One morning I came down to breakfast just in time to hear Dad tell Mom that the two biggest taxi companies were going to give a "discount" to people who used special cards to pay their fares, supposedly to make drivers safer by reducing the amount of cash they carried. I wondered what would happen to the information about who took which cabs where.
I realized how close I'd come. The new indienet client had been pushed out as an automatic update just as this stuff started to get bad, and Jolu told me that 80 percent of the traffic he saw at Pigspleen was now encrypted. The Xnet just might have been saved.
Dad was driving me nuts, though.
"You're being paranoid, Marcus," he told me over breakfast one day as I told him about the guys I'd seen the cops shaking down on BART the day before.
"Dad, it's ridiculous. They're not catching any terrorists, are they? It's just making people scared."
"They may not have caught any terrorists yet, but they're sure getting a lot of scumbags off the streets. Look at the drug dealers -- it says they've put dozens of them away since this all started. Remember when those druggies robbed you? If we don't bust their dealers, it'll only get worse." I'd been mugged the year before. They'd been pretty civilized about it. One skinny guy who smelled bad told me he had a gun, the other one asked me for my wallet. They even let me keep my ID, though they got my debit card and Fast Pass. It had still scared me witless and left me paranoid and checking my shoulder for weeks.
"But most of the people they hold up aren't doing anything wrong, Dad," I said. This was getting to me. My own father! "It's crazy. For every guilty person they catch, they have to punish thousands of innocent people. That's just not good."
"Innocent? Guys cheating on their wives? Drug dealers? You're defending them, but what about all the people who died? If you don't have anything to hide --"
"So you wouldn't mind if they pulled you over?" My dad's histograms had proven to be depressingly normal so far.
"I'd consider it my duty," he said. "I'd be proud. It would make me feel safer."
Easy for him to say.
#
Vanessa didn't like me talking about this stuff, but she was too smart about it for me to stay away from the subject for long. We'd get together all the time, and talk about the weather and school and stuff, and then, somehow, I'd be back on this subject. Vanessa was cool when it happened -- she didn't Hulk out on me again -- but I could see it upset her.
Still.
"So my dad says, 'I'd consider it my duty.' Can you freaking believe it? I mean, God! I almost told him then about going to jail, asking him if he thought that was our 'duty'!"
We were sitting in the grass in Dolores Park after school, watching the dogs chase frisbees.
Van had stopped at home and changed into an old t-shirt for one of her favorite Brazilian tecno-brega bands, Carioca Proibidão -- the forbidden guy from Rio. She'd gotten the shirt at a live show we'd all gone to two years before, sneaking out for a grand adventure down at the Cow Palace, and she'd sprouted an inch or two since, so it was tight and rode up her tummy, showing her flat little belly button.
She lay back in the weak sun with her eyes closed behind her shades, her toes wiggling in her flip-flops. I'd known Van since forever, and when I thought of her, I usually saw the little kid I'd known with hundreds of jangly bracelets made out of sliced-up soda cans, who played the piano and couldn't dance to save her life. Sitting out there in Dolores Park, I suddenly saw her as she was.
She was totally h4wt -- that is to say, hot. It was like looking at that picture of a vase and noticing that it was also two faces. I could see that Van was just Van, but I could also see that she was hella pretty, something I'd never noticed.
Of course, Darryl had known it all along, and don't think that I wasn't bummed out anew when I realized this.
"You can't tell your dad, you know," she said. "You'd put us all at risk." Her eyes were closed and her chest was rising up and down with her breath, which was distracting in a really embarrassing way.
