Homeland (38 page)

"Sounds like a good guy," she said, as she pulled on her jacket and picked up her purse and marched out into the Mission to find a Western Union office.

Joe got back in the late afternoon, just as I was finishing the switchover to our new host. I had set up two more backup clouds for us to move onto if we needed to, one in a country I'd never heard of in Central Asia. Flor had gone out for two more money orders and I'd written the scripts to keep us all in sync. I also made sure to register a bunch of variants on our domain, joenossforsenate.com, in other countries, snagging the .se (Sweden) and the .nz (New Zealand), figuring that it would be a lot harder to convince two countries on the other side of the planet with totally different legal systems to nuke our DNS than it would be to just get Verisign, who runs all the .com domains, to take down the U.S. version.

Joe listened to me report on all this and nodded his head soberly. "Marcus," he said, "I knew you'd be the right guy for this. Thanks for all the good thought and hard work you put into this. Now, Flor tells me you've been in jail. Were you at the chicken farm?"

I found that my voice had disappeared and tears had welled up behind my eyes. I nodded silently.

Normally, Joe looked, well,
statesmanlike
is probably the best word for it. Like someone who might be photographed at any instant and, if he was, would look as though he were carefully considering how to pilot the nation and its interests. But for an instant, something flashed to the surface that I'd never seen on his face before, a momentary glimpse of something like an Old Testament prophet who's about to lay down some smiting on a foolish tribe that had strayed from the path. The fact that he felt that way on
my
behalf made it all the more powerful -- made me like him even more.

"Marcus," he said. "I have been around the block a few times. I've seen all manner of brutalities inflicted in the name of public order and keeping the peace. But the
premeditation
of what happened to you and the others, the sheer
militarization
of it --" He shook his head. "All I can say is, it's not to be tolerated. The fact that the SFPD had prepared for the future of protest by buying fleets of gas-spraying drones and turning a titanic building into an internment center -- it can't stand. It won't. I'm sure you've heard about the class action suits pending against the city." I hadn't, but then I hadn't been doing
anything
except trying to get our infrastructure secured. "As someone who served in this city's government for many years, I wouldn't blame you if you joined them."

"Thank you," I said. The lump in my throat had gone down, and Joe had regained his normal "statesman" look. We were back to baseline.

"Now, about these documents. I'm sorry if I stepped on your toes by having Liam work on this while you were away. He told me that he couldn't do as good a job as you could, but perfection wasn't as important as timeliness. There was a lot of interest in those documents after the demonstrations, and I felt that we could seize on that interest if we moved quickly."

"Uh," I said. He was apologizing to me? "Well, it's your campaign, right? I'm not going to chew you out for running it the way you want to."

He smiled. "Yes, of course. But I hired you to do a job, and the last thing I want to do is make it harder for you to do that job."

I waved him off. "I don't mind, really. But is it working?"

There was another flash, and I got a glimpse of Joe Noss, the imp. The glee in his eyes was unmistakable. "Oh, it's working. I've gotten more airtime in the past twenty-four hours than I have for the whole campaign. Everyone seems to get the connection between the weekend's events and the documents we're publishing. We can barely keep up with the requests to act as official campaign volunteers, going through all that data and making sense of it. I only check in a few times a day, but from what I hear, there's plenty there for Sacramento -- and the rest of the country -- to chew on. My advisory committee squawked and one of them quit. They're worried, sensibly enough, that there's stuff in that archive that could expose us to liability, and they're right to worry. I tried to explain to Liam what you'd suggested about this but --" He spread his hands and shrugged.

"I know," I said. "He told me." I'd been giving that some thought. "I bet I can get it up now, though. I was going to try and do the moderation system tonight, see if I couldn't bang something together that would only show the public the checked documents. Sounds like we could use the volunteers to go through what's left pretty quickly, assuming you trust them. And then we're going to get to work on this vote-getting machine, somewhere for all that positive energy to go."

"I trust them to do a better job than is being done now," he said. "They're substantially better than nothing. But Marcus, you have been in jail, you've been gassed, you've been beaten. I don't expect you to work through the night, too."

I shrugged. "It's not that hard," I said. "I mean, no big deal. I've pulled plenty of all-nighters, and --"

He held his hands up and I fell silent. "Let me put this another way: as your employer, I don't want you to work on this until you've gotten a good night's sleep and had a chance to see your loved ones and start to recover from your trauma. It's not a request, Marcus, it's an order."

Part of me wanted to argue, but I told that part to shut up. "Yes, sir," I said.

"Good man," he said. "But if you should want to stay a little late tonight and possibly turn up a little early tomorrow, I wouldn't take it amiss."

"Yes, sir!" I said.

"Good man," he repeated.

Mom and Dad were surprisingly cool about everything. I tried about six Skype calls to my old phone, but Dalia wasn't answering. Finally, I gave up and dialed into it and picked up my voicemail (about a million messages from Mom, Dad, Ange, Liam, Flor, and Joe, preceded by a series of panicked calls from a woman speaking Arabic whom I took to be Dalia's mother, who must have had kittens when her conversation with her daughter was so rudely cut short and redialed my number). Then I found an old phone and brought its firmware up to date and stuck in a pay-as-you-go SIM I bought at the Walgreens down the hill and changed the outgoing voicemail on the old phone to a message telling people to use this number until I could get a new SIM from my phone carrier.

I
did
work a little on Joe's darknet moderation site before bed, despite what he'd said, because while Joe was a nice guy to insist, the darknet was
my
project, and just because I was working on it, it didn't mean I was working on it for
him
. I worked until the muscles that allowed my eyes to focus on my screen went on strike, blinked hard, brushed my teeth, stripped off, and fell face-first into bed, amid all the junk I'd dropped there, not even feeling the sharp corners that dug into me.

