this chapter is dedicated to the university bookstore at the universityof washington, whose science fiction section rivals many specialtystores, thanks to the sharp-eyed, dedicated science fiction buyer, duanewilkins. duance's a real science fiction fan — i first met him at theworld science fiction convention in toronto in 2003 — and it showsin the eclectic and informed choices on display at the store. one greatpredictor of a great bookstore is the quality of the "shelf review" — thelittle bits of cardboard stuck to the shelves with (generally hand-lettered)staff-reviews extolling the virtues of books you might otherwise miss.
the staff at the university bookstore have clearly benefited fromduane's tutelage, as the shelf reviews at the university bookstore aresecond to none.
the university bookstore 4326 university way ne, seattle, wa 98105usa +1 800 335 readjolu stood up.
"this is where it starts, guys. this is how we know which side you'reon. you might not be willing to take to the streets and get busted foryour beliefs, but if you have beliefs, this will let us know it. this will cre-ate the web of trust that tells us who's in and who's out. if we're ever go-ing to get our country back, we need to do this. we need to dosomething like this."someone in the audience — it was ange — had a hand up, holding abeer bottle.
"so call me stupid but i don't understand this at all. why do you wantus to do this?"jolu looked at me, and i looked back at him. it had all seemed so obvi-ous when we were organizing it. "the xnet isn't just a way to play freegames. it's the last open communications network in america. it's thelast way to communicate without being snooped on by the dhs. for it to140work we need to know that the person we're talking to isn't a snoop.
that means that we need to know that the people we're sending mes-sages to are the people we think they are.
"that's where you come in. you're all here because we trust you. imean, really trust you. trust you with our lives."some of the people groaned. it sounded melodramatic and stupid.
i got back to my feet.
"when the bombs went off," i said, then something welled up in mychest, something painful. "when the bombs went off, there were four ofus caught up by market street. for whatever reason, the dhs decidedthat made us suspicious. they put bags over our heads, put us on a shipand interrogated us for days. they humiliated us. played games with ourminds. then they let us go.
"all except one person. my best friend. he was with us when theypicked us up. he'd been hurt and he needed medical care. he nevercame out again. they say they never saw him. they say that if we evertell anyone about this, they'll arrest us and make us disappear.
"forever."i was shaking. the shame. the goddamned shame. jolu had the lighton me.
"oh christ," i said. "you people are the first ones i've told. if this storygets around, you can bet they'll know who leaked it. you can bet they'llcome knocking on my door." i took some more deep breaths. "that's whyi volunteered on the xnet. that's why my life, from now on, is aboutfighting the dhs. with every breath. every day. until we're free again.
any one of you could put me in jail now, if you wanted to."ange put her hand up again. "we're not going to rat on you," she said.
"no way. i know pretty much everyone here and i can promise you that.
i don't know how to know who to trust, but i know who not to trust: oldpeople. our parents. grownups. when they think of someone beingspied on, they think of someone else, a bad guy. when they think ofsomeone being caught and sent to a secret prison, it's someone else —someone brown, someone young, someone foreign.
"they forget what it's like to be our age. to be the object of suspicionall the time! how many times have you gotten on the bus and had everyperson on it give you a look like you'd been gargling turds and skinningpuppies?
141"what's worse, they're turning into adults younger and younger outthere. back in the day, they used to say 'never trust anyone over 30.' isay, 'don't trust any bastard over 25!'"that got a laugh, and she laughed too. she was pretty, in a weird,horsey way, with a long face and a long jaw. "i'm not really kidding, youknow? i mean, think about it. who elected these ass-clowns? who letthem invade our city? who voted to put the cameras in our classroomsand follow us around with creepy spyware chips in our transit passesand cars? it wasn't a 16-year-old. we may be dumb, we may be young,but we're not scum.""i want that on a t-shirt," i said.
"it would be a good one," she said. we smiled at each other.
"where do i go to get my keys?" she said, and pulled out her phone.
"we'll do it over there, in the secluded spot by the caves. i'll take youin there and set you up, then you do your thing and take the machinearound to your friends to get photos of your public key so they can signit when they get home."i raised my voice. "oh! one more thing! jesus, i can't believe i forgotthis. delete those photos once you've typed in the keys! the last thing wewant is a flickr stream full of pictures of all of us conspiring together."there was some good-natured, nervous chuckling, then jolu turnedout the light and in the sudden darkness i could see nothing. gradually,my eyes adjusted and i set off for the cave. someone was walking behindme. ange. i turned and smiled at her, and she smiled back, luminousteeth in the dark.
