This chapter is dedicated to the incomparable Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego, California, and Redondo Beach, CC. The Mysterious Galaxy folks have had me in to sign books every time I've been in San Diego for a conference or to teach (the Clarion Writers' Workshop is based at UC San Diego in nearby La Jolla, CA), and when I've stopped in LA on tour. Every time I show up, they pack the house. This is a store with a loyal following of die-hard fans who know that they'll always be able to get great recommendations and great ideas at the store. In summer 2007, I took my writing class from Clarion down to the store for the midnight launch of the final Harry Potter book and I've never seen such a rollicking, awesomely fun party at a store.
Mysterious Galaxy
7051 Clairemont Mesa Blvd., Suite #302 San Diego, CA, USA 92111 +1 858 268 4747
2810 Artesia Blvd., Redondo Beach, CA 90278 +1 310 542 6000
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If you ever want to blow your own mind, sit down and think hard about what "randomness" means.
I mean, take pi, the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. Everyone who's passed sixth-grade math knows that pi is an "irrational" number. It has no end, and it never repeats (as far as we know):
3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286208998628034825342117067982148086513282306647093844609550582231725359408128481117450284102701938521105559644622948954930381964428810975665933446128475648233786783165271201909145648566923460348610454326648213393607260249141273 724587006606315588174881520920962829254091715364367892590360011330530548820466521384146951941511609...
And so on. With a short computer program, you can compute pi all day long. Hell, you can compute it to the heat-death of the universe.
You can grab any thousand digits of pi and about a hundred of them will be 1s, a hundred will be 2s, and so on. But there's no pattern within those digits. pick any digit of pi -- digit 2,670, which happens to be 0. The next digit happens to be 4, then 7, then 7, then two 5s. If you were rolling a ten-sided dice and you got these outcomes, you'd call it random. But if you know that 047755 are the values for the 2,670th - 2,675th digits of pi, then you'd know that the next "dice roll" would be 5 (again!). Then 1. Then 3. Then 2.
This isn't "random." It's predictable. You may not know exactly what "random" means (I certainly don't!), but whatever "random" means, it doesn't mean "predictable," right?
So it would be crazy to call pi a "random number," even though it has a bunch of random-like characteristics.
So what about some other number? What if you asked your computer to use some kind of pseudorandom algorithm to spit up some grotendous number like this: 2718281828459045235360287471352662497757. Is that random?
Well, not really. That also happens to be a number called "e," which is sometimes called "Napier's constant." Never mind what "e" means, it's complicated. The point is that e is a number like Pi. Every digit in it can be predicted.
How about if your random-number generator gave you this number:
222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222
Is that random?
Well, duh. No.
Why isn't it random? Because if I said, "What's the one hundredth digit of a number that consists of a thousand twos?" you'd know the answer. You wouldn't be surprised.
It turns out a lot of people have spent a lot of time trying to come up with a decent definition of "random." One of the best definitions anyone's ever come up with is "A number is random if the simplest way to express it is by writing it down."
If you just went lolwut, don't panic. This is hard, but cool. So, take the our friend pi again. You could write a program to print out pi in, like two hundred characters. Maybe less. pi itself is infinite, which is a lot more than two hundred characters long. So the simplest way to express pi is definitely to write the "print out pi program" and not to write out all the infinite digits of pi.
And if pi is easy, "222222222222222222222222222222222222222222" and so on is really easy. In python, it'd be: "print ''.join(['2']*42)". Perl's more compact: "print 2x42". But even in verbose old BASIC, a programming language that's so flowery and ornate it's practically Shakespearean, it's:
10 PRINT "2" 20 GOTO 10 30 END
That's thirty characters, which is shorter than 222222222222222222222222222222222222222222 to infinity. A lot shorter. So if we mean a random number is a surprising one -- one that has no easily expressed pattern or structure, then we can say that:
A number is "random" if the shortest program you can write to print that number out is longer than the number itself.
This has a neat compactness to it, the ring of a good rule: short, punchy and to the point. A guy named Gregory Chaitin came up with this neat rule, then he came up with a hell of a twist on it. He was so proud of this feat that he mailed a paper to one of math's great mad geniuses, a guy called Kurt Godel (pronounced "Girdle," more or less) and messed everything up by asking, "How do you know whether you've come up with the shortest program for printing out a number?"
Which was a good point. Programmers are always coming up with novel ways of solving problems, after all. And there may be some hidden pattern to a number you didn't even realize was there. Say I asked you to write a program to print out this number:
6464126002437968454377733902647251281941632007684873625176406596754069362175887930785591647877727473927200291034294956244766130820072925073452917076422662104767303786316995423745511745652202278332409680352466766319086101120674585628731741351116229207886513294124481547162818207987716834634132236223411778823102765982510935889235916205510876329808799316517252893800123781743489683215159056249334737020683223210011863739577056747386710217321237522432524162635803437625360680866916357159455152781780392177432282343663377281118639051189307590166665074295275838400854463541931719053136365972490515840910658220181473479902235906713814690511605192230126948231611341743994471483304086248426913950233671341242512386402665725813094396762193965540738652422989787978219863791829970955792474732030323911641044590690797786231551834959303530592378981751589145765040802510947912342175848284188195013854616568030175503558005494489488487135160537559340234574897951660244233832140603009593710558845705251570426628460035
Look all you want, you probably won't find any pattern at all (if you do, it's a product of your imagination). So is it random? Nope. It's part of pi: digits 100,000-101,000, to be specific. Now you can write a very short program to print out that number: just add a line to the "print out pi" program that says, "only start printing when you get to the 100,000th digit, and stop 1,000 digits later."
What Chaitin realized was that no one could ever know for sure whether a sufficiently long, interesting number could be printed out with a program shorter than it. That is, you could never tell whether any big number was random or not. In fact, maybe there were no random numbers. He called this "incompleteness" as in "You can never be completely sure you know if a number is random."
Godel was already famous for the idea of "incompleteness," the idea that mathematical systems couldn't prove themselves. Chaitin saw incompleteness in the way we thought about random numbers, too.
As far as anyone knows, he was right. We basically can never know whether something is random or totally predictable. He is one of mathematics's great smartasses.
Fun fact: Godel went crazy at the end of his life and became convinced that someone was trying to poison him. He refused to eat and ended up starving himself to death. No one knows exactly why he went crazy, but I sometimes wonder if all that uncertainty drove him around the bend.
I didn't leak the docs on LaptopLock. Neither did Ange. Neither did Jolu. According to the logs, we were the only ones that had touched them.
But they leaked anyway.
Of course, Liam knew about it before I did. He pretty much ran over to my desk as soon as he saw the story on Reddit. "You went to Chavez High, right?"
"Uh, yeah?"
"Did you know this Fred Benson skeeze?"
He didn't have to say anything else, really. By that point, I knew exactly what this had to be about. But it was worse than that. The pastebin dumps of the stuff about LaptopLock were all headed "DARKNET DOC ______" with the number of the document. The highest-numbered LaptopLock document happened to be 745,120, and several people had already noted this and concluded that somewhere out there, there was a site called "darknet docs" with at least 745,120 documents on it.
We were blown.
"It's amazing, right? I mean, can you believe it? I wonder what else they've got?"
"Yeah," I said. "Huh. Wow."
Liam dragged a chair over to my desk. He put his head close to mine. He smelled of Axe body spray, which may just be the most disgusting scent known to humankind.
"Marcus," he said, in a low voice, "dude. You remember yesterday, when you were talking about root certs and stuff? It sounded like maybe you knew more about the subject than you were letting on."
"Did it."
"I mean, look, you're Marcus Yallow. If there's a darknet, you've gotta be all over that shit, yo. I mean, seriously, dude." He seemed to be waiting for me to say something. I never knew what to say when someone ended a sentence with "yo." They always seemed to be acting out some script for a bromance comedy movie that I hadn't had a chance to see. But Liam was so excited he was shaking a little. "Come on, hook me up, man."
Ah, there it was. Liam wasn't stupid. He was enthusiastic and a little immature, but he listened carefully and knew that 10 plus 10 equaled 100 (in binary, at least). His heart was in the right place. And Jolu had brought his friends into the darknet clubhouse. But I couldn't just randomly start signing up overenthusiastic puppies like Liam without talking to everyone else. Especially as there appeared to be someone in our base, possibly killing our doodz.
"Liam, I seriously, totally, honestly have no idea what you're talking about. This is the first I've heard of it."
"Really? Like pinky-swear really?"
"Cross my eyes and hope to fry. I don't even have a Reddit account. I can't believe how much stuff they've dug up on the administrators who were using LaptopLock."
