[[This chapter is dedicated to Compass Books/Books Inc, the oldest
independent bookstore in the western USA. They've got stores up and
down California, in San Francisco, Burlingame, Mountain View and Palo
Alto, but coolest of all is that they run a killer bookstore in the
middle of Disneyland's Downtown Disney in Anaheim. I'm a stone Disney
park freak (see my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom if
you don't believe it), and every time I've lived in California, I've
bought myself an annual Disneyland pass, and on practically every
visit, I drop by Compass Books in Downtown Disney. They stock a
brilliant selection of unauthorized (and even critical) books about
Disney, as well as a great variety of kids books and science fiction,
and the cafe next door makes a mean cappuccino.]]
[[Compass Books/Books Inc:
http://www.booksinc.net/NASApp/store/Product;jsessionid=abcF-ch09-
pbU6m7ZRrLr?s=showproduct&isbn=0765319853]]
He was so angry I thought he was going to pop. You know I said I'd only
seen him lose his cool rarely? That night, he lost it more than he ever
had.
"You wouldn't believe it. This cop, he was like eighteen years old and
he kept saying, 'But sir, why were you in Berkeley yesterday if your
client is in Mountain View?' I kept explaining to him that I teach at
Berkeley and then he'd say, 'I thought you were a consultant,' and we'd
start over again. It was like some kind of sitcom where the cops have
been taken over by the stupidity ray.
"What's worse was he kept insisting that I'd been in Berkeley today as
well, and I kept saying no, I hadn't been, and he said I had been. Then
he showed me my FasTrak billing and it said I'd driven the San Mateo
bridge three times that day!
"That's not all," he said, and drew in a breath that let me know he was
really steamed. "They had information about where I'd been, places that
*didn't have a toll plaza*. They'd been polling my pass just on the
street, at random. And it was *wrong*! Holy crap, I mean, they're
spying on us all and they're not even competent!"
I'd drifted down into the kitchen as he railed there, and now I was
watching him from the doorway. Mom met my eye and we both raised our
eyebrows as if to say, *Who's going to say 'I told you so' to him?* I
nodded at her. She could use her spousular powers to nullify his rage
in a way that was out of my reach as a mere filial unit.
"Drew," she said, and grabbed him by the arm to make him stop stalking
back and forth in the kitchen, waving his arms like a street-preacher.
"What?" he snapped.
"I think you owe Marcus an apology." She kept her voice even and level.
Dad and I are the spazzes in the household -- Mom's a total rock.
Dad looked at me. His eyes narrowed as he thought for a minute. "All
right," he said at last. "You're right. I was talking about competent
surveillance. These guys were total amateurs. I'm sorry, son," he said.
"You were right. That was ridiculous." He stuck his hand out and shook
my hand, then gave me a firm, unexpected hug.
"God, what are we doing to this country, Marcus? Your generation
deserves to inherit something better than this." When he let me go, I
could see the deep wrinkles in his face, lines I'd never noticed.
I went back up to my room and played some Xnet games. There was a good
multiplayer thing, a clockwork pirate game where you had to quest every
day or two to wind up your whole crew's mainsprings before you could go
plundering and pillaging again. It was the kind of game I hated but
couldn't stop playing: lots of repetitive quests that weren't all that
satisfying to complete, a little bit of player-versus-player combat
(scrapping to see who would captain the ship) and not that many cool
puzzles that you had to figure out. Mostly, playing this kind of game
made me homesick for Harajuku Fun Madness, which balanced out running
around in the real world, figuring out online puzzles, and strategizing
with your team.
But today it was just what I needed. Mindless entertainment.
My poor dad.
I'd done that to him. He'd been happy before, confident that his tax
dollars were being spent to keep him safe. I'd destroyed that
confidence. It was false confidence, of course, but it had kept him
going. Seeing him now, miserable and broken, I wondered if it was
better to be clear-eyed and hopeless or to live in a fool's paradise.
That shame -- the shame I'd felt since I gave up my passwords, since
they'd broken me -- returned, leaving me listless and wanting to just
get away from myself.
My character was a swabbie on the pirate ship *Zombie Charger*, and
he'd wound down while I'd been offline. I had to IM all the other
players on my ship until I found one willing to wind me up. That kept
me occupied. I liked it, actually. There was something magic about a
total stranger doing you a favor. And since it was the Xnet, I knew
that all the strangers were friends, in some sense.
> Where u located?
The character who wound me up was called Lizanator, and it was female,
though that didn't mean that it was a girl. Guys had some weird
affinity for playing female characters.
> San Francisco
I said.
