Chapter 5

This chapter is dedicated to Secret Headquarters in Los Angeles, mydrop-dead all-time favorite comic store in the world. It's small and se-lective about what it stocks, and every time I walk in, I walk out withthree or four collections I'd never heard of under my arm. It's like theowners, Dave and David, have the uncanny ability to predict exactlywhat I'm looking for, and they lay it out for me seconds before I walk in-to the store. I discovered about three quarters of my favorite comics bywandering into SHQ, grabbing something interesting, sinking into oneof the comfy chairs, and finding myself transported to another world.
When my second story-collection, OVERCLOCKED, came out, theyworked with local illustrator Martin Cenreda to do a free mini-comicbased on Printcrime, the first story in the book. I left LA about a yearago, and of all the things I miss about it, Secret Headquarters is right atthe top of the list.
Secret Headquarters: 3817 W. Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA90026 +1 323 666 2228But it was Van, and she was crying, and hugging me so hard I couldn'tbreathe. I didn't care. I hugged her back, my face buried in her hair.
"You're OK!" she said.
"I'm OK," I managed.
She finally let go of me and another set of arms wrapped themselvesaround me. It was Jolu! They were both there. He whispered, "You'resafe, bro," in my ear and hugged me even tighter than Vanessa had.
When he let go, I looked around. "Where's Darryl?" I asked.
They both looked at each other. "Maybe he's still in the truck," Jolusaid.
We turned and looked at the truck at the alley's end. It was a nondes-cript white 18-wheeler. Someone had already brought the little folding63staircase inside. The rear lights glowed red, and the truck rolled back-wards towards us, emitting a steady eep, eep, eep.
"Wait!" I shouted as it accelerated towards us. "Wait! What aboutDarryl?" The truck drew closer. I kept shouting. "What about Darryl?"Jolu and Vanessa each had me by an arm and were dragging me away.
I struggled against them, shouting. The truck pulled out of the alley'smouth and reversed into the street and pointed itself downhill and droveaway. I tried to run after it, but Van and Jolu wouldn't let me go.
I sat down on the sidewalk and put my arms around my knees andcried. I cried and cried and cried, loud sobs of the sort I hadn't done sinceI was a little kid. They wouldn't stop coming. I couldn't stop shaking.
Vanessa and Jolu got me to my feet and moved me a little ways up thestreet. There was a Muni bus stop with a bench and they sat me on it.
They were both crying too, and we held each other for a while, and Iknew we were crying for Darryl, whom none of us ever expected to seeagain.
We were north of Chinatown, at the part where it starts to becomeNorth Beach, a neighborhood with a bunch of neon strip clubs and thelegendary City Lights counterculture bookstore, where the Beat poetrymovement had been founded back in the 1950s.
I knew this part of town well. My parents' favorite Italian restaurantwas here and they liked to take me here for big plates of linguine andhuge Italian ice-cream mountains with candied figs and lethal little es-pressos afterward.
Now it was a different place, a place where I was tasting freedom forthe first time in what seemed like an enternity.
We checked our pockets and found enough money to get a table at oneof the Italian restaurants, out on the sidewalk, under an awning. Thepretty waitress lighted a gas-heater with a barbeque lighter, took our or-ders and went inside. The sensation of giving orders, of controlling mydestiny, was the most amazing thing I'd ever felt.
"How long were we in there?" I asked.
"Six days," Vanessa said.
"I got five," Jolu said.
"I didn't count."64"What did they do to you?" Vanessa said. I didn't want to talk about it,but they were both looking at me. Once I started, I couldn't stop. I toldthem everything, even when I'd been forced to piss myself, and theytook it all in silently. I paused when the waitress delivered our sodas andwaited until she got out of earshot, then finished. In the telling, it re-ceded into the distance. By the end of it, I couldn't tell if I was embroid-ering the truth or if I was making it all seem less bad. My memoriesswam like little fish that I snatched at, and sometimes they wriggled outof my grasp.
