This chapter is dedicated to Borders, the global bookselling giant thatyou can find in cities all over the world — I'll never forget walking intothe gigantic Borders on Orchard Road in Singapore and discovering ashelf loaded with my novels! For many years, the Borders in OxfordStreet in London hosted Pat Cadigan's monthly science fiction evenings,where local and visiting authors would read their work, speak about sci-ence fiction and meet their fans. When I'm in a strange city (which hap-pens a lot) and I need a great book for my next flight, there always seemsto be a Borders brimming with great choices — I'm especially partial tothe Borders on union Square in San Francisco.
Borders worldwideI wasn't the only one who got screwed up by the histograms. There arelots of people who have abnormal traffic patterns, abnormal usage pat-terns. Abnormal is so common, it's practically normal.
The Xnet was full of these stories, and so were the newspapers and theTV news. Husbands were caught cheating on their wives; wives werecaught cheating on their husbands, kids were caught sneaking out withillicit girlfriends and boyfriends. A kid who hadn't told his parents hehad AIDS got caught going to the clinic for his drugs.
Those were the people with something to hide — not guilty people,but people with secrets. There were even more people with nothing tohide at all, but who nevertheless resented being picked up, and ques-tioned. Imagine if someone locked you in the back of a police car and de-manded that you prove that you're not a terrorist.
It wasn't just public transit. Most drivers in the Bay Area have aFasTrak pass clipped to their sun-visors. This is a little radio-based"wallet" that pays your tolls for you when you cross the bridges, savingyou the hassle of sitting in a line for hours at the toll-plazas. They'dtripled the cost of using cash to get across the bridge (though they104always fudged this, saying that FasTrak was cheaper, not that anonym-ous cash was more expensive). Whatever holdouts were left afterwarddisappeared after the number of cash-lanes was reduced to just one perbridge-head, so that the cash lines were even longer.
So if you're a local, or if you're driving a rental car from a local agency,you've got a FasTrak. It turns out that toll-plazas aren't the only placethat your FasTrak gets read, though. The DHS had put FasTrak readersall over town — when you drove past them, they logged the time andyour ID number, building an ever-more perfect picture of who wentwhere, when, in a database that was augmented by "speeding cameras,""red light cameras" and all the other license-plate cameras that hadpopped up like mushrooms.
No one had given it much thought. And now that people were payingattention, we were all starting to notice little things, like the fact that theFasTrak doesn't have an off-switch.
So if you drove a car, you were just as likely to be pulled over by anSFPD cruiser that wanted to know why you were taking so many trips tothe Home Depot lately, and what was that midnight drive up to Sonomalast week about?
The little demonstrations around town on the weekend were growing.
Fifty thousand people marched down Market Street after a week of thismonitoring. I couldn't care less. The people who'd occupied my citydidn't care what the natives wanted. They were a conquering army. Theyknew how we felt about that.
One morning I came down to breakfast just in time to hear Dad tellMom that the two biggest taxi companies were going to give a "discount"to people who used special cards to pay their fares, supposedly to makedrivers safer by reducing the amount of cash they carried. I wonderedwhat would happen to the information about who took which cabswhere.
I realized how close I'd come. The new indienet client had beenpushed out as an automatic update just as this stuff started to get bad,and Jolu told me that 80 percent of the traffic he saw at Pigspleen wasnow encrypted. The Xnet just might have been saved.
Dad was driving me nuts, though.
"You're being paranoid, Marcus," he told me over breakfast one day asI told him about the guys I'd seen the cops shaking down on BART theday before.
105"Dad, it's ridiculous. They're not catching any terrorists, are they? It'sjust making people scared.""They may not have caught any terrorists yet, but they're sure gettinga lot of scumbags off the streets. Look at the drug dealers — it saysthey've put dozens of them away since this all started. Remember whenthose druggies robbed you? If we don't bust their dealers, it'll only getworse." I'd been mugged the year before. They'd been pretty civilizedabout it. One skinny guy who smelled bad told me he had a gun, the oth-er one asked me for my wallet. They even let me keep my ID, thoughthey got my debit card and Fast Pass. It had still scared me witless andleft me paranoid and checking my shoulder for weeks.
