This chapter is dedicated to Borders, the global bookselling giant thatyou can find in cities all over the world — I'll never forget walking intothe gigantic Borders on Orchard Road in Singapore and discovering ashelf loaded with my novels! For many years, the Borders in OxfordStreet in London hosted Pat Cadigan's monthly science fiction evenings,where local and visiting authors would read their work, speak about sci-ence fiction and meet their fans. When I'm in a strange city (which hap-pens a lot) and I need a great book for my next flight, there always seemsto be a Borders brimming with great choices — I'm especially partial tothe Borders on union Square in San Francisco.
Borders worldwideI wasn't the only one who got screwed up by the histograms. There arelots of people who have abnormal traffic patterns, abnormal usage pat-terns. Abnormal is so common, it's practically normal.
The Xnet was full of these stories, and so were the newspapers and theTV news. Husbands were caught cheating on their wives; wives werecaught cheating on their husbands, kids were caught sneaking out withillicit girlfriends and boyfriends. A kid who hadn't told his parents hehad AIDS got caught going to the clinic for his drugs.
Those were the people with something to hide — not guilty people,but people with secrets. There were even more people with nothing tohide at all, but who nevertheless resented being picked up, and ques-tioned. Imagine if someone locked you in the back of a police car and de-manded that you prove that you're not a terrorist.
It wasn't just public transit. Most drivers in the Bay Area have aFasTrak pass clipped to their sun-visors. This is a little radio-based"wallet" that pays your tolls for you when you cross the bridges, savingyou the hassle of sitting in a line for hours at the toll-plazas. They'dtripled the cost of using cash to get across the bridge (though they104always fudged this, saying that FasTrak was cheaper, not that anonym-ous cash was more expensive). Whatever holdouts were left afterwarddisappeared after the number of cash-lanes was reduced to just one perbridge-head, so that the cash lines were even longer.
So if you're a local, or if you're driving a rental car from a local agency,you've got a FasTrak. It turns out that toll-plazas aren't the only placethat your FasTrak gets read, though. The DHS had put FasTrak readersall over town — when you drove past them, they logged the time andyour ID number, building an ever-more perfect picture of who wentwhere, when, in a database that was augmented by "speeding cameras,""red light cameras" and all the other license-plate cameras that hadpopped up like mushrooms.
No one had given it much thought. And now that people were payingattention, we were all starting to notice little things, like the fact that theFasTrak doesn't have an off-switch.
So if you drove a car, you were just as likely to be pulled over by anSFPD cruiser that wanted to know why you were taking so many trips tothe Home Depot lately, and what was that midnight drive up to Sonomalast week about?
The little demonstrations around town on the weekend were growing.
Fifty thousand people marched down Market Street after a week of thismonitoring. I couldn't care less. The people who'd occupied my citydidn't care what the natives wanted. They were a conquering army. Theyknew how we felt about that.
One morning I came down to breakfast just in time to hear Dad tellMom that the two biggest taxi companies were going to give a "discount"to people who used special cards to pay their fares, supposedly to makedrivers safer by reducing the amount of cash they carried. I wonderedwhat would happen to the information about who took which cabswhere.
I realized how close I'd come. The new indienet client had beenpushed out as an automatic update just as this stuff started to get bad,and Jolu told me that 80 percent of the traffic he saw at Pigspleen wasnow encrypted. The Xnet just might have been saved.
Dad was driving me nuts, though.
You're being paranoid, Marcus, he told me over breakfast one day asI told him about the guys I'd seen the cops shaking down on BART theday before.
105"Dad, it's ridiculous. They're not catching any terrorists, are they? It'sjust making people scared.""They may not have caught any terrorists yet, but they're sure gettinga lot of scumbags off the streets. Look at the drug dealers — it saysthey've put dozens of them away since this all started. Remember whenthose druggies robbed you? If we don't bust their dealers, it'll only getworse." I'd been mugged the year before. They'd been pretty civilizedabout it. One skinny guy who smelled bad told me he had a gun, the oth-er one asked me for my wallet. They even let me keep my ID, thoughthey got my debit card and Fast Pass. It had still scared me witless andleft me paranoid and checking my shoulder for weeks.
But most of the people they hold up aren't doing anything wrong,Dad, I said. This was getting to me. My own father! "It's crazy. For everyguilty person they catch, they have to punish thousands of innocentpeople. That's just not good.""Innocent? Guys cheating on their wives? Drug dealers? You're de-fending them, but what about all the people who died? If you don't haveanything to hide —""So you wouldn't mind if they pulled you over?" My dad's histogramshad proven to be depressingly normal so far.
I'd consider it my duty, he said. "I'd be proud. It would make me feelsafer."Easy for him to say.
Vanessa didn't like me talking about this stuff, but she was too smartabout it for me to stay away from the subject for long. We'd get togetherall the time, and talk about the weather and school and stuff, and then,somehow, I'd be back on this subject. Vanessa was cool when ithappened — she didn't Hulk out on me again — but I could see it upsether.
Still.
So my dad says, 'I'd consider it my duty.' Can you freaking believe it? Imean, God! I almost told him then about going to jail, asking him if hethought that was our 'duty'!We were sitting in the grass in Dolores Park after school, watching thedogs chase frisbees.
106Van had stopped at home and changed into an old t-shirt for one ofher favorite Brazilian tecno-brega bands, Carioca Proibid?o — the forbid-den guy from Rio. She'd gotten the shirt at a live show we'd all gone totwo years before, sneaking out for a grand adventure down at the CowPalace, and she'd sprouted an inch or two since, so it was tight and rodeup her tummy, showing her flat little belly button.
She lay back in the weak sun with her eyes closed behind her shades,her toes wiggling in her flip-flops. I'd known Van since forever, andwhen I thought of her, I usually saw the little kid I'd known with hun-dreds of jangly bracelets made out of sliced-up soda cans, who playedthe piano and couldn't dance to save her life. Sitting out there in DoloresPark, I suddenly saw her as she was.
She was totally h4wt — that is to say, hot. It was like looking at thatpicture of a vase and noticing that it was also two faces. I could see thatVan was just Van, but I could also see that she was hella pretty,something I'd never noticed.
Of course, Darryl had known it all along, and don't think that I wasn'tbummed out anew when I realized this.
You can't tell your dad, you know, she said. "You'd put us all at risk."Her eyes were closed and her chest was rising up and down with herbreath, which was distracting in a really embarrassing way.
Yeah, I said, glumly. "But the problem is that I know he's just totallyfull of it. If you pulled my dad over and made him prove he wasn't achild-molesting, drug-dealing terrorist, he'd go berserk. Totally off-the-rails. He hates being put on hold when he calls about his credit-card bill.
Being locked in the back of a car and questioned for an hour would givehim an aneurism.""They only get away with it because the normals feel smug comparedto the abnormals. If everyone was getting pulled over, it'd be a disaster.
No one would ever get anywhere, they'd all be waiting to get questionedby the cops. Total gridlock."Woah.
Van, you are a total genius, I said.
Tell me about it, she said. She had a lazy smile and she looked at methrough half-lidded eyes, almost romantic.
Seriously. We can do this. We can mess up the profiles easily. Gettingpeople pulled over is easy.107She sat up and pushed her hair off her face and looked at me. I felt alittle flip in my stomach, thinking that she was really impressed with me.
It's the arphid cloners, I said. "They're totally easy to make. Just flashthe firmware on a ten-dollar Radio Shack reader/writer and you're done.
What we do is go around and randomly swap the tags on people, over-writing their Fast Passes and FasTraks with other people's codes. That'llmake everyone skew all weird and screwy, and make everyone lookguilty. Then: total gridlock."Van pursed her lips and lowered her shades and I realized she was soangry she couldn't speak.
Good bye, Marcus, she said, and got to her feet. Before I knew it, shewas walking away so fast she was practically running.
Van! I called, getting to my feet and chasing after her. "Van! Wait!"She picked up speed, making me run to catch up with her.
Van, what the hell, I said, catching her arm. She jerked it away sohard I punched myself in the face.
You're psycho, Marcus. You're going to put all your little Xnet bud-dies in danger for their lives, and on top of it, you're going to turn thewhole city into terrorism suspects. Can't you stop before you hurt thesepeople?I opened and closed my mouth a couple times. "Van, I'm not the prob-lem, they are. I'm not arresting people, jailing them, making them disap-pear. The Department of Homeland Security are the ones doing that. I'mfighting back to make them stop.""How, by making it worse?""Maybe it has to get worse to get better, Van. Isn't that what you weresaying? If everyone was getting pulled over —""That's not what I meant. I didn't mean you should get everyone arres-ted. If you want to protest, join the protest movement. Do somethingpositive. Didn't you learn anything from Darryl? Anything?""You're damned right I did," I said, losing my cool. "I learned that theycan't be trusted. That if you're not fighting them, you're helping them.
That they'll turn the country into a prison if we let them. What did youlearn, Van? To be scared all the time, to sit tight and keep your headdown and hope you don't get noticed? You think it's going to get better?
If we don't do anything, this is as good as it's going to get. It will only get108worse and worse from now on. You want to help Darryl? Help me bringthem down!"There it was again. My vow. Not to get Darryl free, but to bring downthe entire DHS. That was crazy, even I knew it. But it was what I plannedto do. No question about it.
Van shoved me hard with both hands. She was strong from school ath-letics — fencing, lacrosse, field hockey, all the girls-school sports — and Iended up on my ass on the disgusting San Francisco sidewalk. She tookoff and I didn't follow.
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The important thing about security systems isn't how they work, it'show they fail.
That was the first line of my first blog post on Open Revolt, my Xnetsite. I was writing as M1k3y, and I was ready to go to war.
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Maybe all the automatic screening is supposed to catch terrorists.
Maybe it will catch a terrorist sooner or later. The problem is that itcatches us too, even though we're not doing anything wrong.
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The more people it catches, the more brittle it gets. If it catches toomany people, it dies.
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Get the idea?
I pasted in my HOWTO for building a arphid cloner, and some tips forgetting close enough to people to read and write their tags. I put my owncloner in the pocket of my vintage black leather motocross jacket withthe armored pockets and left for school. I managed to clone six tagsbetween home and Chavez High.
It was war they wanted. It was war they'd get.
If you ever decide to do something as stupid as build an automatic ter-rorism detector, here's a math lesson you need to learn first. It's called"the paradox of the false positive," and it's a doozy.
Say you have a new disease, called Super-AIDS. Only one in a millionpeople gets Super-AIDS. You develop a test for Super-AIDS that's 99109percent accurate. I mean, 99 percent of the time, it gives the correct result— true if the subject is infected, and false if the subject is healthy. Yougive the test to a million people.
One in a million people have Super-AIDS. One in a hundred peoplethat you test will generate a "false positive" — the test will say he hasSuper-AIDS even though he doesn't. That's what "99 percent accurate"means: one percent wrong.
What's one percent of one million?
1,000,000/100 = 10,000One in a million people has Super-AIDS. If you test a million randompeople, you'll probably only find one case of real Super-AIDS. But yourtest won't identify one person as having Super-AIDS. It will identify10,000 people as having it.
Your 99 percent accurate test will perform with 99.99 percentinaccuracy.
That's the paradox of the false positive. When you try to findsomething really rare, your test's accuracy has to match the rarity of thething you're looking for. If you're trying to point at a single pixel on yourscreen, a sharp pencil is a good pointer: the pencil-tip is a lot smaller(more accurate) than the pixels. But a pencil-tip is no good at pointing ata single atom in your screen. For that, you need a pointer — a test —that's one atom wide or less at the tip.
This is the paradox of the false positive, and here's how it applies toterrorism:
Terrorists are really rare. In a city of twenty million like New York,there might be one or two terrorists. Maybe ten of them at the outside.
10/20,000,000 = 0.00005 percent. One twenty-thousandth of a percent.
That's pretty rare all right. Now, say you've got some software that cansift through all the bank-records, or toll-pass records, or public transit re-cords, or phone-call records in the city and catch terrorists 99 percent ofthe time.
In a pool of twenty million people, a 99 percent accurate test willidentify two hundred thousand people as being terrorists. But only ten ofthem are terrorists. To catch ten bad guys, you have to haul in and in-vestigate two hundred thousand innocent people.
Guess what? Terrorism tests aren't anywhere close to 99 percent accur-ate. More like 60 percent accurate. Even 40 percent accurate, sometimes.
110What this all meant was that the Department of Homeland Securityhad set itself up to fail badly. They were trying to spot incredibly rareevents — a person is a terrorist — with inaccurate systems.
Is it any wonder we were able to make such a mess?
I stepped out the front door whistling on a Tuesday morning one weekinto the Operation False Positive. I was rockin' out to some new musicI'd downloaded from the Xnet the night before — lots of people sentM1k3y little digital gifts to say thank you for giving them hope.
I turned onto 23d Street and carefully took the narrow stone steps cutinto the side of the hill. As I descended, I passed Mr Wiener Dog. I don'tknow Mr Wiener Dog's real name, but I see him nearly every day, walk-ing his three panting wiener dogs up the staircase to the little parkette.
Squeezing past them all on the stairs is pretty much impossible and I al-ways end up tangled in a leash, knocked into someone's front garden, orperched on the bumper of one of the cars parked next to the curb.
Mr Wiener Dog is clearly Someone Important, because he has a fancywatch and always wears a nice suit. I had mentally assumed that heworked down in the financial district.
Today as I brushed up against him, I triggered my arphid cloner,which was already loaded in the pocket of my leather jacket. The clonersucked down the numbers off his credit-cards and his car-keys, his pass-port and the hundred-dollar bills in his wallet.
Even as it was doing that, it was flashing some of them with new num-bers, taken from other people I'd brushed against. It was like switchingthe license-plates on a bunch of cars, but invisible and instantaneous. Ismiled apologetically at Mr Wiener Dog and continued down the stairs. Istopped at three of the cars long enough to swap their FasTrak tags withnumbers taken offall over cars I'd gone past the day before.
You might think I was being a little aggro here, but I was cautious andconservative compared to a lot of the Xnetters. A couple girls in theChemical Engineering program at UC Berkeley had figured out how tomake a harmless substance out of kitchen products that would trip anexplosive sniffer. They'd had a merry time sprinkling it on their profs'
briefcases and jackets, then hiding out and watching the same profs tryto get into the auditoriums and libraries on campus, only to get flying-tackled by the new security squads that had sprung up everywhere.
111Other people wanted to figure out how to dust envelopes with sub-stances that would test positive for anthrax, but everyone else thoughtthey were out of their minds. Luckily, it didn't seem like they'd be able tofigure it out.
I passed by San Francisco General Hospital and nodded with satisfac-tion as I saw the huge lines at the front doors. They had a police check-point too, of course, and there were enough Xnetters working as internsand cafeteria workers and whatnot there that everyone's badges hadbeen snarled up and swapped around. I'd read the security checks hadtacked an hour onto everyone's work day, and the unions were threaten-ing to walk out unless the hospital did something about it.
A few blocks later, I saw an even longer line for the BART. Cops werewalking up and down the line pointing people out and calling themaside for questioning, bag-searches and pat-downs. They kept gettingsued for doing this, but it didn't seem to be slowing them down.
I got to school a little ahead of time and decided to walk down to 22ndStreet to get a coffee — and I passed a police checkpoint where they werepulling over cars for secondary inspection.
School was no less wild — the security guards on the metal detectorswere also wanding our school IDs and pulling out students with oddmovements for questioning. Needless to say, we all had pretty weirdmovements. Needless to say, classes were starting an hour or more later.
Classes were crazy. I don't think anyone was able to concentrate. Ioverheard two teachers talking about how long it had taken them to gethome from work the day before, and planning to sneak out early thatday.
It was all I could do to keep from laughing. The paradox of the falsepositive strikes again!
Sure enough, they let us out of class early and I headed home the longway, circling through the Mission to see the havoc. Long lines of cars.
BART stations lined up around the blocks. People swearing at ATMs thatwouldn't dispense their money because they'd had their accounts frozenfor suspicious activity (that's the danger of wiring your checking accountstraight into your FasTrak and Fast Pass!).
I got home and made myself a sandwich and logged into the Xnet. Ithad been a good day. People from all over town were crowing abouttheir successes. We'd brought the city of San Francisco to a standstill. Thenews-reports confirmed it — they were calling it the DHS gone haywire,112blaming it all on the fake-ass "security" that was supposed to be protect-ing us from terrorism. The Business section of the San Francisco Chron-icle gave its whole front page to an estimate of the economic cost of theDHS security resulting from missed work hours, meetings and so on. Ac-cording to the Chronicle's economist, a week of this crap would cost thecity more than the Bay Bridge bombing had.
Mwa-ha-ha-ha.
The best part: Dad got home that night late. Very late. Three hours late.
Why? Because he'd been pulled over, searched, questioned. Then ithappened again. Twice.
Twice!
This chapter is dedicated to Compass Books/Books Inc, the oldest inde-pendent bookstore in the western USA. They've got stores up and downCalifornia, in San Francisco, Burlingame, Mountain View and PaloAlto, but coolest of all is that they run a killer bookstore in the middle ofDisneyland's Downtown Disney in Anaheim. I'm a stone Disney parkfreak (see my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom if youdon't believe it), and every time I've lived in California, I've bought my-self an annual Disneyland pass, and on practically every visit, I drop byCompass Books in Downtown Disney. They stock a brilliant selection ofunauthorized (and even critical) books about Disney, as well as a greatvariety of kids books and science fiction, and the cafe next door makes amean cappuccino.
Compass Books/Books IncHe was so angry I thought he was going to pop. You know I said I'donly seen him lose his cool rarely? That night, he lost it more than heever had.
"You wouldn't believe it. This cop, he was like eighteen years old andhe kept saying, 'But sir, why were you in Berkeley yesterday if your cli-ent is in Mountain View?' I kept explaining to him that I teach at Berke-ley and then he'd say, 'I thought you were a consultant,' and we'd startover again. It was like some kind of sitcom where the cops have beentaken over by the stupidity ray. What's worse was he kept insisting that I'd been in Berkeley today aswell, and I kept saying no, I hadn't been, and he said I had been. Then heshowed me my FasTrak billing and it said I'd driven the San Mateobridge three times that day!
"That's not all, he said, and drew in a breath that let me know he wasreally steamed. "They had information about where I'd been, places thatdidn't have a toll plaza. They'd been polling my pass just on the street, at114random. And it was wrong! Holy crap, I mean, they're spying on us alland they're not even competent!"I'd drifted down into the kitchen as he railed there, and now I waswatching him from the doorway. Mom met my eye and we both raisedour eyebrows as if to say, Who's going to say 'I told you so' to him? I nod-ded at her. She could use her spousular powers to nullify his rage in away that was out of my reach as a mere filial unit.
Drew, she said, and grabbed him by the arm to make him stop stalk-ing back and forth in the kitchen, waving his arms like a street-preacher.
What? he snapped.
I think you owe Marcus an apology. She kept her voice even andlevel. Dad and I are the spazzes in the household — Mom's a total rock.
Dad looked at me. His eyes narrowed as he thought for a minute. "Allright," he said at last. "You're right. I was talking about competent sur-veillance. These guys were total amateurs. I'm sorry, son," he said. "Youwere right. That was ridiculous." He stuck his hand out and shook myhand, then gave me a firm, unexpected hug.
God, what are we doing to this country, Marcus? Your generation de-serves to inherit something better than this. When he let me go, I couldsee the deep wrinkles in his face, lines I'd never noticed.
I went back up to my room and played some Xnet games. There was agood multiplayer thing, a clockwork pirate game where you had to questevery day or two to wind up your whole crew's mainsprings before youcould go plundering and pillaging again. It was the kind of game I hatedbut couldn't stop playing: lots of repetitive quests that weren't all thatsatisfying to complete, a little bit of player-versus-player combat(scrapping to see who would captain the ship) and not that many coolpuzzles that you had to figure out. Mostly, playing this kind of gamemade me homesick for Harajuku Fun Madness, which balanced out run-ning around in the real world, figuring out online puzzles, and strategiz-ing with your team.
But today it was just what I needed. Mindless entertainment.
My poor dad.
I'd done that to him. He'd been happy before, confident that his taxdollars were being spent to keep him safe. I'd destroyed that confidence.
It was false confidence, of course, but it had kept him going. Seeing himnow, miserable and broken, I wondered if it was better to be clear-eyedand hopeless or to live in a fool's paradise. That shame — the shame I'd115felt since I gave up my passwords, since they'd broken me — returned,leaving me listless and wanting to just get away from myself.
My character was a swabbie on the pirate ship Zombie Charger, andhe'd wound down while I'd been offline. I had to IM all the other playerson my ship until I found one willing to wind me up. That kept me occu-pied. I liked it, actually. There was something magic about a totalstranger doing you a favor. And since it was the Xnet, I knew that all thestrangers were friends, in some sense.
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Where u located?
The character who wound me up was called Lizanator, and it was fe-male, though that didn't mean that it was a girl. Guys had some weirdaffinity for playing female characters.
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San FranciscoI said.
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No stupe, where you located in San Fran?
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Why, you a pervert?
That usually shut down that line of conversation. Of course everygamespace was full of pedos and pervs, and cops pretending to be pedo-and perv-bait (though I sure hoped there weren't any cops on the Xnet!).
An accusation like that was enough to change the subject nine out of tentimes.
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Mission? Potrero Hill? Noe? East Bay?
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Just wind me up k thx?
She stopped winding.
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You scared?
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Safe — why do you care?
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116Just curiousI was getting a bad vibe off her. She was clearly more than just curi-ous. Call it paranoia. I logged off and shut down my Xbox.
Dad looked at me over the table the next morning and said, "It lookslike it's going to get better, at least." He handed me a copy of the Chron-icle open to the third page.
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A Department of Homeland Security spokesman has confirmed thatthe San Francisco office has requested a 300 percent budget and person-nel increase from DCWhat?
