Cory Doctorow's "Scroogled" read by Wil Wheaton

This "video" is just a support for multilingual subtitling of the audio recording of Cory Doctorow's "Scroogled" short story, from his With a Little Help collection, as read by Wil Wheaton.Sources:With a Little Help
craphound.com/walh
(collection of all versions of all stories, and description of the publishing project);Audio of Will Wheaton's recording downloadable from craphound.com/walh/audiobook/download-audiobook
Translations of "Scroogled" and derived works: craphound.com/?p=1902

Wheaton: Scroogled by Cory Doctorow. Originally published in Radar Magazine, September, 2007.

Read by Will Wheaton.

"Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him."

Cardinal Richelieu

Greg landed at SFO at 8PM, but by the time
he made it to the front of the customs line

it was after midnight. He had it good --
he'd been in first class, first off the plane,

brown as a nut and loose-limbed after a month
on the beach at Cabo,

SCUBA diving three days a week, bumming around and flirting with French college girls the rest of the time.

When he'd left San Francisco a month before, he'd been a stoop-shouldered, pot-bellied wreck --

now he was a bronze god, drawing appreciative
looks from the stews at the front of the plane.

In the four hours he spent in the customs line, he fell from god back to man.

His warm buzz wore off, the sweat ran down the crack of his ass,

and his shoulders and neck grew so tense that his upper back felt like a tennis racket.

The batteries on his iPod died after the third hour, leaving him with nothing to do

except eavesdrop on the middle-aged couple ahead of him.

"They've starting googling us at the border," she said. "I told you they'd do it."

"I thought that didn't start until next month?"

The man had brought a huge sombrero on board, carefully stowing it in its own overhead locker,

and now he was stuck alternately wearing it and holding it.

Googling at the border. Christ. Greg vested out from Google six months before, cashing in his options

and "taking some me time," which turned out to be harder than he expected.

Five months later, what he'd mostly done is fix his friends' PCs and websites, and watch daytime TV,

and gain ten pounds, which he blamed on being at home,

instead of in the Googleplex, with its excellent 24-hour gym.

The writing had been on the wall.

Google had a whole pod of lawyers in charge of dealing with the world's governments,

and scumbag lobbyists on the Hill to try to keep the law from turning them into the world's best snitch.

It was a losing battle.

The Government had spent $15 billion on a program to fingerprint and photograph visitors at the border,

and hadn't caught a single terrorist.

Clearly, the public sector was not equipped to Do Search Right.

The DHS officers had bags under their eyes
as they squinted at their screens,

prodding mistrustfully at their keyboards with sausage fingers.

No wonder it was taking four hours to get out of the goddamned airport.

"Evening," he said, as he handed the man his sweaty passport.

The man grunted and swiped it, then stared at his screen, clicking. A lot.

He had a little bit of dried food in the corner of his mouth

and his tongue crept out and licked at it as he concentrated.

"Want to tell me about June, 1998?"

Greg turned, rotated his head this way and that. "I'm sorry?"

"You posted a message to alt.burningman on June 17, 1998 about your plan to attend Burning Man.

You posted, 'Would taking shrooms be a really bad idea?'"

It was 3AM before they let him out of the "secondary screening" room.

The interrogator was an older man, so skinny he looked like he'd been carved out of wood

His questions went a lot further than the Burning Man shrooms.

They were just the start of Greg's problems.

"I'd like to know more about your hobbies. Are you interested in model rocketry?"

"What?"

"Model rocketry."

"No," Greg said. "No, I'm not."

Thinking of all the explosives that model rocketry people surrounded themselves with.

The man made a note, clicked some more.

"You see, I ask because I see a heavy spike of ads for model rocketry supplies

showing up alongside your search results and Google mail."

Greg felt his guts spasm. "You're looking at my searches and email?"

He hadn't touched a keyboard in a month,

but he knew that what you put into the searchbar was more intimate than what you told your father-confessor.

He'd seen enough queries to know that.

"Calm down, please. No, I'm not looking at your searches."

The man made a bitter lemon face and went on in a squeaky voice.

"That would be unconstitutional. You weren't listening to me.

We see the ads that show up when you read your mail and do your searching.

I have a brochure explaining it, I'll give it to you when we're through here."

"But the ads don't mean anything -- I get ads for Ann Coulter ringtones

whenever I get email from my friend who lives in Coulter, Iowa!"