Jolu shook his head. "They were hard on you, dude," he said. He toldus about his stay there. They'd questioned him, mostly about me, andhe'd kept on telling them the truth, sticking to a plain telling of the factsabout that day and about our friendship. They had gotten him to repeatit over and over again, but they hadn't played games with his head theway they had with me. He'd eaten his meals in a mess-hall with a bunchof other people, and been given time in a TV room where they wereshown last year's blockbusters on video.
Vanessa's story was only slightly different. After she'd gotten themangry by talking to me, they'd taken away her clothes and made herwear a set of orange prison overalls. She'd been left in her cell for twodays without contact, though she'd been fed regularly. But mostly it wasthe same as Jolu: the same questions, repeated again and again.
"They really hated you," Jolu said. "Really had it in for you. Why?"I couldn't imagine why. Then I remembered.
You can cooperate, or you can be very, very sorry.
"It was because I wouldn't unlock my phone for them, that first night.
That's why they singled me out." I couldn't believe it, but there was noother explanation. It had been sheer vindictiveness. My mind reeled atthe thought. They had done all that as a mere punishment for defyingtheir authority.
I had been scared. Now I was angry. "Those bastards," I said, softly.
"They did it to get back at me for mouthing off."Jolu swore and then Vanessa cut loose in Korean, something she onlydid when she was really, really angry.
"I'm going to get them," I whispered, staring at my soda. "I'm going toget them."Jolu shook his head. "You can't, you know. You can't fight back againstthat."65None of us much wanted to talk about revenge then. Instead, wetalked about what we would do next. We had to go home. Our phones'
batteries were dead and it had been years since this neighborhood hadany payphones. We just needed to go home. I even thought about takinga taxi, but there wasn't enough money between us to make that possible.
So we walked. On the corner, we pumped some quarters into a SanFrancisco Chronicle newspaper box and stopped to read the front sec-tion. It had been five days since the bombs went off, but it was still allover the front cover.
Severe haircut woman had talked about "the bridge" blowing up, andI'd just assumed that she was talking about the Golden Gate bridge, but Iwas wrong. The terrorists had blown up the Bay bridge.
"Why the hell would they blow up the Bay bridge?" I said. "TheGolden Gate is the one on all the postcards." Even if you've never been toSan Francisco, chances are you know what the Golden Gate looks like:
it's that big orange suspension bridge that swoops dramatically from theold military base called the Presidio to Sausalito, where all the cutesywine-country towns are with their scented candle shops and art galleries.
It's picturesque as hell, and it's practically the symbol for the state ofCalifornia. If you go to the Disneyland California Adventure park,there's a replica of it just past the gates, with a monorail running over it.
So naturally I assumed that if you were going to blow up a bridge inSan Francisco, that's the one you'd blow.
"They probably got scared off by all the cameras and stuff," Jolu said.
"The National Guard's always checking cars at both ends and there's allthose suicide fences and junk all along it." People have been jumping offthe Golden Gate since it opened in 1937 — they stopped counting afterthe thousandth suicide in 1995.
"Yeah," Vanessa said. "Plus the Bay Bridge actually goes somewhere."The Bay Bridge goes from downtown San Francisco to Oakland andthence to Berkeley, the East Bay townships that are home to many of thepeople who live and work in town. It's one of the only parts of the BayArea where a normal person can afford a house big enough to reallystretch out in, and there's also the university and a bunch of light in-dustry over there. The BART goes under the Bay and connects the twocities, too, but it's the Bay Bridge that sees most of the traffic. The GoldenGate was a nice bridge if you were a tourist or a rich retiree living out in66wine country, but it was mostly ornamental. The Bay Bridge is — was —San Francisco's work-horse bridge.
I thought about it for a minute. "You guys are right," I said. "But I don'tthink that's all of it. We keep acting like terrorists attack landmarks be-cause they hate landmarks. Terrorists don't hate landmarks or bridges orairplanes. They just want to screw stuff up and make people scared. Tomake terror. So of course they went after the Bay Bridge after the GoldenGate got all those cameras — after airplanes got all metal-detectored andX-rayed." I thought about it some more, staring blankly at the cars rollingdown the street, at the people walking down the sidewalks, at the city allaround me. "Terrorists don't hate airplanes or bridges. They love terror."It was so obvious I couldn't believe I'd never thought of it before. I guessthat being treated like a terrorist for a few days was enough to clarify mythinking.