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Major General Graeme Sutherland, the commanding officer for North-ern California DHS operations, confirmed the request at a press confer-ence yesterday, noting that a spike in suspicious activity in the Bay Areaprompted the request. "We are tracking a spike in underground chatterand activity and believe that saboteurs are deliberately manufacturingfalse security alerts to undermine our efforts."My eyes crossed. No freaking way.
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These false alarms are potentially 'radar chaff' intended to disguisereal attacks. The only effective way of combatting them is to step upstaffing and analyst levels so that we can fully investigate every lead.>
Sutherland noted the delays experienced all over the city were"unfortunate" and committed to eliminating them.
I had a vision of the city with four or five times as many DHS enfor-cers, brought in to make up for my own stupid ideas. Van was right. Themore I fought them, the worse it was going to get.
Dad pointed at the paper. "These guys may be fools, but they're meth-odical fools. They'll just keep throwing resources at this problem untilthey solve it. It's tractable, you know. Mining all the data in the city, fol-lowing up on every lead. They'll catch the terrorists."I lost it. "Dad! Are you listening to yourself? They're talking about in-vestigating practically every person in the city of San Francisco!"117"Yeah," he said, "that's right. They'll catch every alimony cheat, everydope dealer, every dirt-bag and every terrorist. You just wait. This couldbe the best thing that ever happened to this country.""Tell me you're joking," I said. "I beg you. You think that that's whatthey intended when they wrote the Constitution? What about the Bill ofRights?""The Bill of Rights was written before data-mining," he said. He wasawesomely serene, convinced of his rightness. "The right to freedom ofassociation is fine, but why shouldn't the cops be allowed to mine yoursocial network to figure out if you're hanging out with gangbangers andterrorists?""Because it's an invasion of my privacy!" I said.
What's the big deal? Would you rather have privacy or terrorists?Agh. I hated arguing with my dad like this. I needed a coffee. "Dad,come on. Taking away our privacy isn't catching terrorists: it's just incon-veniencing normal people.""How do you know it's not catching terrorists?""Where are the terrorists they've caught?""I'm sure we'll see arrests in good time. You just wait.""Dad, what the hell has happened to you since last night? You wereready to go nuclear on the cops for pulling you over —""Don't use that tone with me, Marcus. What's happened since lastnight is that I've had the chance to think it over and to read this." Herattled his paper. "The reason they caught me is that the bad guys areactively jamming them. They need to adjust their techniques to over-come the jamming. But they'll get there. Meanwhile the occasional roadstop is a small price to pay. This isn't the time to be playing lawyer aboutthe Bill of Rights. This is the time to make some sacrifices to keep our citysafe."I couldn't finish my toast. I put the plate in the dishwasher and left forschool. I had to get out of there.
The Xnetters weren't happy about the stepped up police surveillance,but they weren't going to take it lying down. Someone called a phone-inshow on KQED and told them that the police were wasting their time,that we could monkeywrench the system faster than they could untangleit. The recording was a top Xnet download that night.
118"This is California Live and we're talking to an anonymous caller at apayphone in San Francisco. He has his own information about the slow-downs we've been facing around town this week. Caller, you're on theair.""Yeah, yo, this is just the beginning, you know? I mean, like, we're justgetting started. Let them hire a billion pigs and put a checkpoint onevery corner. We'll jam them all! And like, all this crap about terrorists?
We're not terrorists! Give me a break, I mean, really! We're jamming upthe system because we hate the Homeland Security, and because we loveour city. Terrorists? I can't even spell jihad. Peace out."He sounded like an idiot. Not just the incoherent words, but also hisgloating tone. He sounded like a kid who was indecently proud of him-self. He was a kid who was indecently proud of himself.
The Xnet flamed out over this. Lots of people thought he was an idiotfor calling in, while others thought he was a hero. I worried that therewas probably a camera aimed at the payphone he'd used. Or an arphidreader that might have sniffed his Fast Pass. I hoped he'd had the smartsto wipe his fingerprints off the quarter, keep his hood up, and leave allhis arphids at home. But I doubted it. I wondered if he'd get a knock onthe door sometime soon.
The way I knew when something big had happened on Xnet was thatI'd suddenly get a million emails from people who wanted M1k3y toknow about the latest haps. It was just as I was reading about Mr Can't-Spell-Jihad that my mailbox went crazy. Everyone had a message for me— a link to a livejournal on the Xnet — one of the many anonymousblogs that were based on the Freenet document publishing system thatwas also used by Chinese democracy advocates.
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Close call>
We were jamming at the Embarcadero tonite and goofing around giv-ing everyone a new car key or door key or Fast Pass or FasTrak, tossingaround a little fake gunpowder. There were cops everywhere but wewere smarter then them; we're there pretty much every night and wenever get caught.
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So we got caught tonight. It was a stupid mistake we got sloppy wegot busted. It was an undercover who caught my pal and then got the119rest of us. They'd been watching the crowd for a long time and they hadone of those trucks nearby and they took four of us in but missed therest.
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The truck was JAMMED like a can of sardines with every kind of per-son, old young black white rich poor all suspects, and there were twocops trying to ask us questions and the undercovers kept bringing inmore of us. Most people were trying to get to the front of the line to getthrough questioning so we kept on moving back and it was like hours inthere and really hot and it was getting more crowded not less.
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At like 8PM they changed shifts and two new cops came in andbawled out the two cops who were there all like wtf? aren't you doinganything here. They had a real fight and then the two old cops left andthe new cops sat down at their desks and whispered to each other for awhile.
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Then one cop stood up and started shouting EVERYONE JUST GOHOME JESUS CHRIST WE'VE GOT BETTER THINGS TO DO THANBOTHER YOU WITH MORE QUESTIONS IF YOU'VE DONESOMETHING WRONG JUST DON'T DO IT AGAIN AND LET THIS BEA WARNING TO YOU ALL.
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A bunch of the suits got really pissed which was HILARIOUS becauseI mean ten minutes before they were buggin about being held there andnow they were wicked pissed about being let go, like make up yourminds!
>
We split fast though and got out and came home to write this. Thereare undercovers everywhere, believe. If you're jamming, be open-eyedand get ready to run when problems happen. If you get caught try towait it out they're so busy they'll maybe just let you go.
>
We made them that busy! All those people in that truck were there be-cause we'd jammed them. So jam on!
I felt like I was going to throw up. Those four people — kids I'd nevermet — they nearly went away forever because of something I'd started.
120Because of something I'd told them to do. I was no better than aterrorist.
The DHS got their budget requisition approved. The President wenton TV with the Governor to tell us that no price was too high for secur-ity. We had to watch it the next day in school at assembly. My Dadcheered. He'd hated the President since the day he was elected, saying hewasn't any better than the last guy and the last guy had been a completedisaster, but now all he could do was talk about how decisive and dy-namic the new guy was.
You have to take it easy on your father, Mom said to me one nightafter I got home from school. She'd been working from home as much aspossible. Mom's a freelance relocation specialist who helps British peopleget settled in in San Francisco. The UK High Commission pays her to an-swer emails from mystified British people across the country who aretotally confused by how freaky we Americans are. She explains Americ-ans for a living, and she said that these days it was better to do that fromhome, where she didn't have to actually see any Americans or talk tothem.
I don't have any illusions about Britain. America may be willing totrash its Constitution every time some Jihadist looks cross-eyed at us, butas I learned in my ninth-grade Social Studies independent project, theBrits don't even have a Constitution. They've got laws there that wouldcurl the hair on your toes: they can put you in jail for an entire year ifthey're really sure that you're a terrorist but don't have enough evidenceto prove it. Now, how sure can they be if they don't have enough evid-ence to prove it? How'd they get that sure? Did they see you committingterrorist acts in a really vivid dream?
And the surveillance in Britain makes America look like amateur hour.
The average Londoner is photographed 500 times a day, just walkingaround the streets. Every license plate is photographed at every corner inthe country. Everyone from the banks to the public transit company isenthusiastic about tracking you and snitching on you if they think you'reremotely suspicious.
But Mom didn't see it that way. She'd left Britain halfway throughhigh school and she'd never felt at home here, no matter that she'd mar-ried a boy from Petaluma and raised a son here. To her, this was alwaysthe land of barbarians, and Britain would always be home.
121"Mom, he's just wrong. You of all people should know that.
Everything that makes this country great is being flushed down the toiletand he's going along with it. Have you noticed that they haven't caughtany terrorists? Dad's all like, 'We need to be safe,' but he needs to knowthat most of us don't feel safe. We feel endangered all the time.""I know this all, Marcus. Believe me, I'm not fan of what's been hap-pening to this country. But your father is —" She broke off. "When youdidn't come home after the attacks, he thought —"She got up and made herself a cup of tea, something she did whenevershe was uncomfortable or disconcerted.
Marcus, she said. "Marcus, we thought you were dead. Do you un-derstand that? We were mourning you for days. We were imagining youblown to bits, at the bottom of the ocean. Dead because some bastard de-cided to kill hundreds of strangers to make some point."That sank in slowly. I mean, I understood that they'd been worried.
Lots of people died in the bombings — four thousand was the present es-timate — and practically everyone knew someone who didn't comehome that day. There were two people from my school who haddisappeared.
"Your father was ready to kill someone. Anyone. He was out of hismind. You've never seen him like this. I've never seen him like it either. He was out of his mind. He'd just sit at this table and curse and curseand curse. Vile words, words I'd never heard him say. One day — thethird day — someone called and he was sure it was you, but it was awrong number and he threw the phone so hard it disintegrated intothousands of pieces. I'd wondered about the new kitchen phone.
" "Something broke in your father. He loves you. We both love you. Youare the most important thing in our lives. I don't think you realize that. Do you remember when you were ten, when I went home to London forall that time? Do you remember?I nodded silently.
" "We were ready to get a divorce, Marcus. Oh, it doesn't matter whyanymore. It was just a bad patch, the kind of thing that happens whenpeople who love each other stop paying attention for a few years. Hecame and got me and convinced me to come back for you. We couldn'tbear the thought of doing that to you. We fell in love again for you. We're together today because of you.122I had a lump in my throat. I'd never known this. No one had ever toldme.
"So your father is having a hard time right now. He's not in his rightmind. It's going to take some time before he comes back to us, before he'sthe man I love again. We need to understand him until then.She gave me a long hug, and I noticed how thin her arms had gotten,how saggy the skin on her neck was. I always thought of my mother asyoung, pale, rosy-cheeked and cheerful, peering shrewdly through hermetal-rim glasses. Now she looked a little like an old woman. I had donethat to her. The terrorists had done that to her. The Department ofHomeland Security had done that to her. In a weird way, we were all onthe same side, and Mom and Dad and all those people we'd spoofedwere on the other side.
I couldn't sleep that night. Mom's words kept running through myhead. Dad had been tense and quiet at dinner and we'd barely spoken,because I didn't trust myself not to say the wrong thing and because hewas all wound up over the latest news, that Al Qaeda was definitely re-sponsible for the bombing. Six different terrorist groups had claimed re-sponsibility for the attack, but only Al Qaeda's Internet video disclosedinformation that the DHS said they hadn't disclosed to anyone.
I lay in bed and listened to a late-night call-in radio show. The topicwas sex problems, with this gay guy who I normally loved to listen to, hewould give people such raw advice, but good advice, and he was reallyfunny and campy.
Tonight I couldn't laugh. Most of the callers wanted to ask what to doabout the fact that they were having a hard time getting busy with theirpartners ever since the attack. Even on sex-talk radio, I couldn't get awayfrom the topic.
I switched the radio off and heard a purring engine on the streetbelow.
My bedroom is in the top floor of our house, one of the painted ladies.
I have a sloping attic ceiling and windows on both sides — one over-looks the whole Mission, the other looks out into the street in front of ourplace. There were often cars cruising at all hours of the night, but therewas something different about this engine noise.
I went to the street-window and pulled up my blinds. Down on thestreet below me was a white, unmarked van whose roof was festooned123with radio antennas, more antennas than I'd ever seen on a car. It wascruising very slowly down the street, a little dish on top spinning aroundand around.
As I watched, the van stopped and one of the back doors poppedopen. A guy in a DHS uniform — I could spot one from a hundred yardsnow — stepped out into the street. He had some kind of handhelddevice, and its blue glow lit his face. He paced back and forth, first scout-ing my neighbors, making notes on his device, then heading for me.
There was something familiar in the way he walked, looking down —He was using a wifinder! The DHS was scouting for Xnet nodes. I letgo of the blinds and dove across my room for my Xbox. I'd left it upwhile I downloaded some cool animations one of the Xnetters had madeof the President's no-price-too-high speech. I yanked the plug out of thewall, then scurried back to the window and cracked the blind a fractionof an inch.
The guy was looking down into his wifinder again, walking back andforth in front of our house. A moment later, he got back into his van anddrove away.
I got out my camera and took as many pictures as I could of the vanand its antennas. Then I opened them in a free image-editor called TheGIMP and edited out everything from the photo except the van, erasingmy street and anything that might identify me.
I posted them to Xnet and wrote down everything I could about thevans. These guys were definitely looking for the Xnet, I could tell.
Now I really couldn't sleep.
Nothing for it but to play wind-up pirates. There'd be lots of playerseven at this hour. The real name for wind-up pirates was ClockworkPlunder, and it was a hobbyist project that had been created by teenageddeath-metal freaks from Finland. It was totally free to play, and offeredjust as much fun as any of the $15/month services like Ender's Universeand Middle Earth Quest and Discworld Dungeons.
I logged back in and there I was, still on the deck of the Zombie Char-ger, waiting for someone to wind me up. I hated this part of the game.
>
Hey youI typed to a passing pirate.
>
124Wind me up?
He paused and looked at me.
>
y should i?
>
We're on the same team. Plus you get experience points.
What a jerk.
>
Where are you located?
>
San FranciscoThis was starting to feel familiar.
>
Where in San Francisco?
I logged out. There was something weird going on in the game. Ijumped onto the livejournals and began to crawl from blog to blog. I gotthrough half a dozen before I found something that froze my blood.
Livejournallers love quizzes. What kind of hobbit are you? Are you agreat lover? What planet are you most like? Which character from somemovie are you? What's your emotional type? They fill them in and theirfriends fill them in and everyone compares their results. Harmless fun.
But the quiz that had taken over the blogs of the Xnet that night waswhat scared me, because it was anything but harmless:
? What's your sex? What grade are you in?
? What school do you go to?
? Where in the city do you live?
The quizzes plotted the results on a map with colored pushpins forschools and neighborhoods, and made lame recommendations for placesto buy pizza and stuff.
But look at those questions. Think about my answers:
? Male? 17? Chavez High125? Potrero HillThere were only two people in my whole school who matched thatprofile. Most schools it would be the same. If you wanted to figure outwho the Xnetters were, you could use these quizzes to find them all.
That was bad enough, but what was worse what what it implied:
someone from the DHS was using the Xnet to get at us. The Xnet wascompromised by the DHS.
We had spies in our midst.
I'd given Xnet discs to hundreds of people, and they'd done the same. Iknew the people I gave the discs to pretty well. Some of them I knewvery well. I've lived in the same house all my life and I've made hun-dreds and hundreds of friends over the years, from people who went todaycare with me to people I played soccer with, people who LARPedwith me, people I met clubbing, people I knew from school. My ARGteam were my closest friends, but there were plenty of people I knewand trusted enough to hand an Xnet disc to.
I needed them now.
I woke Jolu up by ringing his cell phone and hanging up after the firstring, three times in a row. A minute later, he was up on Xnet and wewere able to have a secure chat. I pointed him to my blog-post on the ra-dio vans and he came back a minute later all freaked out.
>
You sure they're looking for us?
In response I sent him to the quiz.
>
OMG we're doomed>
No it's not that bad but we need to figure out who we can trust>
How?
>
That's what I wanted to ask you — how many people can you totallyvouch for like trust them to the ends of the earth?
>
126Um 20 or 30 or so>
I want to get a bunch of really trustworthy people together and do akey-exchange web of trust thingWeb of trust is one of those cool crypto things that I'd read about butnever tried. It was a nearly foolproof way to make sure that you couldtalk to the people you trusted, but that no one else could listen in. Theproblem is that it requires you to physically meet with the people in theweb at least once, just to get started.
>
I get it sure. That's not bad. But how you going to get everyone togeth-er for the key-signing?
>
That's what I wanted to ask you about — how can we do it withoutgetting busted?
Jolu typed some words and erased them, typed more and erased them.
>
Darryl would knowI typed.
>
God, this was the stuff he was great at.
Jolu didn't type anything. Then,>
How about a party?
he typed.
>
How about if we all get together somewhere like we're teenagers hav-ing a party and that way we'll have a ready-made excuse if anyoneshows up asking us what we're doing there?
>
That would totally work! You're a genius, Jolu.
>
I know it. And you're going to love this: I know just where to do it, too>
127Where?
>
Sutro baths!
This chapter is dedicated to Anderson's Bookshops, Chicago's legendarykids' bookstore. Anderson's is an old, old family-run business, whichstarted out as an old-timey drug-store selling some books on the side.
Today, it's a booming, multi-location kids' book empire, with some in-credibly innovative bookselling practices that get books and kids togetherin really exciting ways. The best of these is the store's mobile book-fairs,in which they ship huge, rolling bookcases, already stocked with excel-lent kids' books, direct to schools on trucks — voila, instant book-fair!
Anderson's Bookshops: 123 West Jefferson, Naperville, IL 60540 USA+1 630 355 2665What would you do if you found out you had a spy in your midst?
You could denounce him, put him up against the wall and take him out.
But then you might end up with another spy in your midst, and the newspy would be more careful than the last one and maybe not get caughtquite so readily.
Here's a better idea: start intercepting the spy's communications andfeed him and his masters misinformation. Say his masters instruct him togather information on your movements. Let him follow you around andtake all the notes he wants, but steam open the envelopes that he sendsback to HQ and replace his account of your movements with a fictitiousone. If you want, you can make him seem erratic and unreliable so theyget rid of him. You can manufacture crises that might make one side orthe other reveal the identities of other spies. In short, you own them.
This is called the man-in-the-middle attack and if you think about it,it's pretty scary. Someone who man-in-the-middles your communica-tions can trick you in any of a thousand ways.
Of course, there's a great way to get around the man-in-the-middle at-tack: use crypto. With crypto, it doesn't matter if the enemy can see your129messages, because he can't decipher them, change them, and re-sendthem. That's one of the main reasons to use crypto.
But remember: for crypto to work, you need to have keys for thepeople you want to talk to. You and your partner need to share a secretor two, some keys that you can use to encrypt and decrypt your mes-sages so that men-in-the-middle get locked out.
That's where the idea of public keys comes in. This is a little hairy, butit's so unbelievably elegant too.
In public key crypto, each user gets two keys. They're long strings ofmathematical gibberish, and they have an almost magic property.
Whatever you scramble with one key, the other will unlock, and vice-versa. What's more, they're the only keys that can do this — if you canunscramble a message with one key, you know it was scrambled with theother (and vice-versa).
So you take either one of these keys (it doesn't matter which one) andyou just publish it. You make it a total non-secret. You want anyone in theworld to know what it is. For obvious reasons, they call this your "publickey."The other key, you hide in the darkest reaches of your mind. You pro-tect it with your life. You never let anyone ever know what it is. That'scalled your "private key." (Duh.)Now say you're a spy and you want to talk with your bosses. Theirpublic key is known by everyone. Your public key is known by every-one. No one knows your private key but you. No one knows theirprivate key but them.
You want to send them a message. First, you encrypt it with yourprivate key. You could just send that message along, and it would workpretty well, since they would know when the message arrived that itcame from you. How? Because if they can decrypt it with your publickey, it can only have been encrypted with your private key. This is theequivalent of putting your seal or signature on the bottom of a message.
It says, "I wrote this, and no one else. No one could have tampered withit or changed it."Unfortunately, this won't actually keep your message a secret. That'sbecause your public key is really well known (it has to be, or you'll belimited to sending messages to those few people who have your publickey). Anyone who intercepts the message can read it. They can't change130it and make it seem like it came from you, but if you don't want peopleto know what you're saying, you need a better solution.
So instead of just encrypting the message with your private key, youalso encrypt it with your boss's public key. Now it's been locked twice.
The first lock — the boss's public key — only comes off when combinedwith your boss's private key. The second lock — your private key — onlycomes off with your public key. When your bosses receive the message,they unlock it with both keys and now they know for sure that: a) youwrote it and b) that only they can read it.
It's very cool. The day I discovered it, Darryl and I immediately ex-changed keys and spent months cackling and rubbing our hands as weexchanged our military-grade secret messages about where to meet afterschool and whether Van would ever notice him.
But if you want to understand security, you need to consider the mostparanoid possibilities. Like, what if I tricked you into thinking that mypublic key was your boss's public key? You'd encrypt the message withyour private key and my public key. I'd decrypt it, read it, re-encrypt itwith your boss's real public key and send it on. As far as your bossknows, no one but you could have written the message and no one buthim could have read it.
And I get to sit in the middle, like a fat spider in a web, and all yoursecrets belong to me.
Now, the easiest way to fix this is to really widely advertise your pub-lic key. If it's really easy for anyone to know what your real key is, man-in-the-middle gets harder and harder. But you know what? Makingthings well-known is just as hard as keeping them secret. Think about it— how many billions of dollars are spent on shampoo ads and othercrap, just to make sure that as many people know about something thatsome advertiser wants them to know?
There's a cheaper way of fixing man-in-the-middle: the web of trust.
Say that before you leave HQ, you and your bosses sit down over coffeeand actually tell each other your keys. No more man-in-the-middle!
You're absolutely certain whose keys you have, because they were putinto your own hands.
So far, so good. But there's a natural limit to this: how many peoplecan you physically meet with and swap keys? How many hours in theday do you want to devote to the equivalent of writing your own phonebook? How many of those people are willing to devote that kind of timeto you?
