Little Brother

by Cory Doctorow

  The organizers were a well known literacy charity that ran kids’ writing workshops, drama workshops and so on. They had been running the games for ten years without incident. Everything was strictly booze and drug free, to keep the organizers from getting busted on some kind of corruption of minors rap. We’d draw between ten and a hundred players, depending on the weekend, and for the cost of a couple movies, you could have two and a half days’ worth of solid fun.

  One day, though, they lucked into a block of rooms at the Monaco, a hotel in the Tenderloin that catered to arty older tourists, the kind of place where every room came with a goldfish bowl, where the lobby was full of beautiful old people in fine clothes, showing off their plastic surgery results.

  Normally, the mundanes—our word for nonplayers—just ignored us, figuring that we were skylarking kids. But that weekend there happened to be an editor for an Italian travel magazine staying, and he took an interest in things. He cornered me as I skulked in the lobby, hoping to spot the clan-master of my rivals and swoop in on him and draw his blood. I was standing against the wall with my arms folded over my chest, being invisible, when he came up to me and asked me, in accented English, what me and my friends were doing in the hotel that weekend?

  I tried to brush him off, but he wouldn’t be put off. So I figured I’d just make something up and he’d go away.

  I didn’t imagine that he’d print it. I really didn’t imagine that it would get picked up by the American press.

  “We’re here because our prince has died, and so we’ve had to come in search of a new ruler.”

  “A prince?”

  “Yes,” I said, getting into it. “We’re the Old People. We came to America in the 16th century and have had our own royal family in the wilds of Pennsylvania ever since. We live simply in the woods. We don’t use modern technology. But the prince was the last of the line and he died last week. Some terrible wasting disease took him. The young men of my clan have left to find the descendants of his great-uncle, who went away to join the modern people in the time of my grandfather. He is said to have multiplied, and we will find the last of his bloodline and bring them back to their rightful home.”

  I read a lot of fantasy novels. This kind of thing came easily to me.

  “We found a woman who knew of these descendants. She told us one was staying in this hotel, and we’ve come to find him. But we’ve been tracked here by a rival clan who would keep us from bringing home our prince, to keep us weak and easy to dominate. Thus it is vital we keep to ourselves. We do not talk to the New People when we can help it. Talking to you now causes me great discomfort.”

  He was watching me shrewdly. I had uncrossed my arms, which meant that I was now “visible” to rival vampires, one of whom had been slowly sneaking up on us. At the last moment, I turned and saw her, arms spread, hissing at us, vamping it up in high style.

  I threw my arms wide and hissed back at her, then pelted through the lobby, hopping over a leather sofa and deking around a potted plant, making her chase me. I’d scouted an escape route down through the stairwell to the basement health club and I took it, shaking her off.

  I didn’t see him again that weekend, but I did relate the story to some of my fellow LARPers, who embroidered the tale and found lots of opportunities to tell it over the weekend.

  The Italian magazine had a staffer who’d done her master’s degree on Amish antitechnology communities in rural Pennsylvania, and she thought we sounded awfully interesting. Based on the notes and taped interviews of her boss from his trip to San Francisco, she wrote a fascinating, heart-wrenching article about these weird, juvenile cultists who were crisscrossing America in search of their “prince.” Hell, people will print anything these days.

  But the thing was, stories like that get picked up and republished. First it was Italian bloggers, then a few American bloggers. People across the country reported “sightings” of the Old People, though whether they were making it up, or whether others were playing the same game, I didn’t know.

  It worked its way up the media food chain all the way to the New York Times, who, unfortunately, have an unhealthy appetite for fact-checking. The reporter they put on the story eventually tracked it down to the Monaco Hotel, who put them in touch with the LARP organizers, who laughingly spilled the whole story.

