Little Brother

y any book ever published (along with practically everything else,from laptops to cheese-graters), where they've elevated recommendationsto a high art, w

ning onfast home PCs. Those PCs normally function on behalf of their owners,but when the botmaster calls them, they rise like zombies to do hisbidding.There are so many infected PCs on the Internet that the price of hiringan hour or two on a botnet has crashed. Mostly these things work forspammers as cheap, distributed spambots, filling your mailbox withcome-ons for boner-pills or with new viruses that can infect you and re-cruit your machine to join the botnet.I'd just rented 10 seconds' time on three thousand PCs and had each ofthem send a text message or voice-over-IP call to Charles's phone, whosenumber I'd extracted from a sticky note on Benson's desk during onefateful office-visit.Needless to say, Charles's phone was not equipped to handle this. Firstthe SMSes filled the memory on his phone, causing it to start choking onthe routine operations it needed to do things like manage the ringer andlog all those incoming calls' bogus return numbers (did you know thatit's really easy to fake the return number on a caller ID? There are aboutfifty ways of doing it — just google "spoof caller id").Charles stared at it dumbfounded, and jabbed at it furiously, his thickeyebrows knotting and wiggling as he struggled with the demons thathad possessed his most personal of devices. The plan was working sofar, but he wasn't doing what he was supposed to be doing next — hewas supposed to go find some place to sit down and try to figure outhow to get his phone back.Darryl shook me by the shoulder, and I pulled my eye away from thecrack in the door."What's he doing?" Darryl whispered."I totaled his phone, but he's just staring at it now instead of movingon." It wasn't going to be easy to reboot that thing. Once the memory wastotally filled, it would have a hard time loading the code it needed to de-lete the bogus messages — and there was no bulk-erase for texts on hisphone, so he'd have to manually delet all of the thousands of messages.31Darryl shoved me back and stuck his eye up to the door. A momentlater, his shoulders started to shake. I got scared, thinking he was panick-ing, but when he pulled back, I saw that he was laughing so hard thattears were streaming down his cheeks."Galvez just totally busted him for being in the halls during class andfor having his phone out — you should have seen her tear into him. Shewas really enjoying it."We shook hands solemnly and snuck back out of the corridor, downthe stairs, around the back, out the door, past the fence and out into theglorious sunlight of afternoon in the Mission. Valencia Street had neverlooked so good. I checked my watch and yelped."Let's move! The rest of the gang is meeting us at the cable-cars intwenty minutes!"Van spotted us first. She was blending in with a group of Korean tour-ists, which is one of her favorite ways of camouflaging herself when she'sditching school. Ever since the truancy moblog went live, our world isfull of nosy shopkeepers and pecksniffs who take it upon themselves tosnap our piccies and put them on the net where they can be perused byschool administrators.She came out of the crowd and bounded toward us. Darryl has had athing for Van since forever, and she's sweet enough to pretend shedoesn't know it. She gave me a hug and then moved onto Darryl, givinghim a quick sisterly kiss on the cheek that made him go red to the tops ofhis ears.The two of them made a funny pair: Darryl is a little on the heavy side,though he wears it well, and he's got a kind of pink complexion that goesred in the cheeks whenever he runs or gets excited. He's been able togrow a beard since we were 14, but thankfully he started shaving after abrief period known to our gang as "the Lincoln years." And he's tall.Very, very tall. Like basketball player tall.Meanwhile, Van is half a head shorter than me, and skinny, withstraight black hair that she wears in crazy, elaborate braids that she re-searches on the net. She's got pretty coppery skin and dark eyes, and sheloves big glass rings the size of radishes, which click and clack togetherwhen she dances."Where's Jolu?" she said.32"How are you, Van?" Darryl asked in a choked voice. He always ran astep behind the conversation when it came to Van."I'm great, D. How's your every little thing?" Oh, she was a bad, badperson. Darryl nearly fainted.Jolu saved him from social disgrace by showing up just then, in anoversize leather baseball jacket, sharp sneakers, and a meshback cap ad-vertising our favorite Mexican masked wrestler, El Santo Junior. Jolu isJose Luis Torrez, the completing member of our foursome. He went to asuper-strict Catholic school in the Outer Richmond, so it wasn't easy forhim to get out. But he always did: no one exfiltrated like our Jolu. Heliked his jacket because it hung down low — which was pretty stylish inparts of the city — and covered up all his Catholic school crap, whichwas like a bulls-eye for nosy jerks with the truancy moblog bookmarkedon their phones."Who's ready to go?" I asked, once we'd all said hello. I pulled out myphone and showed them the map I'd downloaded to it on the BART."Near as I can work out, we wanna go up to the Nikko again, then oneblock past it to O'Farrell, then left up toward Van Ness. Somewhere inthere we should find the wireless signal."Van made a face. "That's a nasty part of the Tenderloin." I couldn't ar-gue with her. That part of San Francisco is one of the weird bits — yougo in through the Hilton's front entrance and it's all touristy stuff like thecable-car turnaround and family restaurants. Go through to the otherside and you're in the 'Loin, where every tracked out transvestite hooker,hard-case pimp, hissing drug dealer and cracked up homeless person intown was concentrated. What they bought and sold, none of us were oldenough to be a part of (though there were plenty of hookers our age ply-ing their trade in the 'Loin.)"Look on the bright side," I said. "The only time you want to go uparound there is broad daylight. None of the other players are going to gonear it until tomorrow at the earliest. This is what we in the ARG busi-ness call a monster head start."Jolu grinned at me. "You make it sound like a good thing," he said."Beats eating uni," I said."We going