"Oh, that's nothing," Liam said, already forgetting his conviction that I was the ringleader of some leak-gang in his excitement at the awesome power of the Internet hivemind. "You should see what happens when Anon d0xxes someone."
I knew about Anonymous -- the weird non-group that was an offshoot of /b/, the messageboard on 4chan where everyone was anonymous and the name of the game was to be as humorously offensive as possible. I knew that they kept spinning out these sub-groups that did something brave or stupid or vicious (or all three), like getting thousands of people to knock PayPal offline in protest of PayPal cutting off Wikileaks. I knew that they had some incredibly badass hackers in their orbit, as well as plenty of kids who drifted in and out without knowing much about computers or politics, but who liked the camaraderie or the power or the lulz (or all three).
But I can't say as I spent a lot of time on them. I'd had my time in the cyberguerrilla underground and I had decided I didn't want anymore to do with it, especially when it came to crazy, impossible-to-describe "movements" that spent as much time squabbling among themselves as they did fighting for freedom and lulz.
"D0xxes," I said, trying to remember what it meant.
"Yeah, they get really righteously pissed at someone and they d0x them, dig up all the documents they can about them that they can find -- court records, property records, marriage, birth and death, school records, home address, work address, phone number, news dumps... everything. It's insane, like the DHS turned inside out, all that weird crap all the different agencies and companies and search engines know about you, just, like, hanging out there, all of it where the search engines can find it, forever. The stuff they found about your douchey old vice principal is nothing, man. If Anon gets on this tip, bam, it's going to be sick."
Now I remembered what d0xxing meant. Yikes. "Do you ever wonder if there's anyone else who can do that sort of thing?"
"What do you mean? Like the cops or the FBI or something?"
"Well, I mean, sure, yeah, of course they can do all this stuff." And more, I thought, imagining what you might dig up with a lawful intercept appliance. "But what about, I don't know, some CEO? Or a private military contractor?"
"You mean, is there someone like Anonymous out there, but doing it for the money instead of the lulz? Like hackers for hire or whatever? Oh, man, I'm totally sure there are. It's not like you have to be an angel or a genius to learn how to do an SQL injection or crack a crappy password file. I bet you half the creeps who used to give me noogies at recess are laughing it up at private intelligence outfits these days."
"Yeah," I said. I wondered how many of those particular kinds of creeps were drawing a paycheck from Carrie Johnstone and whether any of them might be hanging out in our darknet, messing with our heads.
I took a long lunch (feeling like a total slacker for grabbing extra time off on my third day at work) and asked Ange and Jolu to meet me in South Park, which was about the same distance from Ange's school and Jolu's and my offices. It was a slightly scuzzy little park right in the middle of SoMa -- south of Market -- but it had been ground zero for a whole ton of dotcom start-ups and tech companies and it was always full of the right kind of nerds. I felt comfortable there.
Jolu arrived first, looking cool and grown-up as usual. A couple of the people eating their lunches on the benches around us recognized him and waved at him.
"How do you do it?" I said when he sat down.
"What?" he said, smiling like he and I were in on some enormous joke together.
"I don't know; how are you so cool? I'm crapping myself over this darknet stuff, I look like I dressed myself in the dark, I can't figure out how to cut my hair so I don't look fifteen years old, and you, you're so totally, I don't know, you know, styling."
He gave me that easy smile again. "I don't know, Marcus. I used to be kind of anxious all the time, did I look "cool," was I going to get in trouble, was the world going to end or whatever? And then one day, I just thought, You know, whatever's happening, I'm not going to improve it by having a total spazz attack. So I decided to just stop. And I did."
"You're a Zen master, you know that?"
"You should try it, pal. You're looking a little freaked out, if you don't mind my saying so."
"Well, you know: 'When in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.'"
"Yeah, I've heard you say that before. I guess what I'm asking is, how's that working out for you?"
I closed my eyes and rubbed my hands on my jeans. "Not so good."
"Why don't you try just cooling it down for a minute or two, see if you can't get your head right before this all kicks off?"
If it had been anyone except Jolu, I might have been offended, but I'd know Jolu forever, and he knew me as well as anyone in the world. I remembered that feeling I'd had in the temple that time I'd lain in the dust among the gongs and the Omm, the total peace and calm that had washed over me like a warm bath. I could remember how that felt, but I couldn't feel it -- the harder I chased it, the more elusive it felt.
Jolu put his hand on my shoulder and gave me a gentle shake. "Easy there, hoss. Don't sprain anything. You look like you're getting ready to kung-fu my ass. This is about relaxing, not stressing out. If it's hard, you're doing something wrong."
I actually felt really bad, like I'd failed at something. To cover up for it, I kind of hammed it up, putting my face in my hands and acting like I was experiencing some kind of artistic torment.
"Don't sweat it, Marcus. Just something to keep in mind, all right? There's the stuff that's happening out there in the world, which we only have limited control over, and the stuff that's happening in our heads, which we can have total control over -- in theory, at least. I've noticed that you spend a lot of time trying to change the outside world, but not much energy on changing how the outside world makes your inside world feel. I'm not saying you should give up on changing the world, but you might try doing a little of both for a while, see what happens."
He was smiling when he said it, and I knew he wasn't trying to be a dick, but it still made me feel ashamed. I guess because I knew he was right. All my life, people had been telling me to chill out, calm down, take it easy, but for some reason, taking it easy was hard, while freaking out came naturally.
He looked worried now. "Okay, forget I said anything. I only brought it up because you asked. Let's talk about the current situation, right? As in, what the hell's going on with the darknet? Who's reading over our shoulders? What are they up to?"
"Good," I said. I was relieved by the change of subject.
"Start with the process of elimination, because we need to start somewhere. The logs say no one but me, you, and Ange accessed those docs. Are you sure Ange didn't leak them? Don't get mad, okay? It's just about covering all the bases."
"Yeah, I get that. No, I can't imagine why Ange would do that. She practically tore my throat out when I suggested that we should go public with the stuff about Benson."
"So you wanted to leak them?"
"What? No. I mean, yeah, of course my first reaction was to nail all those bastards to a wall, but Ange told me not to be an idiot and I reconsidered it. Besides, all I wanted to do was talk to everyone else about it, not go rogue and do it myself. I don't even know how I'd leak it if I wanted to -- whoever's doing it is good. They stick it up on pastebin, and Reddit goes crazy and the press follows."
Ange arrived then, looking absolutely beautiful in a chunky black sweater with a pixel-art Mario/Cthulhu mashup worked into the front, black-and-white striped tights, and a red skirt. She topped it off with ancient, cracked motorcycle boots the color of old cement and a 3D-printed plastic bracelet on each wrist. Ange was basically the most perfect woman I'd ever known, and my best friend in the whole world, and every now and again I'd see her coming down the street or walking through the park and I'd realize that I was pretty much the luckiest man that ever lived.
There's no way Ange had been leaking stuff behind our backs.
She gave Jolu a warm hug and then gave me a warmer one, with a big long kiss that ended with me burying my face in her neck and breathing in the heavenly smell of her collarbones.
"Hey, guys, so have you solved all our problems yet?"
"Not yet, but we're working on it."
We unpacked our lunches. I'd made myself a sack of PB&Js and thrown in an apple, some cookies, and a little bottle of cold-brew before leaving the house that morning. I'd realized I'd need to start brown-bagging it when I started thinking about how little of my paycheck would be left over if I blew eight bucks every day on coffee, a burrito, and horchata. Ange, like always, had made herself a perfect and awesomely cute bento box with rice and vegetables and cold tofu and beef arranged in precise, colorful patterns. Jolu had one of his badass homemade energy bars, big as a two-by-four and twice as dense with all kinds of nuts and seeds, studded with bits of smoked bacon and dusted with his secret mix of spices. I'd seen him live off one of those for a whole day while on a camping trip, having a casual gnaw at it whenever he got a little peckish.
"Before we go any further," Ange said, around a dainty mouthful of rice and marinated eggplant, "Jolu, you're not the leak, are you? I mean, no offense, but --"
He laughed. "Yeah, I know. You should have seen Marcus here when I asked if he thought it could be you."
"Well, you've got to start somewhere. I'm not the leak, for what it's worth. I wish I was, because it would mean that no one was inside our security, messing with us. But Jolu, you haven't answered the question yet -- are you the leak?"
"No, Ange. I wish I was, for the same reason. Because I don't like the alternative, either. I mean, either someone's really seriously compromised the security of my server, which would be pretty goddamned hard because there isn't a single byte of cleartext going in or out of that box, or --"
"Or someone's rooted your computer, or mine, or Ange's."
"Yeah."
