by Bryan Hurt
“August 19,” I said. “11:30 a.m. Play.”
A blacktop road. Sun like a nuclear blast. A kid, running. I recognized myself—I’d been to this summer before, one I remembered as idyllic, messing around in boats, fishing, swimming, wandering the woods with one of the local kids, Billy Scharf, everything neutral, copacetic. But why was I running? And why did I have that look on my face, a look that fused determination and helplessness both? Up the drive now, up the steps to the house, shouting for my parents: “Mom! Dad!”
I began to have a bad feeling.
I saw my father get up off the wicker sofa on the porch, my vigorous young father, who was dressed in a T-shirt and jeans and didn’t have even a trace of gray in his hair, my father, who always made everything right. But not this time. “What’s the matter?” he said. “What is it?”
And my mother coming through the screen door to the porch, a towel in one hand and her hair snarled wet from the lake. And me. I was fighting back tears, my legs and arms like sticks, striped polo shirt, faded shorts. “It’s,” I said, “it’s—”
“Stop,” I said. “Reset.” It was my dog, Queenie, that was what it was, dead on the road that morning, and who’d left the gate ajar so she could get out in the first place? Even though he’d been warned about it a hundred times?
I was in a dark room. There was a pot between my legs, and it was giving off a fierce odor. I needed to go deeper, needed out of this. I spouted random dates, saw myself driving to work, stuck in traffic with ten thousand other fools who could only wish they had a fast-forward app, saw myself in my thirties, post-Lisa, pre-Christine, obsessing over Halo, and I stayed there through all the toppling hours, reliving myself in the game, boxes within boxes, until finally I thought of God, or what passes for God in my life, the mystery beyond words, beyond lasers and silicon chips. I gave a date nine months before I was born, “December 30, 1962, 6:00 a.m.,” when I was, what—a zygote?—but the box gave me nothing, neither visual nor audio. And that was wrong, deeply wrong. There should have been a heartbeat. My mother’s heartbeat, the first thing we hear—or feel, feel before we even have ears.
“Stop,” I said. “Reset.” A wave of rising exhilaration swept over me even as the words came to my lips, “September 30, 1963, 2:35 a.m.,” and the drumbeat started up, ba-boom, ba-boom, but no visual, not yet, the minutes ticking by, ba-boom, ba-boom, and then I was there, in the light of this world, and my mother in her stained hospital gown and the man with the monobrow and the flashing glasses, the stranger, the doctor, saying what he was going to say by way of congratulations and relief. A boy. It’s a boy.
Then it all went dead, and there was somebody standing in front of me, and I didn’t recognize her, not at first, how could I? “Dad,” she was saying. “Dad, are you there?”
I blinked. Tried to focus.
“No,” I said finally, shaking my head in slow emphasis, the word itself, the denial, heavy as a stone in my mouth. “I’m not here. I’m not. I’m not.”
Scroogled
by Cory Doctorow
Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him.
—Cardinal Richelieu
We don’t know enough about you.
—Google CEO Eric Schmidt
Greg landed at San Francisco International Airport at 8:00 p.m., but by the time he’d made it to the front of the customs line, it was after midnight. He’d emerged from first class, brown as a nut, unshaven, and loose-limbed after a month on the beach in Cabo (scuba diving three days a week, seducing French college girls the rest of the time). When he’d left the city a month before, he’d been a stoop-shouldered, potbellied wreck.
Now he was a bronze god, drawing admiring glances from the stews at the front of the cabin.
Four hours later in the customs line, he’d slid from god back to man. His slight buzz had worn off, sweat ran down the crack of his ass, and his shoulders and neck were so tense his upper back felt like a tennis racket. The batteries on his iPod had long since died, leaving him with nothing to do except eavesdrop on the middle-aged couple ahead of him.
“The marvels of modern technology,” said the woman, shrugging at a nearby sign: IMMIGRATION—POWERED BY GOOGLE.
“I thought that didn’t start until next month?” The man was alternately wearing and holding a large sombrero.
