“Yes, Marcus.”
“Isn’t the point of terrorism to make us afraid? That’s why it’s called
“I suppose so.” The class was staring at me. I wasn’t the best student in school, but I did like a good in-class debate. They were waiting to hear what I’d say next.
“So aren’t we doing what the terrorists want from us? Don’t they win if we act all afraid and put cameras in the classrooms and all of that?”
There was some nervous tittering. One of the others put his hand up. It was Charles. Ms Galvez called on him.
“Putting cameras in makes us safe, which makes us less afraid.”
“Safe from what?” I said, without waiting to be called on.
“Terrorism,” Charles said. The others were nodding their heads.
“How do they do that? If a suicide bomber rushed in here and blew us all up —”
“Ms Galvez, Marcus is violating school policy. We’re not supposed to make jokes about terrorist attacks —”
“Who’s making jokes?”
“Thank you, both of you,” Ms Galvez said. She looked really unhappy. I felt kind of bad for hijacking her class. “I think that this is a really interesting discussion, but I’d like to hold it over for a future class. I think that these issues may be too emotional for us to have a discussion about them today. Now, let’s get back to the suffragists, shall we?”
So we spent the rest of the hour talking about suffragists and the new lobbying strategies they’d devised for getting four women into every congresscritter’s office to lean on him and let him know what it would mean for his political future if he kept on denying women the vote. It was normally the kind of thing I really liked — little guys making the big and powerful be honest. But today I couldn’t concentrate. It must have been Darryl’s absence. We both liked Social Studies and we would have had our SchoolBooks out and an IM session up seconds after sitting down, a back-channel for talking about the lesson.
I’d burned twenty ParanoidXbox discs the night before and I had them all in my bag. I handed them out to people I knew were really, really into gaming. They’d all gotten an Xbox Universal or two the year before, but most of them had stopped using them. The games were really expensive and not a lot of fun. I took them aside between periods, at lunch and study hall, and sang the praises of the ParanoidXbox games to the sky. Free and fun — addictive social games with lots of cool people playing them from all over the world.
Giving away one thing to sell another is what they call a “razor blade business” — companies like Gillette give you free razor-blade handles and then stiff you by charging you a small fortune for the blades. Printer cartridges are the worst for that — the most expensive Champagne in the world is cheap when compared with inkjet ink, which costs all of a penny a gallon to make wholesale.
Razor-blade businesses depend on you not being able to get the “blades” from someone else. After all, if Gillette can make nine bucks on a ten-dollar replacement blade, why not start a competitor that makes only four bucks selling an identical blade: an 80 percent profit margin is the kind of thing that makes your average business- guy go all drooly and round-eyed.
So razor-blade companies like Microsoft pour a lot of effort into making it hard and/or illegal to compete with them on the blades. In Microsoft’s case, every Xbox has had countermeasures to keep you from running software that was released by people who didn’t pay the Microsoft blood-money for the right to sell Xbox programs.
The people I met didn’t think much about this stuff. They perked up when I told them that the games were unmonitored. These days, any online game you play is filled with all kinds of unsavory sorts. First there are the pervs who try to get you to come out to some remote location so they can go all weird and Silence of the Lambs on you. Then there are the cops, who are pretending to be gullible kids so they can bust the pervs. Worst of all, though, are the monitors who spend all their time spying on our discussions and snitching on us for violating their Terms of Service, which say, no flirting, no cussing, and no “clear or masked language which insultingly refers to any aspect of sexual orientation or sexuality.”
I’m no 24/7 horn-dog, but I’m a seventeen year old boy. Sex does come up in conversation every now and again. But God help you if it came up in chat while you were gaming. It was a real buzz-kill. No one monitored the ParanoidXbox games, because they weren’t run by a company: they were just games that hackers had written for the hell of it.
So these game-kids loved the story. They took the discs greedily, and promised to burn copies for all of their friends — after all, games are most fun when you’re playing them with your buddies.
When I got home, I read that a group of parents were suing the school board over the surveillance cameras in the classrooms, but that they’d already lost their bid to get a preliminary injunction against them.
I don’t know who came up with the name Xnet, but it stuck. You’d hear people talking about it on the Muni. Van called me up to ask me if I’d heard of it and I nearly choked once I figured out what she was talking about: the discs I’d started distributing last week had been sneakernetted and copied all the way to Oakland in the space of two weeks. It made me look over my shoulder — like I’d broken a rule and now the DHS would come and take me away forever.
They’d been hard weeks. The BART had completely abandoned cash fares now, switching them for arphid “contactless” cards that you waved at the turnstiles to go through. They were cool and convenient, but every time I used one, I thought about how I was being tracked. Someone on Xnet posted a link to an Electronic Frontier Foundation white paper on the ways that these things could be used to track people, and the paper had tiny stories about little groups of people that had protested at the BART stations.
I used the Xnet for almost everything now. I’d set up a fake email address through the Pirate Party, a Swedish political party that hated Internet surveillance and promised to keep their mail accounts a secret from everyone, even the cops. I accessed it strictly via Xnet, hopping from one neighbor’s Internet connection to the next, staying anonymous — I hoped — all the way to Sweden. I wasn’t using w1n5ton anymore. If Benson could figure it out, anyone could. My new handle, come up with on the spur of the moment, was M1k3y, and I got a
