Homeland

by Doctorow, Cory

  (Of course, everyone it didn’t work on wasn’t hired, or was hired even though they’re snorting lines of meth through rolled up pages of The Communist Manifesto while they strap on their suicide bombs.)

  The world is full of science-y crap. You probably know someone who wears a copper bracelet to “help with arthritis.” They might as well burn a witch or cover themselves in blue mud and dance widdershins under a full moon. There’s a chance either of those things will make them feel better, because of the placebo effect (when your brain convinces itself to stop feeling bad), but there are an alarming number of people who insist that because something “works” it must not be a placebo, it must be “real.”

  These guys wanted to wire me up to a lie detector and sacrifice a goat and figure out if I’d lied to them. They were big and tough and rich, they were faster than I was and infinitely better armed, but they’d let a witch doctor sell them a magical lie-catching talisman, and so I was going to absolutely pwn them.

  * * *

  They were total dicks about it, too. They watched me enter my password on my computer, making a show of recording it with yet another black rubber tactical gizmo (it was like these guys had an infinite supply of grown-up Tonka toys): a webcam with a white LED that lit my fingers with harsh, uncompromising light as I entered it. They watched as I fired up TrueCrypt and brought up my hidden partition, watched as I did a directory listing and showed them the files, watched as I nuked them.

  “Okay, that’s fine. But what about your backups, Marcus?”

  Maybe they weren’t totally stupid.

  “I’ve got a lot of backups,” I admitted. “But I think I can solve that problem for you.”

  “Yeah? Tell me.” Timmy was smiling again, all his smile lines crinkling, making him look like he was really enjoying himself and wanted me to enjoy myself, too. I started to get the feeling that Timmy might wear exactly that smile if he was cutting off my fingers or taping electrical wires to my nuts.

  “Well, I encrypt all my backups, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “And I need a key to get at the backups, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “So what if I delete the key?”

  “Haven’t you backed up the key?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ll need to get online and erase it in a few places. But once it’s gone, everything is gone. It might as well be random noise.”

  The other guy—Knothead—was holding the webcam with its bright light shining at me, and I couldn’t make out his face. But when Timmy shifted his attention to him, he lowered the light and I saw he was wearing a (tactical) earpiece. I wondered how many times these guys dropped something small and important on the floor and lost it forever as its black paint job rendered it invisible. I wondered if any of them had been goths in an earlier life.

  Probably not.

  Knothead raised one thick finger. He was listening to someone on the earpiece. So the webcam must be streaming over the net to someone else, a technical expert who was watching everything I did, helping them figure out what to do. He nodded twice, said, “Check that,” and turned to us. “Do it,” he said. “We’ll polygraph him later.”

  Timmy said, “I’m about to give you a WiFi password for the car. You’re going to get a chance to do what you say you’re doing. We’re going to see what you do. We’re going to verify what you do. If we can verify it, you get to go home. It’s that simple. Do we have a deal?”

  Before I’d been afraid. Now I was afraid they’d see how happy I was. That was important, because what I was about to do depended on them believing that I was very, very nervous.

  I keyed in the WiFi password and waited while I connected. I wondered what sort of link I was on. I figured if I were them, I’d be running everything through an SSL tunnel to a Tor router somewhere on the net, so that everything came through nicely anonymized. Why not? If it was good enough for paranoid freaks like me, it’d suit them just fine. That was the thing about this stuff. It worked equally well for everyone—people who had leaks, people who worried about leaks, people who leaked leaks. We were all smart enough to keep our paranoid packets bouncing around the net like hyperactive superballs.

