“Have yourself bathed, waxed, perfumed, and put into bed. I’ll be there in thirty-five minutes.”
“Aye, aye, Cap’n.”
The reunion, when it came, was just what I needed and then some. Both of us had been hurt. Ange had been gassed and trampled, arrested and freed, and while her story had some minor variations in its specifics, it came out to about the same thing as mine. She’d been with Lemmy through most of the process—they’d stayed together somehow, Lemmy bodily lifting Ange free of the crowd at one point when the crushing started, holding her over his head like a freaky circus act. She’d seen him again after they were released, and promised to call him as soon as she found me.
We talked about it for a few minutes, kissing each other in the places where we were bruised or hurt, holding each other, murmuring to each other, until sleep took us.
* * *
And the next day, I went to work.
Well, of course I did. It was Tuesday, and the election was coming up, and someone had to get Joseph Noss elected, and it was going to be me. A hundred times on the way to work, I reached for my phone—to make a reminder for myself, to send a text to Ange (who was still sleeping in my bed; her first class didn’t start until after lunch), to check the weather for that night, to read what my tweeps had to say. Each time, I thought, Crap, I’ve lost my phone. Got to call it from my laptop and talk to Dalia and arrange to get it back from her. Then I thought, Huh, I should really make a note about that, now, where’s my phone? And it began again. It was so funny I forgot to laugh.
I came through the door of the Joe for Senate office and stopped. Something was different. I couldn’t put my finger on it at first, and then I realized what it was.
Everyone was staring at me.
Every single person in the office was watching me with owl-eyed intensity, giving off a mixture of awe and fear. I gave a little half wave and took off my jacket and headed for my desk, plunked down in my seat, pulled out Lurch, and plugged in my monitor and keyboard and mouse and started entering the passwords that got my disks mounted and my network connection going. There was near-total silence as I did this, and it was so unnerving that I fatfingered my password twice before getting it.
I sat down at my computer and started going through my start-of-day routine: downloading my email, checking the server log summaries to see if we were in danger of running out of bits, kicking off my own personal backups—stationkeeping stuff I could have done while half asleep.
I started off half asleep—or half distracted—and so it was only after a few minutes that I pounced on my mouse and started unclosing the browser tabs I’d just closed, hammering on crtl-F12 with a series of whaps so hard I actually felt the spring under the key start to lose its sprungedness. I clicked and clicked again.
Then I got up from my desk and looked into the sea of stares. “Can someone please explain to me what the hell’s going on?”
* * *
As one, the whole office turned to look at Liam, who got up and came over to my desk.
“You wanna get a cup of coffee?” he said.
I realized that that was exactly what I wanted, more than pretty much anything in the entire goddamned universe. I let him steer me up to Dolores Park, stopping at the Turk’s to get a cup to go and a thermosful for after that. We perched on a bench and Liam waited patiently while I drank my first cup and poured myself a second one. Then he raised his eyebrows at me, silently asking if it was time to hear what he had to say. I nodded.
“Joe came into the office on Monday breathing fire. He kept asking where you were, getting Flor to call your phone, getting me to send you email. He had something he really, really wanted to talk to you about, and he couldn’t reach you, so finally, he came and got me. He said I got computers and the Internet and stuff and asked if I had access to our ‘web thing.’ Well, I knew where you kept the sealed envelope with the admin passwords, so the answer was technically yes.
“Then he told me about what you’d suggested at the protest, hosting all those darknet docs. He couldn’t believe that there were all these people in the streets of San Francisco pissed off about the kind of thing that was in those docs, but that they’d gotten practically no mainstream media publication and no one had made a political issue of it. He said that the Dems and the Republicans didn’t want to start everyone thinking about how corrupt the system was, how money bought policy, how scummy the whole Sacramento scene was at the state house. He’d been thinking about it all weekend and had decided that this was going to be the thing that made him different from the regular candidates. Flor tried to argue with him, but you know how he gets when he’s sure about something. He was sure.
