Little Brother

Normally that's a pretty scary neighborhood at 2AM on a Saturday night. That night it was a relief same old druggies and hookers and dealers and drunks. No cops with truncheons, no gas.

"Um," I said as we breathed in the night air. "Coffee?"

"Home," she said. "I think home for now. Coffee later."

"Yeah," I agreed. She lived up in Hayes Valley. I spotted a taxi rolling by and I hailed it. That was a small miracle there are hardly any cabs when you need them in San Francisco.

"Have you got cabfare home?"

"Yeah," she said. The cabdriver looked at us through his window. I opened the back door so he wouldn't take off.

"Good night," I said.

She put her hands behind my head and pulled my face toward her. She kissed me hard on the mouth, nothing sexual in it, but somehow more intimate for that.

"Good night," she whispered in my ear, and slipped into the

taxi.

Head swimming, eyes running, a burning shame for having left all those Xnetters to the tender mercies of the DHS and the SFPD, I set off for home.

#

Monday morning, Fred Benson was standing behind Ms Galvez's desk.

"Ms Galvez will no longer be teaching this class," he said, once we'd taken our seats. He had a selfsatisfied note that I recognized immediately. On a hunch, I checked out Charles. He was smiling like it was his birthday and he'd been given the best present in the world.

I put my hand up.

"Why not?"

"It's Board policy not to discuss employee matters with anyone except the employee and the disciplinary committee," he said, without even bothering to hide how much he enjoyed saying it.

"We'll be beginning a new unit today, on national security. Your SchoolBooks have the new texts. Please open them and turn to the first screen."

The opening screen was emblazoned with a DHS logo and the title: WHAT EVERY AMERICAN SHOULD KNOW ABOUT

HOMELAND SECURITY.

I wanted to throw my SchoolBook on the floor.

#

I'd made arrangements to meet Ange at a cafe in her neighborhood after school. I jumped on the BART and found myself sitting behind two guys in suits. They were looking at the San Francisco Chronicle, which featured a fullpage postmortem on the "youth riot" in Mission Dolores Park. They were tutting and clucking over it. Then one said to the other, "It's like they're brainwashed or something. Christ, were we ever that stupid?"

I got up and moved to another seat.

Chapter 13

This chapter is dedicated to BooksAMillion, a chain of gigantic bookstores spread across the USA. I first encountered BooksAMillion while staying at a hotel in Terre Haute, Indiana (I was giving a speech at the Rose Hulman Institute of Technology later that day). The store was next to my hotel and I really needed some reading material I'd been on the road for a solid month and I'd read everything in my suitcase, and I had another five cities to go before I headed home. As I stared intently at the shelves, a clerk asked me if I needed any help. Now, I've worked at bookstores before, and a knowledgeable clerk is worth her weight in gold, so I said sure, and started to describe my tastes, naming authors I'd enjoyed. The clerk smiled and said, "I've got just the book for you," and proceeded to take down a copy of my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. I busted out laughing, introduced myself, and had an absolutely lovely chat about science fiction that almost made me late to give my speech!

Cory Doctorow/Little Brother/80

BooksAMillion http://www.booksamillion.com/ncom/books? amp;isbn=0765319853

"They're total whores," Ange said, spitting the word out. "In fact, that's an insult to hardworking whores everywhere. They're, they're profiteers."

We were looking at a stack of newspapers we'd picked up and brought to the cafe. They all contained "reporting" on the party in Dolores Park and to a one, they made it sound like a drunken, druggy orgy of kids who'd attacked the cops. USA Today described the cost of the "riot" and included the cost of washing away the pepperspray residue from the gasbombing, the rash of asthma attacks that clogged the city's emergency rooms, and the cost of processing the eight hundred arrested "rioters."

No one was telling our side.

"Well, the Xnet got it right, anyway," I said. I'd saved a bunch of the blogs and videos and photostreams to my phone and I showed them to her. They were firsthand accounts from people who'd been gassed, and beaten up. The video showed us all dancing, having fun, showed the peaceful political speeches and the chant of "Take It Back" and Trudy Doo talking about us being the only generation that could believe in fighting for our freedoms.

"We need to make people know about this," she said.

"Yeah," I said, glumly. "That's a nice theory."