Bill was pinned in a Muni bus window seat by an enormous backpack attached to a young Asian woman. He sighed—internally—and considered his situation. In five minutes the bus had moved approximately 15 feet of the three quarters of a mile he was still away from his destination, the Ferry Building where Market Street terminated at the Embarcadero. Everything downtown was jammed up—streets and sidewalks alike—because of a BART system power outage. With all four of Market Street’s underground train stations pitch black, 100,000 commuters had come bubbling up to the surface from the multiple levels of San Francisco’s transit warrens.

After leaving work and finding BART out of operation, Bill first boarded a Muni streetcar that, after a couple of blocks, came to a standstill. He switched to a Muni bus which advanced him, so far, one more block. If it weren’t for the 30 pounds of presentation materials he was carrying—20% design proposal packets, 70% digital projector, 10% cables and cases—Bill would have walked the remaining distance to the ferry. As it was, he resigned himself to accepting the glacial pace of the bus, missing the Vallejo ferry, and hanging out at Peet’s until the next boat.

The bus, like the street and sidewalks, was crowded. The press of the other commuters reminded Bill of playing rugby, except without the shouting. And, the bus group was decidedly more diverse than his college rugby team.

The other passengers were, for the most part, silent. The one person who wanted to converse, an older, African-American man in an olive drab army jacket, was having a hard time finding an audience. It wasn’t the BART blackout or the day’s traffic that he wanted to discuss. The man in the army jacket was airing his concerns about the government.

“You know the FBI used to just spy on important people? Martin Luther King, Jr., Bobby Kennedy, people like that.” The grizzled man’s comments got a pointed non-reaction from his neighbors—they would not make eye contact, concentrating instead on smartphone or book reader screens. Their white earbuds allowed them to ignore any dialogue attempts.

Bill noticed only one person who conceded army jacket man’s existence. This earnest fellow, unaccustomed or unwilling to practice the metropolitan art of disengagement, looked up from his book to view the weathered man sitting across from him. He gave the wild-haired man a friendly half-smile. An acknowledgement.

Army jacket man continued: “They’re spying on everybody now—everybody in the world! Anytime somebody does something on the Internet, or uses a phone, or sends a text—the government is recording all of it.”

It had taken a moment, but the man in the army jacket saw that the man sitting across from him had put his book away and was listening. He lowered his voice somewhat, focusing on his one listener. “The government has hooks into the switches at every North American telco central office and IXP. They copy all the data passing through the switches to a separate, U.S. government Internet. All the world’s data—200 million terabytes every day—the NSA is saving and indexing all of that in a limestone mine in Pennsylvania.”

Bill was surprised. It wasn’t what the man was saying, which was your sort of garden-variety conspiracy talk, it was that in the moment army jacket man was speaking to someone, his demeanor changed radically. He became calm—lucid—in an instant.

Army jacket man continued: “U.S. intelligence is also plugged into IXPs and COs in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and South America. The data they capture overseas gets piggybacked onto North American-bound high-bandwidth traffic, then when it reaches the borders of the continent, the data is split off and—bang—straight on the government network to Pennsylvania. The separate network is called Internet Q; IQ for short.”

The man in the army jacket laid out the government surveillance plan in increasing detail as the bus inched along Market Street.

Two hours later, Bill was finally aboard the last North Bay-bound ferry. Searching for a spot to park himself and his 30 pounds of marketing materials, he saw the fellow from the bus who had patiently listened to Man in Army Jacket v. U.S. Government Surveillance Infrastructure. The man was seated on the main passenger deck and had returned to reading his book (The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest by Stieg Larsson). This last ferry run of the day was more full than usual, but there were still empty spots—Bill parked his rolling luggage at the end of a row of seats. He sat down next to the man.

“Hi,” Bill started. “I saw you on the bus earlier. We were stuck on Market Street for at least an hour.”

The man looked up from his book. “Hello,” he said, offering his hand. “Danny.”

“Bill.” He shook Danny’s hand. “Nice to meet you, Danny.”

“Likewise.” Danny flipped the flap of his book’s paper cover over the open pages to mark his reading progress—he hadn’t gotten very far yet. He closed the book.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt you from reading,” Bill gestured to Danny’s book. ”I just wanted to say it was generous of you to listen to that older man on the bus.”

“I wouldn’t call it generous. He has a lot to say, and not a lot of people to listen.” Danny paused. “I used to know him—the man on the bus. He was my high school computer science teacher—Mr. White. I don’t think he remembers that, though.”

Earvin White, born 1952 in Jackson, Mississippi, was the second of five children to Marlon and Martha White. Coming of age in the ’60s, he witnessed a tumultuous period of American history, and being black in the Jim Crow South, the events of the time subconsciously imprinted on him hope and fear for the future.

