Homeland

by Cory Doctorow

  “Um,” I said. “Not really. Liam and I went to one yesterday, but I have to admit I don’t get down to protests very often.”

  “I see,” he said. “When I was a young man, it seemed like all we did was protest—the Reagan years were pretty turbulent in San Francisco. Haven’t been out to many since. I keep wondering when something’s going to happen, though. We used to have speeches and such.”

  “Well,” I said. “You can do a speech if you want. I think a lot of people would like to hear what you have to say.” I told him about the People’s Mic, which he’d heard of but never seen.

  “It sounds like a microphone that only works if you can convince the people around you that you’ve got something to say,” he said. “I like that.”

  “Want to try?” Having been shoved in front of the People’s Mic the day before, I was eager to do it to someone else. After all, Joe was a real, no-fooling politician, with that spooky ability to make you trust him with a look and a few words.

  He looked around at the crowd, considering it seriously. “I do believe I would,” he said.

  “Right now?”

  He grinned. “Oh yes, certainly—before I lose my nerve and go home.”

  I put my hands around my mouth, and feeling a little self-conscious, hollered, “Mic check!”

  A dozen or so people picked up the call. I repeated it, and again, until a few hundred people around us were saying “Mic check” and waiting for Joe to start.

  Joe, meanwhile, had struck up a conversation with the driver of a nearby parked car, who had climbed out of the driver’s seat and perched on the car’s bumper. “This gentleman’s volunteered the hood of his car for a stage,” Joe said. The driver, an older Asian guy in a sportscoat and aviator shades, was looking interested and good-tempered. The whole thing was remarkably cheerful, really—for a gathering of hordes of pissed-off people, we were all in very good spirits. Must have been discovering how many of our neighbors felt the same way we did.

  Joe stepped nimbly onto the car’s hood, wobbled once, caught his balance.

  “My name is Joe Noss and I’m running as an independent for the California senate, but that’s not why I’m here today.”

  This was waaay too long for the People’s Mic, and the words got jumbled in the repetition. Joe didn’t look flustered, just did his thoughtful face again, and started over. “Sorry about that.”

  “Sorry about that,” the People’s Mic said.

  “My name is Joseph Noss.

  “I’m running as an independent candidate.

  “For the California senate.

  “I could have had the party nomination from the Democrats.

  “And probably from the Republicans.

  “But I decided to go independent.

  “Even though everyone says you can’t win in this country.

  “Unless you’re part of a party.

  “And they may be right.

  “But I’ve been a Democrat all my life.

  “And the spying, the wars, the banksterism.

  “It’s not the Democratic Party I joined.

  “And the Republicans don’t offer anything better.

  “Because there’s something wrong with our country.

  “There’s something wrong with our world.

  “Somehow, the ideals of fairness, neighborliness, and justice have vanished.

  “To be replaced by a cult of greed, shortsightedness, and whatever you can get away with.”

  He had the rolling tones of a preacher, and a voice like a bullhorn. He had to wait a long time between sentences, because there were rings and rings of people repeating his words, far down the street in every direction. The guy whose car he was standing on wasn’t looking mildly amused anymore. He was looking enraptured. After every sentence, while he was waiting for the mic to finish, he had a look on his face of serene confidence.

  “I don’t have the answer.

  “I don’t think anyone has the answer.

  “But I think we’re only going to find the answer when we stop making it all worse.

  “We need politicians who stand for people, not money.

  “Which is what I have been.

  “And what I plan on being.

  “We have an office on Mission Street, right by 24th.

  “It’s open every weekday.

  “You can drop in any time.

  “Tell us what you hope for from your government.

  “And we’ll tell you what we plan on doing.

  “And you can visit our website of course.

  “Just google Joe Noss.” He flashed me a smile. I’d noticed that he always made a point of spelling out double-you-double-you-double-you-dot-joseph-noss-for-california-senate-dot-org every time he finished his speeches, which made him sound like a time traveler from the 1990s, and I’d pointed out that he was the top three results for his own name on every search engine.