That was the possibility that had been going through my head all morning. Someone with total control over my computer, someone with the power to light up the camera and the mic, to grab text off my screen or files off my hard drive. It wasn't a possibility I liked to think about. The darknet docs showed that Fred Benson had grabbed over eight thousand photos of one student alone, some poor kid the old bastard had a hate-on for.
How many times had my computer been compromised? 0? Or eight thousand?
And more importantly: if my computer had been pwned, had it been "random" -- someone scanning for vulnerabilities discovering my computer in a rare, unpatched moment and grabbing control over it -- or had it been "special"? That is, had someone targeted me? Like Godel, I wasn't sure I knew the difference between random and special any more.
I don't know what Jolu told Restless Agent and the rest of his buddies, but there was no darknet chat accusing me or Ange of being the leak. I still didn't know who Jolu's people were, and didn't want to know, but I kind of assumed that they were people he worked with and that he'd gone back from lunch and had a little chat with them -- hopefully away from any computers that might be covertly running their mics and cameras.
But of course, no one wanted to do much chatting at all on darknet, not without knowing who and how someone or someones were eavesdropping on us.
Long after the last person -- Liam -- had left Joe's campaign office, I sat at my desk, staring at my computer like it might have a live, venomous snake hiding inside it. I had stayed late at my desk, theoretically to finish up the day's work and make up for my little lunchtime face-to-face meeting, but also because I didn't want to try to deworm my laptop at home, not when I had an office filled with so many spare and useful computers lying around.
In theory, it should be easy to secure (or re-secure) my laptop. Find another hard drive and create an encrypted filesystem on it. Boot up my computer -- or any computer! -- with a boot disk downloaded fresh from the Internet, after carefully validating the checksum to make absolutely, positively certain that I was using a clean, uninfected, pristine version of ParanoidLinux. Then I'd install a fresh build of ParanoidLinux on the new drive, copy over the user data from my old disk to the new one, and I'd essentially have given my computer a fresh brain with all the memories of the old one, but with a high degree of certainty about the brain's reliability and trustworthiness. It all worked best if you had a couple of spare laptops and hard drives lying around, which the Joe campaign had -- old laptops are one of those things that no one really wants to throw away, so we'd accumulated a lot of semi-antique machines that had been donated by Joe's supporters.
Figuring out whether the old machine had been infected at all was a harder, more subtle problem. If someone had infected the machine and altered the kernel -- the nugget at the middle of the operating system where you'd hide the most vicious spyware -- I'd either have to go through it line-by-line looking for something out of place (which might take a hundred years or so), or try to build an identical kernel from known good sources and compare the checksums and see if there was any obvious dissimilarity. The problem was that I'd patched and tweaked my kernel so many times over the years that if the new one didn't match, it would almost certainly be because I'd built the new one wrong, not because I'd been taken over. At the very least, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
My computer sat there, staring at me from its little webcam, a ring the size of a grain of rice. The mic was a pinhole-sized hole set into the screen's frame. The first thing I'd done after getting back to the office was grab a roll of duct tape from the supply cupboard, thinking I'd tape over the camera and mic.
But I hadn't done it. It felt paranoid. I was paranoid. If there was someone inside my computer, that person knew more about me than anyone. But so far, all that person had done was carefully, effectively release docs that I'd been planning to leak. Maybe that person wasn't a bad guy (or girl). Maybe that person was on my side, in some twisted way. I found myself imagining the snoop: a seventeen year-old like me a couple years ago, glorying in the thrill of being where he shouldn't be. Or maybe an old, crusty FBI agent, sitting in a cubicle in Quantico, making careful notes on my facial expressions and my kissing techniques with Ange. Or some thick-necked mercenary saving screengrabs of the most embarrassing moments so that Carrie Johnstone could laugh at them later.
It was eerily silent inside Joe's office. The street noises were washed out by the air-conditioning's hum. I looked straight into the webcam and started talking: "You're in there, aren't you? I think it's pretty creepy, I have to say. If you think you're helping me, let me tell you, you're freaking me out instead. I'd much rather that you talk to me than sneak around spying on me. And if you're one of the bad guys, well, screw you. Nothing you do to me now will stop the darknet docs from going public, and if I get scared enough or disappear altogether, I'll just dump the whole goddamned pile. Do you hear me? Are you there?"
Boy, did I feel stupid and awkward. It was like the one time I'd tried praying by my bed, when I was about ten or eleven and I'd been seized by a weird, sudden terror that if there was a God, He'd be really pissed off at me and my family for our total disbelief in Him. I didn't actually believe in God, but I had this wobbly cost-benefit analysis moment that went like this: It costs nothing to believe in God. If the tiny likelihood of the existence of God turns out to be the truth, then He'll punish a failure of belief with eternal damnation. The consequences are terrible, but the risk is low. Wouldn't it make sense to take out some sort of insurance policy to protect against this tiny possibility? My dad had just changed our household insurer and an adjuster had come over to look at the house and talk about whether we'd need flood and fire and lightning and earthquake insurance, and how much, and Dad and I had geeked out on the math together, which had been codified by Richard Price, a British mathematician who had been the patron of Thomas Bayes, my dad's all-time math hero. So I had insurance on the brain.
That was weird enough -- but the really weird part was that once I got this idea, it got me, too. I couldn't let go of the feeling that I hadn't bought the right kind of insurance -- I was believing in the wrong God -- or that I wasn't sending my premiums to the right place -- I wasn't praying right. I spent about a week in a low-grade panic about my religious incompetence, and it was always worse at night, when I was lying in bed, waiting for sleep to come.
So one night, I'd gotten out of bed and, feeling incredibly dumb and self-conscious, I'd gotten down on my knees beside the bed, folded my hands together, bowed my head, and closed my eyes. I'd seen kids praying this way in old cartoons -- I think Donald Duck made his nephews do it, or maybe that was Popeye -- though I'd never done it myself.
I had searched for the words. "Please God," is what came out. "Please God, please don't kill us. Please make us happy and healthy. Please tell Darryl's dad to let him have a sleep-over with me this weekend. Please help me do good on my history assignment --" Once I started going, it turned out that there was a whole litany of stuff I hadn't known that I was worried about, things that I wanted some invisible, all-powerful sky-daddy to solve for me. It came pouring out. I started out in a low conversational tone, but I dropped to a whisper, and then just moved my lips, the way I did when making a birthday-candle wish.
And then, after I'd run out and said, "Amen," I opened my eyes. My knees hurt. It had felt good to unburden myself of all those worries, and it had been surprising to discover them there, but at the same time, I couldn't help but feel absolutely, totally ridiculous. If there was a God, why would He care about whether I had a sleepover that weekend?
But what cinched it was the absence of any feeling of a reply. I'd spoken all my secret fears and worries, words so secret I hadn't even known they were inside me. I'd sent them into the air and into the sky, and the words had floated away, but no words had come back. No feeling of presence. No feeling of being listened to, or heard, or understood. I had spoken to the universe, and the universe hadn't given a damn. I stopped worrying about my "insurance premiums" that night, lost the nagging worry that I was meant to be praying to Allah or preparing for my bar mitzvah or joining the Hare Krishnas. In the space of an hour, I went from an anxious agnostic to a carefree atheist, and I'd stayed that way forever after.
That night, in Joe's office, I spoke words again into the air, sent them out to the universe.
That night, the universe answered.
> ooohhh busted
Unseen hands had dragged my computer's mouse-pointer to the dock and clicked on the LibreOffice icon, making a new text document window appear on my screen with an inaudible mouse click. It was so spooky that the hairs on the back of my neck actually all stood up, and I shivered down my spine. I tried to keep a poker face, staring into the eye of the camera over my screen as one of my biggest fears in the world came to life before me.
I tried to think of something to say or do, but my mouth felt like it was full of ashes and my hands were trembling on the desk in front of me.
> you worry too much dude
With a deliberate effort, I got my arms to move, got my hands onto the lid of my laptop. I slammed it down, then I stood up so fast that my chair went over backwards. I found myself standing in the middle of Joe's office, shaking and goosepimply, and all I could see were the other screens in the room, with their webcam eyes, and imagine the ghostly, distant eyes staring out of them.
Willing myself not to run, I brisk-walked back to the wiring closet, seized with an animalistic need to tear the building's Internet connection out of the physical router, to turn us into a little lightless island of no-man's-land in the great glowing spiderweb of the planetary network. But once I got back into the humming, air-conditioned room with its server rack and its router and network switches and blocky uninterruptable power supplies, I found myself calming down, catching my breath. This room was full of computers, sure, but they didn't have cameras and mics. There was only one keyboard, a little clickety number that sounded like machine gun fire when you rattled out commands on it for checking or rebooting routers. There was one screen, a nine-inch flat panel with burned-in text from the password prompt for one of the routers. Everything in this room was familiar, and safe, and reassuringly technological. In this room, I was invisible to webcams, and in this room, I could program my routers to generate enormous, voluminous logs, whole libraries' worth of data about every packet in or out of the building. From this room, I might be able to set a trap.
