Little Brother

How the hell was I going to get online? My phone’s wifinder was blinking like crazy — there was wireless all around me, but I didn’t have an Xbox and a TV and a ParanoidXbox DVD to boot from. WiFi, WiFi everywhere…

That’s when I spotted them. Two kids, about my age, moving among the crowd at the top of the stairs down into the BART.

What caught my eye was the way they were moving, kind of clumsy, nudging up against the commuters and the tourists. Each had a hand in his pocket, and whenever they met one another’s eye, they snickered. They couldn’t have been more obvious jammers, but the crowd was oblivious to them. Being down in that neighborhood, you expect to be dodging homeless people and crazies, so you don’t make eye contact, don’t look around at all if you can help it.

I sidled up to one. He seemed really young, but he couldn’t have been any younger than me.

“Hey,” I said. “Hey, can you guys come over here for a second?”

He pretended not to hear me. He looked right through me, the way you would a homeless person.

“Come on,” I said. “I don’t have a lot of time.” I grabbed his shoulder and hissed in his ear. “The cops are after me. I’m from Xnet.”

He looked scared now, like he wanted to run away, and his friend was moving toward us. “I’m serious,” I said. “Just hear me out.”

His friend came over. He was taller, and beefy — like Darryl. “Hey,” he said. “Something wrong?”

His friend whispered in his ear. The two of them looked like they were going to bolt.

I grabbed my copy of the Bay Guardian from under my arm and rattled it in front of them. “Just turn to page 5, OK?”

They did. They looked at the headline. The photo. Me.

“Oh, dude,” the first one said. “We are so not worthy.” He grinned at me like crazy, and the beefier one slapped me on the back.

“No way —” he said. “You’re M —”

I put a hand over his mouth. “Come over here, OK?”

I brought them back to my bench. I noticed that there was something old and brown staining the sidewalk underneath it. Darryl’s blood? It made my skin pucker up. We sat down.

“I’m Marcus,” I said, swallowing hard as I gave my real name to these two who already knew me as M1k3y. I was blowing my cover, but the Bay Guardian had already made the connection for me.

“Nate,” the small one said. “Liam,” the bigger one said. “Dude, it is such an honor to meet you. You’re like our all-time hero —”

“Don’t say that,” I said. “Don’t say that. You two are like a flashing advertisement that says, ‘I am jamming, please put my ass in Gitmo-by-the-Bay. You couldn’t be more obvious.”

Liam looked like he might cry.

“Don’t worry, you didn’t get busted. I’ll give you some tips, later.” He brightened up again. What was becoming weirdly clear was that these two really did idolize M1k3y, and that they’d do anything I said. They were grinning like idiots. It made me uncomfortable, sick to my stomach.

“Listen, I need to get on Xnet, now, without going home or anywhere near home. Do you two live near here?”

“I do,” Nate said. “Up at the top of California Street. It’s a bit of a walk — steep hills.” I’d just walked all the way down them. Masha was somewhere up there. But still, it was better than I had any right to expect.

“Let’s go,” I said.

#

Nate loaned me his baseball hat and traded jackets with me. I didn’t have to worry about gait-recognition, not with my ankle throbbing the way it was — I limped like an extra in a cowboy movie.

Nate lived in a huge four-bedroom apartment at the top of Nob Hill. The building had a doorman, in a red overcoat with gold brocade, and he touched his cap and called Nate, “Mr Nate” and welcomed us all there. The place was spotless and smelled of furniture polish. I tried not to gawp at what must have been a couple million bucks’ worth of condo.

“My dad,” he explained. “He was an investment banker. Lots of life insurance. He died when I was 14 and we got it all. They’d been divorced for years, but he left my mom as beneficiary.”

From the floor-to-ceiling window, you could see a stunning view of the other side of Nob Hill, all the way down to Fisherman’s Wharf, to the ugly stub of the Bay Bridge, the crowd of cranes and trucks. Through the mist, I could just make out Treasure Island. Looking down all that way, it gave me a crazy urge to jump.

I got online with his Xbox and a huge plasma screen in the living room. He showed me how many open WiFi networks were visible from his high vantage point — twenty, thirty of them. This was a good spot to be an Xnetter.

There was a lot of email in my M1k3y account. 20,000 new messages since Ange and I had left her place that morning. Lots of it was from the press, asking for followup interviews, but most of it was from the Xnetters, people who’d seen the Guardian story and wanted to tell me that they’d do anything to help me, anything I needed.

That did it. Tears started to roll down my cheeks.

Nate and Liam exchanged glances. I tried to stop, but it was no good. I was sobbing now. Nate went to an oak book-case on one wall and swung a bar out of one of its shelves, revealing gleaming rows of bottles. He poured me a shot of something golden brown and brought it to me.

“Rare Irish whiskey,” he said. “Mom’s favorite.”