By the time he was 11, Earvin had seen boycotts, sit-ins, and protest marches and the arrests of Freedom Riders filling Jackson’s city and county jails. He had seen threats and violence against civil rights activists and the funeral procession for murdered NAACP leader Medgar Evans. He didn’t understand the significance of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 or the Voter Rights Act in 1965, but Earvin’s parents told him and his brothers and sisters that these were both good things for people of color.

In 1966, James Meredith, the first black person to enroll at the University of Mississippi, spoke at a rally in Jackson. It was at that rally that 14-year-old Earvin decided that not only would he go to college, it would be at Ole’ Miss. This worried Earvin’s mother—not only was college a financial stretch for the White family, she did not want her son tempting violence at a desegregated-in-name-only institution. She tried to steer her son’s ambitions to Jackson State University or Tougaloo College (both local, historically black schools), then later narrowed the choice to Tougaloo after police killed two young black men during anti-war protests at Jackson State.

In 1970, with the draft in effect as Earvin was poised to turn 18, Mrs. White was anxious for her son to attend college so that he would be eligible for an educational deferment. A bright student, Earvin was on track for a scholarship to Jackson State. Instead, his girlfriend broke up with him before the senior ball, extinguishing his enthusiasm for the upcoming summer, and college, and everything.

On his 18th birthday, Earvin White walked into the U.S. Armed Forces recruitment office in Jackson and volunteered for the Army. When he told his parents, his mother cried. On the day of his high school graduation ceremony, Earvin was on a Greyhound bus to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, for basic training. 14 weeks later, Private 2nd Class White was sent to Cam Ranh, Vietnam as a rifle platoon RTO (radio telephone operator).

In two years of combat in Vietnam, Earvin largely forgot his high school heartache. He had marched in the jungle in the dead of night and slept on the ground in the rain. He had been under fire over a hundred times and seen dozens of his platoon members wounded or KIA’d. He had used mess kit pieces to field-repair his busted PRC 77 transceiver after it caught shrapnel from a VC mortar. His jury-rigged radio, unable to receive, still worked enough to call in a fire mission that saved the lives of Earvin and the remaining members of his pinned-down platoon.

Earvin spent his last year back in the States, at the Army’s 4th Replacement Training Center at Fort Ord, Monterey, California. Promoted to sergeant, his duty at Fort Ord was overseeing basic training for conscientious objectors, young men who reported for their draft enlistment, but who vowed they would not raise arms against an enemy. Of the 12,000 men undergoing training at the base, Earvin’s CO classes usually numbered less than eight recruits. He told his final group of charges, “I don’t blame you for not wanting to fight. I don’t even know why we’re over there.”

At the end of 1973, Earvin was discharged from the Army and returned to Mississippi. He found that little had changed in Jackson in three years—his family, friends, church, schools, job opportunities—all were virtually the same as when he had left. The civil rights progress of the late ’50s and ’60s had not yet affected much change in the racial attitudes of most Southerners.

Home was familiar, but Earvin found life in Jackson more confining than comforting. While the Army was nowhere near equal in opportunities for non-white soldiers, it was far more racially integrated than the state of Mississippi. Going back to the status quo in Jackson was going backwards. After three months, Earvin repacked his footlocker and left Jackson for the second time. He would not return again.

Earvin headed back to California. A Chicano rifleman that had rotated through Earvin’s platoon used to talk about his hometown of San Jose, a city of farms and orchards where all races—white, black, brown, yellow—got along. Based on this idyllic portrait, and not the immensely popular Dionne Warwick song, Earvin chose to go to San Jose. In 1974, San Jose was not the agricultural community Earvin had imagined, nor were race relations as rosy as has been advertised, but the city still seemed like it was a century ahead of Jackson. Earvin found an apartment, and took the first two jobs he could, part-time at 7-Eleven and McDonald’s.

Using the G.I. Bill, he started taking classes at San Jose City College, transferring to San Jose State University after two years. In 1978, Earvin became the second of Marlon and Martha White’s children to graduate from college—his youngest sister had been the first at Jackson State. With a degree in electrical engineering, Earvin found a job at AT&T as a network engineer. He worked at AT&T through the Ma Bell breakup, but decided to change careers as the company transitioned to Pacific Bell.

Earvin went back to school to get a teaching credential, and in 1987 left PacBell for the San Jose Unified School District. He started, as most teachers do, as a substitute. He started, as most teachers do, as a substitute. After two years he secured a position teaching math at Leland High. After a few years, Earvin also started teaching computer science.

In 1997, 25 years after returning from Vietnam, Earvin visited the Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno, about 40 miles north of San Jose. He found the grave marker for PFC Enrique Galvez, who had introduced himself in the fall of 1971 as “Rick.” The platoon’s sergeant redubbed Galvez “Ricky Ricardo” and then shortened that back down to “Ricardo,” which stuck. Earvin complained to Ricardo’s headstone about San Jose not being the paradise he had made it out to be and then apologized for not visiting Galvez’s parents. He said that after 25 years it felt too late to look in on them—if they were even still alive or in San Jose. Whatever the case, Earvin said he didn’t know what he would say.

