Little Brother
by Cory Doctorow
READ THIS FIRST
This book is distributed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. That means:
You are free:
* to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
* to Remix — to adapt the work
Under the following conditions:
* Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified
by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that
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purposes.
* Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work,
you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or
similar license to this one.
* For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the
license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link
http://craphound.com/littlebrother
* Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get my
permission
More info here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
See the end of this file for the complete legalese.
&&&
INTRODUCTION
I wrote Little Brother in a white-hot fury between May 7, 2007 and July
2, 2007: exactly eight weeks from the day I thought it up to the day I
finished it (Alice, to whom this book is dedicated, had to put up with
me clacking out the final chapter at 5AM in our hotel in Rome, where we
were celebrating our anniversary). I'd always dreamed of having a book
just materialize, fully formed, and come pouring out of my fingertips,
no sweat and fuss -- but it wasn't nearly as much fun as I'd thought it
would be. There were days when I wrote 10,000 words, hunching over my
keyboard in airports, on subways, in taxis -- anywhere I could type.
The book was trying to get out of my head, no matter what, and I missed
so much sleep and so many meals that friends started to ask if I was
unwell.
When my dad was a young university student in the 1960s, he was one of
the few "counterculture" people who thought computers were a good
thing. For most young people, computers represented the de-humanization
of society. University students were reduced to numbers on a punchcard,
each bearing the legend "DO NOT BEND, SPINDLE, FOLD OR MUTILATE,"
prompting some of the students to wear pins that said, "I AM A STUDENT:
DO NOT BEND, SPINDLE, FOLD OR MUTILATE ME." Computers were seen as a
means to increase the ability of the authorities to regiment people and
bend them to their will.
When I was a 17, the world seemed like it was just going to get more
free. The Berlin Wall was about to come down. Computers -- which had
been geeky and weird a few years before -- were everywhere, and the
modem I'd used to connect to local bulletin board systems was now
connecting me to the entire world through the Internet and commercial
online services like GEnie. My lifelong fascination with activist
causes went into overdrive as I saw how the main difficulty in activism
-- organizing -- was getting easier by leaps and bounds (I still
remember the first time I switched from mailing out a newsletter with
hand-written addresses to using a database with mail-merge). In the
Soviet Union, communications tools were being used to bring information
-- and revolution -- to the farthest-flung corners of the largest
authoritarian state the Earth had ever seen.
But 17 years later, things are very different. The computers I love are
being co-opted, used to spy on us, control us, snitch on us. The
National Security Agency has illegally wiretapped the entire USA and
gotten away with it. Car rental companies and mass transit and traffic
authorities are watching where we go, sending us automated tickets,
finking us out to busybodies, cops and bad guys who gain illicit access
to their databases. The Transport Security Administration maintains a
"no-fly" list of people who'd never been convicted of any crime, but
who are nevertheless considered too dangerous to fly. The list's
contents are secret. The rule that makes it enforceable is secret. The
criteria for being added to the list are secret. It has four-year-olds
on it. And US senators. And decorated veterans -- actual war heroes.
The 17 year olds I know understand to a nicety just how dangerous a
computer can be. The authoritarian nightmare of the 1960s has come home
for them. The seductive little boxes on their desks and in their
pockets watch their every move, corral them in, systematically
depriving them of those new freedoms I had enjoyed and made such good
use of in my young adulthood.
What's more, kids were clearly being used as guinea-pigs for a new kind
of technological state that all of us were on our way to, a world where
taking a picture was either piracy (in a movie theater or museum or
even a Starbucks), or terrorism (in a public place), but where we could
be photographed, tracked and logged hundreds of times a day by every
tin-pot dictator, cop, bureaucrat and shop-keeper. A world where any
measure, including torture, could be justified just by waving your
hands and shouting "Terrorism! 9/11! Terrorism!" until all dissent fell
silent.
We don't have to go down that road.
If you love freedom, if you think the human condition is dignified by
privacy, by the right to be left alone, by the right to explore your
weird ideas provided you don't hurt others, then you have common cause
with the kids whose web-browsers and cell phones are being used to lock
them up and follow them around.
If you believe that the answer to bad speech is more speech -- not
censorship -- then you have a dog in the fight.
If you believe in a society of laws, a land where our rulers have to
tell us the rules, and have to follow them too, then you're part of the
same struggle that kids fight when they argue for the right to live
under the same Bill of Rights that adults have.
This book is meant to be part of the conversation about what an
information society means: does it mean total control, or unheard-of
liberty? It's not just a noun, it's a verb, it's something you do.
&&&
DO SOMETHING
This book is meant to be something you do, not just something you read.
The technology in this book is either real or nearly real. You can
build a lot of it. You can share it and remix it (see THE COPYRIGHT
THING, below). You can use the ideas to spark important discussions
with your friends and family. You can use those ideas to defeat
censorship and get onto the free Internet, even if your government,
employer or school doesn't want you to.
Making stuff: The folks at Instructables have put up some killer HOWTOs
for building the technology in this book. It's easy and incredibly fun.
There's nothing so rewarding in this world as making stuff, especially
stuff that makes you more free:
http://www.instructables.com/member/w1n5t0n/
Discussions: There's an educator's manual for this book that my
publisher, Tor, has put together that has tons of ideas for classroom,
reading group and home discussions of the ideas in it:
http://www.tor-forge.com/static/Little_Brother_Readers_Guide.pdf
Defeat censorship: The afterword for this book has lots of resources
for increasing your online freedom, blocking the snoops and evading the
censorware blocks. The more people who know about this stuff, the
better.
