Little Brother

by Cory Doctorow

  Kurt Rooney was known nationally as the President’s chief strategist, the man who returned the party for its third term, and who was steaming toward a fourth. They called him “Ruthless” and I’d seen a news report once about how tight a rein he kept his staffers on, calling them, IMing them, watching their every motion, controlling every step. He was old, with a lined face and pale gray eyes and a flat nose with broad, flared nostrils and thin lips, a man who looked like he was smelling something bad all the time.

  He was the man on the screen. He was talking, and everyone else was focused on his screen, everyone taking notes as fast as they could type, trying to look smart.

  “—say that they’re angry with authority, but we need to show the country that it’s terrorists, not the government, that they need to blame. Do you understand me? The nation does not love that city. As far as they’re concerned, it is a Sodom and Gomorrah of fags and atheists who deserve to rot in hell. The only reason the country cares what they think in San Francisco is that they had the good fortune to have been blown to hell by some Islamic terrorists.

  “These Xnet children are getting to the point where they might start to be useful to us. The more radical they get, the more the rest of the nation understands that there are threats everywhere.”

  His audience finished typing.

  “We can control that, I think,” Severe Haircut said. “Our people in the Xnet have built up a lot of influence. The Manchurian Bloggers are running as many as fifty blogs each, flooding the chat channels, linking to each other, mostly just taking the party line set by this M1k3y. But they’ve already shown that they can provoke radical action, even when M1k3y is putting the brakes on.”

  Major General Sutherland nodded. “We have been planning to leave them underground until about a month before the midterms.” I guessed that meant the midterm elections, not my exams. “That’s per the original plan. But it sounds like—”

  “We’ve got another plan for the midterms,” Rooney said. “Need-to-know, of course, but you should all probably not plan on traveling for the month before. Cut the Xnet loose now, as soon as you can. So long as they’re moderates, they’re a liability. Keep them radical.”

  The video cut off.

  Ange and I sat on the edge of the bed, looking at the screen. Ange reached out and started the video again. We watched it. It was worse the second time.

  I tossed the keyboard aside and got up.

  “I am so sick of being scared,” I said. “Let’s take this to Barbara and have her publish it all. Put it all on the net. Let them take me away. At least I’ll know what’s going to happen then. At least then I’ll have a little certainty in my life.”

  Ange grabbed me and hugged me, soothed me. “I know baby, I know. It’s all terrible. But you’re focusing on the bad stuff and ignoring the good stuff. You’ve created a movement. You’ve outflanked the jerks in the White House, the crooks in DHS uniforms. You’ve put yourself in a position where you could be responsible for blowing the lid off of the entire rotten DHS thing.

  “Sure they’re out to get you. ’Course they are. Have you ever doubted it for a moment? I always figured they were. But Marcus, they don’t know who you are. Think about that. All those people, money, guns and spies, and you, a seventeen-year-old high school kid—you’re still beating them. They don’t know about Barbara. They don’t know about Zeb. You’ve jammed them in the streets of San Francisco and humiliated them before the world. So stop moping, all right? You’re winning.”

  “They’re coming for me, though. You see that. They’re going to put me in jail forever. Not even jail. I’ll just disappear, like Darryl. Maybe worse. Maybe Syria. Why leave me in San Francisco? I’m a liability as long as I’m in the USA.”

  She sat down on the bed with me.

  “Yeah,” she said. “That.”

  “That.”

  “Well, you know what you have to do, right?”

  “What?” She looked pointedly at my keyboard. I could see the tears rolling down her cheeks. “No! You’re out of your mind. You think I’m going to run off with some nut off the Internet? Some spy?”

  “You got a better idea?”

  I kicked a pile of her laundry into the air. “Whatever. Fine. I’ll talk to her some more.”

  “You talk to her,” Ange said. “You tell her you and your girlfriend are getting out.”

  “What?”

