Homeland (37 page)
It's surprising how philosophical being shivering, terrified, and naked in police custody can make you. If you'd have asked me how I'd have felt about these guys beforehand, I would have told you that I hated them, thought they were gutless cowards and worse. They were traitors to humanity, people who made their living defending the interests of the wealthy and corrupt and powerful from everyone else. I'd seen them commit violence, seen them arrive at a peaceful protest dressed up like science fiction super-soldiers, seen them bristling with (supposedly) non-lethal weapons and treating people who were scared and upset about the world like vermin.
But there we were, two groups of human beings in a cold room, one group naked, one group wearing overblown Hallowe'en costumes, and none of us wanted to be there. We had parts we'd been given by some weird, unimaginable authority, "the system," and now we had to act them out. I could see that the cops in the room would rather have been pretty much anywhere else, doing pretty much anything else. But there they were, looking up our buttholes, and getting ready to throw us into cages.
There was a knife-edged moment where I felt like I could just pull on my underwear and walk up to the nearest cop and say, "Come on, dude, let's be reasonable about this," and we could have talked it over like real people who lived in the same city with the same problems. This guy might have kids who were going to get stuck paying off a quarter million bucks' worth of student debt or he'd lose his house; that guy was young enough that he might actually be living with his parents and trying to pay off that debt.
The moment stretched and broke. Our clothes were patted down and shaken out, then we were allowed to dress again. They cuffed us again, too. I silently begged the universe to keep me free from ankle cuffs and thought I'd made it, when the cop who was trussing me up seemed to remember that I'd been ankle-cuffed and reached for his belt again.
"It's okay," I said. "You don't have to do that."
He pretended he didn't hear me, but grabbed one of my ankles and started to cinch the zip strip around it.
"Come on, man," I said, wheedling and whining now, hating the sound of it in my voice. "It's really not necessary."
The guy made eye contact with me and grunted. "You did something to earn those cuffs. Not my job to figure out whether it's time to get rid of 'em."
I squeezed my eyes shut. This guy had no idea why I'd been cuffed, but because I'd been cuffed, I obviously deserved to be cuffed. "Tom" was long gone, and so was the inspector who'd rescued me. I could imagine wearing leg cuffs all the way to the courthouse and the judge, and being denied bail because I was the kind of dangerous offender who got leg bindings.
I shuffled out of the foreman's office and into the main building. The cavernous space had been fitted with mesh cages, stretching in corridors as far as I could see. The cages were made of chain-link and steel poles, the poles bolted to the floor and ceiling at precise intervals, slicing the room into little pens. Each one had an electric lock fitted to its hasp, an open-air chemical toilet, and a collection of grim-looking prisoners. Men were on one side of the central aisle, women on the other.
One by one, the cops tossed us into different "cells," following instructions on their hardened, tactical handheld computers. I decided that "tactical" was the world's most boring fashion statement. Sometimes, they put guys into cells that were so full there was no room to sit, other guys went into cells where they were virtually on their own. Several cells sat empty. Whatever sorting and packing algorithm was being used to incarcerate us, it had a sense of humor.
I ended up in one of the nearly empty ones, and was glad that my hands had been cuffed in front of me, because I was finally able to take the piss that had been trying to batter its way to freedom for the past several hours, sitting down on the exposed toilet and hunching over for privacy, then fumbling my underwear and pants back up.
Within a few hours, the cell had gone from empty to full. Yes, I said hours. More hours went by. It felt like we'd been there for a day, though there was no daylight, and everyone had had their watches and phones confiscated. I got to know some of the guys in my cell, and someone tried a mic check and gave a little speech about how much it sucked that we were being held this way and asked the cops to uphold the law and give us our phone calls and food and water. He got cheers from the other protesters in the cells, and the cops pretended they didn't hear.
Hours oozed past.
People had come and gone for so long that I stopped paying attention. I was hungry and thirsty, and the toilet was overflowing and making revolting smells and starting to ooze a sickening chemical slick that reduced the space in the cell. Finally, I realized that the whole place was quieter and emptier than it had been before. More people were going than coming. They weren't coming back. So they were going
somewhere
, possibly to get their phone calls and their hearings.
Finally, officers came for me, two of them. They sliced the middle of the cuffs around my ankles so that I could walk, and I saw that nearly all the cells toward the front of the building were empty. A tingle of hope came into my belly, joining the hunger growls and the pasty, parched thirst.
We came out to the same foreman's room where I'd been searched. A woman police officer, older, black, took my fingerprints again, read notes off a screen, typed, didn't say anything. It's a good thing she didn't, because I kept forgetting that I wasn't going to say anything to
her
unless I had a lawyer present.
