Little Brother

your lawyer looks for you. A lot can happen in that time. A lot . How'd you like that?"
    I didn't say anything. I'd been giddy and angry. Now I was scared witless.
    "I'm sorry," I managed, hating myself again for saying it.
    Booger got in the front seat and Zit put the car in gear, cruising up 24th Street and over Potrero Hill. They had my address from my ID.
    Mom answered the door after they rang the bell, leaving the chain on. She peeked around it, saw me and said, "Marcus? Who are these men?"
    "Police," Booger said. He showed her his badge, letting her get a good look at it — not whipping it away the way he had with me. "Can we come in?"
    Mom closed the door and took the chain off and let them in. They brought me in and Mom gave the three of us one of her looks.
    "What's this about?"
    Booger pointed at me. "We wanted to ask your son some routine questions about his movements, but he declined to answer them. We felt it might be best to bring him here."
    "Is he under arrest?" Mom's accent was coming on strong. Good old Mom.
    "Are you a United States citizen, ma'am?" Zit said.
    She gave him a look that could have stripped paint. "I shore am, hyuck," she said, in a broad southern accent. "Am I under arrest?"
    The two cops exchanged a look.
    Zit took the fore. "We seem to have gotten off to a bad start. We identified your son as someone with a nonstandard public transit usage pattern, as part of a new pro-active enforcement program. When we spot people whose travels are unusual, or that match a suspicious profile, we investigate further."
    "Wait," Mom said. "How do you know how my son uses the Muni?"
    "The Fast Pass," he said. "It tracks voyages."
    "I see," Mom said, folding her arms. Folding her arms was a bad sign. It was bad enough she hadn't offered them a cup of tea — in Mom-land, that was practically like making them shout through the mail-slot — but once she folded her arms, it was not going to end well for them. At that moment, I wanted to go and buy her a big bunch of flowers.
    "Marcus here declined to tell us why his movements had been what they were."
    "Are you saying you think my son is a terrorist because of how he rides the bus?"
    "Terrorists aren't the only bad guys we catch this way," Zit said. "Drug dealers. Gang kids. Even shoplifters smart enough to hit a different neighborhood with every run."
    "You think my son is a drug dealer?"
    "We're not saying that —" Zit began. Mom clapped her hands at him to shut him up.
    "Marcus, please pass me your backpack."
    I did.
    Mom unzipped it and looked through it, turning her back to us first.
    "Officers, I can now affirm that there are no narcotics, explosives, or shoplifted gewgaws in my son's bag. I think we're done here. I would like your badge numbers before you go, please."
    Booger sneered at her. "Lady, the ACLU is suing three hundred cops on the SFPD, you're going to have to get in line."

    Mom made me a cup of tea and then chewed me out for eating dinner when I knew that she'd been making falafel. Dad came home while we were still at the table and Mom and I took turns telling him the story. He shook his head.
    "Lillian, they were just doing their jobs." He was still wearing the blue blazer and khakis he wore on the days that he was consulting in Silicon Valley. "The world isn't the same place it was last week."
    Mom set down her teacup. "Drew, you're being ridiculous. Your son is not a terrorist. His use of the public transit system is not cause for a police investigation."
    Dad took off his blazer. "We do this all the time at my work. It's how computers can be used to find all kinds of errors, anomalies and outcomes. You ask the computer to create a profile of an average record in a database and then ask it to find out which records in the database are furthest away from average. It's part of something called Bayesian analysis and it's been around for centuries now. Without it, we couldn't do spam-filtering —"
    "So you're saying that you think the police should suck as hard as my spam filter?" I said.
    Dad never got angry at me for arguing with him, but tonight I could see the strain was running high in him. Still, I couldn't resist. My own father, taking the police's side!
    "I'm saying that it's perfectly reasonable for the police to conduct their investigations by starting with data-mining, and then following it up with leg-work where a human being actually intervenes to see why the abnormality exists. I don't think that a computer should be