Your stories: I'm collecting stories of people who've used technology
to get the upper hand when confronted with abusive authority. I'm going
to be including the best of these in a special afterword to the UK
edition (see below) of the book, and I'll be putting them online as
well. Send me your stories at doctorow@craphound.com, with the subject
line "Abuses of Authority".
&&&
GREAT BRITAIN
I'm a Canadian, and I've lived in lots of places (including San
Francisco, the setting for Little Brother), and now I live in London,
England, with my wife Alice and our little daughter, Poesy. I've lived
here (off and on) for five years now, and though I love it to tiny
pieces, there's one thing that's always bugged me: my books aren't
available here. Some stores carried them as special items, imported
from the USA, but it wasn't published by a British publisher.
That's changed! HarperCollins UK has bought the British rights to this
book (along with my next young adult novel, FOR THE WIN), and they're
publishing it just a few months after the US edition, on November 17,
2008 (the day after I get back from my honeymoon!).
UPDATE: November 27, 2008: And it's on shelves now! The HarperCollins
edition's a knockout, too!
I'm so glad about this, I could bust, honestly. Not just because
they're finally selling my books in my adopted homeland, but because
*I'm raising a daughter here, dammit*, and the surveillance and control
mania in this country is starting to scare me bloodless. It seems like
the entire police and governance system in Britain has fallen in love
with DNA-swabbing, fingerprinting and video-recording everyone, on the
off chance that someday you might do something wrong. In early 2008,
the head of Scotland Yard seriously proposed taking DNA from
*five-year-olds* who display "offending traits" because they'll
probably grow up to be criminals. The next week, the London police put
up posters asking us all to turn in people who seem to be taking
pictures of the ubiquitous CCTV spy-cameras because anyone who pays too
much attention to the surveillance machine is probably a terrorist.
America isn't the only country that lost its mind this decade.
Britain's right there in the nuthouse with it, dribbling down its shirt
front and pointing its finger at the invisible bogeymen and screaming
until it gets its meds.
We need to be having this conversation all over the planet.
Want to get a copy in the UK? Sure thing!
http://craphound.com/littlebrother/buy/#uk
&&&
OTHER EDITIONS
My agent, Russell Galen (and his sub-agent Danny Baror) did an amazing
job of pre-selling rights to Little Brother in many languages and
formats. Here's the list as of today (May 4, 2008). I'll be updating it
as more editions are sold, so feel free to grab another copy of this
file (http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download) if there's an
edition you're hoping to see, or see
http://craphound.com/littlebrother/buy/ for links to buy all the
currently shipping editions.
* Audiobook from Random House:
http://www.randomhouse.com/audio/littlebrotheraudiobook
A condition of my deal with Random House is that they're not allowed to
release this on services that use "DRM" (Digital Rights Management)
systems intended to control use and copying. That means that you won't
find this book on Audible or iTunes, because Audible refuses to sell
books without DRM (even if the author and publisher don't want DRM),
and iTunes only carries Audible audiobooks. However, you can buy the
MP3 file direct from RandomHouse or many other fine etailers, or
through this widget:
http://www.zipidee.com/zipidAudioPreview.aspx?aid=c5a8e946-fd2c-4b9e-
a748-f297bba17de8
* My foreign rights agent, Danny Baror, has presold a number of foreign
editions:
* Greece: Pataki
* Russia: AST Publishing
* France: Universe Poche
* Norway: Det Norske Samlaget
No publication dates yet for these, but I'll keep updating this file as
more information is available. You can also subscribe to my mailing
list for more info.
&&&
THE COPYRIGHT THING
The Creative Commons license at the top of this file probably tipped
you off to the fact that I've got some pretty unorthodox views about
copyright. Here's what I think of it, in a nutshell: a little goes a
long way, and more than that is too much.
I like the fact that copyright lets me sell rights to my publishers and
film studios and so on. It's nice that they can't just take my stuff
without permission and get rich on it without cutting me in for a piece
of the action. I'm in a pretty good position when it comes to
negotiating with these companies: I've got a great agent and a decade's
experience with copyright law and licensing (including a stint as a
delegate at WIPO, the UN agency that makes the world's copyright
treaties). What's more, there's just not that many of these
negotiations -- even if I sell fifty or a hundred different editions of
Little Brother (which would put it in top millionth of a percentile for
fiction), that's still only a hundred negotiations, which I could just
about manage.
I *hate* the fact that fans who want to do what readers have always
done are expected to play in the same system as all these hotshot
agents and lawyers. It's just *stupid* to say that an elementary school
classroom should have to talk to a lawyer at a giant global publisher
before they put on a play based on one of my books. It's ridiculous to
say that people who want to "loan" their electronic copy of my book to
a friend need to get a *license* to do so. Loaning books has been
around longer than any publisher on Earth, and it's a fine thing.
I recently saw Neil Gaiman give a talk at which someone asked him how
he felt about piracy of his books. He said, "Hands up in the audience
if you discovered your favorite writer for free -- because someone
loaned you a copy, or because someone gave it to you? Now, hands up if
you found your favorite writer by walking into a store and plunking
down cash." Overwhelmingly, the audience said that they'd discovered
their favorite writers for free, on a loan or as a gift. When it comes
to my favorite writers, there's no boundaries: I'll buy every book they
publish, just to own it (sometimes I buy two or three, to give away to
friends who *must* read those books). I pay to see them live. I buy
t-shirts with their book-covers on them. I'm a customer for life.
