by Various
What about the unlucky few caught in the kettle? They hardly seem to notice that they’re prisoners. They’re dancing too, and applauding with us, and then the police get some new order, and the straight lines move again, trying to reposition themselves so that they’re to either side of the main body of the protest once more. We let them do it, because it means our friends in the kettle get to go free.
But when the police move in to kettle us again, we repeat the magic trick. It’s easier the second time around. We’ve had practice. This time, there’s no one in the kettle when the lines close, and we’re back where we started.
This time we don’t dance, we laugh, because it is hilarious. It’s like a Three Stooges routine, where the big tough guys keep grabbing the little guys, and the little guys keep escaping between their legs or through their arms. We’ve had two tries to practice our superhuman powers in a real field situation, and our back-channels are full of the home guard—people watching the drone feeds and watching the tweets and other updates—talking tactics and revising them in realtime. We don’t need to hear what the cops’ radios are saying, because we know what they’re saying: “form a line, make a kettle.” Keep doing the thing that didn’t work in case it starts working.
It won’t work, not ever again.
After a third dance, the drones’ power is so low that we call it a night. The hivemind begins a triumphant march away from the site of the smooth transition, and the rest follow. Not because anyone forces them. Not because there’s leaders. But because we’re united, tonight.
Hivemind became big news in the days that followed. The overhead video—grainy and night-scoped as it was—was spectacular to watch. Even better than the crowd scenes in the Embarcadero. It’s the epitome of the big, lumbering goofus trying to catch the quick and nimble trickster. The blogs, papers and even TV were all over it. I got called up to do another satellite uplink, and this time it was in a little room where there were four other humans who were there to get me ready. They powdered me and put a little lavaliere mic on my lapel and asked me a lot more questions, and then afterward they put on a “spokesman” for OPD in a crisp uniform who explained that police kettles were a matter of “public safety” and that anything that undermined the ability of police to round up nonviolent protesters and corral them for hours without basics like water, food and toilets was practically terrorism.
“But is it illegal?” the smooth talking head asked. I cheered in my little black room. That’s the question.
“Public safety is something we take very—”
“Are they breaking any laws, sir?”
“When you’re talking about large groups of people—”
“Which specific laws are they breaking?” Oh, she was good. He squirmed.
“I’m not here to talk about specific prosecutions—”
“I’m sorry, we’re out of time, thank you very much—”
I confess that I did a little victory dance on the spot.
Even better was when the reporters took us up on our invitation to come down to Noisebridge and actually meet the people who worked on Hivemind, instead of pretending that it was all my doing and that I spoke for everyone. We never called it a press conference and we refused to let them turn it into one. Instead, we ran it like an open house, and we had all kinds of projects going, the laser-cutters whining and the 3D printers churning, and there were a million kinds of hackers doing a million kinds of projects. I think that a lot of the media had come down to find a secret group of semi-terrorists and we forced them to see us as we were: makers who cared about freedom.
Our back-channels—IRC, message boards, email lists, Twitter and Facebook updates—were full of speculation about what would happen next week when OPD had had some time to think about it, and while there was a lot of debate about whether they’d risk the lawsuits and pull out the electromagnetic guns and whether they’d arrest us on sight, we all agreed that the Hivemind we’d run was just the demo and now it was time to get to work turning it into something real.
We wikied up a huge wishlist of features for future versions and let the developers go to town. In theory, a super-elite OPD-DHS hacker could whip up a sly and malicious hunk of code that weakened our security without being obvious about it and check it into the codebase, then use it to start crashing Hivemind instances when the moment was at hand. But I thought it was more likely that the law enforcement presence lurking in our comms channels was there to figure out who to spy on and hassle at borders and build fat dossiers on.
I mean, maybe we could have tried to keep it all secret, but that was a high price to pay to be superhuman. Working together on this project gave us amazing super-powers, and whatever security we built into the system would be better even if the other side knew exactly what we were doing and how we were doing it.
Our best security was to be so wide open that everyone could help and everyone could check each other. A million free software projects have discovered that “if you build it, they will come” is a big fat lie most of the time, but in our case, they did come. The world’s hackerspaces and makerspaces had already thrown in their skills hacking on tools for the Arab Spring. That fire still burned around the world. From Hacker Dojo down the Peninsula to Hacklab in Toronto, the hackers of the world tweaked the code for Hivemind, tweaked our anklet design, and added more goodness to the drone autopilots and image-processing.
Ange was amazing at it. She hadn’t been much of a coder when we met, but she was a natural, and always willing to learn. We were great together, working back-to-back, shouting at each other as we found bugs in each other’s code. One night, we didn’t even leave Noisebridge, just stayed up all night and then went back to my place and crashed out for five hours.
“We need a change of scenery,” Ange said, as we washed each others’ backs in the shower.
“Where to?”
“Let’s visit Hacker Dojo,” she said. So we packed a picnic basket and caught CalTrain down to Mountain View and met a bunch of people f2f whose code and messages we’d known intimately, but whose faces we’d never seen live. They shared our picnic and found bugs that we’d never have found on our own, because fresh eyeballs are made of awesome, and because my Ange is made of more awesome still.
