Jolu waited after for his brother’s friend to come by and pick up his coolers. I walked with everyone else up the road to the nearest Muni stop and got on board. Of course, none of us was using an issued Muni pass. By that point, Xnetters habitually cloned someone else’s Muni pass three or four times a day, assuming a new identity for every ride.
It was hard to stay cool on the bus. We were all a little drunk, and looking at our faces under the bright bus lights was kind of hilarious. We got pretty loud and the driver used his intercom to tell us to keep it down twice, then told us to shut up right now or he’d call the cops.
That set us to giggling again and we disembarked in a mass before he did call the cops. We were in North Beach now, and there were lots of buses, taxis, the BART at Market Street, neon-lit clubs and cafes to pull apart our grouping, so we drifted away.
I got home and fired up my Xbox and started typing in keys from my phone’s screen. It was dull, hypnotic work. I was a little drunk, and it lulled me into a half-sleep.
I was about ready to nod off when a new IM window popped up.
> herro!
I didn’t recognize the handle — spexgril — but I had an idea who might be behind it.
> hi
I typed, cautiously.
> it’s me, from tonight
Then she paste-bombed a block of crypto. I’d already entered her public key into my keychain, so I told the IM client to try decrypting the code with the key.
> it’s me, from tonight
It was her!
> Fancy meeting you here
I typed, then encrypted it to my public key and mailed it off.
> It was great meeting you
I typed.
> You too. I don’t meet too many smart guys who are also cute and also socially aware. Good god, man, you don’t give a girl much of a chance.
My heart hammered in my chest.
> Hello? Tap tap? This thing on? I wasn’t born here folks, but I’m sure dying here. Don’t forget to tip your waitresses, they work hard. I’m here all week.
I laughed aloud.
> I’m here, I’m here. Laughing too hard to type is all
> Well at least my IM comedy-fu is still mighty
Um.
> It was really great to meet you too
> Yeah, it usually is. Where are you taking me?
> Taking you?
> On our next adventure?
> I didn’t really have anything planned
> Oki — then I’ll take YOU. Saturday. Dolores Park. Illegal open air concert. Be there or be a dodecahedron
> Wait what?
> Don’t you even read Xnet? It’s all over the place. You ever hear of the Speedwhores?
I nearly choked. That was Trudy Doo’s band — as in Trudy Doo, the woman who had paid me and Jolu to update the indienet code.
> Yeah I’ve heard of them
> They’re putting on a huge show and they’ve got like fifty bands signed to play the bill, going to set up on the tennis courts and bring out their own amp trucks and rock out all night
I felt like I’d been living under a rock. How had I missed that? There was an anarchist bookstore on Valencia that I sometimes passed on the way to school that had a poster of an old revolutionary named Emma Goldman with the caption “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be a part of your revolution.” I’d been spending all my energies on figuring out how to use the Xnet to organize dedicated fighters so they could jam the DHS, but this was so much cooler. A big concert — I had no idea how to do one of those, but I was glad someone did.
And now that I thought of it, I was damned proud that they were using the Xnet to do it.
The next day I was a zombie. Ange and I had chatted — flirted — until 4AM. Lucky for me, it was a Saturday and I was able to sleep in, but between the hangover and the sleep-dep, I could barely put two thoughts together.
By lunchtime, I managed to get up and get my ass out onto the streets. I staggered down toward the Turk’s to buy my coffee — these days, if I was alone, I always bought my coffee there, like the Turk and I were part of a secret club.
On the way, I passed a lot of fresh graffiti. I liked Mission graffiti; a lot of the times, it came in huge, luscious murals, or sarcastic art-student stencils. I liked that the Mission’s taggers kept right on going, under the nose of the DHS. Another kind of Xnet, I supposed — they must have all kinds of ways of knowing what was going on, where to get paint, what cameras worked. Some of the cameras had been spray-painted over, I noticed.
Maybe they used Xnet!
Painted in ten-foot-high letters on the side of an auto-yard’s fence were the drippy words: DON’T TRUST ANYONE OVER 25.
I stopped. Had someone left my “party” last night and come here with a can of paint? A lot of those people lived in the neighborhood.
I got my coffee and had a little wander around town. I kept thinking I should be calling someone, seeing if they wanted to get a movie or something. That’s how it used to be on a lazy Saturday like this. But who was I going to call? Van wasn’t talking to me, I didn’t think I was ready to talk to Jolu, and Darryl —
Well, I couldn’t call Darryl.
I got my coffee and went home and did a little searching around on the Xnet’s blogs. These anonablogs were untraceable to any author — unless that author was stupid enough to put her name on it — and there were a lot of them. Most of them were apolitical, but a lot of them weren’t. They talked about schools and the unfairness there. They talked about the cops. Tagging.
Turned out there’d been plans for the concert in the park for weeks. It had hopped from blog to blog, turning into a full-blown movement without my noticing. And the concert was called Don’t Trust Anyone Over 25.
Well, that explained where Ange got it. It was a good slogan.
Monday morning, I decided I wanted to check out that anarchist bookstore again, see about getting one of those Emma Goldman posters. I needed the reminder.
