Chapter 9

This chapter is dedicated to Compass Books/Books Inc, the oldest inde-pendent bookstore in the western USA. They've got stores up and downCalifornia, in San Francisco, Burlingame, Mountain View and PaloAlto, but coolest of all is that they run a killer bookstore in the middle ofDisneyland's Downtown Disney in Anaheim. I'm a stone Disney parkfreak (see my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom if youdon't believe it), and every time I've lived in California, I've bought my-self an annual Disneyland pass, and on practically every visit, I drop byCompass Books in Downtown Disney. They stock a brilliant selection ofunauthorized (and even critical) books about Disney, as well as a greatvariety of kids books and science fiction, and the cafe next door makes amean cappuccino.
Compass Books/Books IncHe was so angry I thought he was going to pop. You know I said I'donly seen him lose his cool rarely? That night, he lost it more than heever had.
"You wouldn't believe it. This cop, he was like eighteen years old andhe kept saying, 'But sir, why were you in Berkeley yesterday if your cli-ent is in Mountain View?' I kept explaining to him that I teach at Berke-ley and then he'd say, 'I thought you were a consultant,' and we'd startover again. It was like some kind of sitcom where the cops have beentaken over by the stupidity ray.
"What's worse was he kept insisting that I'd been in Berkeley today aswell, and I kept saying no, I hadn't been, and he said I had been. Then heshowed me my FasTrak billing and it said I'd driven the San Mateobridge three times that day!
"That's not all," he said, and drew in a breath that let me know he wasreally steamed. "They had information about where I'd been, places thatdidn't have a toll plaza. They'd been polling my pass just on the street, at114random. And it was wrong! Holy crap, I mean, they're spying on us alland they're not even competent!"I'd drifted down into the kitchen as he railed there, and now I waswatching him from the doorway. Mom met my eye and we both raisedour eyebrows as if to say, Who's going to say 'I told you so' to him? I nod-ded at her. She could use her spousular powers to nullify his rage in away that was out of my reach as a mere filial unit.
"Drew," she said, and grabbed him by the arm to make him stop stalk-ing 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 andlevel. 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. "Allright," he said at last. "You're right. I was talking about competent sur-veillance. These guys were total amateurs. I'm sorry, son," he said. "Youwere right. That was ridiculous." He stuck his hand out and shook myhand, then gave me a firm, unexpected hug.
"God, what are we doing to this country, Marcus? Your generation de-serves to inherit something better than this." When he let me go, I couldsee 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 agood multiplayer thing, a clockwork pirate game where you had to questevery day or two to wind up your whole crew's mainsprings before youcould go plundering and pillaging again. It was the kind of game I hatedbut couldn't stop playing: lots of repetitive quests that weren't all thatsatisfying to complete, a little bit of player-versus-player combat(scrapping to see who would captain the ship) and not that many coolpuzzles that you had to figure out. Mostly, playing this kind of gamemade me homesick for Harajuku Fun Madness, which balanced out run-ning around in the real world, figuring out online puzzles, and strategiz-ing 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 taxdollars 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 himnow, miserable and broken, I wondered if it was better to be clear-eyedand hopeless or to live in a fool's paradise. That shame — the shame I'd115felt 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, andhe'd wound down while I'd been offline. I had to IM all the other playerson my ship until I found one willing to wind me up. That kept me occu-pied. I liked it, actually. There was something magic about a totalstranger doing you a favor. And since it was the Xnet, I knew that all thestrangers were friends, in some sense.
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Where u located?
The character who wound me up was called Lizanator, and it was fe-male, though that didn't mean that it was a girl. Guys had some weirdaffinity for playing female characters.
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San FranciscoI said.
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No stupe, where you located in San Fran?
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Why, you a pervert?
That usually shut down that line of conversation. Of course everygamespace 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 tentimes.
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Mission? Potrero Hill? Noe? East Bay?
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Just wind me up k thx?
She stopped winding.
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You scared?
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Safe — why do you care?
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116Just curiousI was getting a bad vibe off her. She was clearly more than just curi-ous. Call it paranoia. I logged off and shut down my Xbox.
Dad looked at me over the table the next morning and said, "It lookslike it's going to get better, at least." He handed me a copy of the Chron-icle open to the third page.
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A Department of Homeland Security spokesman has confirmed thatthe San Francisco office has requested a 300 percent budget and person-nel increase from DCWhat?
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Major General Graeme Sutherland, the commanding officer for North-ern California DHS operations, confirmed the request at a press confer-ence yesterday, noting that a spike in suspicious activity in the Bay Areaprompted the request. "We are tracking a spike in underground chatterand activity and believe that saboteurs are deliberately manufacturingfalse security alerts to undermine our efforts."My eyes crossed. No freaking way.
