Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
By Cory Doctorow
4
“It’s disgusting, keep it away,” Marci said, shrinking away from his hand in mock horror. He held his proto-thumb under her nose and waggled it.
“No joking, okay? I just want to know what it means. I’m growing a new thumb.”
“Maybe you’re part salamander. They regrow their legs and tails. Or a worm – cut a worm in half and you get two worms. It’s in one of my Da’s books.”
He stared at his thumb. It had grown perceptibly, just on the journey into town to Marci’s place. They were holed up in her room, surrounded by watercolors of horses in motion that her mother had painted. She’d raided the fridge for cold pork pies and cheese and fizzy lemonade that her father had shipped from the Marks & Spencer in Toronto. It was the strangest food he’d ever eaten but he’d developed a taste for it.
“Wiggle it again,” she said.
He did, and the thumbtip bent down like a scale model of a thumbtip, cracking the scab around it.
“We should go to a doctor,” she said.
“I don’t go to doctors,” he said flatly.
“You haven’t gone to a doctor – doesn’t mean you can’t.”
“I don’t go to doctors.” X-ray machines and stethoscopes, blood tests and clever little flashlights in your ears – who knew what they’d reveal? He wanted to be the first to discover it, he didn’t want to have to try to explain it to a doctor before he understood it himself.
“Not even when you’re sick?”
“The golems take care of it,” he said.
She shook her head. “You’re a weirdo, you know that?”
“I know it,” he said.
“I thought my family was strange,” she said, stretching out on her tummy on the bed. “But they’re not a patch on you.”
“I know it.”
He finished his fizzy lemonade and lay down beside her, belching.
“We could ask my Da. He knows a lot of strange things.”
He put his face down in her duvet and smelled the cotton covers and her nighttime sweat, like a spice, like cinnamon. “I don’t want to do that. Please don’t tell anyone, all right?”
She took hold of his wrist and looked again at the teensy thumb. “Wiggle it again,” she said. He did. She giggled. “Imagine if you were like a worm. Imagine if your thumbtip was out there growing another you.”
He sat bolt upright. “Do you think that’s possible?” he said. His heart was thudding. “Do you think so?”
She rolled on her side and stared at him. “No, don’t be daft. How could your thumb grow another you?“
“Why wouldn’t it?”
She had no answer for him.
“I need to go home,” he said. “I need to know.”
“I’m coming with,” she said. he opened his mouth to tell her no, but she made a fierce face at him, her foxy features wrinkled into a mock snarl.
“Come along then,” he said. “You can help me do up my coat.”
The winter cave was deserted. He listened at the mouths of all the tunnels, straining to hear Davey. From his high nook, Brian watched them.
“Where is he, Billy?” Alan called. “Tell me, godfuckit!”
Billy looked down from him perch with his sad, hollow eyes – had he been forgetting to eat again? – and shook his head.
They took to the tunnels. Even with the flashlight, Marci couldn’t match him for speed. He could feel the tunnels through the soles of his boots, he could smell them, he could pick them apart by the quality of their echoes. He moved fast, dragging Marci along with his good hand while she cranked the flashlight as hard as she could. He heard her panting, triangulated their location from the way that the shallow noises reflected off the walls.
When they found Davey at last, it was in the golem’s cave, on the other side of the mountain. He was hunkered down in a corner, while the golems moved around him slowly, avoiding him like he was a boulder or a stalagmite that had sprung up in the night. Their stony heads turned to regard Marci and Adam as they came upon them, their luminous eyes lighting on them for a moment and then moving on. It was an eloquent statement for them: This is the business of the mountain and his sons. We will not intervene.
There were more golems than Alan could remember seeing at once, six, maybe seven. The golems made more of their kind from the clay they found at the riverbank whenever they cared to or needed to, and allowed their number to dwindle when the need or want had passed by the simple expedient of deconstructing one of their own back to the clay it had come from.
The golems’ cave was lined with small bones and skulls, rank and row climbing the walls, twined with dried grasses in ascending geometries. These were the furry animals that the golems patiently trapped and killed, skinned, dressed, and smoked, laying them in small, fur-wrapped bundles in the family’s cave when they were done. It was part of their unspoken bargain with the mountain, and the tiny bones had once borne the flesh of nearly every significant meal Alan had ever eaten.
Davey crouched among the bones at the very back of the cave, his back to them, shoulders hunched.
The golems stood stock still as Marci and he crept up on Davey. So intent was he on his work that he didn’t notice them, even as they loomed over his shoulder, staring down on the thing he held in his hands.
It was Alan’s thumb, and growing out of it – Allen. Tiny, the size of a pipe-cleaner man, and just as skinny, but perfectly formed, squirming and insensate, face contorted in a tiny expression of horror.