  “Shut up, dickhead. You think you’re in danger? I’m in just as much danger, Marcus. It’s called guilt by association. When you go, I go.” She had her jaw thrust out at a mutinous angle. “You and I—we’re together now. You have to understand that.”

  We sat down on the bed together.

  “Unless you don’t want me,” she said, finally, in a small voice.

  “You’re kidding me, right?”

  “Do I look like I’m kidding?”

  “There’s no way I would voluntarily go without you, Ange. I could never have asked you to come, but I’m ecstatic that you offered.”

  She smiled and tossed me my keyboard.

  “Email this Masha creature. Let’s see what this chick can do for us.”

  I emailed her, encrypting the message, waiting for a reply. Ange nuzzled me a little and I kissed her and we necked. Something about the danger and the pact to go together—it made me forget the awkwardness of having sex, made me freaking horny as hell.

  We were half-naked again when Masha’s email arrived.

  > Two of you? Jesus, like it won’t be hard enough already.

  > I don’t get to leave except to do field intelligence after a big Xnet hit. You get me? The handlers watch my every move, but I go off the leash when something big happens with Xnetters. I get sent into the field then.

  > You do something big. I get sent to it. I get us both out. All three of us, if you insist.

  > Make it fast, though. I can’t send you a lot of email, understand? They watch me. They’re closing in on you. You don’t have a lot of time. Weeks? Maybe just days.

  > I need you to get me out. That’s why I’m doing this, in case you’re wondering. I can’t escape on my own. I need a big Xnet distraction. That’s your department. Don’t fail me, M1k3y, or we’re both dead. Your girlie too.

  > Masha

  My phone rang, making us both jump. It was my mom wanting to know when I was coming home. I told her I was on my way. She didn’t mention Barbara. We’d agreed that we wouldn’t talk about any of this stuff on the phone. That was my dad’s idea. He could be as paranoid as me.

  “I have to go,” I said.

  “Our parents will be—”

  “I know,” I said. “I saw what happened to my parents when they thought I was dead. Knowing that I’m a fugitive isn’t going to be much better. But they’d rather I be a fugitive than a prisoner. That’s what I think. Anyway, once we disappear, Barbara can publish without worrying about getting us into trouble.”

  We kissed at the door of her room. Not one of the hot, sloppy numbers we usually did when parting ways. A sweet kiss this time. A slow kiss. A good-bye kind of kiss.

  BART rides are introspective. When the train rocks back and forth and you try not to make eye contact with the other riders and you try not to read the ads for plastic surgery, bail bondsmen and AIDS testing, when you try to ignore the graffiti and not look too closely at the stuff in the carpeting. That’s when your mind starts to really churn and churn.

  You rock back and forth and your mind goes over all the things you’ve overlooked, plays back all the movies of your life where you’re no hero, where you’re a chump or a sucker.

  Your brain comes up with theories like this one:

  If the DHS wanted to catch M1k3y, what better way than to lure him into the open, panic him into leading some kind of big, public Xnet event? Wouldn’t that be worth the chance of a compromising video leaking?

  Your brain comes up with stuff like that even when the train ride only lasts two or three stops. When you get off, and you start
moving, the blood gets running and sometimes your brain helps you out again.

  Sometimes your brain gives you solutions in addition to problems.

  Chapter 18

  There was a time when my favorite thing in the world was putting on a cape and hanging out in hotels, pretending to be an invisible vampire whom everyone stared at.

  It’s complicated, and not nearly as weird as it sounds. The Live Action Role Playing scene combines the best aspects of D&D with drama club with going to sci-fi cons.

  I understand that this might not make it sound as appealing to you as it was to me when I was fourteen.

  The best games were the ones at the scout camps out of town: a hundred teenagers, boys and girls, fighting the Friday night traffic, swapping stories, playing handheld games, showing off for hours. Then debarking to stand in the grass before a group of older men and women in badass, homemade armor, dented and scarred, like armor must have been in the old days, not like it’s portrayed in the movies, but like a soldier’s uniform after a month in the bush.