Googling at the border. Christ. Greg had vested out of Google six months before, cashing in his options and “taking some me time,” which turned out to be less rewarding than he’d expected. What he mostly did over the five months that followed was fix his friends’ PCs, watch daytime TV, and gain ten pounds, which he blamed on being at home instead of in the Googleplex, with its well-appointed twenty-four-hour gym.
He should have seen it coming, of course. The US government had lavished $15 billion on a program to fingerprint and photograph visitors at the border, and hadn’t caught a single terrorist. Clearly, the public sector was not equipped to Do Search Right.
The DHS officer had bags under his eyes and squinted at his screen, prodding at his keyboard with sausage fingers. No wonder it was taking four hours to get out of the goddamned airport.
“Evening,” Greg said, handing the man his sweaty passport. The officer grunted and swiped it, then stared at his screen, tapping. A lot. He had a little bit of dried food at the corner of his mouth and his tongue crept out and licked at it.
“Want to tell me about June 1998?”
Greg looked up from his Departures. “I’m sorry?”
“You posted a message to alt.burningman on June 17, 1998, about your plan to attend a festival. You asked, ‘Are shrooms really such a bad idea?’”
The interrogator in the secondary screening room was an older man, so skinny he looked like he’d been carved out of wood. His questions went a lot deeper than shrooms.
“Tell me about your hobbies. Are you into model rocketry?”
“What?”
“Model rocketry.”
“No,” Greg said. “No, I’m not.” He sensed where this was going.
The man made a note, did some clicking. “You see, I ask because I see a heavy spike in ads for rocketry supplies showing up alongside your search results and Google mail.”
Greg felt a spasm in his guts. “You’re looking at my searches and email?” He hadn’t touched a keyboard in a month, but he knew what he put into that search bar was likely more revealing than what he told his shrink.
“Sir, calm down, please. No, I’m not looking at your searches,” the man said in a mocking whine. “That would be unconstitutional. We see only the ads that show up when you read your mail and do your searching. I have a brochure explaining it. I’ll give it to you when we’re through here.”
“But the ads don’t mean anything,” Greg sputtered. “I get ads for Ann Coulter ringtones whenever I get email from my friend in Coulter, Iowa!”
The man nodded. “I understand, sir. And that’s just why I’m here talking to you. Why do you suppose model rocket ads show up so frequently?”
Greg racked his brain. “Okay, just do this. Search for ‘coffee fanatics.’” He’d been very active in the group, helping them build out the site for their coffee-of-the-month subscription service. The blend they were going to launch with was called Jet Fuel. “Jet Fuel” and “launch”—that would probably make Google barf up some model rocket ads.
They were in the home stretch when the carved man found the Halloween photos. They were buried three screens deep in the search results for “Greg Lupinski.”
“It was a Gulf War–themed party,” he said. “In the Castro.”
“And you’re dressed as . . . ?”
“A suicide bomber,” he replied sheepishly. Just saying the words made him wince.
“Come with me, Mr. Lupinski,” the man said.
By the time he was released, it was past 3:00 a.m. His suitcases stood forlornly by the baggage carousel. He
picked them up and saw they had been opened and carelessly closed. Clothes stuck out from around the edges.
WHEN HE RETURNED home, he discovered that all of his fake pre-Columbian statues had been broken, and his brand-new white cotton Mexican shirt had an ominous boot print in the middle of it. His clothes no longer smelled of Mexico. They smelled like airport.
He wasn’t going to sleep. No way. He needed to talk about this. There was only one person who would get it. Luckily, she was usually awake around this hour.
Maya had started working at Google two years after Greg had. It was she who’d convinced him to go to Mexico after he cashed out: anywhere, she’d said, that he could reboot his existence.
Maya had two giant chocolate labs and a very, very patient girlfriend named Laurie who’d put up with anything except being dragged around Dolores Park at 6:00 a.m. by 350 pounds of drooling canine.
Maya reached for her Mace as Greg jogged toward her, then did a double take and threw her arms open, dropping the leashes and trapping them under her sneaker. “Where’s the rest of you? Dude, you look hot!”