The man nodded. "I understand, sir. And that's just why I'm here talking to you, instead of just looking at this screen.

Why do you suppose model rocket ads show up so frequently for you?"

He thought for a moment.

"OK, just do this. Go to Google and search for 'coffee fanciers', all right?"

He'd been very active in the group, helping them build out the site for their coffee-of-the-month subscription service.

The blend they were going to launch with was called "Jet Fuel." "Jet Fuel" and "Launch"

-- that'd probably make Google barf up model rocket ads.

Not that he would know -- he blocked all the ads in his browser.

They were in the home stretch when the carved man found the Hallowe'en photos.

They were buried three screens deep in the search results for "Greg Lupinski," and Greg hadn't noticed them.

"It was a Gulf War themed party," he said. "In the Castro."

"And you're dressed as --?"

"A suicide bomber."

Just saying the words in an airport made him nervous,

as though uttering them would cause the handcuffs to come out.

"Come with me, Mr Lupinski."

The search lasted a long time. They swabbed him in places he didn't know he had.

He asked about a lawyer.

They told him that he could call all the lawyers he wanted once he was out of the Customs sterile area.

"Good night, Mr Lupinski."

This was a new interrogator, a man who'd wanted to know about

the reason that he'd sought both night diving and deep diving specialist certification from the PADI instructor in Cabo.

The guy impliedthat Greg had been training to be an al-Qaeda frogman,

and didn't seem to believe that Greg had just wanted to do all the certifications he could,

pursuing diving the way he pursued everything: thoroughly.

But now the man with the frogman fantasy was bidding him a good night and releasing him from the secondary screening area.

His suitcases stood alone by the baggage carousel.

When he picked them up, he saw that they had been opened and then inexpertly closed.

Some of his clothes stuck out from around the edges.

At home, he saw that all the fake "pre-Colombian" statues had been broken,

and that his white cotton Mexican shirt -- folded and fresh from his laundry-lady -- had a boot-print in the middle of it.

His clothes no longer smelled of Mexico. Now they smelled of airports and machine oil.

The mailman had dropped an entire milk-crate of mail off at his place that day, but he couldn't even begin to confront it.

All he could think of, as the sun rose over the Mission, turning the Victorian houses they called "painted ladies" vivid colors,

was what it meant to be googled.

He wasn't going to sleep. No way. He needed to talk about this.

And there was only one person who he could talk to, and luckily, she was usually awake around now.

Maya had started at Google two years after him, but had gotten a much bigger grant of stock than he had.

She knew exactly what she was going to do with it, too, once she vested:

take her dogs and her girlfriend and head to Florence, for good.

Learn Italian, take in the museums, sit in the cafes.

It was she who'd convinced him to go to Mexico: anywhere, she said, anywhere that he could reboot his existence.

Maya had two giant chocolate Labs and a very, very patient girlfriend who'd put up with anything

except being dragged around Dolores Park at 6AM by 350 pounds of drooling brown canine

She went for her Mace as he jogged towards her, then did a double-take and threw her arms open,

dropping the leashes and stamping on them with one sneaker, a practiced gesture.

"Where's the rest of you? Dude, you look hawt!"

He took the hug, suddenly self-conscious of the way he smelled after a night of invasive googling.

"Maya," he said. "Maya, what do you know about the DHS?"

She stiffened and the dogs whined. She looked around, then nodded up at the tennis courts.

"Top of the light standard there, don't look, there. That's one of our muni WiFi access points.

Wide-angle webcam. Face away from it when you talk. Lip-readers."

He parsed this out slowly. Google's free municipal WiFi program was a hit in every city where it played,

and in the grand scheme of things, it hadn't cost much to put WiFi access points up on light standards and other power-ready poles around town.

Especially not when measured against the ability to serve ads to people based on where they were sitting.

He hadn't paid much attention when they'd made the webcams on all those access points public

-- there'd been a day's worth of blogstorm while people looked out over their childhood streets

or patrolled prostitution strolls, fingering johns, but it had blown over.

Now he felt -- watched. ////

Feeling silly, he kept his lips together and
mumbled, "You're joking."

"Come with me," she said, facing squarely
away from the pole.

