This chapter is dedicated to Compass Books/Books Inc, the oldest inde-pendent bookstore in the western USA. They've got stores up and downCalifornia, in San Francisco, Burlingame, Mountain View and PaloAlto, but coolest of all is that they run a killer bookstore in the middle ofDisneyland's Downtown Disney in Anaheim. I'm a stone Disney parkfreak (see my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom if youdon't believe it), and every time I've lived in California, I've bought my-self an annual Disneyland pass, and on practically every visit, I drop byCompass Books in Downtown Disney. They stock a brilliant selection ofunauthorized (and even critical) books about Disney, as well as a greatvariety of kids books and science fiction, and the cafe next door makes amean cappuccino.
Compass Books/Books IncHe was so angry I thought he was going to pop. You know I said I'donly seen him lose his cool rarely? That night, he lost it more than heever had.
"You wouldn't believe it. This cop, he was like eighteen years old andhe kept saying, 'But sir, why were you in Berkeley yesterday if your cli-ent is in Mountain View?' I kept explaining to him that I teach at Berke-ley and then he'd say, 'I thought you were a consultant,' and we'd startover again. It was like some kind of sitcom where the cops have beentaken over by the stupidity ray.
"What's worse was he kept insisting that I'd been in Berkeley today aswell, and I kept saying no, I hadn't been, and he said I had been. Then heshowed me my FasTrak billing and it said I'd driven the San Mateobridge three times that day!
"That's not all," he said, and drew in a breath that let me know he wasreally steamed. "They had information about where I'd been, places thatdidn't have a toll plaza. They'd been polling my pass just on the street, at114random. And it was wrong! Holy crap, I mean, they're spying on us alland they're not even competent!"I'd drifted down into the kitchen as he railed there, and now I waswatching him from the doorway. Mom met my eye and we both raisedour eyebrows as if to say, Who's going to say 'I told you so' to him? I nod-ded at her. She could use her spousular powers to nullify his rage in away that was out of my reach as a mere filial unit.
"Drew," she said, and grabbed him by the arm to make him stop stalk-ing back and forth in the kitchen, waving his arms like a street-preacher.
"What?" he snapped.
"I think you owe Marcus an apology." She kept her voice even andlevel. Dad and I are the spazzes in the household — Mom's a total rock.
Dad looked at me. His eyes narrowed as he thought for a minute. "Allright," he said at last. "You're right. I was talking about competent sur-veillance. These guys were total amateurs. I'm sorry, son," he said. "Youwere right. That was ridiculous." He stuck his hand out and shook myhand, then gave me a firm, unexpected hug.
"God, what are we doing to this country, Marcus? Your generation de-serves to inherit something better than this." When he let me go, I couldsee the deep wrinkles in his face, lines I'd never noticed.
I went back up to my room and played some Xnet games. There was agood multiplayer thing, a clockwork pirate game where you had to questevery day or two to wind up your whole crew's mainsprings before youcould go plundering and pillaging again. It was the kind of game I hatedbut couldn't stop playing: lots of repetitive quests that weren't all thatsatisfying to complete, a little bit of player-versus-player combat(scrapping to see who would captain the ship) and not that many coolpuzzles that you had to figure out. Mostly, playing this kind of gamemade me homesick for Harajuku Fun Madness, which balanced out run-ning around in the real world, figuring out online puzzles, and strategiz-ing with your team.
But today it was just what I needed. Mindless entertainment.
My poor dad.
I'd done that to him. He'd been happy before, confident that his taxdollars were being spent to keep him safe. I'd destroyed that confidence.
It was false confidence, of course, but it had kept him going. Seeing himnow, miserable and broken, I wondered if it was better to be clear-eyedand hopeless or to live in a fool's paradise. That shame — the shame I'd115felt since I gave up my passwords, since they'd broken me — returned,leaving me listless and wanting to just get away from myself.
My character was a swabbie on the pirate ship Zombie Charger, andhe'd wound down while I'd been offline. I had to IM all the other playerson my ship until I found one willing to wind me up. That kept me occu-pied. I liked it, actually. There was something magic about a totalstranger doing you a favor. And since it was the Xnet, I knew that all thestrangers were friends, in some sense.
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Where u located?
The character who wound me up was called Lizanator, and it was fe-male, though that didn't mean that it was a girl. Guys had some weirdaffinity for playing female characters.
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San FranciscoI said.
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No stupe, where you located in San Fran?
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Why, you a pervert?
That usually shut down that line of conversation. Of course everygamespace was full of pedos and pervs, and cops pretending to be pedo-and perv-bait (though I sure hoped there weren't any cops on the Xnet!).
An accusation like that was enough to change the subject nine out of tentimes.
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Mission? Potrero Hill? Noe? East Bay?
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Just wind me up k thx?
She stopped winding.
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You scared?
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Safe — why do you care?
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116Just curiousI was getting a bad vibe off her. She was clearly more than just curi-ous. Call it paranoia. I logged off and shut down my Xbox.
Dad looked at me over the table the next morning and said, "It lookslike it's going to get better, at least." He handed me a copy of the Chron-icle open to the third page.
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A Department of Homeland Security spokesman has confirmed thatthe San Francisco office has requested a 300 percent budget and person-nel increase from DCWhat?
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Major General Graeme Sutherland, the commanding officer for North-ern California DHS operations, confirmed the request at a press confer-ence yesterday, noting that a spike in suspicious activity in the Bay Areaprompted the request. "We are tracking a spike in underground chatterand activity and believe that saboteurs are deliberately manufacturingfalse security alerts to undermine our efforts."My eyes crossed. No freaking way.
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"These false alarms are potentially 'radar chaff' intended to disguisereal attacks. The only effective way of combatting them is to step upstaffing and analyst levels so that we can fully investigate every lead.">
Sutherland noted the delays experienced all over the city were"unfortunate" and committed to eliminating them.
