Little Brother

  But I wasn’t scared then. The impending press conference, the fights with my parents, the international attention, the sense that there was a movement that was careening around the city like a wild pinball—it made my skin tingle and my blood sing.

  And she was beautiful, and smart, and clever and funny, and I was falling in love with her.

  Her shirt slid off. She arched her back to help me get it over her shoulders. She reached behind her and did something and her bra fell away. I stared goggle-eyed, motionless and breathless, and then she grabbed my shirt and pulled it over my head, grabbing me and pulling my bare chest to hers.

  We rolled on the bed and touched each other and ground our bodies together and groaned. She kissed all over my chest and I did the same to her. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t think, I could only move and kiss and lick and touch.

  We dared each other to go forward. I undid her jeans. She undid mine. I lowered her zipper, she did mine, and tugged my jeans off. I tugged off hers. A moment later we were both naked, except for my socks, which I peeled off with my toes.

  It was then that I caught sight of the bedside clock, which had long ago rolled onto the floor and lay there, glowing up at us.

  “Crap!” I yelped. “It starts in two minutes!” I couldn’t freaking believe that I was about to stop what I was about to stop doing, when I was about to stop doing it. I mean, if you’d asked me, “Marcus, you are about to get laid for the firstest time EVAR, will you stop if I let off this nuclear bomb in the same room as you?” the answer would have been a resounding and unequivical NO.

  And yet we stopped for this.

  She grabbed me and pulled my face to hers and kissed me until I thought I would pass out, then we both grabbed our clothes and more or less dressed, grabbing our keyboards and mice and heading for Patcheye Pete’s.

  You could easily tell who the press were: they were the noobs who played their characters like staggering drunks, weaving back and forth and up and down, trying to get the hang of it all, occasionally hitting the wrong key and offering strangers all or part of their inventory, or giving them accidental hugs and kicks.

  The Xnetters were easy to spot, too: we all played Clockwork Plunder whenever we had some spare time (or didn’t feel like doing our homework), and we had pretty tricked-out characters with cool weapons and booby traps on the keys sticking out of our backs that would cream anyone who tried to snatch them and leave us to wind down.

  When I appeared, a system status message displayed M1K3Y HAS ENTERED PATCHEYE PETE’S—WELCOME SWABBIE WE OFFER FAIR TRADE FOR FINE BOOTY. All the players on the screen froze, then they crowded around me. The chat exploded. I thought about turning on my voice-paging and grabbing a headset, but seeing how many people were trying to talk at once, I realized how confusing that would be. Text was much easier to follow and they couldn’t misquote me (heh heh).

  I’d scouted the location before with Ange—it was great campaigning with her, since we could both keep each other wound up. There was a high spot on a pile of boxes of salt rations that I could stand on and be seen from anywhere in the market.

  > Good evening and thank you all for coming. My name is M1k3y and I’m not the leader of anything. All around you are Xnetters who have as much to say about why we’re here as I do. I use the Xnet because I believe in freedom and the Constitution of the United States of America. I use Xnet because the DHS has turned my city into a police-state where we’re all suspected terrorists. I use Xnet because I think you can’t defend freedom by tearing up the Bill of Rights. I learned about the Constitution in a California school and I was raised to love my country for its freedom. If I have a philosophy, it is this:

  > Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

  > I didn’t write that, but I believe it. The DHS does not govern with my consent.

  > Thank you

  I’d written this the day before, bouncing drafts back and forth with Ange. Pasting it in only took a second, though it took everyone in the game a moment to read it. A lot of the Xnetters cheered, big showy pirate “Hurrah”s with raised sabers and pet parrots squawking and flying overhead.

  Gradually, the journalists digested it, too. The chat was running past fast, so fast you could barely read it, lots of Xnetters saying things like “Right on” and “America, love it or leave it” and “DHS go home” and “America out of San Francisco,” all slogans that had been big on the Xnet blogosphere.

  > M1k3y, this is Priya Rajneesh from the BBC. Yousay you’re not the leader of any movement, but do you believe there is a movement? Is it called the Xnet?

  Lots of answers. Some people said there wasn’t a movement, some said there was and lots of people had ideas about what it was called: Xnet, Little Brothers, Little Sisters and my personal favorite, the United States of America.

  They were really cooking. I let them go, thinking of what I could say. Once I had it, I typed,

  > I think that kind of answers your question, doesn’t it? There may be one or more movements and they may be called Xnet or not.

  > M1k3y, I’m Doug Christensen from the Washington Internet Daily. What do you think the DHS should be doing to prevent another attack on San Francisco, if what they’re doing isn’t successful.

  More chatter. Lots of people said that the terrorists and the government were the same—either literally, or just meaning that they were equally bad. Some said the government knew how to catch terrorists but preferred not to because “war presidents” got reelected.

  > I don’t know

  I typed finally.

  > I really don’t. I ask myself this question a lot because I don’t want to get blown up and I don’t want my city to get blown up. Here’s what I’ve figured out, though: if it’s the DHS’s job to keep us safe, they’re failing. All the crap they’ve done, none of it would stop the bridge from being blown up again. Tracing us around the city? Taking away our freedom? Making us suspicious of each other, turning us against each other? Calling dissenters traitors? The point of terrorism is to terrify us. The DHS terrifies me.

