Homeland

by Cory Doctorow

  I felt my cheeks burning. “No,” I said. “I mean—” I took a deep breath. “My dad got laid off from UC Berkeley last year and I had to drop out. No more discount tuition. So I’ve been looking for work ever since. But I’ve had some campaign experience, the Coalition of Voters for a Free America for two summers.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Volunteer experience, right?”

  “Right,” I said. “We were all volunteers. But I’m very responsible. And I believe in Joe, and I believe that the Internet can change politics for the better—make it more accountable, more transparent. That’s why I want to work here.”

  As I said it, it felt like exactly the right sort of thing to be saying. But when I was done, her expression was harder than ever. “Yes,” she said. “I’ve heard all that before. I’ve been hearing it for twenty years now. But the fact is that elections are won by a lot of shoe leather and a lot of money and a lot of handshakes, the way they always have been. I know that Joe has lots of pie-in-the-sky ideas about reinventing elections and reforming politics, but I run the campaign and I think that reforming politics will be a big enough job to get through, and maybe we can leave the reinventing stuff for the next candidate.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. Some innate, primitive sense of organizational politics told me I should just keep my mouth shut.

  “We’ve got a lot of people around here with big ideas about how the world should be run. That’s fine. That goes with the territory when you’re running as an independent—you get independent-minded people working for you. But the bottom line is that this is a campaign to elect a candidate. It’s not a lab for egalitarian, consensus-based organizational reform. It’s not a high-tech start-up.

  “Right now, this campaign needs a webmaster. That’s someone who’ll put up a website that doesn’t get hacked the minute we stick it online. That website’s got to help us raise money, it’s got to help us mobilize voters, and it’s got to help us win an election. I want to make myself clear on this point, because I’ve hired a few webmasters in my day, and I know a thing or two about some of the problems endemic to the trade. I’m looking for a website that gets the job done: nothing more and nothing less. I don’t want it to be one micron prettier than it needs to be. I don’t want it to be one quantum more technically elegant than it needs to be. And because our webmaster is also going to be our IT department, I need someone who can keep us all reasonably secure, keep our computers backed up, and keep the network up. Someone who’s available on-call twenty-four-seven right up to election day.

  “So, now that you’ve heard my little speech, I need to ask you, does that sound like you, Marcus?”

  But Joe said he wanted a delta force ninja, is what I didn’t say. I had already figured out enough to know that what Joe wanted and what Joe got was filtered through his campaign manager, who held the decision to hire me in her hands.

  “I have done all those things in the past,” I said. “I’m reliable. I’m a fast learner. I believe in Joseph Noss. I may not have had much work experience, but that’s only because no one’s given me the chance. There are lots of people in San Francisco who could be your webmaster, but how many of them have helped run an underground network that beat back the DHS and restored the Bill of Rights to San Francisco?” I spent most of my life telling people that M1k3y was just part of a movement, scuffing my toe when people told me how much they admired me. But something told me that this wasn’t the right time to be humble.

  Her smile came back. “Okay, that was well said.” She finished off the Turk’s coffee. “I’ve asked around about you. Barbara Stratford called me as I was on my way in to work this morning to put in a good word for you. There are lots of people who think the world of you as a leader and a techno-guerrilla. But none of them have ever employed you, and we have more than enough ‘leaders’ around here. Have you ever read The Time Machine, Marcus?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I wrote a paper on it in AP English.”

  “Then you’ll remember the Eloi and the Morlocks. The Eloi were the privileged surface dwellers, enjoying a life of high-tech sophistication and ease. But under the ground, there was an army of Morlocks, toiling away night and day in the subterranean engine rooms, making sure that everything was humming along tickedy-boo.”

  “You want Morlocks, not Eloi, right?”

  She smiled. “Bright boy. Yes, exactly. It’s not a glamorous job, but it’s the job that needs doing. What I’m asking you to do now is look inside yourself and ask, ‘Do I want to do the job that needs doing, even if it’s boring and workaday and merely necessary and not at all exciting?’ You say you believe in Joe—do you support him enough to join his army as a grunt and not a general?”