  “Thank you.”

  He got a lot of Peoples’ Mic–style cheers, fingers wiggling in the air so as not to drown out the speaker, and people crushed in around him as he stepped down and thanked the guy whose car he’d been using. The guy gave him a surprise hug—this was California, after all!—and Joe took it like a pro and gave him a hearty, back-slapping bear hug in return.

  “That was most remarkable, Marcus,” he said. “Thank you for that opportunity.”

  “You did great,” I said, feeling a little silly telling this guy who was a total pro that he’d done well by the lights of a pipsqueak like me, but he seemed genuinely happy.

  We chatted a while longer, and then someone else stood up and did a People’s Mic about her student debts, which had grown by over $200,000 in fines and penalties when the loan company lost one of her payments. There were a few more of these, and I was getting hungry. Ange had some cold pizza in tinfoil in her pack, so we moved off a ways and ate, and when we rejoined Lemmy, Joe was gone.

  “Said he wanted to see what was happening elsewhere,” Lemmy said. “Seems like a good guy.”

  “He is,” I said, vicariously proud to have been the guy who introduced Joe to Lemmy.

  * * *

  Crowds have moods, like people, and these moods are more than the sum of the moods of everyone in the crowd. It’s possible to be a happy person in an angry crowd—but not for long, because either you leave or you get angry yourself.

  The mood of the crowd when we arrived had been happy, if a little nervous. As the day wore on and the crowds grew and grew, the mood got more excited, with tinges of holy-crap-can-you-believe-this and man-we-should-do-something and how-long-are-we-going-to-get-away-with-this?

  The three of us—Lemmy, Ange, and me—moved around some, getting deeper into the crowd and then off into its sub-branches, using the copters to spot places where interesting stuff was happening. We visited a place where a marching band was playing ragtime and people were dancing and whooping; another where a gigantic group of drummers was beating out a wall of polyrhythmic sound, a few makeshift stages where People’s Mic talks were going on. One was a really interesting talk about the Federal Reserve, the other an embarrassing conspiracy theory about the government being secretly behind the bombing of the Bay Bridge. The speaker claimed he’d worked on the rebuilding project and had been officially-secretly told not to save anything that might help figure out who was behind the attack.

  I’d heard that theory a few times and it just didn’t hang together—it seemed like the kind of thing you’d only believe in if you were looking for an excuse to distrust the government. I didn’t need any excuse to distrust the government. I didn’t need to speculate about the unlikely possibility that they’d blown up the Bay Bridge to find a reason to believe that there were people in power who were just waiting for the chance to set up a police state. I distrusted the government because when the Bay Bridge blew, the city of San Francisco became a police state in the space of hours. Either that meant that some evil genius had attacked the Bay Bridge in order to send in all his au
thoritarian thug henchmen, or it meant that there were people out there who were just waiting for any disaster, standing by with a whole well-developed plan for unleashing their goons on people who’ve just lived through some kind of terrible emergency.

  Call me a skeptic, but I think it’s even creepier to see someone who’s just suffered disaster and think, Hey, great, they’re vulnerable and I can screw ’em over, than to actually plan the disaster. So I just don’t see the point in trying to make some kind of case proving that the Bay Bridge was an inside job—it’s ever so much more evil if it wasn’t an inside job.

  Thinking this stuff, talking it over with Ange, I started to feel like, somehow, the crowd’s mood was changing. It was getting dark, and the temperature was dropping—it had started off as one of those San Francisco September days that are as hot as a July day anywhere else, but it was turning into one of those foggy San Francisco nights that makes you cold right to your marrow. The day’s excitement was giving way to more anger and more fear, and it seemed to me that I was hearing a lot more crackling police radios, seeing a lot more helicopters and UAVs overhead.

