By reading into Marcus’ time in the park with Van, how do we know that despite all his brilliance, he’s still just a teenage boy?

Marcus is rebellious like some teens are. By using arphid cloners to overwrite the codes on people's cards, the information gathered from the cards would be so skewed that everyone would appear abnormal. Vanessa is angry, but Marcus tries to reason with her that if they don't do something, life as they know it is as good as it will get.

Marcus describes in his blog, Open Revolt, how to make the arphid cloners and skew the data. A few days later he passes San Francisco's General Hospital and notices a long line of employees at the front doors trying to scan into work. The next day, there is a similarly long line at the BART. Schools have also been disrupted by all the false positives that the DHS has been receiving. The best part for Marcus is when his dad gets pulled over twice in the same evening on his way home from work.