Little Brother

She was totally h4wt that is to say, hot. It was like looking at that picture of a vase and noticing that it was also two faces. I could see that Van was just Van, but I could also see that she was hella pretty, something I'd never noticed.

Of course, Darryl had known it all along, and don't think that I wasn't bummed out anew when I realized this.

"You can't tell your dad, you know," she said. "You'd put us all at risk." Her eyes were closed and her chest was rising up and down with her breath, which was distracting in a really embarrassing way.

"Yeah," I said, glumly. "But the problem is that I know he's just totally full of it. If you pulled my dad over and made him prove he wasn't a childmolesting, drugdealing terrorist, he'd go berserk.

Totally offtherails.

He hates being put on hold when he calls about his creditcard bill. Being locked in the back of a car and questioned for an hour would give him an aneurism."

"They only get away with it because the normals feel smug compared to the abnormals. If everyone was getting pulled over, it'd be a disaster. No one would ever get anywhere, they'd all be waiting to get questioned by the cops. Total gridlock."

Woah.

"Van, you are a total genius," I said.

"Tell me about it," she said. She had a lazy smile and she looked at me through halflidded eyes, almost romantic.

"Seriously. We can do this. We can mess up the profiles easily.

Getting people pulled over is easy."

She sat up and pushed her hair off her face and looked at me. I felt a little flip in my stomach, thinking that she was really impressed with me.

"It's the arphid cloners," I said. "They're totally easy to make.

Just flash the firmware on a tendollar

Radio Shack reader/writer and you're done. What we do is go around and randomly swap the tags on people, overwriting their Fast Passes and FasTraks with other people's codes. That'll make everyone skew all weird and screwy, and make everyone look guilty. Then: total gridlock."

Van pursed her lips and lowered her shades and I realized she was so angry she couldn't speak.

"Good bye, Marcus," she said, and got to her feet. Before I knew it, she was walking away so fast she was practically running.

"Van!" I called, getting to my feet and chasing after her. "Van!

Wait!"

She picked up speed, making me run to catch up with her.

"Van, what the hell," I said, catching her arm. She jerked it away so hard I punched myself in the face.

"You're psycho, Marcus. You're going to put all your little Xnet buddies in danger for their lives, and on top of it, you're going to turn the whole city into terrorism suspects. Can't you stop before you hurt these people?"

I opened and closed my mouth a couple times. "Van, I'm not the problem, they are. I'm not arresting people, jailing them, making them disappear. The Department of Homeland Security are the ones doing that. I'm fighting back to make them stop."

"How, by making it worse?"

"Maybe it has to get worse to get better, Van. Isn't that what you were saying? If everyone was getting pulled over "

"That's not what I meant. I didn't mean you should get everyone

Cory Doctorow/Little Brother/52

arrested. If you want to protest, join the protest movement. Do something positive. Didn't you learn anything from Darryl?

Anything?"

"You're damned right I did," I said, losing my cool. "I learned that they can't be trusted. That if you're not fighting them, you're helping them. That they'll turn the country into a prison if we let them. What did you learn, Van? To be scared all the time, to sit tight and keep your head down and hope you don't get noticed?

You think it's going to get better? If we don't do anything, this is as good as it's going to get. It will only get worse and worse from now on. You want to help Darryl? Help me bring them down!"

There it was again. My vow. Not to get Darryl free, but to bring down the entire DHS. That was crazy, even I knew it. But it was what I planned to do. No question about it.

Van shoved me hard with both hands. She was strong from school athletics fencing, lacrosse, field hockey, all the girlsschool sports and I ended up on my ass on the disgusting San Francisco sidewalk. She took off and I didn't follow.

#

" The important thing about security systems isn't how they work, it's how they fail.

That was the first line of my first blog post on Open Revolt, my Xnet site. I was writing as M1k3y, and I was ready to go to war. " Maybe all the automatic screening is supposed to catch terrorists. Maybe it will catch a terrorist sooner or later.

The problem is that it catches us too, even though we're not doing anything wrong.

" The more people it catches, the more brittle it gets. If it catches too many people, it dies.

" Get the idea?

I pasted in my HOWTO for building a arphid cloner, and some tips for getting close enough to people to read and write their tags.