I did work a little on Joe’s darknet moderation site before bed, despite what he’d said, because while Joe was a nice guy to insist, the darknet was my project, and just because I was working on it, it didn’t mean I was working on it for him. I worked until the muscles that allowed my eyes to focus on my screen went on strike, and I blinked hard, brushed my teeth, stripped off, and fell facefirst into bed, amid all the junk I’d dropped there, not even feeling the sharp corners that dug into me.
I was 99.9999 percent of the way to sleepyland when my eyes opened so fast I heard the click of my eyelids ungumming.
Lemmy’s quadcopter.
We’d put it in the sky just before the gas attacks on the crowd, after the police thought that every camera had been killed. The tweet telling people where to look for its feed hadn’t gone out, but that didn’t mean it didn’t create and store that feed. I pounced on my laptop and after a few minutes’ dicking around, found the file I was looking for.
It was all in ghostly night-vision monochrome, with false-color splotches of orange and red where the people gathered. The SFPD stood out hotter than the rest, with bright red splotches on their hands and feet—I wondered if they were using boot- and glove-warmers? We didn’t get the firing of the HERF gun on the camera, but we did get some amazing footage of the gas blimps setting sail, moving into position like sinister circus balloons, unleashing their chemical rain, a kind of gray static that fell on the screaming, terrified crowd below. The gassing went on and on and on, different blimps releasing at different times, filling the air with wave after wave of choking chemical droplets.
I’d lived through this on the ground, but I hadn’t seen it, not the way I could see it now. Watching thousands and thousands and thousands of Americans of all stripes, choking and falling down—kids, moms, dads, old, young, writhing, crawling over one another, vomiting, screaming. I know that worse things have happened. I know that bombs have fallen on cities, mustard gas sent over trenches, people machine-gunned wholesale.
But this was here. This was San Francisco. America. The twenty-first century. I had been in that crowd. It had just happened.
And yet life was continuing the way it had. The world didn’t stop. No one declared that “everything was different now.” No one was going to remember September 24th as “the day everything changed.”
If some foreign power, some religious terrorist, had gassed hundreds of thousands of Americans in the streets of San Francisco, they’d be rearranging all the furniture in government to make way for the new agencies that would swoop in to make sure that “never again” would such a thing happen “on U.S. soil.” Why did the fact that we’d all bought the gas with our tax dollars make the gas acceptable?
I wanted to put this online, but I didn’t have the energy to do it all over again, make another darknet site, try to get people interested in it. I was about to go back to bed when it hit me: I didn’t need to do anything with the darknet this time. This video was ours, mine and Lemmy’s. It wasn’t a secret who recorded it or where it was recorded. I laughed. I could stick this on YouTube. I could tweet it from my own account! I’d gotten so used to operating in secret that I’d forgotten that I didn’t have to.
I posted the video to the Internet Archive, YouTube, and popped a torrent on The Pirate Bay for good measure, wrote a paragraph explaining that I’d shot this at the demonstration after the HERF event, pasted it in, tweeted it, and crawled beneath the covers.
* * *
Ange woke me up at 6 A.M. by ringing my phone. When I’d set it up the night before, I’d forgotten to configure it to stay silent before 7 A.M., so the ringing drilled into my ears at oh-dark-hundred and dragged me back from the land of nod. “Morning, beautiful,” I said.
“You could have told me you had video of the gassing,” she said.
“I forgot,” I said. I was still half asleep.
There was a long pause at the other end of the line. “You forgot?”
“I forgot I’d made the video.”
Another silence. “Okay, under any other circumstances, that would be really lame, but I guess you’ve been pretty distracted lately. Fine. You get a walk. This time. Still—holy shit, dude, what the hell?”
“Are people talking about it?”
“It got a million YouTube views before it got taken down. The Archive version’s still up and the torrent’s being seeded by about a thousand people.”
“Taken down, huh?” I tried to find some reservoir of naiveté in me that could be surprised to discover that the SFPD had ways of taking down files that embarrassed it.
