[[This chapter is dedicated to the University Bookstore at the
University of Washington, whose science fiction section rivals many
specialty stores, thanks to the sharp-eyed, dedicated science fiction
buyer, Duane Wilkins. Duane's a real science fiction fan -- I first met
him at the World Science Fiction Convention in Toronto in 2003 -- and
it shows in the eclectic and informed choices on display at the store.
One great predictor of a great bookstore is the quality of the "shelf
review" -- the little bits of cardboard stuck to the shelves with
(generally hand-lettered) staff-reviews extolling the virtues of books
you might otherwise miss. The staff at the University Bookstore have
clearly benefited from Duane's tutelage, as the shelf reviews at the
University Bookstore are second to none.]]
[[The University Bookstore
http://www4.bookstore.washington.edu/_trade/ShowTitleUBS.taf?ActionArg=
Title&ISBN=9780765319852 4326 University Way NE, Seattle, WA 98105 USA
+1 800 335 READ]]
Jolu stood up.
"This is where it starts, guys. This is how we know which side you're
on. You might not be willing to take to the streets and get busted for
your beliefs, but if you *have* beliefs, this will let us know it. This
will create the web of trust that tells us who's in and who's out. If
we're ever going to get our country back, we need to do this. We need
to do something like this."
Someone in the audience -- it was Ange -- had a hand up, holding a beer
bottle.
"So call me stupid but I don't understand this at all. Why do you want
us to do this?"
Jolu looked at me, and I looked back at him. It had all seemed so
obvious when we were organizing it. "The Xnet isn't just a way to play
free games. It's the last open communications network in America. It's
the last way to communicate without being snooped on by the DHS. For it
to work we need to know that the person we're talking to isn't a snoop.
That means that we need to know that the people we're sending messages
to are the people we think they are.
"That's where you come in. You're all here because we trust you. I
mean, really trust you. Trust you with our lives."
Some of the people groaned. It sounded melodramatic and stupid.
I got back to my feet.
"When the bombs went off," I said, then something welled up in my
chest, something painful. "When the bombs went off, there were four of
us caught up by Market Street. For whatever reason, the DHS decided
that made us suspicious. They put bags over our heads, put us on a ship
and interrogated us for days. They humiliated us. Played games with our
minds. Then they let us go.
"All except one person. My best friend. He was with us when they picked
us up. He'd been hurt and he needed medical care. He never came out
again. They say they never saw him. They say that if we ever tell
anyone about this, they'll arrest us and make us disappear.
"Forever."
I was shaking. The shame. The goddamned shame. Jolu had the light on
me.
"Oh Christ," I said. "You people are the first ones I've told. If this
story gets around, you can bet they'll know who leaked it. You can bet
they'll come knocking on my door." I took some more deep breaths.
"That's why I volunteered on the Xnet. That's why my life, from now on,
is about fighting the DHS. With every breath. Every day. Until we're
free again. Any one of you could put me in jail now, if you wanted to."
Ange put her hand up again. "We're not going to rat on you," she said.
"No way. I know pretty much everyone here and I can promise you that. I
don't know how to know who to trust, but I know who *not* to trust: old
people. Our parents. Grownups. When they think of someone being spied
on, they think of someone *else*, a bad guy. When they think of someone
being caught and sent to a secret prison, it's someone *else* --
someone brown, someone young, someone foreign.
"They forget what it's like to be our age. To be the object of
suspicion *all the time*! How many times have you gotten on the bus and
had every person on it give you a look like you'd been gargling turds
and skinning puppies?
"What's worse, they're turning into adults younger and younger out
there. Back in the day, they used to say 'Never trust anyone over 30.'
I say, 'Don't trust any bastard over 25!'"
That got a laugh, and she laughed too. She was pretty, in a weird,
horsey way, with a long face and a long jaw. "I'm not really kidding,
you know? I mean, think about it. Who elected these ass-clowns? Who let
them invade our city? Who voted to put the cameras in our classrooms
and follow us around with creepy spyware chips in our transit passes
and cars? It wasn't a 16-year-old. We may be dumb, we may be young, but
we're not scum."