  > I don’t have any say in what the terrorists do to me, but if this is a free country then I should be able to at least say what my own cops do to me. I should be able to keep them from terrorizing me.

  > I know that’s not a good answer. Sorry.

  > What do you mean when you say that the DHS wouldn’t stop terrorists? How do you know?

  > Who are you?

  > I’m with the Sydney Morning Herald.

  > I’m 17 years old. I’m not a straight-A student or anything. Even so, I figured out how to make an Internet that they can’t wiretap. I figured out how to jam their person-tracking technology. I can turn innocent people into suspects and turn guilty people into innocents in their eyes. I could get metal onto an airplane or beat a no-fly list. I figured this stuff out by looking at the web and by thinking about it. If I can do it, terrorists can do it. They told us they took away our freedom to make us safe. Do you feel safe?

  > In Australia? Why yes I do

  The pirates all laughed.

  More journalists asked questions. Some were sympathetic, some were hostile. When I got tired, I handed my keyboard to Ange and let her be M1k3y for a while. It didn’t really feel like M1k3y and me were the same person anymore anyway. M1k3y was the kind of kid who talked to international journalists and inspired a movement. Marcus got suspended from school and fought with his dad and wondered if he was good enough for his kick-ass girlfriend.

  By 11 P.M. I’d had enough. Besides, my parents would be expecting me home soon. I logged out of the game and so did Ange and we lay there for a moment. I took her hand and she squeezed hard.
We hugged.

  She kissed my neck and murmured something.

  “What?”

  “I said I love you,” she said. “What, you want me to send you a telegram?”

  “Wow,” I said.

  “You’re that surprised, huh?”

  “No. Um. It’s just—I was going to say that to you.”

  “Sure you were,” she said, and bit the tip of my nose.

  “It’s just that I’ve never said it before,” I said. “So I was working up to it.”

  “You still haven’t said it, you know. Don’t think I haven’t noticed. We girls pick up on these things.”

  “I love you, Ange Carvelli,” I said.

  “I love you too, Marcus Yallow.”

  We kissed and nuzzled and I started to breathe hard and so did she. That’s when her mom knocked on the door.

  “Angela,” she said, “I think it’s time your friend went home, don’t you?”

  “Yes, Mother,” she said, and mimed swinging an axe. As I put my socks and shoes on, she muttered, “They’ll say, that Angela, she was such a good girl, who would have thought it, all the time she was in the backyard, helping her mother out by sharpening that hatchet.”

  I laughed. “You don’t know how easy you have it. There is no way my folks would leave us alone in my bedroom until 11 o’clock.”

  “11:45,” she said, checking her clock.

  “Crap!” I yelped and tied my shoes.

  “Go,” she said, “run and be free! Look both ways before crossing the road! Write if you get work! Don’t even stop for a hug! If you’re not out of here by the count of ten, there’s going to be trouble, mister. One. Two. Three.”

  I shut her up by leaping onto the bed, landing on her and kissing her until she stopped trying to count. Satisfied with my victory, I pounded down the stairs, my Xbox under my arm.

  Her mom was at the foot of the stairs. We’d only met a couple times. She looked like an older, taller version of Ange—Ange said her father was the short one—with contacts instead of glasses. She seemed to have tentatively classed me as a good guy, I and appreciated it.

  “Good night, Mrs. Carvelli,” I said.

  “Good night, Mr. Yallow,” she said. It was one of our little rituals, ever since I’d called her Mrs. Carvelli when we first met.

  I found myself standing awkwardly by the door.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “Um,” I said. “Thanks for having me over.”

  “You’re always welcome in our home, young man,” she said.

  “And thanks for Ange,” I said finally, hating how lame it sounded. But she smiled broadly and gave me a brief hug.

  “You’re very welcome,” she said.

  The whole bus ride home, I thought over the press conference, thought about Ange naked and writhing with me on her bed, thought about her mother smiling and showing me the door.

  My mom was waiting up for me. She asked me about the movie and I gave her the response I’d worked out in advance, cribbing from the review it had gotten in the Bay Guardian.

  As I fell asleep, the press conference came back. I was really proud of it. It had been so cool, to have all these big-shot journos show up in the game, to have them listen to me and to have them listen to all the people who believed in the same things as me. I dropped off with a smile on my lips.

  I should have known better.

  Xnet Leader: I Could Get Metal Onto An Airplane

  DHS Doesn’t Have My Consent To Govern

  Xnet Kids: USA Out Of San Francisco

  Those were the good headlines. Everyone sent me the articles to blog, but it was the last thing I wanted to do.

  I’d blown it, somehow. The press had come to my press conference and concluded that we were terrorists or terrorist dupes. The worst was the reporter on Fox News, who had apparently shown up anyway, and who devoted a ten-minute commentary to us, talking about our “criminal treason.” Her killer line, repeated on every news outlet I found, was:

  “They say they don’t have a name. I’ve got one for them. Let’s call these spoiled children Cal Qaeda. They do the terrorists’ work on the home front. When—not if, but when—California gets attacked again, these brats will be as much to blame as the House of Saud.”