The dogs weren't happy about having their
walks cut short, and they let it be known

in the kitchen as Maya fixed coffee for them
-- barking, banging into the table and rocking

it. Maya's girlfriend Laurie called out from
the bedroom and Maya went back to talk to

her, then emerged, looking flustered.

"It started with China," she said. "Once we
moved our servers onto the mainland, they

went under Chinese jurisdiction. They could
google everyone going through our servers."

Greg knew what that meant: if you visited
a page with Google ads on it, if you used

Google maps, if you used Google mail -- even
if you sent mail to a gmail account -- Google

was collecting your info, forever.

"They were using us to build profiles of people.
Not arresting them, you understand. But when

they had someone they wanted to arrest, they'd
come to us for a profile and find a reason

to bust them. There's hardly anything you
can do on the net that isn't illegal in China."

Greg shook his head. "Why did they put the
servers in China?"

"The government said they'd block them if
they didn't. And Yahoo was there." They both

made a face. Somewhere along the way, Google
had become obsessed with Yahoo, more worried

about what the competition was doing than
how they were performing. "So we did it. But

a lot of us didn't like the idea."

She sipped her coffee and lowered her voice.
One of the dogs whined. "I made it my 20 percent

project." Googlers were supposed to devote
20 percent of their time to blue-sky projects.

"Me and my pod. We call it the googlecleaner.
It goes deep into the database and statistically

normalizes you. Your searches, your gmail
histograms, your browsing patterns. All of

it."

"The search ads?"

"Ah," she grimaced. "Yes, the DHS. So we brokered
a compromise with the DHS. They'd stop asking

to go fishing in our search records and we'd
let them see what ads got displayed for you."

Greg felt sick. "Why? Don't tell me Yahoo
was doing it already --"

"No, no. Well, yes. Sure. Yahoo was already
doing it. But that wasn't it. You know, Republicans

hate Google. We are overwhelmingly registered
Democrat. So we're doing what we can to make

peace with them before they clobber us. This
isn't PII --" Personally Identifying Information,

the toxic smog of the information age "--
it's just metadata. So it's only slightly

evil."

"If it's all so innocuous, why all this cloak-and-dagger
stuff?"

She sighed and hugged the dog that was butting
her with his huge, anvil-shaped head. "The

spooks are like pubic lice. They get everywhere.
Once we let them in, everything suddenly got

a lot more -- secret. Some of our meetings
have to have spooks present, it's like being

in some Soviet ministry, with a political
officer always there, watching everything.

And the security clearance. Now we're divided
into these two camps: the cleared and the

suspect. We all know who isn't cleared, but
no one knows why. I'm cleared. Lucky me --

being a homo no longer disqualifies you for
access to seekrit crap. No cleared person

wants to even eat lunch with an un-clearable.
And every now and again, one of your teammates

will get pulled off your project 'for security
reasons', whatever that means."

Greg felt very tired. "So now I'm feeling
lucky I got out of the airport alive. I suppose

I might have ended up in Gitmo if it had gone
badly, huh?"

She was staring at him intently, her eyes
flicking from side to side. He waited, but

she didn't say anything.

"What?"

"What I'm about to tell you, you can't ever
repeat it, OK?"

"Um, OK? You're not going to tell me you're
a deep-cover Al-Quaeda suicide bomber?"

"Nothing so simple. Here's the thing: the
airport DHS scrutiny is a gating function.

It lets the spooks narrow down their search
criteria. Once you get pulled aside for secondary

at the border, you become a 'person of interest,'
and they never, ever let up. They'll check

the webcams for your face and gait. Read your
mail. Log your searches."

"I thought you said the courts wouldn't let
them --"

"The courts won't let them indiscriminately
google you. But once you get into the system,

it becomes a selective search. All legal.
And once they start googling you, they always

find something."

"You mean to say they've got a boiler-room
of midwestern housewives reading the email

of everyone who ever got a second look at
the border? Sounds like the world's shittiest

job."

"If only. No, this is all untouched by human
hands. All your data is fed into a big hopper

that checks for 'suspicious patterns' and
gradually builds the case against you, using

deviation from statistical norms to prove
that you're guilty of something. It's just

a variation of the way we spot search-spammers"
-- the "optimizers" who tried to get their

Viagra scams and Ponzi schemes to come to
the top of the search results "-- but instead

of lowering your search rank, we increase
your probability of being sent to Syria. And

of course, they google all of us, everyone
who works on anything 'sensitive.'"