She nodded at the guys who'd brought me out and they gripped my arms and walked me to the door. I emerged to cold, grey daylight and a light drizzle. There were thousands of people standing across the street, holding signs and chanting. The officers brought me to the curb, then let go.
"You're done," one said.
"What?" I said.
"Go," the other one said. "You're done."
"What about the charges?"
"What charges? You want us to press charges?"
After all that, they were just going to let me go. Some part of me wanted to say, "Hell yeah, I want you to press charges. Otherwise, what the hell just happened here? A kidnapping?"
The people across the street with the signs and banners were angry. Now I understood why.
"What a load of bullshit," I said, with feeling.
The cops' faces slammed shut. I stood my ground. I was scared as hell, but I stood my ground. Let 'em grab me, chain me up, arrest me, put me in jail, waterboard me, try me, find me guilty, send me up for life. That
was
a load of bullshit, and I had every right to say it.
We stared at each other like dogs about to fight. I noticed that the people across the street had gotten quieter, then louder. I was peripherally aware of a lot of people with a lot of cameraphones maneuvering into position near me. I guess the cops were, too. One of them turned and walked back. Then the other one.
I was shaking, my fists clenched so hard my fingernails actually broke the skin on my palms in a couple of places.
The protesters patted me on the back. It seemed that they knew what I was freaking out about. There was a table laden with free food -- someone had brought down a whole crapton of lentils and rice and PB&J sandwiches and hot pizzas -- and five different people asked if I had any money to get home and whether I needed to talk to a doctor.
I sat down on the curb amid the shouting, jostling people and wolfed down about a hundred thousand calories' worth of food, eating mechanically, stopping only once I'd run out of food. Then I got up, dusted off my filthy clothes, and walked away, finding my way home, though I couldn't even tell you how I got there.
Harvard Bookstore: Cambridge, Mass
Harvard Bookstore is a wonderful and eclectic bookshop in the heart of one of the all-time kick-ass world-class bookshopping neighborhoods, the stretch of Mass Ave that runs between Harvard and MIT. The last time I visited the store, they'd just gotten in an Espresso print-on-demand book machine that was hooked up to Google's astonishing library of scanned public-domain books and they could print and bind practically any out of print book from the whole of human history for a few dollars in a few minutes. To plumb the unimaginable depths of human creativity this represented, the store had someone whose job it was to just mouse around and find wild titles from out of history to print and stick on the shelves around the machine. I have rarely felt the presence of the future so strongly as I did that night.
Mom and Dad were grey-faced when I knocked on the door. I tried to make a joke of it. "I'd have thought that you guys'd be used to this by now." My voice cracked a little on the last couple words, and they gave me enormous hugs. They'd figured out where I was, and confirmed it by calling my phone, which Dalia had answered, telling them all about what had happened on the bus. Mom and Dad had dipped into their line of credit to pay a lawyer to start shouting at the SFPD about me, but she was only one of hundreds of lawyers so employed and my parents had had no idea that I was released until I stumbled up the walk.
I wanted to shower for a hundred years. I wanted to sleep for a millennium. But before I did anything, I wanted to find Ange.
"She got home ten hours ago," Mom said. "But her mother said she went right back out to the chicken farm." That was what the press was calling the place we'd all been held, down in South San Francisco, the name coming from the cameraphone photos that had already appeared online, making the place look like some kind of nightmarish poultry factory.
No doubt Ange was waiting for me there and I'd missed her in the horde. How the hell did people live before phones?
"Can I borrow your phone?" I said.
Mom handed it to me, and I spent a couple moments unfogging my brain enough to get it to cough up Ange's phone number, which had been my first speed dial for years. "Have you heard from him?" she said as soon as she picked up.
"Kind of," I said.
"Where the hell
are
you?"
"Home," I said.
"What the hell are you doing
there
?"
"Preparing to estivate," I said. Estivate is a very handy verb: it's a kind of hibernation, "a prolonged state of torpor or dormancy." Just where I was heading.
"Not until I get there. How
dare
you get out of jail without my finding you?"
"I know," I said. "I'm a rotter. Sorry, darling."
"Have yourself bathed, waxed, perfumed, and put into bed. I'll be there in thirty-five minutes."
"Aye aye, Cap'n."
The reunion, when it came, was just what I needed and then some. Both of us had been hurt. Ange had been gassed and trampled, arrested and freed, and while her story had some minor variations in its specifics, it came out to about the same thing as mine. She'd been with Lemmy through most of the process -- they'd stayed together somehow, Lemmy bodily lifting Ange free of the crowd at one point when the crushing started, holding her over his head like a freaky circus act. She'd seen him again after they were released, and promised to call him as soon as she found me.