"I want that on a t-shirt," I said.
"It would be a good one," she said. We smiled at each other.
"Where do I go to get my keys?" she said, and pulled out her phone.
"We'll do it over there, in the secluded spot by the caves. I'll take
you in there and set you up, then you do your thing and take the
machine around to your friends to get photos of your public key so they
can sign it when they get home."
I raised my voice. "Oh! One more thing! Jesus, I can't believe I forgot
this. *Delete those photos once you've typed in the keys*! The last
thing we want is a Flickr stream full of pictures of all of us
conspiring together."
There was some good-natured, nervous chuckling, then Jolu turned out
the light and in the sudden darkness I could see nothing. Gradually, my
eyes adjusted and I set off for the cave. Someone was walking behind
me. Ange. I turned and smiled at her, and she smiled back, luminous
teeth in the dark.
"Thanks for that," I said. "You were great."
"You mean what you said about the bag on your head and everything?"
"I meant it," I said. "It happened. I never told anyone, but it
happened." I thought about it for a moment. "You know, with all the
time that went by since, without saying anything, it started to feel
like a bad dream. It was real though." I stopped and climbed up into
the cave. "I'm glad I finally told people. Any longer and I might have
started to doubt my own sanity."
I set up the laptop on a dry bit of rock and booted it from the DVD
with her watching. "I'm going to reboot it for every person. This is a
standard ParanoidLinux disc, though I guess you'd have to take my word
for it."
"Hell," she said. "This is all about trust, right?"
"Yeah," I said. "Trust."
I retreated some distance as she ran the key-generator, listening to
her typing and mousing to create randomness, listening to the crash of
the surf, listening to the party noises from over where the beer was.
She stepped out of the cave, carrying the laptop. On it, in huge white
luminous letters, were her public key and her fingerprint and email
address. She held the screen up beside her face and waited while I got
my phone out.
"Cheese," she said. I snapped her pic and dropped the camera back in my
pocket. She wandered off to the revelers and let them each get pics of
her and the screen. It was festive. Fun. She really had a lot of
charisma -- you didn't want to laugh at her, you just wanted to laugh
*with* her. And hell, it *was* funny! We were declaring a secret war on
the secret police. Who the hell did we think we were?
So it went, through the next hour or so, everyone taking pictures and
making keys. I got to meet everyone there. I knew a lot of them -- some
were my invitees -- and the others were friends of my pals or my pals'
pals. We should all be buddies. We were, by the time the night was out.
They were all good people.
Once everyone was done, Jolu went to make a key, and then turned away,
giving me a sheepish grin. I was past my anger with him, though. He was
doing what he had to do. I knew that no matter what he said, he'd
always be there for me. And we'd been through the DHS jail together.
Van too. No matter what, that would bind us together forever.
I did my key and did the perp-walk around the gang, letting everyone
snap a pic. Then I climbed up on the high spot I'd spoken from earlier
and called for everyone's attention.
"So a lot of you have noted that there's a vital flaw in this
procedure: what if this laptop can't be trusted? What if it's secretly
recording our instructions? What if it's spying on us? What if
Jose-Luis and I can't be trusted?"
More good-natured chuckles. A little warmer than before, more beery.
"I mean it," I said. "If we were on the wrong side, this could get all
of us -- all of *you* -- into a heap of trouble. Jail, maybe."
The chuckles turned more nervous.
"So that's why I'm going to do this," I said, and picked up a hammer
I'd brought from my Dad's toolkit. I set the laptop down beside me on
the rock and swung the hammer, Jolu following the swing with his
keychain light. Crash -- I'd always dreamt of killing a laptop with a
hammer, and here I was doing it. It felt pornographically good. And
bad.
