This chapter is dedicated to Anderson's Bookshops, Chicago's legendary kids' bookstore. Anderson's is an old, old family-run business, which started out as an old-timey drug-store selling some books on the side. Today, it's a booming, multi-location kids' book empire, with some incredibly innovative bookselling practices that get books and kids together in really exciting ways. The best of these is the store's mobile book-fairs, in which they ship huge, rolling bookcases, already stocked with excellent kids' books, direct to schools on trucks -- voila, instant book-fair!
Anderson's Bookshops: 123 West Jefferson, Naperville, IL 60540 USA +1 630 355 2665
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Zyz wasn't always called Zyz. It was once called Fireguard Security, and it was founded by an exec at Halliburton, a giant military contractor that sucked a bazillion dollars out of America's bank accounts selling pricey, underperforming military services to our troops all over the world, then followed up by helping to build a couple of semi-defective, way-over-budget oil wells, including one that may yet be responsible for the sterilization of the Gulf of Mexico.
Halliburton had a "dynamic, thrusting young VP" (seriously, that's what Fortune magazine called him) named Chambers Martin who quit the company in 2008 to found Fireguard, which immediately began to make major bank by taking U.S. Army contracts to guard Halliburton supply convoys in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So far, so normal. There are plenty of companies who bled out the taxpayer by providing bloodthirsty mercs. They guarded truckloads of Twinkies around Kandahar Province and Fallujah to restock the Forward Operating Bases that were a cross between an armed fortress and a mini-mall. The Army paid them enormous fees to have soldiers' clothes laundered and to supply Internet access and Pizza Hut.
But Fireguard had bigger plans. Rather than simply sucking up tax dollars for substandard services, they decided to become...a bank. Specifically, they began to issue bonds based on their anticipated future U.S. government contracts. The simplest bonds are basically loans: I sell you a bond for $100 with a five percent return and then I pay you $5 a year over the term of the bond (say, five years), and when the bond runs out its term, say, five years, we're done. Of course, if I go broke before the bond runs out, I go bankrupt and you're screwed.
Fireguard was selling its debt left, right, and center, paying top interest rates, telling everyone that the gravy train could never end, because every year they were taking in bigger military contracts, which meant that every year, they'd have more money on hand to make their bonds' payouts. It worked great, until the military drawdowns started to reduce their annual revenues, and they needed to branch out.
So they started trading bonds, instead of just issuing them, beginning with bonds issued on student loan debt. It turned out that every dollar I borrowed to go to Berkeley got turned into a bond -- someone with money bought the right to get paid every time I made a payment on my debt. This made big bucks for Berkeley and for other universities and companies that "gave" students the loans they needed to get their magic diploma paper. Student debt bonds are even better than skeezy military contractor debt bonds because a skeezy military contractor can go bankrupt, but students can't.
Bet you didn't know that, huh? If you borrowed money to go to college and you someday find yourself so flat broke that you have to go bankrupt, all your debts will be wiped off the books -- credit cards, car notes -- but your student debts are immortal. And whenever you miss a payment, the scuzzy finance companies that buy the debts from universities are allowed to jack your debt up with monster fees and penalties, so if you owe $30,000 for college and $50,000 in credit card debt and you go bankrupt, you'll find the credit card debt reduced or eliminated, but your student debt might grow to $150,000 after all the missed-payment fees are tacked on. The way student debt bankruptcy laws are set up, they can take money out of your Social Security check to pay the student loans you took out as a teenager, even if you've already paid millions in fees and penalties.
Zyz liked the sound of this. So they took the money that was coming in from the sale of their bonds and started buying up student debt. But not just any student debt: desperate, miserable student debt. Debt carried by the poorest people in America, who had put themselves into permanent hock just to try to get a better job than their parents had by getting a degree.
These people were in trouble. Getting a college degree (or, ahem, dropping out of college) hadn't led to them getting great jobs. They were unemployed, or working a ton of crappy part-time jobs to make rent, and they were missing payments like crazy. They had debts that they could never, ever pay off.
Enter Zyz. They had a dynamic, thrusting plan to get people to pay: straight-up thuggery. Zyz knew a lot about scaring, hurting and chasing people. They had deep connections with Homeland Security, which meant access to databases of who lived where, who they were related to, what their tax-returns said, how much income their parents, ex-spouses, grandparents, cousins, and school pals made. Zyz was...aggressive...about using this information. Thrusting, even.
So far, so sleazy. But it got worse. People who owed money to Zyz started to do things that were pretty out of character for them: a couple armed robberies, some burglaries, a little blackmail. A bunch of them joined the military, only to be discharged for being grossly unfit for service.
Why were they doing this? Because Zyz was providing them with "financial advice." As in "You'd better find some way to pay your bills, pal, or things could get very, very bad for you and the people you love." Zyz wasn't just a private military service, and they weren't just high-flying financial engineers: they were the mafia.
All this was contained in a series of memos, including a bunch of letters from attorneys general and district attorneys who'd gotten complaints from Zyz's "clients." Zyz, of course, denied everything, while simultaneously getting friends of theirs in state and national government, law enforcement, and the DHS itself to keep everything calm and easy.
The most damning memo came from a San Francisco city attorney who'd heard too many nearly identical stories from Zyz clients, and had painstakingly built a case against them, with mountains of supporting documents (all also included in the docs), only to have her boss tell her to forget about it because "there wasn't sufficient evidence to justify an additional investigation at this time."
Well, this lady -- I cheered her on as I read -- wasn't going to take this lying down. She continued to collect stories from Zyz's victims, and to pick away at Zyz's finances, trying to find the "sufficient evidence" that would convince her boss. This continued right up to the time that her bank foreclosed on her house, citing payments in arrears. Being woken up at 6 A.M. and thrown out of her house with her husband and two small children turned her into a full-time, professional prisoner of a bureaucratic nightmare, trying to clear her name and credit, and get her house back.
That's where her story ended, but not Zyz's. Zyz had hired lobbyists in every state capital in America -- which must have cost a fortune, and gave me an idea of the kind of money they were sucking in from buying and selling their dirty bonds -- to push for legislation that allowed them "greater leeway" in going after the assets of parents and even grandparents of ex-students who owed money, especially when the ex-students were living at home. Translation: if you owed for your student loans and were so broke you had to live with your parents (ahem), they wanted to go after your folks' house, their wages, and their pension. They didn't just want to wait to raid your Social Security check; they wanted to raid your grandma's Social Security.
