Homeland

by Doctorow, Cory

  “Yeah,” she said. “And what else are you going to do, dipshit?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “All right. Let me go get my bike.”

  “Screw that. If it’s locked up, you can get it later. If it’s not, someone else will get it and you won’t have to worry about it. Get us a cab. I’ve got money.”

  * * *

  Mom and Dad had left me a note saying they’d gone to a meeting with their accountant and telling me they’d be home for dinner. I raided the fridge for Masha while she used the shower and settled in in my room. I sat down on the end of my bed and watched her gnaw at a hunk of cheese and a tray of cookies while her fingers flew over her keyboard. She stopped typing after a while and spun around on my chair, her wet hair whipping around her shoulder, leaving watermarks on her T-shirt. “Okay,” she said. “Now we wait. I gave them an hour, so let’s assume they’ll get back to us within two hours.”

  “I don’t like the idea of Carrie Johnstone just getting away with this,” I said.

  She looked at me like I was a simpleton. I hated that look. “People like Carrie Johnstone always get away with stuff, until someone shoots them or they retire to some distant dictatorship where no one can get at them. She’s not going to court. She’ll never go to court. No one will ever arrest her. No one can afford to arrest her. You need to get past this romantic idea of justice and realize that some stuff just is.”

  “I hate that,” I said. “It’s like there’s no human beings in the chain of responsibility, just things-that-happen. It’s the ultimate cop-out. The system did it. The company did it. The government did it. What about the person who pulls the trigger?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Well, that’s a nice fairy tale. Have you got any juice or soda, something with sugar? I’m crashing here. Maybe some coffee.”

  I made her an epic cup of coffee. I may not be a ninja secret agent, but that’s one thing I could most certainly do. She drank it with something approaching the proper reverence, sent me for another, drank that, and said, “Okay, this’ll do.” But the way she said it, I could tell that it was Masha-ese for HOLY CRAP THAT IS AWESOME COFFEE.

  Then she typed some more. Then she typed some more. Then she made a face like she smelled something bad and her fingers bounced over the keys like a troupe of ten meth-addled acrobats on eighty-nine little trampolines. Then some more typing, her teeth bared like an animal. I tried to peek over her shoulder—I used a polarized laptop shield that made it impossible to see the screen unless you were looking at it straight on—and she batted me aside without even seeing me. More typing.

  “Yeah, that’ll do it,” she said, and pulled out the plug and the battery in two smooth motions, thoroughly nuking the virtual machine she’d been working inside of and erasing all the passwords and keys she might have entered. I didn’t even bother to object. I wasn’t even particularly offended.

  “That’ll do it, huh?”

  “You just nuke any copies you have of those files, starting with the darknet site you gave them details on, and you can forget about Zyz and Carrie Johnstone forever. I’ve taken the precaution of emailing myself a full set of docs, so that’s that. They want to know if you want your old phone back.”

  “Huh?”

  “They burgled some Egyptian girl’s house after grabbing your old handset’s location from the carrier’s network.”

  “Jesus. Did they hurt anyone?”

  “They didn’t mention, so I’m assuming no. They’re capable of some subtlety. Sounds like it bought you some time, in any event. You want it back? They’ve probably filled it with every bug and trojan known to the human race, of course.”

  “Forget it,” I said.

  “Smart guy,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Well, thanks, I guess.” It felt like something simultaneously monumental and boring had just happened. Once again, someone else had solved my problems for me. People thought M1k3y was some kind of action hero, but I was just a player in someone else’s plot.

  She climbed painfully to her feet, faced me. “You did pretty great, Marcus. I gave you a lot of shit, but you did great. I relied on you, and I got you into trouble. I’m glad I was able to clean up my mess. And I saved my own ass, too, I think.” She wobbled a little on her legs, then put her arm out to steady herself and caught hold of my shoulder in a death grip that I barely noticed, because she was staring at me with huge, liquid brown eyes.