"Naturally," Greg said. He felt like he was
going to throw up. He felt like never using

a search engine again. "How the hell did this
happen? It's such a good place. 'Don't be

evil,' right?" That was the corporate motto,
and for Greg, it had been a huge part of his

reason for taking his fresh-minted computer
science PhD from Stanford directly to Google.

Maya's laugh was bitter and cynical. "Don't
be evil? Come on, Greg. Don't you remember

what it was like when we started censoring
the Chinese search results, and we all asked

how that could be anything but evil? The company
line was hilarious: 'We're not doing evil

-- we're giving them access to a better search
tool! If we showed them search results they

couldn't get to, that would just frustrate
them. It would be a bad user experience. If

we hadn't lost our don't-be-evil cherry by
then, we surely did the day we took that one."

"Now what?" Greg pushed a dog away from him
and Maya looked hurt.

"Now you're a person of interest, Greg. Googlestalked.
Now, you live your life with someone watching

over your shoulder, all the time. You know
the mission statement, right? 'Organize all

human knowledge.' That's everything. Give
it five years, we'll know how many turds were

in the bowl before you flushed. Combine that
with automated suspicion of anyone who matches

a statistical picture of a bad guy and you're
--"

"I'm scroogled."

"Totally."

"Thanks, Maya," he said. "Thanks anyway."

"Sit down," she said. The dog that had been
bumping at his legs was at it again. Maya

took both dogs down the hall to the bedroom
and he heard her muffled argument with her

girlfriend. She came back without the dogs.

"I can fix this," she said in a whisper so
low it was practically a hiss. "I can googleclean

you."

"But you're under constant scrutiny --"

"By DHS agents. Once they fired all non-native-born
Americans from the DHS, it got a lot fatter

and stupider. I can googleclean you, Greg."

"I don't want you to get into trouble."

She shook her head. "I'm already doomed. I
built the googlecleaner. Every day since then

has been borrowed time -- now it's just a
matter of waiting for someone to point out

my expertise and history to the DHS and, oh,
I don't know. Whatever it is they do to people

like me in the War on Abstract Nouns."

Greg remembered the questioning at the airport.
The search. His shirt, the bootprint in the

middle of it.

"Do it," he said.

The ads were weird. He hadn't really paid
attention to them in years. The blocker got

rid of most of them, but Google changed its
code often enough that their little text ads

showed up on a lot of his pages. They stayed
subliminal mostly -- only clunkers like that

Ann Coulter ringtone ad made it past his eyes
into his brain.

Now the clunkers were everywhere: Intelligent
Design Facts, Online Seminary Degree, Terror

Free Tomorrow, Porn Blocker Software, Homosexuality
and Satan. He clicked through a couple of

these and found himself in some kind of alternate
universe Internet, full of weird opinions

about the evils of being gay, the certainty
of the young Earth, the need for eternal national

vigilance.

Then he started to notice something weird
about the search results themselves. After

unpacking his suitcase and opening his mail,
he spent two weeks sitting at home on his

ass, surfing. His pre-Mexico belly was reemerging,
so he decided to do something about it. No

burritos for lunch today -- he'd go to that
holistic place Maya had told him about. Vegan

low-fat cuisine couldn't possibly be as gross
as it sounded.

"Did you mean 'Hungarian Restaurants'?"

He snorted. No, he'd meant "holistic restaurants,"
you dumbass search-engine. It nagged at him.

He pulled up his search history and went back
through the results, printing out the pages.

Then he logged out of his Google account and
went back through the same searches, comparing

the results to the logged-in pages. The differences
were striking. A search for "democratic primary"

pointed to anti-Hillary rants on angry blogs
when he was logged in, and to information

on volunteering for the DNC when he was logged
out. Searching for "abortion clinic" while

logged out listed the nearest Planned Parenthood
office; searching while logged in gave him

information about Campaign Life, ProLife.com,
and the ProLife alliance. Good thing he wasn't

pregnant.

This was Maya's googlecleaner at work. It
was like the stories of people who asked their

TiVos to record an episode of "Queer Eye"
and then got inundated with suggestions for

other "gay shows" -- "My TiVo thinks I'm gay,"
was the title of one article he remembered.

Google had been experimenting with "personalized"
search results before he left the country

-- here it was, in all its glory.

