“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 with 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 coworkers, 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 coworker, 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 hav
e 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 grownup 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 used both 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.
Ange and I 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, 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.
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