Not so perfectly formed, Alan saw, once he was over the initial shock. One of the pipe-cleaner-Allen’s arms was missing, protruding there from Davey’s mouth, and he crunched it with lip-smacking relish. Alan gawped at it, taking it in, watching his miniature doppelganger, hardly bigger than the thumb it sprouted from, thrash like a worm on a hook.
Davey finished the arm, slurping it back like a noodle. Then he dangled the tiny Allen from the thumb, shaking it, before taking hold of the legs, one between the thumb and forefinger of each hand, and he gently, almost lovingly pulled them apart. The Allen screamed, a sound as tiny and tortured as a cricket song, and then the left leg wrenched free of its socket. Alan felt his own leg twist in sympathy, and then there was a killing rage in him. He looked around the cave for the thing that would let him murder his brother for once and for all, but it wasn’t to be found.
Davey’s murder was still to come.
Instead, he leapt on Davey’s back, arm around his neck, hand gripping his choking fist, pulling the headlock tighter and tighter. Marci was screaming something, but she was lost in the crash of the blood-surf that roared in his ears. Davey pitched over backward, trying to buck him off, but he wouldn’t be thrown, and he flipped Davey over by the neck, so that he landed it a thrash of skinny arms and legs. The Allen fell to the floor, weeping and dragging itself one-armed and one-legged away from the melee.
Then Davey was on him, squeezing his injured hand, other thumb in his eye, screeching like a rusted hinge. Alan tried to see through the tears that sprang up, tried to reach Davey with his good hand, but the rage was leaking out of him now. He rolled desperately, but Davey’s weight on his chest was like a cannonball, impossibly heavy.
Suddenly Davey was lifted off of him. Alan struggled up into a sitting position, clutching his injured hand. Davey dangled by his armpits in the implacable hands of one of the golems, face contorted into unrecognizability. Alan stood and confronted him, just out of range of his kicking feet and his gnashing teeth, and Darrel spat in his face, a searing gob that landed in his eye.
Marci took his arm and dragged him back toward the cave mouth. He fought her, looking for the little Allen, not seeing him. Was that him, there, in the shadows? No, that was one of the little bone tableaux, a field mouse’s dried bones splayed in an anatomically correct mystic hieroglyph.
Marci hauled him away, out into the bright snow and the bright sun. His thumb was bleeding anew, dripping fat drops the color of a red crayon into the sun, blood so hot it seemed to sizzle and sink into the snow.
“You need to tell an adult, Alan,” she said, wrapping his new little thumb in gauze she’d taken from her pocket.
“My father knows. My mother knows.” He sat with his head between his knees, not daring to look at her, in his nook in the winter cave.
She just looked at him, squinting.
“They count,” he said. “They understand it.”
She shook her head.
“They understand it better than any adult you know would. This will get better on its own, Marci. Look.” He wiggled his thumb at her. It was now the size of the tip of his pinky, and had a well-formed nail and cuticle.
“That’s not all that has to get better,” she said. “You can’t just let this fester. Your brother. That thing in the cave...” She shook her head. “Someone needs to know about this. You’re not safe.”
“Promise me you won’t tell anyone, Marci. This is important. No one except you knows, and that’s how it has to be. If you tell –”
“What?” She got up and pulled her coat on. “What, Alan? If I tell and try to help you, what will you do to me?”
“I don’t know,” he mumbled into his chest.
“Well, you do whatever you have to do,” she said, and stomped out of the cave.
Davey escaped at dawn. Kurt had gone outside to repark his old Buick, the trunk bungeed shut over his haul of LCD flat panels, empty laser-toner cartridges, and open gift baskets of pricey Japanese cosmetics. Alan and Davey just glared at each other, but then Davey closed his eyes and began to snore softly, and even though Alan paced and pinched the bridge of his nose and stretched out his injured arm, he couldn’t help it when he sat down and closed his eyes and nodded off.
Alan woke with a start, staring at the empty loops of duct tape and twine hanging from his captain’s chair, dried strings of skin like desiccated banana peel fibers hanging from them. He swore to himself quietly, and shouted Shit! at the low basement ceiling. He couldn’t have been asleep for more than a few seconds, and the half-window that Davey had escaped through gaped open at him like a sneer.
He tottered to his feet and went out to find Kurt, bare feet jammed into sneakers, bare chest and bandages covered up with a jacket. He found Kurt cutting through the park, dragging his heels in the bloody dawn light.
Kurt looked at his expression, then said, “What happened?” He had his fists at his sides, he looked tensed to run. Alan felt that he was waiting for an order.
“He got away.”
“How?”