Neil went on to say that he was part of the tribe of readers, the tiny
minority of people in the world who read for pleasure, buying books
because they love them. One thing he knows about everyone who downloads
his books on the Internet without permission is that they're *readers*,
they're people who love books.
People who study the habits of music-buyers have discovered something
curious: the biggest pirates are also the biggest spenders. If you
pirate music all night long, chances are you're one of the few people
left who also goes to the record store (remember those?) during the
day. You probably go to concerts on the weekend, and you probably check
music out of the library too. If you're a member of the red-hot
music-fan tribe, you do lots of *everything* that has to do with music,
from singing in the shower to paying for black-market vinyl bootlegs of
rare Eastern European covers of your favorite death-metal band.
Same with books. I've worked in new bookstores, used bookstores and
libraries. I've hung out in pirate ebook ("bookwarez") places online.
I'm a stone used bookstore junkie, and I go to book fairs for fun. And
you know what? It's the same people at all those places: book fans who
do lots of everything that has to do with books. I buy weird, fugly
pirate editions of my favorite books in China because they're weird and
fugly and look great next to the eight or nine other editions that I
paid full-freight for of the same books. I check books out of the
library, google them when I need a quote, carry dozens around on my
phone and hundreds on my laptop, and have (at this writing) more than
10,000 of them in storage lockers in London, Los Angeles and Toronto.
If I could loan out my physical books without giving up possession of
them, I *would*. The fact that I can do so with digital files is not a
bug, it's a feature, and a damned fine one. It's embarrassing to see
all these writers and musicians and artists bemoaning the fact that art
just got this wicked new feature: the ability to be shared without
losing access to it in the first place. It's like watching restaurant
owners crying down their shirts about the new free lunch machine that's
feeding the world's starving people because it'll force them to
reconsider their business-models. Yes, that's gonna be tricky, but
let's not lose sight of the main attraction: free lunches!
Universal access to human knowledge is in our grasp, for the first time
in the history of the world. This is not a bad thing.
In case that's not enough for you, here's my pitch on why giving away
ebooks makes sense at this time and place:
Giving away ebooks gives me artistic, moral and commercial
satisfaction. The commercial question is the one that comes up most
often: how can you give away free ebooks and still make money?
For me -- for pretty much every writer -- the big problem isn't piracy,
it's obscurity (thanks to Tim O'Reilly for this great aphorism). Of all
the people who failed to buy this book today, the majority did so
because they never heard of it, not because someone gave them a free
copy. Mega-hit best-sellers in science fiction sell half a million
copies -- in a world where 175,000 attend the San Diego Comic Con
alone, you've got to figure that most of the people who "like science
fiction" (and related geeky stuff like comics, games, Linux, and so on)
just don't really buy books. I'm more interested in getting more of
that wider audience into the tent than making sure that everyone who's
in the tent bought a ticket to be there.
Ebooks are verbs, not nouns. You copy them, it's in their nature. And
many of those copies have a destination, a person they're intended for,
a hand-wrought transfer from one person to another, embodying a
personal recommendation between two people who trust each other enough
to share bits. That's the kind of thing that authors (should) dream of,
the proverbial sealing of the deal. By making my books available for
free pass-along, I make it easy for people who love them to help other
people love them.
What's more, I don't see ebooks as substitute for paper books for most
people. It's not that the screens aren't good enough, either: if you're
anything like me, you already spend every hour you can get in front of
the screen, reading text. But the more computer-literate you are, the
less likely you are to be reading long-form works on those screens --
that's because computer-literate people do more things with their
computers. We run IM and email and we use the browser in a million
diverse ways. We have games running in the background, and endless
opportunities to tinker with our music libraries. The more you do with
your computer, the more likely it is that you'll be interrupted after
five to seven minutes to do something else. That makes the computer
extremely poorly suited to reading long-form works off of, unless you
have the iron self-discipline of a monk.
The good news (for writers) is that this means that ebooks on computers
are more likely to be an enticement to buy the printed book (which is,
after all, cheap, easily had, and easy to use) than a substitute for
it. You can probably read just enough of the book off the screen to
realize you want to be reading it on paper.
So ebooks sell print books. Every writer I've heard of who's tried
giving away ebooks to promote paper books has come back to do it again.
That's the commercial case for doing free ebooks.
Now, onto the artistic case. It's the twenty-first century. Copying
stuff is never, ever going to get any harder than it is today (or if it
does, it'll be because civilization has collapsed, at which point we'll
have other problems). Hard drives aren't going to get bulkier, more
expensive, or less capacious. Networks won't get slower or harder to
access. If you're not making art with the intention of having it
copied, you're not really making art for the twenty-first century.
There's something charming about making work you don't want to be
copied, in the same way that it's nice to go to a Pioneer Village and
see the olde-timey blacksmith shoeing a horse at his traditional forge.
But it's hardly, you know, *contemporary*. I'm a science fiction
writer. It's my job to write about the future (on a good day) or at
least the present. Art that's not supposed to be copied is from the
past.