  Leaders of the antiwar movement denounced us as fringe elements. One guy went on TV to say that he believed we had been fabricated by the DHS to discredit them.

  The DHS had their own press conference announcing that they would double the security in San Francisco. They held up an arphid cloner they’d found somewhere and demonstrated it in action, using it to stage a car theft, and warned everyone to be on the alert for young people behaving suspiciously, especially those whose hands were out of sight.

  They weren’t kidding. I finished my Kerouac paper and started in on a paper about the Summer of Love, the summer of 1967 when the antiwar movement and the hippies converged on San Francisco. The guys who founded Ben and Jerry’s—old hippies themselves—had founded a hippie museum in the Haight, and there were other archives and exhibits to see around town.

  But it wasn’t easy getting around. By the end of the week, I was getting frisked an average of four times a day. Cops checked my ID and questioned me about why I was out in the street, carefully eyeballing the letter from Chavez saying that I was suspended.

  I got lucky. No one arrested me. But the rest of the Xnet weren’t so lucky. Every night the DHS announced more arrests, “ringleaders” and “operatives” of Xnet, people I didn’t know and had never heard of, paraded on TV along with the arphid sniffers and other devices that had been in their pockets. They announced that the people were “naming names,” compromising the “Xnet network” and that more arrests were expected soon. The name “M1k3y” was often heard.

  Dad loved this. He and I watched the news together, him gloating, me shrinking away, quietly freaking out. “You should see the stuff they’re going to use on these kids,” Dad said. “I’ve seen it in action. They’ll get a couple of these kids and check out their friends lists on IM and the speed-dials on their phones, look for names that come up over and over, look for patterns, bringing in more kids. They’re going to unravel them like an old sweater.”

  I canceled Ange’s dinner at our place and started spending even more time there. Ange’s little sister Tina started to call me “the houseguest,” as in “is the houseguest eating dinner with me tonight?” I liked Tina. All she cared about was going out and partying and meeting guys, but she was funny and utterly devoted to Ange. One night as we were doing the dishes, she dried her hands and said, conversationally, “You know, you seem like a nice guy, Marcus. My sister’s just crazy about you and I like you, too. But I have to tell you something: if you break her heart, I will track you down and pull your scrotum over your head. It’s not a pretty sight.”

  I assured her that I would sooner pull my own scrotum over my head than break Ange’s heart and she nodded. “So long as we’re clear on that.”

  “Your sister is a nut,” I said as we lay on Ange’s bed again, looking at Xnet blogs. That is pretty much all we did: fool around and read Xnet.

  “Did she use the scrotum line on you? I hate it when she does that. She just loves the word ‘scrotum,’ you know. It’s nothing personal.”

  I kissed her. We read some more.

  “Listen to this,” she said. “Police project four to six hundred arrests this weekend in what they say will be the largest coordinated raid on Xnet dissidents to date.”

  I felt like throwing up.

  “We’ve got to stop this,” I said. “You know there are people who are doing more jamming to show that they’re not intimidated? Isn’t that just crazy?”

  “I think it’s brave,” she said. “We can’t let them scare us into submission.”

  “What? No, Ange, no. We can’t let hundreds of people go to jail. You haven’t been there. I have. It’s worse than you think. It’s worse than you can imagine.”

  “I have a pretty f
ertile imagination,” she said.

  “Stop it, okay? Be serious for a second. I won’t do this. I won’t send those people to jail. If I do, I’m the guy that Van thinks I am.”

  “Marcus, I’m being serious. You think that these people don’t know they could go to jail? They believe in the cause. You believe in it, too. Give them the credit to know what they’re getting into. It’s not up to you to decide what risks they can or can’t take.”

  “It’s my responsibility because if I tell them to stop, they’ll stop.”

  “I thought you weren’t the leader?”

  “I’m not, of course I’m not. But I can’t help it if they look to me for guidance. And so long as they do, I have a responsibility to help them stay safe. You see that, right?”

  “All I see is you getting ready to cut and run at the first sign of trouble. I think you’re afraid they’re going to figure out who you are. I think you’re afraid for you.”

  “That’s not fair,” I said, sitting up, pulling away from her.

  “Really? Who’s the guy who nearly had a heart attack when he thought that his secret identity was out?”

  “That was different,” I said. “This isn’t about me. You know it isn’t. Why are you being like this?”

  “Why are you like this?” she said. “Why aren’t you willing to be the guy who was brave enough to get all this started?”

  “This isn’t brave, it’s suicide.”

  “Cheap teenage melodrama, M1k3y.”

  “Don’t call me that!”

  “What, ‘M1k3y’? Why not, M1k3y?”

  I put my shoes on. I picked up my bag. I walked home.

  > Why I’m not jamming

  > I won’t tell anyone else what to do, because I’m not anyone’s leader, no matter what Fox News thinks.

  > But I am going to tell you what _I_ plan on doing. If you think that’s the right thing to do, maybe you’ll do it too.