Alan shook his head. “Can you help me get dressed? I don’t think I can get a shirt on by myself.”
They went to the Greek’s, waiting out front on the curb for the old man to show up and unchain the chairs and drag them out around the table. He served them tall coffees and omelets sleepily, and they ate in silence, too tired to talk.
“Let me take you to the doctor?” Kurt asked, nodding at the bandage that bulged under his shirt.
“No,” Alan said. “I’m a fast healer.”
Kurt rubbed at his calf and winced. “He broke the skin,” he said.
“You got all your shots?”
“Hell yeah. Too much crap in the dumpsters. I once found a styro cooler of smashed blood vials in a Red Cross trash.”
“You’ll be okay, then,” Alan said. He shifted in his seat and winced. He grunted a little ouch. Kurt narrowed his eyes and shook his head at him.
“This is pretty fucked up right here,” Kurt said, looking down into his coffee.
“It’s only a little less weird for me, if that’s any comfort.”
“It’s not,” Kurt said.
“Well, that’s why I don’t usually tell others. You’re only the second person to believe it.”
“Maybe I could meet up with the first and form a support group?”
Alan pushed his omelet away. “You can’t. She’s dead.”
Davey haunted the schoolyard. Alan had always treated the school and its grounds as a safe haven, a place where he could get away from the inexplicable, a place where he could play at being normal.
But now Davey was everywhere, lurking in the climber, hiding in the trees, peering through the tinsel-hung windows during class. Alan only caught the quickest glimpses of him, but he had the sense that if he turned his head around quickly enough, he’d see him. Davey made himself scarce in the mountain, hiding in the golems’ cave or one of the deep tunnels.
Marci didn’t come to class after Monday. Alan fretted every morning, waiting for her to turn up. He worried that she’d told her father, or that she was at home sulking, too angry to come to school, glaring at her Christmas tree.
Davey’s grin was everywhere.
On Wednesday, he got called into the vice principal’s office. As he neared it, he heard the rumble of Marci’s father’s thick voice and his heart began to pound in his chest.
He cracked the door and put his face in the gap, looking at the two men there: Mr. Davenport, the vice principal, with his gray hair growing out his large ears and cavernous nostrils, sitting behind his desk, looking awkwardly at Marci’s father, eyes bugged and bagged and bloodshot, face turned to the ground, looking like a different man, the picture of worry and loss.
Mr. Davenport saw him and crooked a finger at him, looking stern and stony. Alan was sure, then, that Marci’d told it all to her father, who’d told it all to Mr. Davenport, who would tell the world, and suddenly he was jealous of his secret, couldn’t bear to have it revealed, couldn’t bear the thought of men coming to the mountain to catalogue it for the subject index at the library, to study him and take him apart.
And he was... afraid. Not of what they’d all do to him. What Davey would do to them. He knew, suddenly, that Davey would not abide their secrets being disclosed.
He forced himself forward, his feet dragging like millstones, and stood between the two men, hands in his pockets, nervously twining at his underwear.
“Alan,” Marci’s father croaked. Mr. Davenport held up a hand to silence him.
“Alan,” Mr. Davenport said. “Have you seen Marci?”
Alan had been prepared to deny everything, call Marci a liar, betray her as she’d betrayed him, make it her word against his. Protect her. Protect her father and the school and the town from what Davey would do.
Now he whipped his head toward Marci’s father, suddenly understanding.
“No,” he said. “Not all week! Is she all right?”
Marci’s father sobbed, a sound Alan had never heard an adult make.
And it came tumbling out. No one had seen Marci since Sunday night. Her presumed whereabouts had moved from a friend’s place to Alan’s place to runaway to fallen in a lake to hit by a car and motionless in a ditch, and if Alan hadn’t seen her –
“I haven’t,” Alan said. “Not since the weekend. Sunday morning. She said she was going home.”
Another new sound, the sound of an adult crying. Marci’s father, and his sobs made his chest shake and Mr. Davenport awkwardly came from behind his desk and set a box of kleenexes on the hard bench beside him.
Alan caught Mr. Davenport’s eye and the vice principal made a shoo and pointed at the door.
Alan didn’t bother going back to class. He went straight to the golems’ cave, straight to where he knew Davey would be – must be – hiding, and found him there, playing with the bones that lined the walls.
“Where is she?” Alan said, after he’d taken hold of Davey’s hair and, without fanfare, smashed his face into the cold stone floor hard enough to break his nose. Alan twisted his wrists behind his back and when he tried to get up, Alan kicked his legs out from under him, wrenching his arms in their sockets. He heard a popping sound.