Finally, let's look at the moral case. Copying stuff is natural. It's
how we learn (copying our parents and the people around us). My first
story, written when I was six, was an excited re-telling of Star Wars,
which I'd just seen in the theater. Now that the Internet -- the
world's most efficient copying machine -- is pretty much everywhere,
our copying instinct is just going to play out more and more. There's
no way I can stop my readers, and if I tried, I'd be a hypocrite: when
I was 17, I was making mix-tapes, photocopying stories, and generally
copying in every way I could imagine. If the Internet had been around
then, I'd have been using it to copy as much as I possibly could.
There's no way to stop it, and the people who try end up doing more
harm than piracy ever did. The record industry's ridiculous holy war
against file-sharers (more than 20,000 music fans sued and counting!)
exemplifies the absurdity of trying to get the food-coloring out of the
swimming pool. If the choice is between allowing copying or being a
frothing bully lashing out at anything he can reach, I choose the
former.
&&&
DONATIONS AND A WORD TO TEACHERS AND LIBRARIANS
Every time I put a book online for free, I get emails from readers who
want to send me donations for the book. I appreciate their generous
spirit, but I'm not interested in cash donations, because my publishers
are really important to me. They contribute immeasurably to the book,
improving it, introducing it to audience I could never reach, helping
me do more with my work. I have no desire to cut them out of the loop.
But there has to be some good way to turn that generosity to good use,
and I think I've found it.
Here's the deal: there are lots of teachers and librarians who'd love
to get hard-copies of this book into their kids' hands, but don't have
the budget for it (teachers in the US spend around $1,200 out of pocket
each on classroom supplies that their budgets won't stretch to cover,
which is why I sponsor a classroom at Ivanhoe Elementary in my old
neighborhood in Los Angeles; you can adopt a class yourself here:
http://www.adoptaclassroom.org/).
There are generous people who want to send some cash my way to thank me
for the free ebooks.
I'm proposing that we put them together.
If you're a teacher or librarian and you want a free copy of Little
Brother, email freelittlebrother@gmail.com with your name and the name
and address of your school. It'll be posted to
http://craphound.com/littlebrother/category/donate/ by my fantastic
helper, Olga Nunes, so that potential donors can see it.
If you enjoyed the electronic edition of Little Brother and you want to
donate something to say thanks, go to
http://craphound.com/littlebrother/donate/ and find a teacher or
librarian you want to support. Then go to Amazon, BN.com, or your
favorite electronic bookseller and order a copy to the classroom, then
email a copy of the receipt (feel free to delete your address and other
personal info first!) to freelittlebrother@gmail.com so that Olga can
mark that copy as sent. If you don't want to be publicly acknowledged
for your generosity, let us know and we'll keep you anonymous,
otherwise we'll thank you on the donate page.
I have no idea if this will end up with hundreds, dozens or just a few
copies going out -- but I have high hopes!
&&&
DEDICATION
For Alice, who makes me whole
&&&
QUOTES
"A rousing tale of techno-geek rebellion, as necessary and dangerous as
file sharing, free speech, and bottled water on a plane."
Scott Westerfeld, author of UGLIES and EXTRAS
"I can talk about Little Brother in terms of its bravura political
speculation or its brilliant uses of technology -- each of which make
this book a must-read -- but, at the end of it all, I'm haunted by the
universality of Marcus's rite-of-passage and struggle, an experience
any teen today is going to grasp: the moment when you choose what your
life will mean and how to achieve it."
Steven C Gould, author of JUMPER and REFLEX
I'd recommend Little Brother over pretty much any book I've read this
year, and I'd want to get it into the hands of as many smart 13 year
olds, male and female, as I can.
Because I think it'll change lives. Because some kids, maybe just a
few, won't be the same after they've read it. Maybe they'll change
politically, maybe technologically. Maybe it'll just be the first book
they loved or that spoke to their inner geek. Maybe they'll want to
argue about it and disagree with it. Maybe they'll want to open their
computer and see what's in there. I don't know. It made me want to be
13 again right now and reading it for the first time, and then go out
and make the world better or stranger or odder. It's a wonderful,
important book, in a way that renders its flaws pretty much
meaningless.
Neil Gaiman, author of ANANSI BOYS
Little Brother is a scarily realistic adventure about how homeland
security technology could be abused to wrongfully imprison innocent
Americans. A teenage hacker-turned-hero pits himself against the
government to fight for his basic freedoms. This book is action-packed
with tales of courage, technology, and demonstrations of digital
disobedience as the technophile's civil protest."
Bunnie Huang, author of HACKING THE XBOX
Cory Doctorow is a fast and furious storyteller who gets all the
details of alternate reality gaming right, while offering a startling,
new vision of how these games might play out in the high-stakes context
of a terrorist attack. Little Brother is a brilliant novel with a bold
argument: hackers and gamers might just be our country's best hope for
the future.
Jane McGonical, Designer, I Love Bees
The right book at the right time from the right author -- and, not
entirely coincidentally, Cory Doctorow's best novel yet.
John Scalzi, author of OLD MAN'S WAR
It's about growing up in the near future where things have kept going
on the way they've been going, and it's about hacking as a habit of
mind, but mostly it's about growing up and changing and looking at the
world and asking what you can do about that. The teenage voice is
pitch-perfect. I couldn't put it down, and I loved it.
Jo Walton, author of FARTHING
A worthy younger sibling to Orwell's 1984, Cory Doctorow's LITTLE
BROTHER is lively, precocious, and most importantly, a little scary.