“So he tried to explain to me what you’d suggested, some kind of voting system or something? He couldn’t really explain it. After a while, I said, ‘Look, I can pull down all the darknet docs and put them up on our server in a couple hours, but I have no idea how to do all this other stuff, and if I tried, I’d probably leave the whole thing in such an insecure mess that someone’d take us down and replace the whole site with pictures of penises in about ten seconds flat.’”
I winced. “So what did he say?”
“He said that he’d rather beg forgiveness than ask permission, and told me to just put all the docs up, now, and he’d take care of the rest. The next thing I knew, he was calling in the press team and the next thing I knew after that, they were all checking to see if we could handle the capacity if, like, millions of people all came to download the docs at once. I was like, erm, yeah, I think. I mean, I knew we were on a cloud machine that could expand if we needed it. I tried calling the data center, but I didn’t have your passphrase, so all they would tell me is that their servers could handle anything up to and including the entire state accessing us at once.”
“Is that what happened?” The server logs showed that our traffic had hit over a million simultaneous connections overnight, and the rate was climbing.
“Oh no,” he said. “Worse. I mean: ‘more.’ There was a lot of interest from out of state. At this rate, it’s like the whole world wants to know about it. I mean, you’ve seen the news, right? It was the lead on every broadcast yesterday, and it’s been trending on Twitter since about ten seconds after it went live. We’ve all been waiting for you to come in and get some decent analytics for it. I tried, but…” He shrugged. “Well, I’m just the T-shirt guy, right?”
I took a really, really deep breath. “I’ve been in jail.”
“I figured,” he said. “That was the leading theory. Joe was going to try to find your parents today if you didn’t show up. What happened to your phone, by the way? I’ve been calling and calling.”
“It’s a long story,” I said. I wondered why Dalia wasn’t answering the phone anymore. Maybe she was answering calls where the return number showed up as “Mom,” and ignoring the rest. Maybe the battery was dead. If that was the case, I wasn’t going to be able to get my phone back until she got in touch with me. Great. “Where’s Joe?”
“He’s doing a press conference about this at Rootstrikers,” he said. “They’re an activist group that does something with getting the money out of politics. They’re pretty excited about all this.”
“Huh,” I said, and reviewed what I’d just been told in my head. I mean, basically they’d taken my idea and run with it, and it had worked out well. So far, anyway. I wondered how long it could last, and decided that wasn’t my job. My job was to keep the website online while Joe was off being Joe. The coffee was in my veins now, turning my thick, sluggish blood into quicksilver. It was time to go make some technology work. I was good at that.
Meantime, though: “What about the other thing, the vote-getting machine?”
“Yeah,” Liam said. “That. He told me about it, but I couldn’t really figure out what he was talking about. Something to mine your social-media contacts?”
“Basically,” I said, and ran it down for him.
“Oh,” he said. “That i
s awesome. And we could use the whole thing as a decision-making process, any time some big campaign issue comes up, or after he’s in office, get the whole Joe for Senate machine to have instant runoff polls to see what we should do. That sounds wicked. Are we doing that, too?”
“That depends on whether we can find the time, now that the darknet docs are live.” It’s funny, even though the darknet docs had basically taken over my life, I was a lot more excited about this vote-getting machine, and half wished that I could just focus on that. I’d have to find some time to do it.
* * *
But first, I had to harden our infrastructure.
I figured the first thing to do was get us spanned out across a lot of cloud servers. My predecessor had gotten us hosted on Amazon’s cloud, which was as robust as they came, an inconceivable network of humming racks in data centers all over the world, overseen by labcoated priests who could diagnose and swap out a faulty component in two minutes flat, fed by twisted fiber-optic bundles as thick as my arm, and cooled by enormous chillers with carbon footprints the size of cities. Amazon was a great choice if you wanted to get hosted by someone who’d keep your servers online no matter how popular they got.