These lobbyists had been busy everywhere, but especially in California, where youth unemployment was leading the country, and where, thanks to skyrocketing tuition in the UC state system, there were also record numbers of dropouts like me, whose student debts had come due early, and Zyz wanted our parents' dough.
Now that elections were coming up, Zyz was spreading around a lot of money. They had dozens of subsidiaries for doing this, but once again, some hard-working whistle-blower (his or her name was scrubbed out of the memo) had compiled a list of them and pointed out that they had donated to every "serious" candidate in every race, often backing opposing candidates -- anyone who stood a chance of ending up on an important committee if she or he won the election.
Once the darknet team had known to search for Zyz, they'd uncovered a mountain of stuff like this. Including something that jumped out at me: Zyz had hired a top-notch head of security with years of DHS and military experience: Carrie Johnstone.
"Holy crap," I said.
"Yeah," Ange said. "This is why they're so freaked out. This is their big push. They've been buying up all this debt cheap bonds backed by student loans from really broke-ass kids. If they can go after those kids' families' houses, they'll make millions -- hundreds of millions."
"So what happens if we go public?"
"If we go public? What do you mean, 'if'?" She was looking at me like I'd grown another head.
"Ange," I said, putting up my hands. "You know. These guys, you've read about them. They know who I am. They know I'm the guy who got the leaks from Masha. If this stuff gets out, they'll --"
"What? Marcus, they're insane criminals. You're not going to keep yourself safe by going along with them. If it suits them, they'll come after you again. And what about Masha? Those hacker creeps might've been total dicks, but they're right about her. She trusted you to be her insurance policy and instead you've spent your time cataloging the evidence --"
"Wait, what? I've spent my time? You've spent your time, too, Ange. We all agreed that we needed to go through the darknet docs before we put them out, find out what we had, decide on a strategy --"
"Marcus, that's what you wanted, so that's what we did. There was no reason you couldn't have just tweeted the torrent name and the key and said, 'DOWNLOAD THIS NOW. IT'S FULL OF CRIMINAL STUFF.' You've got what, ten thousand followers? Once you did that, the file would be unkillable."
"Masha's not unkillable," I shot back.
"You don't even know if she's working with those creeps --"
"Ange, come on, you're not making sense. A second ago, you were telling me how evil I was because I hadn't released the docs to save Masha. Now you're saying it doesn't matter if we put Masha in danger because she might be evil? Which one is it?"
Ange shook her head. "It doesn't matter. What matters is that you could be doing something here, and instead you're doing your run in circles, scream and shout act."
"I just want to have a plan before I do something, Ange. What's wrong with that?"
"I've got a plan for you, Marcus. Step one: tell everyone how to get to the docs. Step two: there is no step two."
I felt trapped. Our voices kept getting louder, and I was worried that we'd wake up Ange's mom and sister. If we'd been arguing in public -- in a park or something -- I might have gotten up and walked away to cool off. But it was going on 2 A.M.. Where was I going to go? And of course, all this only made me more angry.
"Sure, it's that easy. Especially if you're not the one getting kidnapped and threatened."
She was ready for that one. "You don't think they've figured out who I am? You don't think I'm next on the list if we publish this stuff? Marcus, I don't care what happens to me. This is too important to let my safety come first. This is bigger than me."
"Nice of you to volunteer me to give up my safety, too."
"I didn't think I had to volunteer you, Marcus. I thought that M1k3y would be right there, ready to fight for what was right, rather than screwing around with getting everything perfectly organized and safe before he took action."
There it was. Pretty much everything I'd been afraid of, laid out by the one person I loved, trusted, and needed more than anyone else in the world. There's only one thing worse than being shredded unfairly by someone like that: being shredded when you deserve it.
"Ange --" I began.
"Forget it," she said. "Let's just go to sleep."
We lay in bed next to each other, like two marble statues, rigid, not touching. I kept replaying the discussions I'd had that day and that night, the anonymous hackers who'd been in my computer, the thugs from Zyz, and Ange, furious and disappointed with me. Around and around they went, a chorus of shame and accusations.
When they got too loud, I stood up and started putting on my clothes, fumbling in the dark. I heard Ange hold her breath, expel it, start to say something, stop.
Half-dressed, shoes undone, my bag hastily restuffed with my crap, I stepped out of Ange's room and let myself down the stairs and out the front door.
At least I'd had the foresight to charge my phone. I scrolled through the speed dial. I suppose I could have called my parents, but what could I say to them? How could they help?
There were two people in my speed dial I hadn't called in months and months. They'd been auto-sorted to the bottom of the list. Only the fact that I'd manually favorited them kept them from being dropped altogether.
Darryl and Van.
I let my thumb hover over Darryl's picture for a long second as I walked down toward Market Street, thinking of how awkward it had been to talk with him, knowing that Van had confessed her crush on me and not knowing whether Darryl knew it, knowing that Van and Ange had hated each other for years and that this couldn't have made it any better, wondering all the time whether Darryl hated me for being his rival or hated my girlfriend for whatever grievance Van held. The days between our talks had turned to weeks, the weeks to months. The longer the gap between conversations and meetings, the weirder and more uncomfortable it would be to get back in touch -- the more it would seem like some special occasion.
It was cold now, and I was shivering, and once I started shivering, it felt like something inside me was giving way and then I was shivering for reasons other than the cold, and I pressed the button. It was after three in the morning. It rang and rang.
"Hi, this is Darryl. Leave a message, or better yet, send me a text or an email."
I hung up.
It was funny how I could feel all alone and under surveillance at the same time. I had ParanoidAndroid installed, but that didn't mean that my phone wasn't rooted -- just that it would be harder to root. Had it been in my line of sight the whole time I'd been in the car with Knothead and Timmy had control over it? Had the creeps who'd taken over my laptop taken a run or two at my phone?
It was all for the best. Waking someone up at three in the morning while you're having a meltdown is no way to restart a friendship --
My phone rang. Darryl.
"Hey, man."
"Are you okay, Marcus?" He sounded so genuinely concerned I wanted to cry again.
Sorry, dude, just pressed the wrong button -- butt-dialing. Sorry. Go back to sleep. The words were on the tip of my tongue. They wouldn't come.
"No," I said. "No, I'm not." A siren screamed past me, a fire engine, and I jumped and gave a little squeak.
