Little Brother

beanbags and shouting "Fireball!" and so on. Good fun, if a little goofy. Not nearly as geeky as talking about what your elf planned on doing as you sat around a table loaded with Diet Coke cans and painted miniatures, and more physically active than going into a mouse-coma in front of a massively multiplayer game at home.
    The thing that got me into trouble were the mini-games in the hotels. Whenever a science fiction convention came to town, some LARPer would convince them to let us run a couple of six-hour mini-games at the con, piggybacking on their rental of the space. Having a bunch of enthusiastic kids running around in costume lent color to the event, and we got to have a ball among people even more socially deviant than us.
    The problem with hotels is that they have a lot of non-gamers in them, too — and not just sci-fi people. Normal people. From states that begin and end with vowels. On holidays.
    And sometimes those people misunderstand the nature of a game.
    Let's just leave it at that, OK?

    Class ended in ten minutes, and that didn't leave me with much time to prepare. The first order of business were those pesky gait-recognition cameras. Like I said, they'd started out as face-recognition cameras, but those had been ruled unconstitutional. As far as I know, no court has yet determined whether these gait-cams are any more legal, but until they do, we're stuck with them.
    "Gait" is a fancy word for the way you walk. People are pretty good at spotting gaits — next time you're on a camping trip, check out the bobbing of the flashlight as a distant friend approaches you. Chances are you can identify him just from the movement of the light, the characteristic way it bobs up and down that tells our monkey brains that this is a person approaching us.
    Gait recognition software takes pictures of your motion, tries to isolate you in the pics as a silhouette, and then tries to match the silhouette to a database to see if it knows who you are. It's a biometric identifier, like fingerprints or retina-scans, but it's got a lot more "collisions" than either of those. A biometric "collision" is when a measurement matches more than one person. Only you have your fingerprint, but you share your gait with plenty other people.
    Not exactly, of course. Your personal, inch-by-inch walk is yours and yours alone. The problem is your inch-by-inch walk changes based on how tired you are, what the floor is made of, whether you pulled your ankle playing basketball, and whether you've changed your shoes lately. So the system kind of fuzzes-out your profile, looking for people who walk kind of like you.
    There are a lot of people who walk kind of like you. What's more, it's easy not to walk kind of like you — just take one shoe off. Of course, you'll always walk like you-with-one-shoe-off in that case, so the cameras will eventually figure out that it's still you. Which is why I prefer to inject a little randomness into my attacks on gait-recognition: I put a handful of gravel into each shoe. Cheap and effective, and no two steps are the same. Plus you get a great reflexology foot massage in the process (I kid. Reflexology is about as scientifically useful as gait-recognition).
    The cameras used to set off an alert every time someone they didn't recognize stepped onto campus.
    This did not work.
    The alarm went off every ten minutes. When the mailman came by. When a parent dropped in. When the grounds-people went to work fixing up the basketball court. When a student showed up wearing new shoes.
    So now it just tries to keep track of who's where and when. If someone leaves by the school-gates during classes, their gait is checked to see if it kinda-sorta matches any student gait and if it does, whoop-whoop-whoop, ring the alarm!
    Chavez High is ringed with gravel walkways. I like to keep a couple handsful of rocks in my shoulder-bag, just in case. I silently passed Darryl ten or fifteen pointy little bastards and we both loaded our shoes.
    Class was about to finish up — and I realized that I still hadn't checked the Harajuku Fun Madness site to see where the next clue was! I'd been a little hyper-focused on the escape, and hadn't bothered to figure out where we were escaping to .
    I turned to my SchoolBook and hit the keyboard. The web-browser we used was supplied with the machine. It was a locked-down spyware version of Internet Explorer, Microsoft's crashware turd that no one under the age of 40 used voluntarily.
    I had