Smash! The screen-panel fell off, shattered into millions of pieces,
exposing the keyboard. I kept hitting it, until the keyboard fell off,
exposing the motherboard and the hard-drive. Crash! I aimed square for
the hard-drive, hitting it with everything I had. It took three blows
before the case split, exposing the fragile media inside. I kept
hitting it until there was nothing bigger than a cigarette lighter,
then I put it all in a garbage bag. The crowd was cheering wildly --
loud enough that I actually got worried that someone far above us might
hear over the surf and call the law.
"All right!" I called. "Now, if you'd like to accompany me, I'm going
to march this down to the sea and soak it in salt water for ten
minutes."
I didn't have any takers at first, but then Ange came forward and took
my arm in her warm hand and said, "That was beautiful," in my ear and
we marched down to the sea together.
It was perfectly dark by the sea, and treacherous, even with our
keychain lights. Slippery, sharp rocks that were difficult enough to
walk on even without trying to balance six pounds of smashed
electronics in a plastic bag. I slipped once and thought I was going to
cut myself up, but she caught me with a surprisingly strong grip and
kept me upright. I was pulled in right close to her, close enough to
smell her perfume, which smelled like new cars. I love that smell.
"Thanks," I managed, looking into the big eyes that were further
magnified by her mannish, black-rimmed glasses. I couldn't tell what
color they were in the dark, but I guessed something dark, based on her
dark hair and olive complexion. She looked Mediterranean, maybe Greek
or Spanish or Italian.
I crouched down and dipped the bag in the sea, letting it fill with
salt water. I managed to slip a little and soak my shoe, and I swore
and she laughed. We'd hardly said a word since we lit out for the
ocean. There was something magical in our wordless silence.
At that point, I had kissed a total of three girls in my life, not
counting that moment when I went back to school and got a hero's
welcome. That's not a gigantic number, but it's not a minuscule one,
either. I have reasonable girl radar, and I think I could have kissed
her. She wasn't h4wt in the traditional sense, but there's something
about a girl and a night and a beach, plus she was smart and passionate
and committed.
But I didn't kiss her, or take her hand. Instead we had a moment that I
can only describe as spiritual. The surf, the night, the sea and the
rocks, and our breathing. The moment stretched. I sighed. This had been
quite a ride. I had a lot of typing to do tonight, putting all those
keys into my keychain, signing them and publishing the signed keys.
Starting the web of trust.
She sighed too.
"Let's go," I said.
"Yeah," she said.
Back we went. It was a good night, that night.
Jolu waited after for his brother's friend to come by and pick up his
coolers. I walked with everyone else up the road to the nearest Muni
stop and got on board. Of course, none of us was using an issued Muni
pass. By that point, Xnetters habitually cloned someone else's Muni
pass three or four times a day, assuming a new identity for every ride.
It was hard to stay cool on the bus. We were all a little drunk, and
looking at our faces under the bright bus lights was kind of hilarious.
We got pretty loud and the driver used his intercom to tell us to keep
it down twice, then told us to shut up right now or he'd call the cops.
That set us to giggling again and we disembarked in a mass before he
did call the cops. We were in North Beach now, and there were lots of
buses, taxis, the BART at Market Street, neon-lit clubs and cafes to
pull apart our grouping, so we drifted away.
I got home and fired up my Xbox and started typing in keys from my
phone's screen. It was dull, hypnotic work. I was a little drunk, and
it lulled me into a half-sleep.
I was about ready to nod off when a new IM window popped up.
> herro!
I didn't recognize the handle -- spexgril -- but I had an idea who
might be behind it.
> hi
I typed, cautiously.
> it's me, from tonight
Then she paste-bombed a block of crypto. I'd already entered her public
key into my keychain, so I told the IM client to try decrypting the
code with the key.
> it's me, from tonight
It was her!
> Fancy meeting you here
I typed, then encrypted it to my public key and mailed it off.
> It was great meeting you
I typed.
> You too. I don't meet too many smart guys who are also cute and also
> socially aware. Good god, man, you don't give a girl much of a
> chance.
My heart hammered in my chest.