"Where are you?" he said.
I looked up at the street signs. "Market and Guerrero."
"Stay there," he said. "Be there in fifteen."
Friends.
Darryl's dad hadn't lost his job in the Berkeley layoffs, though he'd taken a "voluntary" pay cut. But things weren't so bad that they'd sold their car, a ten-year-old Honda that Darryl had his own keys for. It was fuggly and held together with bondo and good thoughts, but it was a car, and capable of getting from Twin Peaks to downtown in fifteen minutes at 3 A.M., though I'm guessing that Darryl blew through a few yellow lights and maybe a red or two to make that time.
It pulled up to the curb and the locks popped, and I opened the door and slid in, my nose filling with the familiar smell of the car, which I'd ridden in a million times before: old coffee, a hint of McDonald's breakfast sandwich, the baked/mildewed smell of a vehicle that had spent a lot of time with its windows rolled up in the alternating scorching heat and misty cool of the Berkeley campus.
He was wearing track pants and a T-shirt, and his feet were bare in his unlaced Converse, big toe poking through a hole in the right one. Darryl had humongous feet, and his shoes were always going out at the toes.
The first words he said weren't "What's wrong?" or "Do you know what time it is?" or "You owe me, buddy, big time."
The first words he said were, "It's great to see you again, bud."
It was the best thing he could have said. "Yeah," I said. "Yeah, it's great to see you, too."
I tried to find some words, some place to start the story. He knew about the darknet, had been going through the docs. Presumably, he'd seen the Zyz docs, helped to assemble them. But there was so much to say, and I couldn't figure out where to begin. I closed my eyes to think and the next thing I knew, he was shaking me awake. I ungummed my eyelids and looked around. We were outside his dad's place, which had once been as familiar to me as my own home.
"Come on, bud," he said, "up you go."
I stumbled after him, scuffing my boots on the ground, kicking them off in the doorway, trailing after him up to the bedroom.
I barely registered that Van was in his bed, sitting up in the dark, wearing a T-shirt, hair in a crazy anime-spray. "Hey, Van," I said, as Darryl steered me to the narrow camping mattress that was already laid out at the foot of the bed. I flopped down on it, eyes closing before my head hit the pillow. Someone -- Darryl -- tried to make me roll off the bed so that he could pull the spare blanket out from under me and cover me with it, but I wasn't budging. I was made of lead. My body knew that it was somewhere safe, with people I could trust, and it was not going to allow me to keep it awake one second longer. A half-formed thought about setting an alarm so I wouldn't be late for work crossed my mind, but my hands were as heavy as cinder blocks, and my phone was a million miles away in my pocket. Besides, I was already asleep.
I woke to the smells of bacon and eggs and toast and, most of all, coffee. The bedroom was empty, filled with grey light filtering through the heavy blinds. I pulled them aside and saw that it was broad daylight. I checked my phone, noting the ache as I pulled it out -- I'd slept on it -- and saw that it was 11:24. I was incredibly late for work. My adrenals tried to fire and fill me with panic, but I was empty. Instead, I felt a kind of low-grade anxiety as I had a quick pee and headed downstairs into the sunny kitchen.
The light dazzled me and I shaded my eyes, provoking laughter from Darryl and Van, who were dancing around the kitchen in a clatter of pans and plates and glasses and mugs.
"Told you that'd get him up," Darryl said. "The boy thinks with his stomach."
Van giggled. "That's a good six inches higher than most boys' thought-centers." They smooched. Were Ange and I this sickening? Probably, I decided.
"Guys," I said. "I really, really owe you, but I can't stay for breakfast. I'm late --"
"For work," Darryl said. "I know. Which is why I called your mom and she called your boss and told him you were feeling poorly and would work from home for the morning and try to come in this afternoon. You're covered, bro. Sit and eat."
Friends! Did it get any better? I poked my nose toward the stove where a little caffettiera was starting to bubble. If you have to make coffee, a caffettiera isn't the worst way to do it, but they're tricky to get right. They're basically a double boiler: you fill the bottom part with water, the top with ground coffee, and you put it straight on the stove. The water heats up and expands and the pressure forces it through the coffee and into the top of the pot. But they have a tendency to get too hot, and the super-hot water extracts all the worst, most bitter acids, making a cup of strong, nasty coffee that needs a gallon of milk and a pound of sugar to drown out the ick.
"Let me in," I said, twisting the burner off, grabbing a kitchen towel and running it under the cold tap and then wrapping it around the boiler, cooling down the water and stopping the extraction. I gave it a three-count, then unscrewed the top section. Ideally, you'd want to cool it all off even faster, but caffettiera have a tendency to crack if they change temperature too fast. I'd found that out the hard way in an adventure involving a bowl full of ice water, a caffettiera, and a mess that took most of the day to clean up. At least I didn't blow my hand off when the cast-iron boiler shattered.
"Marcus," Darryl said, "it's only coffee."
"Yeah," I said. "It's only coffee. What's your point?" I reached for the cupboard where the little espresso cups I'd given Darryl for Christmas years ago were kept, automatically remembering which cupboard that was, and I fished down three cups and poured out the coffee. I tasted mine. It wasn't terrible. It was almost good.
Darryl grabbed another and had a sip, then nodded. "Okay, that's better than anything I make."
Van tried hers. "Darryl, that's amazing. Come on, give the man credit where credit's due."
Darryl faked a little bow at me. "Sir, you astound me with your coffee prowess. Prithee, place thine butt in yonder chair so that I might proffer you a repast of finest fried victuals."
Van swatted him on the ass and I sat down and food appeared before me, with knife and fork and Tabasco -- which reminded me of Ange and sent a knife through my heart -- and even a multivitamin.
Darryl and Van sat, too, and we turned food into dirty dishes and then I turned the dirty dishes into clean ones while Darryl found some tunes and put them on and Van had a shower, coming back down with her hair wrapped in a towel, dressed in a little skirt and a loose, floppy cotton top that hung down as low as the skirt. She looked amazing, and I found myself staring for longer than was polite. She caught me at it and gave me a weird look and I looked away.
"You ready to talk about it?" Darryl said.
"Not really," I said. "But I guess I'd better."
