It was pretty much all I worked on for the rest of the night. And the next night. And the next.
My mailbox overflowed with suggestions from people. They sent me dumps off their phones and their pocket-cameras. Then I got an email from a name I recognized -- Dr Eeevil (three "e"s), one of the prime maintainers of ParanoidLinux.
> M1k3y
> I have been watching your Xnet experiment with great interest. Here in Germany, we have much experience with what happens with a government that gets out of control.
> One thing you should know is that every camera has a unique "noise signature" that can be used to later connect a picture with a camera. That means that the photos you're republishing on your site could potentially be used to identify the photographers, should they later be picked up for something else.
> Luckily, it's not hard to strip out the signatures, if you care to. There's a utility on the ParanoidLinux distro you're using that does this -- it's called photonomous, and you'll find it in /usr/bin. Just read the man pages for documentation. It's simple though.
> Good luck with what you're doing. Don't get caught. Stay free. Stay paranoid.
> Dr Eeevil
I de-fingerprintized all the photos I'd posted and put them back up, along with a note explaining what Dr Eeevil had told me, warning everyone else to do the same. We all had the same basic ParanoidXbox install, so we could all anonymize our pictures. There wasn't anything I could do about the photos that had already been downloaded and cached, but from now on we'd be smarter.
That was all the thought I gave the matter that night, until I got down to breakfast the next morning and Mom had the radio on, playing the NPR morning news.
"Arabic news agency Al-Jazeera is running pictures, video and first-hand accounts of last weekend's youth riot in Mission Dolores park," the announcer said as I was drinking a glass of orange juice. I managed not to spray it across the room, but Ididchoke a little.
"Al-Jazeera reporters claim that these accounts were published on the so-called 'Xnet,' a clandestine network used by students and Al-Quaeda sympathizers in the Bay Area. This network's existence has long been rumored, but today marks its first mainstream mention."
Mom shook her head. "Just what we need," she said. "As if the police weren't bad enough. Kids running around, pretending to be guerrillas and giving them the excuse to really crack down."
"The Xnet weblogs have carried hundreds of reports and multimedia files from young people who attended the riot and allege that they were gathered peacefully until the police attackedthem. Here is one of those accounts.
"'All we were doing was dancing. I brought my little brother. Bands played and we talked about freedom, about how we were losing it to these jerks who say they hate terrorists but who attack us though we're not terrorists we're Americans. I think they hate freedom, not us.
"We danced and the bands played and it was all fun and good and then the cops started shouting at us to disperse. We all shouted take it back! Meaning take America back. The cops gassed us with pepper spray. My little brother is twelve. He missed three days of school. My stupid parents say it was my fault. How about the police? We pay them and they're supposed to protect us but they gassed us for no good reason, gassed us like they gas enemy soldiers.'
"Similar accounts, including audio and video, can be found on Al-Jazeera's website and on the Xnet. You can find directions for accessing this Xnet on NPR's homepage."
Dad came down.
"Do you use the Xnet?" he said. He looked intensely at my face. I felt myself squirm.
"It's for video-games," I said. "That's what most people use it for. It's just a wireless network. It's what everyone did with those free Xboxes they gave away last year."
He glowered at me. "Games? Marcus, you don't realize it, but you're providing cover for people who plan on attacking and destroying this country. I don't want to see you using this Xnet. Not anymore. Do I make myself clear?"
I wanted to argue. Hell, I wanted to shake him by the shoulders. But I didn't. I looked away. I said, "Sure, Dad." I went to school.
#
At first I was relieved when I discovered that they weren't going to leave Mr Benson in charge of my social studies class. But the woman they found to replace him was my worst nightmare.
She was young, just about 28 or 29, and pretty, in a wholesome kind of way. She was blonde and spoke with a soft southern accent when she introduced herself to us as Mrs Andersen. That set off alarm bells right away. I didn't knowanywomen under the age of sixty that called themselves "Mrs."
But I was prepared to overlook it. She was young, pretty, she sounded nice. She would be OK.
She wasn't OK.
"Under what circumstances should the federal government be prepared to suspend the Bill of Rights?" she said, turning to the blackboard and writing down a row of numbers, one through ten.
"Never," I said, not waiting to be called on. This was easy. "Constitutional rights are absolute."
"That's not a very sophisticated view." She looked at her seating-plan. "Marcus. For example, say a policeman conducts an improper search -- he goes beyond the stuff specified in his warrant. He discovers compelling evidence that a bad guy killed your father. It's the only evidence that exists. Should the bad guy go free?"
I knew the answer to this, but I couldn't really explain it. "Yes," I said, finally. "But the police shouldn't conduct improper searches --"
"Wrong," she said. "The proper response to police misconduct is disciplinary action against the police, not punishing all of society for one cop's mistake." She wrote "Criminal guilt" under point one on the board.
"Other ways in which the Bill of Rights can be superseded?"
Charles put his hand up. "Shouting fire in a crowded theater?"
"Very good --" she consulted the seating plan -- "Charles. There are many instances in which the First Amendment is not absolute. Let's list some more of those."
Charles put his hand up again. "Endangering a law enforcement officer."
"Yes, disclosing the identity of an undercover policeman or intelligence officer. Very good." She wrote it down. "Others?"
"National security," Charles said, not waiting for her to call on him again. "Libel. Obscenity. Corruption of minors. Child porn. Bomb-making recipes." Mrs Andersen wrote these down fast, but stopped at child porn. "Child porn is just a form of obscenity."
I was feeling sick. This was not what I'd learned or believed about my country. I put my hand up.
"Yes, Marcus?"
"I don't get it. You're making it sound like the Bill of Rights is optional. It's the Constitution. We're supposed to follow it absolutely."