“Where is she?” Alan said again, amazing himself with his own calmness. Davey was crying now, genuinely scared, it seemed, and Alan reveled in the feeling. “I’ll kill you,” he whispered in Davey’s ear, almost lovingly. “I’ll kill you and put the body where no one will find it, unless you tell me where she is.”
Davey spat out a milk tooth, his right top incisor, and cried around the blood that coursed down his face. “I’m – I’m sorry, Alan,” he said. “But it was the secret.” His sobs were louder and harsher than Marci’s father’s had been.
“Where is she?” Alan said, knowing.
“With Caleb,” Davey said. “I buried her in Caleb.”
He found his brother the island midway down the mountain, sliding under cover of winter for the seaway. He climbed the island’s slope, making for the ring of footprints in the snow, the snow peppered brown with soil and green with grass, and he dug with his hands like a dog, tossing snow soil grass through his legs, digging to loose soil, digging to a cold hand.
A cold hand, protruding from the snow now, from the soil, some of the snow red-brown with blood. A skinny, freckled hand, a fingernail missing, torn off leaving behind an impression, an inverse fingernail. A hand, an arm. Not attached to anything. He set it to one side, dug, found another hand. Another arm. A leg. A head.
She was beaten, bruised, eyes swollen and two teeth missing, ear torn, hair caked with blood. Her beautiful head fell from his shaking cold hands. He didn’t want to dig anymore, but he had to, because it was the secret, and it had to be kept, and –
– he buried her in Caleb, piled dirt grass snow on her parts, and his eyes were dry and he didn’t sob.
It was a long autumn and a long winter and a long spring that year, unwiring the Market. Alan fell into the familiar rhythm of the work of a new venture, rising early, dossing late, always doing two or three things at once: setting up meetings, sweet-talking merchants, debugging his process on the fly.
His first victory came from the Greek, who was no pushover. The man was over seventy, and had been pouring lethal coffee and cheap beer down the throats of Kensington’s hipsters for decades and had steadfastly refused every single crackpot scheme hatched by his customers.
“Larry,” Andy said, “I have a proposal for you and you’re going to hate it.”
“I hate it already,” the Greek said. His dapper little mustache twitched. It was not even seven a.m. yet, and the Greek was tinkering with the guts of his espresso delivery system, making it emit loud hisses and tossing out evil congealed masses of sin-black coffee grounds.
“What if I told you it wouldn’t cost you anything?”
“Maybe I’d hate it a little less.”
“Here’s the pitch,” Alan said, taking a sip of the thick, steaming coffee the Greek handed to him in a minuscule cup. He shivered as the stuff coated his tongue. “Wow.”
The Greek gave him half a smile, which was his version of roaring hilarity.
“Here’s the pitch. Me and that punk kid, Kurt, we’re working on a community Internet project for the Market.”
“Computers?” the Greek said.
“Yup,” Alan said.
“Pah,” the Greek said.
Anders nodded. “I knew you were going to say that. But don’t think of this as a computer thing, okay? Think of this as a free speech thing. We’re putting in a system to allow people all over the Market – and someday, maybe, the whole city – to communicate for free, in private, without permission from anyone. They can send messages, they can get information about the world, they can have conversations. It’s like a library and a telephone and a caf? all at once.”
Larry poured himself a coffee. “I hate when they come in here with computers. They sit forever at their tables, and they don’t talk to nobody, it’s like having a place full of statues or zombies.”
“Well, sure,” Alan said. “If you’re all alone with a computer, you’re just going to fall down the rabbit hole. You’re in your own world and cut off from the rest of the world. But once you put those computers on the network, they become a way to talk to anyone else in the world. For free! You help us with this network – all we want from you is permission to stick up a box over your sign and patch it into your power, you won’t even know it’s there – and those customers won’t be antisocial, they’ll be socializing, over the network.”
“You think that’s what they’ll do if I help them with the network?”
He started to say, Absolutely, but bit it back, because Larry’s bullshit antennae were visibly twitching. “No, but some of them will. You’ll see them in here, talking, typing, typing, talking. That’s how it goes. The point is that we don’t know how people are going to use this network yet, but we know that it’s a social benefit.”
“You want to use my electricity?”
“Well, yeah.”
“So it’s not free.”
“Not entirely,” Alan said. “You got me there.”
“Aha!” the Greek said.
“Look, if that’s a deal breaker, I’ll personally come by every day and give you a dollar for the juice. Come on, Larry – the box we want to put in, it’s just a repeater to extend the range of the network. The network already reaches to here, but your box will help it go farther. You’ll be the first merchant in the Market to have one. I came to you first because you’ve been here the longest. The others look up to you. They’ll see it and say, ’Larry has one, it must be all right.’”