The other two were staring at me. "I'm right, aren't I? All this crap, allthe X-rays and ID checks, they're all useless, aren't they?"They nodded slowly.
"Worse than useless," I said, my voice going up and cracking. "Becausethey ended up with us in prison, with Darryl —" I hadn't thought ofDarryl since we sat down and now it came back to me, my friend, miss-ing, disappeared. I stopped talking and ground my jaws together.
"We have to tell our parents," Jolu said.
"We should get a lawyer," Vanessa said.
I thought of telling my story. Of telling the world what had become ofme. Of the videos that would no doubt come out, of me weeping, re-duced to a groveling animal.
"We can't tell them anything," I said, without thinking.
"What do you mean?" Van said.
"We can't tell them anything," I repeated. "You heard her. If we talk,they'll come back for us. They'll do to us what they did to Darryl.""You're joking," Jolu said. "You want us to —""I want us to fight back," I said. "I want to stay free so that I can dothat. If we go out there and blab, they'll just say that we're kids, makingit up. We don't even know where we were held! No one will believe us.
Then, one day, they'll come for us.
"I'm telling my parents that I was in one of those camps on the otherside of the Bay. I came over to meet you guys there and we got stranded,67and just got loose today. They said in the papers that people were stillwandering home from them.""I can't do that," Vanessa said. "After what they did to you, how canyou even think of doing that?""It happened to me, that's the point. This is me and them, now. I'll beatthem, I'll get Darryl. I'm not going to take this lying down. But once ourparents are involved, that's it for us. No one will believe us and no onewill care. If we do it my way, people will care.""What's your way?" Jolu said. "What's your plan?""I don't know yet," I admitted. "Give me until tomorrow morning, giveme that, at least." I knew that once they'd kept it a secret for a day, itwould have to be a secret forever. Our parents would be even moreskeptical if we suddenly "remembered" that we'd been held in a secretprison instead of taken care of in a refugee camp.
Van and Jolu looked at each other.
"I'm just asking for a chance," I said. "We'll work out the story on theway, get it straight. Give me one day, just one day."The other two nodded glumly and we set off downhill again, headingback towards home. I lived on Potrero Hill, Vanessa lived in the NorthMission and Jolu lived in Noe Valley — three wildly different neighbor-hoods just a few minutes' walk from one another.
We turned onto Market Street and stopped dead. The street was barri-caded at every corner, the cross-streets reduced to a single lane, andparked down the whole length of Market Street were big, nondescript18-wheelers like the one that had carried us, hooded, away from theship's docks and to Chinatown.
Each one had three steel steps leading down from the back and theybuzzed with activity as soldiers, people in suits, and cops went in andout of them. The suits wore little badges on their lapels and the soldiersscanned them as they went in and out — wireless authorization badges.
As we walked past one, I got a look at it, and saw the familiar logo: De-partment of Homeland Security. The soldier saw me staring and staredback hard, glaring at me.
I got the message and moved on. I peeled away from the gang at VanNess. We clung to each other and cried and promised to call each other.
The walk back to Potrero Hill has an easy route and a hard route, thelatter taking you over some of the steepest hills in the city, the kind ofthing that you see car chases on in action movies, with cars catching air68as they soar over the zenith. I always take the hard way home. It's all res-idential streets, and the old Victorian houses they call "painted ladies" fortheir gaudy, elaborate paint-jobs, and front gardens with scented flowersand tall grasses. Housecats stare at you from hedges, and there arehardly any homeless.