"That's a common oversimplification," she said, giving me a fake smile. "But the fact of the matter is that the framers of the Constitution intended it to be a living document that was revised over time. They understood that the Republic wouldn't be able to last forever if the government of the day couldn't govern according to the needs of the day. They never intended the Constitution to be looked on like religious doctrine. After all, they came here fleeing religious doctrine."
I shook my head. "What? No. They were merchants and artisans who were loyal to the King until he instituted policies that were against their interests and enforced them brutally. The religious refugees were way earlier."
"Some of the Framers were descended from religious refugees," she said.
"And the Bill of Rights isn't supposed to be something you pick and choose from. What the Framers hated was tyranny. That's what the Bill of Rights is supposed to prevent. They were a revolutionary army and they wanted a set of principles that everyone could agree to. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The right of people to throw off their oppressors."
"Yes, yes," she said, waving at me. "They believed in the right of people to get rid of their Kings, but --" Charles was grinning and when she said that, he smiled even wider.
"They set out the Bill of Rights because they thought that having absolute rights was better than the risk that someone would take them away. Like the First Amendment: it's supposed to protect us by preventing the government from creating two kinds of speech, allowed speech and criminal speech. They didn't want to face the risk that some jerk would decide that the things that he found unpleasant were illegal."
She turned and wrote, "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" on it.
"We're getting a little ahead of the lesson, but you seem like an advanced group." The others laughed at this, nervously.
"The role of government is to secure for citizens the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In that order. It's like a filter. If the government wants to do something that makes us a little unhappy, or takes away some of our liberty, it's OK, providing they're doing it to save our lives. That's why the cops can lock you up if they think you're a danger to yourself or others. You lose your liberty and happiness to protect life. If you've got life, you might get liberty and happiness later."
Some of the others had their hands up. "Doesn't that mean that they can do anything they want, if they say it's to stop someone from hurting us in the future?"
"Yeah," another kid said. "This sounds like you're saying that national security is more important than the Constitution."
I was so proud of my fellow students then. I said, "How can you protect freedom by suspending the Bill of Rights?"
She shook her head at us like we were being very stupid. "The 'revolutionary' founding fathersshot traitorsand spies. They didn't believe in absolute freedom, not when it threatened the Republic. Now you take these Xnet people --"
I tried hard not to stiffen.
"-- these so-called jammers who were on the news this morning. After this city was attacked by people who've declared war on this country, they set about sabotaging the security measures set up to catch the bad guys and prevent them from doing it again. They did this by endangering and inconveniencing their fellow citizens --"
"They did it to show that our rights were being taken away in the name of protecting them!" I said. OK, I shouted. God, she had me so steamed. "They did it because the government was treatingeveryonelike a suspected terrorist."
"So they wanted to prove that they shouldn't be treated like terrorists," Charles shouted back, "so they acted like terrorists? So they committed terrorism?"
I boiled.
"Oh for Christ's sake. Committed terrorism? They showed that universal surveillance was more dangerous than terrorism. Look at what happened in the park last weekend. Those people were dancing and listening to music. How isthatterrorism?"
The teacher crossed the room and stood before me, looming over me until I shut up. "Marcus, you seem to think that nothing has changed in this country. You need to understand that the bombing of the Bay Bridge changed everything. Thousands of our friends and relatives lie dead at the bottom of the Bay. This is a time for national unity in the face of the violent insult our country has suffered --"
I stood up. I'd had enough of this "everything has changed" crapola. "National unity? The whole point of America is that we're the country where dissent is welcome. We're a country of dissidents and fighters and university dropouts and free speech people."
I thought of Ms Galvez's last lesson and the thousands of Berkeley students who'd surrounded the police-van when they tried to arrest a guy for distributing civil rights literature. No one tried to stop those trucks when they drove away with all the people who'd been dancing in the park. I didn't try. I was running away.
Maybe everythinghadchanged.
"I believe you know where Mr Benson's office is," she said to me. "You are to present yourself to him immediately. I willnothave my classes disrupted by disrespectful behavior. For someone who claims to love freedom of speech, you're certainly willing to shout down anyone who disagrees with you."
I picked up my SchoolBook and my bag and stormed out. The door had a gas-lift, so it was impossible to slam, or I would have slammed it.
I went fast to Mr Benson's office. Cameras filmed me as I went. My gait was recorded. The arphids in my student ID broadcast my identity to sensors in the hallway. It was like being in jail.
"Close the door, Marcus," Mr Benson said. He turned his screen around so that I could see the video feed from the social studies classroom. He'd been watching.
"What do you have to say for yourself?"
"That wasn't teaching, it waspropaganda. She told us that the Constitution didn't matter!"
"No, she said it wasn't religious doctrine. And you attacked her like some kind of fundamentalist, proving her point. Marcus, you of all people should understand that everything changed when the bridge was bombed. Your friend Darryl --"
"Don't you say a goddamned word about him," I said, the anger bubbling over. "You're not fit to talk about him. Yeah, I understand that everything's different now. We used to be a free country. Now we're not."
"Marcus, do you know what 'zero-tolerance' means?"
I backed down. He could expel me for "threatening behavior." It was supposed to be used against gang kids who tried to intimidate their teachers. But of course he wouldn't have any compunctions about using it on me.
"Yes," I said. "I know what it means."
"I think you owe me an apology," he said.
I looked at him. He was barely suppressing his sadistic smile. A part of me wanted to grovel. It wanted to beg for his forgiveness for all my shame. I tamped that part down and decided that I would rather get kicked out than apologize.
"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." I remembered it word for word.
