Little Brother

by Cory Doctorow

  I dug another quarter out of my pocket, then changed my mind. What was the chance that Barbara’s phone wasn’t tapped? There was no way I was going to be able to call her now, not directly. I needed some intermediary to get in touch with her and get her to meet me somewhere south. So much for plans.

  What I really, really needed was the Xnet.

  How the hell was I going to get online? My phone’s wifinder was blinking like crazy—there was wireless all around me, but I didn’t have an Xbox and a TV and a ParanoidXbox DVD to boot from. WiFi, WiFi everywhere…

  That’s when I spotted them. Two kids, about my age, moving among the crowd at the top of the stairs down into the BART.

  What caught my eye was the way they were moving, kind of clumsy, nudging up against the commuters and the tourists. Each had a hand in his pocket, and whenever they met one another’s eye, they snickered. They couldn’t have been more obvious jammers, but the crowd was oblivious to them. Being down in that neighborhood, you expect to be dodging homeless people and crazies, so you don’t make eye contact, don’t look around at all if you can help it.

  I sidled up to one. He seemed really young, but he couldn’t have been any younger than me.

  “Hey,” I said. “Hey, can you guys come over here for a second?”

  He pretended not to hear me. He looked right through me, the way you would a homeless person.

  “Come on,” I said. “I don’t have a lot of time.” I grabbed his shoulder and hissed in his ear. “The cops are after me. I’m from Xnet.”

  He looked scared now, like he wanted to run away, and his friend was moving toward us. “I’m serious,” I said. “Just hear me out.”

  His friend came over. He was taller, and beefy—like Darryl. “Hey,” he said. “Something wrong?”

  His friend whispered in his ear. The two of them looked like they were going to bolt.

  I grabbed my copy of the Bay Guardian from under my arm and rattled it in front of them. “Just turn to page five, okay?”

  They did. They looked at the headline. The photo. Me.

  “Oh, dude,” the first one said. “We are so not worthy.” He grinned at me like crazy, and the beefier one slapped me on the back.

  “No way—” he said. “You’re M—”

  I put a hand over his mouth. “Come over here, okay?”

  I brought them back to my bench. I noticed that there was something old and brown staining the sidewalk underneath it. Darryl’s blood? It made my skin pucker up. We sat down.

  “I’m Marcus,” I said, swallowing hard as I gave my real name to these two who already knew me as M1k3y. I was blowing my cover, but the Bay Guardian had already made the connection for me.

  “Nate,” the small one said. “Liam,” the bigger one said. “Dude, it is such an honor to meet you. You’re like our all-time hero—”

  “Don’t say that,” I said. “Don’t say that. You two are like a flashing advertisement that says, ‘I am jamming, please put my ass in Gitmo-by-the-Bay. You couldn’t be more obvious.”

  Liam looked like he might cry.

  “Don’t worry, you didn’t get busted. I’ll give you some tips, later.” He brightened up again. What was becoming weirdly clear was that these two really did idolize M1k3y, and that they’d do anything I said. They were grinning like idiots. It made me uncomfortable, sick to my stomach.

  “Listen, I need to get on Xnet, now, without going home or anywhere near home. Do you two live near here?”

  “I do,” Nate said. “Up at the top of California Street. It’s a bit of a walk—steep hills.” I’d just walked all the way down them. Masha was somewhere up there. But still, it was better than I had any right to expect.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  Nate loaned me his baseball hat and traded jackets with me. I didn’t have to worry about gait-recognition, not with my ankle throbbing the way it was—I limped like an extra in a cowboy movie.

  Nate lived in a huge four-bedroom apartment at the top of Nob Hill. The building had a doorman, in a red overcoat with gold brocade, and he touched his cap and called Nate “Mr. Nate” and welcomed us all there. The place was spotless and smelled of furniture polish. I tried not to gawp at what must have been a couple million bucks’ worth of condo.