Telling it again, the day after, with a full stomach, felt a little like I was recounting the plot of a movie I'd seen and less like I was telling the story of something that had happened to me. I found myself discoursing on weird details I'd noticed, like the Zyz guys' tactical gear obsession, which provoked comforting hoots of laughter from Van, making it all seem more like a well-worn story of my life, rather than a source of imminent doom. Darryl and Van knew about Zyz, so I was able to skip over that part of my talk with Ange, which left me with the part where she'd told me I was a coward and a jerk for not putting my life at risk. Or at least, that's how it came out.
They made sympathetic faces and noises, and I felt better in a way that was also kind of bad. Like I knew that I'd made myself to be the hero of a story that I didn't deserve to be the hero of.
"Jesus, Marcus, what a frigging nightmare," Van said.
"So what are you going to do?" Darryl said.
Van gave him an impatient look. "What do you think? He's going to walk away from this. He's right: this is too risky for him. It's not his fight."
Darryl had been holding her hand, and he let go of it. "Come on, he can't do that. For one thing, there's other people involved now. Even if he stops, they won't."
Van folded her arms. "Jolu will shut it down if Marcus tells him to. Problem solved."
It was amazing. They'd gone from being a cuddly couple to furious in seconds. It made me realize how infrequently I bickered with Ange, and how little I knew about their relationship. I tried to say something, but Darryl was already speaking.
"No, he won't. He can't and he shouldn't. The stuff about Zyz, all that other stuff, it needs to come out."
"Oh really? And why does it need to come out? Is it going to solve anything? Don't you think that everyone already knows that the whole system is rotten? Do you think a bunch of anonymous, unverified Internet rumors are going to make people rise up and take action? Throw off their chains and free the world? Come on, Darryl. After everything you've been through --"
Darryl stood up abruptly. "Going for a walk," he said. He was out the door before I could say anything. Darryl had had it worse than me, had been in Gitmo-by-the-Bay for months. They'd held him in solitary, messed with his mind, hurt him in ways that showed and ways that didn't. He'd spent a month in the hospital under observation before they let him out. No one ever said it out loud, but I knew they'd had him on suicide watch.
Van had tears in her eyes. "He is such an idiot sometimes," she said. "What's wrong with wanting to be safe? Where does he get off making you take the risk for someone else's principles?"
I didn't have anything to say to that. Of course, they weren't someone else's principles, they were mine. Or they had been, before I'd had the principles terrorized out of me. How was it that Darryl had gone through so much more than I had but had emerged so fearless? Was he the broken one, or was I?
Van was crying now. I gave her a half-assed hug and she put her face on my shoulder and really cried, hard. She'd kissed me, just once, hard on the mouth, when she'd come through for me and helped me get a message through to Barbara Stratford at the Bay Guardian. That's when she'd confessed to me that she had a thing for me, and we'd never spoken about it since. At that moment, it was all I could think about. Between the fight with Ange and the events of the past few days and the strain, I felt like I was about to do something really, really stupid, like kiss her again.
I let go of her and stood up. My shoulder was wet with her tears. She looked up at me, tears streaking her face. I felt like I might cry, too. "I'm going to go find Darryl," I said. "He shouldn't be alone."
It was only once I was out the door that I wondered how Van felt about being alone.
I found Darryl exactly where I expected to find him: a little dog run up the hill from his house that had a commanding view of a valley bowl that swept back up the hills on the other side, to more hills, set below the weird semi-human shape of Sutro Tower, the broadcast antenna that looked like an alien with its hands held up in surrender. It's where we'd always snuck off to when we were up to no good -- a covert joint or an illicit bottle of something, even a couple of epic firecracker experiments, which had miraculously failed to blind or maim us. Judging by the number of times we'd found the roaches, bottles and used-up firecrackers up there, we were hardly the only ones.
Darryl was sitting on the graffiti-carved bench looking down at the valley and the cars below, staring into the middle distance and seeing nothing, I guessed. I sat down next to him.
"I don't know how you can be so brave," I said. "I really don't. I wish I could do it."
He made a noise that sounded a bit like a laugh, but with no humor in it. "Brave? Marcus, I'm not brave. I'm pissed. All the time, do you understand that? A hundred times a day, I feel like I could beat someone's head in. Mostly hers." I didn't have to ask who "her" was -- Carrie Johnstone, the woman of my nightmares. Darryl's, too. "I get so angry, so fast. It's like I'm watching myself from outside myself.
"You got to do something. I was locked away. I couldn't do anything. I couldn't help spread the Xnet, or go to big demonstrations, or jam with the other Xnetters. I sat in that room, naked, alone, for hours and hours and hours, nothing in there but my thoughts, my voices."
I'd never really thought of myself as lucky for being where I had been after the DHS took over San Francisco, but now that I looked at it from Darryl's point of view, I had to admit that yeah, it could have been a lot worse. I tried to imagine what it would have been like to be totally helpless and alone, instead of with all these amazing friends and people who looked up to me and hailed me.
"I'm sorry, D," I said.
"It's not your fault," he said. "I don't want to put this on you. It's my own damned problem." He swallowed a couple times. "It's partly why I hadn't been around much for you lately. Didn't want to say something, you know, ugly. Because I know you did what you did for me." Had I? Maybe a little. But I also did it for me, for the humiliation and suffering and fear, to try and get past all that. "But when Jolu told me about the darknet, when I saw those documents, I felt, like, all right, now it's my turn. Now I can finally do something about all the nastiness and corruption and evil in the world.
"But Van, she's not down for that. She just wants me to be safe. I get that. But she doesn't understand how being 'safe' means that I can't be whole again, can't get demons out of my head. I need to make something right, I need to be the star of my own movie for a change."
"Jeez, D, man --" I couldn't really find the words. I guess I'd suspected some of this, but I don't think I'd ever imagined that Darryl would ever say these words to me. It wasn't the kind of thing that guys said to each other -- not even guys who were as close as brothers, the way we had been.
"Yeah," he said. "It sure is a bitch, isn't it?"
"So what do you want to do?" I said.
"What do I want to do?"
"Yeah," I said. "Yeah. What do you want to do? Not 'What do you think I should do?' or 'What do you think is the safest thing to do?' What does Darryl Glover want to do, right now, today?"
He looked down at his hands. His fingernails were chewed ragged, his cuticles dotted with little scabs from where he'd chewed them bloody. He'd done that as a kid, but he'd stopped when we were both fourteen. I didn't know he'd started again.
"I want to release the whole thing. Today. Now."
"Yeah," I said. "Yeah, that sounds about right. Let's fucking do it."