I had a vision of the city with four or five times as many DHS enfor-cers, brought in to make up for my own stupid ideas. Van was right. Themore I fought them, the worse it was going to get.
Dad pointed at the paper. "These guys may be fools, but they're meth-odical fools. They'll just keep throwing resources at this problem untilthey solve it. It's tractable, you know. Mining all the data in the city, fol-lowing up on every lead. They'll catch the terrorists."I lost it. "Dad! Are you listening to yourself? They're talking about in-vestigating practically every person in the city of San Francisco!"117"Yeah," he said, "that's right. They'll catch every alimony cheat, everydope dealer, every dirt-bag and every terrorist. You just wait. This couldbe the best thing that ever happened to this country.""Tell me you're joking," I said. "I beg you. You think that that's whatthey intended when they wrote the Constitution? What about the Bill ofRights?""The Bill of Rights was written before data-mining," he said. He wasawesomely serene, convinced of his rightness. "The right to freedom ofassociation is fine, but why shouldn't the cops be allowed to mine yoursocial network to figure out if you're hanging out with gangbangers andterrorists?""Because it's an invasion of my privacy!" I said.
"What's the big deal? Would you rather have privacy or terrorists?"Agh. I hated arguing with my dad like this. I needed a coffee. "Dad,come on. Taking away our privacy isn't catching terrorists: it's just incon-veniencing normal people.""How do you know it's not catching terrorists?""Where are the terrorists they've caught?""I'm sure we'll see arrests in good time. You just wait.""Dad, what the hell has happened to you since last night? You wereready to go nuclear on the cops for pulling you over —""Don't use that tone with me, Marcus. What's happened since lastnight is that I've had the chance to think it over and to read this." Herattled his paper. "The reason they caught me is that the bad guys areactively jamming them. They need to adjust their techniques to over-come the jamming. But they'll get there. Meanwhile the occasional roadstop is a small price to pay. This isn't the time to be playing lawyer aboutthe Bill of Rights. This is the time to make some sacrifices to keep our citysafe."I couldn't finish my toast. I put the plate in the dishwasher and left forschool. I had to get out of there.
The Xnetters weren't happy about the stepped up police surveillance,but they weren't going to take it lying down. Someone called a phone-inshow on KQED and told them that the police were wasting their time,that we could monkeywrench the system faster than they could untangleit. The recording was a top Xnet download that night.
118"This is California Live and we're talking to an anonymous caller at apayphone in San Francisco. He has his own information about the slow-downs we've been facing around town this week. Caller, you're on theair.""Yeah, yo, this is just the beginning, you know? I mean, like, we're justgetting started. Let them hire a billion pigs and put a checkpoint onevery corner. We'll jam them all! And like, all this crap about terrorists?
We're not terrorists! Give me a break, I mean, really! We're jamming upthe system because we hate the Homeland Security, and because we loveour city. Terrorists? I can't even spell jihad. Peace out."He sounded like an idiot. Not just the incoherent words, but also hisgloating tone. He sounded like a kid who was indecently proud of him-self. He was a kid who was indecently proud of himself.
The Xnet flamed out over this. Lots of people thought he was an idiotfor calling in, while others thought he was a hero. I worried that therewas probably a camera aimed at the payphone he'd used. Or an arphidreader that might have sniffed his Fast Pass. I hoped he'd had the smartsto wipe his fingerprints off the quarter, keep his hood up, and leave allhis arphids at home. But I doubted it. I wondered if he'd get a knock onthe door sometime soon.
The way I knew when something big had happened on Xnet was thatI'd suddenly get a million emails from people who wanted M1k3y toknow about the latest haps. It was just as I was reading about Mr Can't-Spell-Jihad that my mailbox went crazy. Everyone had a message for me— a link to a livejournal on the Xnet — one of the many anonymousblogs that were based on the Freenet document publishing system thatwas also used by Chinese democracy advocates.
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Close call>
We were jamming at the Embarcadero tonite and goofing around giv-ing everyone a new car key or door key or Fast Pass or FasTrak, tossingaround a little fake gunpowder. There were cops everywhere but wewere smarter then them; we're there pretty much every night and wenever get caught.
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So we got caught tonight. It was a stupid mistake we got sloppy wegot busted. It was an undercover who caught my pal and then got the119rest of us. They'd been watching the crowd for a long time and they hadone of those trucks nearby and they took four of us in but missed therest.
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The truck was JAMMED like a can of sardines with every kind of per-son, old young black white rich poor all suspects, and there were twocops trying to ask us questions and the undercovers kept bringing inmore of us. Most people were trying to get to the front of the line to getthrough questioning so we kept on moving back and it was like hours inthere and really hot and it was getting more crowded not less.
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At like 8PM they changed shifts and two new cops came in andbawled out the two cops who were there all like wtf? aren't you doinganything here. They had a real fight and then the two old cops left andthe new cops sat down at their desks and whispered to each other for awhile.
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Then one cop stood up and started shouting EVERYONE JUST GOHOME JESUS CHRIST WE'VE GOT BETTER THINGS TO DO THANBOTHER YOU WITH MORE QUESTIONS IF YOU'VE DONESOMETHING WRONG JUST DON'T DO IT AGAIN AND LET THIS BEA WARNING TO YOU ALL.
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A bunch of the suits got really pissed which was HILARIOUS becauseI mean ten minutes before they were buggin about being held there andnow they were wicked pissed about being let go, like make up yourminds!
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We split fast though and got out and came home to write this. Thereare undercovers everywhere, believe. If you're jamming, be open-eyedand get ready to run when problems happen. If you get caught try towait it out they're so busy they'll maybe just ............