We talked about it for a few minutes, kissing each other in the places where we were bruised or hurt, holding each other, murmuring to each other, until sleep took us.
And the next day, I went to work.
Well, of course I did. It was Tuesday, and the election was coming up, and someone had to get Joseph Noss elected, and it was going to be me. A hundred times on the way to work, I reached for my phone -- to make a reminder for myself, to send a text to Ange (who was still sleeping in my bed; her first class didn't start until after lunch), to check the weather for that night, to read what my tweeps had to say. Each time, I thought,
Crap, I've lost my phone. Got to call it from my laptop and talk to Dalia and arrange to get it back from her
. Then I thought, ⌠/Huh, I should really make a note about that, now, where's my phone?⌡/ And it began again. It was so funny I forgot to laugh.
I came through the door of the Joe for Senate office and stopped. Something was different. I couldn't put my finger on it at first, and then I realized what it was.
Everyone was staring at me.
Every single person in the office was watching me with owl-eyed intensity, giving off a mixture of awe and fear. I gave a little half wave and took off my jacket and headed for my desk, plunked down in my seat, pulled out Lurch and plugged in my monitor and keyboard and mouse and started entering the passwords that got my disks mounted and my network connection going. There was near-total silence as I did this, and it was so unnerving that I fatfingered my password twice before getting it.
I sat down at my computer and started going through my start-of-day routine: downloading my email, checking the server log summaries to see if we were in danger of running out of bits, kicking off my own personal backups -- stationkeeping stuff I could have done while half asleep.
I started off half asleep -- or half distracted -- and so it was only after a few minutes that I pounced on my mouse and started un-closing the browser tabs I'd just closed, hammering on crtl-F12 with a series of
whaps
so hard I actually felt the spring under the key start to lose its sprungedness. I clicked and clicked again.
Then I got up from my desk and looked into the sea of stares. "Can someone please explain to me what the hell's going on?"
As one, the whole office turned to look at Liam, who got up and came over to my desk.
"You wanna get a cup of coffee?" he said.
I realized that that was exactly what I wanted, more than pretty much anything in the entire goddamned universe. I let him steer me up to Dolores Park, stopping at the Turk's to get a cup to go and a thermosful for after that. We perched on a bench and Liam waited patiently while I drank my first cup and poured myself a second one. Then he raised his eyebrows at me, silently asking if it was time to hear what he had to say. I nodded.
"Joe came into the office on Monday breathing fire. He kept asking where you were, getting Flor to call your phone, getting me to send you email. He had something he really,
really
wanted to talk to you about, and he couldn't reach you, so finally, he came and got me. He said I got computers and the Internet and stuff and asked if I had access to our 'web thing.' Well, I knew where you kept the sealed envelope with the admin passwords, so the answer was technically yes.
"Then he told me about what you'd suggested at the protest, hosting all those darknet docs. He couldn't believe that there were all these people in the streets of San Francisco pissed off about the kind of thing that was in those docs, but that they'd gotten practically no mainstream media publication and no one had made a political issue of it. He said that the Dems and the Republicans didn't want to start everyone thinking about how corrupt the system was, how money bought policy, how scummy the whole Sacramento scene was at the state house. He'd been thinking about it all weekend and had decided that this was going to be the thing that made him different from the regular candidates. Flor tried to argue with him, but you know how he gets when he's sure about something. He was
sure.
"So he tried to explain to me what you'd suggested, some kind of voting system or something? He couldn't really explain it. After a while, I said, 'Look, I can pull down all the darknet docs and put them up on our server in a couple hours, but I have
no
idea how to do all this other stuff, and if I tried, I'd probably leave the whole thing in such an insecure mess that someone'd take us down and replace the whole site with pictures of penises in about ten seconds flat."
I winced. "So what did he say?"
"He said that he'd rather beg forgiveness than ask permission, and told me to just put all the docs up, now, and he'd take care of the rest. The next thing I knew, he was calling in the press team and the next thing I knew after that, they were all checking to see if we could handle the capacity if, like,
millions
of people all came to download the docs at once. I was like, erm, yeah, I
think
. I mean, I knew we were on a cloud machine that could expand if we needed it. I tried calling the data center, but I didn't have your passphrase, so all they would tell me is that their servers could handle anything up to and including the entire state accessing us at once."
"Is that what happened?" The server logs showed that our traffic had hit over a million simultaneous connections overnight, and the rate was climbing.
"Oh no," he said. "Worse. I mean: 'more.' There was a
lot
of interest from out of state. At this rate, it's like the whole
world
wants to know about it. I mean, you've seen the news, right? It was the lead on every broadcast yesterday, and it's been trending on Twitter since about ten seconds after it went live. We've all been waiting for you to come in and get some decent analytics for it. I tried, but..." He shrugged. "Well, I'm just the T-shirt guy, right?"
