“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?” Van asked me.
“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.”
“You were friends?”
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. “Okay, okay. 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 going woooo and 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 okay 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 stand-alone 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 superconscious 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 U.S. 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 okay 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 guy 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 gray 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 the 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, Abuses Of-Authority, 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 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 also 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 antiterrorism 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 to interview me 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, he was the 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
I’d 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 8 P.M., 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 six hundred players in it now!” We’d picked Patcheye Pete’s because it was the market closest to the village square where new players spa
wned. 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 outshoot 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 further. 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 further—I knew I couldn’t rely on her to back off, which scared me a little.