131Thinking about this like a phonebook helps. The world was once aplace with a lot of phonebooks, and when you needed a number, youcould look it up in the book. But for many of the numbers that youwanted to refer to on a given day, you would either know it by heart, oryou'd be able to ask someone else. Even today, when I'm out with mycell-phone, I'll ask Jolu or Darryl if they have a number I'm looking for.
It's faster and easier than looking it up online and they're more reliable,too. If Jolu has a number, I trust him, so I trust the number, too. That'scalled "transitive trust" — trust that moves across the web of ourrelationships.
A web of trust is a bigger version of this. Say I meet Jolu and get hiskey. I can put it on my "keyring" — a list of keys that I've signed with myprivate key. That means you can unlock it with my public key and knowfor sure that me — or someone with my key, anyway — says that "thiskey belongs to this guy."So I hand you my keyring and provided that you trust me to have ac-tually met and verified all the keys on it, you can take it and add it toyour keyring. Now, you meet someone else and you hand the whole ringto him. Bigger and bigger the ring grows, and provided that you trustthe next guy in the chain, and he trusts the next guy in his chain and soon, you're pretty secure.
Which brings me to keysigning parties. These are exactly what theysound like: a party where everyone gets together and signs everyoneelse's keys. Darryl and I, when we traded keys, that was kind of a mini-keysigning party, one with only two sad and geeky attendees. But withmore people, you create the seed of the web of trust, and the web can ex-pand from there. As everyone on your keyring goes out into the worldand meets more people, they can add more and more names to the ring.
You don't have to meet the new people, just trust that the signed key youget from the people in your web is valid.
So that's why web of trust and parties go together like peanut butterand chocolate.
Just tell them it's a super-private party, invitational only, I said. "Tellthem not to bring anyone along or they won't be admitted."Jolu looked at me over his coffee. "You're joking, right? You tell peoplethat, and they'll bring extra friends."132"Argh," I said. I spent a night a week at Jolu's these days, keeping thecode up to date on indienet. Pigspleen actually paid me a non-zero sumof money to do this, which was really weird. I never thought I'd be paidto write code.
So what do we do? We only want people we really trust there, and wedon't want to mention why until we've got everyone's keys and can sendthem messages in secret.Jolu debugged and I watched over his shoulder. This used to be called"extreme programming," which was a little embarrassing. Now we justcall it "programming." Two people are much better at spotting bugs thanone. As the cliche goes, "With enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."We were working our way through the bug reports and getting readyto push out the new rev. It all auto-updated in the background, so ourusers didn't really need to do anything, they just woke up once a week orso with a better program. It was pretty freaky to know that the code Iwrote would be used by hundreds of thousands of people, tomorrow!
What do we do? Man, I don't know. I think we just have to live withit.I thought back to our Harajuku Fun Madness days. There were lots ofsocial challenges involving large groups of people as part of that game.
OK, you're right. But let's at least try to keep this secret. Tell them thatthey can bring a maximum of one person, and it has to be someonethey've known personally for a minimum of five years.Jolu looked up from the screen. "Hey," he said. "Hey, that wouldtotally work. I can really see it. I mean, if you told me not to bring any-one, I'd be all, 'Who the hell does he think he is?' But when you put itthat way, it sounds like some awesome 007 stuff."I found a bug. We drank some coffee. I went home and played a littleClockwork Plunder, trying not to think about key-winders with nosyquestions, and slept like a baby.
Sutro baths are San Francisco's authentic fake Roman ruins. When itopened in 1896, it was the largest indoor bathing house in the world, ahuge Victorian glass solarium filled with pools and tubs and even anearly water slide. It went downhill by the fifties, and the owners torchedit for the insurance in 1966. All that's left is a labyrinth of weatheredstone set into the sere cliff-face at Ocean Beach. It looks for all the worldlike a Roman ruin, crumbled and mysterious, and just beyond them is a133set of caves that let out into the sea. In rough tides, the waves rushthrough the caves and over the ruins — they've even been known to suckin and drown the occasional tourist.
Ocean Beach is way out past Golden Gate park, a stark cliff lined withexpensive, doomed houses, plunging down to a narrow beach studdedwith jellyfish and brave (insane) surfers. There's a giant white rock thatjuts out of the shallows off the shore. That's called Seal Rock, and it usedto be the place where the sea lions congregated until they were relocatedto the more tourist-friendly environs of Fisherman's Wharf.
After dark, there's hardly anyone out there. It gets very cold, with asalt spray that'll soak you to your bones if you let it. The rocks are sharpand there's broken glass and the occasional junkie needle.
It is an awesome place for a party.
Bringing along the tarpaulins and chemical glove-warmers was myidea. Jolu figured out where to get the beer — his older brother, Javier,had a buddy who actually operated a whole underage drinking service:
pay him enough and he'd back up to your secluded party spot with ice-chests and as many brews as you wanted. I blew a bunch of my indienetprogramming money, and the guy showed up right on time: 8PM, agood hour after sunset, and lugged the six foam ice-chests out of hispickup truck and down into the ruins of the baths. He even brought aspare chest for the empties.
You kids play safe now, he said, tipping his cowboy hat. He was a fatSamoan guy with a huge smile, and a scary tank-top that you could seehis armpit- and belly- and shoulder-hair escaping from. I peeled twentiesoff my roll and handed them to him — his markup was 150 percent. Nota bad racket.
He looked at my roll. "You know, I could just take that from you," hesaid, still smiling. "I'm a criminal, after all."I put my roll in my pocket and looked him levelly in the eye. I'd beenstupid to show him what I was carrying, but I knew that there weretimes when you should just stand your ground.
I'm just messing with you, he said, at last. "But you be careful withthat money. Don't go showing it around.""Thanks," I said. "Homeland Security'll get my back though."His smile got even bigger. "Ha! They're not even real five-oh. Thosepeckerwoods don't know nothin'."134I looked over at his truck. Prominently displayed in his windscreenwas a FasTrak. I wondered how long it would be until he got busted.
You got girls coming tonight? That why you got all the beer?I smiled and waved at him as though he was walking back to histruck, which he should have been doing. He eventually got the hint anddrove away. His smile never faltered.
Jolu helped me hide the coolers in the rubble, working with little whiteLED torches on headbands. Once the coolers were in place, we threwlittle white LED keychains into each one, so it would glow when youtook the styrofoam lids off, making it easier to see what you were doing.
It was a moonless night and overcast, and the distant streetlightsbarely illuminated us. I knew we'd stand out like blazes on an infraredscope, but there was no chance that we'd be able to get a bunch of peopletogether without being observed. I'd settle for being dismissed as a littledrunken beach-party.
I don't really drink much. There's been beer and pot and ecstasy at theparties I've been going to since I was 14, but I hated smoking (though I'mquite partial to a hash brownie every now and again), ecstasy took toolong — who's got a whole weekend to get high and come down — andbeer, well, it was all right, but I didn't see what the big deal was. My fa-vorite was big, elaborate cocktails, the kind of thing served in a ceramicvolcano, with six layers, on fire, and a plastic monkey on the rim, butthat was mostly for the theater of it all.
I actually like being drunk. I just don't like being hungover, and boy,do I ever get hungover. Though again, that might have to do with thekind of drinks that come in a ceramic volcano.
But you can't throw a party without putting a case or two of beer onice. It's expected. It loosens things up. People do stupid things after toomany beers, but it's not like my friends are the kind of people who havecars. And people do stupid things no matter what — beer or grass orwhatever are all incidental to that central fact.
Jolu and I each cracked beers — Anchor Steam for him, a Bud Lite forme — and clinked the bottles together, sitting down on a rock.
You told them 9PM?"Yeah, he said.
Me too.135We drank in silence. The Bud Lite was the least alcoholic thing in theice-chest. I'd need a clear head later.
You ever get scared? I said, finally.
He turned to me. "No man, I don't get scared. I'm always scared. I'vebeen scared since the minute the explosions happened. I'm so scaredsometimes, I don't want to get out of bed.""Then why do you do it?"He smiled. "About that," he said. "Maybe I won't, not for much longer.
I mean, it's been great helping you. Great. Really excellent. I don't knowwhen I've done anything so important. But Marcus, bro, I have to say… "He trailed off.
What? I said, though I knew what was coming next.
I can't do it forever, he said at last. "Maybe not even for anothermonth. I think I'm through. It's too much risk. The DHS, you can't go towar on them. It's crazy. Really actually crazy.""You sound like Van," I said. My voice was much more bitter than I'dintended.
I'm not criticizing you, man. I think it's great that you've got thebravery to do this all the time. But I haven't got it. I can't live my life inperpetual terror."What are you saying?"I'm saying I'm out. I'm going to be one of those people who acts likeit's all OK, like it'll all go back to normal some day. I'm going to use theInternet like I always did, and only use the Xnet to play games. I'm goingto get out is what I'm saying. I won't be a part of your plans anymore.I didn't say anything.
"I know that's leaving you on your own. I don't want that, believe me. I'd much rather you give up with me. You can't declare war on the gov-ernment of the USA. It's not a fight you're going to win. Watching youtry is like watching a bird fly into a window again and again.He wanted me to say something. What I wanted to say was, Jesus Jolu,thanks so very much for abandoning me! Do you forget what it was like whenthey took us away? Do you forget what the country used to be like before theytook it over? But that's not what he wanted me to say. What he wanted meto say was:
"I understand, Jolu. I respect your choice.136He drank the rest of his bottle and pulled out another one and twistedoff the cap.
There's something else, he said.
What?"I wasn't going to mention it, but I want you to understand why I haveto do this."Jesus, Jolu, what?"I hate to say it, but you're white. I'm not. White people get caught withcocaine and do a little rehab time. Brown people get caught with crackand go to prison for twenty years. White people see cops on the streetand feel safer. Brown people see cops on the street and wonder if they'reabout to get searched. The way the DHS is treating you? The law in thiscountry has always been like that for us.It was so unfair. I didn't ask to be white. I didn't think I was beingbraver just because I'm white. But I knew what Jolu was saying. If thecops stopped someone in the Mission and asked to see some ID, chanceswere that person wasn't white. Whatever risk I ran, Jolu ran more.
Whatever penalty I'd pay, Jolu would pay more.
I don't know what to say, I said.
You don't have to say anything, he said. "I just wanted you to know,so you could understand."I could see people walking down the side trail toward us. They werefriends of Jolu's, two Mexican guys and a girl I knew from around, shortand geeky, always wearing cute black Buddy Holly glasses that madeher look like the outcast art-student in a teen movie who comes back asthe big success.
Jolu introduced me and gave them beers. The girl didn't take one, butinstead produced a small silver flask of vodka from her purse andoffered me a drink. I took a swallow — warm vodka must be an acquiredtaste — and complimented her on the flask, which was embossed with arepeating motif of Parappa the Rapper characters.
It's Japanese, she said as I played another LED keyring over it. "Theyhave all these great booze-toys based on kids' games. Totally twisted."I introduced myself and she introduced herself. "Ange," she said, andshook my hand with hers — dry, warm, with short nails. Jolu introducedme to his pals, whom he'd known since computer camp in the fourth137grade. More people showed up — five, then ten, then twenty. It was aseriously big group now.
We'd told people to arrive by 9:30 sharp, and we gave it until 9:45 tosee who all would show up. About three quarters were Jolu's friends. I'dinvited all the people I really trusted. Either I was more discriminatingthan Jolu or less popular. Now that he'd told me he was quitting, it mademe think that he was less discriminating. I was really pissed at him, buttrying not to let it show by concentrating on socializing with otherpeople. But he wasn't stupid. He knew what was going on. I could seethat he was really bummed. Good.
OK, I said, climbing up on a ruin, "OK, hey, hello?" A few peoplenearby paid attention to me, but the ones in the back kept on chatting. Iput my arms in the air like a referee, but it was too dark. Eventually I hiton the idea of turning my LED keychain on and pointing it at each of thetalkers in turn, then at me. Gradually, the crowd fell quiet.
I welcomed them and thanked them all for coming, then asked them toclose in so I could explain why we were there. I could tell they were intothe secrecy of it all, intrigued and a little warmed up by the beer.
So here it is. You all use the Xnet. It's no coincidence that the Xnet wascreated right after the DHS took over the city. The people who did thatare an organization devoted to personal liberty, who created the networkto keep us safe from DHS spooks and enforcers. Jolu and I had workedthis out in advance. We weren't going to cop to being behind it all, not toanyone. It was way too risky. Instead, we'd put it out that we weremerely lieutenants in "M1k3y"'s army, acting to organize the localresistance.
The Xnet isn't pure, I said. "It can be used by the other side just asreadily as by us. We know that there are DHS spies who use it now.
They use social engineering hacks to try to get us to reveal ourselves sothat they can bust us. If the Xnet is going to succeed, we need to figureout how to keep them from spying on us. We need a network within thenetwork."I paused and let this sink in. Jolu had suggested that this might be alittle heavy — learning that you're about to be brought into a revolution-ary cell.
Now, I'm not here to ask you to do anything active. You don't have togo out jamming or anything. You've been brought here because we knowyou're cool, we know you're trustworthy. It's that trustworthiness I wantto get you to contribute tonight. Some of you will already be familiar138with the web of trust and keysigning parties, but for the rest of you, I'llrun it down quickly — Which I did.
Now what I want from you tonight is to meet the people here and fig-ure out how much you can trust them. We're going to help you generatekey-pairs and share them with each other.This part was tricky. Asking people to bring their own laptopswouldn't have worked out, but we still needed to do something hellacomplicated that wouldn't exactly work with paper and pencil.
I held up a laptop Jolu and I had rebuilt the night before, from theground up. "I trust this machine. Every component in it was laid by ourown hands. It's running a fresh out-of-the-box version of ParanoidLinux,booted off of the DVD. If there's a trustworthy computer left anywherein the world, this might well be it.
"I've got a key-generator loaded here. You come up here and give itsome random input — mash the keys, wiggle the mouse — and it willuse that as the seed to create a random public- and private key for you,which it will display on the screen. You can take a picture of the privatekey with your phone, and hit any key to make it go away forever — it'snot stored on the disk at all. Then it will show you your public key. Atthat point, you call over all the people here you trust and who trust you,and they take a picture of the screen with you standing next to it, so theyknow whose key it is. When you get home, you have to convert the photos to keys. This isgoing to be a lot of work, I'm afraid, but you'll only have to do it once.
"You have to be super-careful about typing these in — one mistake andyou're screwed. Luckily, we've got a way to tell if you've got it right: be-neath the key will be a much shorter number, called the 'fingerprint'.
Once you've typed in the key, you can generate a fingerprint from it andcompare it to the fingerprint, and if they match, you've got it right."They all boggled at me. OK, so I'd asked them to do something prettyweird, it's true, but still.
This chapter is dedicated to the University Bookstore at the Universityof Washington, whose science fiction section rivals many specialtystores, thanks to the sharp-eyed, dedicated science fiction buyer, DuaneWilkins. Duance's a real science fiction fan — I first met him at theWorld Science Fiction Convention in Toronto in 2003 — and it showsin the eclectic and informed choices on display at the store. One greatpredictor of a great bookstore is the quality of the "shelf review" — thelittle bits of cardboard stuck to the shelves with (generally hand-lettered)staff-reviews extolling the virtues of books you might otherwise miss.
The staff at the University Bookstore have clearly benefited fromDuane's tutelage, as the shelf reviews at the University Bookstore aresecond to none.
The University Bookstore 4326 University Way NE, Seattle, WA 98105USA +1 800 335 READJolu stood up.
This is where it starts, guys. This is how we know which side you'reon. You might not be willing to take to the streets and get busted foryour beliefs, but if you have beliefs, this will let us know it. This will cre-ate the web of trust that tells us who's in and who's out. If we're ever go-ing to get our country back, we need to do this. We need to dosomething like this.Someone in the audience — it was Ange — had a hand up, holding abeer bottle.
So call me stupid but I don't understand this at all. Why do you wantus to do this?Jolu looked at me, and I looked back at him. It had all seemed so obvi-ous when we were organizing it. "The Xnet isn't just a way to play freegames. It's the last open communications network in America. It's thelast way to communicate without being snooped on by the DHS. For it to140work we need to know that the person we're talking to isn't a snoop.
That means that we need to know that the people we're sending mes-sages to are the people we think they are.
That's where you come in. You're all here because we trust you. Imean, really trust you. Trust you with our lives.Some of the people groaned. It sounded melodramatic and stupid.
I got back to my feet.
When the bombs went off, I said, then something welled up in mychest, something painful. "When the bombs went off, there were four ofus caught up by Market Street. For whatever reason, the DHS decidedthat made us suspicious. They put bags over our heads, put us on a shipand interrogated us for days. They humiliated us. Played games with ourminds. Then they let us go.
"All except one person. My best friend. He was with us when theypicked us up. He'd been hurt and he needed medical care. He nevercame out again. They say they never saw him. They say that if we evertell anyone about this, they'll arrest us and make us disappear. Forever.""I was shaking. The shame. The goddamned shame. Jolu had the lighton me.
"Oh Christ, I said. "You people are the first ones I've told. If this storygets around, you can bet they'll know who leaked it. You can bet they'llcome knocking on my door." I took some more deep breaths. "That's whyI volunteered on the Xnet. That's why my life, from now on, is aboutfighting the DHS. With every breath. Every day. Until we're free again.
Any one of you could put me in jail now, if you wanted to."Ange put her hand up again. "We're not going to rat on you," she said.
"No way. I know pretty much everyone here and I can promise you that. I don't know how to know who to trust, but I know who not to trust: oldpeople. Our parents. Grownups. When they think of someone beingspied on, they think of someone else, a bad guy. When they think ofsomeone being caught and sent to a secret prison, it's someone else —someone brown, someone young, someone foreign. They forget what it's like to be our age. To be the object of suspicionall the time! How many times have you gotten on the bus and had everyperson on it give you a look like you'd been gargling turds and skinningpuppies?
"141"What's worse, they're turning into adults younger and younger outthere. Back in the day, they used to say 'Never trust anyone over 30.' Isay, 'Don't trust any bastard over 25!'"That got a laugh, and she laughed too. She was pretty, in a weird,horsey way, with a long face and a long jaw. "I'm not really kidding, youknow? I mean, think about it. Who elected these ass-clowns? Who letthem invade our city? Who voted to put the cameras in our classroomsand follow us around with creepy spyware chips in our transit passesand cars? It wasn't a 16-year-old. We may be dumb, we may be young,but we're not scum.""I want that on a t-shirt," I said.
It would be a good one, she said. We smiled at each other.
Where do I go to get my keys? she said, and pulled out her phone.
We'll do it over there, in the secluded spot by the caves. I'll take youin there and set you up, then you do your thing and take the machinearound to your friends to get photos of your public key so they can signit when they get home.I raised my voice. "Oh! One more thing! Jesus, I can't believe I forgotthis. delete those photos once you've typed in the keys! The last thing wewant is a Flickr stream full of pictures of all of us conspiring together."There was some good-natured, nervous chuckling, then Jolu turnedout the light and in the sudden darkness I could see nothing. Gradually,my eyes adjusted and I set off for the cave. Someone was walking behindme. Ange. I turned and smiled at her, and she smiled back, luminousteeth in the dark.
Thanks for that, I said. "You were great.""You mean what you said about the bag on your head andeverything?""I meant it," I said. "It happened. I never told anyone, but it happened."I thought about it for a moment. "You know, with all the time that wentby since, without saying anything, it started to feel like a bad dream. Itwas real though." I stopped and climbed up into the cave. "I'm glad I fi-nally told people. Any longer and I might have started to doubt my ownsanity."I set up the laptop on a dry bit of rock and booted it from the DVDwith her watching. "I'm going to reboot it for every person. This is astandard ParanoidLinux disc, though I guess you'd have to take myword for it."142"Hell," she said. "This is all about trust, right?""Yeah," I said. "Trust."I retreated some distance as she ran the key-generator, listening to hertyping and mousing to create randomness, listening to the crash of thesurf, listening to the party noises from over where the beer was.
She stepped out of the cave, carrying the laptop. On it, in huge whiteluminous letters, were her public key and her fingerprint and email ad-dress. She held the screen up beside her face and waited while I got myphone out.
Cheese, she said. I snapped her pic and dropped the camera back inmy pocket. She wandered off to the revelers and let them each get pics ofher and the screen. It was festive. Fun. She really had a lot of charisma —you didn't want to laugh at her, you just wanted to laugh with her. Andhell, it was funny! We were declaring a secret war on the secret police.
Who the hell did we think we were?
So it went, through the next hour or so, everyone taking pictures andmaking keys. I got to meet everyone there. I knew a lot of them — somewere my invitees — and the others were friends of my pals or my pals'
pals. We should all be buddies. We were, by the time the night was out.
They were all good people.
Once everyone was done, Jolu went to make a key, and then turnedaway, giving me a sheepish grin. I was past my anger with him, though.
He was doing what he had to do. I knew that no matter what he said,he'd always be there for me. And we'd been through the DHS jail togeth-er. Van too. No matter what, that would bind us together forever.
I did my key and did the perp-walk around the gang, letting everyonesnap a pic. Then I climbed up on the high spot I'd spoken from earlierand called for everyone's attention.
"So a lot of you have noted that there's a vital flaw in this procedure: what if this laptop can't be trusted? What if it's secretly recording our in-structions? What if it's spying on us? What if Jose-Luis and I can't betrusted?More good-natured chuckles. A little warmer than before, more beery.
"I mean it, I said. "If we were on the wrong side, this could get all ofus — all of you — into a heap of trouble. Jail, maybe."The chuckles turned more nervous.
