Little Brother

by Cory Doctorow

  “I’m telling my parents that I was in one of those camps on the other side of the Bay. I came over to meet you guys there and we got stranded, and just got loose today. They said in the papers that people were still wandering home from them.”

  “I can’t do that,” Vanessa said. “After what they did to you, how can you even think of doing that?”

  “It happened to me, that’s the point. This is me and them, now. I’ll beat them, I’ll get Darryl. I’m not going to take this lying down. But once our parents are involved, that’s it for us. No one will believe us and no one will care. If we do it my way, people will care.”

  “What’s your way?” Jolu said. “What’s your plan?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I admitted. “Give me until tomorrow morning, give me that, at least.” I knew that once they’d kept it a secret for a day, it would have to be a secret forever. Our parents would be even more skeptical if we suddenly “remembered” that we’d been held in a secret prison instead of taken care of in a refugee camp.

  Van and Jolu looked at each other.

  “I’m just asking for a chance,” I said. “We’ll work out the story on the way, get it straight. Give me one day, just one day.”

  The other two nodded glumly and we set off downhill again, heading back toward home. I lived on Potrero Hill, Vanessa lived in the North Mission and Jolu lived in Noe Valley—three wildly different neighborhoods just a few minutes’ walk from one another.

  We turned onto Market Street and stopped dead. The street was barricaded at every corner, the cross streets reduced to a single lane, and parked down the whole length of Market Street were big, nondescript 18-wheelers like the one that had carried us, hooded, away from the ship’s docks and to Chinatown.

  Each one had three steel steps leading down from the back and they buzzed with activity as soldiers, people in suits and cops went in and out of them. The suits wore little badges on their lapels and the soldiers scanned them as they went in and out—wireless authorization badges. As we walked past one, I got a look at it, and saw the familiar logo: Department of Homeland Security. The soldier saw me staring and stared back hard, glaring at me.

  I got the message and moved on. I peeled away from the gang at Van Ness. We clung to each other and cried and promised to call each other.

  The walk back to Potrero Hill has an easy route and a hard route, the latter taking you over some of the steepest hills in the city, the kind of thing that you see car chases on in action movies, with cars catching air as they soar over the zenith. I always take the hard way home. It’s all residential streets, and the old Victorian houses they call “painted ladies” for their gaudy, elaborate paint jobs, and front gardens with scented flowers and tall grasses. Housecats stare at you from hedges, and there are hardly any homeless.

  It was so quiet on those streets that it made me wish I’d taken the other route, through the Mission, which is…raucous is probably the best word for it. Loud and vibrant. Lots of rowdy drunks and angry crackheads and unconscious junkies, and also lots of families with strollers, old ladies gossiping on stoops, lowriders with boom-cars going thumpa-thumpa-thumpa down the streets. There were hipsters and mopey emo art students and even a couple old-school punk rockers, old guys with pot bellies bulging out beneath their Dead Kennedys shirts. Also drag queens, angry gang kids, graffiti artists and bewildered gentrifiers trying not to get killed while their real estate investments matured.

  I went up Goat Hill and walked past Goat Hill Pizza, which made me think of the jail I’d been held in, and I had to sit down on the bench out in front of the restaurant until my shakes passed. Then I noticed the truck up the hill from me, a nondescript 18-wheeler with three metal steps coming down from the back end. I got up and got moving. I felt the eyes watching me from all directions.

  I hurried the rest of the way home. I didn’t look at the painted ladies or the gardens or the housecats. I kept my eyes down.

  Both my parents’ cars were in the driveway, even though it was the middle of the day. Of course. Dad works in the East Bay, so he’d be stuck at home while they worked on the bridge. Mom—well, who knew why Mom was home.

  They were home for me.

  Even before I’d finished unlocking the door it had been jerked out of my hand and flung wide. There were both of my parents, looking gray and haggard, bug-eyed and staring at me. We stood there in frozen tableau for a moment, then they both rushed forward and dragged me into the house, nearly tripping me up. They were both talking so loud and fast all I could hear was a wordless, roaring gabble and they both hugged me and cried and I cried, too, and we just stood there like that in the little foyer, crying and making almost-words until we ran out of steam and went into the kitchen.