  These people were nominally paid to run the games, but you didn’t get the job unless you were the kind of person who’d do it for free. They’d have already divided us into teams based on the questionnaires we’d filled in beforehand, and we’d get our team assignments then, like being called up for baseball sides.

  Then you’d get your briefing packages. These were like the briefings the spies get in the movies: here’s your identity, here’s your mission, here’s the secrets you know about the group.

  From there, it was time for dinner: roaring fires, meat popping on spits, tofu sizzling on skillets (it’s northern California, a vegetarian option is not optional), and a style of eating and drinking that can only be described as quaffing.

  Already, the keen kids would be getting into character. My first game, I was a wizard. I had a bag of beanbags that represented spells—when I threw one, I would shout the name of the spell I was casting—fireball, magic missile, cone of light—and the player or “monster” I threw it at would keel over if I connected. Or not—sometimes we had to call in a ref to mediate, but for the most part, we were all pretty good about playing fair. No one liked a dice lawyer.

  By bedtime, we were all in character. At fourteen, I wasn’t super-sure what a wizard was supposed to sound like, but I could take my cues from the movies and novels. I spoke in slow, measured tones, keeping my face composed in a suitably mystical expression, and thinking mystical thoughts.

  The mission was complicated, retrieving a sacred relic that had been stolen by an ogre who was bent on subjugating the people of the land to his will. It didn’t really matter a whole lot. What mattered was that I had a private mission, to capture a certain kind of imp to serve as my familiar, and that I had a secret nemesis, another player on the team who had taken part in a raid that killed my family when I was a boy, a player who didn’t know that I’d come back, bent on revenge. Somewhere, of course, there was another player with a similar grudge against me, so that even as I was enjoying the camaraderie of the team, I’d always have to keep an eye open for a knife in the back, poison in the food.

  For the next two days, we played it out. There were parts of the weekend that were like hide-and-seek, some that were like wilderness survival exercises, some that were like solving crossword puzzles. The game masters had done a great job. And you really got to be friends with the other people on the mission. Darryl was the target of my first murder, and I put my back into it, even though he was my pal. Nice guy. Shame I’d have to kill him.

  I fireballed him as he was seeking out treasure after we wiped out a band of orcs, playing rock-paper-scissors with each orc to determine who would prevail in combat. This is a lot more exciting than it sounds.

  It was like summer camp for drama geeks. We talked until late at night in tents, looked at the stars, jumped in the river when we got hot, slapped away mosquitos. Became best friends, or lifelong enemies.

  I don’t know why Charles’s parents sent him LARPing. He wasn’t the kind of kid who really enjoyed that kind of thing. He was more the pulling-wings-off-flies type. Oh, maybe not. But he just was not into being in costume in the woods. He spent the whole time mooching around, sneering at everyone and everything, trying to convince us all that we weren’t having the good time we all felt like we were having. You’ve no doubt found that kind of person before, the kind of person who is compelled to ensure that everyone else has a rotten time.

  The other thing about Charles was that he couldn’t get the hang of simulated combat. Once you start running around the woods and playing these elaborate, semimilitary games, it’s easy to get totally adrenalized to the point where you’re ready to tear out someone’s throat. This is not a good state to be in when you’re carrying a prop sword, club, pike or other utensil. This is why no one is ever allowed to hit anyone, under any circumstances, in these games. Instead, when you get close enough to someone to fight, you play a quick couple rounds of rock-paper-scissors, with modifiers based on your experience, armaments and condition. The referees mediate disputes. It’s quite civilized, and a little weird. You go running after someone through the woods, catch up with him, bare your teeth, and sit down to play a little roshambo. But it works—and it keeps everything safe and fun.