He hugged her back, suddenly conscious of the way he smelled after a night of invasive Googling. “Maya,” he said, “what do you know about Google and the DHS?”
She stiffened as soon as he asked the question. One of the dogs began to whine. She looked around, then nodded up at the tennis courts. “Top of the light pole there; don’t look,” she said. “That’s one of our muni Wi-Fi access points. Wide-angle webcam. Face away from it when you talk.”
In the grand scheme of things, it hadn’t cost Google much to wire the city with webcams. Especially when measured against the ability to serve ads to people based on where they were sitting. Greg hadn’t paid much attention when the cameras on all those access points went public; there’d been a day’s worth of blogstorm while people played with the new all-seeing toy, zooming in on various prostitute cruising areas, but after a while the excitement blew over.
Feeling silly, Greg mumbled, “You’re joking.”
“Come with me,” she said, turning away from the pole.
The dogs weren’t happy about cutting their walk short, and expressed their displeasure in the kitchen as Maya made coffee.
“We brokered a compromise with the DHS,” she said, reaching for the milk. “They agreed to stop fishing through our search records, and we agreed to let them see what ads got displayed for users.”
Greg felt sick. “Why? Don’t tell me Yahoo was doing it already . . .”
“No, no. Well, yes. Sure. Yahoo was doing it. But that wasn’t the reason Google went along. You know, Republicans hate Google. We’re overwhelmingly registered Democratic, so we’re doing what we can to make peace with them before they clobber us. This isn’t PII.” Personally Identifying Information, the toxic smog of the information age. “It’s just metadata. So it’s only slightly evil.”
“Why all the intrigue, then?”
Maya sighed and hugged the lab that was butting her knee with its huge head. “The spooks are like lice. They get everywhere. They show up at our meetings. It’s like being in some Soviet ministry. And at the security clearance we’re divided into these two camps: the cleared and the suspect. We all know who isn’t cleared, but no one knows why. I’m cleared. Lucky for me, being a dyke no longer disqualifies you. No cleared person would deign to eat lunch with an unclearable.”
Greg felt very tired. “So I guess I’m lucky I got out of the airport alive. I might have ended up ‘disappeared’ if it had gone badly, huh?”
Maya stared at him intently. He waited for an answer.
“What?”
“I’m about to tell you something, but you can’t ever repeat it, okay?”
“Um . . . you’re not in a terrorist cell, are you?”
“Nothing so simple. Here’s the deal: airport DHS scrutiny is a gating function. It lets the spooks narrow down their search criteria. Once you get pulled aside for secondary at the border, you become a ‘person of interest’ and they never, ever let up. They’ll scan webcams for your face and gait. Read your mail. Monitor your searches.”
“I thought you said the courts wouldn’t let them . . .”
“The courts won’t let them indiscriminately Google you. But after you’re in the system, it becomes a selective search. All legal. And once they start Googling you, they always find something. All your data is fed into a big hopper that checks for ‘suspicious patterns,’ using deviation from statistical norms to nail you.”
Greg felt like he was going to throw up. “How the hell did this happen? Google was a good place. ‘Don’t be evil,’ right?” That was the corporate motto, and for Greg, it had been a huge part of why he’d taken his computer science PhD from Stanford directly to Mountain View.
Maya replied with a hard-edged laugh. “‘Don’t be evil’? Come on, Greg. Our lobbying group is that same bunch of crypto-fascists that tried to swift-boat Kerry. We popped our evil cherry a long time ago.”
They were quiet for a minute.
“It started in China,” she went on, finally. “Once we moved our servers onto the mainland, they went under Chinese jurisdiction.”
Greg sighed. He knew Google’s reach all too well: every time you visited a page with Google ads on it, or used Google Maps or Google mail, even if you sent mail to a Gmail account, the company diligently collected your info. Recently, the site’s search-optimization software had begun using the data to tailor Web searches to individual users. It proved to be a revolutionary tool for advertisers. An authoritarian government would have other purposes in mind.