> No stupe, where you located in San Fran?
> Why, you a pervert?
That usually shut down that line of conversation. Of course every
gamespace was full of pedos and pervs, and cops pretending to be pedo-
and perv-bait (though I sure hoped there weren't any cops on the
Xnet!). An accusation like that was enough to change the subject nine
out of ten times.
> Mission? Potrero Hill? Noe? East Bay?
> Just wind me up k thx?
She stopped winding.
> You scared?
> Safe -- why do you care?
> Just curious
I was getting a bad vibe off her. She was clearly more than just
curious. Call it paranoia. I logged off and shut down my Xbox.
Dad looked at me over the table the next morning and said, "It looks
like it's going to get better, at least." He handed me a copy of the
*Chronicle* open to the third page.
> A Department of Homeland Security spokesman has confirmed that the
> San Francisco office has requested a 300 percent budget and personnel
> increase from DC
What?
> Major General Graeme Sutherland, the commanding officer for Northern
> California DHS operations, confirmed the request at a press
> conference yesterday, noting that a spike in suspicious activity in
> the Bay Area prompted the request. "We are tracking a spike in
> underground chatter and activity and believe that saboteurs are
> deliberately manufacturing false security alerts to undermine our
> efforts."
My eyes crossed. No freaking way.
> "These false alarms are potentially 'radar chaff' intended to
> disguise real attacks. The only effective way of combatting them is
> to step up staffing and analyst levels so that we can fully
> investigate every lead."
> Sutherland noted the delays experienced all over the city were
> "unfortunate" and committed to eliminating them.
I had a vision of the city with four or five times as many DHS
enforcers, brought in to make up for my own stupid ideas. Van was
right. The more I fought them, the worse it was going to get.
Dad pointed at the paper. "These guys may be fools, but they're
methodical fools. They'll just keep throwing resources at this problem
until they solve it. It's tractable, you know. Mining all the data in
the city, following up on every lead. They'll catch the terrorists."
I lost it. "Dad! Are you *listening to yourself*? They're talking about
investigating practically every person in the city of San Francisco!"
"Yeah," he said, "that's right. They'll catch every alimony cheat,
every dope dealer, every dirt-bag and every terrorist. You just wait.
This could be the best thing that ever happened to this country."
"Tell me you're joking," I said. "I beg you. You think that that's what
they intended when they wrote the Constitution? What about the Bill of
Rights?"
"The Bill of Rights was written before data-mining," he said. He was
awesomely serene, convinced of his rightness. "The right to freedom of
association is fine, but why shouldn't the cops be allowed to mine your
social network to figure out if you're hanging out with gangbangers and
terrorists?"
"Because it's an invasion of my privacy!" I said.
"What's the big deal? Would you rather have privacy or terrorists?"
Agh. I hated arguing with my dad like this. I needed a coffee. "Dad,
come on. Taking away our privacy isn't catching terrorists: it's just
inconveniencing normal people."
"How do you know it's not catching terrorists?"
"Where are the terrorists they've caught?"
"I'm sure we'll see arrests in good time. You just wait."
"Dad, what the hell has happened to you since last night? You were
ready to go nuclear on the cops for pulling you over --"
"Don't use that tone with me, Marcus. What's happened since last night
is that I've had the chance to think it over and to read *this*." He
rattled his paper. "The reason they caught me is that the bad guys are
actively jamming them. They need to adjust their techniques to overcome
the jamming. But they'll get there. Meanwhile the occasional road stop
is a small price to pay. This isn't the time to be playing lawyer about
the Bill of Rights. This is the time to make some sacrifices to keep
our city safe."
I couldn't finish my toast. I put the plate in the dishwasher and left
for school. I had to get out of there.
The Xnetters weren't happy about the stepped up police surveillance,
but they weren't going to take it lying down. Someone called a phone-in
show on KQED and told them that the police were wasting their time,
that we could monkeywrench the system faster than they could untangle
it. The recording was a top Xnet download that night.
"This is California Live and we're talking to an anonymous caller at a
payphone in San Francisco. He has his own information about the
slowdowns we've been facing around town this week. Caller, you're on
the air."
"Yeah, yo, this is just the beginning, you know? I mean, like, we're
just getting started. Let them hire a billion pigs and put a checkpoint
on every corner. We'll jam them all! And like, all this crap about
terrorists? We're not terrorists! Give me a break, I mean, really!
We're jamming up the system because we hate the Homeland Security, and
because we love our city. Terrorists? I can't even spell jihad. Peace
out."
He sounded like an idiot. Not just the incoherent words, but also his
gloating tone. He sounded like a kid who was indecently proud of
himself. He *was* a kid who was indecently proud of himself.