143"So that's why I'm going to do this," I said, and picked up a hammerI'd brought from my Dad's toolkit. I set the laptop down beside me onthe rock and swung the hammer, Jolu following the swing with his key-chain light. Crash — I'd always dreamt of killing a laptop with a ham-mer, and here I was doing it. It felt pornographically good. And bad.
Smash! The screen-panel fell off, shattered into millions of pieces, ex-posing the keyboard. I kept hitting it, until the keyboard fell off, expos-ing the motherboard and the hard-drive. Crash! I aimed square for thehard-drive, hitting it with everything I had. It took three blows beforethe case split, exposing the fragile media inside. I kept hitting it untilthere was nothing bigger than a cigarette lighter, then I put it all in agarbage bag. The crowd was cheering wildly — loud enough that I actu-ally got worried that someone far above us might hear over the surf andcall the law.
All right! I called. "Now, if you'd like to accompany me, I'm going tomarch this down to the sea and soak it in salt water for ten minutes."I didn't have any takers at first, but then Ange came forward and tookmy arm in her warm hand and said, "That was beautiful," in my ear andwe marched down to the sea together.
It was perfectly dark by the sea, and treacherous, even with our key-chain lights. Slippery, sharp rocks that were difficult enough to walk oneven without trying to balance six pounds of smashed electronics in aplastic bag. I slipped once and thought I was going to cut myself up, butshe caught me with a surprisingly strong grip and kept me upright. Iwas pulled in right close to her, close enough to smell her perfume,which smelled like new cars. I love that smell.
Thanks, I managed, looking into the big eyes that were further mag-nified by her mannish, black-rimmed glasses. I couldn't tell what colorthey were in the dark, but I guessed something dark, based on her darkhair and olive complexion. She looked Mediterranean, maybe Greek orSpanish or Italian.
I crouched down and dipped the bag in the sea, letting it fill with saltwater. I managed to slip a little and soak my shoe, and I swore and shelaughed. We'd hardly said a word since we lit out for the ocean. Therewas something magical in our wordless silence.
At that point, I had kissed a total of three girls in my life, not countingthat moment when I went back to school and got a hero's welcome.
That's not a gigantic number, but it's not a minuscule one, either. I havereasonable girl radar, and I think I could have kissed her. She wasn't144h4wt in the traditional sense, but there's something about a girl and anight and a beach, plus she was smart and passionate and committed.
But I didn't kiss her, or take her hand. Instead we had a moment that Ican only describe as spiritual. The surf, the night, the sea and the rocks,and our breathing. The moment stretched. I sighed. This had been quitea ride. I had a lot of typing to do tonight, putting all those keys into mykeychain, signing them and publishing the signed keys. Starting the webof trust.
She sighed too.
Let's go, I said.
Yeah, she said.
Back we went. It was a good night, that night.
Jolu waited after for his brother's friend to come by and pick up hiscoolers. I walked with everyone else up the road to the nearest Munistop and got on board. Of course, none of us was using an issued Munipass. By that point, Xnetters habitually cloned someone else's Muni passthree or four times a day, assuming a new identity for every ride.
It was hard to stay cool on the bus. We were all a little drunk, andlooking at our faces under the bright bus lights was kind of hilarious. Wegot pretty loud and the driver used his intercom to tell us to keep itdown twice, then told us to shut up right now or he'd call the cops.
That set us to giggling again and we disembarked in a mass before hedid call the cops. We were in North Beach now, and there were lots ofbuses, taxis, the BART at Market Street, neon-lit clubs and cafes to pullapart our grouping, so we drifted away.
I got home and fired up my Xbox and started typing in keys from myphone's screen. It was dull, hypnotic work. I was a little drunk, and itlulled me into a half-sleep.
I was about ready to nod off when a new IM window popped up.
>
herro!
I didn't recognize the handle — spexgril — but I had an idea whomight be behind it.
>
hi145I typed, cautiously.
>
it's me, from tonightThen she paste-bombed a block of crypto. I'd already entered her pub-lic key into my keychain, so I told the IM client to try decrypting thecode with the key.
>
it's me, from tonightIt was her!
>
Fancy meeting you hereI typed, then encrypted it to my public key and mailed it off.
>
It was great meeting youI typed.
>
You too. I don't meet too many smart guys who are also cute and alsosocially aware. Good god, man, you don't give a girl much of a chance.
My heart hammered in my chest.
>
Hello? Tap tap? This thing on? I wasn't born here folks, but I'm suredying here. Don't forget to tip your waitresses, they work hard. I'm hereall week.
I laughed aloud.
>
I'm here, I'm here. Laughing too hard to type is all>
Well at least my IM comedy-fu is still mightyUm.
>
It was really great to meet you too>
Yeah, it usually is. Where are you taking me?
146>
Taking you?
>
On our next adventure?
>
I didn't really have anything planned>
Oki — then I'll take YOU. Friday. Dolores Park. Illegal open air con-cert. Be there or be a dodecahedron>
Wait what?
>
Don't you even read Xnet? It's all over the place. You ever hear of theSpeedwhores?
I nearly choked. That was Trudy Doo's band — as in Trudy Doo, thewoman who had paid me and Jolu to update the indienet code.
>
Yeah I've heard of them>
They're putting on a huge show and they've got like fifty bands signedto play the bill, going to set up on the tennis courts and bring out theirown amp trucks and rock out all nightI felt like I'd been living under a rock. How had I missed that? Therewas an anarchist bookstore on Valencia that I sometimes passed on theway to school that had a poster of an old revolutionary named EmmaGoldman with the caption "If I can't dance, I don't want to be a part ofyour revolution." I'd been spending all my energies on figuring out howto use the Xnet to organize dedicated fighters so they could jam the DHS,but this was so much cooler. A big concert — I had no idea how to doone of those, but I was glad someone did.
And now that I thought of it, I was damned proud that they were us-ing the Xnet to do it.
The next day I was a zombie. Ange and I had chatted — flirted — until4AM. Lucky for me, it was a Saturday and I was able to sleep in, but147between the hangover and the sleep-dep, I could barely put twothoughts together.
By lunchtime, I managed to get up and get my ass out onto the streets.
I staggered down toward the Turk's to buy my coffee — these days, if Iwas alone, I always bought my coffee there, like the Turk and I were partof a secret club.
On the way, I passed a lot of fresh graffiti. I liked Mission graffiti; a lotof the times, it came in huge, luscious murals, or sarcastic art-studentstencils. I liked that the Mission's taggers kept right on going, under thenose of the DHS. Another kind of Xnet, I supposed — they must have allkinds of ways of knowing what was going on, where to get paint, whatcameras worked. Some of the cameras had been spray-painted over, Inoticed.
Maybe they used Xnet!
Painted in ten-foot-high letters on the side of an auto-yard's fence werethe drippy words: DON'T TRUST ANYONE OVER 25.
I stopped. Had someone left my "party" last night and come here witha can of paint? A lot of those people lived in the neighborhood.
I got my coffee and had a little wander around town. I kept thinking Ishould be calling someone, seeing if they wanted to get a movie orsomething. That's how it used to be on a lazy Saturday like this. But whowas I going to call? Van wasn't talking to me, I didn't think I was readyto talk to Jolu, and Darryl —Well, I couldn't call Darryl.
I got my coffee and went home and did a little searching around onthe Xnet's blogs. These anonablogs were untraceable to any author —unless that author was stupid enough to put her name on it — and therewere a lot of them. Most of them were apolitical, but a lot of themweren't. They talked about schools and the unfairness there. They talkedabout the cops. Tagging.
Turned out there'd been plans for the concert in the park for weeks. Ithad hopped from blog to blog, turning into a full-blown movementwithout my noticing. And the concert was called Don't Trust AnyoneOver 25.
Well, that explained where Ange got it. It was a good slogan.
148Monday morning, I decided I wanted to check out that anarchist book-store again, see about getting one of those Emma Goldman posters. Ineeded the reminder.
I detoured down to 16th and Mission on my way to school, then up toValencia and across. The store was shut, but I got the hours off the doorand made sure they still had that poster up.
As I walked down Valencia, I was amazed to see how much of theDON'T TRUST ANYONE OVER 25 stuff there was. Half the shops hadDON'T TRUST merch in the windows: lunchboxes, babydoll tees, pencil-boxes, trucker hats. The hipster stores have been getting faster and faster,of course. As new memes sweep the net in the course of a day or two,stores have gotten better at putting merch in the windows to match.
Some funny little youtube of a guy launching himself with jet-packsmade of carbonated water would land in your inbox on Monday and byTuesday you'd be able to buy t-shirts with stills from the video on it.
But it was amazing to see something make the leap from Xnet to thehead shops. Distressed designer jeans with the slogan written in carefulhigh school ball-point ink. Embroidered patches.
Good news travels fast.
It was written on the black-board when I got to Ms Galvez's SocialStudies class. We all sat at our desks, smiling at it. It seemed to smileback. There was something profoundly cheering about the idea that wecould all trust each other, that the enemy could be identified. I knew itwasn't entirely true, but it wasn't entirely false either.
Ms Galvez came in and patted her hair and set down her SchoolBookon her desk and powered it up. She picked up her chalk and turnedaround to face the board. We all laughed. Good-naturedly, but welaughed.
She turned around and was laughing too. "Inflation has hit the nation'sslogan-writers, it seems. How many of you know where this phrasecomes from?"We looked at each other. "Hippies?" someone said, and we laughed.
Hippies are all over San Francisco, both the old stoner kinds with giantskanky beards and tie-dyes, and the new kind, who are more into dress-up and maybe playing hacky-sack than protesting anything.
"Well, yes, hippies. But when we think of hippies these days, we justthink of the clothes and the music. Clothes and music were incidental tothe main part of what made that era, the sixties, important. 149You've heard about the civil rights movement to end segregation,white and black kids like you riding buses into the South to sign upblack voters and protest against official state racism. California was oneof the main places where the civil rights leaders came from. We've al-ways been a little more political than the rest of the country, and this isalso a part of the country where black people have been able to get thesame union factory jobs as white people, so they were a little better offthan their cousins in the southland.
" "The students at Berkeley sent a steady stream of freedom riders south,and they recruited them from information tables on campus, at Bancroftand Telegraph Avenue. You've probably seen that there are still tablesthere to this day. Well, the campus tried to shut them down. The president of the uni-versity banned political organizing on campus, but the civil rights kidswouldn't stop. The police tried to arrest a guy who was handing out lit-erature from one of these tables, and they put him in a van, but 3,000 stu-dents surrounded the van and refused to let it budge. They wouldn't letthem take this kid to jail. They stood on top of the van and gave speechesabout the First Amendment and Free Speech.
"That galvanized the Free Speech Movement. That was the start of thehippies, but it was also where more radical student movements camefrom. Black power groups like the Black Panthers — and later gay rightsgroups like the Pink Panthers, too. Radical women's groups, even'lesbian separatists' who wanted to abolish men altogether! And the Yip-pies. Anyone ever hear of the Yippies?"Didn't they levitate the Pentagon? I said. I'd once seen a document-ary about this.
She laughed. "I forgot about that, but yes, that was them! Yippies werelike very political hippies, but they weren't serious the way we think ofpolitics these days. They were very playful. Pranksters. They threwmoney into the New York Stock Exchange. They circled the Pentagonwith hundreds of protestors and said a magic spell that was supposed tolevitate it. They invented a fictional kind of LSD that you could sprayonto people with squirt-guns and shot each other with it and pretendedto be stoned. They were funny and they made great TV — one Yippie, aclown called Wavy Gravy, used to get hundreds of protestors to dress uplike Santa Claus so that the cameras would show police officers arrestingand dragging away Santa on the news that night — and they mobilized alot of people.
150"Their big moment was the Democratic National Convention in 1968,where they called for demonstrations to protest the Vietnam War. Thou-sands of demonstrators poured into Chicago, slept in the parks, andpicketed every day. They had lots of bizarre stunts that year, like run-ning a pig called Pigasus for the presidential nomination. The police andthe demonstrators fought in the streets — they'd done that many timesbefore, but the Chicago cops didn't have the smarts to leave the reportersalone. They beat up the reporters, and the reporters retaliated by finallyshowing what really went on at these demonstrations, so the wholecountry watched their kids being really savagely beaten down by the Ch-icago police. They called it a 'police riot.'
"The Yippies loved to say, 'Never trust anyone over 30.' They meantthat people who were born before a certain time, when America hadbeen fighting enemies like the Nazis, could never understand what itmeant to love your country enough to refuse to fight the Vietnamese. They thought that by the time you hit 30, your attitudes would be frozenand you couldn't ever understand why the kids of the day were taking tothe streets, dropping out, freaking out. San Francisco was ground zero for this. Revolutionary armies werefounded here. Some of them blew up buildings or robbed banks for theircause. A lot of those kids grew up to be more or less normal, while oth-ers ended up in jail. Some of the university dropouts did amazing things— for example, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who founded AppleComputers and invented the PC.""I was really getting into this. I knew a little of it, but I'd never heard ittold like this. Or maybe it had never mattered as much as it did now.
"Suddenly, those lame, solemn, grown-up street demonstrations didn'tseem so lame after all. Maybe there was room for that kind of action inthe Xnet movement.
I put my hand up. "Did they win? Did the Yippies win?"She gave me a long look, like she was thinking it over. No one said aword. We all wanted to hear the answer.
They didn't lose, she said. "They kind of imploded a little. Some ofthem went to jail for drugs or other things. Some of them changed theirtunes and became yuppies and went on the lecture circuit telling every-one how stupid they'd been, talking about how good greed was and howdumb they'd been.
But they did change the world. The war in Vietnam ended, and thekind of conformity and unquestioning obedience that people had called151patriotism went out of style in a big way. Black rights, women's rightsand gay rights came a long way. Chicano rights, rights for disabledpeople, the whole tradition of civil liberties was created or strengthenedby these people. Today's protest movement is the direct descendant ofthose struggles."I can't believe you're talking about them like this, Charles said. Hewas leaning so far in his seat he was half standing, and his sharp, skinnyface had gone red. He had wet, large eyes and big lips, and when he gotexcited he looked a little like a fish.
Ms Galvez stiffened a little, then said, "Go on, Charles.""You've just described terrorists. Actual terrorists. They blew up build-ings, you said. They tried to destroy the stock exchange. They beat upcops, and stopped cops from arresting people who were breaking thelaw. They attacked us!"Ms Galvez nodded slowly. I could tell she was trying to figure outhow to handle Charles, who really seemed like he was ready to pop.
Charles raises a good point. The Yippies weren't foreign agents, theywere American citizens. When you say 'They attacked us,' you need tofigure out who 'they' and 'us' are. When it's your fellow countrymen —"Crap! he shouted. He was on his feet now. "We were at war then.
These guys were giving aid and comfort to the enemy. It's easy to tellwho's us and who's them: if you support America, you're us. If you sup-port the people who are shooting at Americans, you're them.""Does anyone else want to comment on this?"Several hands shot up. Ms Galvez called on them. Some people poin-ted out that the reason that the Vietnamese were shooting at Americansis that the Americans had flown to Vietnam and started running aroundthe jungle with guns. Others thought that Charles had a point, thatpeople shouldn't be allowed to do illegal things.
Everyone had a good debate except Charles, who just shouted atpeople, interrupting them when they tried to get their points out. MsGalvez tried to get him to wait for his turn a couple times, but he wasn'thaving any of it.
I was looking something up on my SchoolBook, something I knew I'dread.
I found it. I stood up. Ms Galvez looked expectantly at me. The otherpeople followed her gaze and went quiet. Even Charles looked at meafter a while, his big wet eyes burning with hatred for me.
152"I wanted to read something," I said. "It's short. 'Governments are insti-tuted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of thegoverned, that whenever any form of government becomes destructiveof these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to in-stitute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and or-ganizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to ef-fect their safety and happiness.'"
This chapter is dedicated to Forbidden Planet, the British chain of sci-ence fiction and fantasy books, comics, toys and videos. Forbidden Plan-et has stores up and down the UK, and also sports outposts in Manhat-tan and Dublin, Ireland. It's dangerous to set foot in a Forbidden Planet— rarely do I escape with my wallet intact. Forbidden Planet reallyleads the pack in bringing the gigantic audience for TV and movie sci-ence fiction into contact with science fiction books — something that'sabsolutely critical to the future of the field.
Forbidden Planet, UK, Dublin and New York CityMs Galvez's smile was wide.
Does anyone know what that comes from?A bunch of people chorused, "The Declaration of Independence."I nodded.
"Why did you read that to us, Marcus?""Because it seems to me that the founders of this country said that gov-ernments should only last for so long as we believe that they're workingfor us, and if we stop believing in them, we should overthrow them. That's what it says, right?Charles shook his head. ""That was hundreds of years ago!"" he said.
"Things are different now!"What's different?"Well, for one thing, we don't have a king anymore. They were talkingabout a government that existed because some old jerk's great-great-great-grandfather believed that God put him in charge and killed every-one who disagreed with him. We have a democratically electedgovernment —"I didn't vote for them, I said.
154"So that gives you the right to blow up a building?""What? Who said anything about blowing up a building? The Yippiesand hippies and all those people believed that the government no longerlistened to them — look at the way people who tried to sign up voters inthe South were treated! They were beaten up, arrested —""Some of them were killed," Ms Galvez said. She held up her handsand waited for Charles and me to sit down. "We're almost out of time fortoday, but I want to commend you all on one of the most interestingclasses I've ever taught. This has been an excellent discussion and I'velearned much from you all. I hope you've learned from each other, too.
Thank you all for your contributions.
I have an extra-credit assignment for those of you who want a littlechallenge. I'd like you to write up a paper comparing the political re-sponse to the anti-war and civil rights movements in the Bay Area to thepresent day civil rights responses to the War on Terror. Three pages min-imum, but take as long as you'd like. I'm interested to see what you comeup with.The bell rang a moment later and everyone filed out of the class. Ihung back and waited for Ms Galvez to notice me.
Yes, Marcus?"That was amazing, I said. "I never knew all that stuff about thesixties.""The seventies, too. This place has always been an exciting place to livein politically charged times. I really liked your reference to the Declara-tion — that was very clever.""Thanks," I said. "It just came to me. I never really appreciated whatthose words all meant before today.""Well, those are the words every teacher loves to hear, Marcus," shesaid, and shook my hand. "I can't wait to read your paper."I bought the Emma Goldman poster on the way home and stuck it upover my desk, tacked over a vintage black-light poster. I also bought aNEVER TRUST t-shirt that had a photoshop of Grover and Elmo kickingthe grownups Gordon and Susan off Sesame Street. It made me laugh. Ilater found out that there had already been about six photoshop contestsfor the slogan online in places like Fark and Worth1000 and B3ta andthere were hundreds of ready-made pics floating around to go onwhatever merch someone churned out.
155Mom raised an eyebrow at the shirt, and Dad shook his head and lec-tured me about not looking for trouble. I felt a little vindicated by hisreaction.
Ange found me online again and we IM-flirted until late at nightagain. The white van with the antennas came back and I switched off myXbox until it had passed. We'd all gotten used to doing that.
Ange was really excited by this party. It looked like it was going to bemonster. There were so many bands signed up they were talking aboutsetting up a B-stage for the secondary acts.
>
How'd they get a permit to blast sound all night in that park? There'shouses all around there>
Per-mit? What is "per-mit"? Tell me more of your hu-man per-mit.
>
Woah, it's illegal?
>
Um, hello? You're worried about breaking the law?
>
Fair point>
LOLI felt a little premonition of nervousness though. I mean, I was takingthis perfectly awesome girl out on a date that weekend — well, she wastaking me, technically — to an illegal rave being held in the middle of abusy neighborhood.
It was bound to be interesting at least.
Interesting.
People started to drift into Dolores Park through the long Saturday af-ternoon, showing up among the ultimate frisbee players and the dog-walkers. Some of them played frisbee or walked dogs. It wasn't reallyclear how the concert was going to work, but there were a lot of cops andundercovers hanging around. You could tell the undercovers because,like Zit and Booger, they had Castro haircuts and Nebraska physiques:
tubby guys with short hair and untidy mustaches. They drifted around,156looking awkward and uncomfortable in their giant shorts and loose-fit-ting shirts that no-doubt hung down to cover the chandelier of gearhung around their midriffs.
Dolores Park is pretty and sunny, with palm trees, tennis courts, andlots of hills and regular trees to run around on, or hang out on. Homelesspeople sleep there at night, but that's true everywhere in San Francisco.
I met Ange down the street, at the anarchist bookstore. That had beenmy suggestion. In hindsight, it was a totally transparent move to seemcool and edgy to this girl, but at the time I would have sworn that Ipicked it because it was a convenient place to meet up. She was readinga book called Up Against the Wall Motherfucker when I got there.
Nice, I said. "You kiss your mother with that mouth?""Your mama don't complain," she said. "Actually, it's a history of agroup of people like the Yippies, but from New York. They all used thatword as their last names, like 'Ben M-F.' The idea was to have a groupout there, making news, but with a totally unprintable name. Just toscrew around with the news-media. Pretty funny, really." She put thebook back on the shelf and now I wondered if I should hug her. Peoplein California hug to say hello and goodbye all the time. Except whenthey don't. And sometimes they kiss on the cheek. It's all very confusing.
She settled it for me by grabbing me in a hug and tugging my headdown to her, kissing me hard on the cheek, then blowing a fart on myneck. I laughed and pushed her away.
You want a burrito? I asked.
Is that a question or a statement of the obvious?"Neither. It's an order.I bought some funny stickers that said THIS PHONE IS TAPPEDwhich were the right size to put on the receivers on the pay phones thatstill lined the streets of the Mission, it being the kind of neighborhoodwhere you got people who couldn't necessarily afford a cellphone.
We walked out into the night air. I told Ange about the scene at thepark when I left.