  I could see why she was the campaign manager, and not Joe. Joe had made me want to take to the streets, but she made me want to prove I could get the job done. They must make a great team.

  Which is not to say that I wasn’t disappointed. I had hoped that I’d be greeted as a revolutionary hero and given a squadron of tough info-commandos to boss through a series of action-hero adventures. But the way that Flor Prentice Y Diaz pushed at me, implying that I was just a kid who wanted the spotlight more than he wanted to help, it was like a set of spurs in the belly. So even as I was thinking, Man, that’s an effective motivational technique, I was also thinking, I’ll show her!

  I made a showy salute. “Yes ma’am, general, ma’am.”

  Her smile got wider. “All right, all right. I’m giving you a hard time this morning, because you come with a lot of advance recommendations, but there are also lots of warning flags. You’re a bright young man, and bright young men are nice to have around, but in my experience, they need quite a lot of adult supervision. So I intend on supervising you very closely until I’m convinced that you have learned the difference between what we need and what you’d like us to have.”

  I blinked and replayed what she just said. “Does that mean I’m hired?”

  She waved off the question. “Oh, Marcus, you’ve been hired since we sat down here. Joe loves you, or at least he loves your reputation, and he’s as excited as a puppy about having you around here. But I needed to make sure you understood what working here entails.”

  I couldn’t stop myself, I held my arms over my head like a quarterback after a touchdown: “All right!” I shouted.

  She laughed at me. “Down, boy. Yes, you’ve got a j-o-b. Marian, our HR person, will talk over your pay and such with you later. But before we get started, there’s one thing we need to discuss, and that’s all this hacker business.”

  I composed myself. “Yes?”

  “Don’t. Do. It. You’ve done all sorts of clever things with computers, no doubt. You’ve outsmarted the feds and raided their data, you’ve gone wandering around computer systems where you had no business being. It’s all in the grand old tradition of the Bay Area, but it has no place here. The first time I catch so much as a whiff of anything illegal, immoral, dangerous or ‘leet’”—she made finger quotes—“I will personally bounce your ass to the curb before you have a chance to zip your fly. Do I make myself crystal clear?”

  “You can really turn on and off the scary voice at will, huh?”

  “I can. I find it’s a useful way of indicating to my colleagues when I expect to be taken seriously.”

  “And you can do this really kind of stone-faced, severe facial expression, too. That’s really amazing.” What can I say? I’d just gotten a job. The joy was bringing out my inner weisenheimer.

  “This face? This isn’t my severe face. This is about gale force one. You do not want to be around for a force five.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Chapter 6

  I spent the rest of the morning jumping straight into the work with both feet. The previous webmaster, a volunteer, had just gone back to school at Brown, but she’d left behind a neat sheet of passwords and configuration data, as well as information on our network contracts. I figured the thing to
do was to conduct an audit of everything I’d be in charge of, checking that it was all where it was supposed to be, doing what it was supposed to be doing. I grabbed a stack of one-side-printed paper out of a recycling box and three-hole punched it, then snapped it into a used three-ring binder I found in a supply closet. I could have used Lurch to take notes—I’d brought it in, booted into its plausible deniability partition, with all that deadly secret stuff locked away on disk sectors that were indistinguishable from random noise. But I needed to be able to walk and write, sitting down at peoples’ desks and getting their names and copying down their network cards’ MAC addresses and such, and paper is just easier for that sort of thing. I’d type it all in later.

  Every so often I’d look up and see Flor watching me from her desk in the middle of the room. She’d catch my eye and then nod in satisfaction—at my hustle, I assumed. It made me feel good—like someone was noticing how I was busting my butt to make a good impression on my first day. I may be a Morlock, but it was nice to know the Eloi were looking on in approval. After talking with Flor, I’d remembered that the Morlocks ate the Eloi, which made the whole analogy a little weird. I wondered if she’d intended that, and if so, what it was supposed to mean.

