Little Brother

the kitchen, waving his arms like a street-preacher.
    "What?" he snapped.
    "I think you owe Marcus an apology." She kept her voice even and level. Dad and I are the spazzes in the household — Mom's a total rock.
    Dad looked at me. His eyes narrowed as he thought for a minute. "All right," he said at last. "You're right. I was talking about competent surveillance. These guys were total amateurs. I'm sorry, son," he said. "You were right. That was ridiculous." He stuck his hand out and shook my hand, then gave me a firm, unexpected hug.
    "God, what are we doing to this country, Marcus? Your generation deserves to inherit something better than this." When he let me go, I could see the deep wrinkles in his face, lines I'd never noticed.
    I went back up to my room and played some Xnet games. There was a good multiplayer thing, a clockwork pirate game where you had to quest every day or two to wind up your whole crew's mainsprings before you could go plundering and pillaging again. It was the kind of game I hated but couldn't stop playing: lots of repetitive quests that weren't all that satisfying to complete, a little bit of player-versus-player combat (scrapping to see who would captain the ship) and not that many cool puzzles that you had to figure out. Mostly, playing this kind of game made me homesick for Harajuku Fun Madness, which balanced out running around in the real world, figuring out online puzzles, and strategizing with your team.
    But today it was just what I needed. Mindless entertainment.
    My poor dad.
    I'd done that to him. He'd been happy before, confident that his tax dollars were being spent to keep him safe. I'd destroyed that confidence. It was false confidence, of course, but it had kept him going. Seeing him now, miserable and broken, I wondered if it was better to be clear-eyed and hopeless or to live in a fool's paradise. That shame — the shame I'd felt since I gave up my passwords, since they'd broken me — returned, leaving me listless and wanting to just get away from myself.
    My character was a swabbie on the pirate ship Zombie Charger , and he'd wound down while I'd been offline. I had to IM all the other players on my ship until I found one willing to wind me up. That kept me occupied. I liked it, actually. There was something magic about a total stranger doing you a favor. And since it was the Xnet, I knew that all the strangers were friends, in some sense.
    > Where u located?
    The character who wound me up was called Lizanator, and it was female, though that didn't mean that it was a girl. Guys had some weird affinity for playing female characters.
    > San Francisco
    I said.
    > No stupe, where you located in San Fran?
    > Why, you a pervert?
    That usually shut down that line of conversation. Of course every gamespace was full of pedos and pervs, and cops pretending to be pedo- and perv-bait (though I sure hoped there weren't any cops on the Xnet!). An accusation like that was enough to change the subject nine out of ten times.
    > Mission? Potrero Hill? Noe? East Bay?
    > Just wind me up k thx?
    She stopped winding.
    > You scared?
    > Safe — why do you care?
    > Just curious
    I was getting a bad vibe off her. She was clearly more than just curious. Call it paranoia. I logged off and shut down my Xbox.

    Dad looked at me over the table the next morning and said, "It looks like it's going to get better, at least." He handed me a copy of the Chronicle open to the third page.
    > A Department of Homeland Security spokesman has confirmed that the San Francisco office has requested a 300 percent budget and personnel increase from DC
    What?
    > Major General Graeme Sutherland, the commanding officer for Northern California DHS operations, confirmed the request at a press conference yesterday, noting that a spike in suspicious activity in the Bay Area prompted the request. "We are tracking a spike in underground chatter and activity and believe that saboteurs are deliberately manufacturing false security alerts to undermine our efforts."
    My eyes crossed. No freaking way.
    > "These false alarms are potentially 'radar chaff' intended to disguise real attacks. The only effective way of combatting them is to step up staffing and analyst levels so that we can fully investigate every lead."
    > Sutherland noted the delays experienced all over the city were "unfortunate" and committed to eliminating them.
    I had a vision of the city with four or five times as many DHS enforcers, brought in to make up for