  “My dad,” he explained. “He was an investment banker. Lots of life insurance. He died when I was fourteen and we got it all. They’d been divorced for years, but he left my mom as beneficiary.”

  From the floor-to-ceiling window, you could see a stunning view of the other side of Nob Hill, all the way down to Fisherman’s Wharf, to the ugly stub of the Bay Bridge, the crowd of cranes and trucks. Through the mist, I could just make out Treasure Island. Looking down all that way, it gave me a crazy urge to jump.

  I got online with his Xbox and a huge plasma screen in the living room. He showed me how many open WiFi networks were visible from his high vantage point—twenty, thirty of them. This was a good spot to be an Xnetter.

  There was a lot of email in my M1k3y account. Twenty thousand new messages since Ange and I had left her place that morning. Lots of it was from the press, asking for follow-up interviews, but most of it was from the Xnetters, people who’d seen the Guardian story and wanted to tell me that they’d do anything to help me, anything I needed.

  That did it. Tears started to roll down my cheeks.

  Nate and Liam exchanged glances. I tried to stop, but it was no good. I was sobbing now. Nate went to an oak bookcase on one wall and swung a bar out of one of its shelves, revealing gleaming rows of bottles. He poured me a shot of something golden brown and brought it to me.

  “Rare Irish whiskey,” he said. “Mom’s favorite.”

  It tasted like fire, like gold. I sipped at it, trying not to choke. I didn’t really like hard liquor, but this was different. I took several deep breaths.

  “Thanks, Nate,” I said. He looked like I’d just pinned a medal on him. He was a good kid.

  “All right,” I said, and picked up the keyboard. The two boys watched in fascination as I paged through my mail on the gigantic screen.

  What I was looking for, first and foremost, was email from Ange. There was a chance that she’d just gotten away. There was always that chance.

  I was an idiot to even hope. There was nothing from her. I started going through the mail as fast as I could, picking apart the press requests, the fan mail, the hate mail, the spam…

  And that’s when I found it: a letter from Zeb.

  > It wasn’t nice to wake up this morning and find the letter that I thought you would destroy in the pages of the newspaper. Not nice at all. Made me feel…hunted.

  > But I’ve come to understand why you did it. I don’t know if I can approve of your tactics, but it’s easy to see that your motives were sound.

  > If you’re reading this, that means that there’sa good chance you’ve gone underground. It’s not easy. I’ve been learning that. I’ve been learning a lot more.

  > I can help you. I should do that for you. You’re doing what you can for me. (Even if you’re not doing it with my permission.)

  > Reply if you get this, if you’re on the run and alone. Or reply if you’re in custody, being run by our friends on Gitmo, looking for a way to make the pain stop. If they’ve got you, you’ll do what they tell you. I know that. I’ll take that risk.

  > For you, M1k3y.

  “Whooooa,” Liam breathed. “Duuuuude.” I wanted to smack him. I turned to say something awful and cutting to him, but he was staring at me with eyes as big as saucers, looking like he wanted to drop to his knees and worship me.

  “Can I just say,” Nate said, “can I just say that it is the biggest honor of my entire life to help you? Can I just say that?”

  I was blushing now. There was nothing for it. These two were totally starstruck, even though I wasn’t any kind of star, not in my own mind at least.

  “Can you guys—” I swallowed. “Can I have some privacy here?”

  They sl
unk out of the room like bad puppies and I felt like a tool. I typed fast.

  “I got away, Zeb. And I’m on the run. I need all the help I can get. I want to end this now.” I remembered to take Masha’s phone out of my pocket and tickle it to keep it from going to sleep.

  They let me use the shower, gave me a change of clothes, a new backpack with half their earthquake kit in it—energy bars, medicine, hot and cold packs and an old sleeping bag. They even slipped a spare Xbox Universal already loaded with ParanoidXbox on it into there. That was a nice touch. I had to draw the line at a flare gun.

  I kept on checking my email to see if Zeb had replied. I answered the fan mail. I answered the mail from the press. I deleted the hate mail. I was half expecting to see something from Masha, but chances were she was halfway to LA by now, her fingers hurt, and in no position to type. I tickled her phone again.