I bet they have a hundred of those trucks parked around the block,she said. "The better to bust you with.""Um." I looked around. "I sort of hoped that you would say somethinglike, 'Aw, there's no chance they'll do anything about it.'"157"I don't think that's really the idea. The idea is to put a lot of civiliansin a position where the cops have to decide, are we going to treat theseordinary people like terrorists? It's a little like the jamming, but with mu-sic instead of gadgets. You jam, right?"Sometimes I forget that all my friends don't know that Marcus andM1k3y are the same person. "Yeah, a little," I said.
This is like jamming with a bunch of awesome bands."I see.Mission burritos are an institution. They are cheap, giant and deli-cious. Imagine a tube the size of a bazooka shell, filled with spicy grilledmeat, guacamole, salsa, tomatoes, refried beans, rice, onions and cilantro.
It has the same relationship to Taco Bell that a Lamborghini has to a HotWheels car.
There are about two hundred Mission burrito joints. They're all heroic-ally ugly, with uncomfortable seats, minimal decor — faded Mexicantourist office posters and electrified framed Jesus and Mary holograms— and loud mariachi music. The thing that distinguishes them, mostly,is what kind of exotic meat they fill their wares with. The really authenticplaces have brains and tongue, which I never order, but it's nice to knowit's there.
The place we went to had both brains and tongue, which we didn't or-der. I got carne asada and she got shredded chicken and we each got abig cup of horchata.
As soon as we sat down, she unrolled her burrito and took a littlebottle out of her purse. It was a little stainless-steel aerosol canister thatlooked for all the world like a pepper-spray self-defense unit. She aimedit at her burrito's exposed guts and misted them with a fine red oilyspray. I caught a whiff of it and my throat closed and my eyes watered.
What the hell are you doing to that poor, defenseless burrito?She gave me a wicked smile. "I'm a spicy food addict," she said. "Thisis capsaicin oil in a mister.""Capsaicin —""Yeah, the stuff in pepper spray. This is like pepper spray but slightlymore dilute. And way more delicious. Think of it as Spicy Cajun Visine ifit helps."My eyes burned just thinking of it.
You're kidding, I said. "You are so not going to eat that."158Her eyebrows shot up. "That sounds like a challenge, sonny. You justwatch me."She rolled the burrito up as carefully as a stoner rolling up a joint,tucking the ends in, then re-wrapping it in tinfoil. She peeled off one endand brought it up to her mouth, poised with it just before her lips.
Right up to the time she bit into it, I couldn't believe that she was go-ing to do it. I mean, that was basically an anti-personnel weapon she'djust slathered on her dinner.
She bit into it. Chewed. Swallowed. Gave every impression of having adelicious dinner.
Want a bite? she said, innocently.
Yeah, I said. I like spicy food. I always order the curries with fourchilies next to them on the menu at the Pakistani places.
I peeled back more foil and took a big bite.
Big mistake.
You know that feeling you get when you take a big bite of horseradishor wasabi or whatever, and it feels like your sinuses are closing at thesame time as your windpipe, filling your head with trapped, nuclear-hotair that tries to batter its way out through your watering eyes and nos-trils? That feeling like steam is about to pour out of your ears like a car-toon character?
This was a lot worse.
This was like putting your hand on a hot stove, only it's not yourhand, it's the entire inside of your head, and your esophagus all the waydown to your stomach. My entire body sprang out in a sweat and Ichoked and choked.
Wordlessly, she passed me my horchata and I managed to get thestraw into my mouth and suck hard on it, gulping down half of it in onego.
"So there's a scale, the Scoville scale, that we chili-fanciers use to talkabout how spicy a pepper is. Pure capsaicin is about 15 million Scovilles. Tabasco is about 2,500. Pepper spray is a healthy three million. This stuffis a puny 100,000, about as hot as a mild Scotch Bonnet Pepper. I workedup to it in about a year. Some of the real hardcore can get up to a halfmillion or so, two hundred times hotter than Tabasco. That's prettyfreaking hot. At Scoville temperatures like that, your brain gets totally159awash in endorphins. It's a better body-stone than hash. And it's goodfor you.I was getting my sinuses back now, able to breathe without gasping.
"Of course, you get a ferocious ring of fire when you go to the john,she said, winking at me.
Yowch.
You are insane, I said.
Fine talk from a man whose hobby is building and smashing laptops,she said.
Touche, I said and touched my forehead.
Want some? She held out her mister.
Pass, I said, quickly enough that we both laughed.
When we left the restaurant and headed for Dolores park, she put herarm around my waist and I found that she was just the right height forme to put my arm around her shoulders. That was new. I'd never been atall guy, and the girls I'd dated had all been my height — teenaged girlsgrow faster than guys, which is a cruel trick of nature. It was nice. It feltnice.
We turned the corner on 20th Street and walked up toward Dolores.
Before we'd taken a single step, we could feel the buzz. It was like thehum of a million bees. There were lots of people streaming toward thepark, and when I looked toward it, I saw that it was about a hundredtimes more crowded than it had been when I went to meet Ange.
That sight made my blood run hot. It was a beautiful cool night andwe were about to party, really party, party like there was no tomorrow.
Eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.Without saying anything we both broke into a trot. There were lots ofcops, with tense faces, but what the hell were they going to do? Therewere a lot of people in the park. I'm not so good at counting crowds. Thepapers later quoted organizers as saying there were 20,000 people; thecops said 5,000. Maybe that means there were 12,500.
Whatever. It was more people than I'd ever stood among, as part of anunscheduled, unsanctioned, illegal event.
We were among them in an instant. I can't swear to it, but I don't thinkthere was anyone over 25 in that press of bodies. Everyone was smiling.
Some young kids were there, 10 or 12, and that made me feel better. Noone would do anything too stupid with kids that little in the crowd. No160one wanted to see little kids get hurt. This was just going to be a gloriousspring night of celebration.
I figured the thing to do was push in towards the tennis courts. Wethreaded our way through the crowd, and to stay together we took eachother's hands. Only staying together didn't require us to intertwine fin-gers. That was strictly for pleasure. It was very pleasurable.
The bands were all inside the tennis courts, with their guitars and mix-ers and keyboards and even a drum kit. Later, on Xnet, I found a Flickrstream of them smuggling all this stuff in, piece by piece, in gym bagsand under their coats. Along with it all were huge speakers, the kind yousee in automotive supply places, and among them, a stack of… car bat-teries. I laughed. Genius! That was how they were going to power theirstacks. From where I stood, I could see that they were cells from a hybridcar, a Prius. Someone had gutted an eco-mobile to power the night's en-tertainment. The batteries continued outside the courts, stacked upagainst the fence, tethered to the main stack by wires threaded throughthe chain-link. I counted — 200 batteries! Christ! Those things weighed aton, too.
There's no way they organized this without email and wikis and mail-ing lists. And there's no way people this smart would have done that onthe public Internet. This had all taken place on the Xnet, I'd bet my bootson it.
We just kind of bounced around in the crowd for a while as the bandstuned up and conferred with one another. I saw Trudy Doo from a dis-tance, in the tennis courts. She looked like she was in a cage, like a prowrestler. She was wearing a torn wife-beater and her hair was in long,fluorescent pink dreads down to her waist. She was wearing army cam-ouflage pants and giant gothy boots with steel over-toes. As I watched,she picked up a heavy motorcycle jacket, worn as a catcher's mitt, andput it on like armor. It probably was armor, I realized.
I tried to wave to her, to impress Ange I guess, but she didn't see meand I kind of looked like a spazz so I stopped. The energy in the crowdwas amazing. You hear people talk about "vibes" and "energy" for biggroups of people, but until you've experienced it, you probably think it'sjust a figure of speech.
It's not. It's the smiles, infectious and big as watermelons, on everyface. Everyone bopping a little to an unheard rhythm, shoulders rocking.
Rolling walks. Jokes and laughs. The tone of every voice tight and161excited, like a firework about to go off. And you can't help but be a partof it. Because you are.
By the time the bands kicked off, I was utterly stoned on crowd-vibe.
The opening act was some kind of Serbian turbo-folk, which I couldn'tfigure out how to dance to. I know how to dance to exactly two kinds ofmusic: trance (shuffle around and let the music move you) and punk(bash around and mosh until you get hurt or exhausted or both). Thenext act was Oakland hip-hoppers, backed by a thrash metal band,which is better than it sounds. Then some bubble-gum pop. Then Speed-whores took the stage, and Trudy Doo stepped up to the mic.
"My name is Trudy Doo and you're an idiot if you trust me. I'm thirtytwo and it's too late for me. I'm lost. I'm stuck in the old way of thinking. I still take my freedom for granted and let other people take it away fromme. You're the first generation to grow up in Gulag America, and youknow what your freedom is worth to the last goddamned cent!The crowd roared. She was playing fast little skittery nervous chordson her guitar and her bass player, a huge fat girl with a dykey haircutand even bigger boots and a smile you could open beer bottles with waslaying it down fast and hard already. I wanted to bounce. I bounced.
"Ange bounced with me. We were sweating freely in the evening, whichreeked of perspiration and pot smoke. Warm bodies crushed in on allsides of us. They bounced too.
Don't trust anyone over 25! she shouted.
We roared. We were one big animal throat, roaring.
Don't trust anyone over 25!"Don't trust anyone over 25!"Don't trust anyone over 25!"Don't trust anyone over 25!"Don't trust anyone over 25!"Don't trust anyone over 25!She banged some hard chords on her guitar and the other guitarist, alittle pixie of a girl whose face bristled with piercings, jammed in, goingwheedle-dee-wheedle-dee-dee up high, past the twelfth fret.
It's our goddamned city! It's our goddamned country. No terrorist cantake it from us for so long as we're free. Once we're not free, the terroristswin! Take it back! Take it back! You're young enough and stupid enough162not to know that you can't possibly win, so you're the only ones who canlead us to victory! Take it back!"TAKE IT BACK! we roared. She jammed down hard on her guitar.
We roared the note back and then it got really really LOUD.
I danced until I was so tired I couldn't dance another step. Angedanced alongside of me. Technically, we were rubbing our sweaty bod-ies against each other for several hours, but believe it or not, I totallywasn't being a horn-dog about it. We were dancing, lost in the godbeatand the thrash and the screaming — TAKE IT BACK! TAKE IT BACK!
When I couldn't dance anymore, I grabbed her hand and she squeezedmine like I was keeping her from falling off a building. She dragged metoward the edge of the crowd, where it got thinner and cooler. Out there,on the edge of Dolores Park, we were in the cool air and the sweat on ourbodies went instantly icy. We shivered and she threw her arms aroundmy waist. "Warm me," she commanded. I didn't need a hint. I huggedher back. Her heart was an echo of the fast beats from the stage — break-beats now, fast and furious and wordless.
She smelled of sweat, a sharp tang that smelled great. I knew I smelledof sweat too. My nose was pointed into the top of her head, and her facewas right at my collarbone. She moved her hands to my neck andtugged.
Get down here, I didn't bring a stepladder, is what she said and Itried to smile, but it's hard to smile when you're kissing.
Like I said, I'd kissed three girls in my life. Two of them had neverkissed anyone before. One had been dating since she was 12. She hadissues.
None of them kissed like Ange. She made her whole mouth soft, likethe inside of a ripe piece of fruit, and she didn't jam her tongue in mymouth, but slid it in there, and sucked my lips into her mouth at thesame time, so it was like my mouth and hers were merging. I heard my-self moan and I grabbed her and squeezed her harder.
Slowly, gently, we lowered ourselves to the grass. We lay on our sidesand clutched each other, kissing and kissing. The world disappeared sothere was only the kiss.
My hands found her butt, her waist. The edge of her t-shirt. Her warmtummy, her soft navel. They inched higher. She moaned too.
163"Not here," she said. "Let's move over there." She pointed across thestreet at the big white church that gives Mission Dolores Park and theMission its name. Holding hands, moving quickly, we crossed to thechurch. It had big pillars in front of it. She put my back up against one ofthem and pulled my face down her hers again. My hands went quicklyand boldly back to her shirt. I slipped them up her front.
It undoes in the back, she whispered into my mouth. I had a bonerthat could cut glass. I moved my hands around to her back, which wasstrong and broad, and found the hook with my fingers, which weretrembling. I fumbled for a while, thinking of all those jokes about howbad guys are at undoing bras. I was bad at it. Then the hook sprang free.
She gasped into my mouth. I slipped my hands around, feeling the wet-ness of her armpits — which was sexy and not at all gross for some reas-on — and then brushed the sides of her breasts.
That's when the sirens started.
They were louder than anything I'd ever heard. A sound like a physic-al sensation, like something blowing you off your feet. A sound as loudas your ears could process, and then louder.
DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY, a voice said, like God rattling in myskull.
THIS IS AN ILLEGAL GATHERING. DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY.The band had stopped playing. The noise of the crowd across thestreet changed. It got scared. Angry.
I heard a click as the PA system of car-speakers and car-batteries in thetennis courts powered up.
TAKE IT BACK!It was a defiant yell, like a sound shouted into the surf or screamed offa cliff.
TAKE IT BACK!The crowd growled, a sound that made the hairs on the back of myneck stand up.
TAKE IT BACK! they chanted. "TAKE IT BACK TAKE IT BACKTAKE IT BACK!"The police moved in in lines, carrying plastic shields, wearing DarthVader helmets that covered their faces. Each one had a black truncheonand infra-red goggles. They looked like soldiers out of some futuristicwar movie. They took a step forward in unison and every one of them164banged his truncheon on his shield, a cracking noise like the earth split-ting. Another step, another crack. They were all around the park andclosing in now.
DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY, the voice of God said again. There werehelicopters overhead now. No floodlights, though. The infrared goggles,right. Of course. They'd have infrared scopes in the sky, too. I pulledAnge back against the doorway of the church, tucking us back from thecops and the choppers.
TAKE IT BACK! the PA roared. It was Trudy Doo's rebel yell and Iheard her guitar thrash out some chords, then her drummer playing,then that big deep bass.
TAKE IT BACK! the crowd answered, and they boiled out of thepark at the police lines.
I've never been in a war, but now I think I know what it must be like.
What it must be like when scared kids charge across a field at an oppos-ing force, knowing what's coming, running anyway, screaming,hollering.
DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY, the voice of God said. It was comingfrom trucks parked all around the park, trucks that had swung into placein the last few seconds.
That's when the mist fell. It came out of the choppers, and we justcaught the edge of it. It made the top of my head feel like it was going tocome off. It made my sinuses feel like they were being punctured withice-picks. It made my eyes swell and water, and my throat close.
Pepper spray. Not 100 thousand Scovilles. A million and a half. They'dgassed the crowd.
I didn't see what happened next, but I heard it, over the sound of bothme and Ange choking and holding each other. First the choking, retchingsounds. The guitar and drums and bass crashed to a halt. Thencoughing.
Then screaming.
The screaming went on for a long time. When I could see again, thecops had their scopes up on their foreheads and the choppers wereflooding Dolores Park with so much light it looked like daylight. Every-one was looking at the Park, which was good news, because when thelights went up like that, we were totally visible.
What do we do? Ange said. Her voice was tight, scared. I didn't trustmyself to speak for a moment. I swallowed a few times.
165"We walk away," I said. "That's all we can do. Walk away. Like wewere just passing by. Down to Dolores and turn left and up towards 16thStreet. Like we're just passing by. Like this is none of our business.""That'll never work," she said.
It's all I've got."You don't think we should try to run for it?"No, I said. "If we run, they'll chase us. Maybe if we walk, they'll fig-ure we haven't done anything and let us alone. They have a lot of arreststo make. They'll be busy for a long time."The park was rolling with bodies, people and adults clawing at theirfaces and gasping. The cops dragged them by the armpits, then lashedtheir wrists with plastic cuffs and tossed them into the trucks like rag-dolls.
OK? I said.
OK, she said.
And that's just what we did. Walked, holding hands, quickly andbusiness-like, like two people wanting to avoid whatever troublesomeone else was making. The kind of walk you adopt when you wantto pretend you can't see a panhandler, or don't want to get involved in astreet-fight.
It worked.
We reached the corner and turned and kept going. Neither of us daredto speak for two blocks. Then I let out a gasp of air I hadn't know I'dbeen holding in.
We came to 16th Street and turned down toward Mission Street.
Normally that's a pretty scary neighborhood at 2AM on a Saturdaynight. That night it was a relief — same old druggies and hookers anddealers and drunks. No cops with truncheons, no gas.
Um, I said as we breathed in the night air. "Coffee?""Home," she said. "I think home for now. Coffee later.""Yeah," I agreed. She lived up in Hayes Valley. I spotted a taxi rollingby and I hailed it. That was a small miracle — there are hardly any cabswhen you need them in San Francisco.
Have you got cabfare home?"Yeah, she said. The cab-driver looked at us through his window. Iopened the back door so he wouldn't take off.
166"Good night," I said.
She put her hands behind my head and pulled my face toward her.
She kissed me hard on the mouth, nothing sexual in it, but somehowmore intimate for that.
Good night, she whispered in my ear, and slipped into the taxi.
Head swimming, eyes running, a burning shame for having left allthose Xnetters to the tender mercies of the DHS and the SFPD, I set offfor home.
Monday morning, Fred Benson was standing behind Ms Galvez'sdesk.
Ms Galvez will no longer be teaching this class, he said, once we'dtaken our seats. He had a self-satisfied note that I recognized immedi-ately. On a hunch, I checked out Charles. He was smiling like it was hisbirthday and he'd been given the best present in the world.
I put my hand up.
Why not?"It's Board policy not to discuss employee matters with anyone exceptthe employee and the disciplinary committee, he said, without evenbothering to hide how much he enjoyed saying it.
We'll be beginning a new unit today, on national security. YourSchoolBooks have the new texts. Please open them and turn to the firstscreen.The opening screen was emblazoned with a DHS logo and the title:
WHAT EVERY AMERICAN SHOULD KNOW ABOUT HOMELANDSECURITY.
I wanted to throw my SchoolBook on the floor.
I'd made arrangements to meet Ange at a cafe in her neighborhoodafter school. I jumped on the BART and found myself sitting behind twoguys in suits. They were looking at the San Francisco Chronicle, whichfeatured a full-page post-mortem on the "youth riot" in Mission DoloresPark. They were tutting and clucking over it. Then one said to the other,"It's like they're brainwashed or something. Christ, were we ever thatstupid?"I got up and moved to another seat.
This chapter is dedicated to Books-A-Million, a chain of gigantic book-stores spread across the USA. I first encountered Books-A-Million whilestaying at a hotel in Terre Haute, Indiana (I was giving a speech at theRose Hulman Institute of Technology later that day). The store was nextto my hotel and I really needed some reading material — I'd been on theroad for a solid month and I'd read everything in my suitcase, and I hadanother five cities to go before I headed home. As I stared intently at theshelves, a clerk asked me if I needed any help. Now, I've worked at book-stores before, and a knowledgeable clerk is worth her weight in gold, so Isaid sure, and started to describe my tastes, naming authors I'd enjoyed.
The clerk smiled and said, "I've got just the book for you," and pro-ceeded to take down a copy of my first novel, Down and Out in the Ma-gic Kingdom. I busted out laughing, introduced myself, and had an ab-solutely lovely chat about science fiction that almost made me late togive my speech!
Books-A-Million"They're total whores," Ange said, spitting the word out. "In fact, that'san insult to hardworking whores everywhere. They're, they're profiteers."We were looking at a stack of newspapers we'd picked up and broughtto the cafe. They all contained "reporting" on the party in Dolores Parkand to a one, they made it sound like a drunken, druggy orgy of kidswho'd attacked the cops. USA Today described the cost of the "riot" andincluded the cost of washing away the pepper-spray residue from thegas-bombing, the rash of asthma attacks that clogged the city's emer-gency rooms, and the cost of processing the eight hundred arrested"rioters."No one was telling our side.
Well, the Xnet got it right, anyway, I said. I'd saved a bunch of theblogs and videos and photostreams to my phone and I showed them to168her. They were first-hand accounts from people who'd been gassed, andbeaten up. The video showed us all dancing, having fun, showed thepeaceful political speeches and the chant of "Take It Back" and TrudyDoo talking about us being the only generation that could believe infighting for our freedoms.
We need to make people know about this, she said.
Yeah, I said, glumly. "That's a nice theory.""Well, why do you think the press doesn't ever publish our side?""You said it, they're whores.""Yeah, but whores do it for the money. They could sell more papersand commercials if they had a controversy. All they have now is a crime— controversy is much bigger.""OK, point taken. So why don't they do it? Well, reporters can barelysearch regular blogs, let alone keep track of the Xnet. It's not as if that's areal adult-friendly place to be.""Yeah," she said. "Well, we can fix that, right?""Huh?""Write it all up. Put it in one place, with all the links. A single placewhere you can go that's intended for the press to find it and get thewhole picture. Link it to the HOWTOs for Xnet. Internet users can get tothe Xnet, provided they don't care about the DHS finding out whatthey've been surfing.""You think it'll work?""Well, even if it doesn't, it's something positive to do.""Why would they listen to us, anyway?""Who wouldn't listen to M1k3y?"I put down my coffee. I picked up my phone and slipped it into mypocket. I stood up, turned on my heel, and walked out of the cafe. Ipicked a direction at random and kept going. My face felt tight, theblood gone into my stomach, which churned.
They know who you are, I thought. They know who M1k3y is. That was it.
If Ange had figured it out, the DHS had too. I was doomed. I had knownthat since they let me go from the DHS truck, that someday they'd comeand arrest me and put me away forever, send me to wherever Darryl hadgone.
It was all over.
169She nearly tackled me as I reached Market Street. She was out ofbreath and looked furious.
What the hell is your problem, mister?I shook her off and kept walking. It was all over.
She grabbed me again. "Stop it, Marcus, you're scaring me. Come on,talk to me."I stopped and looked at her. She blurred before my eyes. I couldn't fo-cus on anything. I had a mad desire to jump into the path of a Muni trol-ley as it tore past us, down the middle of the road. Better to die than togo back.
