Little Brother

by Cory Doctorow

  When they took the hood off again, I was in a cell.

  The cell was old and crumbled, and smelled of sea air. There was one window high up, and rusted bars guarded it. It was still dark outside. There was a blanket on the floor and a little metal toilet without a seat, set into the wall. The guard who took off my hood grinned at me and closed the solid steel door behind him.

  I gently massaged my legs, hissing as the blood came back into them and into my hands. Eventually I was able to stand, and then to pace. I heard other people talking, crying, shouting. I did some shouting too: “Jolu! Darryl! Vanessa!” Other voices on the cell-block took up the cry, shouting out names, too, shouting out obscenities. The nearest voices sounded like drunks losing their minds on a street corner. Maybe I sounded like that, too.

  Guards shouted at us to be quiet and that just made everyone yell louder. Eventually we were all howling, screaming our heads off, screaming our throats raw. Why not? What did we have to lose?

  The next time they came to question me, I was filthy and tired, thirsty and hungry. Severe haircut lady was in the new questioning party, as were three big guys who moved me around like a cut of meat. One was black, the other two were white, though one might have been hispanic. They all carried guns. It was like a Benneton’s ad crossed with a game of Counter-Strike.

  They’d taken me from my cell and chained my wrists and ankles together. I paid attention to my surroundings as we went. I heard water outside and thought that maybe we were on Alcatraz—it was a prison, after all, even if it had been a tourist attraction for generations, the place where you went to see where Al Capone and his gangster contemporaries did their time. But I’d been to Alcatraz on a school trip. It was old and rusted, medieval. This place felt like it dated back to World War Two, not colonial times.

  There were bar codes laser-printed on stickers and placed on each of the cell doors, and numbers, but other than that, there was no way to tell who or what might be behind them.

  The interrogation room was modern, with fluorescent lights, ergonomic chairs—not for me, though, I got a folding plastic garden chair—and a big wooden boardroom table. A mirror lined one wall, just like in the cop shows, and I figured someone or other must be watching from behind it. Severe haircut lady and her friends helped themselves to coffee from an urn on a side table (I could have torn her throat out with my teeth and taken her coffee just then), and then set a styrofoam cup of water down next to me—without unlocking my wrists from behind my back, so I couldn’t reach it. Hardy har har.

  “Hello, Marcus,” severe haircut lady said. “How’s your ’tude doing today?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “This isn’t as bad as it gets you know,” she said. “This is as good as it gets from now on. Even once you tell us what we want to know, even if that convinces us that you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, you’re a marked man now. We’ll be watching you everywhere you go and everything you do. You’ve acted like you’ve got something to hide, and we don’t like that.”

  It’s pathetic, but all my brain could think about was that phrase, “convince us that you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.” This was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. I had never, ever felt this bad or this scared before. Those words, “wrong place at the wrong time,” those six words, they were like a lifeline dangling before me as I thrashed to stay on the surface.

  “Hello, Marcus?” She snapped her fingers in front of my face. “Over here, Marcus.” There was a little smile on her face and I hated myself for letting her see my fear. “Marcus, it can be a lot worse than this. This isn’t the worst place we can put you, not by a damned sight.” She reached down below the table and came out with a briefcase, which she snapped open. From it, she withdrew my phone, my arphid sniper/cloner, my wifinder and my memory keys. She set them down on the table one after the other.

  “Here’s what we want from you. You unlock the phone for us today. If you do that, you’ll get outdoor and bathing privileges. You’ll get a shower and you’ll be allowed to walk around in the exercise yard. Tomorrow, we’ll bring you back and ask you to decrypt the data on these memory sticks. Do that, and you’ll get to eat in the mess hall. The day after, we’re going to want your email passwords, and that will get you library privileges.”

  The word “no” was on my lips, like a burp trying to come up, but it wouldn’t come. “Why?” is what came out instead.

  “We want to be sure that you’re what you seem to be. This is about your security, Marcus. Say you’re innocent. You might be, though why an innocent man would act like he’s got so much to hide is beyond me. But say you are: you could have been on that bridge when it blew. Your parents could have been. Your friends. Don’t you want us to catch the people who attacked your home?”

  It’s funny, but when she was talking about my getting “privileges” it scared me into submission. I felt like I’d done something to end up where I was, like maybe it was partially my fault, like I could do something to change it.

  But as soon as she switched to this BS about “safety” and “security,” my spine came back. “Lady,” I said, “you’re talking about attacking my home, but as far as I can tell, you’re the only one who’s attacked me lately. I thought I lived in a country with a constitution. I thought I lived in a country where I had rights. You’re talking about defending my freedom by tearing up the Bill of Rights.”

  A flicker of annoyance passed over her face, then went away. “So melodramatic, Marcus. No one’s attacked you. You’ve been detained by your country’s government while we seek details on the worst terrorist attack ever perpetrated on our nation’s soil. You have it within your power to help us fight this war on our nation’s enemies. You want to preserve the Bill of Rights? Help us stop bad people from blowing up your city. Now, you have exactly thirty seconds to unlock that phone before I send you back to your cell. We have lots of other people to interview today.”