"thanks for that," i said. "you were great.""you mean what you said about the bag on your head andeverything?""i meant it," i said. "it happened. i never told anyone, but it happened."i thought about it for a moment. "you know, with all the time that wentby since, without saying anything, it started to feel like a bad dream. itwas real though." i stopped and climbed up into the cave. "i'm glad i fi-nally told people. any longer and i might have started to doubt my ownsanity."i set up the laptop on a dry bit of rock and booted it from the dvdwith her watching. "i'm going to reboot it for every person. this is astandard paranoidlinux disc, though i guess you'd have to take myword for it."142"hell," she said. "this is all about trust, right?""yeah," i said. "trust."i retreated some distance as she ran the key-generator, listening to hertyping and mousing to create randomness, listening to the crash of thesurf, listening to the party noises from over where the beer was.
she stepped out of the cave, carrying the laptop. on it, in huge whiteluminous letters, were her public key and her fingerprint and email ad-dress. she held the screen up beside her face and waited while i got myphone out.
"cheese," she said. i snapped her pic and dropped the camera back inmy pocket. she wandered off to the revelers and let them each get pics ofher and the screen. it was festive. fun. she really had a lot of charisma —you didn't want to laugh at her, you just wanted to laugh with her. andhell, it was funny! we were declaring a secret war on the secret police.
who the hell did we think we were?
so it went, through the next hour or so, everyone taking pictures andmaking keys. i got to meet everyone there. i knew a lot of them — somewere my invitees — and the others were friends of my pals or my pals'
pals. we should all be buddies. we were, by the time the night was out.
they were all good people.
once everyone was done, jolu went to make a key, and then turnedaway, giving me a sheepish grin. i was past my anger with him, though.
he was doing what he had to do. i knew that no matter what he said,he'd always be there for me. and we'd been through the dhs jail togeth-er. van too. no matter what, that would bind us together forever.
i did my key and did the perp-walk around the gang, letting everyonesnap a pic. then i climbed up on the high spot i'd spoken from earlierand called for everyone's attention.
"so a lot of you have noted that there's a vital flaw in this procedure:
what if this laptop can't be trusted? what if it's secretly recording our in-structions? what if it's spying on us? what if jose-luis and i can't betrusted?"more good-natured chuckles. a little warmer than before, more beery.
"i mean it," i said. "if we were on the wrong side, this could get all ofus — all of you — into a heap of trouble. jail, maybe."the chuckles turned more nervous.
143"so that's why i'm going to do this," i said, and picked up a hammeri'd brought from my dad's toolkit. i set the laptop down beside me onthe rock and swung the hammer, jolu following the swing with his key-chain light. crash — i'd always dreamt of killing a laptop with a ham-mer, and here i was doing it. it felt pornographically good. and bad.
smash! the screen-panel fell off, shattered into millions of pieces, ex-posing the keyboard. i kept hitting it, until the keyboard fell off, expos-ing the motherboard and the hard-drive. crash! i aimed square for thehard-drive, hitting it with everything i had. it took three blows beforethe case split, exposing the fragile media inside. i kept hitting it untilthere was nothing bigger than a cigarette lighter, then i put it all in agarbage bag. the crowd was cheering wildly — loud enough that i actu-ally got worried that someone far above us might hear over the surf andcall the law.
"all right!" i called. "now, if you'd like to accompany me, i'm going tomarch this down to the sea and soak it in salt water for ten minutes."i didn't have any takers at first, but then ange came forward and tookmy arm in her warm hand and said, "that was beautiful," in my ear andwe marched down to the sea together.
it was perfectly dark by the sea, and treacherous, even with our key-chain lights. slippery, sharp rocks that were difficult enough to walk oneven without trying to balance six pounds of smashed electronics in aplastic bag. i slipped once and thought i was going to cut myself up, butshe caught me with a surprisingly strong grip and kept me upright. iwas pulled in right close to her, close enough to smell her perfume,which smelled like new cars. i love that smell.