  They encouraged me to take a nap and for a brief, shameful moment, I got all paranoid like maybe these guys were thinking of turning me in once I was asleep. Which was idiotic—they could have turned me in just as easily when I was awake. I just couldn’t compute the fact that they thought so much of me. I had known, intellectually, that there were people who would follow M1k3y. I’d met some of those people that morning, shouting BITE BITE BITE and vamping it up at Civic Center. But these two were more personal. They were just nice, goofy guys, they coulda been any of my friends back in the days before the Xnet, just two pals who palled around having teenage adventures. They’d volunteered to join an army, my army. I had a responsibility to them. Left to themselves, they’d get caught, it was only a matter of time. They were too trusting.

  “Guys, listen to me for a second. I have something serious I need to talk to you about.”

  They almost stood at attention. It would have been funny if it wasn’t so scary.

  “Here’s the thing. Now that you’ve helped me, it’s really dangerous. If you get caught, I’ll get caught. They’ll get anything you know out of you—” I held up my hand to forestall their protests. “No, stop. You haven’t been through it. Everyone talks. Everyone breaks. If you’re ever caught, you tell them everything, right away, as fast as you can, as much as you can. They’ll get it all eventually anyway. That’s how they work.

  “But you won’t get caught, and here’s why: you’re not jammers anymore. You are retired from active duty. You’re a”—I fished in my memory for vocabulary words culled from spy thrillers—“you’re a sleeper cell. Stand down. Go back to being normal kids. One way or another, I’m going to break this thing, break it wide open, end it. Or it will get me, finally, do me in. If you don’t hear from me within seventy-two hours, assume that they got me. Do whatever you want then. But for the next three days—and forever, if I do what I’m trying to do—stand down. Will you promise me that?”

  They promised with all solemnity. I let them talk me into napping, but made them swear to rouse me once an hour. I’d have to tickle Masha’s phone and I wanted to know as soon as Zeb got back in touch with me.

  The rendezvous was on a BART car, which made me nervous. They’re full of cameras. But Zeb knew what he was doing. He had me meet him in the last car of a certain train departing from Powell Street Station, at a time when that car was filled with the press of bodies. He sidled up to me in the crowd, and the good commuters of San Francisco cleared a space for him, the hollow that always surrounds homeless people.

  “Nice to see you again,” he muttered, facing into the doorway. Looking into the dark glass, I could see that there was no one close enough to eavesdrop—not without some kind of high-efficiency mic rig, and if they knew enough to show up here with one of those, we were dead anyway.

  “You too, brother,” I said. “I’m—I’m sorry, you know?”

  “Shut up. Don’t be sorry. You were braver than I am. Are you ready to go underground now? Ready to disappear?”

  “About that.”

  “Yes?”

  “That’s not the plan.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  “Listen, okay? I have—I have pictures, video. Stuff that really proves something.” I reached into my pocket and tickled Masha’s phone. I’d bought a charger for it in Union Square on the way down, and had stopped and plugged it in at a cafe for long enough to get the battery up to four out of five bars. “I need to get it to Barbara Stratford, the woman from the Guardian. But they’re going to be watching her—watching to see if I show up.”

  “You don’t think that they’ll be watching for me, too? If your plan involves me going within a mile of that woman’s home or office—”

  “I want you to get Van to come and meet me. Did Darryl ever tell you about Van? The girl—”

  “He told me. Yes, he told me. You don’t think they’ll be watching her? All of you who were arrested?”

  “I think they will. I don’t think they’ll be watching her as hard. And Van has totally clean hands. She never cooperated with any of my—” I swallowed. “With my projects. So they might be a little more relaxed about her. If she calls the Bay Guardian to make an appointment to explain why I’m just full of crap, maybe they’ll let her keep it.”

  He stared at the door for a long time.

  “You know what happens when they catch us again.” It wasn’t a question.