It was so quiet on those streets that it made me wish I'd taken the otherroute, through the Mission, which is… raucous is probably the best wordfor it. Loud and vibrant. Lots of rowdy drunks and angry crack-headsand unconscious junkies, and also lots of families with strollers, oldladies gossiping on stoops, lowriders with boom-cars going thumpa-thumpa-thumpa down the streets. There were hipsters and mopey emoart-students and even a couple old-school punk-rockers, old guys withpot bellies bulging out beneath their Dead Kennedys shirts. Also dragqueens, angry gang kids, graffiti artists and bewildered gentrifiers tryingnot to get killed while their real-estate investments matured.
I went up Goat Hill and walked past Goat Hill Pizza, which made methink of the jail I'd been held in, and I had to sit down on the bench outfront of the restaurant until my shakes passed. Then I noticed the truckup the hill from me, a nondescript 18-wheeler with three metal stepscoming down from the back end. I got up and got moving. I felt the eyeswatching me from all directions.
I hurried the rest of the way home. I didn't look at the painted ladies orthe gardens or the housecats. I kept my eyes down.
Both my parents' cars were in the driveway, even though it was themiddle of the day. Of course. Dad works in the East Bay, so he'd be stuckat home while they worked on the bridge. Mom — well, who knew whyMom was home.
They were home for me.
Even before I'd finished unlocking the door it had been jerked out ofmy hand and flung wide. There were both of my parents, looking grayand haggard, bug-eyed and staring at me. We stood there in frozentableau for a moment, then they both rushed forward and dragged meinto the house, nearly tripping me up. They were both talking so loudand fast all I could hear was a wordless, roaring gabble and they bothhugged me and cried and I cried too and we just stood there like that inthe little foyer, crying and making almost-words until we ran out ofsteam and went into the kitchen.
I did what I always did when I came home: got myself a glass of waterfrom the filter in the fridge and dug a couple cookies out of the "biscuit69barrel" that mom's sister had sent us from England. The normalcy of thismade my heart stop hammering, my heart catching up with my brain,and soon we were all sitting at the table.
"Where have you been?" they both said, more or less in unison.
I had given this some thought on the way home. "I got trapped," I said.
"In Oakland. I was there with some friends, doing a project, and we wereall quarantined.""For five days?""Yeah," I said. "Yeah. It was really bad." I'd read about the quarantinesin the Chronicle and I cribbed shamelessly from the quotes they'd pub-lished. "Yeah. Everyone who got caught in the cloud. They thought wehad been attacked with some kind of super-bug and they packed us intoshipping containers in the docklands, like sardines. It was really hot andsticky. Not much food, either.""Christ," Dad said, his fists balling up on the table. Dad teaches inBerkeley three days a week, working with a few grad students in the lib-rary science program. The rest of the time he consults for clients in cityand down the Peninsula, third-wave dotcoms that are doing variousthings with archives. He's a mild-mannered librarian by profession, buthe'd been a real radical in the sixties and wrestled a little in high school.
I'd seen him get crazy angry now and again — I'd even made him thatangry now and again — and he could seriously lose it when he wasHulking out. He once threw a swing-set from Ikea across my granddad'swhole lawn when it fell apart for the fiftieth time while he was assem-bling it.
"Barbarians," Mom said. She's been living in America since she was ateenager, but she still comes over all British when she encounters Amer-ican cops, health-care, airport security or homelessness. Then the word is"barbarians," and her accent comes back strong. We'd been to Londontwice to see her family and I can't say as it felt any more civilized thanSan Francisco, just more cramped.
"But they let us go, and ferried us over today." I was improvising now.
"Are you hurt?" Mom said. "Hungry?""Sleepy?""Yeah, a little of all that. Also Dopey, Doc, Sneezy and Bashful." Wehad a family tradition of Seven Dwarfs jokes. They both smiled a little,but their eyes were still wet. I felt really bad for them. They must have70been out of their minds with worry. I was glad for a chance to change thesubject. "I'd totally love to eat.""I'll order a pizza from Goat Hill," Dad said.
"No, not that," I said. They both looked at me like I'd sprouted anten-nae. I normally have a thing about Goat Hill Pizza — as in, I can nor-mally eat it like a goldfish eats his food, gobbling until it either runs outor I pop. I tried to smile. "I just don't feel like pizza," I said, lamely. "Let'sorder some curry, OK?" Thank heaven that San Francisco is take-outcentral.