The laptop sat back on my desk, the document window staring me in the face:
> you worry too much dude
"Are you there?"
Are you there, God? It's me, Marcus. A hysterical giggle welled up in my throat and I swallowed it.
Nothing. The air-conditioning hummed. Back in the wiring closet, the router was streaming a few extra million bits into its solid-state storage, the work of it all creating a tiny bit more heat than usual, making the air-conditioner work just a tiny little bit harder. A puff of extra carbon wafted into the atmosphere.
I stared into the beady glass eye of the webcam, thinking of the unknown party or parties who may or may not be watching on the other end. I wondered how the bug worked. Did it phone home every time I signed on to a network, telling the snoops that I was online and available for watching and spying? Did it store up pictures of me and logs of my keystrokes when I was offline, waiting for an opportune moment to dump all this stuff?
Did someone's phone just get a discreet SMS? "MARCUS ONLINE NOW" and a cheerful ringtone? Maybe "La Cucaracha?"
"Hello? Anyone home?"
Nothing.
"Come on, you chickenshits, I know you're out there." Now I had the paranoid sensation that I was being recorded, that anything I said or did might end up on YouTube in ten minutes. I tried to butch it up, be as tough and cool as a superspy so that I'd be able to stand tall when the world saw how I reacted to the news that I was on candid webcam. "There's no point in hiding now. I know you've got root. I'll be shutting down this machine and reinstalling the OS just as soon as I'm done. Last chance to chat before I patch your back door."
I stared at the screen. It stared back.
"Fine," I said, and reached up to close the lid. For a second, I felt like I might be insane, like I might have hallucinated the whole thing. Just as my hand reached the lid, a word appeared on the screen:
> wait
I sat back.
"Nice to see you again. Do you have something you'd like to say?"
> were on ur side dude
"You've been spying on me," I said. I heard the tremor in my voice.
> privacys dead get over it
I felt the tremor now. These bastards had been spying on me and they had the nerve to tell me to "get over it"?
"You're not --" My voice caught. I swallowed and took a couple of breaths. "You're not on my side if you believe that. Do you have any idea how totally evil it is to do what you're doing?"
> what a homo
> shut up
> felch me dickcheese
> ur sister said you like that
I started to get offended, and then I noticed something. This wasn't a string of insults directed at me. Two or more people were arguing in my text window. One was a much faster typist than the other, and smoother.
"Are you like twelve years old or something?" I said. "That's it, isn't it? You're children, right?"
> born same year as you marcus edward yallow 1320 rhode island drive san francisco ca 94107..............hey were both aquariuses...........fish in tha hizouse"
Hizouse was right up there with ending sentences with yo on my list of linguistic crimes. These were kids, even if Mr Aquarius wasn't lying about his age. Emotionally, at least, these guys were children.
"I just want you to know that there's two people who might die because of what you've done. Those docs were given to me by someone who's been kidnapped since. You might have gotten some lulz out of it, but you've seriously screwed up the work we were doing to help our friends."
> we did it 4 zed/masha you fag
////// got tired of waiting around for you
For a second I thought they must be part of Masha's group, maybe her multi-colored hair friends. But then -- Occam's razor -- I figured they must have learned about Masha and Zeb by eavesdropping on me.
"That wasn't your call to make."
> no? oppps. our bad. now what?
"What do you mean?"
> now what are you going to do? the docs are getting out there. you can't change that. are you going 2 help or wot?
"Am I going to help? What do you think I've been doing all this time? I mean, when I wasn't running around trying to figure out how all the leaks got out. When I wasn't wasting time on you pindicks."
> flattery will get you nowhere
> sorry d00d it needed doing
> you r soooooooooooooooo slow
> what u waiting 4? carrie johnstone is pure evil
> btw u shld c wot we got on johnstone
> shes a very naughty girl
> worse than youd imagine from ur little docs diving
> the kind of person makes you want to believe in 92nd term abortion
> she will be fun to destroy
> bet she goes total apeshirt
> apeshirt
> apeshirt
> eff you eff ay gee ess
> marcus
"Yes?" I'd been watching the typing. I thought there were three of them. Maybe four.
> u need 2 dump everything now now now what u waiting for a rainy day? What you think masha/zeb are doing right now? enjoying a beach holiday? smokin fatties in a hot club? more like experiencing batteries strapped to their nipples
With normal chat, you get the whole message in a blip -- there's a pause, then some text. But this was different. I could watch the typist on the other end typing, the hesitations and the backspaces, even a couple spots where another mysterious typist broke in and tried to interrupt, only to be furiously deleted. There was a lot of texture in this text, and it made it somehow less spooky. These were squabbling people, not all-powerful gods, and the fact that they'd pwned me wasn't an indication of their omnipotence or their moral superiority.
"I want to dump it all, but I don't want to go to jail. And I want it to make a difference, to put it into stories that people can make sense out of and care about. You've been watching what we're doing, you know why we're doing it." My fear was turning into anger. "What's more, we'd be a lot further along if we weren't screwing around trying to do damage control after you decided to start posting without talking to us."
> srsly? yr pissed that we leaked yr leaks? weak
> masha trusted u, u didnt have da stones. we do. suck it.
"So, what, you just happened to root my computer just in time to get on this little campaign? You only started spying on me at the very second that I started doing something you disapprove of?"
> when we pwned u is irrelevant. stop changing the subject. u r 2 scared 2 do what needs doing. time 2 man up
"Or what? I make one call and all the darknet passwords'll be changed. Give me an hour, I'll have my computers cleaned off. You've got nothing, you little pricks, and without my cooperation, you'll have nothing."
> thats what you think.
I kept my face as still and expressionless as I could. Of course they didn't have "nothing" -- in some sense, they had everything. Depending on how much they'd been logging, they'd have my passwords, my email, video of me, audio... and they'd have Ange, too -- her name, her discussing the leaks with me, our makeout sessions.
"Yeah, you could ruin my life, but then no one will be in a position to help Masha. Is that what you want?"
I had the sense that there was just one person typing now, someone I started to think of as Final Boss, the uber-snoop in this little posse.
"We're going nowhere with this. I'm going now, going to rebuild everything, change all the passwords. You want to talk to me like people instead of stalkers, you know where I am."
> we certainly do
It took two hours to rebuild Lurching Abomination, almost all of it consisting of painfully slow file transfers from my backups and tedious verification of checksums as I downloaded my OS and all my apps all over again, making sure each time that I had clean copies that hadn't had a single byte changed.
I dragged a chair into the wiring closet and did the rebuild there. That gave me direct access to the router and its voluminous, verbose logs. I'd grabbed every packet going in and out of the building's network, a senseless tsunami, a packetstorm, a flood. Trying to make sense of the raw feed would be as pointless and brutal as trying to make sense of every mote of dust floating in the air. But dust is analog, and packets are digital. The router couldn't do much by way of large-scale statistical analysis, but it didn't need to -- that wasn't its job.
VMWare had a fine catalog of virtual machines, pre-configured for heavy data crunching. With two clicks, I loaded one onto a cloud VM loaded on Amazon S3, ticking off the "private/encrypted" box. I booted the VM with another click, then switched to VNC, a screen-sharing app, and now I was looking at the desktop of my virtual machine on that little flatscreen with its burned-in ghost characters. I had the router throw its monster logfile at the machine, and in about two minutes, I had all the pretty charts and graphs you could ever want, courtesy of hadoop, a free data-munging package that did to large blobs of data what Photoshop did to graphics.
I knew just enough hadoop to be a danger to myself and those around me, but by mousing around a lot, I managed to pare away all the traffic except for the streams that were being used to snoop on my laptop. It was hard to tell from a single session, but it looked like the spyware waited a short interval after the machine found a new network, then sent out a little encrypted blip that I figured meant "Here I am." A few milliseconds later, my computer got some bits back ("I see you"). Then, blam, an encrypted stream erupted from the machine. It was encrypted, so I didn't know what it was, technically, though I was moderately certain it was a feed from my screen, my camera and my mic.
Hadoop had a handy traffic-analysis library that went further, hazarding a guess that some of the packets were from Kphone, a free Skype-style phone app that did video, and the rest were from VNC, the same program I was using. Which all made sense: if you were going to put together a trojan to take over peoples' computers, your fastest and most reliable method would be to just smush together a bunch of highly reliable, well-tested, best-of-breed apps. You could even keep it up to date with the bug fixes the apps released, piggybacking on their development, leaving you with more time to get on with invading peoples' privacy. I'd be willing to bet that the lawful intercept stuff detailed in the darknet dumps did exactly the same thing. Cops and robbers all using the same screwdrivers, and civilians in the middle, getting screwed.