I was 99.9999 percent of the way to sleepyland when my eyes opened so fast I heard the
click
of my eyelids ungumming.

Lemmy's quadcopter.

We'd put it in the sky just before the gas attacks on the crowd,
after
the police thought that every camera had been killed. The tweet telling people where to look for its feed hadn't gone out, but that didn't mean it didn't create and store that feed. I pounced on my laptop and after a few minutes' dicking around, found the file I was looking for.

It was all in ghostly night-vision monochrome, with false-color splotches of orange and red where the people gathered. The SFPD stood out hotter than the rest, with bright red splotches on their hands and feet -- I wondered if they were using boot- and glove-warmers? We didn't get the firing of the HERF gun on the camera, but we did get some
amazing
footage of the gas blimps setting sail, moving into position like sinister circus balloons, unleashing their chemical rain, a kind of grey static that fell on the screaming, terrified crowd below. The gassing went on and on and on, different blimps releasing at different times, filling the air with wave after wave of choking chemical droplets.

I'd lived through this on the ground, but I hadn't
seen
it, not the way I could see it now. Watching thousands and thousands and
thousands
of Americans of all stripes, choking and falling down -- kids, moms, dads, old, young, writhing, crawling over one another, vomiting, screaming. I know that worse things have happened. I know that bombs have fallen on cities, mustard gas sent over trenches, people machine-gunned wholesale.

But this was
here
. This was San Francisco. America. The 21st century. I had been in that crowd. It had just happened.

And yet life was continuing the way it had. The world didn't stop. No one declared that "everything was different now." No one was going to remember September 24th as "the day everything changed."

If some foreign power, some religious terrorist, had gassed hundreds of thousands of Americans in the streets of San Francisco, they'd be rearranging all the furniture in government to make way for the new agencies that would swoop in to make sure that "never again" would such a thing happen "on U.S. soil." Why did the fact that we'd all bought the gas with our tax dollars make the gas acceptable?

I wanted to put this online, but I didn't have the energy to do it all over again, make
another
darknet site, try to get people interested in it. I was about to go back to bed when it hit me: I didn't
need
to do anything with the darknet this time. This video was
ours
, mine and Lemmy's. It wasn't a secret who recorded it or where it was recorded. I laughed. I could stick this on YouTube. I could tweet it from my own account! I'd gotten so used to operating in secret that I'd forgotten that I didn't have to.

I posted the video to the Internet Archive, YouTube, and popped a torrent on The Pirate Bay for good measure, wrote a paragraph explaining that I'd shot this at the demonstration after the HERF event, pasted it in, tweeted it, and crawled beneath the covers.

Ange woke me up at 6 A.M. by ringing my phone. When I'd set it up the night before, I'd forgotten to configure it to stay silent before 7 A.M., so the ringing drilled into my ears at oh-dark-hundred and dragged me back from the land of nod. "Morning, beautiful," I said.

"You could have told me you had video of the gassing," she said.

"I forgot," I said. I was still half asleep.

There was a long pause at the other end of the line. "You forgot?"

"I forgot I'd made the video."

Another silence. "Okay, under any other circumstances, that would be really lame, but I guess you've been pretty distracted lately. Fine. You get a walk. This time. Still -- holy shit, dude, what the hell?"

"Are people talking about it?"

"It got a million YouTube views before it got taken down. The Archive version's still up and the torrent's being seeded by about a thousand people."

"Taken down, huh?" I tried to find some reservoir of naiveté in me that could be surprised to discover that the SFPD had ways of taking down files that embarrassed it.

"Temporary injunction," she said. "That's what the YouTube page says. I bet you're going to get a visit from a process-server today."

"You think
they're
going to sue
me
?"

"Sure," she said. "No recording in a frozen zone, remember?" There'd been a bunch of news stories for years about police departments declaring certain areas to be "frozen zones" because a "major operation" was taking place, and no press had been allowed.

"Frozen zone my butt. The courts've said that the press can go into a frozen zone."

"Are you the press?"

"Well, a million people looked at my video. I'd say the answer is yes."

I could hear her smiling on the other end of the phone. "Well,
I
agree with you. But you'll have to explain it to a judge if you want to make it stick."

"Great," I said. "I'll get right on that. After I get Joe Noss elected, sue the SFPD for police brutality and unlawful detention, and rescue two people I don't like very much from the clutches of a band of ruthless international mercenaries."

"You make it sound so hard," she said. "Come on, dude, you're
M1k3y
!"

"And I've got to get my phone number transfered to this new SIM."

"Yeah, that sounds like a total bitch. Phone companies suck. Good thing you've got me."

"I do," I said. "Indeed I do."

So that was that day: getting the rest of the stuff built for Joe, getting a whole raft of emails from reporters -- some of whom I knew from my M1k3y days -- asking if they could license "my" video for their networks. I laughed and said, "License, schmicense, it's all over the net, duh." That was good enough for Al Jazeera and Russia Today and
The Guardian
, but all the big American networks wanted me to sign these release forms saying that if anyone sued them for posting the video, they could sue
me
for letting them post it. Invariably, these "contracts" came as non-editable PDFs so that I couldn't delete the offending clauses before signing them. The first three times this happened, I just opened the PDFs in a graphics-editing program and drew big black boxes over everything in the contract apart from the bit where I said they could use the video, pasted my signature into the bottom, and filled in the date and sent it back. After that, I stopped bothering. I noticed that most of the networks I gave this treatment to later ended up running the video, sometimes with "courtesy of Marcus Yallow" underneath, but more often with their big fat logos superimposed over the picture and "All rights reserved" messages that made me hoot with indignant laughter.