Mom went to the drawer of take-out menus (more normalcy, feelinglike a drink of water on a dry, sore throat) and riffled through them. Wespent a couple of distracting minutes going through the menu from thehalal Pakistani place on Valencia. I settled on a mixed tandoori grill andcreamed spinach with farmer's cheese, a salted mango lassi (much betterthan it sounds) and little fried pastries in sugar syrup.
Once the food was ordered, the questions started again. They'd heardfrom Van's, Jolu's and Darryl's families (of course) and had tried to re-port us missing. The police were taking names, but there were so many"displaced persons" that they weren't going to open files on anyone un-less they were still missing after seven days.
Meanwhile, millions of have-you-seen sites had popped up on the net.
A couple of the sites were old MySpace clones that had run out of moneyand saw a new lease on life from all the attention. After all, some venturecapitalists had missing family in the Bay Area. Maybe if they were re-covered, the site would attract some new investment. I grabbed dad'slaptop and looked through them. They were plastered with advertising,of course, and pictures of missing people, mostly grad photos, weddingpictures and that sort of thing. It was pretty ghoulish.
I found my pic and saw that it was linked to Van's, Jolu's, and Darryl's.
There was a little form for marking people found and another one forwriting up notes about other missing people. I filled in the fields for meand Jolu and Van, and left Darryl blank.
"You forgot Darryl," Dad said. He didn't like Darryl much — once he'dfigured out that a couple inches were missing out of one of the bottles inhis liquor cabinet, and to my enduring shame I'd blamed it on Darryl. Intruth, of course, it had been both of us, just fooling around, trying outvodka-and-Cokes during an all-night gaming session.
"He wasn't with us," I said. The lie tasted bitter in my mouth.
71"Oh my God," my mom said. She squeezed her hands together. "Wejust assumed when you came home that you'd all been together.""No," I said, the lie growing. "No, he was supposed to meet us but wenever met up. He's probably just stuck over in Berkeley. He was going totake the BART over."Mom made a whimpering sound. Dad shook his head and closed hiseyes. "Don't you know about the BART?" he said.
I shook my head. I could see where this was going. I felt like theground was rushing up to me.
"They blew it up," Dad said. "The bastards blew it up at the same timeas the bridge."That hadn't been on the front page of the Chronicle, but then, a BARTblowout under the water wouldn't be nearly as picturesque as the im-ages of the bridge hanging in tatters and pieces over the Bay. The BARTtunnel from the Embarcadero in San Francisco to the West Oakland sta-tion was submerged.
I went back to Dad's computer and surfed the headlines. No one wassure, but the body count was in the thousands. Between the cars thatplummeted 191 feet to the sea and the people drowned in the trains, thedeaths were mounting. One reporter claimed to have interviewed an"identity counterfeiter" who'd helped "dozens" of people walk awayfrom their old lives by simply vanishing after the attacks, getting new IDmade up, and slipping away from bad marriages, bad debts and badlives.
Dad actually got tears in his eyes, and Mom was openly crying. Theyeach hugged me again, patting me with their hands as if to assure them-selves that I was really there. They kept telling me they loved me. I toldthem I loved them too.
We had a weepy dinner and Mom and Dad had each had a coupleglasses of wine, which was a lot for them. I told them that I was gettingsleepy, which was true, and mooched up to my room. I wasn't going tobed, though. I needed to get online and find out what was going on. Ineeded to talk to Jolu and Vanessa. I needed to get working on findingDarryl.
I crept up to my room and opened the door. I hadn't seen my old bedin what felt like a thousand years. I lay down on it and reached over tomy bedstand to grab my laptop. I must have not plugged it in all the72way — the electrical adapter needed to be jiggled just right — so it hadslowly discharged while I was away. I plugged it back in and gave it aminute or two to charge up before trying to power it up again. I used thetime to get undressed and throw my clothes in the trash — I neverwanted to see them again — and put on a clean pair of boxers and afresh t-shirt. The fresh-laundered clothes, straight out of my drawers, feltso familiar and comfortable, like getting hugged by my parents.
