Red Bull. Take it from someone who'sread the Wikipedia entry: this is how the Ottoman Empire was won:
maddened horsemen fueled by lethal jet-black coffee-mud.
I pulled out my debit card to pay and he made a face. "No more debit,"he said.
Huh? Why not? I'd paid for my coffee habit on my card for years atthe Turk's. He used to hassle me all the time, telling me I was too youngto drink the stuff, and he still refused to serve me at all during schoolhours, convinced that I was skipping class. But over the years, the Turkand me have developed a kind of gruff understanding.
He shook his head sadly. "You wouldn't understand. Go to school,kid."There's no surer way to make me want to understand than to tell me Iwon't. I wheedled him, demanding that he tell me. He looked like he wasgoing to throw me out, but when I asked him if he thought I wasn't goodenough to shop there, he opened up.
The security, he said, looking around his little shop with its tubs ofdried beans and seeds, its shelves of Turkish groceries. "The government.
They monitor it all now, it was in the papers. PATRIOT Act II, the Con-gress passed it yesterday. Now they can monitor every time you useyour card. I say no. I say my shop will not help them spy on mycustomers."My jaw dropped.
You think it's no big deal maybe? What is the problem with govern-ment knowing when you buy coffee? Because it's one way they knowwhere you are, where you been. Why you think I left Turkey? Whereyou have government always spying on the people, is no good. I movehere twenty years ago for freedom — I no help them take freedomaway."You're going to lose so many sales, I blurted. I wanted to tell him hewas a hero and shake his hand, but that was what came out. "Everyoneuses debit cards."80"Maybe not so much anymore. Maybe my customers come here be-cause they know I love freedom too. I am making sign for window.
Maybe other stores do the same. I hear the ACLU will sue them for this.""You've got all my business from now on," I said. I meant it. I reachedinto my pocket. "Um, I don't have any cash, though."He pursed his lips and nodded. "Many peoples say the same thing. IsOK. You give today's money to the ACLU."In two minutes, the Turk and I had exchanged more words than wehad in all the time I'd been coming to his shop. I had no idea he had allthese passions. I just thought of him as my friendly neighborhood caf-feine dealer. Now I shook his hand and when I left his store, I felt like heand I had joined a team. A secret team.
I'd missed two days of school but it seemed like I hadn't missed muchclass. They'd shut the school on one of those days while the cityscrambled to recover. The next day had been devoted, it seemed, tomourning those missing and presumed dead. The newspapers publishedbiographies of the lost, personal memorials. The Web was filled withthese capsule obituaries, thousands of them.
Embarrassingly, I was one of those people. I stepped into the school-yard, not knowing this, and then there was a shout and a moment laterthere were a hundred people around me, pounding me on the back,shaking my hand. A couple girls I didn't even know kissed me, and theywere more than friendly kisses. I felt like a rock star.
My teachers were only a little more subdued. Ms Galvez cried as muchas my mother had and hugged me three times before she let me go to mydesk and sit down. There was something new at the front of theclassroom. A camera. Ms Galvez caught me staring at it and handed mea permission slip on smeary Xeroxed school letterhead.
The Board of the San Francisco Unified School District had held anemergency session over the weekend and unanimously voted to ask theparents of every kid in the city for permission to put closed circuit televi-sion cameras in every classroom and corridor. The law said they couldn'tforce us to go to school with cameras all over the place, but it didn't sayanything about us volunteering to give up our Constitutional rights. Theletter said that the Board were sure that they would get complete compli-ance from the City's parents, but that they would make arrangements to81teach those kids' whose parents objected in a separate set of"unprotected" classrooms.
Why did we have cameras in our classrooms now? Terrorists. Ofcourse. Because by blowing up a bridge, terrorists had indicated thatschools were next. Somehow that was the conclusion that the Board hadreached anyway.
I read this note three times and then I stuck my hand up.
Yes, Marcus?"Ms Galvez, about this note?"Yes, Marcus."Isn't the point of terrorism to make us afraid? That's why it's calledterrorism, right?"I suppose so. The class was staring at me. I wasn't the best student inschool, but I did like a good in-class debate. They were waiting to hearwhat I'd say next.
So aren't we doing what the terrorists want from us? Don't they win ifwe act all afraid and put cameras in the classrooms and all of that?There was some nervous tittering. One of the others put his hand up. Itwas Charles. Ms Galvez called on him.
Putting cameras in makes us safe, which makes us less afraid."Safe from what? I said, without waiting to be called on.
Terrorism, Charles said. The others were nodding their heads.
How do they do that? If a suicide bomber rushed in here and blew usall up —"Ms Galvez, Marcus is violating school policy. We're not supposed tomake jokes about terrorist attacks —"Who's making jokes?"Thank you, both of you, Ms Galvez said. She looked really unhappy.
I felt kind of bad for hijacking her class. "I think that this is a really inter-esting discussion, but I'd like to hold it over for a future class. I think thatthese issues may be too emotional for us to have a discussion about themtoday. Now, let's get back to the suffragists, shall we?"So we spent the rest of the hour talking about suffragists and the newlobbying strategies they'd devised for getting four women into everycongresscritter's office to lean on him and let him know what it wouldmean for his political future if he kept on denying women the vote. It82was normally the kind of thing I really liked — little guys making the bigand powerful be honest. But today I couldn't concentrate. It must havebeen Darryl's absence. We both liked Social Studies and we would havehad our SchoolBooks out and an IM session up seconds after sittingdown, a back-channel for talking about the lesson.