> Hello? Tap tap? This thing on? I wasn't born here folks, but I'm sure
> dying here. Don't forget to tip your waitresses, they work hard. I'm
> here all week.
I laughed aloud.
> I'm here, I'm here. Laughing too hard to type is all
> Well at least my IM comedy-fu is still mighty
Um.
> It was really great to meet you too
> Yeah, it usually is. Where are you taking me?
> Taking you?
> On our next adventure?
> I didn't really have anything planned
> Oki -- then I'll take YOU. Saturday. Dolores Park. Illegal open air
> concert. Be there or be a dodecahedron
> Wait what?
> Don't you even read Xnet? It's all over the place. You ever hear of
> the Speedwhores?
I nearly choked. That was Trudy Doo's band -- as in Trudy Doo, the
woman who had paid me and Jolu to update the indienet code.
> Yeah I've heard of them
> They're putting on a huge show and they've got like fifty bands
> signed to play the bill, going to set up on the tennis courts and
> bring out their own amp trucks and rock out all night
I felt like I'd been living under a rock. How had I missed that? There
was an anarchist bookstore on Valencia that I sometimes passed on the
way to school that had a poster of an old revolutionary named Emma
Goldman with the caption "If I can't dance, I don't want to be a part
of your revolution." I'd been spending all my energies on figuring out
how to use the Xnet to organize dedicated fighters so they could jam
the DHS, but this was so much cooler. A big concert -- I had no idea
how to do one of those, but I was glad someone did.
And now that I thought of it, I was damned proud that they were using
the Xnet to do it.
The next day I was a zombie. Ange and I had chatted -- flirted -- until
4AM. Lucky for me, it was a Saturday and I was able to sleep in, but
between the hangover and the sleep-dep, I could barely put two thoughts
together.
By lunchtime, I managed to get up and get my ass out onto the streets.
I staggered down toward the Turk's to buy my coffee -- these days, if I
was alone, I always bought my coffee there, like the Turk and I were
part of a secret club.
On the way, I passed a lot of fresh graffiti. I liked Mission graffiti;
a lot of the times, it came in huge, luscious murals, or sarcastic
art-student stencils. I liked that the Mission's taggers kept right on
going, under the nose of the DHS. Another kind of Xnet, I supposed --
they must have all kinds of ways of knowing what was going on, where to
get paint, what cameras worked. Some of the cameras had been
spray-painted over, I noticed.
Maybe they used Xnet!
Painted in ten-foot-high letters on the side of an auto-yard's fence
were the drippy words: DON'T TRUST ANYONE OVER 25.
I stopped. Had someone left my "party" last night and come here with a
can of paint? A lot of those people lived in the neighborhood.
I got my coffee and had a little wander around town. I kept thinking I
should be calling someone, seeing if they wanted to get a movie or
something. That's how it used to be on a lazy Saturday like this. But
who was I going to call? Van wasn't talking to me, I didn't think I was
ready to talk to Jolu, and Darryl --
Well, I couldn't call Darryl.
I got my coffee and went home and did a little searching around on the
Xnet's blogs. These anonablogs were untraceable to any author -- unless
that author was stupid enough to put her name on it -- and there were a
lot of them. Most of them were apolitical, but a lot of them weren't.
They talked about schools and the unfairness there. They talked about
the cops. Tagging.
Turned out there'd been plans for the concert in the park for weeks. It
had hopped from blog to blog, turning into a full-blown movement
without my noticing. And the concert was called Don't Trust Anyone Over
25.
Well, that explained where Ange got it. It was a good slogan.
Monday morning, I decided I wanted to check out that anarchist
bookstore again, see about getting one of those Emma Goldman posters. I
needed the reminder.
I detoured down to 16th and Mission on my way to school, then up to
Valencia and across. The store was shut, but I got the hours off the
door and made sure they still had that poster up.