  It was one of those moments, those girl-boy moments, where there’s breath passing between you, gazes locked, a kind of falling feeling from every nerve ending, inside and out. I let the moment move me and her together, and let the kiss that had been waiting inside us come out. It went on for a long, long time and she squeezed me like I was the only thing holding her up. We came up for breath and she went on holding me, turning her face into my chest. I could feel the dampness from her hair, but I could also tell by the little shaking movements of her back and chest that she was crying. Hey, so was I.

  She snuffled up her snot and wiped her cheeks on my T-shirt and let go of me. “Well,” she said, with a sad smile, “nice to see you again, Marcus. I’ll look you up the next time I’m in the neighborhood.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sounds good.”

  The door opened downstairs and my parents’ voices came up through the vents, talking about money worries and what to have for dinner. We stood, eyes locked, until they moved into the kitchen, then we descended the stairs in silence. I opened the front door and Masha slipped out into the street, limping down Potrero Hill with her gym bag over her shoulder. I watched her until she turned onto 24th Street, but she never looked back at me.

  Then I went inside and told my parents I’d lost my job.

  * * *

  Ange could tell something was up from the minute I called her, I could hear it in her voice, and she met me at a burrito joint around the corner from Noisebridge, coming straight to the table and sitting down opposite me without a hug or a kiss or any of the other normal pleasantries.

  “I saw Masha,” I said. “And she spoke to Johnstone’s people, and they say it’s over.”

  “Over,” she said, flatly.

  “As in, we don’t have anything to do with them, they don’t have anything to do with us. Over.”

  “Oh,” she said. She bit her lip, the way she did when she was thinking hard. “Over. You believe her.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I do.”

  “Oh.”

  I’d thought about this next part a thousand times, rehearsed every way it could go, hated all of them, decided I needed to do it anyway.

  “Ange,” I said.

  She started crying before I said anything else, so I guess my voice must have conveyed some secret message to her in the cipher known only to our bodies and subconscious minds.

  “What comes after this?” I said, trying to keep my voice even. Other people in the restaurant were staring at us, even though I’d deliberately staked out a place in the back corner.

  “What do you mean?” she said, taking napkins out of the dispenser on the table and wiping at her eyes.

  “I mean, do we just keep dating forever? Do we get married?”

  “You…” She blinked. “You want to get married?”

  “No,” I said. “Do you?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Ever?”

  “Well, I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “But not to me.”

  “I didn’t say that, Marcus. Jesus, you’re being such a freak. Are you breaking up with me?”

  I willed myself not to flinch away from her angry gaze. “I just feel like there comes a point where you have to ask yourself: is this going to go on forever, or isn’t it? Are we doing this for the long haul, or is this just something we’re doing for now?”

  “That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” she said. “This isn’t binary. We can be boyfriend and girlfriend without being husband and wife. We’re young. What the hell is this all about?”

 
I thought about the weird silences with Van, the kiss with Masha, the times I’d woken up next to Ange and just watched her breathe, in love with every curve and angle of her face. “I—” I thought about being a person who did things, instead of someone that the world did stuff to. I thought about the system and how broken it all was. “Look, it’s been intense lately. I don’t know what I’m feeling anymore. I’m just not sure about anything anymore.”

  “That’s it? You’re not sure? Since when was anything sure? Listen, you lunk, you say that you’re not sure about anything. Are you sure that you’re happier when you’re with me than when I’m not there? Not all the time, but on balance, most of the time?”

  It was such a weird, Ange way of framing the question. But I gave it thought. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I am sure about that. But, Ange—”

  She wadded up the napkin and dropped it on the table. “That’s something I’m sure of, too. But you’re clearly going through some crazy mental crap, and if you need to work it out, you need to work it out. Give me a call when you’ve sorted it out. Maybe I’ll still be around.”

  It took everything I had not to chase after her as she left the burrito place, but I stayed in my seat, facing away from the door, staring at the burrito cooling in front of me. I gave her a decent interval to get a ways down Mission Street, then I left the place myself, leaving the food untouched.

