SiSU: - Homeland - Cory Doctorow

Homeland
them out of my computer after all and they'd been watching me all along, had rushed down
here when they saw Liam come and drag me off to the demonstration.
I couldn't go on like this. I was going to have to get my head straight. If I could only get a
decent night's sleep, I could sort it all out. I'd felt that way for years, I realized. If I could only
get a normal day, a day when my parents weren't freaking out about money and jobs, a
day when I was just a regular student or a regular coder, or something else regular --
Was there ever going to be a “normal” again?
Since we'd arrived, the crowd had been growing. And growing. And growing. I'd been in
some big demonstrations in San Francisco before, but they were generally the kind that
had permits and marshalls and were very orderly. This wasn't like that. I'd been vaguely
aware all summer that occupy demonstrations had been growing, mobilizing more people
each time. But I hadn't quite figured out what that meant, not until I realized that the nearly
painful roaring in my ears was just thousands and thousands of people all talking in very
close quarters.
“Holy crap,” I said, and Liam grinned, looking around, then showed me his phone, which
had a live feed off someone's UAV, one of several that were buzzing the demonstration.
Some had police markings, other had news-crew logos, and some were more colorful,
with rainbows and slogans and grinning skulls. But most of them were eerily blank, and
could have belonged to anyone. The one that was feeding Liam's phone was flying a lazy
figure-eight pattern over the crowd, which, I saw now, stretched all the way down to Grove
Street and all the way up to Golden Gate Avenue, and there were people with homemade
signs converging on the crowd from side streets.
Liam was practically dancing a jig, and he was showing his phone's display off to everyone
else -- Trudy Doo, the Anons, anyone who'd hold still. Meanwhile, I was fighting
panic. There was one big, unscheduled crowd I'd been in, the thousands of people who'd
streamed into the Powell Street BART station when the air-raid sirens went off, a crowd so
dense it had been like a living thing, a boa constrictor that strangled you, an enormous dray
horse that trampled you to death. Someone in that crowd had stabbed Darryl, a random
act of senseless violence that I had often laid awake at night wondering about. Had that
person just freaked out? Or had they been secretly waiting for the day when the opportunity
to stab strangers with impunity would arise?
The crowd pressed in on all sides of me, moving in little increments, a sixteenth of an inch
at a time, but moving, and not stopping, and growing closer every moment. I tried to step
backwards and landed on someone's toe. “Sorry!” I said, and it came out in a yelp.
“Um, Liam,” I said, grabbing his arm.
“What is it?”
“I got a bad feeling, Liam. Can we go? Now? I want to get back to the office, and we're
not going to do that if we go to jail.” Or if we get crushed to death.
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