However, they were a terrible choice for hosting your data if you were worried about the police going bugnuts on you. You see, the police don’t necessarily know how to seize just one customer’s data from a global network of server racks. If you’re doing something with your data that was going to really interest the cops, then you had to be prepared for someone powerful calling up Amazon’s lawyers and saying, “We need to investigate one of your customers, and since we don’t know how to take one customer’s data off your servers, we’re coming over with a couple of sixteen wheelers and taking it all away until we finish our investigations.” Or, as the Godfather might have said, “Nice cloud; it’d be a shame if something were to happen to it.”
Amazon had a lot, so they had a lot to lose, and while they’d been a good choice for our nice, boring campaign site, they sucked at providing infrastructure for ground zero in the new infowar. I’d heard a seminar about this from some of the Tor hackers at Noisebridge, and they’d mentioned a bunch of ballsy, free-speech-oriented cloud providers that could take us on. They were the projects of eccentric weirdos, free-speech nuts; bashed-together hackerspace side projects; sketchy-sketchy services with one foot in the porn industry and the other in organized crime. Most of them couldn’t take a credit card payment because they’d been cut off by everyone from American Express to Visa to Mastercard to PayPal. Instead, they received payment through wire transfers, Western Union money orders, and other weird and cumbersome measures. I groaned and facepalmed and went and talked to Flor about this.
I’d been afraid to face Flor. I remembered her warning about dragging the campaign into anything “leet” and had a feeling that she was probably already furious with me. But I hadn’t bargained on what it meant for the idea to come from Joe. Joe and Flor may have argued about this, but once Joe won the argument, Flor was behind him a hundred percent. Like most of us, she was ready to march into the sun for him, and as soon as I made it clear why I needed her to take the campaign credit card down the street to a liquor store and buy a Western Union order for a random dude—I didn’t even know where he lived—she agreed.
“Just let me talk to him first,” she said. I had a moment’s impatience, because I felt like my parent wanted to look over my homework—finding bulletproof web hosting was my department. But then she got on the phone with the guy I’d chosen and exchanged some quick IMs with, and quickly negotiated better terms than I’d been able to get, including thirty-day billing for our future bandwidth bills and a 24/7 cellular number for support calls.
“Sounds like a good guy,” she said, as she pulled on her jacket and picked up her purse and marched out into the Mission to find a Western Union office.
* * *
Joe got back in the late afternoon, just as I was finishing the switchover to our new host. I had set up two more backup clouds for us to move onto if we needed to, one in a country I’d never heard of in Central Asia. Flor had gone out for two more money orders and I’d written the scripts to keep us all in sync. I also made sure to register a bunch of variants on our domain, joenossforsenate.com, in other countries, snagging the .se (Sweden) and the .nz (New Zealand), figuring that it would be a lot harder to convince two countries on the other side of the planet with totally different legal systems to nuke our DNS than it would be to just get Verisign, who runs all the .com domains, to take down the U.S. version.
Joe listened to me report on all this and nodded his head soberly. “Marcus,” he said, “I knew you’d be the right guy for this. Thanks for all the good thought and hard work you put into this. Now, Flor tells me you’ve been in jail. Were you at the chicken farm?”
I found that my voice had disappeared and tears had welled up behind my eyes. I nodded silently.
Normally, Joe looked, well, statesmanlike is probably the best word for it. Like someone who might be photographed at any instant and, if he was, would look as though he were carefully considering how to pilot the nation and its interests. But for an instant, something flashed to the surface that I’d never seen on his face before, a momentary glimpse of something like an Old Testament prophet who’s about to lay down some smiting on a foolish tribe that had strayed from the path. The fact that he felt that way on my behalf made it all the more powerful—made me like him even more.
