Homeland

by Cory Doctorow

  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 my 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.

  Chapter 11

  What if you threw a blockbuster news event and no one showed up? We’d just dumped one of the biggest troves of leaked documents in the history of the human race all over the net, and no one really gave a crap. Some critical combination of the sheer size of the dump, our sketchy promotions strategy, the pain in the ass nature of Tor, and the fact that the net was full of people saying that they were hoaxes and stupid and that there was nothing juicy there—it all added up to a big, fat yawn.

  Joe finally came by my desk at 3:30, just as I was falling into the post-lunch slump, wherein my blood-sugar troughed out so low that I felt like I could barely keep my eyes open—probably as a result of all the horchata I’d guzzled at lunch, the sugar sending my blood-sugar spiking to infinity so it had nowhere to go but down.

  “Hello, Marcus,” he said. He was dressed in his campaigning uniform, a nicely tailored button-up sweater over a crisp white shirt, slacks that showed off the fact that although he was pushing fifty, he still had the waistline he’d had as a college varsity sprinter, a JOE FOR SENATE badge on his lapel. He had like eight of those sweaters, and he kept a spare in a dry-cleaning bag by his desk, just in case a car splattered him or a baby got sick on him between campaign stops.

  “Joe,” I said, feeling like I was about to be sick. “Look, I’m sorry I wasn’t in yesterday, I was really under the weather. And well, today, you know, it’s just been crazy. I’ve just about got the network here sorted out, but the website—” I waved my hands in a way that was meant to convey that it was a total disaster.

  He looked grave. “I thought that the website was all in order. I remember you saying something to that effect. Or did I misunderstand?”

  I was sinking lower with every utterance. “Well, yeah, it looked okay, but when I started doing a code-audit I found a bunch of potential code-injection vulnerabilities so I’ve been doing what I can to reduce the attack-surface of the site, you know, so I can get it all down to a manageable scale, and—”

  He held his hands up to stop my torrent of technobabble. “My, it certainly sounds like quite an undertaking. I really thought that Myra was better than that.”

  And now I really felt like a jerk. Myra, my predecessor, had done an awful lot with very little, and here I was, dumping all over all her hard work to cover my own useless butt. “Well, yeah, I mean, she did, but things move really fast, and the patch-levels were super lagged, and you know, the last thing we want is someone hijacking our donors’ credit card numbers or pas
swords, or using our site to install malicious software on visitors’ computers, and, well—”

  “I get the picture. Well, you sound like you’ve got important things to do here, Marcus. But I want you to remember that this campaign needs you for more than your ability to patch our software and keep our computers running: we need fresh approaches, ways to reach people, motivate them, bring them out to the polls. I’m counting on you, Marcus. I think you’re the right person for this job.”

  Well, I would be if I wasn’t spending all my time trying to leak a mountain of confidential documents that contain the details of thousands of criminal conspiracies—while being kidnapped by mercenaries and spied on by weirdos who probably buy their Guy Fawkes masks by the crate.

  “I won’t let you down, Joe.”

  “I know you won’t, Marcus. Remember: you’re not here to be a grunt in the information troop, you’re my delta force ninja. Get ninj-ing. In two months, we’re going to have an election, and win or lose, that will be the end of the road for the Noss for Senate campaign, our sites, servers, and all the associated whatnot and fooforaw. We need technology that will last us until then and no further. Keep that in mind while you’re managing your time, and I’m sure you’ll find room in your schedule to get past the station-keeping work and on to the important stuff. The fun stuff, right?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. He was right. As important as the stuff I had been obsessed with was, I had taken a job, and I wasn’t doing it. I could tell he was disappointed with me, and that was just a brutal feeling. I had a moment’s premonition of what it would be like to get fired from this job, to go home and admit that to my parents. The world seemed to spin away from beneath me. “Tomorrow, okay? I promise.”

  He squeezed my shoulder. “You don’t need to look so gutted, son. Remember, this is an independent campaign. We’re supposed to be scrappy, exhausted, and overextended.”

  I smiled a little at that, and noticed that Joe had some pretty serious bags under his eyes. On impulse, I said, “Have you been getting enough sleep?”

  He laughed again, that amazing, deep laugh that was his trademark. “You sound like Flor. And you look like you might be burning the candle at both ends, too. How much sleep did you get last night?”

  “I decline to answer that question on the grounds that it might tend to incriminate me,” I said.

  “Spoken like a good civil libertarian. A good, tired civil libertarian. I tell you what, I’m damned busy tomorrow anyway. Take an extra day to get your thoughts in order. And get a good night’s sleep. All right, Marcus?”

  “It’s a deal.”

  Have I mentioned that Joe was a really good guy and that he’d make a hell of a California senator?

  When he left my desk, I found my spirits lifted. Knowing someone like Joe had confidence in me made me want to be a better person. And soon, ideas began to flow—not always good ones, but ideas. Stuff I’d seen done before, new things too. A way to use free voice-over-IP to let kids call their offline parents and grandparents to ask them to vote—“Have you called your mom today?” A browser plugin that would do a popup with the names of the large corporate donors to Joe’s opponents, every time you loaded a page that mentioned their names, a reminder that the other guys were all bought and paid for.

  And I had a killer idea. Or maybe a really stupid idea. I kept putting it out of my head, but it kept coming back and insisting that I put it down in the long file I was brainstorming into (ditching the PowerPoint was really helping, too). So I wrote it down and added THIS IS A KILLER STUPID IDEA right next to it, so I wouldn’t forget.