It’s amazing to think it’s only been a week since Hivemind made its fantastic debut. Hard to believe that this crowd, these thronging thousands, heads high, a bounce in their steps, are what’s become of the morose rump protest that had been present last week.
The OPD are waiting for us. They’ve tripled their numbers. They’ve put up a kind of cherry picker with armor around it, like a guard house in a POW movie. They’ve got water cannons. They’ve got gas.
We’ve got code, sensors, drones and an audience.
Even before we reach the police lines, the quadcopters are hovering along them, transmitting photos of any officer who has illegally removed his name badge. There’s a group of volunteers who asked for this feature, and they’re sitting at home with giant albums of OPD cops at previous demonstrations with their badges on, and they’re using face-matching to put a name to the face. It’s one thing to be anonymous when you’re blowing the whistle on government wrongdoing, but a guy without a badge who hits you over the head with a club isn’t a cop, he’s a mugger.
These muggers-in-waiting have their own hashtag: #wheresyourbadge, and it’s flooded with pictures and names. You can see it working because these nameless wonders start to thrash in their lines as someone in authority gets a phone call from the OPD’s Internet team and then gets on the radio and says, “Johnson, where the hell is your name badge, goddammit?”
We cheer as the OPD chapter of Anonymous uncloaks and pastes its badges back on. The people who know what’s going on cheer for that; the rest cheer for the sheer joy of a beautiful late afternoon and the wonder of a massive crowd that’s bursting with confidence. Then the ones who know what’s what clue the rest in and the cheers get louder.
The first ski
rmish comes right away, no warning this time. They’re not in rigid lines anymore—they’ve apparently drilled in smaller squads that can break up and try to outmaneuver us. This probably sounded good in theory.
It’s a total fail. We absorb the police units like amoebas surrounding their food, and then we poop ‘em out again. The cops whirl to keep up with us and we dance with them like a do-se-do. Yee-haw!
The cops reform their lines and get ready for the next skirmish. It doesn’t go any better. Neither does the next. We’re all slightly breathless now, because we’ve been dancing like gooney birds for half an hour. We’re all in shorts or jeans and tees. We’re not allowed to wear armor. The cops, though, are wearing twenty pounds of nylon and metal and tactical everything, and they’re sweating like pigs. Some of us had talked about bringing bottles of water to offer them, but figured they’d never accept them.
They’re not going to dance with us all afternoon. It takes two heavy hoses and a full teargas charge, and more than half of us get away, but eventually they manage the kettle. But it’s not the same kind of kettle, somehow.
For one thing, we know which cops to avoid. Another volunteer squad—back playing the home game—has been keeping track of which cops have been too macho to rotate off the line. Those are the timebomb cops, the cortisol-fuelled stressbunnies who are going to stand there, grinding their teeth, until it all gets to be too much and the baton comes out. Word gets around: stay clear of those cops.
We had 487 Hivemind rigs at the start of the day. Of those, 174 ended up inside the kettle, but half of those got watercannoned to death, so our intelligence is a little thin. On the other hand, that means there’s more spare batteries to go around, and the folks on the outside are determined to make sure that we don’t have it too rough. A squadron of drones glide overhead, and in unison they drop small, cylindrical parcels with parachutes that snap open. Inside each insulated tube is a burrito and a bottle of water. The drones circle back and pick up more ammo, and soon there are burritos raining all around.
When the sun sets, I reach into the change pocket of my jeans for the thing I’ve been compulsively checking every five minutes. It’s still there, right down at the bottom of the pocket where I’d shoved it. I hold it tight in my hand.
Ange is next to me, arm around my waist. She’s holding the last bite of a burrito in her free hand.
“You know,” she says, “we should rig up some kind of modified blood-sugar monitor for Hivemind, get it to measure cortisol levels, help figure out when you’re about to go off the deep end. Like that guy—” she says, pointing to a guy who’s getting really worked up, shouting at the cop line.
This is a very good idea, but I can barely take it in, because my blood is whooshing in my ears and my hands are shaking.
“Ange,” I say, around my tongue, which is thick and dry. I swallow, but I can’t swallow, and so I choke a little. I kneel.
I am on one knee.
“Ange,” I say again, and she looks at me, and her eyes widen, because she always knows what I’m going to say before I say it.
“No way!” she says. She drops the burrito.
Time stops. My heart stops. The world stops.
She.
Said.
No.
Way.
I am not breathing. I realize this just as she claps her hands over her mouth in horror and I inhale and she inhales, and then she says, “I mean, ‘yes,’ of course but no way because of this—”
And now she’s digging in the change pocket of her jeans and she produces a something that sparkles in the last rays of the sun. “I made it myself,” she says, holding up the ring in her hand. “Out of petrified bogwood.”
“I made mine by hollowing out a nickel and polishing it. I engraved the rim. It says LOVE, in UTF-8 encoded binary.” I show it to her.
“The one I made for you says ALWAYS in Morse.”
We hold our rings. Then she grabs my hand, folds the fingers down until only the ring finger is out, and slips it on.
I do the same to her.
“Will you?” we say.
“Yes,” we say.