  I did what I always did when I came home: got myself a glass of water from the filter in the fridge and dug a couple cookies out of the “biscuit barrel” that Mom’s sister had sent us from England. The normalcy of this made my heart stop hammering, my heart catching up with my brain, and soon we were all sitting at the table.

  “Where have you been?” they both said, more or less in unison.

  I had given this some thought on the way home. “I got trapped,” I said. “In Oakland. I was there with some friends, doing a project, and we were all quarantined.”

  “For five days?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah. It was really bad.” I’d read about the quarantines in the Chronicle and I cribbed shamelessly from the quotes they’d published. “Yeah. Everyone who got caught in the cloud. They thought we had been attacked with some kind of superbug and they packed us into shipping containers in the docklands, like sardines. It was really hot and sticky. Not much food, either.”

  “Christ,” Dad said, his fists balling up on the table. Dad teaches in Berkeley three days a week, working with a few grad students in the library science program. The rest of the time he consults for clients in the city and down the Peninsula, third-wave dotcoms that are doing various things with archives. He’s a mild-mannered librarian by profession, but he’d been a real radical in the sixties and wrestled a little in high school. I’d seen him get crazy angry now and again—I’d even made him that angry now and again—and he could seriously lose it when he was Hulking out. He once threw a swing-set from Ikea across my granddad’s whole lawn when it fell apart for the fiftieth time while he was assembling it.

  “Barbarians,” Mom said. She’s been living in America since she was a teenager, but she still comes over all British when she encounters American cops, health care, airport security or homelessness. Then the word is “barbarians,” and her accent comes back strong. We’d been to London twice to see her family and I can’t say as it felt any more civilized than San Francisco, just more cramped.

  “But they let us go, and ferried us over today.” I was improvising now.

  “Are you hurt?” Mom said. “Hungry?”

  “Sleepy?”

  “Yeah, a little of all that. Also Dopey, Doc, Sneezy and Bashful.” We had a family tradition of Seven Dwarfs jokes. They both smiled a little, but their eyes were still wet. I felt really bad for them. They must have been out of their minds with worry. I was glad for a chance to change the subject. “I’d totally love to eat.”

  “I’ll order a pizza from Goat Hill,” Dad said.

  “No, not that,” I said. They both looked at me like I’d sprouted antennae. I normally have a thing about Goat Hill Pizza—as in, I can normally eat it like a goldfish eats his food, gobbling until it either runs out or I pop. I tried to smile. “I just don’t feel like pizza,” I said, lamely. “Let’s order some curry, okay?” Thank heaven that San Francisco is take-out central.

  Mom went to the drawer of take-out menus (more normalcy, feeling like a drink of water on a dry, sore throat) and riffled through them. We spent a couple of distracting minutes going through the menu from the halal Pakistani place on Valencia. I settled on a mixed tandoori grill and creamed spinach with farmer’s cheese, a salted mango lassi (mu
ch better than it sounds) and little fried pastries in sugar syrup.

  Once the food was ordered, the questions started again. They’d heard from Van’s, Jolu’s and Darryl’s families (of course) and had tried to report us missing. The police were taking names, but there were so many “displaced persons” that they weren’t going to open files on anyone unless they were still missing after seven days.

  Meanwhile, millions of have-you-seen sites had popped up on the net. A couple of the sites were old MySpace clones that had run out of money and saw a new lease on life from all the attention. After all, some venture capitalists had missing family in the Bay Area. Maybe if they were recovered, the site would attract some new investment. I grabbed Dad’s laptop and looked through them. They were plastered with advertising, of course, and pictures of missing people, mostly grad photos, wedding pictures and that sort of thing. It was pretty ghoulish.

  I found my pic and saw that it was linked to Van’s, Jolu’s and Darryl’s. There was a little form for marking people found and another one for writing up notes about other missing people. I filled in the fields for me and Jolu and Van, and left Darryl blank.

