Little Brother

Meanwhile, Van is half a head shorter than me, and skinny, with straight black hair that she wears in crazy, elaborate braids that she researches on the net. She's got pretty coppery skin and dark eyes, and she loves big glass rings the size of radishes, which click and clack together when she dances.

"Where's Jolu?" she said.

"How are you, Van?" Darryl asked in a choked voice. He always ran a step behind the conversation when it came to Van.

"I'm great, D. How's your every little thing?" Oh, she was a bad, bad person. Darryl nearly fainted.

Jolu saved him from social disgrace by showing up just then, in an oversize leather baseball jacket, sharp sneakers, and a meshback cap advertising our favorite Mexican masked wrestler,

El Santo Junior. Jolu is Jose Luis Torrez, the completing member of our foursome. He went to a superstrict Catholic school in the Outer Richmond, so it wasn't easy for him to get out. But he always did: no one exfiltrated like our Jolu. He liked his jacket because it hung down low which was pretty stylish in parts of the city and covered up all his Catholic school crap, which was like a bullseye for nosy jerks with the truancy moblog bookmarked on their phones.

"Who's ready to go?" I asked, once we'd all said hello. I pulled out my phone and showed them the map I'd downloaded to it on the BART. "Near as I can work out, we wanna go up to the Nikko again, then one block past it to O'Farrell, then left up toward Van Ness. Somewhere in there we should find the wireless signal."

Van made a face. "That's a nasty part of the Tenderloin." I couldn't argue with her. That part of San Francisco is one of the weird bits you go in through the Hilton's front entrance and it's all touristy stuff like the cablecar turnaround and family restaurants. Go through to the other side and you're in the 'Loin, where every tracked out transvestite hooker, hardcase pimp, hissing drug dealer and cracked up homeless person in town was concentrated. What they bought and sold, none of us were old enough to be a part of (though there were plenty of hookers our age plying their trade in the 'Loin.)

"Look on the bright side," I said. "The only time you want to go up around there is broad daylight. None of the other players are going to go near it until tomorrow at the earliest. This is what we in the ARG business call a monster head start."

Jolu grinned at me. "You make it sound like a good thing," he said.

"Beats eating uni," I said.

"We going to talk or we going to win?" Van said. After me, she was handsdown the most hardcore player in our group. She took winning very, very seriously.

We struck out, four good friends, on our way to decode a clue, win the game and lose everything we cared about, forever.

#

The physical component of today's clue was a set of GPS coordinates there were coordinates for all the major cities where Harajuku Fun Madness was played where we'd find a WiFi accesspoint's signal. That signal was being deliberately jammed by another, nearby WiFi point that was hidden so that it couldn't

Cory Doctorow/Little Brother/15 be spotted by conventional wifinders, little keyfobs that told you when you were within range of someone's open accesspoint, which you could use for free.

We'd have to track down the location of the "hidden" access point by measuring the strength of the "visible" one, finding the spot where it was most mysteriously weakest. There we'd find another clue last time it had been in the special of the day at Anzu, the swanky sushi restaurant in the Nikko hotel in the Tenderloin. The Nikko was owned by Japan Airlines, one of Harajuku Fun Madness's sponsors, and the staff had all made a big fuss over us when we finally tracked down the clue. They'd given us bowls of miso soup and made us try uni, which is sushi made from sea urchin, with the texture of very runny cheese and a smell like very runny dogdroppings.

But it tasted really good. Or so Darryl told me. I wasn't going to eat that stuff.

I picked up the WiFi signal with my phone's wifinder about three blocks up O'Farrell, just before Hyde Street, in front of a dodgy "Asian Massage Parlor" with a red blinking CLOSED sign in the window. The network's name was HarajukuFM, so we knew we had the right spot.

"If it's in there, I'm not going," Darryl said.

"You all got your wifinders?" I said.

Darryl and Van had phones with builtin wifinders, while Jolu, being too cool to carry a phone bigger than his pinky finger, had a separate little directional fob.

"OK, fan out and see what we see. You're looking for a sharp drop off in the signal that gets worse the more you move along it."

I took a step backward and ended up standing on someone's toes. A female voice said "oof" and I spun around, worried that some crackho was going to stab me for breaking her heels.

Instead, I found myself face to face with another kid my age.