"thanks," i managed, looking into the big eyes that were further mag-nified by her mannish, black-rimmed glasses. i couldn't tell what colorthey were in the dark, but i guessed something dark, based on her darkhair and olive complexion. she looked mediterranean, maybe greek orspanish or italian.
i crouched down and dipped the bag in the sea, letting it fill with saltwater. i managed to slip a little and soak my shoe, and i swore and shelaughed. we'd hardly said a word since we lit out for the ocean. therewas something magical in our wordless silence.
at that point, i had kissed a total of three girls in my life, not countingthat moment when i went back to school and got a hero's welcome.
that's not a gigantic number, but it's not a minuscule one, either. i havereasonable girl radar, and i think i could have kissed her. she wasn't144h4wt in the traditional sense, but there's something about a girl and anight and a beach, plus she was smart and passionate and committed.
but i didn't kiss her, or take her hand. instead we had a moment that ican only describe as spiritual. the surf, the night, the sea and the rocks,and our breathing. the moment stretched. i sighed. this had been quitea ride. i had a lot of typing to do tonight, putting all those keys into mykeychain, signing them and publishing the signed keys. starting the webof trust.
she sighed too.
"let's go," i said.
"yeah," she said.
back we went. it was a good night, that night.
jolu waited after for his brother's friend to come by and pick up hiscoolers. i walked with everyone else up the road to the nearest munistop and got on board. of course, none of us was using an issued munipass. by that point, xnetters habitually cloned someone else's muni passthree or four times a day, assuming a new identity for every ride.
it was hard to stay cool on the bus. we were all a little drunk, andlooking at our faces under the bright bus lights was kind of hilarious. wegot pretty loud and the driver used his intercom to tell us to keep itdown twice, then told us to shut up right now or he'd call the cops.
that set us to giggling again and we disembarked in a mass before hedid call the cops. we were in north beach now, and there were lots ofbuses, taxis, the bart at market street, neon-lit clubs and cafes to pullapart our grouping, so we drifted away.
i got home and fired up my xbox and started typing in keys from myphone's screen. it was dull, hypnotic work. i was a little drunk, and itlulled me into a half-sleep.
i was about ready to nod off when a new im window popped up.
>
herro!
i didn't recognize the handle — spexgril — but i had an idea whomight be behind it.
>
hi145i typed, cautiously.
>
it's me, from tonightthen she paste-bombed a block of crypto. i'd already entered her pub-lic key into my keychain, so i told the im client to try decrypting thecode with the key.
>
it's me, from tonightit was her!
>
fancy meeting you herei typed, then encrypted it to my public key and mailed it off.
>
it was great meeting youi typed.
>
you too. i don't meet too many smart guys who are also cute and alsosocially aware. good god, man, you don't give a girl much of a chance.
my heart hammered in my chest.
>
hello? tap tap? this thing on? i wasn't born here folks, but i'm suredying here. don't forget to tip your waitresses, they work hard. i'm hereall week.
i laughed aloud.
>
i'm here, i'm here. laughing too hard to type is all>
well at least my im comedy-fu is still mightyum.
>
it was really great to meet you too>
yeah, it usually is. where are you taking me?
146>
taking you?
>
on our next adventure?
>
i didn't really have anything planned>
oki — then i'll take you. friday. dolores park. illegal open air con-cert. be there or be a dodecahedron>
wait what?
>
don't you even read xnet? it's all over the place. you ever hear of thespeedwhores?
i nearly choked. that was trudy doo's band — as in trudy doo, thewoman who had paid me and jolu to update the indienet code.
>
yeah i've heard of them>
they're putting on a huge show and they've got like fifty bands signedto play the bill, going to set up on the tennis courts and bring out theirown amp trucks and rock out all nighti felt like i'd been living under a rock. how had i missed that? therewas an anarchist bookstore on valencia that i sometimes passed on theway to school that had a poster of an old revolutionary named emmagoldman with the caption "if i can't dance, i don't want to be a part ofyour revolution." i'd been spending all my energies on figuring out howto use the xnet to organize dedicated fighters so they could jam the dhs,but this was so much cooler. a big concert — i had no idea how to doone of those, but i was glad someone did.
and now that i thought of it, i was damned proud that they were us-ing the xnet to do it.
the next day i was a zombie. ange and i had chatted — flirted — until4am. lucky for me, it was a saturday and i was able to sleep in, but147between the hangover and the sleep-dep, i could barely put twothoughts together.
by lunchtime, i managed to get up and get my ass out onto the streets.
i staggered down toward the turk's to buy my coffee — these days, if iwas alone, i always bought my coffee there, like the turk and i were partof a secret club.
on the way, i passed a lot of fresh graffiti. i liked mission graffiti; a lotof the times, it came in huge, luscious murals, or sarcastic art-studentstencils. i liked that the mission's taggers kept right on going, under thenose of the dhs. another kind of xnet, i supposed — they must have allkinds of ways of knowing what was going on, where to get paint, whatcameras worked. some of the cameras had been spray-painted over, inoticed.
maybe they used xnet!