  Certainly, the connection was slow enough. I waited interminably as my computer logged into the backup at home. “This is my home drive,” I said. I typed in the passphrase that unlocked the key on my hard drive and caused it to be sent to the disk on my desk at home. I let the camera see my fingers enter the commands to securely delete the leaks file from my primary backup drive, overwriting them with three successive passes of random (or “random”) data, then did a search on the drive to show that that was the only copy. “That drive synchs up to one at the hackerspace, Noisebridge.” I logged out and logged in to Noisebridge’s open shell, pwny, the connection crawling over its layers of misdirection and encryption. “I’m nuking it here.” I did. “Noisebridge backs up to the cloud. It’s not a drive I can control, but Noisebridge resynchs every five minutes, and here’s where the process logs.” I opened the logfile with the “tail -f” command, which let us see new lines as they were being written to it. We waited in stuffy silence for the next synch, then watched as the log showed the Noisebridge server being compared to the remote copy, noticing that I’d deleted the leaks files and keys, and instructing that they be deleted on the other side as well.

  I logged out. “Done.”

  “Do we believe him, Timmy?” said Knothead, in a teasing, mean way.

  “Oh, I believe him, but you know what they say: ‘Trust, but verify.’ Your turn, buddy.”

  Knothead came around and opened the back door and swapped places with Timmy. He brought out each piece of his high-technology lie detector, examining it minutely, making sure I saw him do it. Back in the days of the Spanish Inquisition, the torturers had a thing called “showing the implements” where they showed the heretic the weird cutlery they had on hand to lift, separate, and disconnect all the moist, tender, painful places in his body. Knothead would have made a great inquisitor, and he even had the science background for it. It’s a shame he was born five hundred years too late to get the job.

  He fitted me with a blood-pressure cuff—yeah, it was a tactical cuff, which clearly made this guy as happy as a pig in shit—and then started in with the electrodes. He had a lot of electrodes and he was going to use ’em all, that much was clear. Each one went in over a smear of conductive jelly that came out of a disposable packet, like the ketchup packets you get at McDonald’s. These, at least, were nontactical, emblazoned instead with German writing and an unfamiliar logo.

  That was when I started puckering and unpuckering my anus.

  Yes, you read that right. Here’s the thing about lie detectors: they work by measuring the signs of nervousness, like increases in pulse, respiration, and yeah, sweatiness. The theory is that people get more nervous when they’re lying, and that nervousness can be measured by the gadget.

  This doesn’t work so well. There’s plenty of cool customers who’re capable of lying without any outward signs of anxiety, because they’re not feeling any anxiety. That’s pretty much the definition of a sociopath, in fact: someone who doesn’t have any reaction to a lie. So lie detectors work great, except when it comes to the most dangerous liars in the world. That’s the “It’s better than nothing” stupidity I mentioned before, remember?

  But there’re plenty of people who start off nervous—say, people who’re nervous because they’re taking a lie detector test on which depends their job or their freedom. Or someone who’s been kidnapped by a couple of private mercenaries who’ve threatened to take him to their hideout if he doesn’t cooperate.

  But sometimes, lie detectors can tell the difference between normal nervousness and lying nervousness. Which is why it’s useful to inject a few little extra signs of anxiety into the process. There are lots of ways to do this. Supposedly, spies used to keep a thumbtack in their shoe and they could wiggle their toes against it to make the
ir nervous systems do the Charleston at just the right moment to make their “calm” state seem pretty damned nervous. So when they told a lie, any additional nervousness would be swamped by the crazy parasympathetic nervous system jitterbug their bodies were jangling through.

  Thumbtacks in your shoe are overkill, though. They’re fine for supermacho superspies for whom a punctured toe is a badge of honor. But if you ever need to beat a polygraph, just pucker up—your butt, that is.

  Squeezing and releasing your butthole recruits many major muscle and nerve groups, gets a lot of blood flowing, and makes you look like you’re at least as nervous as a liar, when all you’re doing are some rhythmic bum-squeezes. As a side bonus, do it enough and you will have BUNS OF STEEL.

  One of the reasons Noisebridge is such a cool place is that people experimented with stuff like this all the time. Someone heard about the butt-squeezing attack for polygraphs and told someone else, and before you knew it, we’d found a couple models cheap on eBay and were merrily hooking them up to one another and squeezing. You’d think that you could tell if the person you were talking to was clenching, but you’d be wrong. A little bit of practice and you can be a perfectly covert anus flexer.

