Homeland (30 page)
Was there ever going to be a "normal" again?
Since we'd arrived, the crowd had been growing. And growing. And
growing
. I'd been in some big demonstrations in San Francisco before, but they were generally the kind that had permits and marshalls and were very orderly. This wasn't like that. I'd been vaguely aware all summer that occupy demonstrations had been growing, mobilizing more people each time. But I hadn't quite figured out what that meant, not until I realized that the nearly painful roaring in my ears was just thousands and thousands of people all
talking
in very close quarters.
"Holy crap," I said, and Liam grinned, looking around, then showed me his phone, which had a live feed off someone's UAV, one of several that were buzzing the demonstration. Some had police markings, other had news-crew logos, and some were more colorful, with rainbows and slogans and grinning skulls. But most of them were eerily blank, and could have belonged to anyone. The one that was feeding Liam's phone was flying a lazy figure-eight pattern over the crowd, which, I saw now, stretched all the way down to Grove Street and all the way up to Golden Gate Avenue, and there were people with homemade signs converging on the crowd from side streets.
Liam was practically dancing a jig, and he was showing his phone's display off to everyone else -- Trudy Doo, the Anons, anyone who'd hold still. Meanwhile, I was fighting panic. There was one big, unscheduled crowd I'd been in, the thousands of people who'd streamed into the Powell Street BART station when the air-raid sirens went off, a crowd so dense it had been like a living thing, a boa constrictor that strangled you, an enormous dray horse that trampled you to death. Someone in that crowd had stabbed Darryl, a random act of senseless violence that I had often laid awake at night wondering about. Had that person just freaked out? Or had they been secretly waiting for the day when the opportunity to stab strangers with impunity would arise?
The crowd pressed in on all sides of me, moving in little increments, a sixteenth of an inch at a time, but moving, and not stopping, and growing closer every moment. I tried to step backwards and landed on someone's toe. "Sorry!" I said, and it came out in a yelp.
"Um, Liam," I said, grabbing his arm.
"What is it?"
"I got a bad feeling, Liam. Can we go? Now? I want to get back to the office, and we're not going to do that if we go to jail."
Or if we get crushed to death
.
"It's cool," he said. "Don't worry about it."
"Liam, I'm
going
," I said. "I'll see you at Joe's."
"Wait," he said, grabbing hold of me. "I'll go." Then, "Wait. Shit."
"What?"
"Kettle."
I bit the inside of my cheek and swallowed hard against the rising knob of vomit coming up my throat. "Kettling" is when the police surround a protest in a cordon of cops with riot shields, facemasks, batons, and helmets, and then
tighten
it, reducing the amount of space for the crowd, shoving them in together like frozen peas in a bag, often with nowhere to sit or lie down, with no food or water or toilets. Tens of thousands of people -- kids, sick people, pregnant women, old people, people who needed to get back to work. For some reason, kettles had to be airtight -- no one was allowed to get in or out until the police decided to let you dribble out in small numbers. Anyone who tried to get out was treated as a desperate criminal, which is why "kettle" had become synonymous with protesters on stretchers, blood streaming from their head wounds, eyes red with pepper spray, twitching with the effects of the gas and their injuries.
"Liam," I said. "We need to get out of here now." On his screen, I could see the skirmish line of SFPD officers with all their tactical crap, helmets and shields, like the wet dream of some Zyz mercenary or mall ninja. "Before they tighten the cordon."
To my amazement, he started
singing
and smiling. "Polly put the kettle on/Sukey take it off again!" Meanwhile, his fingers flew over his phone's screen. "Don't you know it?" he said, seeing my puzzlement.
"What?"
"Sukey? Like the old poem? 'Polly put the kettle on/Sukey take it off again'? No? It's a nursery rhyme. I thought everyone knew it!"
"I don't know this nursery rhyme, Liam. Why does it matter, precisely?" I was struggling not to bite his head off. No one should look that thrilled about being in a kettle.