painted in ten-foot-high letters on the side of an auto-yard's fence werethe drippy words: don't trust anyone over 25.
i stopped. had someone left my "party" last night and come here witha can of paint? a lot of those people lived in the neighborhood.
i got my coffee and had a little wander around town. i kept thinking ishould be calling someone, seeing if they wanted to get a movie orsomething. that's how it used to be on a lazy saturday like this. but whowas i going to call? van wasn't talking to me, i didn't think i was readyto talk to jolu, and darryl —well, i couldn't call darryl.
i got my coffee and went home and did a little searching around onthe xnet's blogs. these anonablogs were untraceable to any author —unless that author was stupid enough to put her name on it — and therewere a lot of them. most of them were apolitical, but a lot of themweren't. they talked about schools and the unfairness there. they talkedabout the cops. tagging.
turned out there'd been plans for the concert in the park for weeks. ithad hopped from blog to blog, turning into a full-blown movementwithout my noticing. and the concert was called don't trust anyoneover 25.
well, that explained where ange got it. it was a good slogan.
148monday morning, i decided i wanted to check out that anarchist book-store again, see about getting one of those emma goldman posters. ineeded the reminder.
i detoured down to 16th and mission on my way to school, then up tovalencia and across. the store was shut, but i got the hours off the doorand made sure they still had that poster up.
as i walked down valencia, i was amazed to see how much of thedon't trust anyone over 25 stuff there was. half the shops haddon't trust merch in the windows: lunchboxes, babydoll tees, pencil-boxes, trucker hats. the hipster stores have been getting faster and faster,of course. as new memes sweep the net in the course of a day or two,stores have gotten better at putting merch in the windows to match.
some funny little youtube of a guy launching himself with jet-packsmade of carbonated water would land in your inbox on monday and bytuesday you'd be able to buy t-shirts with stills from the video on it.
but it was amazing to see something make the leap from xnet to thehead shops. distressed designer jeans with the slogan written in carefulhigh school ball-point ink. embroidered patches.
good news travels fast.
it was written on the black-board when i got to ms galvez's socialstudies class. we all sat at our desks, smiling at it. it seemed to smileback. there was something profoundly cheering about the idea that wecould all trust each other, that the enemy could be identified. i knew itwasn't entirely true, but it wasn't entirely false either.
ms galvez came in and patted her hair and set down her schoolbookon her desk and powered it up. she picked up her chalk and turnedaround to face the board. we all laughed. good-naturedly, but welaughed.
she turned around and was laughing too. "inflation has hit the nation'sslogan-writers, it seems. how many of you know where this phrasecomes from?"we looked at each other. "hippies?" someone said, and we laughed.
hippies are all over san francisco, both the old stoner kinds with giantskanky beards and tie-dyes, and the new kind, who are more into dress-up and maybe playing hacky-sack than protesting anything.
"well, yes, hippies. but when we think of hippies these days, we justthink of the clothes and the music. clothes and music were incidental tothe main part of what made that era, the sixties, important.
149"you've heard about the civil rights movement to end segregation,white and black kids like you riding buses into the south to sign upblack voters and protest against official state racism. california was oneof the main places where the civil rights leaders came from. we've al-ways been a little more political than the rest of the country, and this isalso a part of the country where black people have been able to get thesame union factory jobs as white people, so they were a little better offthan their cousins in the southland.
"the students at berkeley sent a steady stream of freedom riders south,and they recruited them from information tables on campus, at bancroftand telegraph avenue. you've probably seen that there are still tablesthere to this day.
"well, the campus tried to shut them down. the president of the uni-versity banned political organizing on campus, but the civil rights kidswouldn't stop. the police tried to arrest a guy who was handing out lit-erature from one of these tables, and they put him in a van, but 3,000 stu-dents surrounded the van and refused to let it budge. they wouldn't letthem take this kid to jail. they stood on top of the van and gave speechesabout the first amendment and free speech.
"that galvanized the free speech movement. that was the start of thehippies, but it was also where more radical student movements camefrom. black power groups like the black panthers — and later gay rightsgroups like the pink panthers, too. radical women's groups, even'lesbian separatists' who wanted to abolish men altogether! and the yip-pies. anyone ever hear of the yippies?""didn't they levitate the pentagon?" i said. i'd once seen a document-ary about this.
she laughed. "i forgot about that, but yes, that was them! yippies werelike very political hippies, but they weren't serious the way we think ofpolitics these days. they were very playful. pranksters. they threwmoney into the new york stock exchange. they circled the pentagonwith hundreds of protestors and said a magic spell that was supposed tolevitate it. they invented a fictional kind of lsd that you could sprayonto people with squirt-guns and shot each other with it and pretendedto be stoned. they were funny and they made great tv — one yippie, aclown called wavy gravy, used to get hundreds of protestors to dress uplike santa claus so that the cameras would show police officers arrestingand dragging away santa on the news that night — and they mobilized alot of people.