Google thought he was a conservative Christian
Republican who supported the War on Terror

and many other abstract nouns.

He logged out of Google -- that was simple.
Five minutes later, he logged in again. His

entire address book was in there. He logged
out again. Logged back in. His calendar --

when was his parents' anniversary again?
Logged out. Logged back in. Needed his bookmarked

locations in Maps. Logged out.

He stopped trying. Google was where his friendships
lived -- all those people he stayed connected

to on Orkut. It was where his relationships
lived: all that archived email, all those

addresses in his address-book. It was his
family photos, his bookmarks. Hell, his search

history -- his real search history -- was
like an outboard brain, remembering which

parts of the unplumbable Internet he cared
about, so that he didn't have to remember

it the hard way, with the meat in his skull.

Google had a copy of him -- all the parts
of him that navigated the world and the people

in it. Google owned that copy, and without
it, he couldn't be himself anymore. He'd just

have to stay logged in.

Greg mashed the keys on the laptop next to
his bed, bringing the screen to life. He squinted

at the toolbar clock: 4:13AM! Christ, who
was pounding on his door at this hour?

He shouted "Coming!" in a muzzy voice and
pulled on a robe and slippers. He shuffled

down the hallway, turning on lights as he
went, squinting. At the door, he squinted

through the peephole, peering at -- Maya.

He undid the chains and the deadbolt and yanked
the door open and Maya rushed in past him,

followed by the dogs, followed by her girlfriend,
Laurie, whom he'd last seen at a Christmas

party at Google, in a fabulous cocktail dress
and an elaborate up-do. Now she was wearing

a freebie Google Summer of Code sweatshirt,
jeans, and a frown that started between her

eyebrows and intensified all the way down
her face.

Maya was sheened with sweat, her hair sticking
to her forehead. She scrubbed at her eyes,

which were red and lined.

"Pack a bag," she said, in a hoarse croak.

"What?"

"Whatever you can't live without. A couple
changes of clothes. Anything you're sentimental

about -- shoebox of pictures, your grandfather's
razor, whatever. But keep it small, something

you can carry. We're traveling light."

"Maya, what are you --"

She took him by the shoulders. "Do. It," she
said. "Don't ask questions right now. There's

no time."

"Where do you want to --"

"Mexico, probably. Don't know yet. Pack, dammit."
She pushed past him into his bedroom and started

yanking open drawers.

"Maya," he said, sharply, "I'm not going anywhere
until you tell me what's going on."

She glared at him and pushed her hair away
from her face. "The googlecleaner lives. I

shut it down, walked away from it, after I
did you. It was too dangerous to use anymore.

But I still get buginizer notifications when
new bugs get filed against it, I'm still in

B as the project's owner. Someone filed eight
bugs against it this week. Someone's used

it six times to smear six very specific accounts."

"Who's using it?"

"Well, I'll give you a hint. Let me tell you
who's been cleaned this week --" She listed

six candidates, four Republican and two Democrat,
who were all in the running for the primaries.

"Googlers are blackwashing political candidates?"

"Not Googlers. This is all coming from offsite.
The IP block is registered in DC. And the

IPs are all also used by Gmail users. And
those Gmail users --"

"You spied on gmail accounts?"

"I'm leaving in two minutes, with or without
you. You can interrupt me to ask me questions,

or you can listen." She gave him another look.
Laurie stood in the door of the bedroom, holding

the dogs by the collars and looking down at
the floor.

"Good. OK. Yes. I did spy on their email.
Of course I did. Everyone does it, now and

again, and for a lot worse reasons that this.

"It's our lobbying firm. The ones who invented
the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Remember

them? It was a stink when we hired them, but
Google couldn't afford to be 'that company

full of registered Democrats' forever. We
needed friends in Congress. These guys could

do it for us."

"But they're ruining politicians' careers!"

"Yeah. They certainly are. And who benefits
when they do that?"

Laurie spoke, at last. "Other politicians."

He felt his pulse beating in his temples.
"We should tell someone."

"Yeah," Maya said. "How? They know everything
about us. They can see every search. Every

email. Every time we've been caught on the
webcams. Who is in our social network --

you know that if you've got more than fifteen
Orkut buddies, it's statistically certain

that you're no more than three steps to someone
who's contributed money to a 'terrorist' cause?