“Temporary injunction,” she said. “That’s what the YouTube page says. I bet you’re going to get a visit from a process-server today.”
“You think they’re going to sue me?”
“Sure,” she said. “No recording in a frozen zone, remember?” There’d been a bunch of news stories for years about police departments declaring certain areas to be “frozen zones” because a “major operation” was taking place, and no press had been allowed.
“Frozen zone my butt. The courts’ve said that the press can go into a frozen zone.”
“Are you the press?”
“Well, a million people looked at my video. I’d say the answer is yes.”
I could hear her smiling on the other end of the phone. “Well, I agree with you. But you’ll have to explain it to a judge if you want to make it stick.”
“Great,” I said. “I’ll get right on that. After I get Joe Noss elected, sue the SFPD for police brutality and unlawful detention, and rescue two people I don’t like very much from the clutches of a band of ruthless international mercenaries.”
“You make it sound so hard,” she said. “Come on, dude, you’re M1k3y!”
“And I’ve got to get my phone number transferred to this new SIM.”
“Yeah, that sounds like a total bitch. Phone companies suck. Good thing you’ve got me.”
“I do,” I said. “Indeed I do.”
So that was that day: getting the rest of the stuff built for Joe, getting a whole raft of emails from reporters—some of whom I knew from my M1k3y days—asking if they could license “my” video for their networks. I laughed and said, “License, schmicense, it’s all over the net, duh.” That was good enough for Al Jazeera and Russia Today and The Guardian, but all the big American networks wanted me to sign these release forms saying that if anyone sued them for posting the video, they could sue me for letting them post it. Invariably, these “contracts” came as noneditable PDFs so that I couldn’t delete the offending clauses before signing them. The first three times this happened, I just opened the PDFs in a graphics-editing program and drew big black boxes over everything in the contract apart from the bit where I said they could use the video, pasted my signature into the bottom, and filled in the date and sent it back. After that, I stopped bothering. I noticed that most of the networks I gave this treatment to later ended up running the video, sometimes with “Courtesy of Marcus Yallow” underneath, but more often with their big fat logos superimposed over the picture and “All rights reserved” messages that made me hoot with indignant laughter.
* * *
My new phone rang at 2 A.M. Like an idiot, I’d forgotten again to apply the setting that turned off the ringer after bedtime. I swiped at the ANSWER button.
“Ange,” I said. “It’s the middle of the goddamned night. I love you and all—”
“We love you, too, M1k3y.” It was another one of those text-to-speech voices. This one was female and had a crappy Australian accent.
“Good-bye,” I said.
“You haven’t done anything about Carrie Johnstone,” a different voice said. This one was male and sounded like Yoda.
“You called me to tell me that? I already knew that.”
“Masha and Zeb are depending on you.” The female voice this time. I wondered if there were really two people on the call. It could have been one guy. Or one woman. Or a hundred people typing
into a group-edited page and firing off the results to a text-to-speech engine.
“I’ve done everything I told Masha I would do and then some. If you want to save her, you should do it yourself.”
“We sent you Johnstone’s d0x,” the male voice said.
“You did.”
“Did you look at them?” This was a new voice, impossibly deep, like a cartoon bullfrog. It had a Texas accent.
“No,” I lied.
“You should look at them. Johnstone’s a very naughty girl. You could tell the world about it. You’ve got the platform. Especially now.”
I sat up in bed. “Listen,” I said. “I don’t take advice from anonymous strangers. If you’ve got something to say to me, you can say it to my face. It’s easy to sit there in your parents’ basements telling me how I should be risking my life, but as far as I’m concerned, you’re just another gang of creeps who get their kicks from spying on people.”
“So much drama,” the Australian voice said again. “We’ve handed you Johnstone on a platter. You’ve got the home addresses of everyone she loves, her Social Security number, her ex-husbands, her criminal record, the institution where her daddy is drying out from his latest Vicodin binge. You put all that online, you watch how fast she comes around to bargain.”