Marcus! She did something I'd only seen people do in the movies.
She slapped me, a hard crack across the face. "Talk to me, dammit!"I looked at her and put my hand to my face, which was stinging hard.
No one is supposed to know who I am, I said. "I can't put it any moresimply. If you know, it's all over. Once other people know, it's all over.""Oh god, I'm sorry. Look, I only know because, well, because I black-mailed Jolu. After the party I stalked you a little, trying to figure out ifyou were the nice guy you seemed to be or a secret axe-murderer. I'veknown Jolu for a long time and when I asked him about you, he gushedlike you were the Second Coming or something, but I could hear thatthere was something he wasn't telling me. I've known Jolu for a longtime. He dated my older sister at computer camp when he was a kid. Ihave some really good dirt on him. I told him I'd go public with it if hedidn't tell me.""So he told you.""No," she said. "He told me to go to hell. Then I told him somethingabout me. Something I'd never told anyone else.""What?"She looked at me. Looked around. Looked back at me. "OK. I won'tswear you to secrecy because what's the point? Either I can trust you or Ican't.
Last year, I — she broke off. "Last year, I stole the standardized testsand published them on the net. It was just a lark. I happened to be walk-ing past the principal's office and I saw them in his safe, and the doorwas hanging open. I ducked into his office — there were six sets of cop-ies and I just put one into my bag and took off again. When I got home, Iscanned them all and put them up on a Pirate Party server in Denmark."170"That was you?" I said.
She blushed. "Um. Yeah.""Holy crap!" I said. It had been huge news. The Board of Educationsaid that its No Child Left Behind tests had cost tens of millions of dol-lars to produce and that they'd have to spend it all over again now thatthey'd had the leak. They called it "edu-terrorism." The news had specu-lated endlessly about the political motivations of the leaker, wondering ifit was a teacher's protest, or a student, or a thief, or a disgruntled govern-ment contractor.
That was YOU?"It was me, she said.
And you told Jolu this —"Because I wanted him to be sure that I would keep the secret. If heknew my secret, then he'd have something he could use to put me in jailif I opened my trap. Give a little, get a little. Quid pro quo, like in Silenceof the Lambs."And he told you."No, she said. "He didn't.""But —""Then I told him how into you I was. How I was planning to totallymake an idiot of myself and throw myself at you. Then he told me."I couldn't think of anything to say then. I looked down at my toes. Shegrabbed my hands and squeezed them.
I'm sorry I squeezed it out of him. It was your decision to tell me, ifyou were going to tell me at all. I had no business —"No, I said. Now that I knew how she'd found out, I was starting tocalm down. "No, it's good you know. You.""Me," she said. "Li'l ol' me.""OK, I can live with this. But there's one other thing.""What?""There's no way to say this without sounding like a jerk, so I'll just sayit. People who date each other — or whatever it is we're doing now —they split up. When they split up, they get angry at each other. Some-times even hate each other. It's really cold to think about that happeningbetween us, but you know, we've got to think about it."171"I solemnly promise that there is nothing you could ever do to me thatwould cause me to betray your secret. Nothing. Screw a dozen cheer-leaders in my bed while my mother watches. Make me listen to BritneySpears. Rip off my laptop, smash it with hammers and soak it in sea-wa-ter. I promise. Nothing. Ever."I whooshed out some air.
Um, I said.
Now would be a good time to kiss me, she said, and turned her faceup.
M1k3y's next big project on the Xnet was putting together the ultimateroundup of reports of the DON'T TRUST party at Dolores Park. I put to-gether the biggest, most bad-ass site I could, with sections showing theaction by location, by time, by category — police violence, dancing, after-math, singing. I uploaded the whole concert.
It was pretty much all I worked on for the rest of the night. And thenext night. And the next.
My mailbox overflowed with suggestions from people. They sent medumps off their phones and their pocket-cameras. Then I got an emailfrom a name I recognized — Dr Eeevil (three "e"s), one of the primemaintainers of ParanoidLinux.
>
M1k3y>
I have been watching your Xnet experiment with great interest. Herein Germany, we have much experience with what happens with a gov-ernment that gets out of control.
>
One thing you should know is that every camera has a unique "noisesignature" that can be used to later connect a picture with a camera. Thatmeans that the photos you're republishing on your site could potentiallybe used to identify the photographers, should they later be picked up forsomething else.
>
Luckily, it's not hard to strip out the signatures, if you care to. There'sa utility on the ParanoidLinux distro you're using that does this — it's172called photonomous, and you'll find it in /usr/bin. Just read the manpages for documentation. It's simple though.
>
Good luck with what you're doing. Don't get caught. Stay free. Stayparanoid.
>
Dr EeevilI de-fingerprintized all the photos I'd posted and put them back up,along with a note explaining what Dr Eeevil had told me, warning every-one else to do the same. We all had the same basic ParanoidXbox install,so we could all anonymize our pictures. There wasn't anything I coulddo about the photos that had already been downloaded and cached, butfrom now on we'd be smarter.
That was all the thought I gave the matter than night, until I got downto breakfast the next morning and Mom had the radio on, playing theNPR morning news.
Arabic news agency Al-Jazeera is running pictures, video and first-hand accounts of last weekend's youth riot in Mission Dolores park, theannouncer said as I was drinking a glass of orange juice. I managed notto spray it across the room, but I did choke a little.
Al-Jazeera reporters claim that these accounts were published on theso-called 'Xnet,' a clandestine network used by students and Al-Quaedasympathizers in the Bay Area. This network's existence has long beenrumored, but today marks its first mainstream mention.Mom shook her head. "Just what we need," she said. "As if the policeweren't bad enough. Kids running around, pretending to be guerillasand giving them the excuse to really crack down.""The Xnet weblogs have carried hundreds of reports and multimediafiles from young people who attended the riot and allege that they weregathered peacefully until the police attacked them. Here is one of thoseaccounts.
"'All we were doing was dancing. I brought my little brother. Bandsplayed and we talked about freedom, about how we were losing it tothese jerks who say they hate terrorists but who attack us though we'renot terrorists we're Americans. I think they hate freedom, not us. We danced and the bands played and it was all fun and good andthen the cops started shouting at us to disperse. We all shouted take it173back! Meaning take America back. The cops gassed us with pepperspray. My little brother is twelve. He missed three days of school. Mystupid parents say it was my fault. How about the police? We pay themand they're supposed to protect us but they gassed us for no good reas-on, gassed us like they gas enemy soldiers.'
"Similar accounts, including audio and video, can be found on Al-Jazeera's website and on the Xnet. You can find directions for accessingthis Xnet on NPR's homepage.Dad came down.
Do you use the Xnet? he said. He looked intensely at my face. I feltmyself squirm.
It's for video-games, I said. "That's what most people use it for. It'sjust a wireless network. It's what everyone did with those free Xboxesthey gave away last year."He glowered at me. "Games? Marcus, you don't realize it, but you'reproviding cover for people who plan on attacking and destroying thiscountry. I don't want to see you using this Xnet. Not anymore. Do I makemyself clear?"I wanted to argue. Hell, I wanted to shake him by the shoulders. But Ididn't. I looked away. I said, "Sure, Dad." I went to school.
At first I was relieved when I discovered that they weren't going toleave Mr Benson in charge of my social studies class. But the womanthey found to replace him was my worst nightmare.
She was young, just about 28 or 29, and pretty, in a wholesome kind ofway. She was blonde and spoke with a soft southern accent when she in-troduced herself to us as Mrs Andersen. That set off alarm bells rightaway. I didn't know any women under the age of sixty that called them-selves "Mrs."But I was prepared to overlook it. She was young, pretty, she soundednice. She would be OK.
She wasn't OK.
Under what circumstances should the federal government be pre-pared to suspend the Bill of Rights? she said, turning to the blackboardand writing down a row of numbers, one through ten.
Never, I said, not waiting to be called on. This was easy.
Constitutional rights are absolute.174"That's not a very sophisticated view." She looked at her seating-plan.
Marcus. For example, say a policeman conducts an improper search —he goes beyond the stuff specified in his warrant. He discovers compel-ling evidence that a bad guy killed your father. It's the only evidence thatexists. Should the bad guy go free?I knew the answer to this, but I couldn't really explain it. "Yes," I said,finally. "But the police shouldn't conduct improper searches —""Wrong," she said. "The proper response to police misconduct is dis-ciplinary action against the police, not punishing all of society for onecop's mistake." She wrote "Criminal guilt" under point one on the board.
Other ways in which the Bill of Rights can be superseded?Charles put his hand up. "Shouting fire in a crowded theater?""Very good —" she consulted the seating plan — "Charles. There aremany instances in which the First Amendment is not absolute. Let's listsome more of those."Charles put his hand up again. "Endangering a law enforcementofficer.""Yes, disclosing the identity of an undercover policeman or intelli-gence officer. Very good." She wrote it down. "Others?""National security," Charles said, not waiting for her to call on himagain. "Libel. Obscenity. Corruption of minors. Child porn. Bomb-mak-ing recipes." Mrs Andersen wrote these down fast, but stopped at childporn. "Child porn is just a form of obscenity."I was feeling sick. This was not what I'd learned or believed about mycountry. I put my hand up.
"Yes, Marcus?""I don't get it. You're making it sound like the Bill of Rights is optional. It's the Constitution. We're supposed to follow it absolutely.""That's a common oversimplification, she said, giving me a fake smile.
"But the fact of the matter is that the framers of the Constitution intendedit to be a living document that was revised over time. They understoodthat the Republic wouldn't be able to last forever if the government ofthe day couldn't govern according to the needs of the day. They never in-tended the Constitution to be looked on like religious doctrine. After all,they came here fleeing religious doctrine.I shook my head. "What? No. They were merchants and artisans whowere loyal to the King until he instituted policies that were against their175interests and enforced them brutally. The religious refugees were wayearlier.""Some of the Framers were descended from religious refugees," shesaid.
And the Bill of Rights isn't supposed to be something you pick andchoose from. What the Framers hated was tyranny. That's what the Billof Rights is supposed to prevent. They were a revolutionary army andthey wanted a set of principles that everyone could agree to. Life, libertyand the pursuit of happiness. The right of people to throw off theiroppressors."Yes, yes, she said, waving at me. "They believed in the right ofpeople to get rid of their Kings, but —" Charles was grinning and whenshe said that, he smiled even wider.
"They set out the Bill of Rights because they thought that having abso-lute rights was better than the risk that someone would take them away. Like the First Amendment: it's supposed to protect us by preventing thegovernment from creating two kinds of speech, allowed speech andcriminal speech. They didn't want to face the risk that some jerk woulddecide that the things that he found unpleasant were illegal.She turned and wrote, ""Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"" on it.
"We're getting a little ahead of the lesson, but you seem like an ad-vanced group. The others laughed at this, nervously.
The role of government is to secure for citizens the rights of life,liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In that order. It's like a filter. If thegovernment wants to do something that makes us a little unhappy, ortakes away some of our liberty, it's OK, providing they're doing it to saveour lives. That's why the cops can lock you up if they think you're adanger to yourself or others. You lose your liberty and happiness to pro-tect life. If you've got life, you might get liberty and happiness later.Some of the others had their hands up. "Doesn't that mean that theycan do anything they want, if they say it's to stop someone from hurtingus in the future?""Yeah," another kid said. "This sounds like you're saying that nationalsecurity is more important than the Constitution."I was so proud of my fellow students then. I said, "How can you pro-tect freedom by suspending the Bill of Rights?"She shook her head at us like we were being very stupid. "The'revolutionary' founding fathers shot traitors and spies. They didn't176believe in absolute freedom, not when it threatened the Republic. Nowyou take these Xnet people —"I tried hard not to stiffen.
— these so-called jammers who were on the news this morning. Afterthis city was attacked by people who've declared war on this country,they set about sabotaging the security measures set up to catch the badguys and prevent them from doing it again. They did this by endanger-ing and inconveniencing their fellow citizens —"They did it to show that our rights were being taken away in thename of protecting them! I said. OK, I shouted. God, she had me sosteamed. "They did it because the government was treating everyone likea suspected terrorist.""So they wanted to prove that they shouldn't be treated like terrorists,"Charles shouted back, "so they acted like terrorists? So they committedterrorism?"I boiled.
Oh for Christ's sake. Committed terrorism? They showed that univer-sal surveillance was more dangerous than terrorism. Look at whathappened in the park last weekend. Those people were dancing andlistening to music. How is that terrorism?The teacher crossed the room and stood before me, looming over meuntil I shut up. "Marcus, you seem to think that nothing has changed inthis country. You need to understand that the bombing of the Bay Bridgechanged everything. Thousands of our friends and relatives lie dead atthe bottom of the Bay. This is a time for national unity in the face of theviolent insult our country has suffered —"I stood up. I'd had enough of this "everything has changed" crapola.
National unity? The whole point of America is that we're the countrywhere dissent is welcome. We're a country of dissidents and fighters anduniversity dropouts and free speech people.I thought of Ms Galvez's last lesson and the thousands of Berkeley stu-dents who'd surrounded the police-van when they tried to arrest a guyfor distributing civil rights literature. No one tried to stop those truckswhen they drove away with all the people who'd been dancing in thepark. I didn't try. I was running away.
Maybe everything had changed.
I believe you know where Mr Benson's office is, she said to me. "Youare to present yourself to him immediately. I will not have my classes177disrupted by disrespectful behavior. For someone who claims to lovefreedom of speech, you're certainly willing to shout down anyone whodisagrees with you."I picked up my SchoolBook and my bag and stormed out. The doorhad a gas-lift, so it was impossible to slam, or I would have slammed it.
I went fast to Mr Benson's office. Cameras filmed me as I went. Mygait was recorded. The arphids in my student ID broadcast my identityto sensors in the hallway. It was like being in jail.
Close the door, Marcus, Mr Benson said. He turned his screenaround so that I could see the video feed from the social studiesclassroom. He'd been watching.
What do you have to say for yourself?"That wasn't teaching, it was propaganda. She told us that the Constitu-tion didn't matter!"No, she said it wasn't religious doctrine. And you attacked her likesome kind of fundamentalist, proving her point. Marcus, you of allpeople should understand that everything changed when the bridge wasbombed. Your friend Darryl —"Don't you say a goddamned word about him, I said, the anger bub-bling over. "You're not fit to talk about him. Yeah, I understand thateverything's different now. We used to be a free country. Now we'renot.""Marcus, do you know what 'zero-tolerance' means?"I backed down. He could expel me for "threatening behavior." It wassupposed to be used against gang kids who tried to intimidate theirteachers. But of course he wouldn't have any compunctions about usingit on me.
Yes, I said. "I know what it means.""I think you owe me an apology," he said.
I looked at him. He was barely suppressing his sadistic smile. A part ofme wanted to grovel. It wanted to beg for his forgiveness for all myshame. I tamped that part down and decided that I would rather getkicked out than apologize.
Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powersfrom the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of govern-ment becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to al-ter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation178on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to themshall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. I re-membered it word for word.
He shook his head. "Remembering things isn't the same as under-standing them, sonny." He bent over his computer and made someclicks. His printer purred. He handed me a sheet of warm Board letter-head that said I'd been suspended for two weeks.
I'll email your parents now. If you are still on school property in thirtyminutes, you'll be arrested for trespassing.I looked at him.
You don't want to declare war on me in my own school, he said.
You can't win that war. GO!I left.
This chapter is dedicated to the incomparable Mysterious Galaxy in SanDiego, California. The Mysterious Galaxy folks have had me in to signbooks every time I've been in San Diego for a conference or to teach (theClarion Writers' Workshop is based at San Diego State University innearby La Jolla, CA), and every time I show up, they pack the house.
This is a store with a loyal following of die-hard fans who know thatthey'll always be able to get great recommendations and great ideas atthe store. In summer 2007, I took my writing class from Clarion downto the store for the midnight launch of the final Harry Potter book andI've never seen such a rollicking, awesomely fun party at a store.
Mysterious Galaxy: 7051 Clairemont Mesa Blvd., Suite #302 SanDiego, CA USA 92111 +1 858 268 4747The Xnet wasn't much fun in the middle of the school-day, when allthe people who used it were in school. I had the piece of paper folded inthe back pocket of my jeans, and I threw it on the kitchen table when Igot home. I sat down in the living room and switched on the TV. I neverwatched it, but I knew that my parents did. The TV and the radio andthe newspapers were where they got all their ideas about the world.
The news was terrible. There were so many reasons to be scared.
American soldiers were dying all over the world. Not just soldiers,either. National guardsmen, who thought they were signing up to helprescue people from hurricanes, stationed overseas for years and years ofa long and endless war.
I flipped around the 24-hour news networks, one after another, aparade of officials telling us why we should be scared. A parade of pho-tos of bombs going off around the world.
I kept flipping and found myself looking at a familiar face. It was theguy who had come into the truck and spoken to Severe-Haircut womanwhen I was chained up in the back. Wearing a military uniform. The180caption identified him as Major General Graeme Sutherland, RegionalCommander, DHS.
I hold in my hands actual literature on offer at the so-called concert inDolores Park last weekend. He held up a stack of pamphlets. There'dbeen lots of pamphleteers there, I remembered. Wherever you got agroup of people in San Francisco, you got pamphlets.
"I want you to look at these for a moment. Let me read you their titles. WITHOUT THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED: A CITIZEN'S GUIDETO OVERTHROWING THE STATE. Here's one, DID THE SEPTEMBER11TH BOMBINGS REALLY HAPPEN? And another, HOW TO USETHEIR SECURITY AGAINST THEM. This literature shows us the truepurpose of the illegal gathering on Saturday night. This wasn't merely anunsafe gathering of thousands of people without proper precaution, oreven toilets. It was a recruiting rally for the enemy. It was an attempt tocorrupt children into embracing the idea that America shouldn't protectherself. Take this slogan, DON'T TRUST ANYONE OVER 25. What betterway to ensure that no considered, balanced, adult discussion is ever in-jected into your pro-terrorist message than to exclude adults, limitingyour group to impressionable young people?
" "When police came on the scene, they found a recruitment rally forAmerica's enemies in progress. The gathering had already disrupted thenights of hundreds of residents in the area, none of whom had been con-sulted in the planning of this all night rave party. They ordered these people to disperse — that much is visible on allthe video — and when the revelers turned to attack them, egged on bythe musicians on stage, the police subdued them using non-lethal crowdcontrol techniques.
" "The arrestees were ring-leaders and provocateurs who had led thethousands of impressionistic young people there to charge the policelines. 827 of them were taken into custody. Many of these people hadprior offenses. More than 100 of them had outstanding warrants. Theyare still in custody. Ladies and gentlemen, America is fighting a war on many fronts, butnowhere is she in more grave danger than she is here, at home. Whetherwe are being attacked by terrorists or those who sympathize with them.""181A reporter held up a hand and said, ""General Sutherland, surely you'renot saying that these children were terrorist sympathizers for attending aparty in a park?""""Of course not. But when young people are brought under the influ-ence of our country's enemies, it's easy for them to end up over theirheads. Terrorists would love to recruit a fifth column to fight the war onthe home front for them. If these were my children, I'd be gravelyconcerned.""Another reporter chimed in. ""Surely this is just an open air concert,General? They were hardly drilling with rifles.""The General produced a stack of photos and began to hold them up.
"These are pictures that officers took with infra-red cameras before mov-ing in. He held them next to his face and paged through them one at atime. They showed people dancing really rough, some people gettingcrushed or stepped on. Then they moved into sex stuff by the trees, a girlwith three guys, two guys necking together. "There were children asyoung as ten years old at this event. A deadly cocktail of drugs, propa-ganda and music resulted in dozens of injuries. It's a wonder thereweren't any deaths."I switched the TV off. They made it look like it had been a riot. If myparents thought I'd been there, they'd have strapped me to my bed for amonth and only let me out afterward wearing a tracking collar.
Speaking of which, they were going to be pissed when they found outI'd been suspended.
They didn't take it well. Dad wanted to ground me, but Mom and Italked him out of it.
You know that vice-principal has had it in for Marcus for years,Mom said. "The last time we met him you cursed him for an hour after-ward. I think the word 'asshole' was mentioned repeatedly."Dad shook his head. "Disrupting a class to argue against the Depart-ment of Homeland Security —""It's a social studies class, Dad," I said. I was beyond caring anymore,but I felt like if Mom was going to stick up for me, I should help her out.
We were talking about the DHS. Isn't debate supposed to be healthy?"Look, son, he said. He'd taking to calling me "son" a lot. It made mefeel like he'd stopped thinking of me as a person and switched to think-ing of me as a kind of half-formed larva that needed to be guided out of182adolescence. I hated it. "You're going to have to learn to live with the factthat we live in a different world today. You have every right to speakyour mind of course, but you have to be prepared for the consequencesof doing so. You have to face the fact that there are people who are hurt-ing, who aren't going to want to argue the finer points of Constitutionallaw when their lives are at stakes. We're in a lifeboat now, and onceyou're in the lifeboat, no one wants to hear about how mean the captainis being."I barely restrained myself from rolling my eyes.
I've been assigned two weeks of independent study, writing one pa-per for each of my subjects, using the city for my background — a his-tory paper, a social studies paper, an English paper, a physics paper. Itbeats sitting around at home watching television.Dad looked hard at me, like he suspected I was up to something, thennodded. I said goodnight to them and went up to my room. I fired upmy Xbox and opened a word-processor and started to brainstorm ideasfor my papers. Why not? It really was better than sitting around at home.
I ended up IMing with Ange for quite a while that night. She was sym-pathetic about everything and told me she'd help me with my papers if Iwanted to meet her after school the next night. I knew where her schoolwas — she went to the same school as Van — and it was all the way overin the East Bay, where I hadn't visited since the bombs went.