The Xnet flamed out over this. Lots of people thought he was an idiot
for calling in, while others thought he was a hero. I worried that
there was probably a camera aimed at the payphone he'd used. Or an
arphid reader that might have sniffed his Fast Pass. I hoped he'd had
the smarts to wipe his fingerprints off the quarter, keep his hood up,
and leave all his arphids at home. But I doubted it. I wondered if he'd
get a knock on the door sometime soon.
The way I knew when something big had happened on Xnet was that I'd
suddenly get a million emails from people who wanted M1k3y to know
about the latest haps. It was just as I was reading about Mr
Can't-Spell-Jihad that my mailbox went crazy. Everyone had a message
for me -- a link to a livejournal on the Xnet -- one of the many
anonymous blogs that were based on the Freenet document publishing
system that was also used by Chinese democracy advocates.
> Close call
> We were jamming at the Embarcadero tonite and goofing around giving
> everyone a new car key or door key or Fast Pass or FasTrak, tossing
> around a little fake gunpowder. There were cops everywhere but we
> were smarter than them; we're there pretty much every night and we
> never get caught.
> So we got caught tonight. It was a stupid mistake we got sloppy we
> got busted. It was an undercover who caught my pal and then got the
> rest of us. They'd been watching the crowd for a long time and they
> had one of those trucks nearby and they took four of us in but missed
> the rest.
> The truck was JAMMED like a can of sardines with every kind of
> person, old young black white rich poor all suspects, and there were
> two cops trying to ask us questions and the undercovers kept bringing
> in more of us. Most people were trying to get to the front of the
> line to get through questioning so we kept on moving back and it was
> like hours in there and really hot and it was getting more crowded
> not less.
> At like 8PM they changed shifts and two new cops came in and bawled
> out the two cops who were there all like wtf? aren't you doing
> anything here. They had a real fight and then the two old cops left
> and the new cops sat down at their desks and whispered to each other
> for a while.
> Then one cop stood up and started shouting EVERYONE JUST GO HOME
> JESUS CHRIST WE'VE GOT BETTER THINGS TO DO THAN BOTHER YOU WITH MORE
> QUESTIONS IF YOU'VE DONE SOMETHING WRONG JUST DON'T DO IT AGAIN AND
> LET THIS BE A WARNING TO YOU ALL.
> A bunch of the suits got really pissed which was HILARIOUS because I
> mean ten minutes before they were buggin about being held there and
> now they were wicked pissed about being let go, like make up your
> minds!
> We split fast though and got out and came home to write this. There
> are undercovers everywhere, believe. If you're jamming, be open-eyed
> and get ready to run when problems happen. If you get caught try to
> wait it out they're so busy they'll maybe just let you go.
> We made them that busy! All those people in that truck were there
> because we'd jammed them. So jam on!
I felt like I was going to throw up. Those four people -- kids I'd
never met -- they nearly went away forever because of something I'd
started.
Because of something I'd told them to do. I was no better than a
terrorist.
The DHS got their budget requisition approved. The President went on TV
with the Governor to tell us that no price was too high for security.
We had to watch it the next day in school at assembly. My Dad cheered.
He'd hated the President since the day he was elected, saying he wasn't
any better than the last guy and the last guy had been a complete
disaster, but now all he could do was talk about how decisive and
dynamic the new guy was.
"You have to take it easy on your father," Mom said to me one night
after I got home from school. She'd been working from home as much as
possible. Mom's a freelance relocation specialist who helps British
people get settled in in San Francisco. The UK High Commission pays her
to answer emails from mystified British people across the country who
are totally confused by how freaky we Americans are. She explains
Americans for a living, and she said that these days it was better to
do that from home, where she didn't have to actually see any Americans
or talk to them.
I don't have any illusions about Britain. America may be willing to
trash its Constitution every time some Jihadist looks cross-eyed at us,
but as I learned in my ninth-grade Social Studies independent project,
the Brits don't even *have* a Constitution. They've got laws there that
would curl the hair on your toes: they can put you in jail for an
entire year if they're really sure that you're a terrorist but don't
have enough evidence to prove it. Now, how sure can they be if they
don't have enough evidence to prove it? How'd they get that sure? Did
they see you committing terrorist acts in a really vivid dream?
And the surveillance in Britain makes America look like amateur hour.
The average Londoner is photographed 500 times a day, just walking
around the streets. Every license plate is photographed at every corner
in the country. Everyone from the banks to the public transit company
is enthusiastic about tracking you and snitching on you if they think
you're remotely suspicious.