Brian K Vaughn, author of Y: THE LAST MAN
"Little Brother" sounds an optimistic warning. It extrapolates from
current events to remind us of the ever-growing threats to liberty. But
it also notes that liberty ultimately resides in our individual
attitudes and actions. In our increasingly authoritarian world, I
especially hope that teenagers and young adults will read it -- and
then persuade their peers, parents and teachers to follow suit.
Dan Gillmor, author of WE, THE MEDIA
&&&
ABOUT THE BOOKSTORE DEDICATIONS
Every chapter of this file has been dedicated to a different bookstore,
and in each case, it's a store that I love, a store that's helped me
discover books that opened my mind, a store that's helped my career
along. The stores didn't pay me anything for this -- I haven't even
told them about it -- but it seems like the right thing to do. After
all, I'm hoping that you'll read this ebook and decide to buy the paper
book, so it only makes sense to suggest a few places you can pick it
up!
&&&
Chapter 1
[[This chapter is dedicated to BakkaPhoenix Books in Toronto, Canada.
Bakka is the oldest science fiction bookstore in the world, and it made
me the mutant I am today. I wandered in for the first time around the
age of 10 and asked for some recommendations. Tanya Huff (yes, *the*
Tanya Huff, but she wasn't a famous writer back then!) took me back
into the used section and pressed a copy of H. Beam Piper's "Little
Fuzzy" into my hands, and changed my life forever. By the time I was
18, I was working at Bakka -- I took over from Tanya when she retired
to write full time -- and I learned life-long lessons about how and why
people buy books. I think every writer should work at a bookstore (and
plenty of writers have worked at Bakka over the years! For the 30th
anniversary of the store, they put together an anthology of stories by
Bakka writers that included work by Michelle Sagara (AKA Michelle
West), Tanya Huff, Nalo Hopkinson, Tara Tallan --and me!)]]
[[BakkaPhoenix Books: http://www.bakkaphoenixbooks.com/ 697 Queen
Street West, Toronto ON Canada M6J1E6, +1 416 963 9993]]
I'm a senior at Cesar Chavez high in San Francisco's sunny Mission
district, and that makes me one of the most surveilled people in the
world. My name is Marcus Yallow, but back when this story starts, I was
going by w1n5t0n. Pronounced "Winston."
*Not* pronounced "Double-you-one-enn-five-tee-zero-enn" -- unless
you're a clueless disciplinary officer who's far enough behind the
curve that you still call the Internet "the information superhighway."
I know just such a clueless person, and his name is Fred Benson, one of
three vice-principals at Cesar Chavez. He's a sucking chest wound of a
human being. But if you're going to have a jailer, better a clueless
one than one who's really on the ball.
"Marcus Yallow," he said over the PA one Friday morning. The PA isn't
very good to begin with, and when you combine that with Benson's
habitual mumble, you get something that sounds more like someone
struggling to digest a bad burrito than a school announcement. But
human beings are good at picking their names out of audio confusion --
it's a survival trait.
I grabbed my bag and folded my laptop three-quarters shut -- I didn't
want to blow my downloads -- and got ready for the inevitable.
"Report to the administration office immediately."
My social studies teacher, Ms Galvez, rolled her eyes at me and I
rolled my eyes back at her. The Man was always coming down on me, just
because I go through school firewalls like wet kleenex, spoof the
gait-recognition software, and nuke the snitch chips they track us
with. Galvez is a good type, anyway, never holds that against me
(especially when I'm helping get with her webmail so she can talk to
her brother who's stationed in Iraq).
My boy Darryl gave me a smack on the ass as I walked past. I've known
Darryl since we were still in diapers and escaping from play-school,
and I've been getting him into and out of trouble the whole time. I
raised my arms over my head like a prizefighter and made my exit from
Social Studies and began the perp-walk to the office.
I was halfway there when my phone went. That was another no-no --
phones are muy prohibido at Chavez High -- but why should that stop me?
I ducked into the toilet and shut myself in the middle stall (the
furthest stall is always grossest because so many people head straight
for it, hoping to escape the smell and the squick -- the smart money
and good hygiene is down the middle). I checked the phone -- my home PC
had sent it an email to tell it that there was something new up on
Harajuku Fun Madness, which happens to be the best game ever invented.
I grinned. Spending Fridays at school was teh suck anyway, and I was
glad of the excuse to make my escape.
I ambled the rest of the way to Benson's office and tossed him a wave
as I sailed through the door.
"If it isn't Double-you-one-enn-five-tee-zero-enn," he said. Fredrick
Benson -- Social Security number 545-03-2343, date of birth August 15
1962, mother's maiden name Di Bona, hometown Petaluma -- is a lot
taller than me. I'm a runty 5'8", while he stands 6'7", and his college
basketball days are far enough behind him that his chest muscles have
turned into saggy man-boobs that were painfully obvious through his
freebie dot-com polo-shirts. He always looks like he's about to
slam-dunk your ass, and he's really into raising his voice for dramatic
effect. Both these start to lose their efficacy with repeated
application.
"Sorry, nope," I said. "I never heard of this R2D2 character of yours."
"W1n5t0n," he said, spelling it out again. He gave me a hairy eyeball
and waited for me to wilt. Of course it was my handle, and had been for
years. It was the identity I used when I was posting on message-boards
where I was making my contributions to the field of applied security
research. You know, like sneaking out of school and disabling the
minder-tracer on my phone. But he didn't know that this was my handle.