I was really excited at the prospect of seeing her again. Every nightsince the party, I'd gone to bed thinking of two things: the sight of thecrowd charging the police lines and the feeling of the side of her breastunder her shirt as we leaned against the pillar. She was amazing. I'd nev-er been with a girl as… aggressive as her before. It had always been meputting the moves on and them pushing me away. I got the feeling thatAnge was as much of a horn-dog as I was. It was a tantalizing notion.
I slept soundly that night, with exciting dreams of me and Ange andwhat we might do if we found ourselves in a secluded spot somewhere.
The next day, I set out to work on my papers. San Francisco is a goodplace to write about. History? Sure, it's there, from the Gold Rush to theWWII shipyards, the Japanese internment camps, the invention of thePC. Physics? The Exploratorium has the coolest exhibits of any museumI've ever been to. I took a perverse satisfaction in the exhibits on soil li-quefaction during big quakes. English? Jack London, Beat Poets, science183fiction writers like Pat Murphy and Rudy Rucker. Social studies? TheFree Speech Movement, Cesar Chavez, gay rights, feminism, anti-warmovement…I've always loved just learning stuff for its own sake. Just to be smarterabout the world around me. I could do that just by walking around thecity. I decided I'd do an English paper about the Beats first. City Lightsbooks had a great library in an upstairs room where Alan Ginsberg andhis buddies had created their radical druggy poetry. The one we'd readin English class was Howl and I would never forget the opening lines,they gave me shivers down my back:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hyster-ical naked,dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angryfix,angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to thestarry dynamo in the machinery of night…I liked the way he ran those words all together, "starving hysterical na-ked." I knew how that felt. And "best minds of my generation" made methink hard too. It made me remember the park and the police and the gasfalling. They busted Ginsberg for obscenity over Howl — all about a lineabout gay sex that would hardly have caused us to blink an eye today. Itmade me happy somehow, knowing that we'd made some progress.
That things had been even more restrictive than this before.
I lost myself in the library, reading these beautiful old editions of thebooks. I got lost in Jack Kerouac's On the Road, a novel I'd been meaningto read for a long time, and a clerk who came up to check on me noddedapprovingly and found me a cheap edition that he sold me for six bucks.
I walked into Chinatown and had dim sum buns and noodles withhot-sauce that I had previously considered to be pretty hot, but whichwould never seem anything like hot ever again, not now that I'd had anAnge special.
As the day wore on toward the afternoon, I got on the BART andswitched to a San Mateo bridge shuttle bus to bring me around to theEast Bay. I read my copy of On the Road and dug the scenery whizzingpast. On the Road is a semi-autobiographical novel about Jack Kerouac, adruggy, hard-drinking writer who goes hitchhiking around America,working crummy jobs, howling through the streets at night, meetingpeople and parting ways. Hipsters, sad-faced hobos, con-men, muggers,184scumbags and angels. There's not really a plot — Kerouac supposedlywrote it in three weeks on a long roll of paper, stoned out of his mind —only a bunch of amazing things, one thing happening after another. Hemakes friends with self-destructing people like Dean Moriarty, who gethim involved in weird schemes that never really work out, but still itworks out, if you know what I mean.
There was a rhythm to the words, it was luscious, I could hear it beingread aloud in my head. It made me want to lie down in the bed of apickup truck and wake up in a dusty little town somewhere in the cent-ral valley on the way to LA, one of those places with a gas station and adiner, and just walk out into the fields and meet people and see stuff anddo stuff.
It was a long bus ride and I must have dozed off a little — staying uplate IMing with Ange was hard on my sleep-schedule, since Mom stillexpected me down for breakfast. I woke up and changed buses and be-fore long, I was at Ange's school.
She came bounding out of the gates in her uniform — I'd never seenher in it before, it was kind of cute in a weird way, and reminded me ofVan in her uniform. She gave me a long hug and a hard kiss on thecheek.
Hello you! she said.
Hiya!"Whatcha reading?I'd been waiting for this. I'd marked the passage with a finger. "Listen:
'They danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after asI've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the onlypeople for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad totalk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the onesthat never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn likefabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the starsand in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes"Awww!"'"She took the book and read the passage again for herself. "Wow,dingledodies! I love it! Is it all like this?"I told her about the parts I'd read, walking slowly down the sidewalkback toward the bus-stop. Once we turned the corner, she put her armaround my waist and I slung mine around her shoulder. Walking downthe street with a girl — my girlfriend? Sure, why not? — talking about185this cool book. It was heaven. Made me forget my troubles for a littlewhile.
Marcus?I turned around. It was Van. In my subconscious I'd expected this. Iknew because my conscious mind wasn't remotely surprised. It wasn't abig school, and they all got out at the same time. I hadn't spoken to Vanin weeks, and those weeks felt like months. We used to talk every day.
Hey, Van, I said. I suppressed the urge to take my arm off of Ange'sshoulders. Van seemed surprised, but not angry, more ashen, shaken.
She looked closely at the two of us.
Angela?"Hey, Vanessa, Ange said.
What are you doing here?"I came out to get Ange, I said, trying to keep my tone neutral. I wassuddenly embarrassed to be seen with another girl.
Oh, Van said. "Well, it was nice to see you.""Nice to see you too, Vanessa," Ange said, swinging me around,marching me back toward the bus-stop.
You know her? Ange said.
Yeah, since forever."Was she your girlfriend?"What? No! No way! We were just friends."You were friends?I felt like Van was walking right behind us, listening in, though at thepace we were walking, she would have to be jogging to keep up. I res-isted the temptation to look over my shoulder for as long as possible,then I did. There were lots of girls from the school behind us, but no Van.
"She was with me and Jose-Luis and Darryl when we were arrested. We used to ARG together. The four of us, we were kind of best friends.""And what happened?I dropped my voice. ""She didn't like the Xnet,"" I said. ""She thought wewould get into trouble. That I'd get other people into trouble.""""And that's why you stopped being friends?""""We just drifted apart.""186We walked a few steps. ""You weren't, you know, boyfriend/girlfriendfriends?""""No!"" I said. My face was hot. I felt like I sounded like I was lying,even though I was telling the truth.
"Ange jerked us to a halt and studied my face.
"Were you?""No! Seriously! Just friends. Darryl and her — well, not quite, butDarryl was so into her. There was no way —""But if Darryl hadn't been into her, you would have, huh?""No, Ange, no. Please, just believe me and let it go. Vanessa was agood friend and we're not anymore, and that upsets me, but I was neverinto her that way, all right? She slumped a little. OK, OK. I'm sorry. I don't really get along withher is all. We've never gotten along in all the years we've known eachother.""Oh ho, I thought. This would be how it came to be that Jolu knew herfor so long and I never met her; she had some kind of thing with Vanand he didn't want to bring her around.
"She gave me a long hug and we kissed, and a bunch of girls passed usgoing woooo and we straightened up and headed for the bus-stop. Aheadof us walked Van, who must have gone past while we were kissing. I feltlike a complete jerk.
Of course, she was at the stop and on the bus and we didn't say aword to each other, and I tried to make conversation with Ange all theway, but it was awkward.
The plan was to stop for a coffee and head to Ange's place to hang outand "study," i.e. take turns on her Xbox looking at the Xnet. Ange's momgot home late on Tuesdays, which was her night for yoga class and din-ner with her girls, and Ange's sister was going out with her boyfriend, sowe'd have the place to ourselves. I'd been having pervy thoughts about itever since we'd made the plan.
We got to her place and went straight to her room and shut the door.
Her room was kind of a disaster, covered with layers of clothes and note-books and parts of PCs that would dig into your stocking feet like cal-trops. Her desk was worse than the floor, piled high with books andcomics, so we ended up sitting on her bed, which was OK by me.
187The awkwardness from seeing Van had gone away somewhat and wegot her Xbox up and running. It was in the center of a nest of wires, somegoing to a wireless antenna she'd hacked into it and stuck to the windowso she could tune in the neighbors' WiFi. Some went to a couple of oldlaptop screens she'd turned into standalone monitors, balanced onstands and bristling with exposed electronics. The screens were on bothbedside tables, which was an excellent setup for watching movies orIMing from bed — she could turn the monitors sidewise and lie on herside and they'd be right-side-up, no matter which side she lay on.
We both knew what we were really there for, sitting side by sidepropped against the bedside table. I was trembling a little and super-con-scious of the warmth of her leg and shoulder against mine, but I neededto go through the motions of logging into Xnet and seeing what email I'dgotten and so on.
There was an email from a kid who liked to send in funny phone-camvideos of the DHS being really crazy — the last one had been of themdisassembling a baby's stroller after a bomb-sniffing dog had shown aninterest in it, taking it apart with screwdrivers right on the street in theMarina while all these rich people walked past, staring at them and mar-veling at how weird it was.
I'd linked to the video and it had been downloaded like crazy. He'dhosted it on the Internet Archive's Alexandria mirror in Egypt, wherethey'd host anything for free so long as you'd put it under the CreativeCommons license, which let anyone remix it and share it. The US archive— which was down in the Presidio, only a few minutes away — hadbeen forced to take down all those videos in the name of national secur-ity, but the Alexandria archive had split away into its own organizationand was hosting anything that embarrassed the USA.
This kid — his handle was Kameraspie — had sent me an even bettervideo this time around. It was at the doorway to City Hall in CivicCenter, a huge wedding cake of a building covered with statues in littlearchways and gilt leaves and trim. The DHS had a secure perimeteraround the building, and Kameraspie's video showed a great shot oftheir checkpoint as a guy in an officer's uniform approached and showedhis ID and put his briefcase on the X-ray belt.
It was all OK until one of the DHS people saw something he didn't likeon the X-ray. He questioned the General, who rolled his eyes and saidsomething inaudible (the video had been shot from across the street,188apparently with a homemade concealed zoom lens, so the audio wasmostly of people walking past and traffic noises).
The General and the DHS guys got into an argument, and the longerthey argued, the more DHS guys gathered around them. Finally, theGeneral shook his head angrily and waved his finger at the DHS guy'schest and picked up his briefcase and started to walk away. The DHSguys shouted at him, but he didn't slow. His body language really said,"I am totally, utterly pissed."Then it happened. The DHS guys ran after the general. Kameraspieslowed the video down here, so we could see, in frame-by-frame slo-mo,the general half-turning, his face all like, "No freaking way are you aboutto tackle me," then changing to horror as three of the giant DHS guardsslammed into him, knocking him sideways, then catching him at themiddle, like a career-ending football tackle. The general — middle aged,steely grey hair, lined and dignified face — went down like a sack ofpotatoes and bounced twice, his face slamming off the sidewalk andblood starting out of his nose.
The DHS hog-tied the general, strapping him at ankles and wrists. Thegeneral was shouting now, really shouting, his face purpling under theblood streaming from his nose. Legs swished by in the tight zoom.
Passing pedestrians looked at this guy in his uniform, getting tied up,and you could see from his face that this was the worst part, this was theritual humiliation, the removal of dignity. The clip ended.
Oh my dear sweet Buddha, I said looking at the screen as it faded toblack, starting the video again. I nudged Ange and showed her the clip.
She watched wordless, jaw hanging down to her chest.
Post that, she said. "Post that post that post that post that!"I posted it. I could barely type as I wrote it up, describing what I'dseen, adding a note to see if anyone could identify the military man inthe video, if anyone knew anything about this.
I hit publish.
We watched the video. We watched it again.
My email pinged.
>
I totally recognize that dude — you can find his bio on Wikipedia.
He's General Claude Geist. He commanded the joint UN peacekeepingmission in Haiti.
189I checked the bio. There was a picture of the general at a press confer-ence, and notes about his role in the difficult Haiti mission. It was clearlythe same guy.
I updated the post.
Theoretically, this was Ange's and my chance to make out, but thatwasn't what we ended up doing. We crawled the Xnet blogs, looking formore accounts of the DHS searching people, tackling people, invadingthem. This was a familiar task, the same thing I'd done with all the foot-age and accounts from the riots in the park. I started a new category onmy blog for this, AbusesOfAuthority, and filed them away. Ange keptcoming up with new search terms for me to try and by the time her momgot home, my new category had seventy posts, headlined by GeneralGeist's City Hall takedown.
I worked on my Beat paper all the next day at home, reading the Ker-ouac and surfing the Xnet. I was planning on meeting Ange at school,but I totally wimped out at the thought of seeing Van again, so I textedher an excuse about working on the paper.
There were all kinds of great suggestions for AbusesOfAuthority com-ing in; hundreds of little and big ones, pictures and audio. The memewas spreading.
It spread. The next morning there were even more. Someone started anew blog called AbusesOfAuthority that collected hundreds more. Thepile grew. We competed to find the juiciest stories, the craziest pictures.
The deal with my parents was that I'd eat breakfast with them everymorning and talk about the projects I was doing. They liked that I wasreading Kerouac. It had been a favorite book of both of theirs and itturned out there was already a copy on the bookcase in my parents'
room. My dad brought it down and I flipped through it. There were pas-sages marked up with pen, dog-eared pages, notes in the margin. Mydad had really loved this book.
It made me remember a better time, when my Dad and I had been ableto talk for five minutes without shouting at each other about terrorism,and we had a great breakfast talking about the way that the novel wasplotted, all the crazy adventures.
But the next morning at breakfast they were both glued to the radio.
"Abuses of Authority — it's the latest craze on San Francisco's notori-ous Xnet, and it's captured the world's attention. Called A-oh-A, the190movement is composed of 'Little Brothers' who watch back against theDepartment of Homeland Security's anti-terrorism measures, document-ing the failures and excesses. The rallying cry is a popular viral videoclip of a General Claude Geist, a retired three-star general, being tackledby DHS officers on the sidewalk in front of City Hall. Geist hasn't made astatement on the incident, but commentary from young people who areupset with their own treatment has been fast and furious. Most notable has been the global attention the movement has re-ceived. Stills from the Geist video have appeared on the front pages ofnewspapers in Korea, Great Britain, Germany, Egypt and Japan, andbroadcasters around the world have aired the clip on prime-time news.
"The issue came to a head last night, when the British BroadcastingCorporation's National News Evening program ran a special report onthe fact that no American broadcaster or news agency has covered thisstory. Commenters on the BBC's website noted that BBC America's ver-sion of the news did not carry the report."They brought on a couple of interviews: British media watchdogs, aSwedish Pirate Party kid who made jeering remarks about America'scorrupt press, a retired American newscaster living in Tokyo, then theyaired a short clip from Al-Jazeera, comparing the American press recordand the record of the national news-media in Syria.
I felt like my parents were staring at me, that they knew what I wasdoing. But when I cleared away my dishes, I saw that they were lookingat each other.
Dad was holding his coffee cup so hard his hands were shaking. Momwas looking at him.
They're trying to discredit us, Dad said finally. "They're trying tosabotage the efforts to keep us safe."I opened my mouth, but my mom caught my eye and shook her head.
Instead I went up to my room and worked on my Kerouac paper. OnceI'd heard the door slam twice, I fired up my Xbox and got online.
>
Hello M1k3y. This is Colin Brown. I'm a producer with the CanadianBroadcasting Corporation's news programme The National. We're doinga story on Xnet and have sent a reporter to San Francisco to cover it fromthere. Would you be interested in doing an interview to discuss yourgroup and its actions?
191I stared at the screen. Jesus. They wanted to interview me about "mygroup"?
>
Um thanks no. I'm all about privacy. And it's not "my group." Butthanks for doing the story!
A minute later, another email.
>
We can mask you and ensure your anonymity. You know that the De-partment of Homeland Security will be happy to provide their ownspokesperson. I'm interested in getting your side.
I filed the email. He was right, but I'd be crazy to do this. For all Iknew, he was the DHS.
I picked up more Kerouac. Another email came in. Same request,different news-agency: KQED wanted to meet me and record a radio in-terview. A station in Brazil. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Deutsche Welle. All day, the press requests came in. All day, I politelyturned them down.
I didn't get much Kerouac read that day.
Hold a press-conference, is what Ange said, as we sat in the cafe nearher place that evening. I wasn't keen on going out to her school anymore,getting stuck on a bus with Van again.
What? Are you crazy?"Do it in Clockwork Plunder. Just pick a trading post where there's noPvP allowed and name a time. You can login from here.PvP is player-versus-player combat. Parts of Clockwork Plunder wereneutral ground, which meant that we could theoretically bring in a ton ofnoob reporters without worrying about gamers killing them in themiddle of the press-conference.
"I don't know anything about press conferences.""Oh, just google it. I'm sure someone's written an article on holding asuccessful one. I mean, if the President can manage it, I'm sure you can. He looks like he can barely tie his shoes without help.We ordered more coffee.
"You are a very smart woman, I said.
And I'm beautiful, she said.
192"That too," I said.
This chapter is dedicated to Chapters/Indigo, the national Canadianmegachain. I was working at Bakka, the independent science fictionbookstore, when Chapters opened its first store in Toronto and I knewthat something big was going on right away, because two of oursmartest, best-informed customers stopped in to tell me that they'd beenhired to run the science fiction section. From the start, Chapters raisedthe bar on what a big corporate bookstore could be, extending its hours,adding a friendly cafe and lots of seating, installing in-store self-serviceterminals and stocking the most amazing variety of titles.
Chapters/IndigoI blogged the press-conference even before I'd sent out the invitationsto the press. I could tell that all these writers wanted to make me into aleader or a general or a supreme guerrilla commandant, and I figuredone way of solving that would be to have a bunch of Xnetters runningaround answering questions too.
Then I emailed the press. The responses ranged from puzzled to en-thusiastic — only the Fox reporter was "outraged" that I had the gall toask her to play a game in order to appear on her TV show. The rest ofthem seemed to think that it would make a pretty cool story, thoughplenty of them wanted lots of tech support for signing onto the gameI picked 8PM, after dinner. Mom had been bugging me about all theevenings I'd been spending out of the house until I finally spilled thebeans about Ange, whereupon she came over all misty and kept lookingat me like, my-little-boy's-growing-up. She wanted to meet Ange, and Iused that as leverage, promising to bring her over the next night if Icould "go to the movies" with Ange tonight.
Ange's mom and sister were out again — they weren't real stay-at-homes — which left me and Ange alone in her room with her Xbox and194mine. I unplugged one of her bedside screens and attached my Xbox to itso that we could both login at once.
Both Xboxes were idle, logged into Clockwork Plunder. I was pacing.
It's going to be fine, she said. She glanced at her screen. "PatcheyePete's Market has 600 players in it now!" We'd picked Patcheye Pete's be-cause it was the market closest to the village square where new playersspawned. If the reporters weren't already Clockwork Plunder players —ha! — then that's where they'd show up. In my blog post I'd askedpeople generally to hang out on the route between Patcheye Pete's andthe spawn-gate and direct anyone who looked like a disoriented reporterover to Pete's.
"What the hell am I going to tell them?""You just answer their questions — and if you don't like a question, ig-nore it. Someone else can answer it. It'll be fine.""This is insane.""This is perfect, Marcus. If you want to really screw the DHS, you haveto embarrass them. It's not like you're going to be able to out-shoot them. Your only weapon is your ability to make them look like morons.I flopped on the bed and she pulled my head into her lap and strokedmy hair. I'd been playing around with different haircuts before thebombing, dying it all kinds of funny colors, but since I'd gotten out of jailI couldn't be bothered. It had gotten long and stupid and shaggy and I'dgone into the bathroom and grabbed my clippers and buzzed it down tohalf an inch all around, which took zero effort to take care of and helpedme to be invisible when I was out jamming and cloning arphids.
"I opened my eyes and stared into her big brown eyes behind herglasses. They were round and liquid and expressive. She could makethem bug out when she wanted to make me laugh, or make them softand sad, or lazy and sleepy in a way that made me melt into a puddle ofhorniness.
That's what she was doing right now.
I sat up slowly and hugged her. She hugged me back. We kissed. Shewas an amazing kisser. I know I've already said that, but it bears repeat-ing. We kissed a lot, but for one reason or another we always stopped be-fore it got too heavy.
Now I wanted to go farther. I found the hem of her t-shirt and tugged.
She put her hands over her head and pulled back a few inches. I knewthat she'd do that. I'd known since the night in the park. Maybe that's195why we hadn't gone farther — I knew I couldn't rely on her to back off,which scared me a little.
But I wasn't scared then. The impending press-conference, the fightswith my parents, the international attention, the sense that there was amovement that was careening around the city like a wild pinball — itmade my skin tingle and my blood sing.
And she was beautiful, and smart, and clever and funny, and I wasfalling in love with her.
Her shirt slid off, her arching her back to help me get it over hershoulders. She reached behind her and did something and her bra fellaway. I stared goggle-eyed, motionless and breathless, and then shegrabbed my shirt and pulled it over my head, grabbing me and pullingmy bare chest to hers.
We rolled on the bed and touched each other and ground our bodiestogether and groaned. She kissed all over my chest and I did the same toher. I couldn't breathe, I couldn't think, I could only move and kiss andlick and touch.
We dared each other to go forward. I undid her jeans. She undid mine.
I lowered her zipper, she did mine, and tugged my jeans off. I tugged offhers. A moment later we were both naked, except for my socks, which Ipeeled off with my toes.
It was then that I caught sight of the bedside clock, which had longago rolled onto the floor and lay there, glowing up at us.
Crap! I yelped. "It starts in two minutes!" I couldn't freaking believethat I was about to stop what I was about to stop doing, when I wasabout to stop doing it. I mean, if you'd asked me, "Marcus, you are aboutto get laid for the firstest time EVAR, will you stop if I let off this nuclearbomb in the same room as you?" the answer would have been a resound-ing and unequivical NO.
And yet we stopped for this.
She grabbed me and pulled my face to hers and kissed me until Ithought I would pass out, then we both grabbed our clothes and more orless dressed, grabbing our keyboards and mice and heading for PatcheyePete's.