The Greek downed his coffee and smoothed his mustache. “You are a bullshit artist, huh? All right, you put your box in. If my electricity bills are too high, though, I take it down.”
“That’s a deal,” Andy said. “How about I do it this morning, before you get busy? Won’t take more than a couple minutes.”
The Greek’s was midway between his place and Kurt’s, and Kurt hardly stirred when he let himself in to get an access point from one of the chipped shelving units before going back to his place to get his ladder and Makita drill. It took him most of the morning to get it securely fastened over the sign, screws sunk deep enough into the old, spongy wood to survive the build up of ice and snow that would come with the winter. Then he had to wire it into the sign, which took longer than he thought it would, too, but then it was done, and the idiot lights started blinking on the box Kurt had assembled.
“And what, exactly, are you doing up there, Al?” Kurt said, when he finally stumbled out of bed and down the road for his afternoon breakfast coffee.
“Larry’s letting us put up an access point,” he said, wiping the pigeon shit off a wire preparatory to taping it down. He descended the ladder and wiped his hands off on his painter’s pants. “That’ll be ten bucks, please.”
Kurt dug out a handful of coins and picked out enough loonies and toonies to make ten dollars, and handed it over. “You talked the Greek into it?” he hissed. “How?”
“I kissed his ass without insulting his intelligence.”
“Neat trick,” Kurt said, and they had a little partner-to-partner high-five. “I’d better login to that thing and get it onto the network, huh?”
“Yeah,” Anders said. “I’m gonna order some lunch, lemme get you something.”
What they had done, was they had hacked the shit out of those boxes that Kurt had built in his junkyard of a storefront of an apartment.
“These work?” Alan said. He had three of them in a big catering tub from his basement that he’d sluiced clean. The base stations no longer looked like they’d been built out of garbage. They’d switched to low-power Mini-ATX motherboards that let them shrink the hardware down to small enough to fit in a 50-dollar all-weather junction box from Canadian Tire.
Adam vaguely recognized the day’s street-kids as regulars who’d been hanging around the shop for some time, and they gave him the hairy eyeball when he had the audacity to question Kurt. These kids of Kurt’s weren’t much like the kids he’d had working for him over the years. They might be bright, but they were a lot...angrier. Some of the girls were cutters, with knife scars on their forearms. Some of the boys looked like they’d been beaten up a few times too many on the streets, like they were spoiling for a fight. Alan tried to unfocus his eyes when he was in the front of Kurt’s shop, to not see any of them too closely.
“They work,” Kurt said. He smelled terrible, a combination of garbage and sweat, and he had the raccoon-eyed jitters he got when he stayed up all night. “I tested them twice.”
“You built me a spare?” Alan said, examining the neat lines of hot glue that gasketed the sturdy rubberized antennae in place, masking the slightly melted edges left behind by the drill press.
“You don’t need a spare,” Kurt said. Alan knew that when he got touchy like this, he had to be very careful or he’d blow up, but he wasn’t going to do another demo Kurt’s way. They’d done exactly one of those, at a Toronto District School Board superintendents meeting, when Alan had gotten the idea of using schools’ flagpoles and backhaul as test beds for building out the net. It had been a debacle, needless to say. Two of the access points had been permanently installed on either end of Kurt’s storefront and the third had been in storage for a month since it was last tested.
One of the street kids, a boy with a pair of improbably enormous raver shoes, looked up at Alan. “We’ve tested these all. They work.”
Kurt puffed up and gratefully socked the kid in the shoulder. “We did.”
“Fine,” Adam said patiently. “But can we make sure they work now?”
“They’ll work,” Kurt had said when Alan told him that he wanted to test the access points out before they took them to the meeting. “It’s practically solid-state. They’re running off the standard distribution. There’s almost no configuration.”
Which may or may not have been true – it certainly sounded plausible to Alan’s lay ear – but it didn’t change the fact that once they powered up the third box, the other two seized up and died. The blinking network lights fell still, and as Kurt hauled out an old VT-100 terminal and plugged it into the serial ports on the backs of his big, ugly, bestickered, and cig-burned PC cases, it became apparent that they had ceased to honor all requests for routing, association, deassociation, DHCP leases, and the myriad of other networking services provided for by the software.
“It’s practically solid-state,” Kurt said, nearly shouted, after he’d powered down the third box and found that the other two – previously routing and humming along happily – refused to come back up into their known-good state. He gave Alan a dirty look, as though his insistence on preflighting were the root of their problems.
The street-kid who’d spoken up had jumped when Kurt raised his voice, then cringed away. Now as Kurt began to tear around the shop, looking through boxes of CDs and dropping things on the floor, the kid all but cowered, and the other three all looked down at the table.