  “You forgot Darryl,” Dad said. He didn’t like Darryl much—once he’d figured out that a couple inches were missing out of one of the bottles in his liquor cabinet, and to my enduring shame I’d blamed it on Darryl. In truth, of course, it had been both of us, just fooling around, trying out vodka-and-Cokes during an all-night gaming session.

  “He wasn’t with us,” I said. The lie tasted bitter in my mouth.

  “Oh my God,” my mom said. She squeezed her hands together. “We just assumed when you came home that you’d all been together.”

  “No,” I said, the lie growing. “No, he was supposed to meet us but we never met up. He’s probably just stuck over in Berkeley. He was going to take the BART over.”

  Mom made a whimpering sound. Dad shook his head and closed his eyes. “Don’t you know about the BART?” he said.

  I shook my head. I could see where this was going. I felt like the ground was rushing up to me.

  “They blew it up,” Dad said. “The bastards blew it up at the same time as the bridge.”

  That hadn’t been on the front page of the Chronicle, but then, a BART blowout under the water wouldn’t be nearly as picturesque as the images of the bridge hanging in tatters and pieces over the Bay. The BART tunnel from the Embarcadero in San Francisco to the West Oakland station was submerged.

  I went back to Dad’s computer and surfed the headlines. No one was sure, but the body count was in the thousands. Between the cars that plummeted 191 feet to the sea and the people drowned in the trains, the deaths were mounting. One reporter claimed to have interviewed an “identity counterfeiter” who’d helped “dozens” of people walk away from their old lives by simply vanishing after the attacks, getting new ID made up and slipping away from bad marriages, bad debts and bad lives.

  Dad actually got tears in his eyes, and Mom was openly crying. They each hugged me again, patting me with their hands as if to assure themselves that I was really there. They kept telling me they loved me. I told them I loved them, too.

  We had a weepy dinner and Mom and Dad had each had a couple glasses of wine, which was a lot for them. I told them that I was getting sleepy, which was true, and mooched up to my room. I wasn’t going to bed, though. I needed to get online and find out what was going on. I needed to talk to Jolu and Vanessa. I needed to get working on finding Darryl.

  I crept up to my room and opened the door. I hadn’t seen my old bed in what felt like a thousand years. I lay down on it and reached over to my bedstand to grab my laptop. I must have not plugged it in all the way—the electrical adapter needed to be jiggled just right—so it had slowly discharged while I was away. I plugged it back in and gave it a minute or two to charge up before trying to power it up again. I used the time to get undressed and throw my clothes in the trash—I never wanted to see them again—and put on a clean pair of boxers and a fresh T-shirt. The fresh-laundered clothes, straight out of my drawers, felt so familiar and comfortable, like getting hugged by my parents.

  I powered up my laptop and punched a bunch of pillows into place behind me at the top of the bed. I scooched back and opened my computer’s lid and settled it onto my thighs. It was still booting, and man, those icons creeping across the screen looked good. It came all the way up and then it started giving me more low-power warnings. I checked the power cable again and wiggled it and they went away. The power jack was really flaking out.

  In fact, it was so bad that I couldn’t actually get anything done. Every time I took my hand off the power cable it lost contact and the computer started to complain about its battery. I took a closer look at it.

  The whole case of my computer was slightly misaligned, the seam split in an angular gape that started narrow and widened toward the back.

  Sometimes you look at a piece of equipment and discover something like this and you wonder, “Was it always like that?” Maybe you just never noticed.

  But with my laptop, that wasn’t possible. You see, I built it. After the Board of Ed issued us all SchoolBooks, there was no way my parents were going to buy me a computer of my own, even though technically the SchoolBook didn’t belong to me, and I wasn’t supposed to install software on it or mod it.

  I had some money saved—odd jobs, Christmases and birthdays, a little bit of judicious ebaying. Put it all together and I had enough money to buy a totally crappy, five-year-old machine.