I powered up my laptop and punched a bunch of pillows into placebehind me at the top of the bed. I scooched back and opened mycomputer's lid and settled it onto my thighs. It was still booting, andman, those icons creeping across the screen looked good. It came all theway up and then it started giving me more low-power warnings. Ichecked the power-cable again and wiggled it and they went away. Thepower-jack was really flaking out.
In fact, it was so bad that I couldn't actually get anything done. Everytime I took my hand off the power-cable it lost contact and the computerstarted to complain about its battery. I took a closer look at it.
The whole case of my computer was slightly misaligned, the seamsplit in an angular gape that started narrow and widened toward theback.
Sometimes you look at a piece of equipment and discover somethinglike this and you wonder, "Was it always like that?" Maybe you just nev-er noticed.
But with my laptop, that wasn't possible. You see, I built it. After theBoard of Ed issued us all with SchoolBooks, there was no way my par-ents were going to buy me a computer of my own, even though technic-ally the SchoolBook didn't belong to me, and I wasn't supposed to installsoftware on it or mod it.
I had some money saved — odd jobs, Christmases and birthdays, alittle bit of judicious ebaying. Put it all together and I had enough moneyto buy a totally crappy, five-year-old machine.
So Darryl and I built one instead. You can buy laptop cases just likeyou can buy cases for desktop PCs, though they're a little more special-ized than plain old PCs. I'd built a couple PCs with Darryl over theyears, scavenging parts from Craigslist and garage sales and orderingstuff from cheap cheap Taiwanese vendors we found on the net. Ifigured that building a laptop would be the best way to get the power Iwanted at the price I could afford.
73To build your own laptop, you start by ordering a "barebook" — a ma-chine with just a little hardware in it and all the right slots. The goodnews was, once I was done, I had a machine that was a whole poundlighter than the Dell I'd had my eye on, ran faster, and cost a third ofwhat I would have paid Dell. The bad news was that assembling alaptop is like building one of those ships in a bottle. It's all finicky workwith tweezers and magnifying glasses, trying to get everything to fit inthat little case. Unlike a full-sized PC — which is mostly air — every cu-bic millimeter of space in a laptop is spoken for. Every time I thought Ihad it, I'd go to screw the thing back together and find that somethingwas keeping the case from closing all the way, and it'd be back to thedrawing board.
So I knew exactly how the seam on my laptop was supposed to lookwhen the thing was closed, and it was not supposed to look like this.
I kept jiggling the power-adapter, but it was hopeless. There was noway I was going to get the thing to boot without taking it apart. Igroaned and put it beside the bed. I'd deal with it in the morning.
That was the theory, anyway. Two hours later, I was still staring at theceiling, playing back movies in my head of what they'd done to me, whatI should have done, all regrets and esprit d'escalier.
I rolled out of bed. It had gone midnight and I'd heard my parents hitthe sack at eleven. I grabbed the laptop and cleared some space on mydesk and clipped the little LED lamps to the temples of my magnifyingglasses and pulled out a set of little precision screwdrivers. A minutelater, I had the case open and the keyboard removed and I was staring atthe guts of my laptop. I got a can of compressed air and blew out thedust that the fan had sucked in and looked things over.
Something wasn't right. I couldn't put my finger on it, but then it hadbeen months since I'd had the lid off this thing. Luckily, the third time I'dhad to open it up and struggle to close it again, I'd gotten smart: I'd takena photo of the guts with everything in place. I hadn't been totally smart:
at first, I'd just left that pic on my hard drive, and naturally I couldn't getto it when I had the laptop in parts. But then I'd printed it out and stuckit in my messy drawer of papers, the dead-tree graveyard where I keptall the warranty cards and pin-out diagrams. I shuffled them — theyseemed messier than I remembered — and brought out my photo. I set itdown next to the computer and kind of unfocused my eyes, trying tofind things that looked out of place.