Then I noticed something I should have seen from the start: the "I see you" message, the screen grabs, and the camera feed were all going to different IP addresses. I punched each one into Google and, of course, they were Tor exit nodes. My snoops weren't just encrypting the traffic from my machine, they were bouncing it all over the Internet so that I couldn't see where it was going. Somewhere out there was a server like our darknet dump except it had buttons labeled "View from Marcus's camera" and "Sound from Marcus's mic" and "Marcus's screen" and "Marcus's hard drive."
In other words, they'd taken the technology I used to protect my privacy on the net and used it to protect their privacy while they snooped on me. The irony, it burns.
That wasn't going to get me anywhere. Meanwhile, Lurch was back up to nominal. I'd even nuked its BIOS, the part of the computer that tells the rest of the computer how to turn on -- a tedious process -- but I felt like I'd be nuts not to do it. It was considered insanely hard to poison a computer's BIOS remotely, but if I was going to rebuild a computer that had been fatally pwned, ignoring the BIOS would be like changing all your house locks after losing your keys but leaving all the windows unlocked.
BIOS flashed, computer restored, trolls locked out, I shut off all the lights at Joe For Senate, shrugged on my jacket, set the burglar alarm, and stepped out into the cool night of the Mission.
And straight into the arms of the goons who'd been waiting for me in the parked car across the street.
I've been snatched twice. This was not the roughest of the lot (that would be when the DHS grabbed us off Market Street the day the Bay Bridge blew and clubbed us in the head when we asked what the hell was going on), nor was it the scariest (that would be when I puked into the bag Carrie Johnstone's squad cinched around my neck, convinced I was going to choke to death on dumpster-dived pizza). It was so smooth and professional, I would have given them a customer service award, if I wasn't so busy freaking out.
They stepped out of the car in perfect synchrony just as I came through the door. Two guys, big and beefy, with the "cop" vibe that always made my neck muscles go as tight as a tennis racket. One of them stood at the curb, covering me and watching who was around with a regular, predatory head swivel. The other closed the distance between me and him in three quick steps, coming right into my personal space, flipping a laminated DHS ID out of his pocket. Before I could look at it, he'd put it back in his pocket, as neat as a magician vanishing a card.
"Marcus," he said. "We'd like to talk to you for a moment."
When in trouble or in doubt...
"I'd like to have a lawyer present," I said.
"You won't need a lawyer, it's just an informal chat." He smelled like Axe body spray. It was the perfect gagworthy aroma for a huge, looming goon.
"I would like to see your badge again," I said.
"You don't need to see my badge again. Let's go."
Run in circles...
I took one step up Mission Street, away from the goon, already looking around for passers-by to call out to. A hand like a bar of iron wrapped itself around my bicep and lifted, and I felt like my shoulder might separate as my toes dangled over the pavement.
Scream and shout...
"FIRE!" I screamed. No one in the Mission is going to come running if you scream "Help!" but everyone likes to get a good look at a fire. That was the theory, anyway -- what they told you in self-defense classes. "FIRE!" I screamed again.
The goon's other hand covered my mouth and nose with an airtight seal, his thumb hooked under my chin, clamping my jaw shut.
Maybe I should have tried "HELP!"
They did that cop thing when they put me in the car, pushing my head down with that weird rough/tender gesture so that I wouldn't brain myself on the door frame. But I was 110 percent certain that these two were not cops, nor DHS, nor anyone else on a government payroll. It was the gear in the car: none of your scarred, scratched rubberized cop laptops like you got in the SFPD cruisers I'd been handcuffed in. These guys had computers that screamed "tactical," that matte-black finish and those rugged matte-black steel corner reinforcements, screens fitted with polarized privacy filters that made them appear black unless you were sitting right in front of them. They looked like they'd been designed by someone who'd never seen a modern computer, but had had one described to him by someone who spent a lot of time in muscle cars or Hummers.
They didn't just have a GPS: they had a crazy militarized one, with a hedgehog bristle of stubby, rubberized antennae and a street map display that showed the familiar streets of the Mission using blocky, eight-bit style graphics that looked nothing at all like any commercial GPS or Google Maps. They had these crazy armored USB ports set right into the dashboard, each with a pair of LEDs set under hardened glass. There was a strong new-car smell, like they'd ordered some kind of fresh spookmobile that morning to stalk me with, something they could douse in gasoline and roll off a cliff when they were through with it.
These guys looked like they had money, a lot of it, and weren't afraid to spend it. They didn't look like the sort of people who had to fill in a lot of crazy paperwork to get reimbursed, the way my dad had had to do for the books he'd bought for his department at UC Berkeley. The guy who'd been on lookout slid into the back seat with me -- I noticed that there were no door handles on the inside of the back doors, and wondered how he'd get back out again when he was through with me. This was a distracting thing to wonder about. It took my mind off what "through with me" might mean.
"Hi there, Marcus," the man in the back said. He also smelled like Axe body spray, which must be the national scent of Douchesylvania. He had a disarmingly friendly look: his tight, smooth-shaved face had all kinds of smile-lines and wrinkles around his eyes. He projected this air of total relaxation and confidence, like the grown-up version of the Most Popular Kid on the Football Team character from a bad teen movie. "You can call me Timmy." If we were about to play good cop/bad cop, Timmy was most definitely the good cop.
"I'd like to consult an attorney," I said.
He smiled wider. "I like that," he said. "That's exactly what she said he'd say, isn't it? She even got the voice down. Man, she really knows you well." "She" must be Carrie Johnstone, squirreled away in some lair somewhere, eating popcorn and regaling her underlings with stories of my weakness and patheticness.
These guys were here to shake me up, get me to say or do something, give them something: the names of the people who had access to the leaks, the passwords or keys, the locations of all the copies. They wanted to scare me. They had scared me. I felt like I could throw up at any second. I felt like I could piss myself.
No. You know what I felt like? I felt like I was drowning. Like I'd been strapped to a board, tilted backwards with saran-wrap over my mouth, and had water ladled down my nose, so that it filled my windpipe. My choke reflex had come to life, sucking hard to try to bring air into my lungs. Each time I coughed, the saran-wrap belled out, pushing out some of the precious sips of air left in my lungs. Each time I breathed in, the saran-wrap formed a tight seal around my mouth, and the suction drew more water down my windpipe. My lungs began to empty and collapse. My brain began a kind of awful fireworks display, the last lights and noises of a panicked organ about to wither and die and rot.
That.
I was sweating now, all over my body, and had the feeling of a terrible weight on my chest. It was the weight of the knowledge that I was in the power of someone who believed that he could do anything he wanted to me and never pay a single consequence.
"Marcus, buddy, calm down, all right? We're not here to hurt you."
I hated myself for the weakness I was showing. I'd once slept badly, pinching a nerve or a vein or something in my leg, and when I'd stood up in the morning, my leg had given way like it was made of wood, and I'd pitched forward on my face. Now I felt like something else -- my inner strength, the place I'd gone to that moment on the playa at the temple -- had let me down when I least expected it.
"I would like," I said, voice a gasp, "to consult --"
He slapped me. Not hard. In fact, he was almost gentle. But he was fast, so fast I didn't even see his hand move, and had to reconstruct what had just happened from the way that his body shifted, leaning forward a little, then relaxing back, his arm a blur in between. My face stung, but didn't hurt.
"Marcus," he said, and now his voice was stern and paternal. "Enough of that. We're not here to hurt you." But you slapped me, didn't you? Of course, he hadn't slapped me hard. And I had no doubt that he could have, had he chosen to. He was a good six inches taller than me, broad-shouldered, and the muscles on his forearms and wrists stood out in cords and masses like a superhero drawing. "We just want to talk to you. If you want to get this over with, you should listen to what we have to say."
I stared fixedly ahead of me.
"There's something you have, Marcus. Something important. Something that you've been gossiping about to certain urinalists in the big old world.
"The thing you have, it's not yours. It's our job to get it back. Once we're confident that we have secured it, there will be no further need for us to communicate with you and no further need for you to communicate with us."
I thought about asking for a lawyer again, but couldn't see the point. I kept up my fixed staring.
"I understand that a certain party has asked you to publish this material." What? Oh, right, Masha. "That party has changed her mind."
I was trying to keep my poker face on, but I suck at poker faces. He saw something change in my expression.