"Sukey's an open source intelligence app. It gathers reports on kettles from people in the crowds, UAVs, webcams, SMSs, whatever, and overlays them on a U.S. Geographical Survey map, so that you can easily see what routes are still open. There's no way they could block
all
the side streets off in a space this big."
He handed me his phone and I peered intently at it. Angry, thick red lines denoted the police lines, with arrows showing the directions that reinforcements were arriving from. Thin green lines showed the escape routes.
"Dotted lines are unverified. Solid lines are verified, but they fade into unverified dots if they're not regularly refreshed. That one looks good." He pointed at a pedestrian walkway between two civic buildings, a few hundred yards down the street.
"That one's unverified," I said. "What about this one? It's verified and it's closer."
He shook his head. "Yeah, but someone needs to go verify that one. And if it's shut off, look, there's another verified route just past it. It'd be doing our part for the cause."
"I just want to
go
, Liam," I said.
He gave me a look of such utter disappointment that I was literally unable to set off, pinned in place by his gaze and the crush of bodies around me. The Anons had climbed up on the base and were impossible to read beneath their masks' gigantic grins. Trudy Doo had moved off into the crowd and I'd lost sight of her. But I felt like she was watching me, along with the Anons, and Liam, and the whole crowd, all watching "M1k3y" lose his nerve. Like they were already tweeting it.
"Forget it," I said. "Let's go check the Sukey route."
Liam smiled uncertainly and we set off. It was like walking through molasses, and while there was plenty of happy chanting and discussion, there were also far-off cries that might have been screams. I began to shiver as I inched through the press of bodies. But Sukey was right: the little walkway was unguarded, and people were slipping in and out of it. We followed them, going single file, and when we reached the end, Liam tapped his screen and verified the route. "Job done," he said, and we headed down Market Street. I made Liam take off his bandanna. We passed plenty of cops, both stationary and moving toward the demonstration. There were also plenty of demonstrators, and the police were stopping some of them, searching them and their bags. We passed a pair of girls about our age in plastic handcuffs, one looking furious, the other looking like she might cry any second, being led into a police cruiser. We hurried past.
We descended into the BART station and rode in uncomfortable silence. The oppressive feeling of being watched crowded in from all sides.
As we came up onto Mission, Liam said, "I can't believe how many people came out."
"Yeah."
"Like, no one wanted to come out until they found out that everyone else was. And once everyone started to come out, everyone else came out, too."
Unspoken, hanging in the air between us, was the question, "So why aren't we there now?"
I finished the day at my desk, flipping back and forth from my work to newsfeeds and streams and tweets from the monster demonstration. According to Sukey, people were still escaping the kettle, but from what I could tell from the overhead shots, more people were joining the demo than were leaving. The UAV shots were like some kind of monster rock show. Ange texted me after class to say she was heading to one of the satellite demonstrations that had formed on the other side of the kettle, turning the police line into a stupid joke. Later, I found out that Jolu, Darryl, and Van had all been there separately. I didn't go back. Just before I fell asleep, I checked my phone and saw that the kettle had lifted and most of the demonstrators had gone home -- except for the 600-plus who'd been hauled off to jail, and the couple dozen who'd gone to the hospital. I went to sleep.
The Tattered Cover: Denver, CO
This chapter is dedicated to The Tattered Cover, Denver's legendary independent bookstore. I happened upon The Tattered Cover quite by accident: Alice and I had just landed in Denver, coming in from London, and it was early and cold and we needed coffee. We drove in aimless rental-car circles, and that's when I spotted it, the Tattered Cover's sign. Something about it tingled in my hindbrain -- I knew I'd heard of this place. We pulled in (got a coffee) and stepped into the store -- a wonderland of dark wood, homey reading nooks, and miles and miles of bookshelves.