“I’ll just reinstall,” Kurt said. “That’s the beauty of these things. It’s a standard distro, I just copy it over, and biff-bam, it’ll come right back up. No problem. Take me ten minutes. We’ve got plenty of time.”
Then, five minutes later, “Shit, I forgot that this one has a different mo-bo than the others.”
“Mo-bo?” Alan said, amused. He’d spotted the signs of something very finicky gone very wrong and he’d given up any hope of actually doing the demo, so he’d settled in to watch the process without rancor and to learn as much as he could.
“Motherboard,” Kurt said, reaching for a spool of blank CDs. “Just got to patch the distribution, recompile, burn it to CD, and reboot, and we’re on the road.”
Ten minutes later, “Shit.”
“Yes?” Alan said.
“Back off, okay?”
“I’m going to call them and let them know we’re going to be late.”
“We’re not going to be late,” Kurt said, his fingers going into claws on the keyboard.
“We’re already late,” Alan said.
“Shit,” Kurt said.
“Let’s do this,” Alan said. “Let’s bring down the two that you’ve got working and show them those, and explain the rest.”
They’d had a fight, and Kurt had insisted, as Alan had suspected he would, that he was only a minute or two away from bringing everything back online. Alan kept his cool, made mental notes of the things that went wrong, and put together a plan for avoiding all these problems the next time around.
“Is there a spare?” Alan said.
Kurt sneered and jerked a thumb at his workbench, where another junction box sat, bunny-ear antennae poking out of it. Alan moved it into his tub. “Great,” he said. “Tested, right?”
“All permutations tested and ready to go. You know, you’re not the boss around here.”
“I know it,” he said. “Partners.” He clapped Kurt on the shoulder, ignoring the damp gray grimy feeling of the clammy T-shirt under his palm.
The shoulder under his palm sagged. “Right,” Kurt said. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Alan said. “You’ve been hard at it. I’ll get loaded while you wash up.
Kurt sniffed at his armpit. “Whew,” he said. “Yeah, okay.”
When Kurt emerged from the front door of his storefront ten minutes later, he looked like he’d at least made an effort. His mohawk and its fins were slicked back and tucked under a baseball hat, his black jeans were unripped and had only one conservative chain joining the wallet in his back pocket to his belt loop. Throw in a clean t-shirt advertising an old technology conference instead of the customary old hardcore band and you had an approximation of the kind of geek that everyone knew was in possession of secret knowledge and hence must be treated with attention, if not respect.
“I feel like such a dilbert,” he said.
“You look totally disreputable,” Alan said, hefting the tub of their access points into the bed of his truck and pulling the bungees tight around it. “Punk as fuck.”
Kurt grinned and ducked his head. “Stop it,” he said. “Flatterer.”
“Get in the truck,” Alan said.
Kurt drummed his fingers nervously on his palms the whole way to Bell offices. Alan grabbed his hand and stilled it. “Stop worrying,” he said. “This is going to go great.”
“I still don’t understand why we’re doing this,” Kurt said. “They’re the phone company. They hate us, we hate them. Can’t we just leave it that way?”
“Don’t worry, we’ll still all hate each other when we get done.”
“So why bother?” He sounded petulant and groggy, and Alan reached under his seat for the thermos he’d had filled at the Greek’s before heading to Kurt’s place. “Coffee,” he said, and handed it to Kurt, who groaned and swigged and stopped bitching.
“Why bother is this,” Alan said. “We’re going to get a lot of publicity for doing this.” Kurt snorted into the thermos. “It’s going to be a big deal. You know how big a deal this can be. We’re going to communicate that to the press, who will communicate it to the public, and then there will be a shitstorm. Radio cops, telco people, whatever – they’re going to try to discredit us. I want to know what they’re liable to say.”
“Christ, you’re dragging me out for that? I can tell you what they’ll say. They’ll drag out the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse: kiddie porn, terrorists, pirates, and the mafia. They’ll tell us that any tool for communicating that they can’t tap, logm and switch off us irresponsible. They’ll tell us we’re stealing from ISPs. It’s what they say every time some tries this: Philly, New York, London. All around the world same song.”
Alan nodded. “That’s good background – thanks. I still want to know how they say it, what the flaws are in their expression of their argument. And I wanted us to run a demo for some people who we could never hope to sway – that’s a good audience for exposing the flaws in the show. This’ll be a good prep session.”
“So I pulled an all-nighter and busted my nuts to produce a demo for a bunch of people we don’t care about? Thanks a lot.”
Alan started to say something equally bitchy back, and then he stopped himself. He knew where this would end up – a screaming match that would leave both of them emotionally overwrought at a time when they needed cool heads. But he couldn’t think of what to tell Kurt in order to placate him. All his life, he’d been in situations like this: confronted by people who had some beef, some grievance, and he’d had no answer for it. Usually he could puzzle out the skeleton of their cause, but sometimes – times like this – he was stumped.
