I switched the radio off and heard a purring engine on the street below.
My bedroom is in the top floor of our house, one of the painted ladies. I have a sloping attic ceiling and windows on both sides — one overlooks the whole Mission, the other looks out into the street in front of our place. There were often cars cruising at all hours of the night, but there was something different about this engine noise.
I went to the street-window and pulled up my blinds. Down on the street below me was a white, unmarked van whose roof was festooned with radio antennas, more antennas than I’d ever seen on a car. It was cruising very slowly down the street, a little dish on top spinning around and around.
As I watched, the van stopped and one of the back doors popped open. A guy in a DHS uniform — I could spot one from a hundred yards now — stepped out into the street. He had some kind of handheld device, and its blue glow lit his face. He paced back and forth, first scouting my neighbors, making notes on his device, then heading for me. There was something familiar in the way he walked, looking down —
He was using a wifinder! The DHS was scouting for Xnet nodes. I let go of the blinds and dove across my room for my Xbox. I’d left it up while I downloaded some cool animations one of the Xnetters had made of the President’s no-price-too-high speech. I yanked the plug out of the wall, then scurried back to the window and cracked the blind a fraction of an inch.
The guy was looking down into his wifinder again, walking back and forth in front of our house. A moment later, he got back into his van and drove away.
I got out my camera and took as many pictures as I could of the van and its antennas. Then I opened them in a free image-editor called The GIMP and edited out everything from the photo except the van, erasing my street and anything that might identify me.
I posted them to Xnet and wrote down everything I could about the vans. These guys were definitely looking for the Xnet, I could tell.
Now I really couldn’t sleep.
Nothing for it but to play wind-up pirates. There’d be lots of players even at this hour. The real name for wind- up pirates was Clockwork Plunder, and it was a hobbyist project that had been created by teenaged death-metal freaks from Finland. It was totally free to play, and offered just as much fun as any of the $15/month services like Ender’s Universe and Middle Earth Quest and Discworld Dungeons.
I logged back in and there I was, still on the deck of the Zombie Charger, waiting for someone to wind me up. I hated this part of the game.
> Hey you
I typed to a passing pirate.
> Wind me up?
He paused and looked at me.
> y should i?
> We’re on the same team. Plus you get experience points.
What a jerk.
> Where are you located?
> San Francisco
This was starting to feel familiar.
> Where in San Francisco?
I logged out. There was something weird going on in the game. I jumped onto the livejournals and began to crawl from blog to blog. I got through half a dozen before I found something that froze my blood.
Livejournallers love quizzes. What kind of hobbit are you? Are you a great lover? What planet are you most like? Which character from some movie are you? What’s your emotional type? They fill them in and their friends fill them in and everyone compares their results. Harmless fun.
But the quiz that had taken over the blogs of the Xnet that night was what scared me, because it was anything but harmless:
What’s your sex
The quizzes plotted the results on a map with colored pushpins for schools and neighborhoods, and made lame recommendations for places to buy pizza and stuff.
But look at those questions. Think about my answers:
There were only two people in my whole school who matched that profile. Most schools it would be the same. If you wanted to figure out who the Xnetters were, you could use these quizzes to find them all.
That was bad enough, but what was worse was what it implied: someone from the DHS was using the Xnet to get at us. The Xnet was compromised by the DHS.
We had spies in our midst.
I’d given Xnet discs to hundreds of people, and they’d done the same. I knew the people I gave the discs to pretty well. Some of them I knew very well. I’ve lived in the same house all my life and I’ve made hundreds and hundreds of friends over the years, from people who went to daycare with me to people I played soccer with, people who LARPed with me, people I met clubbing, people I knew from school. My ARG team were my closest friends, but there were plenty of people I knew and trusted enough to hand an Xnet disc to.
I needed them now.
I woke Jolu up by ringing his cell phone and hanging up after the first ring, three times in a row. A minute later, he was up on Xnet and we were able to have a secure chat. I pointed him to my blog-post on the radio vans and he came back a minute later all freaked out.
> You sure they’re looking for us?
In response I sent him to the quiz.
> OMG we’re doomed
> No it’s not that bad but we need to figure out who we can trust
> How?
> That’s what I wanted to ask you — how many people can you totally vouch for like trust them to the ends of the earth?
> Um 20 or 30 or so
> I want to get a bunch of really trustworthy people together and do a key-exchange web of trust thing
Web of trust is one of those cool crypto things that I’d read about but never tried. It was a nearly foolproof way to make sure that you could talk to the people you trusted, but that no one else could listen in. The problem is that it requires you to