“Marcus,” he said. “I have been around the block a few times. I’ve seen all manner of brutalities inflicted in the name of public order and keeping the peace. But the premeditation of what happened to you and the others, the sheer militarization of it—” He shook his head. “All I can say is, it’s not to be tolerated. The fact that the SFPD had prepared for the future of protest by buying fleets of gas-spraying drones and turning a titanic building into an internment center—it can’t stand. It won’t. I’m sure you’ve heard about the class action suits pending against the city.” I hadn’t, but then I hadn’t been doing anything except trying to get our infrastructure secured. “As someone who served in this city’s government for many years, I wouldn’t blame you if you joined them.”
“Thank you,” I said. The lump in my throat had gone down, and Joe had regained his normal “statesman” look. We were back to baseline.
“Now, about these documents. I’m sorry if I stepped on your toes by having Liam work on this while you were away. He told me that he couldn’t do as good a job as you could, but perfection wasn’t as important as timeliness. There was a lot of interest in those documents after the demonstrations, and I felt that we could seize on that interest if we moved quickly.”
“Uh,” I said. He was apologizing to me? “Well, it’s your campaign, right? I’m not going to chew you out for running it the way you want to.”
He smiled. “Yes, of course. But I hired you to do a job, and the last thing I want to do is make it harder for you to do that job.”
I waved him off. “I don’t mind, really. But is it working?”
There was another flash, and I got a glimpse of Joe Noss, the imp. The glee in his eyes was unmistakable. “Oh, it’s working. I’ve gotten more airtime in the past twenty-four hours than I have for the whole campaign. Everyone seems to get the connection between the weekend’s events and the documents we’re publishing. We can barely keep up with the requests to act as official campaign volunteers, going through all that data and making sense of it. I only check in a few times a day, but from what I hear, there’s plenty there for Sacramento—and the rest of the country—to chew on. My advisory committee squawked and one of them quit. They’re worried, sensibly enough, that there’s stuff in that archive that could expose us to liability, and they’re right to worry. I tried to explain to Liam what you’d suggested about this but—” He spread his hands and shrugged.
“I know,” I said. “He told me.” I’d been giving that some thought. “I bet I can get
it up now, though. I was going to try and do the moderation system tonight, see if I couldn’t bang something together that would only show the public the checked documents. Sounds like we could use the volunteers to go through what’s left pretty quickly, assuming you trust them. And then we’re going to get to work on this vote-getting machine, somewhere for all that positive energy to go.”
“I trust them to do a better job than is being done now,” he said. “They’re substantially better than nothing. But Marcus, you have been in jail, you’ve been gassed, you’ve been beaten. I don’t expect you to work through the night, too.”
I shrugged. “It’s not that hard,” I said. “I mean, no big deal. I’ve pulled plenty of all-nighters, and—”
He held his hands up and I fell silent. “Let me put this another way: as your employer, I don’t want you to work on this until you’ve gotten a good night’s sleep and had a chance to see your loved ones and start to recover from your trauma. It’s not a request, Marcus, it’s an order.”
Part of me wanted to argue, but I told that part to shut up. “Yes, sir,” I said.
“Good man,” he said. “But if you should want to stay a little late tonight and possibly turn up a little early tomorrow, I wouldn’t take it amiss.”
“Yes, sir!” I said.
“Good man,” he repeated.
* * *
Mom and Dad were surprisingly cool about everything. I tried about six Skype calls to my old phone, but Dalia wasn’t answering. Finally, I gave up and dialed into it and picked up my voicemail (about a million messages from Mom, Dad, Ange, Liam, Flor, and Joe, preceded by a series of panicked calls from a woman speaking Arabic whom I took to be Dalia’s mother, who must have had kittens when her conversation with her daughter was so rudely cut short and redialed my number). Then I found an old phone and brought its firmware up to date and stuck in a pay-as-you-go SIM I bought at the Walgreens down the hill and changed the outgoing voicemail on the old phone to a message telling people to use this number until I could get a new SIM from my phone carrier.