  * * *

  I hung around across the street from the Joe Noss for State Senate campaign office, wearing track pants and a hooded sweatshirt and carrying a gym bag, figuring that what worked for Masha would probably work for me. Autumn was upon us, and the sun had set early, making me just one more anonymous, slightly menacing guy with his hands in his pockets on a street in the upper Mission. But I wasn’t clutching a vial of rock. I was holding onto a USB stick.

  I hadn’t been able to talk this over with anyone. Talking to Darryl meant talking to Van, and that meant being a theoretically single man talking to his theoretical best friend’s girlfriend who had some kind of theoretical crush on him that might or might not be theoretically mutual. Jolu was busy with Kylie, because what had failed so miserably for me had worked really well for him. And of course, there was no way to talk to Ange about anything now, and maybe never again.

  Liam left the building. Then the speechwriter and the researchers whose names I forgot. Then some volunteers, with Flor behind them. I was sure I’d seen Joe go in there, but Flor locked the door behind her, so maybe I’d missed Joe somehow. But I’d seen a few lights on inside the office as she shut the door, and so I hung tight. Joe came out twenty minutes later, wearing his Joe uniform, his cardigan buttoned high against the chill night.

  I crossed the street and matched his stride. He looked at me, did a double take.

  “Hello, Marcus,” he said, his voice gentle and unconcerned. Statesmanlike.

  I held out my closed fist, hand down. “Here,” I said.

  He held his hand out, let me transfer the USB stick to him. He felt it, put it in his pocket.

  “Do I want to know what this is?”

  “No,” I said. “But your friend in the FBI might.”

  “Aha,” he said, and patted his pocket. “Well, I’ll take that under advisement.”

  We walked on for a few steps.

  “Is this going to get me into trouble, Marcus?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Is it going to get you into trouble?”

  “Don’t know,” I said. “Are you going to win the election?”

  “It seems likely,” he said. “That vote machine idea of yours— Woah. Though nothing’s certain in politics.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m a member of the network. I recruited sixteen people from my contact list. Maybe I’ll get a pizza-and-beer party invite.”

  He stifled a small, sad laugh. “You’re always welcome to pizza on me, Marcus.”

  “Well, that’s good,” I said. “Keep them honest, okay?”

  “I’ll certainly try.”

  “And keep yourself honest.”

  “Yes, that much you can be sure of,” he said.

  I walked away.

  * * *

  As I walked into the night, back toward home, I felt a huge weight lift from my shoulders. It’s funny, because I assumed that after I started the chain of events that would lead to Carrie Johnstone’s d0x ending up in an FBI agent’s possession, I would be clobbered by worry. Would Carrie Johnstone come back for me? Would Zyz come after me? They’d have no reason to assume I turned over the d0x to the FBI, but no reason not to, either. Hell, maybe the FBI wouldn’t do anything—what had Joe said? Even the most foolish, vicious Feeb at HQ in DC has some self-respect and doesn’t want to be used as a game token by scheming politicians who’re hoping to score points with the electorate during the midterms. Maybe they’d just drop it in a shredder.

  But somehow, that little voice I knew to be my own, the little voice that told me all the time about the ways I’d screwed up, the way I’d let other people do the driving, the way I let life push me around—that little voice shut up the instant I did something. And not just something: the exact thing I knew to be right. Because if the system was broken, if Carrie Johnstone wasn’t going to ever pay consequences for her actions, it wasn’t because “the system” failed to get her. It was because people like me chose not to act when we could. The system was people, and I was part of it, part of its problems, and I was going to be part of the solution from now on.

