Little Brother

days.
    But the thing was, stories like that get picked up and republished. First it was Italian bloggers, then a few American bloggers. People across the country reported "sightings" of the Old People, though whether they were making it up, or whether others were playing the same game, I didn't know.
    It worked its way up the media food-chain all the way to the New York Times , who, unfortunately, have an unhealthy appetite for fact-checking. The reporter they put on the story eventually tracked it down to the Monaco Hotel, who put them in touch with the LARP organizers, who laughingly spilled the whole story.
    Well, at that point, LARPing got a lot less cool. We became known as the nation's foremost hoaxers, as weird, pathological liars. The press who we'd inadvertently tricked into covering the story of the Old People were now interested in redeeming themselves by reporting on how unbelievably weird we LARPers were, and that was when Charles let everyone in school know that Darryl and I were the biggest LARPing weenies in the city.
    That was not a good season. Some of the gang didn't mind, but we did. The teasing was merciless. Charles led it. I'd find plastic fangs in my bag, and kids I passed in the hall would go "bleh, bleh" like a cartoon vampire, or they'd talk with fake Transylvanian accents when I was around.
    We switched to ARGing pretty soon afterwards. It was more fun in some ways, and it was a lot less weird. Every now and again, though, I missed my cape and those weekends in the hotel.

    The opposite of esprit d'escalier is the way that life's embarrassments come back to haunt us even after they're long past. I could remember every stupid thing I'd ever said or done, recall them with picture-perfect clarity. Any time I was feeling low, I'd naturally start to remember other times I felt that way, a hit-parade of humiliations coming one after another to my mind.
    As I tried to concentrate on Masha and my impending doom, the Old People incident kept coming back to haunt me. There'd been a similar, sick, sinking doomed feeling then, as more and more press outlets picked up the story, as the likelihood of someone figuring out that it had been me who'd sprung the story on the stupid Italian editor in the designer jeans with crooked seams, the starched collarless shirt, and the oversized metal-rimmed glasses.
    There's an alternative to dwelling on your mistakes. You can learn from them.
    It's a good theory, anyway. Maybe the reason your subconscious dredges up all these miserable ghosts is that they need to get closure before they can rest peacefully in humiliation afterlife. My subconscious kept visiting me with ghosts in the hopes that I would do something to let them rest in peace.
    All the way home, I turned over this memory and the thought of what I would do about "Masha," in case she was playing me. I needed some insurance.
    And by the time I reached my house — to be swept up into melancholy hugs from Mom and Dad — I had it.

    The trick was to time this so that it happened fast enough that the DHS couldn't prepare for it, but with a long enough lead time that the Xnet would have time to turn out in force.
    The trick was to stage this so that there were too many present to arrest us all, but to put it somewhere that the press could see it and the grownups, so the DHS wouldn't just gas us again.
    The trick was to come up with something with the media friendliness of the levitation of the Pentagon. The trick was to to stage something that we could rally around, like 3,000 Berkeley students refusing to let one of their number be taken away in a police van.
    The trick was to put the press there, ready to say what the police did, the way they had in 1968 in Chicago.
    It was going to be some trick.
    I cut out of school an hour early the next day, using my customary techniques for getting out, not caring if it would trigger some kind of new DHS checker that would result in my parents getting a note.
    One way or another, my parents' last problem after tomorrow would be whether I was in trouble at school.
    I met Ange at her place. She'd had to cut out of school even earlier, but she'd just made a big deal out of her cramps and pretended she was going to keel over and they sent her home.
    We started to spread the word on Xnet. We sent it in email to trusted friends, and IMmed it to our buddy lists. We roamed the decks and towns of Clockwork Plunder and told our team-mates. Giving everyone enough information to