Chapter 2

This chapter is dedicated to Amazon.com, the largest Internet booksellerin the world. Amazon is amazing — a "store" where you can get prac-tically any book ever published (along with practically everything else,from laptops to cheese-graters), where they've elevated recommendationsto a high art, where they allow customers to directly communicate witheach other, where they are constantly invented new and better ways ofconnecting books with readers. Amazon has always treated me like gold— the founder, Jeff Bezos, even posted a reader-review for my first nov-el! — and I shop there like crazy (looking at my spreadsheets, it appearsthat I buy something from Amazon approximately every six days).
Amazon's in the process of reinventing what it means to be a bookstorein the twenty-first century and I can't think of a better group of peopleto be facing down that thorny set of problems.
Amazon"I'm thinking of majoring in physics when I go to Berkeley," Darrylsaid. His dad taught at the University of California at Berkeley, whichmeant he'd get free tuition when he went. And there'd never been anyquestion in Darryl's household about whether he'd go.
"Fine, but couldn't you research it online?""My dad said I should read it. Besides, I didn't plan on committing anycrimes today.""Skipping school isn't a crime. It's an infraction. They're totallydifferent.""What are we going to do, Marcus?""Well, I can't hide it, so I'm going to have to nuke it." Killing arphids isa dark art. No merchant wants malicious customers going for a walkaround the shop-floor and leaving behind a bunch of lobotomized mer-chandise that is missing its invisible bar-code, so the manufacturers have28refused to implement a "kill signal" that you can radio to an arphid to getit to switch off. You can reprogram arphids with the right box, but I hatedoing that to library books. It's not exactly tearing pages out of a book,but it's still bad, since a book with a reprogrammed arphid can't beshelved and can't be found. It just becomes a needle in a haystack.
That left me with only one option: nuking the thing. Literally. 30seconds in a microwave will do in pretty much every arphid on the mar-ket. And because the arphid wouldn't answer at all when D checked itback in at the library, they'd just print a fresh one for it and recode itwith the book's catalog info, and it would end up clean and neat back onits shelf.
All we needed was a microwave.
"Give it another two minutes and the teacher's lounge will be empty," Isaid.
Darryl grabbed his book at headed for the door. "Forget it, no way. I'mgoing to class."I snagged his elbow and dragged him back. "Come on, D, easy now.
It'll be fine.""The teacher's lounge? Maybe you weren't listening, Marcus. If I getbusted just once more, I am expelled. You hear that? Expelled.""You won't get caught," I said. The one place a teacher wouldn't beafter this period was the lounge. "We'll go in the back way." The loungehad a little kitchenette off to one side, with its own entrance for teacherswho just wanted to pop in and get a cup of joe. The microwave — whichalways reeked of popcorn and spilled soup — was right in there, on topof the miniature fridge.
Darryl groaned. I thought fast. "Look, the bell's already rung. if you goto study hall now, you'll get a late-slip. Better not to show at all at thispoint. I can infiltrate and exfiltrate any room on this campus, D. You'veseen me do it. I'll keep you safe, bro."He groaned again. That was one of Darryl's tells: once he starts groan-ing, he's ready to give in.
"Let's roll," I said, and we took off.
It was flawless. We skirted the classrooms, took the back stairs into thebasement, and came up the front stairs right in front of the teachers'
lounge. Not a sound came from the door, and I quietly turned the knoband dragged Darryl in before silently closing the door.
29The book just barely fit in the microwave, which was looking even lesssanitary than it had the last time I'd popped in here to use it. I conscien-tiously wrapped it in paper towels before I set it down. "Man, teachersare pigs," I hissed. Darryl, white faced and tense, said nothing.
The arphid died in a shower of sparks, which was really quite lovely(though not nearly as pretty as the effect you get when you nuke afrozen grape, which has to be seen to be believed).
Now, to exfiltrate the campus in perfect anonymity and make ourescape.
Darryl opened the door and began to move out, me on his heels. Asecond later, he was standing on my toes, elbows jammed into my chest,as he tried to back-pedal into the closet-sized kitchen we'd just left.