150"their big moment was the democratic national convention in 1968,where they called for demonstrations to protest the vietnam war. thou-sands of demonstrators poured into chicago, slept in the parks, andpicketed every day. they had lots of bizarre stunts that year, like run-ning a pig called pigasus for the presidential nomination. the police andthe demonstrators fought in the streets — they'd done that many timesbefore, but the chicago cops didn't have the smarts to leave the reportersalone. they beat up the reporters, and the reporters retaliated by finallyshowing what really went on at these demonstrations, so the wholecountry watched their kids being really savagely beaten down by the ch-icago police. they called it a 'police riot.'
"the yippies loved to say, 'never trust anyone over 30.' they meantthat people who were born before a certain time, when america hadbeen fighting enemies like the nazis, could never understand what itmeant to love your country enough to refuse to fight the vietnamese.
they thought that by the time you hit 30, your attitudes would be frozenand you couldn't ever understand why the kids of the day were taking tothe streets, dropping out, freaking out.
"san francisco was ground zero for this. revolutionary armies werefounded here. some of them blew up buildings or robbed banks for theircause. a lot of those kids grew up to be more or less normal, while oth-ers ended up in jail. some of the university dropouts did amazing things— for example, steve jobs and steve wozniak, who founded applecomputers and invented the pc."i was really getting into this. i knew a little of it, but i'd never heard ittold like this. or maybe it had never mattered as much as it did now.
suddenly, those lame, solemn, grown-up street demonstrations didn'tseem so lame after all. maybe there was room for that kind of action inthe xnet movement.
i put my hand up. "did they win? did the yippies win?"she gave me a long look, like she was thinking it over. no one said aword. we all wanted to hear the answer.
"they didn't lose," she said. "they kind of imploded a little. some ofthem went to jail for drugs or other things. some of them changed theirtunes and became yuppies and went on the lecture circuit telling every-one how stupid they'd been, talking about how good greed was and howdumb they'd been.
"but they did change the world. the war in vietnam ended, and thekind of conformity and unquestioning obedience that people had called151patriotism went out of style in a big way. black rights, women's rightsand gay rights came a long way. chicano rights, rights for disabledpeople, the whole tradition of civil liberties was created or strengthenedby these people. today's protest movement is the direct descendant ofthose struggles.""i can't believe you're talking about them like this," charles said. hewas leaning so far in his seat he was half standing, and his sharp, skinnyface had gone red. he had wet, large eyes and big lips, and when he gotexcited he looked a little like a fish.
ms galvez stiffened a little, then said, "go on, charles.""you've just described terrorists. actual terrorists. they blew up build-ings, you said. they tried to destroy the stock exchange. they beat upcops, and stopped cops from arresting people who were breaking thelaw. they attacked us!"ms galvez nodded slowly. i could tell she was trying to figure outhow to handle charles, who really seemed like he was ready to pop.
"charles raises a good point. the yippies weren't foreign agents, theywere american citizens. when you say 'they attacked us,' you need tofigure out who 'they' and 'us' are. when it's your fellow countrymen —""crap!" he shouted. he was on his feet now. "we were at war then.
these guys were giving aid and comfort to the enemy. it's easy to tellwho's us and who's them: if you support america, you're us. if you sup-port the people who are shooting at americans, you're them.""does anyone else want to comment on this?"several hands shot up. ms galvez called on them. some people poin-ted out that the reason that the vietnamese were shooting at americansis that the americans had flown to vietnam and started running aroundthe jungle with guns. others thought that charles had a point, thatpeople shouldn't be allowed to do illegal things.
everyone had a good debate except charles, who just shouted atpeople, interrupting them when they tried to get their points out. msgalvez tried to get him to wait for his turn a couple times, but he wasn'thaving any of it.
i was looking something up on my schoolbook, something i knew i'dread.
i found it. i stood up. ms galvez looked expectantly at me. the otherpeople followed her gaze and went quiet. even charles looked at meafter a while, his big wet eyes burning with hatred for me.
152"i wanted to read something," i said. "it's short. 'governments are insti-tuted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of thegoverned, that whenever any form of government becomes destructiveof these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to in-stitute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and or-ganizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to ef-fect their safety and happiness.'"