Only a small number of people did, and I trusted them all to the end of
the earth.
"Um, not ringing any bells," I said. I'd done some pretty cool stuff
around school using that handle -- I was very proud of my work on
snitch-tag killers -- and if he could link the two identities, I'd be
in trouble. No one at school ever called me w1n5t0n or even Winston.
Not even my pals. It was Marcus or nothing.
Benson settled down behind his desk and tapped his class-ring nervously
on his blotter. He did this whenever things started to go bad for him.
Poker players call stuff like this a "tell" -- something that let you
know what was going on in the other guy's head. I knew Benson's tells
backwards and forwards.
"Marcus, I hope you realize how serious this is."
"I will just as soon as you explain what this is, sir." I always say
"sir" to authority figures when I'm messing with them. It's my own
tell.
He shook his head at me and looked down, another tell. Any second now,
he was going to start shouting at me. "Listen, kiddo! It's time you
came to grips with the fact that we know about what you've been doing,
and that we're not going to be lenient about it. You're going to be
lucky if you're not expelled before this meeting is through. Do you
want to graduate?"
"Mr Benson, you still haven't explained what the problem is --"
He slammed his hand down on the desk and then pointed his finger at me.
"The *problem*, Mr Yallow, is that you've been engaged in criminal
conspiracy to subvert this school's security system, and you have
supplied security countermeasures to your fellow students. You know
that we expelled Graciella Uriarte last week for using one of your
devices." Uriarte had gotten a bad rap. She'd bought a radio-jammer
from a head-shop near the 16th Street BART station and it had set off
the countermeasures in the school hallway. Not my doing, but I felt for
her.
"And you think I'm involved in that?"
"We have reliable intelligence indicating that you are w1n5t0n" --
again, he spelled it out, and I began to wonder if he hadn't figured
out that the 1 was an I and the 5 was an S. "We know that this w1n5t0n
character is responsible for the theft of last year's standardized
tests." That actually hadn't been me, but it was a sweet hack, and it
was kind of flattering to hear it attributed to me. "And therefore
liable for several years in prison unless you cooperate with me."
"You have 'reliable intelligence'? I'd like to see it."
He glowered at me. "Your attitude isn't going to help you."
"If there's evidence, sir, I think you should call the police and turn
it over to them. It sounds like this is a very serious matter, and I
wouldn't want to stand in the way of a proper investigation by the duly
constituted authorities."
"You want me to call the police."
"And my parents, I think. That would be for the best."
We stared at each other across the desk. He'd clearly expected me to
fold the second he dropped the bomb on me. I don't fold. I have a trick
for staring down people like Benson. I look slightly to the left of
their heads, and think about the lyrics to old Irish folk songs, the
kinds with three hundred verses. It makes me look perfectly composed
and unworried.
*And the wing was on the bird and the bird was on the egg and the egg
was in the nest and the nest was on the leaf and the leaf was on the
twig and the twig was on the branch and the branch was on the limb and
the limb was in the tree and the tree was in the bog -- the bog down in
the valley-oh! High-ho the rattlin' bog, the bog down in the valley-oh
--*
"You can return to class now," he said. "I'll call on you once the
police are ready to speak to you."
"Are you going to call them now?"
"The procedure for calling in the police is complicated. I'd hoped that
we could settle this fairly and quickly, but since you insist --"
"I can wait while you call them is all," I said. "I don't mind."
He tapped his ring again and I braced for the blast.
"*Go!*" he yelled. "Get the hell out of my office, you miserable little
--"
I got out, keeping my expression neutral. He wasn't going to call the
cops. If he'd had enough evidence to go to the police with, he would
have called them in the first place. He hated my guts. I figured he'd
heard some unverified gossip and hoped to spook me into confirming it.
I moved down the corridor lightly and sprightly, keeping my gait even
and measured for the gait-recognition cameras. These had been installed
only a year before, and I loved them for their sheer idiocy.
Beforehand, we'd had face-recognition cameras covering nearly every
public space in school, but a court ruled that was unconstitutional. So
Benson and a lot of other paranoid school administrators had spent our
textbook dollars on these idiot cameras that were supposed to be able
to tell one person's walk from another. Yeah, right.
I got back to class and sat down again, Ms Galvez warmly welcoming me
back. I unpacked the school's standard-issue machine and got back into
classroom mode. The SchoolBooks were the snitchiest technology of them
all, logging every keystroke, watching all the network traffic for
suspicious keywords, counting every click, keeping track of every
fleeting thought you put out over the net. We'd gotten them in my
junior year, and it only took a couple months for the shininess to wear
off. Once people figured out that these "free" laptops worked for the
man -- and showed a never-ending parade of obnoxious ads to boot --
they suddenly started to feel very heavy and burdensome.
Cracking my SchoolBook had been easy. The crack was online within a
month of the machine showing up, and there was nothing to it -- just
download a DVD image, burn it, stick it in the SchoolBook, and boot it
while holding down a bunch of different keys at the same time. The DVD
did the rest, installing a whole bunch of hidden programs on the
machine, programs that would stay hidden even when the Board of Ed did
its daily remote integrity checks of the machines. Every now and again
I had to get an update for the software to get around the Board's
latest tests, but it was a small price to pay to get a little control
over the box.
I fired up IMParanoid, the secret instant messenger that I used when I
wanted to have an off-the-record discussion right in the middle of
class. Darryl was already logged in.