  We were stopped in a particularly dense spot near McAllister Street, so I got out my phone and watched Lemmy’s copters’ point of view for a while. There were a lot more cops, it was true. One of the copters was off at the fringe of the protest and as it swung around, I saw a line of police and military buses stretching out to infinity, seemingly all the way to the Embarcadero. Either those buses were there to bring about a zillion cops to the protest, or they were there to take a zillion protesters away in handcuffs. Or both.

  “Lemmy,” I said, showing him my screen. Ange pulled my hands lower so she could see, too—I was so freaked that I’d forgotten to take her height into account, which is pretty freaked, all right. Ange wasn’t kind to people who were oblivious to the world of short people.

  “Time to get out of Dodge,” Lemmy said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Let’s go.” We looked around, trying to figure out the shortest path out of the protest, starting to feel a little fear. As I scanned the crowd, I saw that I wasn’t the only one getting wild-eyed. There were probably lots of other people who’d been tuned in to feeds from overhead and noticed the massing horde.

  I looked back at my phone. “Something’s weird.”

  Ange yanked my arm down, stared at my phone. “Can you be more specific?”

  “No,” I said. “I can’t. But something’s weird.”

  Lemmy peered intently at my screen.

  “No police UAVs,” he said.

  We all looked up at the airspace over the protest. The density of UAVs—gliders and quadcopters—had definitely fallen off. “How do you know it’s the police UAVs that are missing?” I said.

  “They’re the lowest flying,” Lemmy said. “Better for getting face shots.”

  My mouth had gone dry. “Why would they ground all their UAVs?”

  Lemmy looked at me with a crazy eye-roll. “Maybe they don’t want to get any video of what’s about to happen.”

  “Or maybe they’re about to do something to the electronics,” Ange said.

  Lemmy and I both looked at her. She had a pitbull look of determination on her face and she was digging through her bag. She pulled out two pairs of swim goggles and a stack of paper painter’s masks. She pulled one pair of goggles over her eyes and passed the other to me, then used her free hand to produce a quart of milk of magnesia that she used to douse the painter’s masks. She put one on, I put one on, and I handed one to Lemmy, but he wasn’t paying attention. Instead, he’d crouched down and buried his face in his backpack and he was all but throwing its contents on the ground as he dug for something.

  “Lemmy,” I said, shaking the dripping mask under his nose. The liquid would neutralize some of the sting in any kind of pepper spray, and if they used some other chemical agent, the wet mask would trap more than a dry one. “Lemmy!”

  He stood up so fast he caught me on the chin a little and would have sent me backwards on my ass if there’d been room for it. As it was, the people behind me caught me and steadied me, and I waved a quick thanks at them and turned back to see Lemmy holding a silver zip-lock bag.

  “Phones,” he said. “Quick!”

  I recognized the bag: a Faraday pouch, the kind of thing you put your RFID-emitting ID, transit pass, toll road transponder, or passport into if you didn’t want strangers to be able to read it.

  But Faraday pouches weren’t just good at keeping the stuff inside from communicating with the outside world: they were also good at keeping radio waves from the outside world from getting inside them. I yanked out my phone so fast I turned my jeans pocket inside out and scattered small change on the ground around our feet. Ange already had hers out. We dropped them in the bag and Lemmy shoved his in and sealed it and dropped it back in his backpack, then he took the mask from me and dug out his own goggles and pulled them on.

  The people around us had seen this weird behavior and some of them were following us. Others were starting to push and panic, trying to get out, and I thought Oh god, there’s going to be a stampede, we’re going to die—

  And at that moment, there was a crack like the sky was a sheet of paper being torn in two by enormous, divine hands, and every electronic device in the vicinity sputtered and died.

  They’d HERFed us.

  * * *

  HERF stands for High Energy Radio Frequency, and it basically means a big, nasty pulse of raw radio energy. You can build a HERF gun that will tune the power from a standard car battery, focusing it into a pencil-beam of ugly brute force by means of a mini satellite dish and use it to kill a laptop at twenty paces. The whole thing’ll cost you under $200 if you’re smart about parts.