The BOO-YAH interlude
Boo-yah, right? Let's do it.
I loved writing this part of the book. There's days when writing comes like pulling teeth, and days when it just flows. I used to think that I could only write on the good days, which made me pretty miserable. Then I had a breakthrough when I noticed that I couldn't tell the difference between the "good day" stuff and the "bad day" stuff after the fact. That may have been the most liberating realization in my life, the one that made me believe that I could go pro -- quit my day-job and write full time.
That's what I do. I'm a freelance writer, a member of the precariat, dependent on my ability to amuse you on the long slog from the cradle and the grave, and to do so sufficiently that you voluntarily part with your cash. I am one of the lucky ones -- a one percenter in the world of the arts -- and there isn't a day that goes by that I don't realize just how amazing that is.
Thank you for your support.
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Van didn't like it, but she got in the car with us. Darryl drove carefully and slowly, but I was in the passenger seat and I could see how his hands were shaking. We snarled in traffic in SoMa, and Darryl showed off his encyclopedic knowledge of the alleyways of the neighborhood to beat it, popping out on Market Street from an alleyway that was so narrow we scraped up a couple of plastic recycling wheelie-bins on our way out. He was in Hayes Valley a few minutes later, pulling up in front of Ange's house. I knew she didn't have any classes that afternoon, but she hadn't answered her phone when I called her. I thumped on her door.
She came down in track pants and the T-shirt she'd slept in the night before, her eyes swollen and red. She folded her arms when she saw me and glared. "Get dressed, okay?" I said. "You can be pissed at me later. Get dressed." She looked over my shoulder at Darryl, who waved at her. Van gave a half-assed, unenthusiastic wave, too.
"You're kidding me," she said.
"Get dressed," I said. "It's happening."
She gave me a long, searching look. I looked back at her, thinking, Come on, Ange, argue later, do this now before I lose my nerve. My heart was fluttering in my chest like a pigeon trapped in a store, beating against the windows and trying to break out.
She turned on her heel and disappeared into the house. I heard her run up the stairs to her room. A minute later, her little sister, Tina, appeared in the hallway. "You remember when I told you if you broke her heart I'd pull your scrotum over your head?" She was two years younger than Ange, and tall and skinny where Ange was short and curvy, but they were unmistakably sisters, with nearly the same voice and facial expressions.
"I remember, Tina. Can we save the scrotal reconfiguration for later? We're kind of into something more important than me or Ange or any of us."
She cocked her head. "I'll think about it."
Ange came pelting down the stairs, toothpaste on the corner of her mouth. She was wearing a long electric-blue raincoat I loved and hand-painted Keds and huge, squarish Japanese pants she'd sewn herself from a pattern, all clothes that had been strewn on the floor of her room the last time I'd been in it, a hundred years ago, the night before.
"Tina, enough with the scrotums, already," Ange said as she reached us. Tina made an exaggerated, monkey-like face at her and then gave her a kiss on the cheek. "Come on," Ange said to me, whisking past me toward Darryl's car, hesitating for a second before yanking open the back door and sliding into the seat next to Van. I brought up the rear and got into the passenger seat, checking out whether Van and Ange were ready to kill each other while trying to look like I wasn't checking it out at all.
Inside the car, the tension was as thick as the fog on a wet night on Twin Peaks.
"You know where Jolu's office is, right?" I said to Darryl.
"We're going to see Jolu?" Ange said.
"I told you," I said. "It's happening. And if it's going to happen, we should all be there, in person. Better than worrying about our computers or phones being tapped."
Ange took her phone out of her purse and switched it off. I did the same, and so did Van. Darryl dug his phone out and handed it to me, and I did the same for him.
"Okay," Ange said.
Darryl said, "Yeah, I know where he works." We were halfway there already. Darryl had an almost mystical knack for beating San Francisco traffic. He could have been the world's greatest cab driver or getaway man.
"What's the plan?" Ange said as we got closer.
Van said, "They don't have a plan. They just got in the car and started driving."
I looked over my shoulder at Ange, who was nodding. "Yeah," she said. "That sounds like them."
The two women looked at each other for a moment. I tried not to hold my breath. They'd disliked each other since eighth grade, and while I'd never gotten the whole story, I assumed that it was one of those old grievances that takes on a life of its own, so that the reason you don't get along is that you don't get along.
They stopped looking. I turned back around. A few seconds later, Van said, conversationally, "You got a lawyer?"
Ange said, "Not really. There was the public defender and that guy from the ACLU, back in the Gitmo-by-the-Bay days, but no one who's really my lawyer."
"Yeah," Van said. "Did you have the woman from ACLU, or the guy?"
"Both. But the woman really seemed like she knew her stuff. What was her name?"
"Alyssa? Alanna?"
"Elana," Ange said. "She was great."
"So I was thinking we should write a lawyer's number on our arms, you know, just in case. One phone call, right? Don't want to waste it calling directory assistance."
"I'm pretty sure I've got her number in my email." I heard Ange open her computer, enter her password.
"Here's a Sharpie."
There was some mutual arm-scribbling.
"Not so big," Ange said.
"If I write it this big, the rest of us will be able to read it from across the room, even if ours has been washed off or, you know, whatever."
"Good point," Ange said. "Here, roll up your sleeve."
"You really think if we get busted anyone's going to let us talk to a lawyer?" I asked, secretly pleased at how civilized the two of them were being to each other.
"You shut up," Ange said. "Wouldn't you feel like a total moron if we did get a phone call and you didn't have a number? Idiot."
"Yeah, dude," Darryl said.
"You shut up, too," Van said. "And hold your arm out at the next red light."
I rolled up my sleeve and twisted to stick my arm into the back seat. Ange's fingers grabbed around my wrist and yanked painfully. I yelped, and she made a disgusted noise. "Silence," she said, and I felt the tickle of the Sharpie moving over my arm. It seemed to be taking an awfully long time. When I finally got my arm back, I saw that she'd made sour faces of the 0s and skulls out of the 8s. I decided that this was a gesture of affection. At least, it comforted me to think of it that way.
Jolu's little startup was three guys and a woman sharing two desks in the back of a bigger, richer startup, crammed together four broken down Aeron chairs that looked like they'd been in continuous use since the dot-com boom of the last century, more duct tape than original mesh. Jolu noticed us as we threaded our way down the office, past the desks of people from the bigger startup -- some kind of analytics company that I'd vaguely heard of -- toward him. He took a moment to assess the fact that all four of us were together, and quietly tapped one of his co-workers, the woman, on the shoulder, stood and moved to intercept us.