Remember the airport? Imagine a lot more of
that."

"Maya," he said, carefully. "I think you're
over-reacting. You don't need to go to Mexico.

You can just quit. We can do a startup together
or something. Or you can move to the country

and raise dogs. Whatever. This is crazy --"

"They came to see me today," she said. "At
work. Two of the political officers -- the

minders who monitor our sensitive projects.
And they asked me a lot of very heavy questions."

"About the googlecleaner?"

"About my friends and family. About my search
history. About my political beliefs."

"Jesus."

"They were sending me a message. They were
letting me know that they were onto me. They're

watching every click and every search. It's
time to go -- time to get out of range."

"There's a Google office in Mexico, you know."

"Are you coming, Greg? We're going now."

"Laurie, what do you think of this?"

Laurie thumped the dogs between the shoulders.
"Maya showed me what Google knows about me.

It's like there's a little me in there, a
copy of me. Like I'm pinned down under a jar

with a ball of ether. My parents left East
Germany in '65 -- they used to tell me about

the Stasi. They'd put everything about you
in your file -- even unpatriotic jokes. Lately

I've been feeling...watched. All the time.
Like I can't live without leaving a trail.

Like I'm throwing off a smog of data and it
can't be gotten rid of."

"We're going now, Greg. Now. Are you coming?"

Greg looked at the dogs. "I've got some pesos
left over," he said. "You take them. Be careful,

OK?"

She looked like she was going to slug him.
Then she softened and gave him a ferocious

hug. "Be careful yourself," she whispered
in his ear.

They came for him a week later. At home, in
the middle of the night, just as he'd imagined

it. Their knock was nothing like Maya's tentative,
nervous thump. They went bang-bang-bang, confident,

knowing that they had every right to be there
and not caring who else came after them.

Two men. One stayed by the door and didn't
say anything. The other was a smiler, short

and rumpled, in a sports coat with a small
stain on one lapel and a cloisonn⊠American

flag on the other. "Computer Fraud and Abuse
Act," he said, by way of introduction. "'Exceeding

authorized access, and by means of such conduct
having obtained information.' Ten years for

a first offense, ever since the PATRIOT Act
extended it. I have it on the best of authority

that what you and your friend did to your
Google records qualifies. And oh, what will

come out in the trial. All the stuff you whitewashed
out of your profile."

Greg had been playing this scene out in his
head for a week. He'd had all kinds of brave

things to say, planned out in advance. He'd
even written some down, to see how they looked.

It had given him something to do while the
knots in his stomach tightened, while he waited

to hear from Maya.

"I'd like to call a lawyer," is all he managed.
It came out in a whisper.

"You can do that," the man said. "But hear
me out first."

Greg found his voice. "I'd like to see your
badge."

The man's basset-hound face lit up as he hissed
a laugh. "Oh, Greg, buddy. I'm not a cop.

I work for --" He named the DC firm in Google's
employ. The inventors of swiftboating. "You're

a Googler. You're part of the family. We couldn't
send the police after you without talking

with you first. There's an offer I'd like
to make."

Greg made coffee. It gave him something to
do with his hands while he tried to find that

bravery he'd been honing all week. "I'll go
to the press," he said. "I've written this

all up. I'll go straight to them."

The guy nodded as if thinking it over. "Well,
sure. You could walk into the Chronicle's

office in the morning and spill everything
you need. They'd try to find a confirming

source. They won't find it. Maybe you'll try
to show them what your profile looks like

today? Well, tell you what, it looks just
like it looked the day you landed at SFO.

Greg, buddy, why don't you hear me out before
you start trying to figure out how to fight

me? I'm in the win-win business. I'm in the
business of figuring out how to get all parties

what they need. I'm very good at it. You don't
even want to know what I'm billing Google

for this little tete-a-tete. By the way, those
are excellent beans, but you want to give

them a little rinse first, takes some of the
bitterness out and brings up the oils. Here,

pass me a colander?"

Greg watched in numb bemusement as the man
took off his jacket and hung it over a kitchen

chair, then undid his cuffs and rolled them
up, slipping a cheap digital watch into his

pocket. Then he poured the beans back out
of the grinder and into Greg's colander and

did things at the sink.

He was a little pudgy, and very pale. He needed
a haircut -- had unruly curls at his neck.