  Well, at that point, LARPing got a lot less cool. We became known as the nation’s foremost hoaxers, as weird, pathological liars. The press who we’d inadvertently tricked into covering the story of the Old People were now interested in redeeming themselves by reporting on how unbelievably weird we LARPers were, and that was when Charles let everyone in school know that Darryl and I were the biggest LARPing weenies in the city.

  That was not a good season. Some of the gang didn’t mind, but we did. The teasing was merciless. Charles led it. I’d find plastic fangs in my bag, and kids I passed in the hall would go “bleh, bleh” like a cartoon vampire, or they’d talk with fake Transylvanian accents when I was around.

  We switched to ARGing pretty soon afterward. It was more fun in some ways, and it was a lot less weird. Every now and again, though, I missed my cape and those weekends in the hotel.

  The opposite of esprit d’escalier is the way that life’s embarrassments come back to haunt us even after they’re long past. I could remember every stupid thing I’d ever said or done, recall them with picture-perfect clarity. Any time I was feeling low, I’d naturally start to remember other times I felt that way, a hit parade of humiliations coming one after another to my mind.

  As I tried to concentrate on Masha and my impending doom, the Old People incident kept coming back to haunt me. There’d been a similar, sick, sinking doomed feeling then, as more and more press outlets picked up the story, as the likelihood increased of someone figuring out that it had been me who’d sprung the story on the stupid Italian editor in the designer jeans with crooked seams, the starched collarless shirt and the oversized metal-rimmed glasses.

  There’s an alternative to dwelling on your mistakes. You can learn from them.

  It’s a good theory, anyway. Maybe the reason your subconscious dredges up all these miserable ghosts is that they need to get closure before they can rest peacefully in humiliation afterlife. My subconscious kept visiting me with ghosts in the hopes that I would do something to let them rest in peace.

  All the way home, I turned over this memory and the thought of what I would do about “Masha,” in case she was playing me. I needed some insurance.

  And by the time I reached my house—to be swept up into melancholy hugs from Mom and Dad—I had it.

  The trick was to time this so that it happened fast enough that the DHS couldn’t prepare for it, but with a long enough lead time that the Xnet would have time to turn out in force.

  The trick was to stage this so that there were too many present to arrest us all, but to put it somewhere that the press could see it and the grown-ups, so the DHS wouldn’t just gas us again.

  The trick was to come up with something with the media friendliness of the levitation of the Pentagon. The trick was to stage something that we could rally around, like three thousand Berkeley students refusing to let one of their number be taken away in a police van.

  The trick was to put the press there, ready to say what the police did, the way they had in 1968 in Chicago.

  It was going to be some trick.

  I cut out of school an hour early the next day, using my customary techniques for getting out, not caring if it would trigger some kind of new DHS checker that would result in my parents getting a note.

  One way or another, my parents’ last problem after tomorrow would be whether I was in trouble at school.

  I met Ange at her place. She’d had to cut out of school even earlier, but she’d just made a big deal out of her cramps and pretended she was going to keel over and they sent her home.

  We started to spread the word on Xnet. We sent it in email to trusted friends, and IMed it to our bud
dy lists. We roamed the decks and towns of Clockwork Plunder and told our teammates. Giving everyone enough information to get them to show up but not so much as to tip our hand to the DHS was tricky, but I thought I had just the right balance:

  > VAMPMOB TOMORROW

  > If you’re a goth, dress to impress. If you’re not a goth, find a goth and borrow some clothes. Think vampire.

  > The game starts at 8:00AM sharp. SHARP. Be there and ready to be divided into teams. The game lasts 30 minutes, so you’ll have plenty of time to get to school afterward.

  > Location will be revealed tomorrow. Email your public key to m1k3y@littlebrother.pirateparty.org.se and check your messages at 7AM for the update. If that’s too early for you, stay up all night. That’s what we’re going to do.

  > This is the most fun you will have all year, guaranteed.

  > Believe.

  > M1k3y

  Then I sent a short message to Masha.