I'd burned twenty ParanoidXbox discs the night before and I had themall in my bag. I handed them out to people I knew were really, really intogaming. They'd all gotten an Xbox Universal or two the year before, butmost of them had stopped using them. The games were really expensiveand not a lot of fun. I took them aside between periods, at lunch andstudy hall, and sang the praises of the ParanoidXbox games to the sky.
Free and fun — addictive social games with lots of cool people playingthem from all over the world.
Giving away one thing to sell another is what they call a "razor bladebusiness" — companies like Gillette give you free razor-blade handlesand then stiff you by charging you a small fortune for the blades. Printercartridges are the worst for that — the most expensive Champagne in theworld is cheap when compared with inkjet ink, which costs all of apenny a gallon to make wholesale.
Razor-blade businesses depend on you not being able to get the"blades" from someone else. After all, if Gillette can make nine bucks ona ten-dollar replacement blade, why not start a competitor that makesonly four bucks selling an identical blade: an 80 percent profit margin isthe kind of thing that makes your average business-guy go all droolyand round-eyed.
So razor-blade companies like Microsoft pour a lot of effort into mak-ing it hard and/or illegal to compete with them on the blades. InMicrosoft's case, every Xbox has had countermeasures to keep you fromrunning software that was released by people who didn't pay theMicrosoft blood-money for the right to sell Xbox programs.
The people I met didn't think much about this stuff. They perked upwhen I told them that the games were unmonitored. These days, any on-line game you play is filled with all kinds of unsavory sorts. First thereare the pervs who try to get you to come out to some remote location sothey can go all weird and Silence of the Lambs on you. Then there are thecops, who are pretending to be gullible kids so they can bust the pervs.
Worst of all, though, are the monitors who spend all their time spying onour discussions and snitching on us for violating their Terms of Service,83which say, no flirting, no cussing, and no "clear or masked languagewhich insultingly refers to any aspect of sexual orientation or sexuality."I'm no 24/7 horn-dog, but I'm a seventeen year old boy. Sex does comeup in conversation every now and again. But God help you if it came upin chat while you were gaming. It was a real buzz-kill. No one monitoredthe ParanoidXbox games, because they weren't run by a company: theywere just games that hackers had written for the hell of it.
So these game-kids loved the story. They took the discs greedily, andpromised to burn copies for all of their friends — after all, games aremost fun when you're playing them with your buddies.
When I got home, I read that a group of parents were suing the schoolboard over the surveillance cameras in the classrooms, but that they'dalready lost their bid to get a preliminary injunction against them.
I don't know who came up with the name Xnet, but it stuck. You'dhear people talking about it on the Muni. Van called me up to ask me ifI'd heard of it and I nearly choked once I figured out what she was talk-ing about: the discs I'd started distributing last week had been sneaker-netted and copied all the way to Oakland in the space of two weeks. Itmade me look over my shoulder — like I'd broken a rule and now theDHS would come and take me away forever.
They'd been hard weeks. The BART had completely abandoned cashfares now, switching them for arphid "contactless" cards that you wavedat the turnstiles to go through. They were cool and convenient, but everytime I used one, I thought about how I was being tracked. Someone onXnet posted a link to an Electronic Frontier Foundation white paper onthe ways that these things could be used to track people, and the paperhad tiny stories about little groups of people that had protested at theBART stations.
I used the Xnet for almost everything now. I'd set up a fake email ad-dress through the Pirate Party, a Swedish political party that hated Inter-net surveillance and promised to keep their mail accounts a secret fromeveryone, even the cops. I accessed it strictly via Xnet, hopping from oneneighbor's Internet connection to the next, staying anonymous — Ihoped — all the way to Sweden. I wasn't using w1n5ton anymore. IfBenson could figure it out, anyone could. My new handle, come up withon the spur of the moment, was M1k3y, and I got a lot of email frompeople who heard in chat rooms and message boards that I could helpthem troubleshoot their Xnet configurations and connections.
84I missed Harajuku Fun Madness. The company had suspended thegame indefinitely. They said that for "security reasons" they didn't thinkit would be a good idea to hide things and then send people off to findthem. What if someone thought it was a bomb? What if someone put abomb in the same spot?
What if I got hit by lightning while walking with an umbrella? Banumbrellas! Fight the menace of lightning!
I kept on using my laptop, though I got a skin-crawly feeling when Iused it. Whoever had wiretapped it would wonder why I didn't use it. Ifigured I'd just do some random surfing with it every day, a little lesseach day, so that anyone watching would see me slowly changing myhabits, not doing a sudden reversal. Mostly I read those creepy obits —all those thousands of my friends and neighbors dead at the bottom ofthe Bay.
Truth be told, I was doing less and less homework every day. I hadbusiness elsewhere. I burned new stacks of ParanoidXbox every day,fifty or sixty, and took them around the city to people I'd heard werewilling to burn sixty of their own and hand them out to their friends.
I wasn't too worried about getting caught doing this, because I hadgood crypto on my side. Crypto is cryptography, or "secret writing," andit's been around since Roman times (literally: Augustus Caesar was a bigfan and liked to invent his own codes, some of which we use today forscrambling joke punchlines in email).
