- The two police officers—called Booger and Zit in Marcus's mind—take Marcus home when he keeps asking them questions and not answering theirs. Turns out they're detaining people with strange ride histories.
- Marcus's mom is not amused when the police show up with her son. They ask if she's an American citizen and she answers them back in her strongest accent. She doesn't invite them in or offer them tea. She's mad.
- Looking through Marcus's backpack, she tells the cops her son isn't a drug dealer or shoplifter, and then sends them on their way.
- When Marcus's dad comes home a little later, Mom and Marcus take turns telling him the story. Dad's on side of the police, saying they're just doing Bayesian analysis.
- Don't know what Bayesian analysis is? Don't worry—Marcus explains this too. It's what makes spam filters work and is the basis for most data-mining.
- An 18th-century British mathematician named Thomas Bayes came up with the technique. That's before computers had been invented.
- Marcus goes up to his room after this short argument with his dad about why he had a strange traffic pattern (Marcus: 1; Dad: 0) and then starts worrying about cryptography with the Xnet.
- Even though the Xnet makes things private, the high volume of encrypted traffic could give DHS clues about who uses it. It's the same thing that happens to dissidents in China. Marcus needs to solve this problem.
- The next day Van, Jolu, and Marcus meet up for coffee. Van leaves, angry and scared about them getting into serious trouble. She doesn't want to watch them destroy themselves.
- Jolu and Marcus think about how to change what looks "normal" on the internet. Turns out Jolu's been working for Pigspleen Net, a company that's one of the top independent ISPs in the world, since he was twelve.
- Context note: Pigspleen was founded by punk legend Trudy Doo, the frontwoman of an anarcho-feminist band called Speedwhores. She's totally into privacy.
- Jolu thinks Marcus shut him out of the Xnet beginnings on purpose and is furious. Marcus explains and apologizes. They head to Jolu's house to start writing code that could solve the encryption traffic problem.
- Marcus tells us that we should learn how to program computers because they do exactly what we tell them to.
- He and Jolu drink lots of coffee, and write lots of code into the night.