  > Tomorrow

  > M1k3y

  A minute later, she emailed back:

  > I thought so. VampMob, huh? You work fast. Wear a red hat. Travel light.

  What do you bring along when you go fugitive? I’d carried enough heavy packs around enough scout camps to know that every ounce you add cuts into your shoulders with all the crushing force of gravity with every step you take—it’s not just one ounce, it’s one ounce that you carry for a million steps. It’s a ton.

  “Right,” Ange said. “Smart. And you never take more than three days’ worth of clothes, either. You can rinse stuff out in the sink. Better to have a spot on your T-shirt than a suitcase that’s too big and heavy to stash under a plane seat.”

  She’d pulled out a ballistic nylon courier bag that went across her chest, between her breasts—something that made me get a little sweaty—and slung diagonally across her back. It was roomy inside, and she’d set it down on the bed. Now she was piling clothes next to it.

  “I figure that three T-shirts, a pair of pants, a pair of shorts, three changes of underwear, three pairs of socks and a sweater will do it.”

  She dumped out her gym bag and picked out her toiletries. “I’ll have to remember to stick my toothbrush in tomorrow morning before I head down to Civic Center.”

  Watching her pack was impressive. She was ruthless about it all. It was also freaky—it made me realize that the next day, I was going to go away. Maybe for a long time. Maybe forever.

  “Do I bring my Xbox?” she asked. “I’ve got a ton of stuff on the hard drive, notes and sketches and email. I wouldn’t want it to fall into the wrong hands.”

  “It’s all encrypted,” I said. “That’s standard with ParanoidXbox. But leave the Xbox behind, there’ll be plenty of them in LA. Just create a Pirate Party account and email an image of your hard drive to yourself. I’m going to do the same when I get home.”

  She did so, and queued up the email. It was going to take a couple hours for all the data to squeeze through her neighbor’s WiFi network and wing its way to Sweden.

  Then she closed the flap on the bag and tightened the compression straps. She had something the size of a soccer ball slung over her back now, and I stared admiringly at it. She could walk down the street with that under her shoulder and no one would look twice—she looked like she was on her way to school.

  “One more thing,” she said, and went to her bedside table and took out the condoms. She took the strips of rubbers out of the box and opened the bag and stuck them inside, then gave me a slap on the ass.

  “Now what?” I said.

  “Now we go to your place and do your stuff. It’s time I met your parents, no?”

  She left the bag amid the piles of clothes and junk all over the floor. She was ready to turn her back on all of it, walk away, just to be with me. Just to support the cause. It made me feel brave, too.

  Mom was already home when I got there. She had her laptop open on the kitchen table and was answering email while talking into a headset connected to it, helping some poor Yorkshireman and his family acclimate to living in Louisiana.

  I came through the door and Ange followed, grinning like mad, but holding my hand so tight I could feel the bones grinding together. I didn’t know what she was so worried about. It wasn’t like she was going to end up spending a lot of time hanging around with my parents after this, even if it went badly.

  Mom hung up on the Yorkshireman when we got in.

  “Hello, Marcus,” she said, giving me a kiss on the cheek. “And who is this?”

  “Mom, meet Ange. Ange, this is my mom, Louisa.” Mom stood up and gave Ange a hug.

  “It’s very good to meet you, darling,” she said, looking her over from top to bottom. Ange looked pretty acceptable, I think. She dressed well, and low-key, and you could tell how smart she was just by looking at her.

  “A pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Yallow,” she said. She sounded very confident and self-assured. Much better than I had when I’d met her mom.

  “It’s Lillian, love,” she said. She was taking in every detail. “Are you staying for dinner?”

  “I’d love that,” she said.

  “Do you eat meat?” Mom’s pretty acclimated to living in California.

  “I eat anything that doesn’t eat me first,” she said.

  “She’s a hot sauce junkie,” I said. “You could serve her old tires and she’d eat ’em if she could smother them in salsa.”

  Ange socked me gently in the shoulder.