“They were using us to build profiles of people,” she went on. “When they had someone they wanted to arrest, they’d come to us and find a reason to bust them. There’s hardly anything you can do on the Net that isn’t illegal in China.”
Greg shook his head. “Why did they have to put the servers in China?”
“The government said they’d block us otherwise. And Yahoo was there.” They both made faces. Somewhere along the way, employees at Google had become obsessed with Yahoo, more concerned with what the competition was doing than how their own company was performing. “So we did it. But a lot of us didn’t like the idea.”
Maya sipped her coffee and lowered her voice. One of her dogs sniffed insistently under Greg’s chair.
“Almost immediately, the Chinese asked us to start censoring search results,” Maya said. “Google agreed. The company line was hilarious: ‘We’re not doing evil, we’re giving consumers access to a better search tool! If we showed them search results they couldn’t get to, that would just frustrate them. It would be a bad user experience.’”
“Now what?” Greg pushed a dog away from him. Maya looked hurt.
“Now you’re a person of interest, Greg. You’re Googlestalked. Now you live your life with someone constantly looking over your shoulder. You know the mission statement, right? ‘Organize the world’s information.’ Everything. Give it five years, we’ll know how many turds were in the bowl before you flushed. Combine that with automated suspicion of anyone who matches a statistical picture of a bad guy and you’re—”
“Scroogled.”
“Totally.” She nodded.
Maya took both labs down the hall to the bedroom. He heard a muffled argument with her girlfriend, and she came back alone.
“I can fix this,” she said in an urgent whisper. “After the Chinese started rounding up people, my podmates and I made it our 20 percent project to fuck with them.” (Among Google’s business innovations was a rule that required every employee to devote 20 percent of his or her time to high-minded pet projects.) “We call it the Googlecleaner. It goes deep into the database and statistically normalizes you. Your searches, your Gmail histograms, your browsing patterns. All of it. Greg, I can Googleclean you. It’s the only way.”
“I don’t want you to get into trouble.”
She shook her head. “I’m already doomed
. Every day since I built the damn thing has been borrowed time. Now it’s just a matter of waiting for someone to point out my expertise and history to the DHS and, oh, I don’t know. Whatever it is they do to people like me in the war on abstract nouns.”
Greg remembered the airport. The search. His shirt, the boot print in the middle of it.
“Do it,” he said.
THE GOOGLECLEANER WORKED wonders. Greg could tell by the ads that popped up alongside his searches, ads clearly meant for someone else: “Intelligent Design Facts,” “Online Seminary Degree,” “Terror Free Tomorrow,” “Porn Blocker Software,” “The Homosexual Agenda,” “Cheap Toby Keith Tickets.” This was Maya’s program at work. Clearly Google’s new personalized search had him pegged as someone else entirely, a God-fearing right-winger with a thing for hat acts.
Which was fine by him.
Then he clicked on his address book, and found that half of his contacts were missing. His Gmail in-box was hollowed out like a termite-ridden stump. His Orkut profile, normalized. His calendar, family photos, bookmarks: all empty. He hadn’t quite realized before how much of him had migrated onto the Web and worked its way into Google’s server farms. His entire online identity. Maya had scrubbed him to a high gloss; he’d become the invisible man.
Greg sleepily mashed the keys on the laptop next to his bed, bringing the screen to life. He squinted at the flashing toolbar clock: 4:13 a.m.! Christ, who was pounding on his door at this hour?
He shouted, “Coming!” in a muzzy voice and pulled on a robe and slippers. He shuffled down the hallway, turning on lights as he went. At the door, he squinted through the peephole to find Maya staring glumly back at him.
He undid the chains and dead bolt and yanked the door open. Maya rushed in past him, followed by the dogs and her girlfriend.
She was sheened in sweat, her usually combed hair clinging in clumps to her forehead. She rubbed at her eyes, which were red and lined. “Pack a bag,” she croaked hoarsely.
“What?”
She took him by the shoulders. “Do it,” she said.