You could easily tell who the press were: they were the noobs whoplayed their characters like staggering drunks, weaving back and forthand up and down, trying to get the hang of it all, occasionally hitting the196wrong key and offering strangers all or part of their inventory, or givingthem accidental hugs and kicks.
The Xnetters were easy to spot, too: we all played Clockwork Plunderwhenever we had some spare time (or didn't feel like doing our home-work), and we had pretty tricked-out characters with cool weapons andbooby-traps on the keys sticking out of our backs that would cream any-one who tried to snatch them and leave us to wind down.
When I appeared, a system status message displayed M1K3Y HASENTERED PATCHEYE PETE'S — WELCOME SWABBIE WE OFFERFAIR TRADE FOR FINE BOOTY. All the players on the screen froze,then they crowded around me. The chat exploded. I thought about turn-ing on my voice-paging and grabbing a headset, but seeing how manypeople were trying to talk at once, I realized how confusing that wouldbe. Text was much easier to follow and they couldn't misquote me (hehheh).
I'd scouted the location before with Ange — it was great campaigningwith her, since we could both keep each other wound up. There was ahigh-spot on a pile of boxes of salt-rations that I could stand on and beseen from anywhere in the market.
>
Good evening and thank you all for coming. My name is M1k3y andI'm not the leader of anything. All around you are Xnetters who have asmuch to say about why we're here as I do. I use the Xnet because I be-lieve in freedom and the Constitution of the United States of America. Iuse Xnet because the DHS has turned my city into a police-state wherewe're all suspected terrorists. I use Xnet because I think you can't defendfreedom by tearing up the Bill of Rights. I learned about the Constitutionin a California school and I was raised to love my country for its free-dom. If I have a philosophy, it is this:
>
Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powersfrom the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of govern-ment becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to al-ter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundationon such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to themshall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
>
197I didn't write that, but I believe it. The DHS does not govern with myconsent.
>
Thank youI'd written this the day before, bouncing drafts back and forth withAnge. Pasting it in only took a second, though it took everyone in thegame a moment to read it. A lot of the Xnetters cheered, big showy pirate"Hurrah"s with raised sabers and pet parrots squawking and flyingoverhead.
Gradually, the journalists digested it too. The chat was running pastfast, so fast you could barely read it, lots of Xnetters saying things like"Right on" and "America, love it or leave it" and "DHS go home" and"America out of San Francisco," all slogans that had been big on the Xnetblogosphere.
>
M1k3y, this is Priya Rajneesh from the BBC. You say you're not theleader of any movement, but do you believe there is a movement? Is itcalled the Xnet?
Lots of answers. Some people said there wasn't a movement, somesaid there was and lots of people had ideas about what it was called:
Xnet, Little Brothers, Little Sisters, and my personal favorite, the UnitedStates of America.
They were really cooking. I let them go, thinking of what I could say.
Once I had it, I typed,>
I think that kind of answers your question, doesn't it? There may beone or more movements and they may be called Xnet or not.
>
M1k3y, I'm Doug Christensen from the Washington Internet Daily.
What do you think the DHS should be doing to prevent another attackon San Francisco, if what they're doing isn't successful.
More chatter. Lots of people said that the terrorists and the govern-ment were the same — either literally, or just meaning that they wereequally bad. Some said the government knew how to catch terrorists butpreferred not to because "war presidents" got re-elected.
>
I don't know198I typed finally.
>
I really don't. I ask myself this question a lot because I don't want toget blown up and I don't want my city to get blown up. Here's what I'vefigured out, though: if it's the DHS's job to keep us safe, they're failing.
All the crap they've done, none of it would stop the bridge from beingblown up again. Tracing us around the city? Taking away our freedom?
Making us suspicious of each other, turning us against each other?
Calling dissenters traitors? The point of terrorism is to terrify us. TheDHS terrifies me.
>
I don't have any say in what the terrorists do to me, but if this is a freecountry then I should be able to at least say what my own cops do to me.
I should be able to keep them from terrorizing me.
>
I know that's not a good answer. Sorry.
>
What do you mean when you say that the DHS wouldn't stop terror-ists? How do you know?
>
Who are you?
>
I'm with the Sydney Morning Herald.
>
I'm 17 years old. I'm not a straight-A student or anything. Even so, Ifigured out how to make an Internet that they can't wiretap. I figured outhow to jam their person-tracking technology. I can turn innocent peopleinto suspects and turn guilty people into innocents in their eyes. I couldget metal onto an airplane or beat a no-fly list. I figured this stuff out bylooking at the web and by thinking about it. If I can do it, terrorists cando it. They told us they took away our freedom to make us safe. Do youfeel safe?
>
In Australia? Why yes I doThe pirates all laughed.
199More journalists asked questions. Some were sympathetic, some werehostile. When I got tired, I handed my keyboard to Ange and let her beM1k3y for a while. It didn't really feel like M1k3y and me were the sameperson anymore anyway. M1k3y was the kind of kid who talked to inter-national journalists and inspired a movement. Marcus got suspendedfrom school and fought with his dad and wondered if he was goodenough for his kick-ass girlfriend.
By 11PM I'd had enough. Besides, my parents would be expecting mehome soon. I logged out of the game and so did Ange and we lay therefor a moment. I took her hand and she squeezed hard. We hugged.
She kissed my neck and murmured something.
What?"I said I love you, she said. "What, you want me to send you atelegram?""Wow," I said.
You're that surprised, huh?"No. Um. It's just — I was going to say that to you."Sure you were, she said, and bit the tip of my nose.
It's just that I've never said it before, I said. "So I was working up toit.""You still haven't said it, you know. Don't think I haven't noticed. Wegirls pick upon these things.""I love you, Ange Carvelli," I said.
I love you too, Marcus Yallow.We kissed and nuzzled and I started to breathe hard and so did she.
That's when her mom knocked on the door.
Angela, she said, "I think it's time your friend went home, don'tyou?""Yes, mother," she said, and mimed swinging an axe. As I put mysocks and shoes on, she muttered, "They'll say, that Angela, she was sucha good girl, who would have thought it, all the time she was in the backyard, helping her mother out by sharpening that hatchet."I laughed. "You don't know how easy you have it. There is no way myfolks would leave us alone in my bedroom until 11 o'clock.""11:45," she said, checking her clock.
Crap! I yelped and tied my shoes.
200"Go," she said, "run and be free! Look both ways before crossing theroad! Write if you get work! Don't even stop for a hug! If you're not outof here by the count of ten, there's going to be trouble, mister. One. Two.
Three."I shut her up by leaping onto the bed, landing on her and kissing heruntil she stopped trying to count. Satisfied with my victory, I poundeddown the stairs, my Xbox under my arm.
Her mom was at the foot of the stairs. We'd only met a couple times.
She looked like an older, taller version of Ange — Ange said her fatherwas the short one — with contacts instead of glasses. She seemed to havetentatively classed me as a good guy, I and appreciated it.
Good night, Mrs Carvelli, I said.
Good night, Mr Yallow, she said. It was one of our little rituals, eversince I'd called her Mrs Carvelli when we first met.
I found myself standing awkwardly by the door.
Yes? she said.
Um, I said. "Thanks for having me over.""You're always welcome in our home, young man," she said.
And thanks for Ange, I said finally, hating how lame it sounded. Butshe smiled broadly and gave me a brief hug.
You're very welcome, she said.
The whole bus ride home, I thought over the press-conference,thought about Ange naked and writhing with me on her bed, thoughtabout her mother smiling and showing me the door.
My mom was waiting up for me. She asked me about the movie and Igave her the response I'd worked out in advance, cribbing from the re-view it had gotten in the Bay Guardian.
As I fell asleep, the press-conference came back. I was really proud ofit. It had been so cool, to have all these big-shot journos show up in thegame, to have them listen to me and to have them listen to all the peoplewho believed in the same things as me. I dropped off with a smile on mylips.
I should have known better.
XNET LEADER: I COULD GET METAL ONTO AN AIRPLANEDHS DOESN'T HAVE MY CONSENT TO GOVERN201XNET KIDS: USA OUT OF SAN FRANCISCOThose were the good headlines. Everyone sent me the articles to blog,but it was the last thing I wanted to do.
I'd blown it, somehow. The press had come to my press-conferenceand concluded that we were terrorists or terrorist dupes. The worst wasthe reporter on Fox News, who had apparently shown up anyway, andwho devoted a ten-minute commentary to us, talking about our"criminal treason." Her killer line, repeated on every news-outlet I found,was:
They say they don't have a name. I've got one for them. Let's callthese spoiled children Cal-Quaeda. They do the terrorists' work on thehome front. When — not if, but when — California gets attacked again,these brats will be as much to blame as the House of Saud.Leaders of the anti-war movement denounced us as fringe elements.
One guy went on TV to say that he believed we had been fabricated bythe DHS to discredit them.
The DHS had their own press-conference announcing that they woulddouble the security in San Francisco. They held up an arphid clonerthey'd found somewhere and demonstrated it in action, using it to stagea car-theft, and warned everyone to be on their alert for young peoplebehaving suspiciously, especially those whose hands were out of sight.
They weren't kidding. I finished my Kerouac paper and started in on apaper about the Summer of Love, the summer of 1967 when the anti-warmovement and the hippies converged on San Francisco. The guys whofounded Ben and Jerry's — old hippies themselves — had founded a hip-pie museum in the Haight, and there were other archives and exhibits tosee around town.
But it wasn't easy getting around. By the end of the week, I was gettingfrisked an average of four times a day. Cops checked my ID and ques-tioned me about why I was out in the street, carefully eyeballing the let-ter from Chavez saying that I was suspended.
I got lucky. No one arrested me. But the rest of the Xnet weren't solucky. Every night the DHS announced more arrests, "ringleaders" and"operatives" of Xnet, people I didn't know and had never heard of,paraded on TV along with the arphid sniffers and other devices that hadbeen in their pockets. They announced that the people were "namingnames," compromising the "Xnet network" and that more arrests wereexpected soon. The name "M1k3y" was often heard.
202Dad loved this. He and I watched the news together, him gloating, meshrinking away, quietly freaking out. "You should see the stuff they'regoing to use on these kids," Dad said. "I've seen it in action. They'll get acouple of these kids and check out their friends lists on IM and thespeed-dials on their phones, look for names that come up over and over,look for patterns, bringing in more kids. They're going to unravel themlike an old sweater."I canceled Ange's dinner at our place and started spending even moretime there. Ange's little sister Tina started to call me "the house-guest," asin "is the house-guest eating dinner with me tonight?" I liked Tina. Allshe cared about was going out and partying and meeting guys, but shewas funny and utterly devoted to Ange. One night as we were doing thedishes, she dried her hands and said, conversationally, "You know, youseem like a nice guy, Marcus. My sister's just crazy about you and I likeyou too. But I have to tell you something: if you break her heart, I willtrack you down and pull your scrotum over your head. It's not a prettysight."I assured her that I would sooner pull my own scrotum over my headthan break Ange's heart and she nodded. "So long as we're clear on that.""Your sister is a nut," I said as we lay on Ange's bed again, looking atXnet blogs. That is pretty much all we did: fool around and read Xnet.
Did she use the scrotum line on you? I hate it when she does that. Shejust loves the word 'scrotum,' you know. It's nothing personal.I kissed her. We read some more.
Listen to this, she said. "Police project four to six hundred arrests thisweekend in what they say will be the largest coordinated raid on Xnetdissidents to date."I felt like throwing up.
We've got to stop this, I said. "You know there are people who aredoing more jamming to show that they're not intimidated? Isn't that justcrazy?""I think it's brave," she said. "We can't let them scare us intosubmission.""What? No, Ange, no. We can't let hundreds of people go to jail. Youhaven't been there. I have. It's worse than you think. It's worse than youcan imagine.""I have a pretty fertile imagination," she said.
203"Stop it, OK? Be serious for a second. I won't do this. I won't sendthose people to jail. If I do, I'm the guy that Van thinks I am.""Marcus, I'm being serious. You think that these people don't knowthey could go to jail? They believe in the cause. You believe in it too.
Give them the credit to know what they're getting into. It's not up to youto decide what risks they can or can't take.""It's my responsibility because if I tell them to stop, they'll stop.""I thought you weren't the leader?""I'm not, of course I'm not. But I can't help it if they look to me forguidance. And so long as they do, I have a responsibility to help themstay safe. You see that, right?""All I see is you getting ready to cut and run at the first sign of trouble.
I think you're afraid they're going to figure out who you are. I thinkyou're afraid for you.""That's not fair," I said, sitting up, pulling away from her.
Really? Who's the guy who nearly had a heart attack when hethought that his secret identity was out?"That was different, I said. "This isn't about me. You know it isn't.
Why are you being like this?""Why are you like this?" she said. "Why aren't you willing to be the guywho was brave enough to get all this started?""This isn't brave, it's suicide.""Cheap teenage melodrama, M1k3y.""Don't call me that!""What, 'M1k3y'? Why not, M1k3y?"I put my shoes on. I picked up my bag. I walked home.
>
Why I'm not jamming>
I won't tell anyone else what to do, because I'm not anyone's leader, nomatter what Fox News thinks.
>
But I am going to tell you what I plan on doing. If you think that's theright thing to do, maybe you'll do it too.
204>
I'm not jamming. Not this week. Maybe not next. It's not because I'mscared. It's because I'm smart enough to know that I'm better free than inprison. They figured out how to stop our tactic, so we need to come upwith a new tactic. I don't care what the tactic is, but I want it to work. It'sstupid to get arrested. It's only jamming if you get away with it.
>
There's another reason not to jam. If you get caught, they might useyou to catch your friends, and their friends, and their friends. Theymight bust your friends even if they're not on Xnet, because the DHS islike a maddened bull and they don't exactly worry if they've got the rightguy.
>
I'm not telling you what to do.
>
But the DHS is dumb and we're smart. Jamming proves that they can'tfight terrorism because it proves that they can't even stop a bunch ofkids. If you get caught, it makes them look like they're smarter than us.
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THEY AREN'T SMARTER THAN US! We are smarter than them. Let'sbe smart. Let's figure out how to jam them, no matter how many goonsthey put on the streets of our city.
I posted it. I went to bed.
I missed Ange.
Ange and I didn't speak for the next four days, including the weekend,and then it was time to go back to school. I'd almost called her a milliontimes, written a thousand unsent emails and IMs.
Now I was back in Social Studies class, and Mrs Andersen greeted mewith voluble, sarcastic courtesy, asking me sweetly how my "holiday"had been. I sat down and mumbled nothing. I could hear Charlessnicker.
She taught us a class on Manifest Destiny, the idea that the Americanswere destined to take over the whole world (or at least that's how shemade it seem) and seemed to be trying to provoke me into sayingsomething so she could throw me out.
205I felt the eyes of the class on me, and it reminded me of M1k3y and thepeople who looked up to him. I was sick of being looked up to. I missedAnge.
I got through the rest of the day without anything making any kind ofmark on me. I don't think I said eight words.
Finally it was over and I hit the doors, heading for the gates and thestupid Mission and my pointless house.
I was barely out the gate when someone crashed into me. He was ayoung homeless guy, maybe my age, maybe a little older. He wore along, greasy overcoat, a pair of baggy jeans, and rotting sneakers thatlooked like they'd been through a wood-chipper. His long hair hungover his face, and he had a pubic beard that straggled down his throat in-to the collar of a no-color knit sweater.
I took this all in as we lay next to each other on the sidewalk, peoplepassing us and giving us weird looks. It seemed that he'd crashed intome while hurrying down Valencia, bent over with the burden of a splitbackpack that lay beside him on the pavement, covered in tight geomet-ric doodles in magic-marker.
He got to his knees and rocked back and forth, like he was drunk orhad hit his head.
Sorry buddy, he said. "Didn't see you. You hurt?"I sat up too. Nothing felt hurt.
Um. No, it's OK.He stood up and smiled. His teeth were shockingly white and straight,like an ad for an orthodontic clinic. He held his hand out to me and hisgrip was strong and firm.
I'm really sorry. His voice was also clear and intelligent. I'd expectedhim to sound like the drunks who talked to themselves as they roamedthe Mission late at night, but he sounded like a knowledgeable bookstoreclerk.
It's no problem, I said.
He stuck out his hand again.
Zeb, he said.
Marcus, I said.
A pleasure, Marcus, he said. "Hope to run into you again sometime!"206Laughing, he picked up his backpack, turned on his heel and hurriedaway.
I walked the rest of the way home in a bemused fug. Mom was at thekitchen table and we had a little chat about nothing at all, the way weused to do, before everything changed.
I took the stairs up to my room and flopped down in my chair. Foronce, I didn't want to login to the Xnet. I'd checked in that morning be-fore school to discover that my note had created a gigantic controversyamong people who agreed with me and people who were righteouslypissed that I was telling them to back off from their beloved sport.
I had three thousand projects I'd been in the middle of when it had allstarted. I was building a pinhole camera out of legos, I'd been playingwith aerial kite photography using an old digital camera with a triggerhacked out of silly putty that was stretched out at launch and slowlysnapped back to its original shape, triggering the shutter at regular inter-vals. I had a vacuum tube amp I'd been building into an ancient, rusted,dented olive-oil tin that looked like an archaeological find — once it wasdone, I'd planned to build in a dock for my phone and a set of 5.1surround-sound speakers out of tuna-fish cans.
I looked over my workbench and finally picked up the pinhole cam-era. Methodically snapping legos together was just about my speed.
I took off my watch and the chunky silver two-finger ring that showeda monkey and a ninja squaring off to fight and dropped them into thelittle box I used for all the crap I load into my pockets and around myneck before stepping out for the day: phone, wallet, keys, wifinder,change, batteries, retractable cables… I dumped it all out into the box,and found myself holding something I didn't remember putting in therein the first place.
It was a piece of paper, grey and soft as flannel, furry at the edgeswhere it had been torn away from some larger piece of paper. It wascovered in the tiniest, most careful handwriting I'd ever seen. I unfoldedit and held it up. The writing covered both sides, running down from thetop left corner of one side to a crabbed signature at the bottom rightcorner of the other side.
The signature read, simply: ZEB.
I picked it up and started to read.
>
207Dear Marcus>
You don't know me but I know you. For the past three months, sincethe Bay Bridge was blown up, I have been imprisoned on Treasure Is-land. I was in the yard on the day you talked to that Asian girl and gottackled. You were brave. Good on you.
>
I had a burst appendix the day afterward and ended up in the infirm-ary. In the next bed was a guy named Darryl. We were both in recoveryfor a long time and by the time we got well, we were too much of an em-barrassment to them to let go.
>
So they decided we must really be guilty. They questioned us everyday. You've been through their questioning, I know. Imagine it formonths. Darryl and I ended up cell-mates. We knew we were bugged, sowe only talked about inconsequentialities. But at night, when we were inour cots, we would softly tap out messages to each other in Morse code(I knew my HAM radio days would come in useful sometime).
>
At first, their questions to us were just the same crap as ever, who didit, how'd they do it. But after a little while, they switched to asking usabout the Xnet. Of course, we'd never heard of it. That didn't stop themasking.
>
Darryl told me that they brought him arphid cloners, Xboxes, all kindsof technology and demanded that he tell them who used them, wherethey learned to mod them. Darryl told me about your games and thethings you learned.
>
Especially: The DHS asked us about our friends. Who did we know?
What were they like? Did they have political feelings? Had they been introuble at school? With the law?
>
We call the prison Gitmo-by-the-Bay. It's been a week since I got outand I don't think that anyone knows that their sons and daughters areimprisoned in the middle of the Bay. At night we could hear peoplelaughing and partying on the mainland.
208>
I got out last week. I won't tell you how, in case this falls into thewrong hands. Maybe others will take my route.
>
Darryl told me how to find you and made me promise to tell you whatI knew when I got back. Now that I've done that I'm out of here like lastyear. One way or another, I'm leaving this country. Screw America.
>
Stay strong. They're scared of you. Kick them for me. Don't get caught.
>
ZebThere were tears in my eyes as I finished the note. I had a disposablelighter somewhere on my desk that I sometimes used to melt the insula-tion off of wires, and I dug it out and held it to the note. I knew I owed itto Zeb to destroy it and make sure no one else ever saw it, in case itmight lead them back to him, wherever he was going.
I held the flame and the note, but I couldn't do it.
Darryl.
With all the crap with the Xnet and Ange and the DHS, I'd almost for-gotten he existed. He'd become a ghost, like an old friend who'd movedaway or gone on an exchange program. All that time, they'd been ques-tioning him, demanding that he rat me out, explain the Xnet, the jam-mers. He'd been on Treasure Island, the abandoned military base thatwas halfway along the demolished span of the Bay Bridge. He'd been soclose I could have swam to him.
I put the lighter down and re-read the note. By the time it was done, Iwas weeping, sobbing. It all came back to me, the lady with the severehaircut and the questions she'd asked and the reek of piss and the stiff-ness of my pants as the urine dried them into coarse canvas.
Marcus?My door was ajar and my mother was standing in it, watching mewith a worried look. How long had she been there?
I armed the tears away from my face and snorted up the snot. "Mom,"I said. "Hi."She came into my room and hugged me. "What is it? Do you need totalk?"209The note lay on the table.
Is that from your girlfriend? Is everything all right?She'd given me an out. I could just blame it all on problems with Angeand she'd leave my room and leave me alone. I opened my mouth to dojust that, and then this came out:
I was in jail. After the bridge blew. I was in jail for that whole time.The sobs that came then didn't sound like my voice. They sounded likean animal noise, maybe a donkey or some kind of big cat noise in thenight. I sobbed so my throat burned and ached with it, so my chestheaved.
Mom took me in her arms, the way she used to when I was a little boy,and she stroked my hair, and she murmured in my ear, and rocked me,and gradually, slowly, the sobs dissipated.
I took a deep breath and Mom got me a glass of water. I sat on theedge of my bed and she sat in my desk chair and I told her everything.
Everything.
Well, most of it.