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"These false alarms are potentially 'radar chaff' intended to disguisereal attacks. The only effective way of combatting them is to step upstaffing 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 enfor-cers, brought in to make up for my own stupid ideas. Van was right. Themore I fought them, the worse it was going to get.
Dad pointed at the paper. "These guys may be fools, but they're meth-odical fools. They'll just keep throwing resources at this problem untilthey solve it. It's tractable, you know. Mining all the data in the city, fol-lowing up on every lead. They'll catch the terrorists."I lost it. "Dad! Are you listening to yourself? They're talking about in-vestigating practically every person in the city of San Francisco!"117"Yeah," he said, "that's right. They'll catch every alimony cheat, everydope dealer, every dirt-bag and every terrorist. You just wait. This couldbe the best thing that ever happened to this country.""Tell me you're joking," I said. "I beg you. You think that that's whatthey intended when they wrote the Constitution? What about the Bill ofRights?""The Bill of Rights was written before data-mining," he said. He wasawesomely serene, convinced of his rightness. "The right to freedom ofassociation is fine, but why shouldn't the cops be allowed to mine yoursocial network to figure out if you're hanging out with gangbangers andterrorists?""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 incon-veniencing 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 wereready to go nuclear on the cops for pulling you over —""Don't use that tone with me, Marcus. What's happened since lastnight is that I've had the chance to think it over and to read this." Herattled his paper. "The reason they caught me is that the bad guys areactively jamming them. They need to adjust their techniques to over-come the jamming. But they'll get there. Meanwhile the occasional roadstop is a small price to pay. This isn't the time to be playing lawyer aboutthe Bill of Rights. This is the time to make some sacrifices to keep our citysafe."I couldn't finish my toast. I put the plate in the dishwasher and left forschool. 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-inshow on KQED and told them that the police were wasting their time,that we could monkeywrench the system faster than they could untangleit. The recording was a top Xnet download that night.
118"This is California Live and we're talking to an anonymous caller at apayphone in San Francisco. He has his own information about the slow-downs we've been facing around town this week. Caller, you're on theair.""Yeah, yo, this is just the beginning, you know? I mean, like, we're justgetting started. Let them hire a billion pigs and put a checkpoint onevery 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 upthe system because we hate the Homeland Security, and because we loveour city. Terrorists? I can't even spell jihad. Peace out."He sounded like an idiot. Not just the incoherent words, but also hisgloating tone. He sounded like a kid who was indecently proud of him-self. He was a kid who was indecently proud of himself.
The Xnet flamed out over this. Lots of people thought he was an idiotfor calling in, while others thought he was a hero. I worried that therewas probably a camera aimed at the payphone he'd used. Or an arphidreader that might have sniffed his Fast Pass. I hoped he'd had the smartsto wipe his fingerprints off the quarter, keep his hood up, and leave allhis arphids at home. But I doubted it. I wondered if he'd get a knock onthe door sometime soon.
The way I knew when something big had happened on Xnet was thatI'd suddenly get a million emails from people who wanted M1k3y toknow 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 anonymousblogs that were based on the Freenet document publishing system thatwas also used by Chinese democracy advocates.
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Close call>
We were jamming at the Embarcadero tonite and goofing around giv-ing everyone a new car key or door key or Fast Pass or FasTrak, tossingaround a little fake gunpowder. There were cops everywhere but wewere smarter then them; we're there pretty much every night and wenever get caught.
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So we got caught tonight. It was a stupid mistake we got sloppy wegot busted. It was an undercover who caught my pal and then got the119rest of us. They'd been watching the crowd for a long time and they hadone of those trucks nearby and they took four of us in but missed therest.
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The truck was JAMMED like a can of sardines with every kind of per-son, old young black white rich poor all suspects, and there were twocops trying to ask us questions and the undercovers kept bringing inmore of us. Most people were trying to get to the front of the line to getthrough questioning so we kept on moving back and it was like hours inthere and really hot and it was getting more crowded not less.
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At like 8PM they changed shifts and two new cops came in andbawled out the two cops who were there all like wtf? aren't you doinganything here. They had a real fight and then the two old cops left andthe new cops sat down at their desks and whispered to each other for awhile.
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Then one cop stood up and started shouting EVERYONE JUST GOHOME JESUS CHRIST WE'VE GOT BETTER THINGS TO DO THANBOTHER YOU WITH MORE QUESTIONS IF YOU'VE DONESOMETHING WRONG JUST DON'T DO IT AGAIN AND LET THIS BEA WARNING TO YOU ALL.
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A bunch of the suits got really pissed which was HILARIOUS becauseI mean ten minutes before they were buggin about being held there andnow they were wicked pissed about being let go, like make up yourminds!