  “I was going to order Thai,” Mom said. “I’ll add a couple of their five-chili dishes to the order.”

  Ange thanked her politely and Mom bustled around the kitchen, getting us glasses of juice and a plate of biscuits and asking three times if we wanted any tea. I squirmed a little.

  “Thanks, Mom,” I said. “We’re going to go upstairs for a while.”

  Mom’s eyes narrowed for a second, then she smiled again. “Of course,” she said. “Your father will be home in an hour, we’ll eat then.”

  I had my vampire stuff all stashed in the back of my closet. I let Ange sort through it while I went through my clothes. I was only going as far as LA. They had stores there, all the clothing I could need. I just needed to get together three or four favorite tees and a favorite pair of jeans, a tube of deodorant, a roll of dental floss.

  “Money!” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I was going to clean out my bank account on the way home at an ATM. I’ve got maybe fifteen hundred saved up.”

  “Really?”

  “What am I going to spend it on?” she said. “Ever since the Xnet, I haven’t had to even pay any service charges.”

  “I think I’ve got three hundred or so.”

  “Well, there you go. Grab it on the way to Civic Center in the morning.”

  I had a big book bag I used when I was hauling lots of gear around town. It was less conspicuous than my camping pack. Ange went through my piles mercilessly and culled them down to her favorites.

  Once it was packed and under my bed, we both sat down.

  “We’re going to have to get up really early tomorrow,” she said.

  “Yeah, big day.”

  The plan was to get messages out with a bunch of fake VampMob locations tomorrow, sending people out to secluded spots within a few minutes’ walk of Civic Center. We’d cut out a spray-paint stencil that just said VAMPMOB CIVIC CENTER that we would spray-paint at those spots around 5 A.M. That would keep the DHS from locking down Civic Center before we got there. I had the mailbot ready to send out the messages at 7 A.M.—I’d just leave my Xbox running when I went out.

  “How long…” She trailed off.

  “That’s what I’ve been wondering, too,” I said. “It could be a long time, I suppose. But who knows? With Barbara’s article coming out”—I’d queued an email to her for the next morning, too—“and all, maybe we’ll be heroes in two weeks.”

  “Maybe,” she said, and sighed.

  I put my arm around her. Her shoulders were shaking
.

  “I’m terrified,” I said. “I think that it would be crazy not to be terrified.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah.”

  Mom called us to dinner. Dad shook Ange’s hand. He looked unshaved and worried, the way he had since we’d gone to see Barbara, but on meeting Ange, a little of the old Dad came back. She kissed him on the cheek and he insisted that she call him Drew.

  Dinner was actually really good. The ice broke when Ange took out her hot sauce mister and treated her plate, and explained about Scoville units. Dad tried a forkful of her food and went reeling into the kitchen to drink a gallon of milk. Believe it or not, Mom still tried it after that and gave every impression of loving it. Mom, it turned out, was an undiscovered spicy food prodigy, a natural.

  Before she left, Ange pressed the hot sauce mister on Mom. “I have a spare at home,” she said. I’d watched her pack it in her backpack. “You seem like the kind of woman who should have one of these.”

  Chapter 19

  Here’s the email that went out at 7 A.M. the next day, while Ange and I were spray-painting VAMPMOB CIVIC CENTER at strategic locations around town.

  > RULES FOR VAMPMOB

  > You are part of a clan of daylight vampires. You’ve discovered the secret of surviving the terrible light of the sun. The secret was cannibalism: the blood of another vampire can give you the strength to walk among the living.

  > You need to bite as many other vampires as you can in order to stay in the game. If one minute goes by without a bite, you’re out. Once you’re out, turn your shirt around backwards and go referee—watch twoor three vamps to see if they’re getting their bites in.

  > To bite another vamp, you have to say “Bite!” five times before they do. So you run up to a vamp, make eye-contact and shout “bite bite bite bite bite!” and if you get it out before she does, you live and she crumbles to dust.