"You think that we beat her up or something? Forced her to change her mind?" He laughed (a full-throated laugh, like someone hearing a funny joke) and his friend in the front seat laughed, too, (a mean little bark of a laugh, like someone enjoying the sight of a stranger tripping and falling painfully). "Marcus, buddy. That little girl was plain worn out from all her rough travel. She was tired of living on tortillas and beans, tired of hiding out in the badlands. She wanted what she'd had before, three hots and a cot, a big-screen TV and a mini-fridge full of Twinkies, all the luxury stuff. Living large. She didn't want to spend the rest of her life as a refugee, sleeping under a newspaper and eating out of the trash. And hey, we need people like her. Our group, we know her, some of us have worked with her before. We like what she does. She's good at it. We didn't beat her up, we didn't pull out her fingernails or drip candle wax on her skin. We just offered her a job and she took it."
This was so obvious a lie I nearly laughed myself. Whatever else Masha was, there was no way she'd sell out to these sick assholes.
But, well, how well did I know Masha, really? I'd only met her three times, after all. Only knew her by reputation, mostly, and it wasn't like her reputation was particularly spotless.
Zeb, though. No way Zeb would have gone for it. And I'd seen Masha and Zeb together. They were a unit. Or they seemed like it, at least.
"That little old man of hers," said Timmy, reading my mind -- or my crappy poker face -- again. "He doesn't really have much we need. We told her we'd keep him around though, if she wanted him. It's not like he takes up a lot of room or eats a lot of chow. Everyone's entitled to a pet. But she was through with him, not that I was privy to the, you know, intimate details. But they had words, is what I'm saying, and he went his way.
"I bet you think we're the bad guys. We're not, though. We're no monsters. We're good guys, Marcus."
Yeah, because good guys do a lot of kidnapping. Good guys blow up art cars in the middle of the desert and put a whole load of people in the hospital. You're a pack of angels. Thinking it, but not saying it.
"What if we take you to see her? We could do that, you know. It's a bit of traveling, though. Could take a while."
"You got all your shots?" said the guy in the front seat with a voice full of morbid cheer. "You don't wanna go there without all your shots, Marcus."
"That's very true. But if that's what it'll take to convince you, we'd be happy to. Who knows, maybe there'd be something you could do for us too. Kid like you, you're at least half smart, which is smarter than most of the sheep out here. But I don't think you wanna go on a long trip right now, do you?"
The guy in front started the car and eased out onto Mission, and the guy in back put a gentle hand on my chest before I'd had a chance to move. A pane of opaque glass slid up between the front and back seats, and something happened to the rear windows, rendering them black. The only light came from the little dome light on the car's ceiling.
"Where are we going?" I said, and I sounded like a scared little kid, which is exactly what I felt like.
"Just somewhere more private, Marcus. Glad to hear you're up for a little chat, though. So, let's talk."
If I were a super-spy, I'd have spent the ride counting hills and listening for the tell-tale cues of San Francisco traffic and figured out exactly where we were headed. But San Francisco is full of hills, and if you can tell one from the other while you're scared to death in a blacked-out box, you're a truer San Franciscan than I am.
Timmy hummed softly to himself while we drove. He had taken my jacket and bag and he methodically went through the pockets of both, taking out every bit of electronics -- laptop, phone, ereader, a little circuit tester I had stuck in my pocket so I could check on the Ethernet wiring in the office -- and removed the battery from each device, then put the device and its battery in a heavy-duty freezer bag and set it to one side. Everything else got a fast but thorough examination and then went back into the bag, except for my multitool, a cool little Leatherman Skeletool that I'd coated in candy apple red enamel using the gear at Noisebridge. He turned that over a few times, brought out the blade and tested it on his thumb -- I kept it razor-sharp -- and smiled and nodded approvingly. "Nice," he said, and I felt stupid pride that this bad-ass ninja goon approved of my knife. Maybe that's the feeling that Masha had felt when she went to work for the DHS the first time around, or when she joined up with Carrie Johnstone and tossed out Zeb -- if that's what she'd actually done.
The knife went into a baggie on the seat beside him, with the electronics. He felt carefully around the seams and edges of my bags, and I realized that he was doing the kind of bag search that you would get at the airport if the people at the airport actually gave a crap about finding stuff, instead of putting on a little puppet show about security.
The car came to a stop. We'd been driving for a few minutes, or a hundred years, take your pick. The divider between the front and the back of the car slid down with that kind of purring near-silence of a really well-engineered mechanism. The guy in the front, whose ultra-short hair revealed a gnarly knob of scar tissue that ran from the crown of his head to the tendons standing out in the back of his neck, turned around to look at us. I looked past him, trying to figure out where we'd come. There was water, some dark shapes that might be boats, some industrial-looking buildings. I thought it must be China Basin, a landfill neighborhood that was a mix of abandoned warehouses and factories and trendy condos and offices built into former abandoned warehouses and factories. Judging from the boarded-up windows and the plastic bags and other ancient trash caught in the trees, this was the actual abandoned part.
"Well, here we are," Timmy said, and rubbed his hands together. He and the other man exchanged a long look. "Marcus," Timmy said, turning back to me. "You know what the deal is now. We need what you've got back. We'll take whatever steps you make us take to convince you that that's the right thing to do. If you need us to take you to where your little friend is so she can explain the facts of life to you, that's what we'll do.
"I don't think you want that, do you? I think you'd like to have this unpleasantness behind you quickly and with a minimum of mess."
The other man twisted his face into an ugly smile. "You don't want a mess, buddy. You really don't want a mess."
I knew he was saying it to intimidate me.
But it worked.
"On the other hand," Timmy said, accepting a little bottle of mineral water from his friend and sucking back half of it in one go, "you could just give us what we want and we'll give you a ride to anywhere you'd like to go. You'd be out of this business, we'd get to knock off early and hit the strip bars, and you'd even get a free taxi ride out of it. It's up to you. Are you a smart guy, Marcus, or are you a stupid guy?"
I tried to find peace and calm, but it wouldn't come. So I looked for anger, which is an easy place to get to from scared, and yeah, there it was. "You guys are so full of it," I said. "You must think I'm a complete tard. I open up my laptop and nuke the file, and then what, you believe that's my only copy and you let me go? Please. If that file is so important to you, you're never going to trust me."
Timmy laughed and thumped the car door. "Oh, Marcus. Come on, we're pros. We know how to do this kind of thing. We don't want to take you along with us if we don't have to. Where we're headed, it's a nice place, it's a reward and an honor to get assigned there. The people there, they're elite. You wouldn't fit in. If we have any choice in the matter, we'll leave you right where we found you."
I tried again for a poker face. Yeah, sure they'd leave me. In a garbage bag at the bottom of the San Francisco Bay.
"Or maybe you think we want to off you? Now that wouldn't make any sense. Smart guy like you, you'd have lots of copies where we couldn't find them, but where they'd be sure to come to light some day if you weren't around. We want your cooperation, and we can only get that for so long as you're alive."
"And so long as you've got something to lose," the other guy said. Bad cop.
"Show him," Timmy said. The guy in the front seat got out and walked around the car, closing the door behind him with another well-engineered thunk. The car rocked a little on its suspension as he opened it and got something out. His shoes crunched softly on the ground as he came back around and opened the passenger-side door and slid in. He was holding a heavy-duty ballistic plastic equipment case, another tactical black number, with big, chunky latches that had worn away a little to show glints of silver metal beneath the matte-black paint. He thumbed the latches and opened the case, which made a little gasketty, rubbery sound as it opened. It had been filled with foam rubber with precise cutouts to accommodate a little black box, some wires, assorted discs of plastic and clips.
"Polygraph," the man said. It was such a pleasant surprise that I found myself on the verge of laughter.
"Polygraph" is the fancy, semi-scientific name for a "lie detector," a machine that's supposed to be able to tell whether you're fibbing by measuring things like "galvanic skin response" (another science-y word, meaning "sweatiness") and your heart rate. They were invented in 1921, and, like many science-y things, people decided they were so complicated that they must work. This, of course, is an insane reason to believe something.
Lie detectors are crap. What they tell you is whether the person they've been hooked up to is sweaty, or whether his pulse has gone up, but that doesn't mean he's lying. Courts don't admit lie detector evidence for a reason.
But they're still made and they're still used -- for much the same reason that people still wear crystals around their necks to cure their diseases or buy "homeopathic remedies" to get better. It's a combination of two distinct flavors of stupidity. I call the first one "It's better than nothing." I call the second one "It worked for me."
These delusions are why many big corporations, the U.S. military, and the FBI subject their people to lie detectors. Imagine that you're some kind of millionaire big-shot company executive, the founder of a chain of successful convenience stores. You need to hire a regional manager, and if you hire the wrong person, he or she might rob you blind and ruin you. You need to get this right.