But Mom didn't see it that way. She'd left Britain halfway through high
school and she'd never felt at home here, no matter that she'd married
a boy from Petaluma and raised a son here. To her, this was always the
land of barbarians, and Britain would always be home.
"Mom, he's just wrong. You of all people should know that. Everything
that makes this country great is being flushed down the toilet and he's
going along with it. Have you noticed that they haven't *caught any
terrorists*? Dad's all like, 'We need to be safe,' but he needs to know
that most of us don't feel safe. We feel endangered all the time."
"I know this all, Marcus. Believe me, I'm not fan of what's been
happening to this country. But your father is --" She broke off. "When
you didn't come home after the attacks, he thought --"
She got up and made herself a cup of tea, something she did whenever
she was uncomfortable or disconcerted.
"Marcus," she said. "Marcus, we thought you were dead. Do you
understand that? We were mourning you for days. We were imagining you
blown to bits, at the bottom of the ocean. Dead because some bastard
decided to kill hundreds of strangers to make some point."
That sank in slowly. I mean, I understood that they'd been worried.
Lots of people died in the bombings -- four thousand was the present
estimate -- and practically everyone knew someone who didn't come home
that day. There were two people from my school who had disappeared.
"Your father was ready to kill someone. Anyone. He was out of his mind.
You've never seen him like this. I've never seen him like it either. He
was out of his mind. He'd just sit at this table and curse and curse
and curse. Vile words, words I'd never heard him say. One day -- the
third day -- someone called and he was sure it was you, but it was a
wrong number and he threw the phone so hard it disintegrated into
thousands of pieces." I'd wondered about the new kitchen phone.
"Something broke in your father. He loves you. We both love you. You
are the most important thing in our lives. I don't think you realize
that. Do you remember when you were ten, when I went home to London for
all that time? Do you remember?"
I nodded silently.
"We were ready to get a divorce, Marcus. Oh, it doesn't matter why
anymore. It was just a bad patch, the kind of thing that happens when
people who love each other stop paying attention for a few years. He
came and got me and convinced me to come back for you. We couldn't bear
the thought of doing that to you. We fell in love again for you. We're
together today because of you."
I had a lump in my throat. I'd never known this. No one had ever told
me.
"So your father is having a hard time right now. He's not in his right
mind. It's going to take some time before he comes back to us, before
he's the man I love again. We need to understand him until then."
She gave me a long hug, and I noticed how thin her arms had gotten, how
saggy the skin on her neck was. I always thought of my mother as young,
pale, rosy-cheeked and cheerful, peering shrewdly through her metal-rim
glasses. Now she looked a little like an old woman. I had done that to
her. The terrorists had done that to her. The Department of Homeland
Security had done that to her. In a weird way, we were all on the same
side, and Mom and Dad and all those people we'd spoofed were on the
other side.
I couldn't sleep that night. Mom's words kept running through my head.
Dad had been tense and quiet at dinner and we'd barely spoken, because
I didn't trust myself not to say the wrong thing and because he was all
wound up over the latest news, that Al Qaeda was definitely responsible
for the bombing. Six different terrorist groups had claimed
responsibility for the attack, but only Al Qaeda's Internet video
disclosed information that the DHS said they hadn't disclosed to
anyone.
I lay in bed and listened to a late-night call-in radio show. The topic
was sex problems, with this gay guy who I normally loved to listen to,
he would give people such raw advice, but good advice, and he was
really funny and campy.
Tonight I couldn't laugh. Most of the callers wanted to ask what to do
about the fact that they were having a hard time getting busy with
their partners ever since the attack. Even on sex-talk radio, I
couldn't get away from the topic.
I switched the radio off and heard a purring engine on the street
below.
My bedroom is in the top floor of our house, one of the painted ladies.
I have a sloping attic ceiling and windows on both sides -- one
overlooks the whole Mission, the other looks out into the street in
front of our place. There were often cars cruising at all hours of the
night, but there was something different about this engine noise.
I went to the street-window and pulled up my blinds. Down on the street
below me was a white, unmarked van whose roof was festooned with radio
antennas, more antennas than I'd ever seen on a car. It was cruising
very slowly down the street, a little dish on top spinning around and
around.
As I watched, the van stopped and one of the back doors popped open. A
guy in a DHS uniform -- I could spot one from a hundred yards now --
stepped out into the street. He had some kind of handheld device, and
its blue glow lit his face. He paced back and forth, first scouting my
neighbors, making notes on his device, then heading for me. There was
something familiar in the way he walked, looking down --
He was using a wifinder! The DHS was scouting for Xnet nodes. I let go
of the blinds and dove across my room for my Xbox. I'd left it up while
I downloaded some cool animations one of the Xnetters had made of the
President's no-price-too-high speech. I yanked the plug out of the
wall, then scurried back to the window and cracked the blind a fraction
of an inch.