I got up the next morning before my alarm sounded, lurching out of bed and into the bathroom in a mild panic over all the work I had to do that day. I pulled on a T-shirt that passed the sniff test (barely) and decided I could get away with the same socks I'd had on the day before. I was about to open my throat and tip a bowl of muesli down it when I saw the fat newspaper sitting on the kitchen table where my mom had left it. Thick as a hotel-room Bible: the San Francisco Chronicle, a newspaper that had thumped down on our doorstep every Saturday morning since time began.
Every
Saturday
morning. I put down my muesli mid-guzzle and flumpfed into a kitchen chair, all the get-out-of-the-house adrenaline leaving my body with an almost audible
whoosh
.
Five minutes later, I was still sitting there, contemplating the question of what I should do with my weekend. The last time I'd had a real
weekend
was back in high school, and even then I'd had all that homework. I decided it'd be good to make a big ole weekend brunch, something for Mom and Dad, with proper coffee (not the swill they normally drank) brewed up with my little AeroPress. Then I could have a leisurely shower, tidy up my room, stick a load of laundry in the machine, and meander down to Noisebridge and dust off Secret Project X-1 and see about getting my 3D printer going in time for
next year
's Burning Man.
It was the best plan I could have made -- for a change. I did crazy-ass 3D pancake sculptures (I cook a mean pancake AT-AT), and the coffee was "brilliant" (a direct quote from my mom). The parents were duly impressed with my room-cleaning, and by the time I shoved Lurch into my backpack and jumped on my bike, I was feeling like maybe I'd found some of that "normal" I'd been missing.
There weren't too many Noisebridgers around by the time I rolled in at 10:30. I went to my shelf and grabbed down my box-o'-stuff, making puffs of playa dust rise off all the broken crap I'd brought back from Burning Man. I found a free workbench and nodded at the girl with the shaved head who was teaching her little sister how to solder at the next bench over. I got a can of compressed air and some soft cloths and started blowing out the dust and getting ready to wrestle with my printer anew. I slipped into an easy reverie, punctuated by Club-Mate breaks -- this being the official drink of hackerspaces around the world, a sweet German soda laced with caffeine and Mate tea extract, a jet-fuel-grade stimulant.
When the cleaning was done, I grabbed a multimeter and started testing all the circuits in X-1, starting from the power supply and working my way through the system. Partway through my checks, I thought I found the problem, a spot where it looked like a stepper motor had been mounted backwards, so I grabbed Lurch and went hunting for a diagram to see if I was right, thinking,
Jeez, if it turns out that this was all that was wrong, I'm going to feel like a total derp.
Of course, once my laptop was open on the workbench beside me, it was inevitable that I'd have a sneaky peek at my email -- looking at my laptop without checking in would be like going to the cupboard and not snagging a cookie.
To: <
[email protected]
<
From: Leaky McLeakerpants
Subject: carrie johnstone d0x
2 use as u see fit
It was signed with a little ASCII-art Guy Fawkes face made out of punctuation marks and letters, and attached to the email was a gigantic ZIP file.
I had a pretty good idea what that was: every single fact and fantasy that could be had about Carrie Johnstone and what she was up to. I'd seen d0xxes that went back to second grade report cards, ones that included the subjects' kids' medical records, everything. Nothing was off-limits when you were being d0xxed.
I closed my laptop's lid and closed my eyes.
A big part of me didn't want to see the docs in that folder. I had plenty of secret docs in my life already. And I knew what it was like to be totally, absolutely invaded. Carrie Johnstone had done it to me. So had the jerks who'd rooted my laptop. Somewhere in the world, someone might be staring at an email whose subject line was "Marcus Yallow d0x."
The thing was, I
knew
I was going to open that zip file. Of course I was. Who wouldn't? Carrie Johnstone was a monster: kidnapper, torturer, murderer. War criminal. Power-tripping mercenary. Scumbag and commander of scumbags. She was hunting me, too. Let's not forget that. Now that the story was out, wouldn't Zyz be back? How long until I met Timmy and Knothead again? Would I end up at the bottom of the Bay this time?