> The game's afoot! Something big is going down with Harajuku Fun
> Madness, dude. You in?
> No. Freaking. Way. If I get caught ditching a third time, I'm
> expelled. Man, you know that. We'll go after school.
> You've got lunch and then study-hall, right? That's two hours. Plenty
> of time to run down this clue and get back before anyone misses us.
> I'll get the whole team out.
Harajuku Fun Madness is the best game ever made. I know I already said
that, but it bears repeating. It's an ARG, an Alternate Reality Game,
and the story goes that a gang of Japanese fashion-teens discovered a
miraculous healing gem at the temple in Harajuku, which is basically
where cool Japanese teenagers invented every major subculture for the
past ten years. They're being hunted by evil monks, the Yakuza (AKA the
Japanese mafia), aliens, tax-inspectors, parents, and a rogue
artificial intelligence. They slip the players coded messages that we
have to decode and use to track down clues that lead to more coded
messages and more clues.
Imagine the best afternoon you've ever spent prowling the streets of a
city, checking out all the weird people, funny hand-bills,
street-maniacs, and funky shops. Now add a scavenger hunt to that, one
that requires you to research crazy old films and songs and teen
culture from around the world and across time and space. And it's a
competition, with the winning team of four taking a grand prize of ten
days in Tokyo, chilling on Harajuku bridge, geeking out in Akihabara,
and taking home all the Astro Boy merchandise you can eat. Except that
he's called "Atom Boy" in Japan.
That's Harajuku Fun Madness, and once you've solved a puzzle or two,
you'll never look back.
> No man, just no. NO. Don't even ask.
> I need you D. You're the best I've got. I swear I'll get us in and
> out without anyone knowing it. You know I can do that, right?
> I know you can do it
> So you're in?
> Hell no
> Come on, Darryl. You're not going to your deathbed wishing you'd
> spent more study periods sitting in school
> I'm not going to go to my deathbed wishing I'd spent more time
> playing ARGs either
> Yeah but don't you think you might go to your death-bed wishing you'd
> spent more time with Vanessa Pak?
Van was part of my team. She went to a private girl's school in the
East Bay, but I knew she'd ditch to come out and run the mission with
me. Darryl has had a crush on her literally for years -- even before
puberty endowed her with many lavish gifts. Darryl had fallen in love
with her mind. Sad, really.
> You suck
> You're coming?
He looked at me and shook his head. Then he nodded. I winked at him and
set to work getting in touch with the rest of my team.
I wasn't always into ARGing. I have a dark secret: I used to be a
LARPer. LARPing is Live Action Role Playing, and it's just about what
it sounds like: running around in costume, talking in a funny accent,
pretending to be a super-spy or a vampire or a medieval knight. It's
like Capture the Flag in monster-drag, with a bit of Drama Club thrown
in, and the best games were the ones we played in Scout Camps out of
town in Sonoma or down on the Peninsula. Those three-day epics could
get pretty hairy, with all-day hikes, epic battles with foam-and-bamboo
swords, casting spells by throwing beanbags and shouting "Fireball!"
and so on. Good fun, if a little goofy. Not nearly as geeky as talking
about what your elf planned on doing as you sat around a table loaded
with Diet Coke cans and painted miniatures, and more physically active
than going into a mouse-coma in front of a massively multiplayer game
at home.
The thing that got me into trouble were the mini-games in the hotels.
Whenever a science fiction convention came to town, some LARPer would
convince them to let us run a couple of six-hour mini-games at the con,
piggybacking on their rental of the space. Having a bunch of
enthusiastic kids running around in costume lent color to the event,
and we got to have a ball among people even more socially deviant than
us.
The problem with hotels is that they have a lot of non-gamers in them,
too -- and not just sci-fi people. Normal people. From states that
begin and end with vowels. On holidays.
And sometimes those people misunderstand the nature of a game.
Let's just leave it at that, OK?
Class ended in ten minutes, and that didn't leave me with much time to
prepare. The first order of business were those pesky gait-recognition
cameras. Like I said, they'd started out as face-recognition cameras,
but those had been ruled unconstitutional. As far as I know, no court
has yet determined whether these gait-cams are any more legal, but
until they do, we're stuck with them.
"Gait" is a fancy word for the way you walk. People are pretty good at
spotting gaits -- next time you're on a camping trip, check out the
bobbing of the flashlight as a distant friend approaches you. Chances
are you can identify him just from the movement of the light, the
characteristic way it bobs up and down that tells our monkey brains
that this is a person approaching us.
Gait recognition software takes pictures of your motion, tries to
isolate you in the pics as a silhouette, and then tries to match the
silhouette to a database to see if it knows who you are. It's a
biometric identifier, like fingerprints or retina-scans, but it's got a
lot more "collisions" than either of those. A biometric "collision" is
when a measurement matches more than one person. Only you have your
fingerprint, but you share your gait with plenty other people.
Not exactly, of course. Your personal, inch-by-inch walk is yours and
yours alone. The problem is your inch-by-inch walk changes based on how
tired you are, what the floor is made of, whether you pulled your ankle
playing basketball, and whether you've changed your shoes lately. So
the system kind of fuzzes-out your profile, looking for people who walk
kind of like you.