74Then I spotted it. The ribbon cable that connected the keyboard to thelogic-board wasn't connected right. That was a weird one. There was notorque on that part, nothing to dislodge it in the course of normal opera-tions. I tried to press it back down again and discovered that the plugwasn't just badly mounted — there was something between it and theboard. I tweezed it out and shone my light on it.
There was something new in my keyboard. It was a little chunk ofhardware, only a sixteenth of an inch thick, with no markings. The key-board was plugged into it, and it was plugged into the board. It otherwords, it was perfectly situated to capture all the keystrokes I madewhile I typed on my machine.
It was a bug.
My heart thudded in my ears. It was dark and quiet in the house, but itwasn't a comforting dark. There were eyes out there, eyes and ears, andthey were watching me. Surveilling me. The surveillance I faced atschool had followed me home, but this time, it wasn't just the Board ofEducation looking over my shoulder: the Department of Homeland Se-curity had joined them.
I almost took the bug out. Then I figured that who ever put it therewould know that it was gone. I left it in. It made me sick to do it.
I looked around for more tampering. I couldn't find any, but did thatmean there hadn't been any? Someone had broken into my room andplanted this device — had disassembled my laptop and reassembled it.
There were lots of other ways to wiretap a computer. I could never findthem all.
I put the machine together with numb fingers. This time, the casewouldn't snap shut just right, but the power-cable stayed in. I booted itup and set my fingers on the keyboard, thinking that I would run somediagnostics and see what was what.
But I couldn't do it.
Hell, maybe my room was wiretapped. Maybe there was a cameraspying on me now.
I'd been feeling paranoid when I got home. Now I was nearly out ofmy skin. It felt like I was back in jail, back in the interrogation room,stalked by entities who had me utterly in their power. It made me wantto cry.
Only one thing for it.
75I went into the bathroom and took off the toilet-paper roll and re-placed it with a fresh one. Luckily, it was almost empty already. I un-rolled the rest of the paper and dug through my parts box until I found alittle plastic envelope full of ultra-bright white LEDs I'd scavenged out ofa dead bike-lamp. I punched their leads through the cardboard tubecarefully, using a pin to make the holes, then got out some wire and con-nected them all in series with little metal clips. I twisted the wires intothe leads for a nine-volt battery and connected the battery. Now I had atube ringed with ultra-bright, directional LEDs, and I could hold it up tomy eye and look through it.
I'd built one of these last year as a science fair project and had beenthrown out of the fair once I showed that there were hidden cameras inhalf the classrooms at Chavez High. Pinhead video-cameras cost lessthan a good restaurant dinner these days, so they're showing up every-where. Sneaky store clerks put them in changing rooms or tanningsalons and get pervy with the hidden footage they get from their custom-ers — sometimes they just put it on the net. Knowing how to turn atoilet-paper roll and three bucks' worth of parts into a camera-detector isjust good sense.
This is the simplest way to catch a spy-cam. They have tiny lenses, butthey reflect light like the dickens. It works best in a dim room: starethrough the tube and slowly scan all the walls and other places someonemight have put a camera until you see the glint of a reflection. If the re-flection stays still as you move around, that's a lens.
There wasn't a camera in my room — not one I could detect, anyway.
There might have been audio bugs, of course. Or better cameras. Ornothing at all. Can you blame me for feeling paranoid?
I loved that laptop. I called it the Salmagundi, which means anythingmade out of spare parts.
Once you get to naming your laptop, you know that you're really hav-ing a deep relationship with it. Now, though, I felt like I didn't want toever touch it again. I wanted to throw it out the window. Who knewwhat they'd done to it? Who knew how it had been tapped?
I put it in a drawer with the lid shut and looked at the ceiling. It waslate and I should be in bed. There was no way I was going to sleep now,though. I was tapped. Everyone might be tapped. The world hadchanged forever.
"I'll find a way to get them," I said. It was a vow, I knew it when Iheard it, though I'd never made a vow before.
76I couldn't sleep after that. And besides, I had an idea.
