Little Brother

by Cory Doctorow

  The thing that got me into trouble were the minigames in the hotels. Whenever a science fiction convention came to town, some LARPer would convince them to let us run a couple of six-hour minigames at the con, piggybacking on their rental of the space. Having a bunch of enthusiastic kids running around in costume lent color to the event, and we got to have a ball among people even more socially deviant than us.

  The problem with hotels is that they have a lot of nongamers in them, too—and not just sci-fi people. Normal people. From states that begin and end with vowels. On holidays.

  And sometimes those people misunderstand the nature of a game.

  Let’s just leave it at that, okay?

  Class ended in ten minutes, and that didn’t leave me with much time to prepare. The first order of business was those pesky gait-recognition cameras. Like I said, they’d started out as face-recognition cameras, but those had been ruled unconstitutional. As far as I know, no court has yet determined whether these gait-cams are any more legal, but until they do, we’re stuck with them.

  “Gait” is a fancy word for the way you walk. People are pretty good at spotting gaits—next time you’re on a camping trip, check out the bobbing of the flashlight as a distant friend approaches you. Chances are you can identify him just from the movement of the light, the characteristic way it bobs up and down that tells our monkey brains that this is a person approaching us.

  Gait-recognition software takes pictures of your motion, tries to isolate you in the pics as a silhouette, and then tries to match the silhouette to a database to see if it knows who you are. It’s a biometric identifier, like fingerprints or retina-scans, but it’s got a lot more “collisions” than either of those. A biometric “collision” is when a measurement matches more than one person. Only you have your fingerprint, but you share your gait with plenty other people.

  Not exactly, of course. Your personal, inch-by-inch walk is yours and yours alone. The problem is your inch-by-inch walk changes based on how tired you are, what the floor is made of, whether you pulled your ankle playing basketball, and whether you’ve changed your shoes lately. So the system kind of fuzzes out your profile, looking for people who walk kind of like you.

  There are a lot of people who walk kind of like you. What’s more, it’s easy not to walk kind of like you—just take one shoe off. Of course, you’ll always walk like you-with-one-shoe-off in that case, so the cameras will eventually figure out that it’s still you. Which is why I prefer to inject a little randomness into my attacks on gait-recognition: I put a handful of gravel into each shoe. Cheap and effective, and no two steps are the same. Plus you get a great reflexology foot massage in the process. (I kid. Reflexology is about as scientifically useful as gait-recognition.)

  The cameras used to set off an alert every time someone they didn’t recognize stepped onto campus.

  This did not work.

  The alarm went off every ten minutes. When the mailman came by. When a parent dropped in. When the groundspeople went to work fixing up the basketball court. When a student showed up wearing new shoes.

  So now it just tries to keep track of who’s where, when. If someone leaves by the school gates during classes, their gait is checked to see if it kinda-sorta matches any student gait and if it does, whoop-whoop-whoop, ring the alarm!

  Chavez High is ringed with gravel walkways. I like to keep a couple handsful of rocks in my shoulder bag, just in case. I silently passed Darryl ten or fifteen pointy little bastards and we both loaded our shoes.

  Class was about to finish up—and I realized that I still hadn’t checked the Harajuku Fun Madness site to see where the next clue was! I’d been a little hyperfocused on the escape, and hadn’t bothered to figure out where we were escaping to.

  I turned to my SchoolBook and hit the keyboard. The web browser we used was supplied with the machine. It was a locked-down spyware version of Internet Explorer, Microsoft’s crashware turd that no one under the age of forty used voluntarily.

  I had a copy of Firefox on the USB drive built into my watch, but that wasn’t enough—the SchoolBook ran Windows Vista4Schools, an antique operating system designed to give school administrators the illusion that they controlled the programs their students could run.

  But Vista4Schools is its own worst enemy. There are a lot of programs that Vista4Schools doesn’t want you to be able to shut down—keyloggers, censorware—and these programs run in a special mode that makes them invisible to the system. You can’t quit them because you can’t even see they’re there.

  Any program whose name starts with $SYS$ is invisible to the operating system. It doesn’t show up on listings of the hard drive, nor in the process monitor. So my copy of Firefox was called $SYS$Firefox—and as I launched it, it became invisible to Windows, and thus invisible to the network’s snoopware.

  Now that I had an indie browser running, I needed an indie network connection. The school’s network logged every click in and out of the system, which was bad news if you were planning on surfing over to the Harajuku Fun Madness site for some extracurricular fun.

  The answer is something ingenious called TOR—The Onion Router. An onion router is an Internet site that takes requests for web pages and passes them onto other onion routers, and on to other onion routers, until one of them finally decides to fetch the page and pass it back through the layers of the onion until it reaches you. The traffic to the onion routers is encrypted, which means that the school can’t see what you’re asking for, and the layers of the onion don’t know who they’re working for. There are millions of nodes—the program was set up by the U.S. Office of Naval Research to help their people get around the censorware in countries like Syria and China, which means that it’s perfectly designed for operating in the confines of an average American high school.