  So Darryl and I built one instead. You can buy laptop cases just like you can buy cases for desktop PCs, though they’re a little more specialized than plain old PCs. I’d built a couple PCs with Darryl over the years, scavenging parts from Craigslist and garage sales and ordering stuff from cheap Taiwanese vendors we found on the net. I figured that building a laptop would be the best way to get the power I wanted at the price I could afford.

  To build your own laptop, you start by ordering a “bare-book”—a machine with just a little hardware in it and all the right slots. The good news was, once I was done, I had a machine that was a whole pound lighter than the Dell I’d had my eye on, ran faster and cost a third of what I would have paid Dell. The bad news was that assembling a laptop is like building one of those ships in a bottle. It’s all finicky work with tweezers and magnifying glasses, trying to get everything to fit in that little case. Unlike a full-sized PC—which is mostly air—every cubic millimeter of space in a laptop is spoken for. Every time I thought I had it, I’d go to screw the thing back together and find that something was keeping the case from closing all the way, and it’d be back to the drawing board.

  So I knew exactly how the seam on my laptop was supposed to look when the thing was closed, and it was not supposed to look like this.

  I kept jiggling the power adapter, but it was hopeless. There was no way I was going to get the thing to boot without taking it apart. I groaned and put it beside the bed. I’d deal with it in the morning.

  That was the theory, anyway. Two hours later, I was still staring at the ceiling, playing back movies in my head of what they’d done to me, what I should have done, all regrets and esprit d’escalier.

  I rolled out of bed. It had gone midnight and I’d heard my parents hit the sack at eleven. I grabbed the laptop and cleared some space on my desk and clipped the little LED lamps to the temples of my magnifying glasses and pulled out a set of little precision screwdrivers. A minute later, I had the case open and the keyboard removed and I was staring at the guts of my laptop. I got a can of compressed air and blew out the dust that the fan had sucked in and looked things over.

  Something wasn’t right. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but then it had been months since I’d had the lid off this thing. Luckily, the third time I’d had to open it up and struggle to close it again, I’d gotten smart: I’d taken a photo of the guts with everything in place. I hadn’t been totally smart: at first, I’d just left that pic on my hard dr
ive, and naturally I couldn’t get to it when I had the laptop in parts. But then I’d printed it out and stuck it in my messy drawer of papers, the dead-tree graveyard where I kept all the warranty cards and pin-out diagrams. I shuffled them—they seemed messier than I remembered—and brought out my photo. I set it down next to the computer and kind of unfocused my eyes, trying to find things that looked out of place.

  Then I spotted it. The ribbon cable that connected the keyboard to the logic board wasn’t connected right. That was a weird one. There was no torque on that part, nothing to dislodge it in the course of normal operations. I tried to press it back down again and discovered that the plug wasn’t just badly mounted—there was something between it and the board. I tweezed it out and shone my light on it.

  There was something new in my keyboard. It was a little chunk of hardware, only a sixteenth of an inch thick, with no markings. The keyboard was plugged into it, and it was plugged into the board. It other words, it was perfectly situated to capture all the keystrokes I made while I typed on my machine.

  It was a bug.

  My heart thudded in my ears. It was dark and quiet in the house, but it wasn’t a comforting dark. There were eyes out there, eyes and ears, and they were watching me. Surveilling me. The surveillance I faced at school had followed me home, but this time, it wasn’t just the Board of Education looking over my shoulder: the Department of Homeland Security had joined them.

  I almost took the bug out. Then I figured that whoever put it there would know that it was gone. I left it in. It made me sick to do it.

  I looked around for more tampering. I couldn’t find any, but did that mean there hadn’t been any? Someone had broken into my room and planted this device—had disassembled my laptop and reassembled it. There were lots of other ways to wiretap a computer. I could never find them all.

  I put the machine together with numb fingers. This time, the case wouldn’t snap shut just right, but the power cable stayed in. I booted it up and set my fingers on the keyboard, thinking that I would run some diagnostics and see what was what.