Crypto is math. Hard math. I'm not going to try to explain it in detailbecause I don't have the math to really get my head around it, either —look it up on Wikipedia if you really want.
But here's the Cliff's Notes version: Some kinds of mathematical func-tions are really easy to do in one direction and really hard to do in theother direction. It's easy to multiply two big prime numbers together andmake a giant number. It's really, really hard to take any given giant num-ber and figure out which primes multiply together to give you thatnumber.
That means that if you can come up with a way of scramblingsomething based on multiplying large primes, unscrambling it withoutknowing those primes will be hard. Wicked hard. Like, a trillion years ofall the computers ever invented working 24/7 won't be able to do it.
There are four parts to any crypto message: the original message,called the "cleartext." The scrambled message, called the "ciphertext." The85scrambling system, called the "cipher." And finally there's the key: secretstuff you feed into the cipher along with the cleartext to make ciphertext.
It used to be that crypto people tried to keep all of this a secret. Everyagency and government had its own ciphers and its own keys. The Nazisand the Allies didn't want the other guys to know how they scrambledtheir messages, let alone the keys that they could use to descramblethem. That sounds like a good idea, right?
Wrong.
The first time anyone told me about all this prime factoring stuff, I im-mediately said, "No way, that's BS. I mean, sure it's hard to do this primefactorization stuff, whatever you say it is. But it used to be impossible tofly or go to the moon or get a hard-drive with more than a few kilobytesof storage. Someone must have invented a way of descrambling the mes-sages." I had visions of a hollow mountain full of National SecurityAgency mathematicians reading every email in the world andsnickering.
In fact, that's pretty much what happened during World War II. That'sthe reason that life isn't more like Castle Wolfenstein, where I've spentmany days hunting Nazis.
The thing is, ciphers are hard to keep secret. There's a lot of math thatgoes into one, and if they're widely used, then everyone who uses themhas to keep them a secret too, and if someone changes sides, you have tofind a new cipher.
The Nazi cipher was called Enigma, and they used a little mechanicalcomputer called an Enigma Machine to scramble and unscramble themessages they got. Every sub and boat and station needed one of these,so it was inevitable that eventually the Allies would get their hands onone.
When they did, they cracked it. That work was led by my personal all-time hero, a guy named Alan Turing, who pretty much invented com-puters as we know them today. Unfortunately for him, he was gay, soafter the war ended, the stupid British government forced him to get shotup with hormones to "cure" his homosexuality and he killed himself.
Darryl gave me a biography of Turing for my 14th birthday — wrappedin twenty layers of paper and in a recycled Batmobile toy, he was likethat with presents — and I've been a Turing junkie ever since.
Now the Allies had the Enigma Machine, and they could intercept lotsof Nazi radio-messages, which shouldn't have been that big a deal, since86every captain had his own secret key. Since the Allies didn't have thekeys, having the machine shouldn't have helped.
Here's where secrecy hurts crypto. The Enigma cipher was flawed.
Once Turing looked hard at it, he figured out that the Nazi cryptograph-ers had made a mathematical mistake. By getting his hands on an En-igma Machine, Turing could figure out how to crack any Nazi message,no matter what key it used.
That cost the Nazis the war. I mean, don't get me wrong. That's goodnews. Take it from a Castle Wolfenstein veteran. You wouldn't want theNazis running the country.
After the war, cryptographers spent a lot of time thinking about this.
The problem had been that Turing was smarter than the guy whothought up Enigma. Any time you had a cipher, you were vulnerable tosomeone smarter than you coming up with a way of breaking it.
And the more they thought about it, the more they realized that anyonecan come up with a security system that he can't figure out how to break.
But no one can figure out what a smarter person might do.
You have to publish a cipher to know that it works. You have to tell asmany people as possible how it works, so that they can thwack on it witheverything they have, testing its security. The longer you go withoutanyone finding a flaw, the more secure you are.
Which is how it stands today. If you want to be safe, you don't usecrypto that some genius thought of last week. You use the stuff thatpeople have been using for as long as possible without anyone figuringout how to break them. Whether you're a bank, a terrorist, a governmentor a teenager, you use the same ciphers.
If you tried to use your own cipher, there'd be the chance thatsomeone out there had found a flaw you missed and was doing a Turingon your butt, deciphering all your "secret" messages and chuckling atyour dumb gossip, financial transactions and military secrets.
So I knew that crypto would keep me safe from eavesdroppers, but Iwasn't ready to deal with histograms.
I got off the BART and waved my card over the turnstile as I headedup to the 24th Street station. As usual, there were lots of weirdoshanging out in the station, drunks and Jesus freaks and intense Mexicanmen staring at the ground and a few gang kids. I looked straight pastthem as I hit the stairs and jogged up to the surface. My bag was empty87now, no longer bulging with the ParanoidXbox discs I'd been distribut-ing, and it made my shoulders feel light and put a spring in my step as Icame up the street. The preachers were at work still, exhorting in Span-ish and English about Jesus and so on.
The counterfeit sunglass sellers were gone, but they'd been replacedby guys selling robot dogs that barked the national anthem and wouldlift their legs if you showed them a picture of Osama bin Laden. Therewas probably some cool stuff going on in their little brains and I made amental note to pick a couple of them up and take them apart later. Face-recognition was pretty new in toys, having only recently made the leapfrom the military to casinos trying to find cheats, to law enforcement.