  “What day is it?” Knothead said.

  “Wednesday,” I said, clenching. This was how you started a lie-detector session, by getting the answers to a bunch of questions you knew the answer to, so you could see what the normal, nonlying state looked like.

  “Is your name Marcus Yallow?”

  Clench. “Yes.” Clench.

  “Am I wearing a black jacket?”

  Squeeze, squeeze. “Yes.” And a black shirt and black pants and black socks and a black belt. Clench, clench.

  “Were you given the tools to download and decrypt a file containing confidential documents by a confederate at the Burning Man festival in Nevada?”

  “Yes.” Squeeze. I was going to have an ass you could bounce quarters off of by the time this was done.

  “Were you born in San Francisco?”

  Clench. “Yes.”

  “Do you speak Latin?”

  “No.” Clench.

  Knothead went on in this vein for quite some time. It was clear that he was going to be ultra-sure that he had precisely calibrated his gizmo before he got to the good stuff.

  Then: “Did you delete your copies of this file?”

  Squeeze. “Yes.”

  “Have you got any remaining copies of this file?”

  “No.” Clench.

  “Is there any way for you to retrieve a copy of this file or its decrypted components?”

  “Yes. Some of them have been published already. I can access those.”

  He snarled, but Timmy laughed. “He’s got you there, buddy.”

  “Excluding the documents that are already in the public’s hands, is there any way for you to retrieve a copy of this file or its decrypted components?”

  “Yes. I assume I can still download the encrypted torrent file.”

  Knothead jabbed a finger that was as hard as a steel rod into a spot below my ribs and a scorching ball of pain radiated outward from the spot and I pitched forward, gasping, gagging, feeling like I’d puke.

  “Puke on me and I’ll twist your head off and shove it down your neck,” Knothead said, in an absolutely conversational tone.

  I kept gasping, but the air didn’t want to come back in. Sip by sip, I refilled my lungs. I hadn’t thrown up.

  “Is that going to decalibrate the polygraph?” Timmy said, sounding slightly irritated at the thought. I didn’t for a second think that he was irritated with his partner for hurting me.

  “Nope,” said Knothead. “Watch.” He reached out and gave me a firm, but not hard, smack across the face. “Hey, Marcus, you ready for more questions?”

  “Yes,” I said, and squeezed automatically.

  “Are you sorry you were such a smartdick?”

  “Yes.” Squeeze.

  “Have you deleted all the copies you possess of the documents you were leaked?”

  “Yes.” Squeeze.

  “Do you still have access to the keys to decrypt any other copies you might find?”

  “No.” Squeeze.

  “Have you told anyone else about these documents, or given copies of them to anyone else?”

  “No.” I squeezed. This was the big one. This was the one that determined whether they hunted down Ange or Jolu or my other friends and gave them the same treatment I got—and did to them whatever would be done to me. I kept squeezing and releasing.

  He showed Timmy the screen. Timmy cocked his head and listened to the voice in his headset briefly. “Roger,” he said. Knothead turned off the gadget. “It’s all good, buddy. Nice work. Let’s take our little pal here where he wants to go. Where you want to go, Marcus? The malt shop? The drive-in? You got a Bible-study class we could take you to? Eagle scouts?”

  “I can walk from here,” I said. I was bathed in sweat, and wanted desperately to get out of the car. My eyes kept darting back to the handleless doors, my brain kept thinking, This isn’t a car, it’s a rolling prison. I was half certain that they were still planning to fill my pockets with rocks and chuck me into the Bay. That’s what mercenaries did, right? Kill people.

  “Now, don’t be like that, sweetie pie,” Timmy said. “We were friendly enough, weren’t we? We’re just guys with a job to do. And by the way, that job is protecting your butt from some really bad guys who’d love to blow up your house and put your mama in a burka. You’ve done your country a service tonight. You should be proud of yourself.”

  I didn’t say anything. Everything I could think of saying was the sort of thing that would earn me another slap, another punch. Maybe worse.