As I walked down Valencia, I was amazed to see how much of the DON'T
TRUST ANYONE OVER 25 stuff there was. Half the shops had DON'T TRUST
merch in the windows: lunchboxes, babydoll tees, pencil-boxes, trucker
hats. The hipster stores have been getting faster and faster, of
course. As new memes sweep the net in the course of a day or two,
stores have gotten better at putting merch in the windows to match.
Some funny little youtube of a guy launching himself with jet-packs
made of carbonated water would land in your inbox on Monday and by
Tuesday you'd be able to buy t-shirts with stills from the video on it.
But it was amazing to see something make the leap from Xnet to the head
shops. Distressed designer jeans with the slogan written in careful
high school ball-point ink. Embroidered patches.
Good news travels fast.
It was written on the black-board when I got to Ms Galvez's Social
Studies class. We all sat at our desks, smiling at it. It seemed to
smile back. There was something profoundly cheering about the idea that
we could all trust each other, that the enemy could be identified. I
knew it wasn't entirely true, but it wasn't entirely false either.
Ms Galvez came in and patted her hair and set down her SchoolBook on
her desk and powered it up. She picked up her chalk and turned around
to face the board. We all laughed. Good-naturedly, but we laughed.
She turned around and was laughing too. "Inflation has hit the nation's
slogan-writers, it seems. How many of you know where this phrase comes
from?"
We looked at each other. "Hippies?" someone said, and we laughed.
Hippies are all over San Francisco, both the old stoner kinds with
giant skanky beards and tie-dyes, and the new kind, who are more into
dress-up and maybe playing hacky-sack than protesting anything.
"Well, yes, hippies. But when we think of hippies these days, we just
think of the clothes and the music. Clothes and music were incidental
to the main part of what made that era, the sixties, important.
"You've heard about the civil rights movement to end segregation, white
and black kids like you riding buses into the South to sign up black
voters and protest against official state racism. California was one of
the main places where the civil rights leaders came from. We've always
been a little more political than the rest of the country, and this is
also a part of the country where black people have been able to get the
same union factory jobs as white people, so they were a little better
off than their cousins in the southland.
"The students at Berkeley sent a steady stream of freedom riders south,
and they recruited them from information tables on campus, at Bancroft
and Telegraph Avenue. You've probably seen that there are still tables
there to this day.
"Well, the campus tried to shut them down. The president of the
university banned political organizing on campus, but the civil rights
kids wouldn't stop. The police tried to arrest a guy who was handing
out literature from one of these tables, and they put him in a van, but
3,000 students surrounded the van and refused to let it budge. They
wouldn't let them take this kid to jail. They stood on top of the van
and gave speeches about the First Amendment and Free Speech.
"That galvanized the Free Speech Movement. That was the start of the
hippies, but it was also where more radical student movements came
from. Black power groups like the Black Panthers -- and later gay
rights groups like the Pink Panthers, too. Radical women's groups, even
'lesbian separatists' who wanted to abolish men altogether! And the
Yippies. Anyone ever hear of the Yippies?"
"Didn't they levitate the Pentagon?" I said. I'd once seen a
documentary about this.
She laughed. "I forgot about that, but yes, that was them! Yippies were
like very political hippies, but they weren't serious the way we think
of politics these days. They were very playful. Pranksters. They threw
money into the New York Stock Exchange. They circled the Pentagon with
hundreds of protestors and said a magic spell that was supposed to
levitate it. They invented a fictional kind of LSD that you could spray
onto people with squirt-guns and shot each other with it and pretended
to be stoned. They were funny and they made great TV -- one Yippie, a
clown called Wavy Gravy, used to get hundreds of protestors to dress up
like Santa Claus so that the cameras would show police officers
arresting and dragging away Santa on the news that night -- and they
mobilized a lot of people.