I started down 24th Street toward Potrero Hill and home, rolling myshoulders and smelling the burrito smells wafting out of the restaurantsand thinking about dinner.
I don't know why I happened to glance back over my shoulder, but Idid. Maybe it was a little bit of subconscious sixth-sense stuff. I knew Iwas being followed.
They were two beefy white guys with little mustaches that made methink of either cops or the gay bikers who rode up and down the Castro,but gay guys usually had better haircuts. They had on windbreakers thecolor of old cement and blue-jeans, with their waistbands concealed. Ithought of all the things a cop might wear on his waistband, of theutility-belt that DHS guy in the truck had worn. Both guys were wearingBluetooth headsets.
I kept walking, my heart thumping in my chest. I'd been expecting thissince I started. I'd been expecting the DHS to figure out what I was do-ing. I took every precaution, but Severe-Haircut woman had told me thatshe'd be watching me. She'd told me I was a marked man. I realized thatI'd been waiting to get picked up and taken back to jail. Why not? Whyshould Darryl be in jail and not me? What did I have going for me? Ihadn't even had the guts to tell my parents — or his — what had reallyhappened to us.
I quickened my steps and took a mental inventory. I didn't have any-thing incriminating in my bag. Not too incriminating, anyway. MySchoolBook was running the crack that let me IM and stuff, but half thepeople in school had that. I'd changed the way I encrypted the stuff onmy phone — now I did have a fake partition that I could turn back intocleartext with one password, but all the good stuff was hidden, andneeded another password to open up. That hidden section looked just88like random junk — when you encrypt data, it becomes indistinguish-able from random noise — and they'd never even know it was there.
There were no discs in my bag. My laptop was free of incriminatingevidence. Of course, if they thought to look hard at my Xbox, it wasgame over. So to speak.
I stopped where I was standing. I'd done as good a job as I could ofcovering myself. It was time to face my fate. I stepped into the nearestburrito joint and ordered one with carnitas — shredded pork — and ex-tra salsa. Might as well go down with a full stomach. I got a bucket ofhorchata, too, an ice-cold rice drink that's like watery, semi-sweet rice-pudding (better than it sounds).
I sat down to eat, and a profound calm fell over me. I was about to goto jail for my "crimes," or I wasn't. My freedom since they'd taken me inhad been just a temporary holiday. My country was not my friend any-more: we were now on different sides and I'd known I could never win.
The two guys came into the restaurant as I was finishing the burritoand going up to order some churros — deep-fried dough with cinnamonsugar — for dessert. I guess they'd been waiting outside and got tired ofmy dawdling.
They stood behind me at the counter, boxing me in. I took my churrofrom the pretty granny and paid her, taking a couple of quick bites of thedough before I turned around. I wanted to eat at least a little of mydessert. It might be the last dessert I got for a long, long time.
Then I turned around. They were both so close I could see the zit onthe cheek of the one on the left, the little booger up the nose of the other.
'Scuse me, I said, trying to push past them. The one with the boogermoved to block me.
Sir, he said, "can you step over here with us?" He gestured towardthe restaurant's door.
Sorry, I'm eating, I said and moved again. This time he put his handon my chest. He was breathing fast through his nose, making the boogerwiggle. I think I was breathing hard too, but it was hard to tell over thehammering of my heart.
The other one flipped down a flap on the front of his windbreaker toreveal a SFPD insignia. "Police," he said. "Please come with us.""Let me just get my stuff," I said.
89"We'll take care of that," he said. The booger one stepped right up closeto me, his foot on the inside of mine. You do that in some martial arts,too. It lets you feel if the other guy is shifting his weight, getting ready tomove.
I wasn't going to run, though. I knew I couldn't outrun fate.
This chapter is dedicated to New York City's Books of Wonder, the old-est and largest kids' bookstore in Manhattan. They're located just a fewblocks away from Tor Books' offices in the Flatiron Building and everytime I drop in to meet with the Tor people, I always sneak away to Booksof Wonder to peruse their stock of new, used and rare kids' books. I'm aheavy collector of rare editions of Alice in Wonderland, and Books ofWonder never fails to excite me with some beautiful, limited-editionAlice. They have tons of events for kids and one of the most inviting at-mospheres I've ever experienced at a bookstore.
Books of Wonder: 18 West 18th St, New York, NY 10011 USA +1 212989 3270They took me outside and around the corner, to a waiting unmarkedpolice car. It wasn't like anyone in that neighborhood would have had ahard time figuring out that it was a cop-car, though. Only police drivebig Crown Victorias now that gas had hit seven bucks a gallon. What'smore, only cops could double-park in the middle of Van Ness streetwithout getting towed by the schools of predatory tow-operators thatcircled endlessly, ready to enforce San Francisco's incomprehensibleparking regulations and collect a bounty for kidnapping your car.
Booger blew his nose. I was sitting in the back seat, and so was he. Hispartner was sitting in the front, typing with one finger on an ancient,ruggedized laptop that looked like Fred Flintstone had been its originalowner.
Booger looked closely at my ID again. "We just want to ask you a fewroutine questions.""Can I see your badges?" I said. These guys were clearly cops, but itcouldn't hurt to let them know I knew my rights.
Booger flashed his badge at me too fast for me to get a good look at it,but Zit in the front seat gave me a long look at his. I got their division91number and memorized the four-digit badge number. It was easy: 1337is also the way hackers write "leet," or "elite."They were both being very polite and neither of them was trying to in-timidate me the way that the DHS had done when I was in their custody.
