SiSU: - Homeland - Cory Doctorow

Homeland
-- Carrie Johnstone, the woman of my nightmares. Darryl's, too. “I get so angry, so fast.
It's like I'm watching myself from outside myself.
“You got to do something. I was locked away. I couldn't do anything. I couldn't help
spread the Xnet, or go to big demonstrations, or jam with the other Xnetters. I sat in that
room, naked, alone, for hours and hours and hours, nothing in there but my thoughts, my
voices.”
I'd never really thought of myself as lucky for being where I had been after the DHS took
over San Francisco, but now that I looked at it from Darryl's point of view, I had to admit
that yeah, it could have been a lot worse. I tried to imagine what it would have been like
to be totally helpless and alone, instead of with all these amazing friends and people who
looked up to me and hailed me.
“I'm sorry, D,” I said.
“It's not your fault,” he said. “I don't want to put this on you. It's my own damned problem.”
He swallowed a couple times. “It's partly why I hadn't been around much for you lately.
Didn't want to say something, you know, ugly. Because I know you did what you did for
me.” Had I? Maybe a little. But I also did it for me, for the humiliation and suffering and fear,
to try and get past all that. “But when Jolu told me about the darknet, when I saw those
documents, I felt, like, all right, now it's my turn. Now I can finally do something about all
the nastiness and corruption and evil in the world.
“But Van, she's not down for that. She just wants me to be safe. I get that. But she doesn't
understand how being `safe' means that I can't be whole again, can't get demons out of
my head. I need to make something right, I need to be the star of my own movie for a
change.”
“Jeez, D, man --” I couldn't really find the words. I guess I'd suspected some of this, but I
don't think I'd ever imagined that Darryl would ever say these words to me. It wasn't the
kind of thing that guys said to each other -- not even guys who were as close as brothers,
the way we had been.
“Yeah,” he said. “It sure is a bitch, isn't it?”
“So what do you want to do?” I said.
“What do I want to do?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah. What do you want to do? Not `What do you think I should do?' or
`What do you think is the safest thing to do?' What does Darryl Glover want to do, right
now, today?”
He looked down at his hands. His fingernails were chewed ragged, his cuticles dotted with
little scabs from where he'd chewed them bloody. He'd done that as a kid, but he'd stopped
when we were both fourteen. I didn't know he'd started again.
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