  TOR works because the school has a finite blacklist of naughty addresses we aren’t allowed to visit, and the addresses of the nodes change all the time—no way could the school keep track of them all. Firefox and TOR together made me into the invisible man, impervious to Board of Ed snooping, free to check out the Harajuku FM site and see what was up.

  There it was, a new clue. Like all Harajuku Fun Madness clues, it had a physical, online and mental component. The online component was a puzzle you had to solve, one that required you to research the answers to a bunch of obscure questions. This batch included a bunch of questions on the plots in djinshi—those are comic books drawn by fans of manga, Japanese comics. They can be as big as the official comics that inspire them, but they’re a lot weirder, with crossover storylines and sometimes really silly songs and action. Lots of love stories, of course. Everyone loves to see their favorite toons hook up.

  I’d have to solve those riddles later, when I got home. They were easiest to solve with the whole team, downloading tons of djinshi files and scouring them for answers to the puzzles.

  I’d just finished scrap-booking all the clues when the bell rang and we began our escape. I surreptitiously slid the gravel down the side of my short boots—ankle-high Blundstones from Australia, great for running and climbing, and the easy slip-on/slip-off laceless design makes them convenient at the never-ending metal detectors that are everywhere now.

  We also had to evade physical surveillance, of course, but that gets easier every time they add a new layer of physical snoopery—all the bells and whistles lull our beloved faculty into a totally false sense of security. We surfed the crowd down the hallways, heading for my favorite side-exit. We were halfway along when Darryl hissed, “Crap! I forgot, I’ve got a library book in my bag.”

  “You’re kidding me,” I said, and hauled him into the next bathroom we passed. Library books are bad news. Every one of them has an arphid—Radio Frequency ID tag—glued into its binding, which makes it possible for the librarians to check out the books by waving them over a reader, and lets a library shelf tell you if any of the books on it are out of place.

  But it also lets the school track where you
are at all times. It was another of those legal loopholes: the courts wouldn’t let the schools track us with arphids, but they could track library books, and use the school records to tell them who was likely to be carrying which library book.

  I had a little Faraday pouch in my bag—these are little wallets lined with a mesh of copper wires that effectively block radio energy, silencing arphids. But the pouches were made for neutralizing ID cards and toll-book transponders, not books like—

  “Introduction to Physics?” I groaned. The book was the size of a dictionary.

  Chapter 2

  “I’m thinking of majoring in physics when I go to Berkeley,” Darryl said. His dad taught at the University of California at Berkeley, which meant he’d get free tuition when he went. And there’d never been any question in Darryl’s household about whether he’d go.

  “Fine, but couldn’t you research it online?”

  “My dad said I should read it. Besides, I didn’t plan on committing any crimes today.”

  “Skipping school isn’t a crime. It’s an infraction. They’re totally different.”

  “What are we going to do, Marcus?”

  “Well, I can’t hide it, so I’m going to have to nuke it.” Killing arphids is a dark art. No merchant wants malicious customers going for a walk around the shop floor and leaving behind a bunch of lobotomized merchandise that is missing its invisible bar code, so the manufacturers have refused to implement a “kill signal” that you can radio to an arphid to get it to switch off. You can reprogram arphids with the right box, but I hate doing that to library books. It’s not exactly tearing pages out of a book, but it’s still bad, since a book with a reprogrammed arphid can’t be shelved and can’t be found. It just becomes a needle in a haystack.

  That left me with only one option: nuking the thing. Literally. Thirty seconds in a microwave will do in pretty much every arphid on the market. And because the arphid wouldn’t answer at all when D checked it back in at the library, they’d just print a fresh one for it and recode it with the book’s catalog info, and it would end up clean and neat back on its shelf.

  All we needed was a microwave.

  “Give it another two minutes and the teachers’ lounge will be empty,” I said.

  Darryl grabbed his book and headed for the door. “Forget it, no way. I’m going to class.”

  I snagged his elbow and dragged him back. “Come on, D, easy now. It’ll be fine.”

  “The teachers’ lounge? Maybe you weren’t listening, Marcus. If I get busted just once more, I am expelled. You hear that? Expelled.”

  “You won’t get caught,” I said. The one place a teacher wouldn’t be after this period was the lounge. “We’ll go in the back way.” The lounge had a little kitchenette off to one side, with its own entrance for teachers who just wanted to pop in and get a cup of joe. The microwave—which always reeked of popcorn and spilled soup—was right in there, on top of the miniature fridge.

  Darryl groaned. I thought fast. “Look, the bell’s already rung. If you go to study hall now, you’ll get a late slip. Better not to show at all at this point. I can infiltrate and exfiltrate any room on this campus, D. You’ve seen me do it. I’ll keep you safe, bro.”

  He groaned again. That was one of Darryl’s tells: once he starts groaning, he’s ready to give in.

  “Let’s roll,” I said, and we took off.

  It was flawless. We skirted the classrooms, took the back stairs into the basement, and came up the front stairs right in front of the teachers’ lounge. Not a sound came from the door, and I quietly turned the knob and dragged Darryl in before silently closing the door.