"Get back," he whispered urgently. "Quick — it's Charles!"Charles Walker and I don't get along. We're in the same grade, andwe've known each other as long as I've known Darryl, but that's wherethe resemblance ends. Charles has always been big for his age, and nowthat he's playing football and on the juice, he's even bigger. He's got an-ger management problems — I lost a milk-tooth to him in the thirdgrade, and he's managed to keep from getting in trouble over them bybecoming the most active snitch in school.
It's a bad combination, a bully who also snitches, taking great pleasurein going to the teachers with whatever infractions he's found. Bensonloved Charles. Charles liked to let on that he had some kind of unspe-cified bladder problem, which gave him a ready-made excuse to prowlthe hallways at Chavez, looking for people to fink on.
The last time Charles had caught some dirt on me, it had ended withme giving up LARPing. I had no intention of being caught by him again.
"What's he doing?""He's coming this way is what he's doing," Darryl said. He wasshaking.
"OK," I said. "OK, time for emergency countermeasures." I got myphone out. I'd planned this well in advance. Charles would never get meagain. I emailed my server at home, and it got into motion.
A few seconds later, Charles's phone spazzed out spectacularly. I'dhad tens of thousands of simultaneous random calls and text messagessent to it, causing every chirp and ring it had to go off and keep on goingoff. The attack was accomplished by means of a botnet, and for that I feltbad, but it was in the service of a good cause.
30Botnets are where infected computers spend their afterlives. When youget a worm or a virus, your computer sends a message to a chat channelon IRC — the Internet Relay Chat. That message tells the botmaster —the guy who deployed the worm — that the computers in there ready todo his bidding. Botnets are supremely powerful, since they can comprisethousands, even hundreds of thousands of computers, scattered all overthe Internet, connected to juicy high-speed connections and running onfast home PCs. Those PCs normally function on behalf of their owners,but when the botmaster calls them, they rise like zombies to do hisbidding.
There are so many infected PCs on the Internet that the price of hiringan hour or two on a botnet has crashed. Mostly these things work forspammers as cheap, distributed spambots, filling your mailbox withcome-ons for boner-pills or with new viruses that can infect you and re-cruit your machine to join the botnet.
I'd just rented 10 seconds' time on three thousand PCs and had each ofthem send a text message or voice-over-IP call to Charles's phone, whosenumber I'd extracted from a sticky note on Benson's desk during onefateful office-visit.
Needless to say, Charles's phone was not equipped to handle this. Firstthe SMSes filled the memory on his phone, causing it to start choking onthe routine operations it needed to do things like manage the ringer andlog all those incoming calls' bogus return numbers (did you know thatit's really easy to fake the return number on a caller ID? There are aboutfifty ways of doing it — just google "spoof caller id").
Charles stared at it dumbfounded, and jabbed at it furiously, his thickeyebrows knotting and wiggling as he struggled with the demons thathad possessed his most personal of devices. The plan was working sofar, but he wasn't doing what he was supposed to be doing next — hewas supposed to go find some place to sit down and try to figure outhow to get his phone back.
Darryl shook me by the shoulder, and I pulled my eye away from thecrack in the door.
"What's he doing?" Darryl whispered.
"I totaled his phone, but he's just staring at it now instead of movingon." It wasn't going to be easy to reboot that thing. Once the memory wastotally filled, it would have a hard time loading the code it needed to de-lete the bogus messages — and there was no bulk-erase for texts on hisphone, so he'd have to manually delete all of the thousands of messages.
31Darryl shoved me back and stuck his eye up to the door. A momentlater, his shoulders started to shake. I got scared, thinking he was panick-ing, but when he pulled back, I saw that he was laughing so hard thattears were streaming down his cheeks.
"Galvez just totally busted him for being in the halls during class andfor having his phone out — you should have seen her tear into him. Shewas really enjoying it."We shook hands solemnly and snuck back out of the corridor, downthe stairs, around the back, out the door, past the fence and out into theglorious sunlight of afternoon in the Mission. Valencia Street had neverlooked so good. I checked my watch and yelped.
"Let's move! The rest of the gang is meeting us at the cable-cars intwenty minutes!"Van spotted us first. She was blending in with a group of Korean tour-ists, which is one of her favorite ways of camouflaging herself when she'sditching school. Ever since the truancy moblog went live, our world isfull of nosy shopkeepers and pecksniffs who take it upon themselves tosnap our piccies and put them on the net where they can be perused byschool administrators.