  “Where are we taking you, Marcus? Want to come to the titty bar with us?”

  “I’ll get out here.”

  He looked disgusted. “Suit yourself,” he said.

  Knothead ripped the electrodes off me and popped the door. I began to repack my bag, just throwing things in. As I reached for my multitool, Timmy snatched it up and dangled it. “You don’t mind if I keep this, do you? As a memento, you know? Of our time campaigning together for truth and justice?” His eyes glittered with lunatic merriment and he suddenly looked more dangerous than Knothead. I shook my head.

  “Keep it.”

  “Gosh, that’s very nice of you, Marcus,” he said. “Isn’t that nice of him?”

  Knothead laughed. I grabbed my bag and zipped it up, then shrugged into my jacket and set out walking. I didn’t know exactly where I was, but it wasn’t hard to figure out that walking away from the water would take me toward SoMa, and from there I could find Mission Street and walk all the way home, or catch a bus, or hop on BART. I got about twenty steps before I heard the car’s big engine gun, and then I jumped to one side as the car roared past me, nearly clipping me. It was a final dick-move screw-you from Knothead and Timmy, a last reminder that I was a little pussy and they were big, tough guys. It was so petty it should have been laughable, but if it was so funny, why did I start crying?

  Real, big, wet sobs, too, and snot running down my face. My hands were shaking, and my legs wobbled under me. I felt like my backpack weighed a million pounds, and I slipped out of it and let it drop to the ground, not caring about my laptop.

  I felt … beaten. Like I counted for nothing. Like I was nothing. I tried to comfort myself with the fact that they were stupid enough to believe a lie detector, the fact that I’d outsmarted them. It didn’t matter. They were bigger, stronger, better funded. They believed in lie detectors because they’d taken lie detector tests and so had everyone they knew, so they “knew” that the tests worked. It was no different from people who believed in astrology or faith healing because everyone they knew believed, too. It didn’t stop these guys from being more powerful and stronger than me.

  I made myself stop crying, squeezed my eyes shut, and tried to get rid of that scratchy, weepy feeling. I shouldered my bag again. I s
tarted walking. I needed to get home, get in touch with Ange and Jolu, tell them about this. Tell them about everything. My broken nose ached. It was nearly midnight and I was supposed to be at work in a few hours, with a proposal for turning Joe’s campaign into “Election 2.0.” I had no idea what I was going to tell him.

  Maybe I’d just tell him the mercenaries ate my homework.

  * * *

  I didn’t make it home. Halfway to Mission Street, I kept going to Market, kept walking to Hayes Valley and Ange’s place. I stood at her door, dithering. It was late and every light was off in the house, and the battery on my phone was dead so I couldn’t even call. I was going to have to ring the bell and wake up the whole house. Or I was going to have to go home and spend the night alone. I couldn’t face that.

  I realized I could sit down on the front step, get out my laptop, log on to Ange’s WiFi, and use Skype to call her phone and wake her up. It was a perverse way of making a phone call to a person who was about ten yards away from me, but it was also how I made my cell phone ring when I couldn’t remember where I put it. Ange’s window must have been open a crack because as the Skype call rang, I could hear her ringtone—the Doctor Who Tardis whoosh-whoosh sound—floating out over the street.

  “Who is this?” Skype calls came up UNKNOWN NUMBER.

  “It’s me. I’m downstairs. Let me in.”

  “Downstairs where?”

  “Downstairs here. Like, right below you.” I heard movement over my computer’s speakers and through the window and the bones of the house: Ange getting on a bathrobe and coming down the stairs. A moment later, the chain scraped on the door and the dead bolts snapped open and the door opened and there was Ange. My computer started to play a feedback squeal as Ange’s phone got too close to it and I flipped the lid shut as she stabbed at her phone’s screen with a finger to hang it up.

  “Marcus?”

  “Let me in, okay?”

  I love Ange. She kissed me hard on the mouth, grabbed my hand, and pulled me inside the house. We went upstairs together, tiptoeing, and before I went into her room, I whispered, “Is your computer on?”