I
had
to open it. It was self-defense. In fact, I'd bet the only reason Carrie Johnstone hadn't had me whisked away to some private torture chamber was that she assumed that I'd been sneaky enough to gather this kind of dossier and had it ready to dump, on a dead man's switch, if I got disappeared. People like Carrie Johnstone always assume everyone else thinks like them. Not like people like me. People like me are good people. We deserve to read other peoples' dirty laundry. Especially bad people.
I was such a coward.
I unpacked the folder and started browsing the docs.
You would have done it, too.
"Marcus?" a voice said, some eternity later. It was Lemmy, the Noisebridger who'd given me and Ange our ride back from Burning Man. He was in his forties, an old ex-punk with stretched-out ear piercings and blurred tattoos up and down his arms. He was a demon in the machine shop, and was the first person I'd ask any time I had a question about something big, fast-moving, and lethal. I always got the impression that he thought my little electronics projects were cute toys, fun, but not serious like a giant piece of precision-machined metal.
I had the feeling he'd been talking to me for a little while, and that I hadn't heard him.
"Sorry," I said. "Engrossing reading, is all."
He smiled. "Look, I was going to go join the rest down at the big demonstration, bring some UAVs along. Want to come along and be my crew?"
"There's a big demonstration?"
He laughed. "Come on, buddy, take a break every now and then, will you? You know that big one that happened yesterday? Well, it looks like everyone who went yesterday's come back again, and they brought all their friends. Downtown's
shut down
. I've been playing with my quadcopters, think I can get them to produce some killer footage. They're all rigged to act as WiFi bridges, too, each on a different 4G network, so we should be able to supply some free connectivity to the crowd. I've also got a software-defined radio rig in three of them that can triangulate on police and emergency bands. I think I've got it set so they'll home in on any clusters of dense police-radio chatter, which should be pretty interesting. But you know, I'm not really much of a coder, so I thought I could use a pit crew to help me debug the code on the fly during the inaugural flight."
Lemmy was also a UAV nut, though, again, I think he'd have preferred unmanned autonomous tanks or ATVs, anything with a lot of shiny, heavy metal. I looked at my screen, and my screen looked back at me, with everything I could have ever wanted to know about Carrie Johnstone and a lot more.
I couldn't stop looking at it, but I didn't want to keep looking at it.
"Let's go," I said, putting my lid down and sticking Lurch in my bag. "You can't write code for shit, dude."
"Yeah," he said, cheerfully. "Code's just
details
. I'm a big-picture kind of guy."
Lemmy wanted to drive -- it being hard to carry four miniature quad-copters the couple of miles to the periphery of the demonstration -- but we probably could have crawled in less time than it took to beat the frozen traffic leading up to the march. I spent the time getting familiar with Lemmy's control software, which built on some standard libraries I was already familiar with: systems for steering UAVs and for running software defined radios, mostly.
Software-defined radio is hot stuff, and it's kind of snuck up on the world without us noticing much. Old-fashioned radios work with a little quartz crystal, like the one in an electrical watch. Quartz vibrates, buzzing back and forth at a rate that's determined at the time that it's manufactured. You choose a crystal, build a circuit around it, and the radio is done -- it can tune in to any signals that are inside the vibrational frequency of the crystal. One radio works for tuning into GPS satellites, another to CDMA cellular phone signals, another for FM radio, and so on.
But SDR is
programmable
radio. Instead of a crystal, it uses a fast analog-to-digital converter, a little electronic gizmo that takes any analog signal off a sensor (say, light patterns off an electric eye, or sound patterns off a microphone) and turns it into ones and zeros. You connect the converter to a radio antenna and tell it what band to listen in on, and then you use standard software to make sense of what it receives.
What this means is that the same box can be used to read air-traffic signals, police band, CB radio, analog TV, digital TV, AM radio, FM radio, satellite radio, GPS, baby monitors, eleven flavors of WiFi and every cellular phone standard ever invented,
all at once
, provided the converter is fast enough, the antenna is big enough, and the software is smart enough. It's the radio-wave equivalent of inventing a car that can turn itself into a bicycle, a jumbo jet, a zeppelin, an ocean-liner or a performance motorcycle just by loading different code into its computer. It's bad ass.