  The book just barely fit in the microwave, which was looking even less sanitary than it had the last time I’d popped in here to use it. I conscientiously wrapped it in paper towels before I set it down. “Man, teachers are pigs,” I hissed. Darryl, white-faced and tense, said nothing.

  The arphid died in a shower of sparks, which was really quite lovely (though not nearly as pretty as the effect you get when you nuke a frozen grape, which has to be seen to be believed).

  Now, to exfiltrate the campus in perfect anonymity and make our escape.

  Darryl opened the door and began to move out, me on his heels. A second later, he was standing on my toes, elbows jammed into my chest, as he tried to backpedal into the closet-sized kitchen we’d just left.

  “Get back,” he whispered urgently. “Quick—it’s Charles!”

  Charles Walker and I don’t get along. We’re in the same grade, and we’ve known each other as long as I’ve known Darryl, but that’s where the resemblance ends. Charles has always been big for his age, and now that he’s playing football and on the juice, he’s even bigger. He’s got anger management problems—I lost a milk tooth to him in the third grade—and he’s managed to keep from getting in trouble over them by becoming the most active snitch in school.

  It’s a bad combination, a bully who also snitches, taking great pleasure in going to the teachers with whatever infractions he’s found. Benson loved Charles. Charles liked to let on that he had some kind of unspecified bladder problem, which gave him a ready-made excuse to prowl the hallways at Chavez, looking for people to fink on.

  The last time Charles had caught some dirt on me, it had ended with me giving up LARPing. I had no intention of being caught by him again.

  “What’s he doing?”

  “He’s coming this way is what he’s doing,” Darryl said. He was shaking.

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay, time for emergency countermeasures.” I got my phone out. I’d planned this well in advance. Charles would never get me again. I emailed my server at home, and it got into motion.

  A few seconds later, Charles’s phone spazzed out spectacularly. I’d had tens of thousands of simultaneous random calls and text messages sent to it, causing every chirp and ring it had to go off and keep going off. The attack was accomplished by means of a botnet, and for that I felt bad, but it was in the service of a good cause.

  Botnets are where infected computers spend their afterlives. When you get a worm or a virus, your computer sends a message to a chat channel on IRC—the Internet Relay Chat. That message tells the botmaster—the guy who deployed the worm—that the computers in there are ready to do his bidding. Botnets are supremely powerful, since they can comprise thousands, even hundreds of thousands of computers, scattered all over the Internet, connected to juicy high-speed connections and running on fast home PCs. Those PCs normally function on behalf of their owners, but when the botmaster calls them, they rise like zombies to do his bidding.

  There are so many infected PCs on the Internet that the price of hiring an hour or two on a botnet has crashed. Mostly these things work for spammers as cheap, distributed spambots, filling your mailbox with come-ons for boner-pills or with new viruses that can infect you and recruit your machine to join the botnet.

  I’d just rented ten seconds’ time on three thousand PCs and had each of them send a text message or voice-over-IP call to Charles’s phone, whose number I’d extracted from a sticky note on Benson’s desk during one fateful office visit.

  Needless to say, Charles’s phone was not equipped to handle this. First the SMSes filled the memory on his phone, causing it to start choking on the routine operations it needed to do things like manage the ringer and log all those incoming calls’ bogus return numbers (did you know that it’s really easy to fake the return number on a caller ID? There are about fifty ways of doing it—just google “spoof caller id”).

  Charles stared at it dumbfounded, and jabbed at it furiously, his thick eyebrows knotting and wiggling as he struggled with the demons that had possessed his most personal of devices. The plan was working so far, but he wasn’t doing what he was supposed to be doing next—he was supposed to go find some place to sit down and try to figure out how to get his phone back.

  Darryl shook me by the shoulder, and I pulled my eye away from the crack in the door.

  “W
hat’s he doing?” Darryl whispered.

  “I totaled his phone, but he’s just staring at it now instead of moving on.” It wasn’t going to be easy to reboot that thing. Once the memory was totally filled, it would have a hard time loading the code it needed to delete the bogus messages—and there was no bulk-erase for texts on his phone, so he’d have to manually delete all of the thousands of messages.

  Darryl shoved me back and stuck his eye up to the door. A moment later, his shoulders started to shake. I got scared, thinking he was panicking, but when he pulled back, I saw that he was laughing so hard that tears were streaming down his cheeks.

  “Galvez just totally busted him for being in the halls during class and for having his phone out—you should have seen her tear into him. She was really enjoying it.”

  We shook hands solemnly and snuck back out of the corridor, down the stairs, around the back, out the door, past the fence and out into the glorious sunlight of afternoon in the Mission. Valencia Street had never looked so good. I checked my watch and yelped.

  “Let’s move! The rest of the gang is meeting us at the cable cars in twenty minutes!”

  Van spotted us first. She was blending in with a group of Korean tourists, which is one of her favorite ways of camouflaging herself when she’s ditching school. Ever since the truancy moblog went live, our world is full of nosy shopkeepers and pecksniffs who take it upon themselves to snap our piccies and put them on the net where they can be perused by school administrators.