There are a lot of people who walk kind of like you. What's more, it's
easy not to walk kind of like you -- just take one shoe off. Of course,
you'll always walk like you-with-one-shoe-off in that case, so the
cameras will eventually figure out that it's still you. Which is why I
prefer to inject a little randomness into my attacks on
gait-recognition: I put a handful of gravel into each shoe. Cheap and
effective, and no two steps are the same. Plus you get a great
reflexology foot massage in the process (I kid. Reflexology is about as
scientifically useful as gait-recognition).
The cameras used to set off an alert every time someone they didn't
recognize stepped onto campus.
This did *not* work.
The alarm went off every ten minutes. When the mailman came by. When a
parent dropped in. When the grounds-people went to work fixing up the
basketball court. When a student showed up wearing new shoes.
So now it just tries to keep track of who's where and when. If someone
leaves by the school-gates during classes, their gait is checked to see
if it kinda-sorta matches any student gait and if it does,
whoop-whoop-whoop, ring the alarm!
Chavez High is ringed with gravel walkways. I like to keep a couple
handsful of rocks in my shoulder-bag, just in case. I silently passed
Darryl ten or fifteen pointy little bastards and we both loaded our
shoes.
Class was about to finish up -- and I realized that I still hadn't
checked the Harajuku Fun Madness site to see where the next clue was!
I'd been a little hyper-focused on the escape, and hadn't bothered to
figure out where we were escaping *to*.
I turned to my SchoolBook and hit the keyboard. The web-browser we used
was supplied with the machine. It was a locked-down spyware version of
Internet Explorer, Microsoft's crashware turd that no one under the age
of 40 used voluntarily.
I had a copy of Firefox on the USB drive built into my watch, but that
wasn't enough -- the SchoolBook ran Windows Vista4Schools, an antique
operating system designed to give school administrators the illusion
that they controlled the programs their students could run.
But Vista4Schools is its own worst enemy. There are a lot of programs
that Vista4Schools doesn't want you to be able to shut down --
keyloggers, censorware -- and these programs run in a special mode that
makes them invisible to the system. You can't quit them because you
can't even see they're there.
Any program whose name starts with $SYS$ is invisible to the operating
system. it doesn't show up on listings of the hard drive, nor in the
process monitor. So my copy of Firefox was called $SYS$Firefox -- and
as I launched it, it became invisible to Windows, and so invisible to
the network's snoopware.
Now I had an indie browser running, I needed an indie network
connection. The school's network logged every click in and out of the
system, which was bad news if you were planning on surfing over to the
Harajuku Fun Madness site for some extra-curricular fun.
The answer is something ingenious called TOR -- The Onion Router. An
onion router is an Internet site that takes requests for web-pages and
passes them onto other onion routers, and on to other onion routers,
until one of them finally decides to fetch the page and pass it back
through the layers of the onion until it reaches you. The traffic to
the onion-routers is encrypted, which means that the school can't see
what you're asking for, and the layers of the onion don't know who
they're working for. There are millions of nodes -- the program was
set up by the US Office of Naval Research to help their people get
around the censorware in countries like Syria and China, which means
that it's perfectly designed for operating in the confines of an
average American high school.
TOR works because the school has a finite blacklist of naughty
addresses we aren't allowed to visit, and the addresses of the nodes
change all the time -- no way could the school keep track of them all.
Firefox and TOR together made me into the invisible man, impervious to
Board of Ed snooping, free to check out the Harajuku FM site and see
what was up.
There it was, a new clue. Like all Harajuku Fun Madness clues, it had a
physical, online and mental component. The online component was a
puzzle you had to solve, one that required you to research the answers
to a bunch of obscure questions. This batch included a bunch of
questions on the plots in dojinshi -- those are comic books drawn by
fans of manga, Japanese comics. They can be as big as the official
comics that inspire them, but they're a lot weirder, with crossover
story-lines and sometimes really silly songs and action. Lots of love
stories, of course. Everyone loves to see their favorite toons hook up.
I'd have to solve those riddles later, when I got home. They were
easiest to solve with the whole team, downloading tons of dojinshi
files and scouring them for answers to the puzzles.
I'd just finished scrap-booking all the clues when the bell rang and we
began our escape. I surreptitiously slid the gravel down the side of my
short boots -- ankle-high Blundstones from Australia, great for running
and climbing, and the easy slip-on/slip-off laceless design makes them
convenient at the never-ending metal-detectors that are everywhere now.
We also had to evade physical surveillance, of course, but that gets
easier every time they add a new layer of physical snoopery -- all the
bells and whistles lull our beloved faculty into a totally false sense
of security. We surfed the crowd down the hallways, heading for my
favorite side-exit. We were halfway along when Darryl hissed, "Crap! I
forgot, I've got a library book in my bag."
"You're kidding me," I said, and hauled him into the next bathroom we
passed. Library books are bad news. Every one of them has an arphid --
Radio Frequency ID tag -- glued into its binding, which makes it
possible for the librarians to check out the books by waving them over
a reader, and lets a library shelf tell you if any of the books on it
are out of place.
But it also lets the school track where you are at all times. It was
another of those legal loopholes: the courts wouldn't let the schools
track *us* with arphids, but they could track *library books*, and use
the school records to tell them who was likely to be carrying which
library book.
I had a little Faraday pouch in my bag -- these are little wallets
lined with a mesh of copper wires that effectively block radio energy,
silencing arphids. But the pouches were made for neutralizing ID cards
and toll-booth transponders, not books like --
"Introduction to Physics?" I groaned. The book was the size of a
dictionary.
&&&