The kettle didn’t lift for five more hours. I hardly noticed them. And that time, neither of us went to jail.
There was always next time.
Lawful Interception. Copyright © 2013 by Cory Doctorow.
Art copyright © 2013 by Yuko Shimizu
All rights reserved.
For information, address A Tor Book, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
e-ISBN: 978-1-4668-4217-5
First eBook Edition: February 2013
Contents
Title Page
Begin Reading
Wakulla Springs. A strange and unknown world, this secret treasure lies hidden in the jungle of northern Florida. In its unfathomable depths, a variety of curious creatures have left a record of their coming, of their struggle to survive, and of their eventual end. Twenty-five thousand years after they disappeared from the face of the Earth, the bones of prehistoric mastodons, giant armadillos, and other primeval monsters have been found beneath the seemingly placid surface of the lagoon. The visitor to this magical place enters a timeless world of mystery.
1.
Secret Treasure
“Well, there you is, Mayola.” Vergie Jackson looked up from the porch of the shotgun cabin on the edge of the piney woods, waving a paper fan with a faded picture of Jesus. “I like to die in this heat, a-waiting.”
“I told you,” Mayola Williams said. “I was helping Miz Green close up the school for the summer.”
“You said you’d be home ’bout noon. It’s near two o’clock.”
Mayola shrugged. “We got to talking, and I lost track of the time.” She shifted a stack of books from one hip to the other. “Lemme set these in the house and we can go someplace cooler. I won’t be a minute.”
“What for she give you homework in the summer?”
“Ain’t homework. Just some books she loaned me to read.”
“What kind?”
“The kind they teach up at the A&M.”
Vergie rolled her eyes. “I want to be quit of school, and you always asking for more. I don’t see the point of it.”
“Well. How ’bout this?” Mayola took the top book off the stack and held it up, just out of Vergie’s reach.
“They Eyes Was Watching God,” Vergie sounded out slowly. “That’s just Bible study.”
“Nope. It’s a story novel.”
Vergie fanned herself again. “Make believe.” She shook her head.
“But look here.” Mayola showed the back cover. “Wrote by a real-life colored woman. She from Florida, too.” She laid the book on top of the others with gentle care, then went into the house, the rickety screen door slapping shut behind her.
She reappeared a few minutes later. “Let’s go over to Cherokee Sink. I’m all over sweaty, and a swim would sure feel good.” Mayola liked to swim about as much as anything, except to read, and it’d been nearly a week since she’d been able to kick loose all the kinks and sitting aches.
“Uh-uh. My brothers gone over there, and Luke Callen’s with ’em. That boy’s mean as a sack a’snakes.”
“True enough. How ’bout the river then? Lower Bridge only ten minutes more.”
“I can’t swim nowheres this week. I got my monthlies.”
“Oh.” There was no arguing with that. Mayola thought for a minute. “Tell you what. Miz Green give me twelve cents for helping her clean. I put it all in my piggy bank, ’cept for one Indian head penny—that’s good luck, and I put it right into my shoe, so it’ll watch out for me. But I reckon I could spare a nickel to walk over to Gavin’s store and get us an RC Cola from the ice chest. That’s almost as cool as swimming.”
“Let’s get us some goobers, too.” Vergie pulled on a pair of laceless, formerly white Keds.
“I don’t know. That’s another nickel.”
“And you saving up for college. I know. I
know. I been hearing ’bout your biggity dream ever since Miz Green put that bug in your ear. But this’s my treat.” Vergie paused, to make sure Mayola was paying her proper attention. “I got me a whole quarter.”
“How?” Vergie never did a lick of work if there was some way round it.
“Odell Watkins. He kinda sweet on me, and he got hisself a job up at the springs, rowing white folks out on the river. He shows ’em a sleeping gator and some old bones way deep under the water, and they tip.” She held up the coin with a satisfied smile.
Mayola didn’t think much of Odell, but a cold soda was nothing to fuss about, so she just nodded, and they headed down the sandy track out to the Shadeville Road. She was a tall, slender girl with long, muscular legs. Vergie was a head shorter and sashayed as she walked, all hips and curves. The soles of her Keds were coming unglued, and made a flap-scritch-flap sound when they hit the gravel.
“I need to get me a pair of shoes somebody else ain’t worn out first.”
“You could save up Odell’s quarter.”
“What for? We thirsty today,” Vergie said.
The sides of the road were shallow, weed-filled ditches, jumping with grasshoppers and chigger bugs, and there was nary a car, so they walked down the center. By the time they’d gone a few hundred yards in the fierce June sun, Mayola could feel the thin cotton of her dress sticking to her back, damp as if she was laundering it from the inside out.
The one-room white-washed store sat at the crossroads, its tin roof and bright red Coca-Cola sign glinting in the sun. Inside it was dark and cool and smelled of briny pickles and sweet Moon Pies. A man in bib overalls stood by the counter, talking louder than polite conversation called for.
“You think just ’cause Roosevelt’s in for the third time, we gonna get the electric down here? May as well wish in one hand and spit in the other.” He threw a sack of potatoes over his shoulder with a grunt. “Sometime I think you tetched in the head, Frank Gavin.”