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Pamela DiFrancesco writes, “Iread your novel Little Brother, not too long ago and really loved it—except I just didn’t believe that the court system would be as just as it was, or that Marcus would be saved by the police, or that he would go on to “rock the vote,” so to speak. So (thanks to the wonder of Creative Commons), I rewrote it and posted it on my blog.”

I lost track of time. Days and nights blended together, a never-ending stream of assaults on my senses and my body. I began to lose my grip on reality. Sometimes during the torture, I made up stories. Every teacher, adult, authority figure I’d ever known had been an al Qaeda operative, bent on recruiting me. I babbled these stories to my torturers, and sometimes even believed they were true. They recorded my rantings and played them back to me at night. They became the dreams I was deprived of.

But through it all, I never gave them my password, or told them about Xnet, or sold out my friends.

One day after a torture session, I was dragged down a different hallway than usual. One of my guards, talking over me as if I wasn’t there, addressed the other guard.