"Let's go to the meeting room," he said, pointing back the way we'd come.
The meeting room was barely big enough for all of us to fit in, and the meeting table was a converted ping-pong table (there was a net and paddles tucked onto one of the room's crowded shelves). But it had a door, and Jolu closed it.
"Everyone, this is Kylie Deveau," he said, pointing to his co-worker, a pretty black woman a little older than us, with short hair and red-framed round-lensed wire-rim glasses. She smiled and shook hands all around.
"You must be the darknet," she said. "Pleased to meet you in the flesh."
"Kylie started the company," Jolu said. "I couldn't do darknet without letting her in on it."
"Yeah," I said. "I guess it wouldn't be fair."
"No," Jolu said. "Well, yeah. But I told Kylie because I figured that she was smarter than the rest of us put together." Kylie made a small pretend-bow. "She's the one who found the Zyz stuff in the first place. I assume that's why you are all here, right? Or is there some other enormous, terrible conspiracy I'm about to expose that I should know about."
"No, I said. "Just that one. Nice to meet you, Kylie. Let me tell you about some people I ran into last night. Well, I say people, but the first batch could have been ghosts or super-intelligent LOLCats for all I know, and the second batch were more like gorillas or possibly hyenas."
"I can tell this is going to be good," Jolu said, and sat down.
Kylie said, "Well, I can see why you want to get this out now."
Darryl said, "You do? Because I keep feeling like it's suicidal." I winced when he used the word, thinking of all the shrinks who'd felt the need to keep Darryl under observation for all that time.
Kylie smiled. "It just might be. But doing nothing is entirely suicidal, isn't it? It's not like these characters are going to ignore the fact that you're still out here, not forever. I'm guessing that they only let you go because they'd had to act fast and hadn't had a chance to figure out how to put you away without sticking out their own necks. But from what we've seen, they've got a lot of juice with a lot of different agencies, enough to take away city attorneys' houses, anyway. I don't suppose it'd be hard for them to figure out a way to get the police to take a special interest in you."
"You know," I said, "I hadn't even thought about that until now. I'd only gotten as far as them putting a bag over my head and sticking me in a plane to Yemen or something."
Kylie said, "That sounds expensive. You know what jet-fuel costs, these days? Much cheaper to get someone else to bear the expense. These guys are the world's biggest welfare queens, after all -- suck up government money in military contracts, use it to issue bonds, get the government to pass laws that make your bonds into safer bets, then go after even bigger and better laws. I'm guessing they never spend a penny if they can get Uncle Sucker to foot the bill.
"No, I bet last night was all about making sure that if they did send the law after you that you wouldn't somehow get out of it, say, by revealing a giant trove of documents about all kinds of illegal activity. Which is why I think it's right for you to act now, because the next thing that's going to happen, I bet, is that someone from some law-enforcement agency is going to get an important phone call, maybe just about you, or maybe about you and all your friends, because they know who your friends are from last time around, and when that happens, it's going to be much harder for you to get the truth out there --"
I put my hands up. "I get the picture." I looked around at my friends -- my oldest, best friends. Ange was looking a little pale, her hands clasped in front of her on the table, white-knuckled, the lawyer's number written in Van's familiar handwriting on her arm. Darryl, too, was looking sick and scared. Jolu, as always, was as cool as a movie star, though I could recognize the subtle signs around his eyes and the corners of his mouth, the vein that stood out faintly on his forehead and the pulse thudding in his throat. But Van -- well, she looked grimly determined, and not at all scared. "So we'd better do it, right?" she said.
Jolu nodded. "It's time, all right. I wrote a script that would nuke our chats on the darknet site and erase all the logs and scrub our handles from the notes in the database."
"You wrote that script, huh?" Van said.
Jolu smiled his movie star smile. "Yeah, the first night. I figured that there was a good chance we'd have to open up the site in a hurry, so I figured what the hell, better beat the rush. Stitch in time saves nine."
"That's a great motto, Jolu," Ange said. "Beats the shit out of 'when in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.'" I winced.
Jolu shrugged. "I don't want to get in the middle of whatever you two are into, Ange, but you know, there's a time and place for running in circles, too. We all got our own super-powers."
Darryl laughed nervously. "Yeah, he wouldn't be Marcus if he didn't do that scream and shout thing, right?"
"Guys," I said, "I'm here. I can hear you."
"Shut up, sweetheart," Ange said. But she leaned across the table and took my hand and gave it a squeeze. I squeezed back and she hauled back, dragging me across the table to her, and she grabbed my head with her other hand and gave me a ferocious kiss. "You're an idiot," she said, when we were done. "But you're my idiot. Don't you ever run out on me after an argument again or I'm going to start sitting on you whenever you lose a fight until I'm sure you won't turn rabbit."
"Daww," Jolu said. "Isn't young love sweet?"
"Actually," Van said, "it is." And Darryl got up and came around the table and wrapped her up in his long arms and hugged her so hard I heard her ribs creak.
Kylie said, "Children, love is sweet and important indeed, but we've got a job to do. Mr Torrez, I believe you mentioned a script you have ready to run?"
Jolu thunked at his keyboard. "Done."
Darryl stuck his hand up. "So what I was thinking, you know, is that we should start by getting in touch with those weirdos who'd been spying on Marcus. They sure seemed to have a good idea about how to get people to notice what they had to say."
I bit my tongue. If I hadn't been kidnapped by two totally evil mercenaries after my run-in with the ghosts in my machine, I think my head would have exploded in rage at the suggestion that we should work with those total creeps. As it was, my creepiness scale had been radically recalibrated in the last day or so, and while the spooks who'd rooted my machine might have rated a nine the week before, now they were about a six, and falling fast.
Ange spoke up for me, though. "I don't think that's fair to Marcus, Darryl. They were spying on him, after all. They violated his privacy all the way, from asshole to appetite. I don't think that's the kind of people we want to work with."
I relaxed a little. Good old Ange.
"So what do you propose?" Darryl said. His body language was noticeably more on edge than it had been a second before. I remembered his confession in the park, his desire to get a chance to be the star of his own movie for a change. I'm sure it sucked to have someone else second-guess his awesome action-hero plan. But screw it, those guys were still creeps.