It made Greg relax, somehow. This guy had
the social gracelessness of a nerd, felt like

a real Googler, obsessed with the minutiae.
He knew his way around a coffee-grinder, too.

"We're drafting a team for Building 49 --"

"There is no building 49," Greg said, automatically.

"Yeah," the guy said, with a private little
smile. "There's no Building 49. And we're

putting together a team, with its own buginizer,
to own googlecleaner. Maya's code wasn't very

efficient. Every time someone runs it, it
clobbers the whole farm. And it's got plenty

of bugs. We've asked around and there's consensus
on this. You'd be the right guy, and it wouldn't

matter what you knew if you were back inside
--"

"No, I wouldn't," Greg said. "You're on crack."

"Hear me out. There's money involved. Good
work, too. Smart colleagues. A direction for

your life. A chance to participate in the
political life of your country --"

Greg gave a bitter laugh. "Unbelievable,"
he said. "If you think I'm going to help you

smear political candidates in exchange for
favors, you're even crazier than I thought."

"Greg," he said, "Greg, you're right. That
was dumb. No one is going to do that anymore.

We're just going to -- clean things up a little.
For some select people. You know what I mean,

right? Every Google profile is a little scary
under close inspection. Close inspection is

the order of the day in politics. You stand
for office and they'll look at your kids,

your brothers, your ex-girlfriends. Now that
your search history is available to so many

people, it won't be that hard to look into
that too. Your Orkut network, your old Usenet

messages, your searches, all of it." He loaded
the cafetiere and depressed the plunger, his

face screwed up in solemn concentration. He
held out his hand and Greg got down two coffee

mugs -- Google mugs, of course -- and passed
them to him.

"We're going to do for our friends just what
Maya did for you. Just give them a little

cleanup. Preserve their privacy. That's all
-- I promise you, that's all."

Greg sipped the coffee, but didn't taste it.
"And whichever candidates you don't clean

--"

"Yeah," the guy said. "Yeah, you're right.
It'll be tough for them."

"You can go now," Greg said.

"Oh, Greg," the guy said. He plucked his jacket
off his chair-back and shrugged it on, felt

in the inside pocket and produced a small
stack of paper, folded into quarters. He smoothed

it out and put it on the table.

Greg looked quickly and saw the rows of results
he'd seen on the DHS man's screen, back at

the airport, when this all started. "I don't
care," he said. "Tell the world about my search

history. Go ahead. In five years, everyone
will have had their search history ruptured.

We'll all be guilty."

"It's not your history," the man said. He
divided the stack into two piles, and pointed

to names on the top sheet of each. One was
Maya's. The other was a candidate whose campaign

Greg had contributed to for the last three
elections.

"You get five weeks' vacation a year. You
can go to Cabo for the SCUBA. The options

package is very generous, too."

The man sat down and drank some coffee. Greg
tried some more of his own. It didn't taste

so bad. It was, in fact, more delicious than
anything that had ever come out of his kitchen.

The man knew what he was doing.

The best years of Greg's life had been spent
at Google. Smart people. Amazing work environment.

Wonderful technology. Nothing in the world
like it. When you worked at G, you had the

best model train set in the universe to play
with. Organizing all of human knowledge.

"You can pick your team, of course," the man
said.

Greg poured himself another cup of delicious
coffee.

The new Congress took eleven working days
to pass the Securing and Enumerating America's

Communications and Hypertext Act, which authorized
the DHS and the NSA to outsource up to 80

percent of its intelligence and analysis work
to private contractors.

Theoretically, the contracts were open to
a competitive bidding process, but within

the secure group at Google, in building 49,
there was no question of who would win those

contracts. If Google had spent $15 billion
on a program to catch bad guys at the border,

you can bet that they would have caught them
-- governments just aren't equipped to Do

Search Right.

Greg looked himself in the eye that morning
as he shaved -- the security minders didn't

like hacker-stubble, and they weren't shy
about telling you so -- and realized that

today was his first day as a de facto intelligence
agent in the US government.

How bad would it be? Wasn't it better to have
Google doing this stuff than some ham-fisted

spook?

He had himself convinced by the time he parked
at the Googleplex, among the hybrid cars and

bulging bike-racks. He stopped for an organic
smoothie on the way to his desk, then sat

down and sipped.