She came out of the crowd and bounded toward us. Darryl has had athing for Van since forever, and she's sweet enough to pretend shedoesn't know it. She gave me a hug and then moved onto Darryl, givinghim a quick sisterly kiss on the cheek that made him go red to the tops ofhis ears.
The two of them made a funny pair: Darryl is a little on the heavy side,though he wears it well, and he's got a kind of pink complexion that goesred in the cheeks whenever he runs or gets excited. He's been able togrow a beard since we were 14, but thankfully he started shaving after abrief period known to our gang as "the Lincoln years." And he's tall.
Very, very tall. Like basketball player tall.
Meanwhile, Van is half a head shorter than me, and skinny, withstraight black hair that she wears in crazy, elaborate braids that she re-searches on the net. She's got pretty coppery skin and dark eyes, and sheloves big glass rings the size of radishes, which click and clack togetherwhen she dances.
"Where's Jolu?" she said.
32"How are you, Van?" Darryl asked in a choked voice. He always ran astep behind the conversation when it came to Van.
"I'm great, D. How's your every little thing?" Oh, she was a bad, badperson. Darryl nearly fainted.
Jolu saved him from social disgrace by showing up just then, in anoversize leather baseball jacket, sharp sneakers, and a meshback cap ad-vertising our favorite Mexican masked wrestler, El Santo Junior. Jolu isJose Luis Torrez, the completing member of our foursome. He went to asuper-strict Catholic school in the Outer Richmond, so it wasn't easy forhim to get out. But he always did: no one exfiltrated like our Jolu. Heliked his jacket because it hung down low — which was pretty stylish inparts of the city — and covered up all his Catholic school crap, whichwas like a bulls-eye for nosy jerks with the truancy moblog bookmarkedon their phones.
"Who's ready to go?" I asked, once we'd all said hello. I pulled out myphone and showed them the map I'd downloaded to it on the BART.
"Near as I can work out, we wanna go up to the Nikko again, then oneblock past it to O'Farrell, then left up toward Van Ness. Somewhere inthere we should find the wireless signal."Van made a face. "That's a nasty part of the Tenderloin." I couldn't ar-gue with her. That part of San Francisco is one of the weird bits — yougo in through the Hilton's front entrance and it's all touristy stuff like thecable-car turnaround and family restaurants. Go through to the otherside and you're in the 'Loin, where every tracked out transvestite hooker,hard-case pimp, hissing drug dealer and cracked up homeless person intown was concentrated. What they bought and sold, none of us were oldenough to be a part of (though there were plenty of hookers our age ply-ing their trade in the 'Loin.)"Look on the bright side," I said. "The only time you want to go uparound there is broad daylight. None of the other players are going to gonear it until tomorrow at the earliest. This is what we in the ARG busi-ness call a monster head start."Jolu grinned at me. "You make it sound like a good thing," he said.
"Beats eating uni," I said.
"We going to talk or we going to win?" Van said. After me, she washands-down the most hardcore player in our group. She took winningvery, very seriously.
33We struck out, four good friends, on our way to decode a clue, win thegame — and lose everything we cared about, forever.
The physical component of today's clue was a set of GPS coordinates— there were coordinates for all the major cities where Harajuku FunMadness was played — where we'd find a WiFi access-point's signal.
That signal was being deliberately jammed by another, nearby WiFipoint that was hidden so that it couldn't be spotted by conventionalwifinders, little key-fobs that told you when you were within range ofsomeone's open access-point, which you could use for free.
We'd have to track down the location of the "hidden" access point bymeasuring the strength of the "visible" one, finding the spot where it wasmost mysteriously weakest. There we'd find another clue — last time ithad been in the special of the day at Anzu, the swanky sushi restaurantin the Nikko hotel in the Tenderloin. The Nikko was owned by JapanAirlines, one of Harajuku Fun Madness's sponsors, and the staff had allmade a big fuss over us when we finally tracked down the clue. They'dgiven us bowls of miso soup and made us try uni, which is sushi madefrom sea urchin, with the texture of very runny cheese and a smell likevery runny dog-droppings. But it tasted really good. Or so Darryl toldme. I wasn't going to eat that stuff.