He shook his head. "Remembering things isn't the same as understanding them, sonny." He bent over his computer and made some clicks. His printer purred. He handed me a sheet of warm Board letterhead that said I'd been suspended for two weeks.
"I'll email your parents now. If you are still on school property in thirty minutes, you'll be arrested for trespassing."
I looked at him.
"You don't want to declare war on me in my own school," he said. "You can't win that war. GO!"
I left.
Chapter 14
This chapter is dedicated to the incomparable Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego, California. The Mysterious Galaxy folks have had me in to sign books every time I've been in San Diego for a conference or to teach (the Clarion Writers' Workshop is based at UC San Diego in nearby La Jolla, CA), and every time I show up, they pack the house. This is a store with a loyal following of die-hard fans who know that they'll always be able to get great recommendations and great ideas at the store. In summer 2007, I took my writing class from Clarion down to the store for the midnight launch of the final Harry Potter book and I've never seen such a rollicking, awesomely fun party at a store.
Mysterious Galaxy: 7051 Clairemont Mesa Blvd., Suite #302 San Diego, CA USA 92111 +1 858 268 4747
The Xnet wasn't much fun in the middle of the school-day, when all the people who used it were in school. I had the piece of paper folded in the back pocket of my jeans, and I threw it on the kitchen table when I got home. I sat down in the living room and switched on the TV. I never watched it, but I knew that my parents did. The TV and the radio and the newspapers were where they got all their ideas about the world.
The news was terrible. There were so many reasons to be scared. American soldiers were dying all over the world. Not just soldiers, either. National guardsmen, who thought they were signing up to help rescue people from hurricanes, stationed overseas for years and years of a long and endless war.
I flipped around the 24-hour news networks, one after another, a parade of officials telling us why we should be scared. A parade of photos of bombs going off around the world.
I kept flipping and found myself looking at a familiar face. It was the guy who had come into the truck and spoken to Severe-Haircut woman when I was chained up in the back. Wearing a military uniform. The caption identified him as Major General Graeme Sutherland, Regional Commander, DHS.
"I hold in my hands actual literature on offer at the so-called concert in Dolores Park last weekend." He held up a stack of pamphlets. There'd been lots of pamphleteers there, I remembered. Wherever you got a group of people in San Francisco, you got pamphlets.
"I want you to look at these for a moment. Let me read you their titles. WITHOUT THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED: A CITIZEN'S GUIDE TO OVERTHROWING THE STATE. Here's one, DID THE SEPTEMBER 11TH BOMBINGS REALLY HAPPEN? And another, HOW TO USE THEIR SECURITY AGAINST THEM. This literature shows us the true purpose of the illegal gathering on Saturday night. This wasn't merely an unsafe gathering of thousands of people without proper precaution, or even toilets. It was a recruiting rally for the enemy. It was an attempt to corrupt children into embracing the idea that America shouldn't protect herself.
"Take this slogan, DON'T TRUST ANYONE OVER 25. What better way to ensure that no considered, balanced, adult discussion is ever injected into your pro-terrorist message than to exclude adults, limiting your group to impressionable young people?
"When police came on the scene, they found a recruitment rally for America's enemies in progress. The gathering had already disrupted the nights of hundreds of residents in the area, none of whom had been consulted in the planning of this all night rave party.
"They ordered these people to disperse -- that much is visible on all the video -- and when the revelers turned to attack them, egged on by the musicians on stage, the police subdued them using non-lethal crowd control techniques.
"The arrestees were ring-leaders and provocateurs who had led the thousands of impressionistic young people there to charge the police lines. 827 of them were taken into custody. Many of these people had prior offenses. More than 100 of them had outstanding warrants. They are still in custody.
"Ladies and gentlemen, America is fighting a war on many fronts, but nowhere is she in more grave danger than she is here, at home. Whether we are being attacked by terrorists or those who sympathize with them."
A reporter held up a hand and said, "General Sutherland, surely you're not saying that these children were terrorist sympathizers for attending a party in a park?"
"Of course not. But when young people are brought under the influence of our country's enemies, it's easy for them to end up over their heads. Terrorists would love to recruit a fifth column to fight the war on the home front for them. If these were my children, I'd be gravely concerned."
Another reporter chimed in. "Surely this is just an open air concert, General? They were hardly drilling with rifles."
The General produced a stack of photos and began to hold them up. "These are pictures that officers took with infra-red cameras before moving in." He held them next to his face and paged through them one at a time. They showed people dancing really rough, some people getting crushed or stepped on. Then they moved into sex stuff by the trees, a girl with three guys, two guys necking together. "There were children as young as ten years old at this event. A deadly cocktail of drugs, propaganda and music resulted in dozens of injuries. It's a wonder there weren't any deaths."
I switched the TV off. They made it look like it had been a riot. If my parents thought I'd been there, they'd have strapped me to my bed for a month and only let me out afterward wearing a tracking collar.
Speaking of which, they were going to bepissedwhen they found out I'd been suspended.
#
They didn't take it well. Dad wanted to ground me, but Mom and I talked him out of it.
"You know that vice-principal has had it in for Marcus for years," Mom said. "The last time we met him you cursed him for an hour afterward. I think the word 'asshole' was mentioned repeatedly."
Dad shook his head. "Disrupting a class to argue against the Department of Homeland Security --"
"It's a social studies class, Dad," I said. I was beyond caring anymore, but I felt like if Mom was going to stick up for me, I should help her out. "We were talking about the DHS. Isn't debate supposed to be healthy?"