The guy was looking down into his wifinder again, walking back and
forth in front of our house. A moment later, he got back into his van
and drove away.
I got out my camera and took as many pictures as I could of the van and
its antennas. Then I opened them in a free image-editor called The GIMP
and edited out everything from the photo except the van, erasing my
street and anything that might identify me.
I posted them to Xnet and wrote down everything I could about the vans.
These guys were definitely looking for the Xnet, I could tell.
Now I really couldn't sleep.
Nothing for it but to play wind-up pirates. There'd be lots of players
even at this hour. The real name for wind-up pirates was Clockwork
Plunder, and it was a hobbyist project that had been created by
teenaged death-metal freaks from Finland. It was totally free to play,
and offered just as much fun as any of the $15/month services like
Ender's Universe and Middle Earth Quest and Discworld Dungeons.
I logged back in and there I was, still on the deck of the Zombie
Charger, waiting for someone to wind me up. I hated this part of the
game.
> Hey you
I typed to a passing pirate.
> Wind me up?
He paused and looked at me.
> y should i?
> We're on the same team. Plus you get experience points.
What a jerk.
> Where are you located?
> San Francisco
This was starting to feel familiar.
> Where in San Francisco?
I logged out. There was something weird going on in the game. I jumped
onto the livejournals and began to crawl from blog to blog. I got
through half a dozen before I found something that froze my blood.
Livejournallers love quizzes. What kind of hobbit are you? Are you a
great lover? What planet are you most like? Which character from some
movie are you? What's your emotional type? They fill them in and their
friends fill them in and everyone compares their results. Harmless fun.
But the quiz that had taken over the blogs of the Xnet that night was
what scared me, because it was anything but harmless:
* What's your sex
* What grade are you in?
* What school do you go to?
* Where in the city do you live?
The quizzes plotted the results on a map with colored pushpins for
schools and neighborhoods, and made lame recommendations for places to
buy pizza and stuff.
But look at those questions. Think about my answers:
* Male
* 12
* Chavez High
* Potrero Hill
There were only two people in my whole school who matched that profile.
Most schools it would be the same. If you wanted to figure out who the
Xnetters were, you could use these quizzes to find them all.
That was bad enough, but what was worse was what it implied: someone
from the DHS was using the Xnet to get at us. The Xnet was compromised
by the DHS.
We had spies in our midst.
I'd given Xnet discs to hundreds of people, and they'd done the same. I
knew the people I gave the discs to pretty well. Some of them I knew
very well. I've lived in the same house all my life and I've made
hundreds and hundreds of friends over the years, from people who went
to daycare with me to people I played soccer with, people who LARPed
with me, people I met clubbing, people I knew from school. My ARG team
were my closest friends, but there were plenty of people I knew and
trusted enough to hand an Xnet disc to.
I needed them now.
I woke Jolu up by ringing his cell phone and hanging up after the first
ring, three times in a row. A minute later, he was up on Xnet and we
were able to have a secure chat. I pointed him to my blog-post on the
radio vans and he came back a minute later all freaked out.
> You sure they're looking for us?
In response I sent him to the quiz.
> OMG we're doomed
> No it's not that bad but we need to figure out who we can trust
> How?
> That's what I wanted to ask you -- how many people can you totally
> vouch for like trust them to the ends of the earth?
> Um 20 or 30 or so
> I want to get a bunch of really trustworthy people together and do a
> key-exchange web of trust thing
Web of trust is one of those cool crypto things that I'd read about but
never tried. It was a nearly foolproof way to make sure that you could
talk to the people you trusted, but that no one else could listen in.
The problem is that it requires you to physically meet with the people
in the web at least once, just to get started.
> I get it sure. That's not bad. But how you going to get everyone
> together for the key-signing?
> That's what I wanted to ask you about -- how can we do it without
> getting busted?
Jolu typed some words and erased them, typed more and erased them.
> Darryl would know
I typed.
> God, this was the stuff he was great at.
Jolu didn't type anything. Then,
> How about a party?
he typed.
> How about if we all get together somewhere like we're teenagers
> having a party and that way we'll have a ready-made excuse if anyone
> shows up asking us what we're doing there?
> That would totally work! You're a genius, Jolu.
> I know it. And you're going to love this: I know just where to do it,
> too
> Where?
> Sutro baths!
&&&