Am I under arrest?"You've been momentarily detained so that we can ensure your safetyand the general public safety, Booger said.
He passed my driver's license up to Zit, who pecked it slowly into hiscomputer. I saw him make a typo and almost corrected him, but figuredit was better to just keep my mouth shut.
Is there anything you want to tell me, Marcus? Do they call youMarc?"Marcus is fine, I said. Booger looked like he might be a nice guy. Ex-cept for the part about kidnapping me into his car, of course.
Marcus. Anything you want to tell me?"Like what? Am I under arrest?"You're not under arrest right now, Booger said. "Would you like tobe?""No," I said.
Good. We've been watching you since you left the BART. Your FastPass says that you've been riding to a lot of strange places at a lot offunny hours.I felt something let go inside my chest. This wasn't about the Xnet atall, then, not really. They'd been watching my subway use and wanted toknow why it had been so freaky lately. How totally stupid.
So you guys follow everyone who comes out of the BART station witha funny ride-history? You must be busy."Not everyone, Marcus. We get an alert when anyone with an uncom-mon ride profile comes out and that helps us assess whether we want toinvestigate. In your case, we came along because we wanted to knowwhy a smart-looking kid like you had such a funny ride profile?Now that I knew I wasn't about to go to jail, I was getting pissed.
These guys had no business spying on me — Christ, the BART had nobusiness helping them to spy on me. Where the hell did my subway passget off on finking me out for having a "nonstandard ride pattern?""I think I'd like to be arrested now," I said.
92Booger sat back and raised his eyebrow at me.
Really? On what charge?"Oh, you mean riding public transit in a nonstandard way isn't acrime?Zit closed his eyes and scrubbed them with his thumbs.
Booger sighed a put-upon sigh. "Look, Marcus, we're on your sidehere. We use this system to catch bad guys. To catch terrorists and drugdealers. Maybe you're a drug dealer yourself. Pretty good way to getaround the city, a Fast Pass. Anonymous.""What's wrong with anonymous? It was good enough for Thomas Jef-ferson. And by the way, am I under arrest?""Let's take him home," Zit said. "We can talk to his parents.""I think that's a great idea," I said. "I'm sure my parents will be anxiousto hear how their tax dollars are being spent —"I'd pushed it too far. Booger had been reaching for the door handle butnow he whirled on me, all Hulked out and throbbing veins. "Why don'tyou shut up right now, while it's still an option? After everything that'shappened in the past two weeks, it wouldn't kill you to cooperate withus. You know what, maybe we should arrest you. You can spend a day ortwo in jail while your lawyer looks for you. A lot can happen in thattime. A lot. How'd you like that?"I didn't say anything. I'd been giddy and angry. Now I was scaredwitless.
I'm sorry, I managed, hating myself again for saying it.
Booger got in the front seat and Zit put the car in gear, cruising up24th Street and over Potrero Hill. They had my address from my ID.
Mom answered the door after they rang the bell, leaving the chain on.
She peeked around it, saw me and said, "Marcus? Who are these men?""Police," Booger said. He showed her his badge, letting her get a goodlook at it — not whipping it away the way he had with me. "Can wecome in?"Mom closed the door and took the chain off and let them in. Theybrought me in and Mom gave the three of us one of her looks.
What's this about?93Booger pointed at me. "We wanted to ask your son some routine ques-tions about his movements, but he declined to answer them. We felt itmight be best to bring him here.""Is he under arrest?" Mom's accent was coming on strong. Good oldMom.
Are you a United States citizen, ma'am? Zit said.
She gave him a look that could have stripped paint. "I shore am,hyuck," she said, in a broad southern accent. "Am I under arrest?"The two cops exchanged a look.
Zit took the fore. "We seem to have gotten off to a bad start. We identi-fied your son as someone with a nonstandard public transit usage pat-tern, as part of a new pro-active enforcement program. When we spotpeople whose travels are unusual, or that match a suspicious profile, weinvestigate further.""Wait," Mom said. "How do you know how my son uses the Muni?""The Fast Pass," he said. "It tracks voyages.""I see," Mom said, folding her arms. Folding her arms was a bad sign.
It was bad enough she hadn't offered them a cup of tea — in Mom-land,that was practically like making them shout through the mail-slot — butonce she folded her arms, it was not going to end well for them. At thatmoment, I wanted to go and buy her a big bunch of flowers.
Marcus here declined to tell us why his movements had been whatthey were."Are you saying you think my son is a terrorist because of how herides the bus?"Terrorists aren't the only bad guys we catch this way, Zit said. "Drugdealers. Gang kids. Even shoplifters smart enough to hit a differentneighborhood with every run.""You think my son is a drug dealer?""We're not saying that —" Zit began. Mom clapped her hands at him toshut him up.
Marcus, please pass me your backpack.I did.
Mom unzipped it and looked through it, turning her back to us first.
94"Officers, I can now affirm that there are no narcotics, explosives, orshoplifted gewgaws in my son's bag. I think we're done here. I wouldlike your badge numbers before you go, please."Booger sneered at her. "Lady, the ACLU is suing three hundred copson the SFPD, you're going to have to get in line."Mom made me a cup of tea and then chewed me out for eating dinnerwhen I knew that she'd been making falafel. Dad came home while wewere still at the table and Mom and I took turns telling him the story. Heshook his head.
