Cory Doctorow/Little Brother/118
Well, at that point, LARPing got a lot less cool. We became melancholy hugs from Mom and Dad I had it.
known as the nation's foremost hoaxers, as weird, pathological
liars. The press who we'd inadvertently tricked into covering the #
story of the Old People were now interested in redeeming
themselves by reporting on how unbelievably weird we LARPers The trick was to time this so that it happened fast enough that
were, and that was when Charles let everyone in school know that the DHS couldn't prepare for it, but with a long enough lead time
Darryl and I were the biggest LARPing weenies in the city. that the Xnet would have time to turn out in force.
That was not a good season. Some of the gang didn't mind, but The trick was to stage this so that there were too many present
we did. The teasing was merciless. Charles led it. I'd find plastic to arrest us all, but to put it somewhere that the press could see it
fangs in my bag, and kids I passed in the hall would go "bleh, and the grownups, so the DHS wouldn't just gas us again.
bleh" like a cartoon vampire, or they'd talk with fake
Transylvanian accents when I was around. The trick was to come up with something with the media
friendliness of the levitation of the Pentagon. The trick was to
We switched to ARGing pretty soon afterwards. It was more fun stage something that we could rally around, like 3,000 Berkeley
in some ways, and it was a lot less weird. Every now and again, students refusing to let one of their number be taken away in a
though, I missed my cape and those weekends in the hotel. police van.
# The trick was to put the press there, ready to say what the police
did, the way they had in 1968 in Chicago.
The opposite of esprit d'escalier is the way that life's
embarrassments come back to haunt us even after they're long It was going to be some trick.
past. I could remember every stupid thing I'd ever said or done,
recall them with pictureperfect clarity. Any time I was feeling I cut out of school an hour early the next day, using my
low, I'd naturally start to remember other times I felt that way, a customary techniques for getting out, not caring if it would trigger
hitparade of humiliations coming one after another to my mind. some kind of new DHS checker that would result in my parents
getting a note.
As I tried to concentrate on Masha and my impending doom,
the Old People incident kept coming back to haunt me. There'd One way or another, my parents' last problem after tomorrow
been a similar, sick, sinking doomed feeling then, as more and would be whether I was in trouble at school.
more press outlets picked up the story, as the likelihood increased
of someone figuring out that it had been me who'd sprung the I met Ange at her place. She'd had to cut out of school even
story on the stupid Italian editor in the designer jeans with earlier, but she'd just made a big deal out of her cramps and
crooked seams, the starched collarless shirt, and the oversized pretended she was going to keel over and they sent her home.
metalrimmed glasses.
We started to spread the word on Xnet. We sent it in email to
There's an alternative to dwelling on your mistakes. You can trusted friends, and IMmed it to our buddy lists. We roamed the
learn from them. decks and towns of Clockwork Plunder and told our teammates.
Giving everyone enough information to get them to show up but
It's a good theory, anyway. Maybe the reason your subconscious not so much as to tip our hand to the DHS was tricky, but I
dredges up all these miserable ghosts is that they need to get thought I had just the right balance:
closure before they can rest peacefully in humiliation afterlife. My
subconscious kept visiting me with ghosts in the hopes that I > VAMPMOB TOMORROW
would do something to let them rest in peace. > If you're a goth, dress to impress. If
All the way home, I turned over this memory and the thought of you're not a goth, find a goth and
what I would do about "Masha," in case she was playing me. I
borrow some clothes. Think vampire.
needed some insurance. > The game starts at 8:00AM sharp.
SHARP. Be there and ready to be divided
And by the time I reached my house to be swept up into into teams. The game lasts 30 minutes,
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