  I nodded.

  “Are you sure? Some of the people that were on Treasure Island with us got taken away in helicopters. They got taken offshore. There are countries where America can outsource its torture. Countries where you will rot forever. Countries where you wish they would just get it over with, have you dig a trench and then shoot you in the back of the head as you stand over it.”

  I swallowed and nodded.

  “Is it worth the risk? We can go underground for a long, long time here. Someday we might get our country back. We can wait it out.”

  I shook my head. “You can’t get anything done by doing nothing. It’s our country. They’ve taken it from us. The terrorists who attack us are still free—but we’re not. I can’t go underground for a year, ten years, my whole life, waiting for freedom to be handed to me. Freedom is something you have to take for yourself.”

  That afternoon, Van left school as usual, sitting in the back of the bus with a tight knot of her friends, laughing and joking the way she always did. The other riders on the bus took special note of her, she was so loud, and besides, she was wearing that stupid, giant floppy hat, something that looked like a piece out of a school play about Renaissance sword fighters. At one point they all huddled together, then turned away to look out the back of the bus, pointing and giggling. The girl who wore the hat now was the same height as Van, and from behind, it could be her.

  No one paid any attention to the mousy little Asian girl who got off a few stops before the BART. She was dressed in a plain old school uniform, and looking down shyly as she stepped off. Besides, at that moment, the loud Korean girl let out a whoop and her friends followed along, laughing so loudly that even the bus driver slowed down, twisted in his seat and gave them a dirty look.

  Van hurried away down the street with her head down, her hair tied back and dropped down the collar of her out-of-style bubble jacket. She had slipped lifts into her shoes that made her two wobbly, awkward inches taller, and had taken her contacts out and put on her least-favored glasses, with huge lenses that took up half her face. Although I’d been waiting in the bus shelter for her and knew when to expect her, I hardly recognized her. I got up and walked along behind her, across the street, trailing by half a block.

  The people who passed me looked away as quickly as possible. I looked like a homeless kid, with a grubby cardboard sign, street-grimy overcoat, huge, overstuffed knapsack with duct tape over its rips. No one wants to look at a street kid, because if you meet his eye, he might ask you for some spare change. I’d walked around Oakland all afternoon and the only people who’d spoken to me were a Jehovah’s Witness and a Scientologist, both trying to convert me. It felt gross, like being hit on by a perve
rt.

  Van followed the directions I’d written down carefully. Zeb had passed them to her the same way he’d given me the note outside school—bumping into her as she waited for the bus, apologizing profusely. I’d written the note plainly and simply, just laying it out for her: I know you don’t approve. I understand. But this is it, this is the most important favor I’ve ever asked of you. Please. Please.

  She’d come. I knew she would. We had a lot of history, Van and I. She didn’t like what had happened to the world, either. Besides, an evil, chuckling voice in my head had pointed out, she was under suspicion now that Barbara’s article was out.

  We walked like that for six or seven blocks, looking at who was near us, what cars went past. Zeb told me about five-person trails, where five different undercovers traded off duties following you, making it nearly impossible to spot them. You had to go somewhere totally desolate, where anyone at all would stand out like a sore thumb.

  The overpass for the 880 was just a few blocks from the Coliseum BART station, and even with all the circling Van did, it didn’t take long to reach it. The noise from overhead was nearly deafening. No one else was around, not that I could tell. I’d visited the site before I suggested it to Van in the note, taking care to check for places where someone could hide. There weren’t any.

  Once she stopped at the appointed place, I moved quickly to catch up to her. She blinked owlishly at me from behind her glasses.

  “Marcus,” she breathed, and tears swam in her eyes. I found that I was crying, too. I’d make a really rotten fugitive. Too sentimental.

  She hugged me so hard I couldn’t breathe. I hugged her back even harder.

  Then she kissed me.

  Not on the cheek, not like a sister. Full on the lips, a hot, wet, steamy kiss that seemed to go on forever. I was so overcome with emotion—