“Why would she bargain with me after I put all her secrets online?”
“Oh,” the Yoda voice said, “because she doesn’t know what else you have. We told you, Ms. Johnstone’s been a very naughty girl. You remember what we did to your computer? You’d be amazed at how many other peoples’ computers we’ve pwned.”
I groaned and pulled my knees up to my chest. “If you guys are all so leet and badass, why don’t you do this? Why aren’t you destroying Carrie Johnstone?”
“We are, Marcus. But you are our instrument in this mission. You are the perfect weapon to use to destroy one of the worst people on Earth. You should feel special.”
I hung up.
* * *
Look, you try to get to sleep after a call like that. I’d spent several mesmerized hours staring at Carrie Johnstone’s d0x already, but being gassed, beaten, shackled, nearly kidnapped, taken into custody, and then released to an insanely busy work situation had managed to drive the details out of my mind. And it wasn’t as if I’d gotten through all of them. There were thousands of files in the Johnstone d0x. It was like a miniature ship-in-a-bottle version of the darknet docs, a mammoth library of sleaze and misery blended with a million irrelevant facts, cryptic files, and weird irrelevancies. I’d become a one-man version of the Department of Homeland Security, sitting on top of a haystack the size of the universe, trying to find the needles.
I dove back into the Johnstone d0x. The conversation with the freaky, computer-voiced Anons had rattled me, but it had also intrigued me. I’d had nightmares about Johnstone, and there was something evilly attractive about giving her a nightmare for a change.
The conversation had equipped me with some search terms to use on the trove, and I saw that yup, her family was pretty screwed up, and that there were a bunch of phone numbers and addresses for relatives. Some of them were important people—there was an uncle who was a judge in Texas—and some were only noteworthy because they were in rehab or had some embarrassing criminal charge in their records. Once I started to search on their names, I saw that a lot of them had received “consulting” payments from Zyz, and while I didn’t know enough about finance to know exactly what that meant, I assumed that it was either a way for Johnstone to rip off Zyz by sending a lot of money to her family, or some kind of slimy money-laundering. No reason it couldn’t be both, either.
There were a few folders of photos. The most disturbing of these were clearly taken by the webcam on Johnstone’s computer without her knowledge. In several, she wore pajamas or only a bra, and in one, she had a finger rammed up one nostril to the second knuckle. My first thought was how humiliating it would be to her if I released these pictures. My second thought was to feel sick at the number of pictures like this of me that there had to be floating around, and to wonder what all my robot-voiced “friends” might do with them if they decided I wasn’t on their side.
A file called “searchterms.txt” turned out to be exactly what it sounded like: everything Carrie Johnstone had plugged into a search engine, harvested from her browser’s cache of search queries. I started looking through it and quickly looked away. I hated Carrie Johnstone, but I didn’t need to know what kind of breast cancer she was looking into, about her research into antidepressant drugs, or the names of the stars whose “nude photos” she was searching for.
I shook myself like a dog shaking off water, and retreated to the emotionally safer distance of all those payments from Zyz. Looking at several different files, I saw that everything that had to do with a payment used the string “IBAN,” which stood for International Bank Account Number, and had to be specified for wire transfers. From there, it only took a few seconds to produce a list of every file that had to do with payments and start looking through them. I quickly saw that Johnstone controlled and moved a lot of Zyz money, and that her payments went to a lot of political action committees. I wondered if maybe her family was channeling the PAC money as well.
A few seconds on the Web and I saw that Johnstone’s favorite PACs were big donors to politicians who supported easy debt-collection laws, and it clicked. The darknet docs might tell the story of the pressure to wipe out the families of kids with student debt, but here was the smoking gun, the money paid from Zyz to fronts that went on to fatten up politicians who went along with the deal.