  She looked at her watch. I rattled my wrists, rattled the chains that kept me from reaching around and unlocking the phone. Yes, I was going to do it. She’d told me what my path was to freedom—to the world, to my parents—and that had given me hope. Now she’d threatened to send me away, to take me off that path, and my hope had crashed and all I could think of was how to get back on it.

  So I rattled my wrists, wanting to get to my phone and unlock it for her, and she just looked at me coldly, checking her watch.

  “The password,” I said, finally understanding what she wanted of me. She wanted me to say it out loud, here, where she could record it, where her pals could hear it. She didn’t want me to just unlock the phone. She wanted me to submit to her. To put her in charge of me. To give up every secret, all my privacy. “The password,” I said again, and then I told her the password. God help me, I submitted to her will.

  She smiled a little prim smile, which had to be her ice-queen equivalent of a touchdown dance, and the guards led me away. As the door closed, I saw her bend down over the phone and key the password in.

  I wish I could say that I’d anticipated this possibility in advance and created a fake password that unlocked a completely innocuous partition on my phone, but I wasn’t nearly that paranoid/clever.

  You might be wondering at this point what dark secrets I had locked away on my phone and memory sticks and email. I’m just a kid, after all.

  The truth is that I had everything to hide, and nothing. Between my phone and my memory sticks, you could get a pretty good idea of who my friends were, what I thought of them, all the goofy things we’d done. You could read the transcripts of the electronic arguments we’d carried out and the electronic reconciliations we’d arrived at.

  You see, I don’t delete stuff. Why would I? Storage is cheap, and you never know when you’re going to want to go back to that stuff. Especially the stupid stuff. You know that feeling you get sometimes where you’re sitting on the subway and there’s no one to talk to and you suddenly remember s
ome bitter fight you had, some terrible thing you said? Well, it’s usually never as bad as you remember. Being able to go back and see it again is a great way to remind yourself that you’re not as horrible a person as you think you are. Darryl and I have gotten over more fights that way than I can count.

  And even that’s not it. I know my phone is private. I know my memory sticks are private. That’s because of cryptography—message scrambling. The math behind crypto is good and solid, and you and me get access to the same crypto that banks and the National Security Agency use. There’s only one kind of crypto that anyone uses: crypto that’s public, open and can be deployed by anyone. That’s how you know it works.

  There’s something really liberating about having some corner of your life that’s yours, that no one gets to see except you. It’s a little like nudity or taking a dump. Everyone gets naked every once in a while. Everyone has to squat on the toilet. There’s nothing shameful, deviant or weird about either of them. But what if I decreed that from now on, every time you went to evacuate some solid waste, you’d have to do it in a glass room perched in the middle of Times Square, and you’d be buck naked?

  Even if you’ve got nothing wrong or weird with your body—and how many of us can say that?—you’d have to be pretty strange to like that idea. Most of us would run screaming. Most of us would hold it in until we exploded.

  It’s not about doing something shameful. It’s about doing something private. It’s about your life belonging to you.

  They were taking that from me, piece by piece. As I walked back to my cell, that feeling of deserving it came back to me. I’d broken a lot of rules all my life and I’d gotten away with it, by and large. Maybe this was justice. Maybe this was my past coming back to me. After all, I had been where I was because I’d snuck out of school.

  I got my shower. I got to walk around the yard. There was a patch of sky overhead, and it smelled like the Bay Area, but beyond that, I had no clue where I was being held. No other prisoners were visible during my exercise period, and I got pretty bored with walking in circles. I strained my ears for any sound that might help me understand what this place was, but all I heard was the occasional vehicle, some distant conversations, a plane landing somewhere nearby.

  They brought me back to my cell and fed me, a half a pepperoni pie from Goat Hill Pizza, which I knew well, up on Potrero Hill. The carton with its familiar graphic and 415 phone number was a reminder that only a day before, I’d been a free man in a free country and that now I was a prisoner. I worried constantly about Darryl and fretted about my other friends. Maybe they’d been more cooperative and had been released. Maybe they’d told my parents and they were frantically calling around.

  Maybe not.

  The cell was fantastically spare, empty as my soul. I fantasized that the wall opposite my bunk was a screen that I could be hacking right now, opening the cell door. I fantasized about my workbench and the projects there—the old cans I was turning into a ghetto surround-sound rig, the aerial photography kite-cam I was building, my home-brew laptop.

  I wanted to get out of there. I wanted to go home and have my friends and my school and my parents and my life back. I wanted to be able to go where I wanted to go, not be stuck pacing and pacing and pacing.

  They took my passwords for my USB keys next. Those held some interesting messages I’d downloaded from one online discussion group or another, some chat transcripts, things where people had helped me out with some of the knowledge I needed to do the things I did. There was nothing on there you couldn’t find with Google, of course, but I didn’t think that would count in my favor.

  I got exercise again that afternoon, and this time there were others in the yard when I got there, four other guys and two women, of all ages and racial backgrounds. I guess lots of people were doing things to earn their “privileges.”