So you pay some expensive "executive recruiting" company to find the right person. They have a big sales pitch: we're smart, we've been doing this for years, and best of all, we're scientific. We have "scientific personality tests" we'll administer to make sure you're getting the right person. And before you hire that person, we'll wire her up to our lie detector and ask her some important questions, like "Are you planning on robbing the company?" and "Are you a secret drug user?" and so on.
Science is awesome, right? A scientific recruiting company's going to be totally bad-ass at finding you the right person, using the science of hiring-ology, and their science lab must have a bunch of Ph.D. hire-ologists. But you've heard that the polygraph is, you know, kind of sketchy. Does it really work?
"Oh, sure," the consultants tell you. "Not perfectly, of course. But nothing's perfect. Polygraphs, though, sometimes tell you when someone is lying, and isn't that better than nothing?"
(The correct answer is "probably not." Flipping a coin or sacrificing a goat would "sometimes" tell you if someone was lying, if you had enough lies and enough goats and you did it for long enough.)
Now, imagine you're a section chief at the FBI. You got your job by passing a lie detector test. You'd been wired up, you'd been asked if you were a secret communist islamofascist terrorist dope-fiend. You'd said "no," and the machine agreed. It works! Now, some people out there say that the machine's a piece of crap, but what do they know? After all, it not only worked on you, it worked on everyone you work with!
(Of course, everyone it didn't work on wasn't hired, or was hired even though they're snorting lines of meth through rolled up pages of The Communist Manifesto while they strap on their suicide bombs.)
The world is full of science-y crap. You probably know someone who wears a copper bracelet to "help with arthritis." They might as well burn a witch or cover themselves in blue mud and dance widdershins under a full moon. There's a chance either of those things will make them feel better, because of the placebo effect (when your brain convinces itself to stop feeling bad), but there are an alarming number of people who insist that because something "works" it must not be a placebo, it must be "real."
These guys wanted to wire me up to a lie detector and sacrifice a goat and figure out if I'd lied to them. They were big and tough and rich, they were faster than I was and infinitely better armed, but they'd let a witch doctor sell them a magical lie-catching talisman, and so I was going to absolutely pwn them.
They were total dicks about it, too. They watched me enter my password on my computer, making a show of recording it with yet another black rubber tactical gizmo (it was like these guys had an infinite supply of grown-up Tonka toys): a webcam with a white LED that lit my fingers with harsh, uncompromising light as I entered it. They watched as I fired up TrueCrypt and brought up my hidden partition, watched as I did a directory listing and showed them the files, watched as I nuked them.
"Okay, that's fine. But what about your backups, Marcus?"
Maybe they weren't totally stupid.
"I've got a lot of backups," I admitted. "But I think I can solve that problem for you."
"Yeah? Tell me." Timmy was smiling again, all his smile lines crinkling, making him look like he was really enjoying himself and wanted me to enjoy myself, too. I started to get the feeling that Timmy might wear exactly that smile if he was cutting off my fingers or taping electrical wires to my nuts.
"Well, I encrypt all my backups, of course."
"Of course."
"And I need a key to get at the backups, right?"
"Sure."
"So what if I delete the key?"
"Haven't you backed up the key?"
"Yeah," I said. "I'll need to get online and erase it in a few places. But once it's gone, everything is gone. It might as well be random noise."
The other guy -- Knothead -- was holding the webcam with its bright light shining at me, and I couldn't make out his face. But when Timmy shifted his attention to him, he lowered the light and I saw he was wearing a (tactical) earpiece. I wondered how many times these guys dropped something small and important on the floor and lost it forever as its black paint job rendered it invisible. I wondered if any of them had been goths in an earlier life.
Probably not.
Knothead raised one thick finger. He was listening to someone on the earpiece. So the webcam must be streaming over the net to someone else, a technical expert who was watching everything I did, helping them figure out what to do. He nodded twice, said, "Check that," and turned to us. "Do it," he said. "We'll polygraph him later."
Timmy said, "I'm about to give you a WiFi password for the car. You're going to get a chance to do what you say you're doing. We're going to see what you do. We're going to verify what you do. If we can verify it, you get to go home. It's that simple. Do we have a deal?"
Before I'd been afraid. Now I was afraid they'd see how happy I was. That was important, because what I was about to do depended on them believing that I was very, very nervous.
I keyed in the WiFi password and waited while I connected. I wondered what sort of link I was on. I figured if I were them, I'd be running everything through an SSL tunnel to a Tor router somewhere on the net, so that everything came through nicely anonymized. Why not? If it was good enough for paranoid freaks like me, it'd suit them just fine. That was the thing about this stuff. It worked equally well for everyone: people who had leaks, people who worried about leaks, people who leaked leaks. We were all smart enough to keep our paranoid packets bouncing around the net like hyperactive superballs.
Certainly, the connection was slow enough. I waited interminably as my computer logged into the backup at home. "This is my home drive," I said. I typed in the passphrase that unlocked the key on my hard drive and caused it to be sent to the disk on my desk at home. I let the camera see my fingers enter the commands to securely delete the leaks file from my primary backup drive, overwriting them with three successive passes of random (or "random") data, then did a search on the drive to show that that was the only copy. "That drive synchs up to one at the hackerspace, Noisebridge." I logged out and logged in to Noisebridge's open shell, pwny, the connection crawling over its layers of misdirection and encryption. "I'm nuking it here." I did. "Noisebridge backs up to the cloud. It's not a drive I can control, but Noisebridge re-synchs every five minutes, and here's where the process logs." I opened the logfile with the "tail -f" command, which let us see new lines as they were being written to it. We waited in stuffy silence for the next synch, then watch as the log showed the Noisebridge server being compared to the remote copy, noticing that I'd deleted the leaks files and keys, and instructing that they be deleted on the other side as well.
I logged out. "Done."
"Do we believe him, Timmy?" said Knothead, in a teasing, mean way.
"Oh, I believe him, but you know what they say: 'Trust, but verify.' Your turn, buddy."
Knothead came around and opened the back door and swapped places with Timmy. He brought out each piece of his high-technology lie detector, examining it minutely, making sure I saw him do it. Back in the days of the Spanish Inquisition, the torturers had a thing called "showing the implements" where they showed the heretic the weird cutlery they had on hand to lift, separate and disconnect all the moist, tender, painful places in his body. Knothead would have made a great inquisitor, and he even had the science background for it. It's a shame he was born five hundred years too late to get the job.
He fitted me with a blood pressure cuff -- yeah, it was a tactical cuff, which clearly made this guy as happy as a pig in shit -- and then started in with the electrodes. He had a lot of electrodes and he was going to use 'em all, that much was clear. Each one went in over a smear of conductive jelly that came out of a disposable packet, like the ketchup packets you get at McDonald's. These, at least, were non-tactical, emblazoned instead with German writing and an unfamiliar logo.
That was when I started puckering and unpuckering my anus.
Yes, you read that right. Here's the thing about lie detectors: they work by measuring the signs of nervousness, like increases in pulse, respiration, and yeah, sweatiness. The theory is that people get more nervous when they're lying, and that nervousness can be measured by the gadget.
This doesn't work so well. There's plenty of cool customers who're capable of lying without any outward signs of anxiety, because they're not feeling any anxiety. That's pretty much the definition of a sociopath, in fact: someone who doesn't have any reaction to a lie. So lie detectors work great, except when it comes to the most dangerous liars in the world. That's the "It's better than nothing" stupidity I mentioned before, remember?
But there're plenty of people who start off nervous -- say, people who're nervous because they're taking a lie detector test on which depends their job or their freedom. Or someone who's been kidnapped by a couple of private mercenaries who've threatened to take him to their hideout if he doesn't cooperate.
But sometimes, lie detectors can tell the difference between normal nervousness and lying nervousness. Which is why it's useful to inject a few little extra signs of anxiety into the process. There are lots of ways to do this. Supposedly, spies used to keep a thumbtack in their shoe and they could wiggle their toes against it to make their nervous systems do the Charleston at just the right moment to make their "calm" state seem pretty damned nervous. So when they told a lie, any additional nervousness would be swamped by the crazy parasympathetic nervous system jitterbug their bodies were jangling through.
Thumbtacks in your shoe are overkill, though. They're fine for super-macho super-spies for whom a punctured toe is a badge of honor. But if you ever need to beat a polygraph, just pucker up -- your butt, that is.
Squeezing and releasing your butt-hole recruits many major muscle- and nerve groups, gets a lot of blood flowing, and makes you look like you're at least as nervous as a liar, when all you're doing are some rhythmic bum-squeezes. As a side bonus, do it enough and you will have BUNS OF STEEL.