Somewhere in my closet was a shrink-wrapped box containing onestill-sealed, mint-in-package Xbox Universal. Every Xbox has been soldway below cost — Microsoft makes most of its money charging gamescompanies money for the right to put out Xbox games — but the Univer-sal was the first Xbox that Microsoft decided to give away entirely forfree.
Last Christmas season, there'd been poor losers on every cornerdressed as warriors from the Halo series, handing out bags of thesegame-machines as fast as they could. I guess it worked — everyone saysthey sold a whole butt-load of games. Naturally, there were counter-measures to make sure you only played games from companies that hadbought licenses from Microsoft to make them.
Hackers blow through those countermeasures. The Xbox was crackedby a kid from MIT who wrote a best-selling book about it, and then the360 went down, and then the short-lived Xbox Portable (which we allcalled the "luggable" — it weighed three pounds!) succumbed. TheUniversal was supposed to be totally bulletproof. The high school kidswho broke it were Brazilian Linux hackers who lived in a favela — a kindof squatter's slum.
Never underestimate the determination of a kid who is time-rich andcash-poor.
Once the Brazilians published their crack, we all went nuts on it. Soonthere were dozens of alternate operating systems for the Xbox Universal.
My favorite was ParanoidXbox, a flavor of Paranoid Linux. ParanoidLinux is an operating system that assumes that its operator is under as-sault from the government (it was intended for use by Chinese and Syri-an dissidents), and it does everything it can to keep your communica-tions and documents a secret. It even throws up a bunch of "chaff" com-munications that are supposed to disguise the fact that you're doing any-thing covert. So while you're receiving a political message one characterat a time, ParanoidLinux is pretending to surf the Web and fill in ques-tionnaires and flirt in chat-rooms. Meanwhile, one in every five hundredcharacters you receive is your real message, a needle buried in a hugehaystack.
I'd burned a ParanoidXbox DVD when they first appeared, but I'dnever gotten around to unpacking the Xbox in my closet, finding a TV tohook it up to and so on. My room is crowded enough as it is without let-ting Microsoft crashware eat up valuable workspace.
77Tonight, I'd make the sacrifice. It took about twenty minutes to get upand running. Not having a TV was the hardest part, but eventually I re-membered that I had a little overhead LCD projector that had standardTV RCA connectors on the back. I connected it to the Xbox and shone iton the back of my door and got ParanoidLinux installed.
Now I was up and running, and ParanoidLinux was looking for otherXbox Universals to talk to. Every Xbox Universal comes with built-inwireless for multiplayer gaming. You can connect to your neighbors onthe wireless link and to the Internet, if you have a wireless Internet con-nection. I found three different sets of neighbors in range. Two of themhad their Xbox Universals also connected to the Internet. ParanoidXboxloved that configuration: it could siphon off some of my neighbors' Inter-net connections and use them to get online through the gaming network.
The neighbors would never miss the packets: they were paying for flat-rate Internet connections, and they weren't exactly doing a lot of surfingat 2AM.
The best part of all this is how it made me feel: in control. My techno-logy was working for me, serving me, protecting me. It wasn't spying onme. This is why I loved technology: if you used it right, it could give youpower and privacy.
My brain was really going now, running like 60. There were lots ofreasons to run ParanoidXbox — the best one was that anyone couldwrite games for it. Already there was a port of MAME, the Multiple Ar-cade Machine Emulator, so you could play practically any game that hadever been written, all the way back to Pong — games for the Apple ][+and games for the Colecovision, games for the NES and the Dreamcast,and so on.
Even better were all the cool multiplayer games being built specificallyfor ParanoidXbox — totally free hobbyist games that anyone could run.
When you combined it all, you had a free console full of free games thatcould get you free Internet access.
And the best part — as far as I was concerned — was that Para-noidXbox was paranoid. Every bit that went over the air was scrambled towithin an inch of its life. You could wiretap it all you wanted, but you'dnever figure out who was talking, what they were talking about, or whothey were talking to. Anonymous web, email and IM. Just what I needed.
All I had to do now was convince everyone I knew to use it too.