  Epilogue

  I’d had eight months to debug Secret Project X-1. I even made a special midsummer trip to the Mojave, where the gypsum dust was nearly identical to the stuff you got out on the playa. I’d watched with glee and pride as X-1 sucked up the sun’s rays, turned them into a laser beam, and used that to sinter fine white powder into 3D shapes. First a little skull ring. Then a toy car. Then some chain-mail, the links already formed and joined, one of the coolest tricks 3D printing had to offer. I gave a presentation on my progress one night at Noisebridge, and resulting praise had given me a glow you could have seen with a spy drone.

  But now, here, on the actual playa, the goddamned machine wouldn’t work. Lemmy sat in his lounger nearby, sipping electrolyte drink from a CamelBak and making helpful suggestions, as well as several unhelpful ones. Burners passing by stopped and asked what I was doing, and I let Lemmy explain it to them so that I could concentrate on the infernal and stubborn machine.

  I only stopped when I found that even the light from my headlamp wasn’t sufficient for seeing what I was doing, and then I stretched all the aches and pains out of my body, swilled a pint of cold brew, and proceeded to dance my skinny ass off for forty-five minutes straight, chasing after a giant art car blasting ferocious dubstep as it crawled across the open playa. I stopped as a thunderstrike of inspiration struck me, and I ran straight back to camp, unlocked Lemmy’s car, and used its dome light to confirm that yes, I had in fact inserted a critical part of the power assembly backwards. I turned it around, slotted it in, and heard the familiar boot sequence kick in as the stored power from the solar panels kicked the 3D printer to life.

  I wasn’t a total moron after all.

  * * *

  It didn’t matter how much dancing I’d done the night before, I was for goddamned sure getting up at first light to crank up X-1. I had a lot of printing to do. I puttered around it as the blue arc of laser light shone out of its guts, making it glow like a lantern in the pink dawn.

  People stopped and asked me what it was doing. I gave them trinkets: bone-white skull rings; renderings of perfect knots and other mathematical solids; strange, ghostly figurines. I had a whole library of 3D shapes I’d plundered from Thingiverse when I realized that I was going to have a real, functional 3D printer on the playa this year. Word got around, and by the time Lemmy got out of bed, a huge crowd had gathered around our camp: dancers who’d been up all night, their pupils the size of saucers; early risers with yoga mats; college kids who’d somehow found thems
elves at the burn; and a familiar jawa with crossed bandoliers over her chest, emphasizing her breasts.

  “Hi, Ange,” I said, leaving Lemmy to run the machine while I grabbed us a jar of cold brew and walked off a ways with her. She pulled down her mask. The sun had toasted a smattering of freckles around her nose and cheeks. I gave her first slurp at the coffee, then I had one. Then we hugged. It was awkward.

  It was wonderful.

  “Hey, Marcus. Congratulations on getting it working.”

  “Yeah,” I said. All I wanted to do was hug her again.

  “So,” I said.

  “So,” she said.

  “I’m an idiot,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “I’ve missed you.”

  “Yeah,” she said again. “I missed you, too. Like fire. Like part of me had been cut away.”

  I dropped my voice. “I gave Johnstone’s d0x to the FBI.”

  She blinked twice. “When?”

  “Back in October.”

  “And you’re still here, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess that means they didn’t do anything with it.”

  “Or maybe it means they did do something with it.”

  I found my mouth was hanging open. “You know,” I said. “That possibility never occurred to me.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “You have a tendency to see the bad side of things.”

  “I guess I do.”

  We didn’t say anything for a while, just drank our coffee.

  “Have you seen anything great yet?”

  “No,” I said. “I’ve been working on that goddamned machine since the moment we arrived.”

  “I haven’t been to the temple yet,” she said.

  I took the hint. “I bet Lemmy’ll be okay with the printer for a while.”

  “You think?”

  “Yeah. Let’s go.”

  * * *

  “You spending much time at the protests?” she said.

  “Every day,” I said. “Trying to figure out how to do more with the kind of technology we build at Noisebridge to help make them harder to bust up. Better antikettling stuff, HERF shielding, effective treatments for gas poisoning and those dazzler lasers and sound cannons they’re using now. Been arrested a few times, but I keep going back.”