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We split fast though and got out and came home to write this. Thereare undercovers everywhere, believe. If you're jamming, be open-eyedand get ready to run when problems happen. If you get caught try towait it out they're so busy they'll maybe just let you go.
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We made them that busy! All those people in that truck were there be-cause we'd jammed them. So jam on!
I felt like I was going to throw up. Those four people — kids I'd nevermet — they nearly went away forever because of something I'd started.
120Because of something I'd told them to do. I was no better than aterrorist.
The DHS got their budget requisition approved. The President wenton TV with the Governor to tell us that no price was too high for secur-ity. We had to watch it the next day in school at assembly. My Dadcheered. He'd hated the President since the day he was elected, saying hewasn't any better than the last guy and the last guy had been a completedisaster, but now all he could do was talk about how decisive and dy-namic the new guy was.
"You have to take it easy on your father," Mom said to me one nightafter I got home from school. She'd been working from home as much aspossible. Mom's a freelance relocation specialist who helps British peopleget settled in in San Francisco. The UK High Commission pays her to an-swer emails from mystified British people across the country who aretotally confused by how freaky we Americans are. She explains Americ-ans for a living, and she said that these days it was better to do that fromhome, where she didn't have to actually see any Americans or talk tothem.
I don't have any illusions about Britain. America may be willing totrash its Constitution every time some Jihadist looks cross-eyed at us, butas I learned in my ninth-grade Social Studies independent project, theBrits don't even have a Constitution. They've got laws there that wouldcurl the hair on your toes: they can put you in jail for an entire year ifthey're really sure that you're a terrorist but don't have enough evidenceto prove it. Now, how sure can they be if they don't have enough evid-ence to prove it? How'd they get that sure? Did they see you committingterrorist 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 walkingaround the streets. Every license plate is photographed at every corner inthe country. Everyone from the banks to the public transit company isenthusiastic about tracking you and snitching on you if they think you'reremotely suspicious.
But Mom didn't see it that way. She'd left Britain halfway throughhigh school and she'd never felt at home here, no matter that she'd mar-ried a boy from Petaluma and raised a son here. To her, this was alwaysthe land of barbarians, and Britain would always be home.
121"Mom, he's just wrong. You of all people should know that.
Everything that makes this country great is being flushed down the toiletand he's going along with it. Have you noticed that they haven't caughtany terrorists? Dad's all like, 'We need to be safe,' but he needs to knowthat 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 hap-pening to this country. But your father is —" She broke off. "When youdidn't come home after the attacks, he thought —"She got up and made herself a cup of tea, something she did whenevershe was uncomfortable or disconcerted.
"Marcus," she said. "Marcus, we thought you were dead. Do you un-derstand that? We were mourning you for days. We were imagining youblown to bits, at the bottom of the ocean. Dead because some bastard de-cided 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 es-timate — and practically everyone knew someone who didn't comehome that day. There were two people from my school who haddisappeared.
"Your father was ready to kill someone. Anyone. He was out of hismind. 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 curseand curse. Vile words, words I'd never heard him say. One day — thethird day — someone called and he was sure it was you, but it was awrong number and he threw the phone so hard it disintegrated intothousands of pieces." I'd wondered about the new kitchen phone.
"Something broke in your father. He loves you. We both love you. Youare 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 forall that time? Do you remember?"I nodded silently.
"We were ready to get a divorce, Marcus. Oh, it doesn't matter whyanymore. It was just a bad patch, the kind of thing that happens whenpeople who love each other stop paying attention for a few years. Hecame and got me and convinced me to come back for you. We couldn'tbear the thought of doing that to you. We fell in love again for you.
We're together today because of you."122I had a lump in my throat. I'd never known this. No one had ever toldme.
"So your father is having a hard time right now. He's not in his rightmind. It's going to take some time before he comes back to us, before he'sthe 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 asyoung, pale, rosy-cheeked and cheerful, peering shrewdly through hermetal-rim glasses. Now she looked a little like an old woman. I had donethat to her. The terrorists had done that to her. The Department ofHomeland Security had done that to her. In a weird way, we were all onthe same side, and Mom and Dad and all those people we'd spoofedwere on the other side.
I couldn't sleep that night. Mom's words kept running through myhead. 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 hewas all wound up over the latest news, that Al Qaeda was definitely re-sponsible for the bombing. Six different terrorist groups had claimed re-sponsibility for the attack, but only Al Qaeda's Internet video disclosedinformation 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 topicwas sex problems, with this gay guy who I normally loved to listen to, hewould give people such raw advice, but good advice, and he was reallyfunny and campy.
Tonight I couldn't laugh. Most of the callers wanted to ask what to doabout the fact that they were having a hard time getting busy with theirpartners ever since the attack. Even on sex-talk radio, I couldn't get awayfrom the topic.
I switched the radio off and heard a purring engine on the streetbelow.