“I was going to give this to your folks,” Earvin told Ricardo’s grave, “I’ll leave this for you here because you complained so much about the Army never giving you yours even though you had qualified for it.” He left a small medal, an iron cross with a three-ring bullseye in the center with an attached banner reading “RIFLE,” on top of the grave marker. Earvin left, and having said his peace, felt some relief from the guilt he had been carrying for a quarter-century.

Six days later, on Memorial Day, Enrique’s sister visited her brother’s grave. She found the rifle sharpshooter medal there, but did not know who had left it or why. She took it home to keep with the flag that had covered her brother’s casket during his funeral.

In 1999, Earvin traveled to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., to see the memorial wall and find the names of men he had served with who hadn’t made it back. He visited the Lincoln Memorial and sat on the steps where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his “I have a dream” speech. Tourists walked around the memorial, taking their photos with the seated Abraham Lincoln and looking out over the reflecting pool to the Washington Monument.

In 2006, concerned with progressive lapses in his short-term memory and recurring episodes of confusion, Earvin asked his doctor for a neurological check up. After several visits and cognitive tests he was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s disease. In the summer of 2007, Earvin, or Mr. White as most of the faculty, staff, and students at Leland High had known him, quietly retired from teaching. Outside of his doctor’s office, only the principal at the school and the HR administrator at the school district, who was putting through his disability claim, knew about Earvin’s worsening condition. Leaving without fanfare, he told his coworkers that he had saved up enough to go traveling around the U.S. and that he wanted to visit all of the national parks.

When Leland High School started again in fall 2007, many of Mr. White’s returning homeroom, math, and computer science students were surprised to find he had retired. Two of his AP Calculus seniors circulated a “Congratulations Mr. White” poster to sign and send to their departed instructor. The poster had over a dozen messages on it before it had to be scrapped and restarted because of unfortunate statements written by one disrespectful student. In the end, over 50 sophomores, juniors, and seniors signed their well-wishes, admiration, and jokes on the poster-sized card. If the 4,700+ students Earvin had worked with in 20 years of teaching had also had the opportunity, many hundreds of them would have congratulated him as well.

Leland High’s principal brought the card to Mr. White’s new address. Earvin had moved from his tiny one-bedroom apartment—the one he had taken when he first came to San Jose—to a tiered-care retirement community. Earvin knew that, at some point, his mental faculties wouldn’t be up to the task of navigating modern-day life. When that day came, he would be moved from his independent living quarters to a room on one of the assisted living floors. In the final stages of his condition, he would be moved up to hospice care on the sixth floor. Explaining the situation to his former principal, Earvin said that the view would be better, but he wouldn’t know it. The principal remarked that it seemed like the facility was preparing its residents for Heaven by moving them up one floor at a time. “Nothing wrong with that,” Mr. White agreed.

Before he left, the principal brought out the card Mr. White’s students had made. It brought a smile to Earvin’s face. He read the card later, after the principal had gone. Some of the messages made him smile, a few left him shaking his head. A particularly bad math joke made him laugh out loud.

In the next year-and-a-half, Earvin visited six national parks: Grand Teton, Joshua Tree, Olympic, Zion, Yellowstone, and Yosemite. He sent postcards back to the principal at Leland High who shared them on the staff bulletin board.

By 2009, Earvin was still living independently, but no longer had the confidence to take a long trip on his own. In 2010, at age 58, Earvin was being more closely monitored and staff at the care facility were considering when to move him to a managed floor. A neuropsychologist would make that determination.

Danny continued. “He’s different now. Some form of dementia, it appears.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Bill.

“It seems like he’s being cared for. Before I got off the bus I asked him if he knew where he lived,” Danny said. “The address he gave me is for a managed care residence in Colma.”

“It seems like you know about this type of situation.”

“A bit.”

“In any case, sorry again for interrupting you.” Bill fished a business card out of his shirt pocket and handed it to Danny. “This is me.”

Danny produced a card of his own. “For your collection.“ He handed it to Bill.

Bill looked at the card. It was simple; a matte white, thick card with a slight texture. On the front it had one line of centered type: DANIEL SAAPULOA. On the back was an email address, also centered.

Danny returned to reading his book. Bill crossed his arms and closed his eyes. When the ferry docked in Vallejo an hour later, the two men parted ways with a nod.

Bill’s ride, Art, was waiting for him in the parking lot. He helped Bill stow the projector and other bags in the trunk of he car.

“Sorry for the delay,” Bill said.

“Not a problem,” said Art. “Hell of a commute for you today.”

Bill thought for a moment before responding. “It was interesting. Long, but interesting.”