"Look, son," he said. He'd taken to calling me "son" a lot. It made me feel like he'd stopped thinking of me as a person and switched to thinking of me as a kind of half-formed larva that needed to be guided out of adolescence. I hated it. "You're going to have to learn to live with the fact that we live in a different world today. You have every right to speak your mind of course, but you have to be prepared for the consequences of doing so. You have to face the fact that there are people who are hurting, who aren't going to want to argue the finer points of Constitutional law when their lives are at stake. We're in a lifeboat now, and once you're in the lifeboat, no one wants to hear about how mean the captain is being."
I barely restrained myself from rolling my eyes.
"I've been assigned two weeks of independent study, writing one paper for each of my subjects, using the city for my background -- a history paper, a social studies paper, an English paper, a physics paper. It beats sitting around at home watching television."
Dad looked hard at me, like he suspected I was up to something, then nodded. I said goodnight to them and went up to my room. I fired up my Xbox and opened a word-processor and started to brainstorm ideas for my papers. Why not? It really was better than sitting around at home.
#
I ended up IMing with Ange for quite a while that night. She was sympathetic about everything and told me she'd help me with my papers if I wanted to meet her after school the next night. I knew where her school was -- she went to the same school as Van -- and it was all the way over in the East Bay, where I hadn't visited since the bombs went.
I was really excited at the prospect of seeing her again. Every night since the party, I'd gone to bed thinking of two things: the sight of the crowd charging the police lines and the feeling of the side of her breast under her shirt as we leaned against the pillar. She was amazing. I'd never been with a girl as...aggressive as her before. It had always been me putting the moves on and them pushing me away. I got the feeling that Ange was as much of a horn-dog as I was. It was a tantalizing notion.
I slept soundly that night, with exciting dreams of me and Ange and what we might do if we found ourselves in a secluded spot somewhere.
The next day, I set out to work on my papers. San Francisco is a good place to write about. History? Sure, it's there, from the Gold Rush to the WWII shipyards, the Japanese internment camps, the invention of the PC. Physics? The Exploratorium has the coolest exhibits of any museum I've ever been to. I took a perverse satisfaction in the exhibits on soil liquefaction during big quakes. English? Jack London, Beat Poets, science fiction writers like Pat Murphy and Rudy Rucker. Social studies? The Free Speech Movement, Cesar Chavez, gay rights, feminism, anti-war movement...
I've always loved just learning stuff for its own sake. Just to be smarter about the world around me. I could do that just by walking around the city. I decided I'd do an English paper about the Beats first. City Lights books had a great library in an upstairs room where Alan Ginsberg and his buddies had created their radical druggy poetry. The one we'd read in English class wasHowland I would never forget the opening lines, they gave me shivers down my back:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night...
I liked the way he ran those words all together, "starving hysterical naked." I knew how that felt. And "best minds of my generation" made me think hard too. It made me remember the park and the police and the gas falling. They busted Ginsberg for obscenity over Howl -- all about a line about gay sex that would hardly have caused us to blink an eye today. It made me happy somehow, knowing that we'd made some progress. That things had been even more restrictive than this before.
I lost myself in the library, reading these beautiful old editions of the books. I got lost in Jack Kerouac'sOn the Road, a novel I'd been meaning to read for a long time, and a clerk who came up to check on me nodded approvingly and found me a cheap edition that he sold me for six bucks.
I walked into Chinatown and had dim sum buns and noodles with hot-sauce that I had previously considered to be pretty hot, but which would never seem anything like hot ever again, not now that I'd had an Ange special.
As the day wore on toward the afternoon, I got on the BART and switched to a San Mateo bridge shuttle bus to bring me around to the East Bay. I read my copy ofOn the Roadand dug the scenery whizzing past.On the Roadis a semi-autobiographical novel about Jack Kerouac, a druggy, hard-drinking writer who goes hitchhiking around America, working crummy jobs, howling through the streets at night, meeting people and parting ways. Hipsters, sad-faced hobos, con-men, muggers, scumbags and angels. There's not really a plot -- Kerouac supposedly wrote it in three weeks on a long roll of paper, stoned out of his mind -- only a bunch of amazing things, one thing happening after another. He makes friends with self-destructing people like Dean Moriarty, who get him involved in weird schemes that never really work out, but still it works out, if you know what I mean.
There was a rhythm to the words, it was luscious, I could hear it being read aloud in my head. It made me want to lie down in the bed of a pickup truck and wake up in a dusty little town somewhere in the central valley on the way to LA, one of those places with a gas station and a diner, and just walk out into the fields and meet people and see stuff and do stuff.
It was a long bus ride and I must have dozed off a little -- staying up late IMing with Ange was hard on my sleep-schedule, since Mom still expected me down for breakfast. I woke up and changed buses and before long, I was at Ange's school.
She came bounding out of the gates in her uniform -- I'd never seen her in it before, it was kind of cute in a weird way, and reminded me of Van in her uniform. She gave me a long hug and a hard kiss on the cheek.
"Hello you!" she said.
"Hiya!"
"Whatcha reading?"
I'd been waiting for this. I'd marked the passage with a finger. "Listen: 'They danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!"'"
She took the book and read the passage again for herself. "Wow, dingledodies! I love it! Is it all like this?"
I told her about the parts I'd read, walking slowly down the sidewalk back toward the bus-stop. Once we turned the corner, she put her arm around my waist and I slung mine around her shoulder. Walking down the street with a girl -- my girlfriend? Sure, why not? -- talking about this cool book. It was heaven. Made me forget my troubles for a little while.
"Marcus?"
I turned around. It was Van. In my subconscious I'd expected this. I knew because my conscious mind wasn't remotely surprised. It wasn't a big school, and they all got out at the same time. I hadn't spoken to Van in weeks, and those weeks felt like months. We used to talk every day.
"Hey, Van," I said. I suppressed the urge to take my arm off of Ange's shoulders. Van seemed surprised, but not angry, more ashen, shaken. She looked closely at the two of us.
