Little Brother Read Online Free PDF Page B

the whole team, downloading tons of d™jinshi files and scouring them for answers to the puzzles.
    I'd just finished scrap-booking all the clues when the bell rang and we began our escape. I surreptitiously slid the gravel down the side of my short boots — ankle-high Blundstones from Australia, great for running and climbing, and the easy slip-on/slip-off laceless design makes them convenient at the never-ending metal-detectors that are everywhere now.
    We also had to evade physical surveillance, of course, but that gets easier every time they add a new layer of physical snoopery — all the bells and whistles lull our beloved faculty into a totally false sense of security. We surfed the crowd down the hallways, heading for my favorite side-exit. We were halfway along when Darryl hissed, "Crap! I forgot, I've got a library book in my bag."
    "You're kidding me," I said, and hauled him into the next bathroom we passed. Library books are bad news. Every one of them has an arphid — Radio Frequency ID tag — glued into its binding, which makes it possible for the librarians to check out the books by waving them over a reader, and lets a library shelf tell you if any of the books on it are out of place.
    But it also lets the school track where you are at all times. It was another of those legal loopholes: the courts wouldn't let the schools track us with arphids, but they could track library books , and use the school records to tell them who was likely to be carrying which library book.
    I had a little Faraday pouch in my bag — these are little wallets lined with a mesh of copper wires that effectively block radio energy, silencing arphids. But the pouches were made for neutralizing ID cards and toll-book transponders, not books like —
    "Introduction to Physics?" I groaned. The book was the size of a dictionary.

Chapter
2

    This chapter is dedicated to Amazon.com, the largest Internet bookseller in the world. Amazon is amazing — a "store" where you can get practically any book ever published (along with practically everything else, from laptops to cheese-graters), where they've elevated recommendations to a high art, where they allow customers to directly communicate with each other, where they are constantly invented new and better ways of connecting books with readers. Amazon has always treated me like gold — the founder, Jeff Bezos, even posted a reader-review for my first novel! — and I shop there like crazy (looking at my spreadsheets, it appears that I buy something from Amazon approximately every six days ). Amazon's in the process of reinventing what it means to be a bookstore in the twenty-first century and I can't think of a better group of people to be facing down that thorny set of problems.
    Amazon
    "I'm thinking of majoring in physics when I go to Berkeley," Darryl said. His dad taught at the University of California at Berkeley, which meant he'd get free tuition when he went. And there'd never been any question in Darryl's household about whether he'd go.
    "Fine, but couldn't you research it online?"
    "My dad said I should read it. Besides, I didn't plan on committing any crimes today."
    "Skipping school isn't a crime. It's an infraction. They're totally different."
    "What are we going to do, Marcus?"
    "Well, I can't hide it, so I'm going to have to nuke it." Killing arphids is a dark art. No merchant wants malicious customers going for a walk around the shop-floor and leaving behind a bunch of lobotomized merchandise that is missing its invisible bar-code, so the manufacturers have refused to implement a "kill signal" that you can radio to an arphid to get it to switch off. You can reprogram arphids with the right box, but I hate doing that to library books. It's not exactly tearing pages out of a book, but it's still bad, since a book with a reprogrammed arphid can't be shelved and can't be found. It just becomes a needle in a haystack.
    That left me with only one option: nuking the thing.