  They gave me half an hour, and I tried to make conversation with the most normal-seeming of the other prisoners, a black guy about my age with a short afro. But when I introduced myself and stuck my hand out, he cut his eyes toward the cameras mounted ominously in the corners of the yard and kept walking without ever changing his facial expression.

  But then, just before they called my name and brought me back into the building, the door opened and out came—Vanessa! I’d never been more glad to see a friendly face. She looked tired and grumpy, but not hurt, and when she saw me, she shouted my name and ran to me. We hugged each other hard and I realized I was shaking. Then I realized she was shaking, too.

  “Are you okay?” she said, holding me at arms’ length.

  “I’m okay,” I said. “They told me they’d let me go if I gave them my passwords.”

  “They keep asking me questions about you and Darryl.”

  There was a voice blaring over the loudspeaker, shouting at us to stop talking, to walk, but we ignored it.

  “Answer them,” I said, instantly. “Anything they ask, answer them. If it’ll get you out.”

  “How are Darryl and Jolu?”

  “I haven’t seen them.”

  The door banged open and four big guards boiled out. Two took me and two took Vanessa. They forced me to the ground and turned my head away from Vanessa, though I heard her getting the same treatment. Plastic cuffs went around my wrists and then I was yanked to my feet and brought back to my cell.

  No dinner came that night. No breakfast came the next morning. No one came and brought me to the interrogation room to extract more of my secrets. The plastic cuffs didn’t come off, and my shoulders burned, then ached, then went numb, then burned again. I lost all feeling in my hands.

  I had to pee. I couldn’t undo my pants. I really, really had to pee.

  I pissed myself.

  They came for me after that, once the hot piss had cooled and gone clammy, making my already filthy jeans stick to my legs. They came for me and walked me down the long hall lined with doors, each door with its own bar code, each bar code a prisoner like me. They walked me down the corridor and brought me to the interrogation room and it was like a different planet when I entered there, a world where things were normal, where everything didn’t reek of urine. I felt so dirty and ashamed, and all those feelings of deserving what I got came back to me.

  Severe haircut lady was already sitting. She was perfect: coifed and with just a little makeup. I smelled her hair stuff. She wrinkled her nose at me. I felt the shame rise in me.

  “Well, you’ve been a very naughty boy, haven’t you? Aren’t you a filthy thing?”

  Shame. I looked down at the table. I couldn’t bear to look up. I wanted to tell her my email password and get gone.

  “What did you and your friend talk about in the yard?”

  I barked a laugh at the table. “I told her to answer your questions. I told her to cooperate.”

  “So do you give the orders?”

  I felt the blood sing in my ears. “Oh come on,” I said. “We play a game together, it’s called Harajuku Fun Madness. I’m the team captain. We’re not terrorists, we’re high school students. I don’t give her orders. I told her that we needed to be honest with you so that we could clear up any suspicion and get out of here.”

  She didn’t say anything for a moment.

  “How is Darryl?” I said.

  “Who?”

  “Darryl. You picked us up together. My friend. Someone had stabbed him in the Powell Street BART. That’s why we were up on the surface. To get him help.”

  “I’m sure he’s fine, then,” she said.

  My stomach knotted and I almost threw up. “You don’t know? You haven’t got him here?”

  “Who we have here and who we don’t have here is not something we’re going to discuss with you, ever. That’s not something you’re going to know. Marcus, you’ve seen what happens when you don’t cooperate with us. You’ve seen what happens when you disobey our orders. You’ve been a little cooperative, and it’s gotten you almost to the point where you might go free again. If you want
to make that possibility into a reality, you’ll stick to answering my questions.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You’re learning, that’s good. Now, your email passwords, please.”

  I was ready for this. I gave them everything: server address, login, password. This didn’t matter. I didn’t keep any email on my server. I downloaded it all and kept it on my laptop at home, which downloaded and deleted my mail from the server every sixty seconds. They wouldn’t get anything out of my mail—it got cleared off the server and stored on my laptop at home.

  Back to the cell, but they cut loose my hands and they gave me a shower and a pair of orange prison pants to wear. They were too big for me and hung down low on my hips, like a Mexican gang kid in the Mission. That’s where the baggy-pants-down-your-ass look comes from you know that? From prison. I tell you what, it’s less fun when it’s not a fashion statement.

  They took away my jeans, and I spent another day in the cell. The walls were scratched cement over a steel grid. You could tell, because the steel was rusting in the salt air, and the grid shone through the green paint in red-orange. My parents were out that window, somewhere.

  They came for me again the next day.

  “We’ve been reading your mail for a day now. We changed the password so that your home computer couldn’t fetch it.”

  Well, of course they had. I would have done the same, now that I thought of it.

  “We have enough on you now to put you away for a very long time, Marcus. Your possession of these articles”—she gestured at all my little gizmos—“and the data we recovered from your phone and memory sticks, as well as the subversive material we’d no doubt find if we raided your house and took your computer. It’s enough to put you away until you’re an old man. Do you understand that?”

  I didn’t believe it for a second. There’s no way a judge would say that all this stuff constituted any kind of real crime. It was free speech, it was technological tinkering. It wasn’t a crime.