"Angela?"
"Hey, Vanessa," Ange said.
"What are you doing here?"
"I came out to get Ange," I said, trying to keep my tone neutral. I was suddenly embarrassed to be seen with another girl.
"Oh," Van said. "Well, it was nice to see you."
"Nice to see you too, Vanessa," Ange said, swinging me around, marching me back toward the bus-stop.
"You know her?" Ange said.
"Yeah, since forever."
"Was she your girlfriend?"
"What? No! No way! We were just friends."
"Youwerefriends?"
I felt like Van was walking right behind us, listening in, though at the pace we were walking, she would have to be jogging to keep up. I resisted the temptation to look over my shoulder for as long as possible, then I did. There were lots of girls from the school behind us, but no Van.
"She was with me and Jose-Luis and Darryl when we were arrested. We used to ARG together. The four of us, we were kind of best friends."
"And what happened?"
I dropped my voice. "She didn't like the Xnet," I said. "She thought we would get into trouble. That I'd get other people into trouble."
"And that's why you stopped being friends?"
"We just drifted apart."
We walked a few steps. "You weren't, you know, boyfriend/girlfriend friends?"
"No!" I said. My face was hot. I felt like I sounded like I was lying, even though I was telling the truth.
Ange jerked us to a halt and studied my face.
"Were you?"
"No! Seriously! Just friends. Darryl and her -- well, not quite, but Darryl was so into her. There was no way --"
"But if Darryl hadn't been into her, you would have, huh?"
"No, Ange, no. Please, just believe me and let it go. Vanessa was a good friend and we're not anymore, and that upsets me, but I was never into her that way, all right?
She slumped a little. "OK, OK. I'm sorry. I don't really get along with her is all. We've never gotten along in all the years we've known each other."
Oh ho, I thought. This would be how it came to be that Jolu knew her for so long and I never met her; she had some kind of thing with Van and he didn't want to bring her around.
She gave me a long hug and we kissed, and a bunch of girls passed us goingwooooand we straightened up and headed for the bus-stop. Ahead of us walked Van, who must have gone past while we were kissing. I felt like a complete jerk.
Of course, she was at the stop and on the bus and we didn't say a word to each other, and I tried to make conversation with Ange all the way, but it was awkward.
The plan was to stop for a coffee and head to Ange's place to hang out and "study," i.e. take turns on her Xbox looking at the Xnet. Ange's mom got home late on Tuesdays, which was her night for yoga class and dinner with her girls, and Ange's sister was going out with her boyfriend, so we'd have the place to ourselves. I'd been having pervy thoughts about it ever since we'd made the plan.
We got to her place and went straight to her room and shut the door. Her room was kind of a disaster, covered with layers of clothes and notebooks and parts of PCs that would dig into your stocking feet like caltrops. Her desk was worse than the floor, piled high with books and comics, so we ended up sitting on her bed, which was OK by me.
The awkwardness from seeing Van had gone away somewhat and we got her Xbox up and running. It was in the center of a nest of wires, some going to a wireless antenna she'd hacked into it and stuck to the window so she could tune in the neighbors' WiFi. Some went to a couple of old laptop screens she'd turned into standalone monitors, balanced on stands and bristling with exposed electronics. The screens were on both bedside tables, which was an excellent setup for watching movies or IMing from bed -- she could turn the monitors sidewise and lie on her side and they'd be right-side-up, no matter which side she lay on.
We both knew what we were really there for, sitting side by side propped against the bedside table. I was trembling a little and super-conscious of the warmth of her leg and shoulder against mine, but I needed to go through the motions of logging into Xnet and seeing what email I'd gotten and so on.
There was an email from a kid who liked to send in funny phone-cam videos of the DHS being really crazy -- the last one had been of them disassembling a baby's stroller after a bomb-sniffing dog had shown an interest in it, taking it apart with screwdrivers right on the street in the Marina while all these rich people walked past, staring at them and marveling at how weird it was.
I'd linked to the video and it had been downloaded like crazy. He'd hosted it on the Internet Archive's Alexandria mirror in Egypt, where they'd host anything for free so long as you'd put it under the Creative Commons license, which let anyone remix it and share it. The US archive -- which was down in the Presidio, only a few minutes away -- had been forced to take down all those videos in the name of national security, but the Alexandria archive had split away into its own organization and was hosting anything that embarrassed the USA.
This kid -- his handle was Kameraspie -- had sent me an even better video this time around. It was at the doorway to City Hall in Civic Center, a huge wedding cake of a building covered with statues in little archways and gilt leaves and trim. The DHS had a secure perimeter around the building, and Kameraspie's video showed a great shot of their checkpoint as a guy in an officer's uniform approached and showed his ID and put his briefcase on the X-ray belt.
It was all OK until one of the DHS people saw something he didn't like on the X-ray. He questioned the General, who rolled his eyes and said something inaudible (the video had been shot from across the street, apparently with a homemade concealed zoom lens, so the audio was mostly of people walking past and traffic noises).
The General and the DHS guys got into an argument, and the longer they argued, the more DHS guys gathered around them. Finally, the General shook his head angrily and waved his finger at the DHS guy's chest and picked up his briefcase and started to walk away. The DHS guys shouted at him, but he didn't slow. His body language really said, "I am totally, utterly pissed."
Then it happened. The DHS guys ran after the general. Kameraspie slowed the video down here, so we could see, in frame-by-frame slo-mo, the general half-turning, his face all like, "No freaking way are you about to tackle me," then changing to horror as three of the giant DHS guards slammed into him, knocking him sideways, then catching him at the middle, like a career-ending football tackle. The general -- middle aged, steely grey hair, lined and dignified face -- went down like a sack of potatoes and bounced twice, his face slamming off the sidewalk and blood starting out of his nose.