  Charles couldn’t really get the hang of this. I think he was perfectly capable of understanding that the rule was no contact, but he was simultaneously capable of deciding that the rule didn’t matter, and that he wasn’t going to abide by it. The refs called him on it a bunch of times over the weekend, and he kept on promising to stick by it, and kept on going back. He was one of the bigger kids there already, and he was fond of “accidentally” tackling you at the end of a chase. Not fun when you get tackled into the rocky forest floor.

  I had just mightily smote Darryl in a little clearing where he’d been treasure-hunting, and we were having a little laugh over my extreme sneakiness. He was going to go monstering—killed players could switch to playing monsters, which meant that the longer the game wore on, the more monsters there were coming after you, meaning that everyone got to keep on playing and the game’s battles just got more and more epic.

  That was when Charles came out of the woods behind me and tackled me, throwing me to the ground so hard that I couldn’t breathe for a moment. “Gotcha!” he yelled. I only knew him slightly before this, and I’d never thought much of him, but now I was ready for murder. I climbed slowly to my feet and looked at him, his chest heaving, grinning. “You’re so dead,” he said. “I totally got you.”

  I smiled and something felt wrong and sore in my face. I touched my upper lip. It was bloody. My nose was bleeding and my lip was split, cut on a root I’d face-planted into when he tackled me.

  I wiped the blood on my pants leg and smiled. I made like I thought that it was all in fun. I laughed a little. I moved toward him.

  Charles wasn’t fooled. He was already backing away, trying to fade into the woods. Darryl moved to flank him. I took the other flank. Abruptly, he turned and ran. Darryl’s foot hooked his ankle and sent him sprawling. We rushed him, just in time to hear a ref’s whistle.

  The ref hadn’t seen Charles foul me, but he’d seen Charles’s play that weekend. He sent Charles back to the camp entrance and told him he was out of the game. Charles complained mightily, but to our satisfaction, the ref wasn’t having any of it. Once Charles had gone, he gave us both a lecture, too, telling us that our retaliation was no more justified than Charles’s attack.

  It was okay. That night, once the games had ended, we all got hot showers in the scout dorms. Darryl and I stole Charles’s clothes and towel. We tied them in knots and dropped them in the urinal. A lot of the boys were happy to contribute to the effort of soaking them. Charles had been very enthusiastic about his tackles.

  I wish I could have watched him when he got out of his shower and discovered his clothes. It’s a hard decision: do you run naked across the camp, or pick apart the tight, piss-soaked kn
ots in your clothes and then put them on?

  He chose nudity. I probably would have chosen the same. We lined up along the route from the showers to the shed where the packs were stored and applauded him. I was at the front of the line, leading the applause.

  The Scout Camp weekends only came three or four times a year, which left Darryl and me—and lots of other LARPers—with a serious LARP deficiency in our lives.

  Luckily, there were the Wretched Daylight games in the city hotels. Wretched Daylight is another LARP, rival vampire clans and vampire hunters, and it’s got its own quirky rules. Players get cards to help them resolve combat skirmishes, so each skirmish involves playing a little hand of a strategic card game. Vampires can become invisible by cloaking themselves, crossing their arms over their chests, and all the other players have to pretend they don’t see them, continuing with their conversations about their plans and so on. The true test of a good player is whether you’re honest enough to go on spilling your secrets in front of an “invisible” rival without acting as though he was in the room.

  There were a couple of big Wretched Daylight games every month. The organizers of the games had a good relationship with the city’s hotels and they let it be known that they’d take ten un-booked rooms on Friday night and fill them with players who’d run around the hotel, playing low-key Wretched Daylight in the corridors, around the pool, and so on, eating at the hotel restaurant and paying for the hotel WiFi. They’d close the booking on Friday afternoon, email us, and we’d go straight from school to whichever hotel it was, bringing our knapsacks, sleeping six or eight to a room for the weekend, living on junk food, playing until 3 A.M. It was good, safe fun that our parents could get behind.