The rumpled man hadn't been to the G since
Greg went back to work, but it often felt

like his influence was all around them in
building 49. He wasn't any less rumpled today

-- he could have been wrapped in saran-wrap
on the day he brought Greg back to work and

refrigerated for all that he hadn't changed
a hair.

"Hi, Greg," he said, sliding into the chair
next to his. His podmates stood up in unison

and left the room.

"Just tell me what it is," Greg said. "Just
spit it out. You want me to pwn NORAD and

start World War III, right?"

"Nothing so obvious," the man said, patting
his shoulder. "Just a little search-job."

"Yeah?"

"There's a person we want to find. A person
who's left the country, apparently headed

for Mexico. She knows certain things that
are, as of today, classified. She needs to

be briefed on her new responsibilities."

Greg stood up. "I'm not going to find Maya
for you." He pulled on his jacket.

"There are plenty of people here who will.
It's up to you, though. You can work here

with her, being productive, or you can find
out just how rotten life can get -- while

she works here, being productive with your
co-workers."

Greg stared at him, his hands balled into
fists.

"Come on," the rumpled man said. "Greg, we
both know how this goes. When you said yes

to me in your kitchen, you lost the option
of saying no. It's not so bad, is it? Who

would you rather have doing the nation's intelligence:
you and your pals here in the Valley, or a

bunch of straight-edge code-grinders in Virginia?"

Greg turned on his heel and left. He made
it all the way to the parking lot before he

stopped and kicked a wall so hard he felt
something give way in his foot.

Then he limped back to his desk, hung his
jacket on his chair, and logged back in.

It was a week later when his key-card failed
to open the door to Building 49. The idiot

red LED shone at him every time he swiped
it. He swiped it and swiped it. Any other

building and there'd be someone to tailgate
on, people trickling in and out all day. But

the Googlers in 49 only emerged for meals,
and sometimes not even that.

Swipe, swipe, swipe.

"Greg, can I see you, please?"

The rumpled man hadn't shaved in a couple
of days. He put an arm around Greg's shoulders

and Greg smelled his citrusy aftershave. It
was the same cologne that his divemaster in

Baja had worn when they went out to the bars
in the evening. Greg couldn't remember his

name. Juan-Carlos? Juan-Luis?

The man's arm around his shoulders was firm,
steering him away from the door, out onto

the immaculate lawn, past the kitchen's herb
garden. "We're giving you a couple of days

off," he said.

Greg felt a cold premonition that sank all
the way to his balls. "Why?" Had he done something

wrong? Was he going to jail?

"It's Maya." The man turned him around, met
his eyes with his bottomless basset-hound

gaze. "It's Maya. Killed herself. In Guatemala.
I'm sorry, Greg."

Greg seemed to hurtle away from himself, to
a place miles above, a Google Earth view of

the Googleplex, looking down on himself and
the rumpled man as a pair of dots, two pixels,

tiny and insignificant. He willed himself
to tear at his hair, to drop to his knees

and weep.

From a long way away, he heard himself say,
"I don't need any time off. I'm OK."

From a long way away, he heard the rumpled
man insist.

But one-pixel Greg wouldn't be turned aside.
The argument persisted for a long time, and

then the two pixels moved into Building 49
and the door swung shut behind them.

Doctorow: This one came as a commission from Radar magazine
-- now defunct, a casualty of the 2008 crash,

but in 2007, this was the most widely circulated
"lifestyle" magazine in the US. They asked

me to write about "the day Google became evil."
I didn't want to cheap out and just write

about the company selling out to some evil
millionaire. If Google ever turned evil, it

would be because a) evil had a compelling
business-model and b) evil lay at the end

of a compelling technical challenge.

I spent a lot of time talking off-the-record
to Googlers, who are, to a one, the nicest

people I know (OK, one exception springs to
mind, but let's not air our dirty laundry

in public, right?). I also had an incredibly
productive conversation with the Electronic

Frontier Foundation's Kevin Bankston, a profound
and sharp-witted privacy lawyer.

I wanted to capture a company that was full
of good people who do bad. There are lots

of these. For example, all the Microsoft employees
I know are fantastic and smart and caring

and principled. But ethically and technically,
most of what comes out of Redmond is a train-wreck.

It's anti-synergy: a firm that is far less
than the sum of its parts. I could easily

see Google turning into that. I wish I understood
how groups of good people trying to do good

can do bad.