The DHS hog-tied the general, strapping him at ankles and wrists. The general was shouting now, really shouting, his face purpling under the blood streaming from his nose. Legs swished by in the tight zoom. Passing pedestrians looked at this guy in his uniform, getting tied up, and you could see from his face that this was the worst part, this was the ritual humiliation, the removal of dignity. The clip ended.
"Oh my dear sweet Buddha," I said looking at the screen as it faded to black, starting the video again. I nudged Ange and showed her the clip. She watched wordless, jaw hanging down to her chest.
"Post that," she said. "Post that post that post that post that!"
I posted it. I could barely type as I wrote it up, describing what I'd seen, adding a note to see if anyone could identify the military man in the video, if anyone knew anything about this.
I hit publish.
We watched the video. We watched it again.
My email pinged.
> I totally recognize that dude -- you can find his bio on Wikipedia. He's General Claude Geist. He commanded the joint UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti.
I checked the bio. There was a picture of the general at a press conference, and notes about his role in the difficult Haiti mission. It was clearly the same guy.
I updated the post.
Theoretically, this was Ange's and my chance to make out, but that wasn't what we ended up doing. We crawled the Xnet blogs, looking for more accounts of the DHS searching people, tackling people, invading them. This was a familiar task, the same thing I'd done with all the footage and accounts from the riots in the park. I started a new category on my blog for this, AbusesOfAuthority, and filed them away. Ange kept coming up with new search terms for me to try and by the time her mom got home, my new category had seventy posts, headlined by General Geist's City Hall takedown.
#
I worked on my Beat paper all the next day at home, reading the Kerouac and surfing the Xnet. I was planning on meeting Ange at school, but I totally wimped out at the thought of seeing Van again, so I texted her an excuse about working on the paper.
There were all kinds of great suggestions for AbusesOfAuthority coming in; hundreds of little and big ones, pictures and audio. The meme was spreading.
It spread. The next morning there were even more. Someone started a new blog called AbusesOfAuthority that collected hundreds more. The pile grew. We competed to find the juiciest stories, the craziest pictures.
The deal with my parents was that I'd eat breakfast with them every morning and talk about the projects I was doing. They liked that I was reading Kerouac. It had been a favorite book of both of theirs and it turned out there was already a copy on the bookcase in my parents' room. My dad brought it down and I flipped through it. There were passages marked up with pen, dog-eared pages, notes in the margin. My dad had really loved this book.
It made me remember a better time, when my Dad and I had been able to talk for five minutes without shouting at each other about terrorism, and we had a great breakfast talking about the way that the novel was plotted, all the crazy adventures.
But the next morning at breakfast they were both glued to the radio.
"Abuses of Authority -- it's the latest craze on San Francisco's notorious Xnet, and it's captured the world's attention. Called A-oh-A, the movement is composed of 'Little Brothers' who watch back against the Department of Homeland Security's anti-terrorism measures, documenting the failures and excesses. The rallying cry is a popular viral video clip of a General Claude Geist, a retired three-star general, being tackled by DHS officers on the sidewalk in front of City Hall. Geist hasn't made a statement on the incident, but commentary from young people who are upset with their own treatment has been fast and furious.
"Most notable has been the global attention the movement has received. Stills from the Geist video have appeared on the front pages of newspapers in Korea, Great Britain, Germany, Egypt and Japan, and broadcasters around the world have aired the clip on prime-time news. The issue came to a head last night, when the British Broadcasting Corporation's National News Evening program ran a special report on the fact that no American broadcaster or news agency has covered this story. Commenters on the BBC's website noted that BBC America's version of the news did not carry the report."
They brought on a couple of interviews: British media watchdogs, a Swedish Pirate Party kid who made jeering remarks about America's corrupt press, a retired American newscaster living in Tokyo, then they aired a short clip from Al-Jazeera, comparing the American press record and the record of the national news-media in Syria.
I felt like my parents were staring at me, that they knew what I was doing. But when I cleared away my dishes, I saw that they were looking at each other.
Dad was holding his coffee cup so hard his hands were shaking. Mom was looking at him.
"They're trying to discredit us," Dad said finally. "They're trying to sabotage the efforts to keep us safe."
I opened my mouth, but my mom caught my eye and shook her head. Instead I went up to my room and worked on my Kerouac paper. Once I'd heard the door slam twice, I fired up my Xbox and got online.
> Hello M1k3y. This is Colin Brown. I'm a producer with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's news programme The National. We're doing a story on Xnet and have sent a reporter to San Francisco to cover it from there. Would you be interested in doing an interview to discuss your group and its actions?
I stared at the screen. Jesus. They wanted tointerviewme about "my group"?
> Um thanks no. I'm all about privacy. And it's not "my group." But thanks for doing the story!
A minute later, another email.
> We can mask you and ensure your anonymity. You know that the Department of Homeland Security will be happy to provide their own spokesperson. I'm interested in getting your side.
I filed the email. He was right, but I'd be crazy to do this. For all I knew, hewasthe DHS.
I picked up more Kerouac. Another email came in. Same request, different news-agency: KQED wanted to meet me and record a radio interview. A station in Brazil. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Deutsche Welle. All day, the press requests came in. All day, I politely turned them down.
I didn't get much Kerouac read that day.
#
"Hold a press-conference," is what Ange said, as we sat in the cafe near her place that evening. I wasn't keen on going out to her school anymore, getting stuck on a bus with Van again.
"What? Are you crazy?"
"Do it in Clockwork Plunder. Just pick a trading post where there's no PvP allowed and name a time. You can login from here."