  Joe had swept in around 10 A.M. with one phone pressed to his head and another in his hand and had been swarmed by about a dozen staffers and volunteers with urgent questions. He clamped one phone between his ear and shoulder and used his free hand to point at people in the mob and then at places they were to wait for him, all the while without losing his place in the animated conversation he was having. As the crowd dispersed, he said his good-byes and dropped his phone into one pocket, then did the same with the other one.

  He was a tall, broad-shouldered black guy with his graying hair cropped short. His skin was somewhere between an americano and a macchiato, a few shades darker than the high-necked sweater he wore over comfortable-looking blue jeans and black Converse. I decided I could dress down for work the next day.

  I was in the middle of going through every line of the WiFi router’s configuration file, plugged straight into it at the very back of the room. Much as I wanted to jump up and introduce myself, I decided to play it Morlock and let him get on with all the urgent stuff he needed to do and try to find a quiet moment later to say hello.

  But Joe scouted around the room, spotted me, and said, loudly, “Marcus, all right!” and half jogged straight to me, hand already out.

  “Hello, sir,” I said.

  “Marcus, I can’t tell you how glad I am that you’re joining us. Flor tells me she’s very impressed with you. I’m not surprised. I imagine you’ve got plenty to do to get up to speed, but please ask Flor to put you in my diary for tomorrow, whenever she can squeeze you in, so we can talk about strategy, all right?”

  “All right,” I said, making an effort not to stammer. In person, Joseph Noss just radiated charisma, and it made me tongue-tied. Here was a guy who just felt, I don’t know, important and smart, and I wanted to impress him, but everything I could think of to say felt too boring to burden him with.

  “Good man,” he said, and slapped my shoulder before turning on his heel to jog back to Flor’s desk, pointing at the staffers he was ready to hear from as he went. They converged in a huddle at Flor’s desk and I went back to work.

  “Marcus?” someone said from behind me, a few minutes later.

  I looked up, and into a semi-familiar face. It was a guy about my age, or maybe a little younger, with a scruffy beard, and he was grinning so widely I thought his head would fall off. I recognized him from somewhere, but I couldn’t think where. I decided I’d try to fake it. I stood up and shook his hand. “Hey, man!” I said. “Great to see you again!”

  He clapped in uncontainable delight. “Dude, I can’t believe it’s you. Are you the new webmaster? Really?”

  “Yup,” I said. “Sweet gig, huh?”

  He shook his head furiously. “No. Way. I can’t believe it! Marcus Yallow is our webmaster? Oh man!”

  This was more familiar territory—someone going all gushy and me not knowing what to say in response. Been there, done that, still don’t know what to do when it happens. “So, uh, what have you been up to?”

  “I’m the swag barista,” he said, thumping his chest. He was wearing a SAN FRANCISCO NEEDS NOSS shirt, done like an old-timey sci-fi movie poster, with a giant Joe standing astride the Golden Gate bridge. “I design the T-shirts and posters. I try to do a new one every couple days, and screen them on demand. Keep it fresh, mix it up, you know? One thing I wanted to ask you about was whether you could put up a Threadless clone for the website so I could do a little shirt-community for all the Nossers out there?”

  “Uh,” I said, “yeah. Sure, why not?” We were running the site on OpenCampaign, which was a free mod of WordPress designed for election campaigns. It could run WordPress plugins with no additional work, and the one that was based on the Threadless user-generated T-shirt site was one I’d looked at before. It didn’t seem like it’d be too hard to run.

  “You are such a dude. God, I can’t believe this! Wait until I tell Nate. He is going to flip out.”

  And that’s when I remembered him. “Liam?” I said.

  “Yeah, of course! Liam! I’ve been volunteering here all summer! Ever since I saw Joe’s July Fourth video. That stuff was straight-up inspiring, yo.”