"Their big moment was the Democratic National Convention in 1968, where
they called for demonstrations to protest the Vietnam War. Thousands of
demonstrators poured into Chicago, slept in the parks, and picketed
every day. They had lots of bizarre stunts that year, like running a
pig called Pigasus for the presidential nomination. The police and the
demonstrators fought in the streets -- they'd done that many times
before, but the Chicago cops didn't have the smarts to leave the
reporters alone. They beat up the reporters, and the reporters
retaliated by finally showing what really went on at these
demonstrations, so the whole country watched their kids being really
savagely beaten down by the Chicago police. They called it a 'police
riot.'
"The Yippies loved to say, 'Never trust anyone over 30.' They meant
that people who were born before a certain time, when America had been
fighting enemies like the Nazis, could never understand what it meant
to love your country enough to refuse to fight the Vietnamese. They
thought that by the time you hit 30, your attitudes would be frozen and
you couldn't ever understand why the kids of the day were taken to the
streets, dropping out, freaking out.
"San Francisco was ground zero for this. Revolutionary armies were
founded here. Some of them blew up buildings or robbed banks for their
cause. A lot of those kids grew up to be more or less normal, while
others ended up in jail. Some of the university dropouts did amazing
things -- for example, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who founded Apple
Computers and invented the PC."
I was really getting into this. I knew a little of it, but I'd never
heard it told like this. Or maybe it had never mattered as much as it
did now. Suddenly, those lame, solemn, grown-up street demonstrations
didn't seem so lame after all. Maybe there was room for that kind of
action in the Xnet movement.
I put my hand up. "Did they win? Did the Yippies win?"
She gave me a long look, like she was thinking it over. No one said a
word. We all wanted to hear the answer.
"They didn't lose," she said. "They kind of imploded a little. Some of
them went to jail for drugs or other things. Some of them changed their
tunes and became yuppies and went on the lecture circuit telling
everyone how stupid they'd been, talking about how good greed was and
how dumb they'd been.
"But they did change the world. The war in Vietnam ended, and the kind
of conformity and unquestioning obedience that people had called
patriotism went out of style in a big way. Black rights, women's rights
and gay rights came a long way. Chicano rights, rights for disabled
people, the whole tradition of civil liberties was created or
strengthened by these people. Today's protest movement is the direct
descendant of those struggles."
"I can't believe you're talking about them like this," Charles said. He
was leaning so far in his seat he was half standing, and his sharp,
skinny face had gone red. He had wet, large eyes and big lips, and when
he got excited he looked a little like a fish.
Ms Galvez stiffened a little, then said, "Go on, Charles."
"You've just described terrorists. Actual terrorists. They blew up
buildings, you said. They tried to destroy the stock exchange. They
beat up cops, and stopped cops from arresting people who were breaking
the law. They attacked us!"
Ms Galvez nodded slowly. I could tell she was trying to figure out how
to handle Charles, who really seemed like he was ready to pop. "Charles
raises a good point. The Yippies weren't foreign agents, they were
American citizens. When you say 'They attacked us,' you need to figure
out who 'they' and 'us' are. When it's your fellow countrymen --"
"Crap!" he shouted. He was on his feet now. "We were at war then. These
guys were giving aid and comfort to the enemy. It's easy to tell who's
us and who's them: if you support America, you're us. If you support
the people who are shooting at Americans, you're *them*."
"Does anyone else want to comment on this?"
Several hands shot up. Ms Galvez called on them. Some people pointed
out that the reason that the Vietnamese were shooting at Americans is
that the Americans had flown to Vietnam and started running around the
jungle with guns. Others thought that Charles had a point, that people
shouldn't be allowed to do illegal things.
Everyone had a good debate except Charles, who just shouted at people,
interrupting them when they tried to get their points out. Ms Galvez
tried to get him to wait for his turn a couple times, but he wasn't
having any of it.
I was looking something up on my SchoolBook, something I knew I'd read.
I found it. I stood up. Ms Galvez looked expectantly at me. The other
people followed her gaze and went quiet. Even Charles looked at me
after a while, his big wet eyes burning with hatred for me.
"I wanted to read something," I said. "It's short. 'Governments are
instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of
the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive
of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it,
and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such
principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall
seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.'"
&&&