  Of course, if you’re a big government or well-equipped police force, you don’t need to homebrew anything like this. You can just go through a paramilitary mail-order catalog and buy some ginormous pulsed-energy appliances from off the shelf. From a law-enforcement perspective, they’re like a friendly nuclear bomb, one that leaves all the people and buildings intact, but preserves that wicked electromagnetic pulse that turns anything more complicated than a 1975 diesel engine into a paperweight.

  I figured that the police had HERFed the crowd, but that wasn’t quite right. Later on, during the hearings on the September 24th Protest, police crowd-control specialists testified that they aimed the pulse weapon 100 feet over the crowd, instantly killing every UAV in the sky. These plummeted to the crowd below, and represented the first wave of casualties of the night. No fatalities, but one person was in a coma for six months, and another lost her left eye.

  The specialists who testified swore that the mobile phones that they took out were unintentional, as were the firmware on all the cars that caught the edges of the burst. And the six people whose hearing aids died, and the twelve whose pacemakers stopped—entirely accidental and most unfortunate.

  But they had to “preserve operational security,” which is police-ese for “make sure no one could watch what they did next.” And after all, they had given a “lawful order to disperse,” though I can’t say as I heard it. Stuff happens, I suppose. All part of life in the big city.

  * * *

  I put my masked mouth right up to Lemmy’s ear.

  “Lemmy.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You know that copter we landed on the roof, the one with the low battery?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You think it’s still able to fly?”

  “Dunno. Maybe. Why?”

  “I think you should get it in the sky and start streaming video with infrared right now.”

  “Yeah.”

  He broke the seal on the Faraday pouch and spilled out the phones, handing me mine and Ange’s, prodding his handset. The cellular towers had all been switched off at SFPD request a moment before the HERF detonated, but Lemmy’s phone included a 900Mhz direct radio link to his UAVs. 900Mhz was a good frequency, great for penetrating walls and
other structures, but it was also a busy band, noisy with baby monitors and walkie-talkies and RC toys. Of course, all of those were pretty much toast at the moment, so Lemmy had the airwaves all to himself.

  He grunted in satisfaction. “It’s up,” he said. “Maybe twenty-five minutes on the battery.” A moment later: “It’s got 4G, too. Must be picking up towers farther away from us—it’s the altitude.”

  “Great,” I said. “Get it over us.”

  “Yeah.”

  Ange, meanwhile, was hitting reload-reload-reload on her phone’s wifinder, waiting for the moment that the network the copter was retransmitting became available to her. “Got it,” she said.

  “Can you tweet out the URL for the livestream off the copter?”

  “Derp. What do you think I’m doing?”

  “Sorry.”

  I had my phone out, too, and signed on to the UAV’s network, sent out my tweet.

  “Can you shut down its network bridge?” I asked Lemmy. “There’s going to be a zillion people trying to get online and none of the video’ll make it out if they do.”

  “Yeah,” Lemmy said. “Yeah, done.”

  “Okay,” I said, and looked around for the first time since the pulse. “Holy mother of Zeus.” It was as though all the light in the area had been sucked into the Earth, leaving us in a realm of shadows. All I could see, for as far as I could make out in every direction, were silhouettes, moving uneasily like stalks of wheat in a gathering storm. Here and there people had found flashlights or headlights, and these created pinpricks of illumination that stood out like searchlights.

  Then, a wailing sound, a sound I hadn’t heard since the day the Bay Bridge blew. It was the San Francisco air-raid siren, a sound like an effect from an old war movie. They used to test it every Tuesday afternoon, but after the trauma of its actual use following the attack on the bridge, they’d discontinued the tests. Too many people reacted to the sound with post-traumatic-stress freak-outs—crying jags, an uncontrollable urge to hide or get out of doors—or indoors—and various other low-grade psychotic reactions. There’d been a long debate and finally the city had settled on testing the alarm by playing three long beeps, three short beeps, and three long beeps—Morse code for SOS.