Lemmy's UAVs had some off-the-shelf SDRs he'd bought from an open source hardware company called Adafruit in New York. Adafruit sells electronics that come with full source code and schematics, complete road maps for remaking them to do your bidding. Everyone at Noisebridge loved their SDRs and other gear. And since there were thousands of hackers and tinkerers around the world who worked with the Adafruit SDRs (and all the other versions that Adafruit's competition made from the same plans), there was a lot of very clean, very well-documented code for talking to them.
I dove into this in the passenger seat, vaguely aware that the car was lurching from stop to start, turning corner after corner, as Lemmy sought out a spot close to the protest.
"What's the verdict, doc?" he said, as he engaged the parking brake. "Is my code going to live?"
I shrugged. "Looks about right to me. Am I right in thinking you've just pasted in the code examples from the tutorials with a couple of lines tying each module in with the last?"
He grinned. "Yup. I treat writing code like making a cake from a cake mix: pour it into a bowl, add an egg and a cup of water, stir, and throw it in the oven. It's not always pretty, but it's always a cake."
"Well, let's see if we've got a cake, then."
I got out of the car, a tricky feat since we were parked on the upslope of a steep hill. I didn't immediately recognize the neighborhood, but when I did, I was surprised. "Are we on the
other side
of Nob Hill?"
"Yup. It's the closest I could get to the protest. That thing is
huge
."
"But we must be, I don't know, a mile away?"
"Oh, less than that. Plus the protest is getting bigger, from what I can tell. It might reach here before the day's out. Something's
happening
. People are
pissed
. I've been living here since the eighties and I've never seen anything on this scale."
He dug around in the trunk and pulled out his quadcopters. Each one was an X of light, flexible plastic, with helicopter rotors at the end of each leg of the X. A round pod in the middle carried the battery and the electronics, radios, and control systems. Without the battery, each one weighed less than a pound, but the batteries doubled their weight. He handed me two of them, and I held one in each hand, awkwardly fitting my fingers around the sensors and antennae in the center disc, trying not to bend anything or smudge any of the lens covers.
Then he handed me one more, being much rougher with it than I'd dared to be (but then, it was his quadcopter to break, not mine). I stuck it awkwardly under one arm. He perched the remaining one on his hand and thumbed at his phone with his other hand. The four rotors spun up with a dragonfly whirring, the quadcopter wobbled twice on his palm, then lifted off straight into the sky in a vertical takeoff that was so fast it seemed like the quadcopter had simply vanished like a special effect.
He took back the extra copter from me and showed me his phone, which was showing the view from the copter's lower camera, a receding landscape with the tops of our heads in the middle of it, shrinking to two little dots as the copter clawed at the air and pulled itself into the sky.
"Well, that works," he said. "Thought it'd be useful to have a little overview as we got close. Here, I'm going to webcast the feed." He thumbed some more buttons.
"Nice," I said. This was exactly what I loved about technology: when it just
worked
and turned individuals into forces of nature. We'd just put an eye in the sky that anyone could tune in to. "What's the link?"
"It automatically tweets the URL from my account when I start it up. Do you follow me?"
"Yeah," I said. I got out my phone and punched up the Twitter client, found the tweet with the link, and retweeted it, tapping in, "Heading to the #sanfrancisco #occupy #protest. Bringing quadcopters. Aerial video here."
We walked laboriously uphill to the top of Nob Hill, the copter hovering a hundred feet above us, high enough to be clear of any overhead wires or trees. From Lemmy's phone screen, we could see the hairy edges of the protest, where people were still arriving. Farther in, it looked almost like static, all these little dots -- peoples' heads -- moving in tiny, quick blips, packed as densely as oranges in an orange crate.