Little Brother

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.
    "Yeah," I said, glumly. "But the problem is that I know he's just totally full of it. If you pulled my dad over and made him prove he wasn't a child-molesting, drug-dealing terrorist, he'd go berserk. Totally off-the-rails. He hates being put on hold when he calls about his credit-card bill. Being locked in the back of a car and questioned for an hour would give him an aneurism."
    "They only get away with it because the normals feel smug compared to the abnormals. If everyone was getting pulled over, it'd be a disaster. No one would ever get anywhere, they'd all be waiting to get questioned by the cops. Total gridlock."
    Woah.
    "Van, you are a total genius," I said.
    "Tell me about it," she said. She had a lazy smile and she looked at me through half-lidded eyes, almost romantic.
    "Seriously. We can do this. We can mess up the profiles easily. Getting people pulled over is easy."
    She sat up and pushed her hair off her face and looked at me. I felt a little flip in my stomach, thinking that she was really impressed with me.
    "It's the arphid cloners," I said. "They're totally easy to make. Just flash the firmware on a ten-dollar Radio Shack reader/writer and you're done. What we do is go around and randomly swap the tags on people, overwriting their Fast Passes and FasTraks with other people's codes. That'll make everyone skew all weird and screwy, and make everyone look guilty. Then: total gridlock."
    Van pursed her lips and lowered her shades and