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 over-looks the whole Mission, the other looks out into the street in front of ourplace. There were often cars cruising at all hours of the night, but therewas something different about this engine noise.
I went to the street-window and pulled up my blinds. Down on thestreet below me was a white, unmarked van whose roof was festooned123with radio antennas, more antennas than I'd ever seen on a car. It wascruising very slowly down the street, a little dish on top spinning aroundand around.
As I watched, the van stopped and one of the back doors poppedopen. A guy in a DHS uniform — I could spot one from a hundred yardsnow — stepped out into the street. He had some kind of handhelddevice, and its blue glow lit his face. He paced back and forth, first scout-ing 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 letgo of the blinds and dove across my room for my Xbox. I'd left it upwhile I downloaded some cool animations one of the Xnetters had madeof the President's no-price-too-high speech. I yanked the plug out of thewall, then scurried back to the window and cracked the blind a fractionof an inch.
The guy was looking down into his wifinder again, walking back andforth in front of our house. A moment later, he got back into his van anddrove away.
I got out my camera and took as many pictures as I could of the vanand its antennas. Then I opened them in a free image-editor called TheGIMP and edited out everything from the photo except the van, erasingmy street and anything that might identify me.
I posted them to Xnet and wrote down everything I could about thevans. 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 playerseven at this hour. The real name for wind-up pirates was ClockworkPlunder, and it was a hobbyist project that had been created by teenageddeath-metal freaks from Finland. It was totally free to play, and offeredjust as much fun as any of the $15/month services like Ender's Universeand Middle Earth Quest and Discworld Dungeons.
I logged back in and there I was, still on the deck of the Zombie Char-ger, waiting for someone to wind me up. I hated this part of the game.
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Hey youI typed to a passing pirate.
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124Wind me up?
He paused and looked at me.
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y should i?
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We're on the same team. Plus you get experience points.
What a jerk.
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Where are you located?
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San FranciscoThis was starting to feel familiar.
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Where in San Francisco?
I logged out. There was something weird going on in the game. Ijumped onto the livejournals and began to crawl from blog to blog. I gotthrough half a dozen before I found something that froze my blood.
Livejournallers love quizzes. What kind of hobbit are you? Are you agreat lover? What planet are you most like? Which character from somemovie are you? What's your emotional type? They fill them in and theirfriends fill them in and everyone compares their results. Harmless fun.
But the quiz that had taken over the blogs of the Xnet that night waswhat 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 forschools and neighborhoods, and made lame recommendations for placesto buy pizza and stuff.
But look at those questions. Think about my answers:
? Male? 17? Chavez High125? Potrero HillThere were only two people in my whole school who matched thatprofile. Most schools it would be the same. If you wanted to figure outwho the Xnetters were, you could use these quizzes to find them all.
That was bad enough, but what was worse what what it implied:
someone from the DHS was using the Xnet to get at us. The Xnet wascompromised by the DHS.
We had spies in our midst.
I'd given Xnet discs to hundreds of people, and they'd done the same. Iknew the people I gave the discs to pretty well. Some of them I knewvery well. I've lived in the same house all my life and I've made hun-dreds and hundreds of friends over the years, from people who went todaycare with me to people I played soccer with, people who LARPedwith me, people I met clubbing, people I knew from school. My ARGteam were my closest friends, but there were plenty of people I knewand 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 firstring, three times in a row. A minute later, he was up on Xnet and wewere able to have a secure chat. I pointed him to my blog-post on the ra-dio vans and he came back a minute later all freaked out.
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You sure they're looking for us?
In response I sent him to the quiz.
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OMG we're doomed>
No it's not that bad but we need to figure out who we can trust>
How?
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That's what I wanted to ask you — how many people can you totallyvouch for like trust them to the ends of the earth?
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126Um 20 or 30 or so>
I want to get a bunch of really trustworthy people together and do akey-exchange web of trust thingWeb of trust is one of those cool crypto things that I'd read about butnever tried. It was a nearly foolproof way to make sure that you couldtalk to the people you trusted, but that no one else could listen in. Theproblem is that it requires you to physically meet with the people in theweb at least once, just to get started.
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I get it sure. That's not bad. But how you going to get everyone togeth-er for the key-signing?
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That's what I wanted to ask you about — how can we do it withoutgetting busted?
Jolu typed some words and erased them, typed more and erased them.
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Darryl would knowI typed.
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God, this was the stuff he was great at.
Jolu didn't type anything. Then,>
How about a party?
he typed.
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How about if we all get together somewhere like we're teenagers hav-ing a party and that way we'll have a ready-made excuse if anyoneshows up asking us what we're doing there?
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That would totally work! You're a genius, Jolu.
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I know it. And you're going to love this: I know just where to do it, too>
127Where?
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Sutro baths!