Lillian, they were just doing their jobs. He was still wearing the blueblazer and khakis he wore on the days that he was consulting in SiliconValley. "The world isn't the same place it was last week."Mom set down her teacup. "Drew, you're being ridiculous. Your son isnot a terrorist. His use of the public transit system is not cause for a po-lice investigation."Dad took off his blazer. "We do this all the time at my work. It's howcomputers can be used to find all kinds of errors, anomalies and out-comes. You ask the computer to create a profile of an average record in adatabase and then ask it to find out which records in the database arefurthest away from average. It's part of something called Bayesian ana-lysis and it's been around for centuries now. Without it, we couldn't dospam-filtering —""So you're saying that you think the police should suck as hard as myspam filter?" I said.
Dad never got angry at me for arguing with him, but tonight I couldsee the strain was running high in him. Still, I couldn't resist. My ownfather, taking the police's side!
I'm saying that it's perfectly reasonable for the police to conduct theirinvestigations by starting with data-mining, and then following it upwith leg-work where a human being actually intervenes to see why theabnormality exists. I don't think that a computer should be telling the po-lice whom to arrest, just helping them sort through the haystack to find aneedle."But by taking in all that data from the transit system, they're creatingthe haystack, I said. "That's a gigantic mountain of data and there's al-most nothing worth looking at there, from the police's point of view. It'sa total waste."95"I understand that you don't like that this system caused you some in-convenience, Marcus. But you of all people should appreciate the gravityof the situation. There was no harm done, was there? They even gaveyou a ride home."They threatened to send me to jail, I thought, but I could see there was nopoint in saying it.
Besides, you still haven't told us where the blazing hells you've beento create such an unusual traffic pattern.That brought me up short.
I thought you relied on my judgment, that you didn't want to spy onme. He'd said this often enough. "Do you really want me to account forevery trip I've ever taken?"I hooked up my Xbox as soon as I got to my room. I'd bolted the pro-jector to the ceiling so that it could shine on the wall over my bed (I'dhad to take down my awesome mural of punk rock handbills I'd takendown off telephone poles and glued to big sheets of white paper).
I powered up the Xbox and watched as it came onto the screen. I wasgoing to email Van and Jolu to tell them about the hassles with the cops,but as I put my fingers to the keyboard, I stopped again.
A feeling crept over me, one not unlike the feeling I'd had when I real-ized that they'd turned poor old Salmagundi into a traitor. This time, itwas the feeling that my beloved Xnet might be broadcasting the locationof every one of its users to the DHS.
It was what Dad had said: You ask the computer to create a profile of anaverage record in a database and then ask it to find out which records in thedatabase are furthest away from average.
The Xnet was secure because its users weren't directly connected to theInternet. They hopped from Xbox to Xbox until they found one that wasconnected to the Internet, then they injected their material as unde-cipherable, encrypted data. No one could tell which of the Internet'spackets were Xnet and which ones were just plain old banking and e-commerce and other encrypted communication. You couldn't find outwho was tying the Xnet, let alone who was using the Xnet.
But what about Dad's "Bayesian statistics?" I'd played with Bayesianmath before. Darryl and I once tried to write our own better spam filterand when you filter spam, you need Bayesian math. Thomas Bayes wasan 18th century British mathematician that no one care about until a96couple hundred years after he died, when computer scientists realizedthat his technique for statistically analyzing mountains of data would besuper-useful for the modern world's info-Himalayas.
Here's some of how Bayesian stats work. Say you've got a bunch ofspam. You take every word that's in the spam and count how manytimes it appears. This is called a "word frequency histogram" and it tellsyou what the probability is that any bag of words is likely to be spam.
Now, take a ton of email that's not spam — in the biz, they call that"ham" — and do the same.
Wait until a new email arrives and count the words that appear in it.
Then use the word-frequency histogram in the candidate message to cal-culate the probability that it belongs in the "spam" pile or the "ham" pile.
If it turns out to be spam, you adjust the "spam" histogram accordingly.
There are lots of ways to refine the technique — looking at words inpairs, throwing away old data — but this is how it works at core. It's oneof those great, simple ideas that seems obvious after you hear about it.
It's got lots of applications — you can ask a computer to count thelines in a picture and see if it's more like a "dog" line-frequency histo-gram or a "cat" line-frequency histogram. It can find porn, bank fraud,and flamewars. Useful stuff.
And it was bad news for the Xnet. Say you had the whole Internetwiretapped — which, of course, the DHS has. You can't tell who'spassing Xnet packets by looking at the contents of those packets, thanksto crypto.
What you can do is find out who is sending way, way more encryptedtraffic out than everyone else. For a normal Internet surfer, a session on-line is probably about 95 percent cleartext, five percent ciphertext. Ifsomeone is sending out 95 percent ciphertext, maybe you could dispatchthe computer-savvy equivalents of Booger and Zit to ask them if they'reterrorist drug-dealer Xnet users.
This happens all the time in China. Some smart dissident will get theidea of getting around the Great Firewall of China, which is used to cen-sor the whole country's Internet connection, by using an encrypted con-nection to a computer in some other country. Now, the Party there can'ttell what the dissident is surfing: maybe it's porn, or bomb-making in-structions, or dirty letters from his girlfriend in the Philippines, or polit-ical material, or good news about Scientology. They don't have to know.