PvP is player-versus-player combat. Parts of Clockwork Plunder were neutral ground, which meant that we could theoretically bring in a ton of noob reporters without worrying about gamers killing them in the middle of the press-conference.
"I don't know anything about press conferences."
"Oh, just google it. I'm sure someone's written an article on holding a successful one. I mean, if the President can manage it, I'm sure you can. He looks like he can barely tie his shoes without help."
We ordered more coffee.
"You are a very smart woman," I said.
"And I'm beautiful," she said.
"That too," I said.
Chapter 15
This chapter is dedicated to Chapters/Indigo, the national Canadian megachain. I was working at Bakka, the independent science fiction bookstore, when Chapters opened its first store in Toronto and I knew that something big was going on right away, because two of our smartest, best-informed customers stopped in to tell me that they'd been hired to run the science fiction section. From the start, Chapters raised the bar on what a big corporate bookstore could be, extending its hours, adding a friendly cafe and lots of seating, installing in-store self-service terminals and stocking the most amazing variety of titles.
Chapters/Indigo
I blogged the press-conference even before I'd sent out the invitations to the press. I could tell that all these writers wanted to make me into a leader or a general or a supreme guerrilla commandant, and I figured one way of solving that would be to have a bunch of Xnetters running around answering questions too.
Then I emailed the press. The responses ranged from puzzled to enthusiastic -- only the Fox reporter was "outraged" that I had the gall to ask her to play a game in order to appear on her TV show. The rest of them seemed to think that it would make a pretty cool story, though plenty of them wanted lots of tech support for signing onto the game
I picked 8PM, after dinner. Mom had been bugging me about all the evenings I'd been spending out of the house until I finally spilled the beans about Ange, whereupon she came over all misty and kept looking at me like, my-little-boy's-growing-up. She wanted to meet Ange, and I used that as leverage, promising to bring her over the next night if I could "go to the movies" with Ange tonight.
Ange's mom and sister were out again -- they weren't real stay-at-homes -- which left me and Ange alone in her room with her Xbox and mine. I unplugged one of her bedside screens and attached my Xbox to it so that we could both login at once.
Both Xboxes were idle, logged into Clockwork Plunder. I was pacing.
"It's going to be fine," she said. She glanced at her screen. "Patcheye Pete's Market has 600 players in it now!" We'd picked Patcheye Pete's because it was the market closest to the village square where new players spawned. If the reporters weren't already Clockwork Plunder players -- ha! -- then that's where they'd show up. In my blog post I'd asked people generally to hang out on the route between Patcheye Pete's and the spawn-gate and direct anyone who looked like a disoriented reporter over to Pete's.
"What the hell am I going to tell them?"
"You just answer their questions -- and if you don't like a question, ignore it. Someone else can answer it. It'll be fine."
"This is insane."
"This is perfect, Marcus. If you want to really screw the DHS, you have to embarrass them. It's not like you're going to be able to out-shoot them. Your only weapon is your ability to make them look like morons."
I flopped on the bed and she pulled my head into her lap and stroked my hair. I'd been playing around with different haircuts before the bombing, dying it all kinds of funny colors, but since I'd gotten out of jail I couldn't be bothered. It had gotten long and stupid and shaggy and I'd gone into the bathroom and grabbed my clippers and buzzed it down to half an inch all around, which took zero effort to take care of and helped me to be invisible when I was out jamming and cloning arphids.
I opened my eyes and stared into her big brown eyes behind her glasses. They were round and liquid and expressive. She could make them bug out when she wanted to make me laugh, or make them soft and sad, or lazy and sleepy in a way that made me melt into a puddle of horniness.
That's what she was doing right now.
I sat up slowly and hugged her. She hugged me back. We kissed. She was an amazing kisser. I know I've already said that, but it bears repeating. We kissed a lot, but for one reason or another we always stopped before it got too heavy.
Now I wanted to go farther. I found the hem of her t-shirt and tugged. She put her hands over her head and pulled back a few inches. I knew that she'd do that. I'd known since the night in the park. Maybe that's why we hadn't gone farther -- I knew I couldn't rely on her to back off, which scared me a little.
But I wasn't scared then. The impending press-conference, the fights with my parents, the international attention, the sense that there was a movement that was careening around the city like a wild pinball -- it made my skin tingle and my blood sing.
And she was beautiful, and smart, and clever and funny, and I was falling in love with her.
Her shirt slid off, her arching her back to help me get it over her shoulders. She reached behind her and did something and her bra fell away. I stared goggle-eyed, motionless and breathless, and then she grabbedmyshirt and pulled it over my head, grabbing me and pulling my bare chest to hers.
We rolled on the bed and touched each other and ground our bodies together and groaned. She kissed all over my chest and I did the same to her. I couldn't breathe, I couldn't think, I could only move and kiss and lick and touch.
We dared each other to go forward. I undid her jeans. She undid mine. I lowered her zipper, she did mine, and tugged my jeans off. I tugged off hers. A moment later we were both naked, except for my socks, which I peeled off with my toes.
It was then that I caught sight of the bedside clock, which had long ago rolled onto the floor and lay there, glowing up at us.
"Crap!" I yelped. "It starts in two minutes!" I couldn't freaking believe that I was about to stop what I was about to stop doing, when I was about to stop doing it. I mean, if you'd asked me, "Marcus, you are about to get laid for the firstest time EVAR, will you stop if I let off this nuclear bomb in the same room as you?" the answer would have been a resounding and unequivocalNO.
And yet we stopped for this.
She grabbed me and pulled my face to hers and kissed me until I thought I would pass out, then we both grabbed our clothes and more or less dressed, grabbing our keyboards and mice and heading for Patcheye Pete's.