It was 3 A.M. I had work the next day. It was going to be a big day. There was a pretty good chance all our servers would be taken down by some scary lawyer-threat somewhere and I’d have to have a clear head to fix that. But who the hell could sleep under these circumstances? Who was I kidding? I was up for the count.
I took my laptop down into the kitchen and made myself cheese on toast—always my favorite midnight feast—and dithered in front of the coffee machine for ten minutes, trying to decide whether I should or shouldn’t have a cup. If I drank coffee now, I really would be up for the rest of the night. But even if I didn’t, I was pretty sure that I wasn’t going back to bed, and a little of the old bean-juice would sure help sharpen my wits.
Who was I kidding? I loaded up the AeroPress and made myself a double, and then made another to keep it company. I sat down at the kitchen table with the machine and kept on reading. I even went back to the pictures.
A chat request popped up on my screen. That didn’t happen often. Ever since I’d gotten the job with Joe, I’d kept my main ID logged out, and the only handle I left logged in was one that almost no one knew about.
> hey jolu
> hey mr nite owl - good to see im not the only one awake at o-dark-hunnerd
> why are you up?
> fight with kylie
> oh
I paused.
> you mean you two are …
> kinda. its complicated
I had no idea that Jolu had any kind of romantic life, though it stood to reason. But Kylie? She was old! Oh, chronologically she was only a couple years older than us. But she was such a grown-up. She’d run that meeting like a boss.
> listen you want to get a slice of pie?
It was the first sensible suggestion anyone had made to me all night.
> hell yeah
> ill be there in 15
* * *
San Francisco isn’t a bad place to get a slice of pie at three in the morning. I’m willing to believe that New York might be better, but it’s not like we lacked for choice in any event. We ended up in the Tenderloin at one of those ’50s-retro places that stayed open 24 hours and catered to a weird blend of jet-lagged tourists, hookers, off-duty cops, homeless people, and night-shifters. And us.
“I think you should do something really lateral,” Jolu said, after I had him up to speed. “I mean, you’ve got these t
wo groups of weird-ass crooks hoping to make you jump one way or the other, and they’re both calculating your next move to see if they can get inside it, steer it. They’re smart, nuts, and totally lacking in ethics. The only way you’re going to get ahead of them is by doing something totally, absolutely whacked out. Move to Albania. Rappel off the Golden Gate Bridge. Become a Trappist monk.”
“That’s really helpful, thanks.”
“Oh, come on, it’s a major advance on ‘When in trouble or in doubt…’”
“Again, this is less than helpful.”
“It’s four in the morning, cut me a break.”
This wasn’t the first time I’d found myself in an all-night diner with Jolu, and all the nights we’d passed in this kind of place had a certain sameness to them—I’d swear that some of the skeezy drunks and cracked-out weirdos holding down the booths around us were there the last time we’d been here. It’s funny how comforting it was to inhabit the sheer weirdness of eating a slice of bad blueberry pie and good ice cream in the middle of the night sitting next to a guy with a face full of broken veins like a map of the California state highway system, a crooked nose, and a pink ballerina’s tutu around his prodigious middle. Especially when that guy is trading unintelligible drunken remarks with a skinny one-armed guy with a heavily tattooed scalp, bare feet, and long fingernails painted with glitter polish.
“Marcus,” Jolu said, “seriously. This is some bad stuff you’ve gotten involved with, and you’re letting yourself be driven by what other people are doing, instead of choosing a path and making other people decide what to do about you. There’s no reason for that. Look at it this way: all these people—the weirdos who rooted your computer, these mercenaries—have a lot of advantages over you. They’re organized, they have money, they have technical expertise you lack.”
“Gee, thanks, Jolu.”
“Wait for it. They also all have to have meetings to decide what to do next. You can just decide on your own. That means that you can do something, force them to all sit down and figure out their next course of action, and while they’re doing that, you can change direction, so that by the time they’ve worked out their response, it no longer applies. They have lots of advantages, but this is your advantage, and you’ve more or less surrendered it.”