He picked at the phrase. I pulled an all-nighter. Kurt pulled an all-nighter because he’d left this to the last minute, not because Alan had surprised him with it. He knew that, of course. Was waiting, then, for Kurt to bust him on it. To tell him, This is your fault, not mine. To tell him If this demo fails, it’s because you fucked off and left it to the last minute. So he was angry, but not at Alan, he was angry at himself.
A bunch of people we don’t care about, what was that about? Ah. Kurt knew that they didn’t take him seriously in the real world. He was too dirty, too punk-as-fuck, too much of his identity was wrapped up in being alienated and alienating. But he couldn’t make his dream come true without Alan’s help, either, and so Alan was the friendly face on their enterprise, and he resented that – feared that in order to keep up his appearance of punk-as-fuckitude, he’d have to go into the meeting cursing and sneering and that Alan would bust him on that, too.
Alan frowned at the steering wheel. He was getting better at understanding people, but that didn’t make him necessarily better at being a person. What should he say here?
“That was a really heroic effort, Kurt,” he said, biting his lip. “I can tell you put a lot of work into it.” He couldn’t believe that praise this naked could possibly placate someone of Kurt’s heroic cynicism, but Kurt’s features softened and he turned his face away, rolled down the window, lit a cigarette.
“I thought I’d never get it done,” Kurt said. “I was so sleepy, I felt like I was half-baked. Couldn’t concentrate.”
You were up all night because you left it to the last minute, Alan thought. But Kurt knew that, was waiting to be reassured about it. “I don’t know how you get as much done as you do. Must be really hard.”
“It’s not so bad,” Kurt said, dragging on his cigarette and not quite disguising his grin. “It gets easier every time.”
“Yeah, we’re going to get this down to a science someday,” Alan said. “Something we can teach anyone to do.”
“That would be so cool,” Kurt said, and put his boots up on the dash. “God, you could pick all the parts you needed out of the trash, throw a little methodology at them, and out would pop this thing that destroyed the phone company.”
“This is going to be a fun meeting,” Alan said.
“Shit, yeah. They’re going to be terrified of us.”
“Someday. Maybe it starts today.”
The Bell boardroom looked more like a retail operation than a back office, decked out in brand-consistent livery, from the fabric-dyed rag carpets to the avant-garde lighting fixtures. They were given espressos by the young secretary-barista whose skirt-and-top number was some kind of reinterpreted ravewear outfit toned down for a corporate workplace.
“So this is the new Bell,” Kurt said, once she had gone. “Our tax dollars at work.”
“This is good work,” Alan said, gesturing at the blown-up artwork of pan-ethnic models who were extraordinary- but not beautiful-looking on the walls. The Bell redesign had come at the same time as the telco was struggling back from the brink of bankruptcy, and the marketing firm they’d hired to do the work had made its name on the strength of the campaign. “Makes you feel like using a phone is a really futuristic, cutting-edge activity,” he said.
His contact at the semiprivatized corporation was a young kid who shopped at one of his prot?g?s’ designer furniture store. He was a young turk who’d made a name for himself quickly in the company through a couple of ISP acquisitions at fire-sale prices after the dot-bomb, which he’d executed flawlessly, integrating the companies into Bell’s network with hardly a hiccup. He’d been very polite and guardedly enthusiastic when Alan called him, and had invited him down to meet some of his colleagues.
Though Alan had never met him, he recognized him the minute he walked in as the person who had to go with the confident voice he’d heard on the phone.
“Lyman,” he said, standing up and holding out his hand. The guy was slightly Asian-looking, tall, with a sharp suit that managed to look casual and expensive at the same time.
He shook Alan’s hand and said, “Thanks for coming down.” Alan introduced him to Kurt, and then Lyman introduced them both to his colleagues, a gender-parity posse of young, smart-looking people, along with one graybeard (literally – he had a Unix beard of great rattiness and gravitas) who had no fewer than seven devices on his belt, including a line tester and a GPS.
Once they were seated, Alan snuck a look at Kurt, who had narrowed his eyes and cast his gaze down onto the business cards he’d been handed. Alan hadn’t been expecting this – he’d figured on finding himself facing down a group of career bureaucrats – and Kurt was clearly thrown for a loop, too.
“Well, Alan, Kurt, it’s nice to meet you,” Lyman said. “I hear you’re working on some exciting stuff.”
“We are,” Alan said. “We’re building a city-wide mesh wireless network using unlicensed spectrum that will provide high-speed, Internet connectivity absolutely gratis.”