I picked up the WiFi signal with my phone's wifinder about threeblocks up O'Farrell, just before Hyde Street, in front of a dodgy "AsianMassage Parlor" with a red blinking CLOSED sign in the window. Thenetwork's name was HarajukuFM, so we knew we had the right spot.
"If it's in there, I'm not going," Darryl said.
"You all got your wifinders?" I said.
Darryl and Van had phones with built-in wifinders, while Jolu, beingtoo cool to carry a phone bigger than his pinky finger, had a separatelittle directional fob.
"OK, fan out and see what we see. You're looking for a sharp drop offin the signal that gets worse the more you move along it."I took a step backward and ended up standing on someone's toes. Afemale voice said "oof" and I spun around, worried that some crack-howas going to stab me for breaking her heels.
Instead, I found myself face to face with another kid my age. She had ashock of bright pink hair and a sharp, rodent-like face, with bigsunglasses that were practically air-force goggles. She was dressed in34striped tights beneath a black granny dress, with lots of little Japanesedecorer toys safety pinned to it — anime characters, old world leaders,emblems from foreign soda-pop.
She held up a camera and snapped a picture of me and my crew.
"Cheese," she said. "You're on candid snitch-cam.""No way," I said. "You wouldn't —""I will," she said. "I will send this photo to truant watch in thirtyseconds unless you four back off from this clue and let me and myfriends here run it down. You can come back in one hour and it'll be allyours. I think that's more than fair."I looked behind her and noticed three other girls in similar garb — onewith blue hair, one with green, and one with purple. "Who are you sup-posed to be, the Popsicle Squad?""We're the team that's going to kick your team's ass at Harajuku FunMadness," she said. "And I'm the one who's right this second about to up-load your photo and get you in so much trouble —"Behind me I felt Van start forward. Her all-girls school was notoriousfor its brawls, and I was pretty sure she was ready to knock this chick'sblock off.
Then the world changed forever.
We felt it first, that sickening lurch of the cement under your feet thatevery Californian knows instinctively — earthquake. My first inclination,as always, was to get away: "when in trouble or in doubt, run in circles,scream and shout." But the fact was, we were already in the safest placewe could be, not in a building that could fall in on us, not out toward themiddle of the road where bits of falling mortice could brain us.
Earthquakes are eerily quiet — at first, anyway — but this wasn'tquiet. This was loud, an incredible roaring sound that was louder thananything I'd ever heard before. The sound was so punishing it drove meto my knees, and I wasn't the only one. Darryl shook my arm and poin-ted over the buildings and we saw it then: a huge black cloud rising fromthe northeast, from the direction of the Bay.
There was another rumble, and the cloud of smoke spread out, thatspreading black shape we'd all grown up seeing in movies. Someone hadjust blown up something, in a big way.
There were more rumbles and more tremors. Heads appeared at win-dows up and down the street. We all looked at the mushroom cloud insilence.
Then the sirens started.
I'd heard sirens like these before — they test the civil defense sirens atnoon on Tuesdays. But I'd only heard them go off unscheduled in oldwar movies and video games, the kind where someone is bombingsomeone else from above. Air raid sirens. The wooooooo sound made itall less real.
"Report to shelters immediately." It was like the voice of God, comingfrom all places at once. There were speakers on some of the electricpoles, something I'd never noticed before, and they'd all switched on atonce.
"Report to shelters immediately." Shelters? We looked at each other inconfusion. What shelters? The cloud was rising steadily, spreading out.
Was it nuclear? Were we breathing in our last breaths?
The girl with the pink hair grabbed her friends and they tore assdownhill, back toward the BART station and the foot of the hills.
"REPORT TO SHELTERS IMMEDIATELY." There was screaming now,and a lot of running around. Tourists — you can always spot the tourists,they're the ones who think CALIFORNIA = WARM and spend their SanFrancisco holidays freezing in shorts and t-shirts — scattered in everydirection.
"We should go!" Darryl hollered in my ear, just barely audible over theshrieking of the sirens, which had been joined by traditional policesirens. A dozen SFPD cruisers screamed past us.
"REPORT TO SHELTERS IMMEDIATELY.""Down to the BART station," I hollered. My friends nodded. We closedranks and began to move quickly downhill.