I took a really, really deep breath. "I've been in jail."
"I figured," he said. "That was the leading theory. Joe was going to try to find your parents today if you didn't show up. What happened to your phone, by the way? I've been calling and calling."
"It's a long story," I said. I wondered why Dalia wasn't answering the phone anymore. Maybe she was answering calls where the return number showed up as "Mom," and ignoring the rest. Maybe the battery was dead. If that was the case, I wasn't going to be able to get my phone back until she got in touch with me. Great. "Where's Joe?"
"He's doing a press conference about this at Rootstrikers," he said. "They're an activist group that does something with getting the money out of politics. They're pretty excited about all this."
"Huh," I said, and reviewed what I'd just been told in my head. I mean, basically they'd taken my idea and
run
with it, and it had worked out
well
. So far, anyway. I wondered how long it could last, and decided that wasn't my job. My job was to keep the web-site online while Joe was off being Joe. The coffee was in my veins now, turning my thick, sluggish blood into quicksilver. It was time to go make some technology work. I was good at that.
Meantime, though: "What about the other thing, the vote-getting machine?"
"Yeah," Liam said. "That. He told me about it, but I couldn't really figure out what he was talking about. Something to mine your social-media contacts?"
"Basically," I said, and ran it down for him.
"Oh," he said. "That is awesome. And we could use the whole thing as a decision-making process, any time some big campaign issue comes up, or after he's in office, get the whole Joe for Senate machine to have instant run-off polls to see what we should do. That sounds
wicked
. Are we doing that too?"
"That depends on whether we can find the time, now that the darknet docs are live." It's funny, even though the darknet docs had basically taken over my life, I was a lot more excited about this vote-getting machine, and half wished that I could just focus on that. I'd have to find some time to do it.
But first, I had to harden our infrastructure.
I figured the first thing to do was get us spanned out across a
lot
of cloud servers. My predecessor had gotten us hosted on Amazon's cloud, which was as robust as they came, an inconceivable network of humming racks in data centers all over the world, overseen by labcoated priests who could diagnose and swap out a faulty component in two minutes flat, fed by twisted fiber-optic bundles as thick as my arm, and cooled by enormous chillers with carbon footprints the size of cities. Amazon was a great choice if you wanted to get hosted by someone who'd keep your servers online no matter how popular they got.
However, they were a
terrible
choice for hosting your data if you were worried about the police going bugnuts on you. You see, the police don't necessarily know how to seize just one customer's data from a global network of server racks. If you're doing something with your data that was going to
really
interest the cops, then you had to be prepared for someone powerful calling up Amazon's lawyers and saying, "We need to investigate one of your customers, and since we don't know how to take one customer's data off your servers, we're coming over with a couple of sixteen wheelers and taking it
all
away until we finish our investigations." Or, as the Godfather might have said, "Nice cloud; it'd be a shame if something were to happen to it."
Amazon had a lot, so they had a lot to lose, and while they'd been a good choice for our nice, boring campaign site, they sucked at providing infrastructure for ground zero in the new infowar. I'd heard a seminar about this from some of the Tor hackers at Noisebridge, and they'd mentioned a bunch of ballsy, free-speech-oriented cloud providers that would take us on. They were the projects of eccentric weirdos, free-speech nuts; bashed-together hackerspace side projects; sketchy-sketchy services with one foot in the porn industry and the other in organized crime. Most of them couldn't take a credit card payment because they'd been cut off by everyone from American Express to Visa to Mastercard to PayPal. Instead, they received payment through wire transfers, Western Union money orders, and other weird and cumbersome measures. I groaned and facepalmed and went and talked to Flor about this.
I'd been afraid to face Flor. I remembered her warning about dragging the campaign into anything "leet" and had a feeling that she was probably already furious with me. But I hadn't bargained on what it meant for the idea to come from Joe. Joe and Flor may have argued about this, but once Joe won the argument, Flor was behind him a hundred percent. Like most of us, she was ready to march into the sun for him, and as soon as I made it clear why I needed her to take the campaign credit card down the street to a liquor store and buy a Western Union order for a random dude -- I didn't even know where he lived -- she agreed.
"Just let me talk to him first," she said. I had a moment's impatience, because I felt like my parent wanted to look over my homework -- finding bulletproof web hosting was my department. But then she got on the phone with the guy I'd chosen and exchanged some quick IMs with, and quickly negotiated better terms than I'd been able to get, including thirty-day billing for our future bandwidth bills and a 24/7 cellular number for support calls.