"We tell it to the press. Mail a link to Barbara Stratford, anonymously, tell her how to access the darknet. Of all the journalists in the world, she's probably the most likely to be able to figure out how to use a Tor darknet site. And if she can't figure it out, she'll know lots of hairfaces who can help her out." Barbara Stratford was a muckraking journo who wrote for the Bay Guardian. She was an old friend of my folks', and had led the effort to spring me from the clutches of Carrie Johnstone's torturers. But she was a traditional print journalist with a lot to lose, and she moved with a lot of plodding caution.
"That sounds slow," Darryl said. "What's she going to do, read all those docs, call up a second source to corroborate them, run it past legal, write a story, and file it for publication in next week's issue? We need this stuff to go live now."
Ange opened her mouth to argue, but Jolu held a hand up. "No reason we can't do both. We tell your reporter friend about it, but we also post the darknet address where anyone can find it."
"How?" I said. I'd been thinking about this. How do you publicize something while staying anonymous?
Jolu shrugged. "Create a new Twitter account, use it from behind IPredator. Create a new Wordpress blog, do the same thing. Make a new Facebook identity, put it there, too."
I shook my head. "That'll never work. Who pays attention to a Twitter account that's just been created?"
"Well, you could retweet it, you've got thousands of followers. Or I could."
"Yeah, and I could just make a blinking EL wire sign that says 'That anonymous account? It's really me.'"
"Good point," Darryl said. "So we find someone we trust, and ask that person to ask their friends to big it up, link to it, retweet it, friend it, whatever. Make it hard to trace it back."
Now Jolu was shaking his head. "Sorry, dude. Remember that they'll be doing this on social networks -- you know, places where they've conveniently laid out lists of all their friends for the whole world to see. All you do is, slurp up all those contacts, check to see which contact they have in common, and there you go, a convenient list of high-probability suspects to spy on or assassinate with your aerial drones."
Darryl shut up and glared at the table. Jolu stayed cool. "Sorry, man, but you know, it's just reality. It's not convenient, but it's real."
Through this all, Van had been hanging back a little, not really seeming to be engaged with us. Now she said, "Kylie, Jolu says you're the smartest person he knows, and he's a smart guy. So what do you think we should do?"
"Well, let me start by saying this is a hard problem. Maybe the hard problem today. You've got the same problem anyone who wants to attract attention to a product or a cause has. This is what every politician faces, everyone who makes soda-pop or opens a restaurant, everyone who wants to sell a record or get people to come to their little league games. It's the reason that ad agencies and marketing companies exist, it's the basis for billions of dollars in business every year. And you've got the additional complications of wanting to make this stuff happen in a hurry, and of not wanting anyone to know who's behind it. What I mean to say here is, you're doing something hard.
"Now, all that said, there's at least two important things going for you here: First, you're good, you know a lot about computers and networks and people and technology. And second, you've got a great 'product' to 'sell.' I've been in those docs, I know the kind of dynamite you're sitting on. You're not trying to get people to give a damn about yet another flavor of sugar water. You want to tell people about a trove of some genuinely explosive materiel, a pile of information plutonium that you've dug up in the government's backyard. There's a certain intrinsic interest in this stuff, you know, and it's the kind of thing that people might enjoy telling each other about.
"I think our best strategy is going to be sending out messages from our new account, messages to anyone we can think of with any political clout or a lot of followers or a big platform of some description. Your basic, 'Hey, mister, look what I've got,' message. Most of these people are going to ignore us, initially at least, because they get a bazillion of these every day, from con artists and spammers and PR people and nutcases. But we've got to think like dandelions here."
"What do you mean?" Van said. I could tell that she liked Kylie, saw her as a potential ally in her role as designated grown-up and worry-wart. I liked her, too -- she talked like I wished I could talk, saying the stuff I thought better than I could.
"Well, we're mammals, so we tend to think of reproduction as being expensive and precious. When we want to copy ourselves, we take ourselves out of commission for months, then commit years of more-or-less full-time work to making sure our copies survive." I wasn't sure if I liked being talked about as a "copy" of my parents, but I couldn't deny the underlying truth. "But look at a dandelion: by the time it's seeding, it's made thousands of potential copies of itself, all those little bits of fluff that make up the puffball. When a gust of wind comes along, the dandelion doesn't follow all its children to make sure they get steered in the right direction and have their mittens and a packed lunch with them. Almost every seed a dandelion tosses into the wind is going to die without taking root, but that's not what matters to a dandelion. Dandelions don't care that every seed survives: they care that every opportunity to take root is exploited. A successful dandelion is one that colonizes every crack in the sidewalk, not one that successfully plants all its seeds.
"Sending out messages about the darknet shouldn't cost much. It's probably worth tailoring each message a little to the people we're spamming -- put their name in the message, mention some kind of fit with what they do. But keep it down to less than a minute for each message, dandelion-style. The important thing isn't to make sure that everyone we hit repeats the story, but rather to make sure that everyone who might give us a little signal boost knows that the story is out there to be boosted."
"And if that doesn't work?" I said. It all seemed a little too easy, too pat.
"We try something else," she said.
"And if a snatch squad takes us away and throws us in the ocean with weights around our ankles before we can try something else?"
Kylie gave me a look down her nose.
Van leapt in. "Marcus, I know you've got a reason to be worried, but honestly, what else can we do? It's not like you've got a better idea, right? You and Darryl decided it was time to do this, and we're all going along with it, but don't just shoot down everything -- that's not fair."
I briefly reconsidered trying to get in touch with the creeps who'd been spying on me, but I didn't want to do that -- and I didn't know how, either. Half of me wanted to just say screw it, and start shouting it all from the mountaintops, using my own accounts, which had plenty of followers. It'd probably cost me my job, but hell, if it was a race to make this well known before Zyz could come after me, that was more important than a paycheck I might never get to cash. The other half of me was, well, scared. The thing about Kylie's suggestion was that it sounded a lot safer.
"Fine," I said. "But when we all get sent to a secret prison in Afghanistan, don't come crying to me."
