CORY DOCTOROW · 98
Van shook her head. “That’s just what I’m talking about. You could end up going to jail for this, Marcus, and not just you. Lots of people. After what happened to Darryl — ” “I’m doing this for Darryl!” Art students swiveled to look at us and I lowered my voice. “I’m doing this because the alternative is to let them get away with it all.” “You think you’re going to stop them? You’re out of your mind. They’re the government.” “It’s still our country,” I said. “We still have the right to do this.” Van looked like she was going to cry. She took a couple of deep breaths and stood up. “I can’t do it, I’m sorry. I can’t watch you do this. It’s like watching a car-wreck in slow motion. You’re going to destroy yourself, and I love you too much to watch it happen.” She bent down and gave me a fierce hug and a hard kiss on the cheek that caught the edge of my mouth. “Take care of yourself, Marcus,” she said. My mouth burned where her lips had pressed it. She gave Jolu the same treatment, but square on the cheek. Then she left. Jolu and I stared at each other after she’d gone. I put my face in my hands. “Dammit,” I said, finally. Jolu patted me on the back and ordered me another latte. “It’ll be OK,” he said. “You’d think Van, of all people, would understand.” Half of Van’s family lived in North Korea. Her parents never forgot that they had all those people living under a crazy dictator, not able to escape to America, the way her parents had. Jolu shrugged. “Maybe that’s why she’s so freaked out. Because she knows how dangerous it can get.” I knew what he was talking about. Two of Van’s uncles had gone to jail and had never reappeared. “Yeah,” I said. “So how come you weren’t on Xnet last night?” I was grateful for the distraction. I explained it all to him, the Bayesian stuff and my fear that we couldn’t go on using Xnet the way we had been without getting nabbed. He listened thoughtfully. “I see what you’re saying. The problem is that if there’s too much crypto in someone’s Internet connection, they’ll stand out as unusual. But if you don’t encrypt, you’ll make it easy for the bad guys to wiretap you.”