  At the end of the day, I caught Liam slinking out of the door, not making eye contact with me. God, I was such a dick sometimes.

  I called out to him and dragged him back over by my desk and apologized, and before I knew it, I’d invited him out for a cup of coffee after work and I was shutting down my computer and throwing it in my bag and heading out the door with him.

  * * *

  On the way home, I passed a Guatemalan grocery with a bunch of mouth-watering fresh California produce out front. I had a few dollars in my pockets and I was suddenly seized with a desire to cook my family an amazing, fresh dinner, sit my mom and dad down at the table and have a rollicking discussion, the way we once had. I blew some money on the makings of a big salad and a fruit salad for dessert, then stopped in at a Vietnamese grocer for fresh noodles and some tofu and chicken for pho, the Vietnamese noodle soup. I’d only cooked it once before, but it wasn’t that hard, and it was filling and cheap.

  When I got home, I tied on an apron and googled some recipes and started washing the dishes and putting them away. Mom heard the rattle and clatter and came into the kitchen, carrying a mug of cold tea.

  “Goodness, Marcus, have you contracted a brain fever?”

  “Har. Har. You’re not invited to dinner now. And it’s going to be a good one. Pho.”

  “Fa?”

  “Yes. Pho. It’s pronounced ‘fa.’ Not ‘foh.’ Fun fact. And now you know.”

  “Indeed I do. What has precipitated this uncharacteristic burst of activity, dare I ask? I’m certain you haven’t wrecked the car, as we no longer own one. Is there some sort of terrible news you plan on breaking to us? Are we to be grandparents?”

  “Mom!”

  “Inquiring minds want to know, Marcus.”

  “I just felt like a good supper, and thought you might enjoy one, too. And it’s the least I could do, right? After you carried me about in your womb for nine months, endured the pain of childbirth, the long years of childrearing—”

  “So you were listening all those times we explained the ways of the world to you.”

  “—I figure I’ll make you some soup and salad and we can call it even, right?”

  She picked up a soapy dishcloth from the counter and threw it at me, but it was a slow, easy toss and I caught it out of the air and wound up like a baseball pitcher, making her squeal and run out of the kitchen. “Dinner’s in an hour!” I called after her. “Wear something nice, would you?”

  She made a disgusted shriek and I heard her telling my dad about the weird thing their kid was doing now.

  Yeah, I was in trouble, and it was only going to get worse. But in the previous week, I’d been blown up, had my nose broken, gotten a job, been kidnapped and freaked out, nearly broken up with the love of my life, and screwed up at the job I could hardly believe I’d landed.

  I needed a night off. And I was going to enjoy it. I got one of my dad’s beers out of the fridge and cracked it. Technically, I was still two years too young to be doing that, but screw it, it was time to unlax like a boss.

  * * *

  Mom treated me to a raised eyebrow as I set out the food and clicked my second beer in place in front of my plate. “Oh really?” she said.

  “What, you want me to use a glass?”

  Dad snorted. “Forget it, Lillian, it’s not going to kill him. And if it does, we can collect on his life insurance policy.”

  And then there was no talking, only the sound of soup being blown upon, the sound of noodles being slurped, the sound of Dad trying not to slurp his soup, Mom teasing him about eating like a barbarian. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d eaten like this: normal and funny and not freaking out about, well, everything. It felt insanely great.

  My phone rang while we were working our way through the fruit salad I’d made for dessert, garnishing it with chopped mint and drizzling it with spiced rum. I looked at the faceplate: 202-456-1414.

  I knew that number, but I couldn’t place it at first. 202 was Washington DC, right? Why was that number so familiar. The ringer went off again. Hum. Oh, yeah, right. It was the White House’s main switchboard.

  (Don’t ask me how I knew that—just let it be said that I had friends who had weird ideas about what constituted a funny crank call in the eighth grade, which is how my junior high got a visit from the secret service: it had been scrawled on half the bathroom walls in scho
ol, with FOR A GOOD TIME CALL above it.)

  “Excuse me,” I said, getting up from the table so fast I nearly knocked over my chair, hustling up the stairs with my thumb over the green button. I pressed it as I passed into my room and closed the door.

  “Hello?” I said.

  There was a long, weird, flat silence, with a couple loud clicks.

  “Hello?” I said again.

  “Marcus?” It was a computer-generated voice, and not a very good one. Needless to say, it wasn’t the president, or the White House. Spoofing caller ID was a pretty basic trick, a one-google query job.

  “Yeah.”

  A little pause. Someone was typing. “You haven’t been checking your email.”

  “What, in the last two hours? No. I haven’t.”

  “And you’re not on IM.”

  “No. I had dinner. Is there something you needed to say?”

  “In the darknet docs, there’s a procurement order and brochure for a product called ‘Hearts and Minds.’” The text-to-speech engine was stupid enough that “hearts” came out “heerts” and I had to try to recalibrate my brain to understand what it meant.

  “Okay, I’ll take your word for it. What about it?”

  “You should be checking your email.” Somehow, the robot voice managed to sound peeved. “It’s all in the email.”

  “I’ll check my email,” I said. “But I’ve had a lot of IT crap to wade through lately. Some total jackasses have been using my computer to violate my privacy and creep me right the hell out. I don’t suppose you’d know anything about that, right?”

  A pause. “Stop changing the subject.”

  “Look, I’ve got plenty of stuff I could be doing here. In case you didn’t notice, I released all the docs, just like you were whining at me to do. For all the good it’s done. No one gives a damn. In case you didn’t notice.”