One of the reasons Noisebridge is such a cool place is that people experimented with stuff like this all the time. Someone heard about the butt-squeezing attack for polygraphs and told someone else, and before you knew it, we'd found a couple models cheap on eBay and were merrily hooking them up to one another and squeezing. You'd think that you could tell if the person you were talking to was clenching, but you'd be wrong. A little bit of practice and you can be a perfectly covert anus flexer.
"What day is it?" Knothead said.
"Wednesday," I said, clenching. This was how you started a lie detector session, by getting the answers to a bunch of questions you knew the answer to, so you could see what the normal, non-lying state looked like.
"Is your name Marcus Yallow?"
Clench. "Yes." Clench.
"Am I wearing a black jacket?"
Squeeze, squeeze. "Yes." And a black shirt and black pants and black socks and a black belt. Clench, clench.
"Were you given the tools to download and decrypt a file containing confidential documents by a confederate at the Burning Man festival in Nevada?"
"Yes." Squeeze. I was going to have an ass you could bounce quarters off of by the time this was done.
"Were you born in San Francisco?"
Clench. "Yes."
"Do you speak Latin?"
"No." Clench.
Knothead went on in this vein for quite some time. It was clear that he was going to be ultra-sure that he had precisely calibrated his gizmo before he got to the good stuff.
Then: "Did you delete your copies of this file?"
Squeeze. "Yes."
"Have you got any remaining copies of this file?"
"No." Clench.
"Is there any way for you to retrieve a copy of this file or its decrypted components?"
"Yes. Some of them have been published already. I can access those."
He snarled, but Timmy laughed. "He's got you there, buddy."
"Excluding the documents that are already in the public's hands, is there any way for you to retrieve a copy of this file or its decrypted components?"
"Yes. I assume I can still download the encrypted torrent file."
Knothead jabbed a finger that was as hard as a steel rod into a spot below my ribs and a scorching ball of pain radiated outward from the spot and I pitched forward, gasping, gagging, feeling like I'd puke.
"Puke on me and I'll twist your head off and shove it down your neck," Knothead said, in an absolutely conversational tone.
I kept gasping, but the air didn't want to come back in. Sip by sip, I refilled my lungs. I hadn't thrown up.
"Is that going to decalibrate the polygraph?" Timmy said, sounding slightly irritated at the thought. I didn't for a second think that he was irritated with his partner for hurting me.
"Nope," said Knothead. "Watch." He reached out and gave me a firm, but not hard, smack across the face. "Hey, Marcus, you ready for more questions?"
"Yes," I said, and squeezed automatically.
"Are you sorry you were such a smartdick?"
"Yes." Squeeze.
"Have you deleted all the copies you possess of the documents you were leaked?"
"Yes." Squeeze.
"Do you still have access to the keys to decrypt any other copies you might find?"
"No." Squeeze.
"Have you told anyone else about these documents, or given copies of them to anyone else?"
"No." I squeezed. This was the big one. This was the one that determined whether they hunted down Ange or Jolu or my other friends and gave them the same treatment I got -- and did to them whatever would be done to me. I kept squeezing and releasing.
He showed Timmy the screen. Timmy cocked his head and listened to the voice in his headset briefly. "Roger," he said. Knothead turned off the gadget. "It's all good, buddy. Nice work. Let's take our little pal here where he wants to go. Where you want to go, Marcus? The malt shop? The drive-in? You got a Bible study class we could take you to? Eagle scouts?"
"I can walk from here," I said. I was bathed in sweat, and wanted desperately to get out of the car. My eyes kept darting back to the handle-less doors, my brain kept thinking, This isn't a car, it's a rolling prison. I was half certain that they were still planning to fill my pockets with rocks and chuck me into the Bay. That's what mercenaries did, right? Kill people.
"Now, don't be like that, sweetie pie," Timmy said. "We were friendly enough, weren't we? We're just guys with a job to do. And by the way, that job is protecting your butt from some really bad guys who'd love to blow up your house and put your mama in a burka. You've done your country a service tonight. You should be proud of yourself."
I didn't say anything. Everything I could think of saying was the sort of thing that would earn me another slap, another punch. Maybe worse.
"Where are we taking you, Marcus? Want to come to the titty bar with us?"
"I'll get out here."
He looked disgusted. "Suit yourself," he said.
Knothead ripped the electrodes off me and popped the door. I began to repack my bag, just throwing things in. As I reached for my multitool, Timmy snatched it up and dangled it. "You don't mind if I keep this, do you? As a memento, you know? Of our time campaigning together for truth and justice?" His eyes glittered with lunatic merriment and he suddenly looked more dangerous than Knothead. I shook my head.
"Keep it."
"Gosh, that's very nice of you, Marcus," he said. "Isn't that nice of him?"
Knothead laughed. I grabbed my bag and zipped it up, then shrugged into my jacket and set out walking. I didn't know exactly where I was, but it wasn't hard to figure out that walking away from the water would take me toward SoMa, and from there I could find Mission Street and walk all the way home, or catch a bus, or hop on BART. I got about twenty steps before I heard the car's big engine gun, and then I jumped to one side as the car roared past me, nearly clipping me. It was a final dick-move screw-you from Knothead and Timmy, a last reminder that I was a little pussy and they were big, tough guys. It was so petty it should have been laughable, but if it was so funny, why did I start crying?
Real, big, wet sobs, too, and snot running down my face. My hands were shaking, and my legs wobbled under me. I felt like my backpack weighed a million pounds, and I slipped out of it and let it drop to the ground, not caring about my laptop.
I felt. Like I counted for nothing. Like I was nothing. I tried to comfort myself with the fact that they were stupid enough to believe a lie detector, the fact that I'd outsmarted them. It didn't matter. They were bigger, stronger, better funded. They believed in lie detectors because they'd taken lie detector tests and so had everyone they knew, so they "knew" that the tests worked. It was no different from people who believed in astrology or faith healing because everyone they knew believed too. It didn't stop these guys from being more powerful and stronger than me.
I made myself stop crying, squeezed my eyes shut, and tried to get rid of that scratchy, weepy feeling. I shouldered my bag again. I started walking. I needed to get home, get in touch with Ange and Jolu, tell them about this. Tell them about everything. My broken nose ached. It was nearly midnight and I was supposed to be at work in a few hours, with a proposal for turning Joe's campaign into "Election 2.0." I had no idea what I was going to tell him.
Maybe I'd just tell him the mercenaries ate my homework.
I didn't make it home. Halfway to Mission Street, I kept going to Market, kept walking to Hayes Valley and Ange's place. I stood at her door, dithering. It was late and every light was off in the house, and the battery on my phone was dead so I couldn't even call. I was going to have to ring the bell and wake up the whole house. Or I was going to have to go home and spend the night alone. I couldn't face that.
I realized I could sit down on the front step, get out my laptop, log on to Ange's WiFi, and use Skype to call her phone and wake her up. It was a perverse way of making a phone call to a person who was about ten yards away from me, but it was also how I made my cell phone ring when I couldn't remember where I put it. Ange's window must have been open a crack because as the Skype call rang, I could hear her ringtone -- the Doctor Who Tardis whoosh-whoosh sound -- floating out over the street.
"Who is this?" Skype calls came up "Unknown Number."
"It's me. I'm downstairs. Let me in."
"Downstairs where?"
"Downstairs here. Like, right below you." I heard movement over my computer's speakers and through the window and the bones of the house: Ange getting on a bathrobe and coming down the stairs. A moment later, the chain scraped on the door and the dead bolts snapped open and the door opened and there was Ange. My computer started to play a feedback squeal as Ange's phone got too close to it and I flipped the lid shut as she stabbed at her phone's screen with a finger to hang it up.
"Marcus?"
"Let me in, okay?"
I love Ange. She kissed me hard on the mouth, grabbed my hand, and pulled me inside the house. We went upstairs together, tiptoeing, and before I went into her room, I whispered, "Is your computer on?"
She cocked her head at me. "Yeah."
"Go shut it off, okay?"
I waited outside her door while she went into her room and moved around. She opened her door, holding her laptop in one hand and its battery in the other.
"I think you'd better tell me what's going on."
I thought I'd have the biggest news of the night, but I was wrong.
"How sure are you that your computer is safe?" Ange said, when I was finished telling her my story. It wasn't exactly what I was expecting her to say at that juncture.
"Yes, I'm fine, just a little shaken up, thank you for asking," I said.
"Forget that for now. Do you think your computer is clean? Do you trust it enough to get into the darknet?"
Only now did I notice what I should have seen right away. Ange was freaked out, too, and not just because of what I had to tell her.
"What is it?"
"Do. You. Trust. Your. Computer --"
"Yes, yes," I said. I woke it up and started typing and clicking.
"Search the database," she said. "Look for Zyz. That's zee-why-zee."
"What's a 'zyz'?"
She gave me a "don't ask stupid questions" look. I typed.