All they have to know is that this guy gets way more encrypted trafficthan his neighbors. At that point, they send him to a forced labor camp97just to set an example so that everyone can see what happens to smart-asses.
So far, I was willing to bet that the Xnet was under the DHS's radar,but it wouldn't be the case forever. And after tonight, I wasn't sure that Iwas in any better shape than a Chinese dissident. I was putting all thepeople who signed onto the Xnet in jeopardy. The law didn't care if youwere actually doing anything bad; they were willing to put you underthe microscope just for being statistically abnormal. And I couldn't evenstop it — now that the Xnet was running, it had a life of its own.
I was going to have to fix it some other way.
I wished I could talk to Jolu about this. He worked at an Internet Ser-vice Provider called Pigspleen Net that had hired him when he wastwelve, and he knew way more about the net than I did. If anyone knewhow to keep our butts out of jail, it would be him.
Luckily, Van and Jolu and I were planning to meet for coffee the nextnight at our favorite place in the Mission after school. Officially, it wasour weekly Harajuku Fun Madness team meeting, but with the gamecanceled and Darryl gone, it was pretty much just a weekly weep-fest,supplemented by about six phone-calls and IMs a day that went, "Areyou OK? Did it really happen?" It would be good to have something elseto talk about.
You're out of your mind, Vanessa said. "Are you actually, totally,really, for-real crazy or what?"She had shown up in her girl's school uniform because she'd beenstuck going the long way home, all the way down to the San Mateobridge then back up into the city, on a shuttle-bus service that her schoolwas operating. She hated being seen in public in her gear, which wastotally Sailor Moon — a pleated skirt and a tunic and knee-socks. She'dbeen in a bad mood ever since she turned up at the cafe, which was fullof older, cooler, mopey emo art students who snickered into their latteswhen she turned up.
What do you want me to do, Van? I said. I was getting exasperatedmyself. School was unbearable now that the game wasn't on, now thatDarryl was missing. All day long, in my classes, I consoled myself withthe thought of seeing my team, what was left of it. Now we werefighting.
98"I want you to stop putting yourself at risk, M1k3y." The hairs on theback of my neck stood up. Sure, we always used our team handles atteam meetings, but now that my handle was also associated with myXnet use, it scared me to hear it said aloud in a public place.
Don't use that name in public anymore, I snapped.
Van shook her head. "That's just what I'm taking about. You could endup going to jail for this, Marcus, and not just you. Lots of people. Afterwhat happened to Darryl —""I'm doing this for Darryl!" Art students swiveled to look at us and Ilowered my voice. "I'm doing this because the alternative is to let themget away with it all.""You think you're going to stop them? You're out of your mind.
They're the government.""It's still our country," I said. "We still have the right to do this."Van looked like she was going to cry. She took a couple of deepbreaths and stood up. "I can't do it, I'm sorry. I can't watch you do this.
It's like watching a car-wreck in slow motion. You're going to destroyyourself, and I love you too much to watch it happen."She bent down and gave me a fierce hug and a hard kiss on the cheekthat caught the edge of my mouth. "Take care of yourself, Marcus," shesaid. My mouth burned where her lips had pressed it. She gave Jolu thesame treatment, but square on the cheek. Then she left.
Jolu and I stared at each other after she'd gone.
I put my face in my hands. "Dammit," I said, finally.
Jolu patted me on the back and ordered me another latte. "It'll be OK,"he said.
You'd think Van, of all people, would understand. Half of Van's fam-ily lived in North Korea. Her parents never forgot that they had all thosepeople living a crazy dictator, not able to escape to America, the way herparents had.
Jolu shrugged. "Maybe that's why she's so freaked out. Because sheknows how dangerous it can get."I knew what he was talking about. Two of Van's uncles had gone tojail and had never reappeared.
Yeah, I said.
So how come you weren't on Xnet last night?99I was grateful for the distraction. I explained it all to him, the Bayesianstuff and my fear that we couldn't go on using Xnet the way we had beenwithout getting nabbed. He listened thoughtfully.
I see what you're saying. The problem is that if there's too muchcrypto in someone's Internet connection, they'll stand out as unusual. Butif you don't encrypt, you'll make it easy for the bad guys to wiretap you."Yeah, I said. "I've been trying to figure it out all day. Maybe we couldslow the connection down, spread it out over more peoples' accounts —""Won't work," he said. "To get it slow enough to vanish into the noise,you'd have to basically shut down the network, which isn't an option.""You're right," I said. "But what else can we do?""What if we changed the definition of normal?"And that was why Jolu got hired to work at Pigspleen when he was 12.
Give him a problem with two bad solutions and he'd figure out a thirdtotally different solution based on throwing away all your assumptions. Inodded vigorously. "Go on, tell me.""What if the average San Francisco Internet user had a lot more cryptoin his average day on the Internet? If we could change the split so it'smore like fifty-fifty cleartext to ciphertext, then the users that supply theXnet would just look like normal.""But how do we do that? People just don't care enough about their pri-vacy to surf the net through an encrypted link. They don't see why itmatters if eavesdroppers know what they're googling for.""Yeah, but web-pages are small amounts of traffic. If we got people toroutinely download a few giant encrypted files every day, that wouldcreate as much ciphertext as thousands of web-pages.""You're talking about indienet," I said.
You got it, he said.
indienet — all lower case, always — was the thing that made Pigs-pleen Net into one of the most successful independent ISPs in the world.