  I had friends who ended their sentences with “yo,” but always ironically, making fun of the people who were trying to talk all “street” and badass. Liam wasn’t being ironic. He really did end his sentences with “yo.”

  “Yo,” I said, then felt mean about it and gave him a friendly slug on the shoulder. “Liam, man, I didn’t recognize you at first with the beard and all. How cool that we’re going to be working together?”

  “Me too. Look, do you have lunch plans? Want to get a burrito? I know a great place up on Valencia—”

  “Sure, burritos sound great,” I said. I hefted my notebook and said, “I’d better get back to work if I’m going to get time for a lunch break, then.”

  He did a couple of dance steps on the spot, then gave me a surprise hug, a real crusher that involved lifting me a couple inches off the floor. “See you at lunch!”

  * * *

  Once upon a time, I’d been part of a tight foursome of awesomely close friends. Darryl, Jolu, Van, and I had done everything together since we’d been little kids. But after the whole Xnet thing, well, one thing happened and then another. Van and Darryl started dating, and Van didn’t like Ange at all (and there was all the weirdness about the fact that she’d been secretly crushing on me, which loomed up like an invisible wall whenever we saw each other). Darryl went off to Berkeley, and we’d seen each other a little at first, but between classes, Van, and his psychotherapy for all the crazy nightmares and freak-outs he still had thanks to the horrors of Gitmo-by-the-Bay, we barely had time to say hi. Jolu, meanwhile, had graduated from his job at Pigspleen to a sweet gig as a programmer on a start-up that was commercializing municipal data, cranking out services based on the feeds put out by City Hall. He had a ton of new friends, including a bunch of intimidatingly smart civic hackers, and when they were all really going at it, I could only understand about half of what they said. We didn’t see much of each other.

  And then there was Ange, who was the world’s most perfect girlfriend: funny, smart, exciting. She liked the same movies and games that I did, liked the same books and music, and was always up for keeping me company when she wasn’t at school—she’d gotten into SFSU for communications studies and was acing her courses. So even though I missed my friends, it wasn’t like I was actually lonely or anything—so somehow I never got around to calling them or IMing them or poking them and seeing how they were doing.

  But it had been a long time since I’d had a regular gang of friends, a little posse of my own. And I missed that.

  * * *

  Liam’s friend Nate joined us for lunch, taking BART down fr
om his mom’s place downtown. He, too, gave me a crushing hug, and then he and Liam exchanged one of the same. These guys were as Californian as they came, and they loved their physical contact. I’d been born and raised in San Francisco, but my mom was British, and so I just hadn’t gotten into the whole super-huggy scene ever.

  We ended up at my favorite burrito joint, and I got tongue, which Ange had convinced me to try and which turned out to be amazingly tasty, provided you didn’t think too hard about the fact that you were, you know, eating a tongue. Liam ordered one, too, and raved about how good it tasted and how he wished he’d tried it sooner.

  “I still can’t believe you’re our webmaster,” Liam said. “That’s like, I don’t know, Bruce Lee being your bouncer or something.”

  “Or Jack Daniels being your bartender,” Nate said. He had the same beard as Liam.

  “I think Jack Daniels is dead, or made up,” Liam said.

  “Okay, it’s like Steve Wozniak fixing your PC,” Nate said.

  “Dude, old school,” Liam said. “Woz is the guy who built the first Apple computers,” he said to me.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

  “Oh,” Liam said. “Yeah! Of course you do! Listen to me, huh?”

  I wanted to find some way to politely say, “Hey, Liam, don’t worry about impressing me, okay? I already like you, and all this stuff is just making you sound kind of desperate.” But every way I could think of saying that would make Liam feel like a loser and make me sound like a dick.

  “What are you up to, Nate?” I said, pointedly changing the subject.

  He shrugged. “Being unemployed. Polishing my nonexistent résumé.” Another shrug.

  “I know how that feels,” I said. “I was unemployed until this morning.”

  They both boggled at me.