"But most of the people they hold up aren't doing anything wrong,Dad," I said. This was getting to me. My own father! "It's crazy. For everyguilty person they catch, they have to punish thousands of innocentpeople. That's just not good.""Innocent? Guys cheating on their wives? Drug dealers? You're de-fending them, but what about all the people who died? If you don't haveanything to hide —""So you wouldn't mind if they pulled you over?" My dad's histogramshad proven to be depressingly normal so far.
"I'd consider it my duty," he said. "I'd be proud. It would make me feelsafer."Easy for him to say.
Vanessa didn't like me talking about this stuff, but she was too smartabout it for me to stay away from the subject for long. We'd get togetherall the time, and talk about the weather and school and stuff, and then,somehow, I'd be back on this subject. Vanessa was cool when ithappened — she didn't Hulk out on me again — but I could see it upsether.
Still.
"So my dad says, 'I'd consider it my duty.' Can you freaking believe it? Imean, God! I almost told him then about going to jail, asking him if hethought that was our 'duty'!"We were sitting in the grass in Dolores Park after school, watching thedogs chase frisbees.
106Van had stopped at home and changed into an old t-shirt for one ofher favorite Brazilian tecno-brega bands, Carioca Proibid?o — the forbid-den guy from Rio. She'd gotten the shirt at a live show we'd all gone totwo years before, sneaking out for a grand adventure down at the CowPalace, and she'd sprouted an inch or two since, so it was tight and rodeup her tummy, showing her flat little belly button.
She lay back in the weak sun with her eyes closed behind her shades,her toes wiggling in her flip-flops. I'd known Van since forever, andwhen I thought of her, I usually saw the little kid I'd known with hun-dreds of jangly bracelets made out of sliced-up soda cans, who playedthe piano and couldn't dance to save her life. Sitting out there in DoloresPark, I suddenly saw her as she was.
She was totally h4wt — that is to say, hot. It was like looking at thatpicture of a vase and noticing that it was also two faces. I could see thatVan was just Van, but I could also see that she was hella pretty,something I'd never noticed.
Of course, Darryl had known it all along, and don't think that I wasn'tbummed out anew when I realized this.
"You can't tell your dad, you know," she said. "You'd put us all at risk."Her eyes were closed and her chest was rising up and down with herbreath, which was distracting in a really embarrassing way.
"Yeah," I said, glumly. "But the problem is that I know he's just totallyfull of it. If you pulled my dad over and made him prove he wasn't achild-molesting, drug-dealing terrorist, he'd go berserk. Totally off-the-rails. He hates being put on hold when he calls about his credit-card bill.
Being locked in the back of a car and questioned for an hour would givehim an aneurism.""They only get away with it because the normals feel smug comparedto the abnormals. If everyone was getting pulled over, it'd be a disaster.
No one would ever get anywhere, they'd all be waiting to get questionedby the cops. Total gridlock."Woah.
"Van, you are a total genius," I said.
"Tell me about it," she said. She had a lazy smile and she looked at methrough half-lidded eyes, almost romantic.
"Seriously. We can do this. We can mess up the profiles easily. Gettingpeople pulled over is easy."107She sat up and pushed her hair off her face and looked at me. I felt alittle flip in my stomach, thinking that she was really impressed with me.
"It's the arphid cloners," I said. "They're totally easy to make. Just flashthe firmware on a ten-dollar Radio Shack reader/writer and you're done.
What we do is go around and randomly swap the tags on people, over-writing their Fast Passes and FasTraks with other people's codes. That'llmake everyone skew all weird and screwy, and make everyone lookguilty. Then: total gridlock."Van pursed her lips and lowered her shades and I realized she was soangry she couldn't speak.
"Good bye, Marcus," she said, and got to her feet. Before I knew it, shewas walking away so fast she was practically running.
"Van!" I called, getting to my feet and chasing after her. "Van! Wait!"She picked up speed, making me run to catch up with her.
"Van, what the hell," I said, catching her arm. She jerked it away sohard I punched myself in the face.
"You're psycho, Marcus. You're going to put all your little Xnet bud-dies in danger for their lives, and on top of it, you're going to turn thewhole city into terrorism suspects. Can't you stop before you hurt thesepeople?"I opened and closed my mouth a couple times. "Van, I'm not the prob-lem, they are. I'm not arresting people, jailing them, making them disap-pear. The Department of Homeland Security are the ones doing that. I'mfighting back to make them stop.""How, by making it worse?""Maybe it has to get worse to get better, Van. Isn't that what you weresaying? If everyone............