#
You could easily tell who the press were: they were the noobs who played their characters like staggering drunks, weaving back and forth and up and down, trying to get the hang of it all, occasionally hitting the wrong key and offering strangers all or part of their inventory, or giving them accidental hugs and kicks.
The Xnetters were easy to spot, too: we all played Clockwork Plunder whenever we had some spare time (or didn't feel like doing our homework), and we had pretty tricked-out characters with cool weapons and booby-traps on the keys sticking out of our backs that would cream anyone who tried to snatch them and leave us to wind down.
When I appeared, a system status message displayed M1K3Y HAS ENTERED PATCHEYE PETE'S -- WELCOME SWABBIE WE OFFER FAIR TRADE FOR FINE BOOTY. All the players on the screen froze, then they crowded around me. The chat exploded. I thought about turning on my voice-paging and grabbing a headset, but seeing how many people were trying to talk at once, I realized how confusing that would be. Text was much easier to follow and they couldn't misquote me (heh heh).
I'd scouted the location before with Ange -- it was great campaigning with her, since we could both keep each other wound up. There was a high-spot on a pile of boxes of salt-rations that I could stand on and be seen from anywhere in the market.
> Good evening and thank you all for coming. My name is M1k3y and I'm not the leader of anything. All around you are Xnetters who have as much to say about why we're here as I do. I use the Xnet because I believe in freedom and the Constitution of the United States of America. I use Xnet because the DHS has turned my city into a police-state where we're all suspected terrorists. I use Xnet because I think you can't defend freedom by tearing up the Bill of Rights. I learned about the Constitution in a California school and I was raised to love my country for its freedom. If I have a philosophy, it is this:
> 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.
> I didn't write that, but I believe it. The DHS does not govern with my consent.
> Thank you
I'd written this the day before, bouncing drafts back and forth with Ange. Pasting it in only took a second, though it took everyone in the game a moment to read it. A lot of the Xnetters cheered, big showy pirate "Hurrah"s with raised sabers and pet parrots squawking and flying overhead.
Gradually, the journalists digested it too. The chat was running past fast, so fast you could barely read it, lots of Xnetters saying things like "Right on" and "America, love it or leave it" and "DHS go home" and "America out of San Francisco," all slogans that had been big on the Xnet blogosphere.
> M1k3y, this is Priya Rajneesh from the BBC. You say you're not the leader of any movement, but do you believe there is a movement? Is it called the Xnet?
Lots of answers. Some people said there wasn't a movement, some said there was and lots of people had ideas about what it was called: Xnet, Little Brothers, Little Sisters, and my personal favorite, the United States of America.
They were really cooking. I let them go, thinking of what I could say. Once I had it, I typed,
> I think that kind of answers your question, doesn't it? There may be one or more movements and they may be called Xnet or not.
> M1k3y, I'm Doug Christensen from the Washington Internet Daily. What do you think the DHS should be doing to prevent another attack on San Francisco, if what they're doing isn't successful.
More chatter. Lots of people said that the terrorists and the government were the same -- either literally, or just meaning that they were equally bad. Some said the government knew how to catch terrorists but preferred not to because "war presidents" got re-elected.
> I don't know
I typed finally.
> I really don't. I ask myself this question a lot because I don't want to get blown up and I don't want my city to get blown up. Here's what I've figured out, though: if it's the DHS's job to keep us safe, they're failing. All the crap they've done, none of it would stop the bridge from being blown up again. Tracing us around the city? Taking away our freedom? Making us suspicious of each other, turning us against each other? Calling dissenters traitors? The point of terrorism is to terrify us. The DHS terrifies me.
> I don't have any say in what the terrorists do to me, but if this is a free country then I should be able to at least say what my own cops do to me. I should be able to keep them from terrorizing me.
> I know that's not a good answer. Sorry.
> What do you mean when you say that the DHS wouldn't stop terrorists? How do you know?
> Who are you?
> I'm with the Sydney Morning Herald.
> I'm 17 years old. I'm not a straight-A student or anything. Even so, I figured out how to make an Internet that they can't wiretap. I figured out how to jam their person-tracking technology. I can turn innocent people into suspects and turn guilty people into innocents in their eyes. I could get metal onto an airplane or beat a no-fly list. I figured this stuff out by looking at the web and by thinking about it. If I can do it, terrorists can do it. They told us they took away our freedom to make us safe. Do you feel safe?
> In Australia? Why yes I do
The pirates all laughed.
More journalists asked questions. Some were sympathetic, some were hostile. When I got tired, I handed my keyboard to Ange and let her be M1k3y for a while. It didn't really feel like M1k3y and me were the same person anymore anyway. M1k3y was the kind of kid who talked to international journalists and inspired a movement. Marcus got suspended from school and fought with his dad and wondered if he was good enough for his kick-ass girlfriend.
By 11PM I'd had enough. Besides, my parents would be expecting me home soon. I logged out of the game and so did Ange and we lay there for a moment. I took her hand and she squeezed hard. We hugged.
She kissed my neck and murmured something.
"What?"
"I said I love you," she said. "What, you want me to send you a telegram?"
"Wow," I said.
"You're that surprised, huh?"
"No. Um. It's just -- I was going to say that to you."
"Sure you were," she said, and bit the tip of my nose.
"It's just that I've never said it before," I said. "So I was working up to it."
"You still haven't said it, you know. Don't think I haven't noticed. We girls pick upon these things."
"I love you, Ange Carvelli," I said.
"I love you too, Marcus Yallow."
We kissed and nuzzled and I started to breathe hard and so did she. That's when her mom knocked on the door.
"Angela," she said, "I think it's time your friend went home, don't you?"