Darryl gave us a ride back to Ange's place. We flopped around her room as we had a million times before, perching with our computers on our laps, quickly researching people who might pick up our message, tailoring it for each one, and firing it out using the anonymous accounts that we'd cooked up at Jolu's office. We both used IPredator and Tor to do the research and messaging, which slowed us down somewhat -- so to compensate we each targeted several people at once, using multiple tabs, cycling from one to the next. Jolu had offered to whip up another darknet site where we could all coordinate who we were spamming and what the response had been to avoid double-dipping, but Kylie had just said, "You're not thinking like a dandelion, Jolu," and he'd dropped the idea.
We had been on-edge when we got back to her room, still smarting from the fight we'd had the night before, but we both quickly lost ourselves in the work and forgot about the fight. Soon we were joking and teasing the way we usually did -- Ange started it when I got too engrossed in reading the bio of the Woz, the legendary engineering wizard who'd co-founded Apple, and who had millions of Twitter followers. I was in a real Wikipedia clicktrance, following link after link to information about his achievements and career and all the awesome hacks he'd pulled off.
Ange threw a pencil at my head and said, "Hey, mister, I don't hear any typing. Are you thinking like a dandelion or a mammal?" I snorted and gave her the finger, but I also stopped screwing around and sent off the message.
We ate dinner in her room -- PB&J sandwiches that we'd made together in the kitchen, and yeah, Ange even put hot sauce on that, which actually tasted pretty good, like Indonesian curry -- and then she kicked me out. "You've got to go to work tomorrow," she said. "You can't afford to miss two days in a row."
I let myself be pushed out and spent the whole bus ride home reloading a search for links to our darknet site on my phone. There were a few, a couple dozen, but of course it was hard to figure out the darknet -- you had to install Tor on your computer, and then you had to figure out how to use it, installing something like Torbutton in your browser. Even I forgot how to get it installed and had to look up the docs every time I set up a new computer. I swore to myself that if I made it out of this mess alive and intact, I'd throw myself into the work of the Noisebridge hackers who were always messing around with making Tor easier to use.
I was bone-tired. I'd hardly slept the night before, and my adrenals had been bashing my body around like a punching bag for the past seventy-two hours -- plus I still had my stupid, aching broken nose and assorted bruises from Burning Man, not to mention the lasting effects of a week spent in the desert. It's a good thing Mom and Dad were so caught up in their own problems -- if they'd been paying the kind of attention they used to give me back when I was sixteen, they'd have had a total freakout.
And yeah, that made me feel pretty rotten too -- lying there in my bed, setting the alarm on the glowing bedside nixie-tube clock I'd built, aching and stupid-feeling, and the stupid voices in my head kept whispering that my parents didn't even care enough about me to have a meltdown over my absence, which was as stupid as stupid could be.
It's a lucky thing I was so close to total exhaustion, because even the voices in my head couldn't fight the biological necessity of sleep, and the next thing I knew, the alarm was yanking me back from murky dreams and I was staggering into the bathroom for a pee, a shower, and a tooth-brushing.
By the time I got out the door, I was half convinced that it was all over. After all, the last time I'd done this, Barbara Stratford had put my face on the cover of the Bay Guardian, and the events had more or less unfolded from there. The closer I got to the office, the more certain I was that I'd step through the door and the first thing anyone would say to me would be, "Man, can you believe all that darknet stuff? It's all anyone's talking about."
But no one even looked up when I got in. No one seemed to know that the world had turned on its head. I sat down at my desk and tried to concentrate on putting together my briefing for Joe, who'd emailed me that he was sorry I was feeling under the weather but that he looked forward to hearing my ideas when I got back into the office.
I felt like I should be putting together some kind of powerpoint presentation, but every time I loaded up LibreOffice Impress, the free equivalent, I felt like a total tool. I hated powerpoint. Besides, all I could think about was the darknet.
I told myself I'd just spend a minute or two googling it and seeing what came up. Yeah, right.
An hour later, I was furious. Oh, there were a few prominent places that had published our link, some cracks in the sidewalk with dandelion stalks sprouting from them. But every single one of these was flooded with sarcastic, dismissive comments. Some people insisted it had to be a hoax. Others said there was nothing there. Hundreds claimed that it was impossible to reach and don't bother trying. All of these were from different IDs, and they all seemed to have been written by different people, but I found it hard to believe that everyone who looked at the darknet docs would be so convinced that there was nothing to them.
Worse: if I had just happened upon this stuff for the first time, I'd probably figure that anything that attracted all this negative attention and people saying "hoax" and "nothing to see here," was just junk. As Kylie pointed out, I spent most of my day trying to figure out what not to pay attention to, so that I could free up to attention for the good stuff, and one of the ways I figured out which stuff to ignore was by paying attention to what was said by the people who'd already gone and looked.
I dragged myself back to hopeless powerpoint fiddling, and was incredibly relieved when Liam came by to pester me, thus putting me out of my misery.
"What do you think? Is the darknet stuff a hoax?"
I wasn't surprised that Liam had found out about it already. It would have been a surprise if he hadn't -- this stuff was totally up his alley.
"Did you actually check it out?" I asked.
He looked a little embarrassed. "Naw," he said. "I mean, I used to have Tor on my machine, but then I upgraded the OS, and I hadn't gotten around to reinstalling it, and, well, with all those people saying it was a hoax..." He trailed off and shrugged.
"It's pretty weak to dismiss it as a hoax until you've seen it yourself, don't you think?" I said. "I mean, why would you take some random Internet idiot's word for it instead of checking it out with your own two eyes? Don't you have a brain? Don't you know how to think?" Even as I said it, I knew how unfair it was, not least because Liam didn't make a secret of how much he looked up to me. He shrank as I pummeled him with words, looking like he wished the ground would open up and swallow him. The part of me that wasn't feeling like a total dick felt good about that, because he deserved to be humiliated and miserable for not going off and looking at the stuff we'd sweated so hard to make available to him. I mean, if Liam couldn't get worked up about the darknet docs, who would?
"So you've seen them?" he said in a small, hurt voice. "You think they're real?"
Yeah, I'm not just a dick, I'm an idiot. I hadn't planned on admitting that I'd seen the darknet docs to anyone, at least not until they were all over the front page and the evening news, because I didn't want to be known as a guy who was suspiciously interested in them. But now I couldn't say, No dude, I didn't look either, because that would make me look like even more of a dick.
"Yeah," I said, kicking myself. "I saw them. They're incredible. Explosive stuff. You should really, really have a look."
"Okay," he said. "Totally. You're right, I really should make up my mind for myself, not let other people tell me what to do."
And then he went off and did what I'd told him to do. I am a total dick.