Back when the major record labels started suing their fans for download-ing their music, a lot of the independent labels and their artists wereaghast. How can you make money by suing your customers?
Pigspleen's founder had the answer: she opened up a deal for any actthat wanted to work with their fans instead of fighting them. Give Pigs-pleen a license to distribute your music to its customers and it wouldgive you a share of the subscription fees based on how popular your100music was. For an indie artist, the big problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity:
no one even cares enough about your tunes to steal 'em.
It worked. Hundreds of independent acts and labels signed up withPigspleen, and the more music there was, the more fans switched to get-ting their Internet service from Pigspleen, and the more money there wasfor the artists. Inside of a year, the ISP had a hundred thousand new cus-tomers and now it had a million — more than half the broadband con-nections in the city.
An overhaul of the indienet code has been on my plate for monthsnow, Jolu said. "The original programs were written really fast and dirtyand they could be made a lot more efficient with a little work. But I justhaven't had the time. One of the high-marked to-do items has been to en-crypt the connections, just because Trudy likes it that way." Trudy Doowas the founder of Pigspleen. She was an old time San Francisco punklegend, the singer/front-woman of the anarcho-feminist band Speed-whores, and she was crazy about privacy. I could totally believe thatshe'd want her music service encrypted on general principles.
Will it be hard? I mean, how long would it take?"Well, there's tons of crypto code for free online, of course, Jolu said.
He was doing the thing he did when he was digging into a meaty codeproblem — getting that faraway look, drumming his palms on the table,making the coffee slosh into the saucers. I wanted to laugh — everythingmight be destroyed and crap and scary, but Jolu would write that code.
Can I help?He looked at me. "What, you don't think I can manage it?""What?""I mean, you did this whole Xnet thing without even telling me.
Without talking to me. I kind of thought that you didn't need my helpwith this stuff."I was brought up short. "What?" I said again. Jolu was looking reallysteamed now. It was clear that this had been eating him for a long time.
Jolu —He looked at me and I could see that he was furious. How had Imissed this? God, I was such an idiot sometimes. "Look dude, it's not abig deal —" by which he clearly meant that it was a really big deal "— it'sjust that you know, you never even asked. I hate the DHS. Darryl was myfriend too. I could have really helped with it."101I wanted to stick my head between my knees. "Listen Jolu, that wasreally stupid of me. I did it at like two in the morning. I was just crazywhen it was happening. I —" I couldn't explain it. Yeah, he was right,and that was the problem. It had been two in the morning but I couldhave talked to Jolu about it the next day or the next. I hadn't because I'dknown what he'd say — that it was an ugly hack, that I needed to think itthrough better. Jolu was always figuring out how to turn my 2 AM ideasinto real code, but the stuff that he came out with was always a little dif-ferent from what I'd come up with. I'd wanted the project for myself. I'dgotten totally into being M1k3y.
I'm sorry, I said at last. "I'm really, really sorry. You're totally right. Ijust got freaked out and did something stupid. I really need your help. Ican't make this work without you.""You mean it?""Of course I mean it," I said. "You're the best coder I know. You're agoddamned genius, Jolu. I would be honored if you'd help me with this."He drummed his fingers some more. "It's just — You know. You're theleader. Van's the smart one. Darryl was… He was your second-in-com-mand, the guy who had it all organized, who watched the details. Beingthe programmer, that was my thing. It felt like you were saying youdidn't need me.""Oh man, I am such an idiot. Jolu, you're the best-qualified person Iknow to do this. I'm really, really, really —""All right, already. Stop. Fine. I believe you. We're all really screwedup right now. So yeah, of course you can help. We can probably evenpay you — I've got a little budget for contract programmers.""Really?" No one had ever paid me for writing code.
Sure. You're probably good enough to be worth it. He grinned andslugged me in the shoulder. Jolu's really easy-going most of the time,which is why he'd freaked me out so much.
I paid for the coffees and we went out. I called my parents and letthem know what I was doing. Jolu's mom insisted on making us sand-wiches. We locked ourselves in his room with his computer and the codefor indienet and we embarked on one of the great all-time marathon pro-gramming sessions. Once Jolu's family went to bed around 11:30, wewere able to kidnap the coffee-machine up to his room and go IV withour magic coffee bean supply.
102If you've never programmed a computer, you should. There's nothinglike it in the whole world. When you program a computer, it does exactlywhat you tell it to do. It's like designing a machine — any machine, like acar, like a faucet, like a gas-hinge for a door — using math and instruc-tions. It's awesome in the truest sense: it can fill you with awe.
A computer is the most complicated machine you'll ever use. It's madeof billions of micro-miniaturized transistors that can be configured to runany program you can imagine. But when you sit down at the keyboardand write a line of code, those transistors do what you tell them to.
Most of us will never build a car. Pretty much none of us will ever cre-ate an aviation system. Design a building. Lay out a city.
Those are complicated machines, those things, and they're off-limits tothe likes of you and me. But a computer is like, ten times more complic-ated, and it will dance to any tune you play. You can learn to writesimple code in an afternoon. Start with a language like Python, whichwas written to give non-programmers an easier way to make the ma-chine dance to their tune. Even if you only write code for one day, oneafternoon, you have to do it. Computers can control you or they canlighten your work — if you want to be in charge of your machines, youhave to learn to write code.
We wrote a lot of code that night.