“That’s ambitious,” Lyman said, without the skepticism that Alan had assumed would greet his statement. “How’s it coming?”
“Well, we’ve got a bunch of Kensington Market covered,” Alan said. “Kurt’s been improving the hardware design and we’ve come up with something cheap and reproducible.” He opened his tub and handed out the access points, housed in gray high-impact plastic junction boxes.
Lyman accepted one solemnly and passed it on to his graybeard, then passed the next to an East Indian woman in horn-rim glasses whose bitten-down fingernails immediately popped the latch and began lightly stroking the hardware inside, tracing the connections. The third landed in front of Lyman himself.
“So, what do they do?”
Alan nodded at Kurt. Kurt put his hands on the table and took a breath. “They’ve got three network interfaces; we can do any combination of wired and wireless cards. The OS is loaded on a flash-card; it auto-detects any wireless cards and auto-configures them to seek out other access points. When it finds a peer, they negotiate a client-server relationship based on current load, and the client then associates with the server. There’s a key exchange that we use to make sure that rogue APs don’t sneak into the mesh, and a self-healing routine we use to switch routes if the connection drops or we start to see too much packet loss.”
The graybeard looked up. “It izz a radio vor talking to Gott!” he said. Lyman’s posse laughed, and after a second, so did Kurt.
Alan must have looked puzzled, for Kurt elbowed him in the ribs and said, “It’s from Indiana Jones,” he said.
“Ha,” Alan said. That movie had come out long before he’d come to the city – he hadn’t seen a movie until he was almost 20. As was often the case, the reference to a film made him feel like a Martian.
The graybeard passed his unit on to the others at the table.
“Does it work?” he said.
“Yeah,” Kurt said.
“Well, that’s pretty cool,” he said.
Kurt blushed. “I didn’t write the firmware,” he said. “Just stuck it together from parts of other peoples’ projects.”
“So, what’s the plan?” Lyman said. “How many of these are you going to need?”
“Hundreds, eventually,” Alan said. “But for starters, we’ll be happy if we can get enough to shoot down to 151 Front.”
“You’re going to try to peer with someone there?” The East Indian woman had plugged the AP into a riser under the boardroom table and was examining its blinkenlights.
“Yeah,” Alan said. “That’s the general idea.” He was getting a little uncomfortable – these people weren’t nearly hostile enough to their ideas.
“Well, that’s very ambitious,” Lyman said. His posse all nodded as though he’d paid them a compliment, though Alan wasn’t sure. Ambitious could certainly be code for “ridiculous.”
“How about a demo?” the East Indian woman said.
“Course,” Kurt said. He dug out his laptop, a battered thing held together with band stickers and gaffer tape, and plugged in a wireless card. The others started to pass him back his access points but he shook his head. “Just plug ’em in,” he said. “Here or in another room nearby – that’ll be cooler.”
A couple of the younger people at the table picked up two of the APs and headed for the hallway. “Put one on my desk,” Lyman told them, “and the other at reception.”
Alan felt a sudden prickle at the back of his neck, though he didn’t know why – just a random premonition that they were on the brink of something very bad happening. This wasn’t the kind of vision that Brad would experience, that far away look followed by a snap-to into the now, eyes filled with certitude about the dreadful future. More like a goose walking over his grave, a tickle of badness.
The East Indian woman passed Kurt a VGA cable that snaked into the table’s guts and down into the riser on the floor. She hit a button on a remote and an LCD projector mounted in the ceiling began to hum, projecting a rectangle of white light on one wall. Kurt wiggled it into the backside of his computer and spun down the thumbscrews, hit a button, and then his desktop was up on the wall, ten feet high. His wallpaper was a picture of a group of black-clad, kerchiefed protesters charging a police line of batons and gas-grenades. A closer look revealed that the protester running in the lead was probably Kurt.
He tapped at his touchpad and a window came up, showing relative strength signals for two of the access points. A moment later, the third came online.
“I’ve been working with this network visualizer app,” Kurt said. “It tries to draw logical maps of the network topology, with false coloring denoting packet loss between hops – that’s a pretty good proxy for distance between two APs.”
“More like the fade,” the graybeard said.
“Fade is a function of distance,” Kurt said. Alan heard the dismissal in his voice and knew they were getting into a dick-swinging match.
“Fade is a function of geography and topology,” the graybeard said quietly.
Kurt waved his hand. “Whatever – sure. Geography. Topology. Distance. It’s a floor wax and a dessert topping.”
“I’m not being pedantic,” the graybeard said.
“You’re not just being pedantic,” Lyman said gently, watching the screen on which four animated jaggy boxes were jumbling and dancing as they reported on the throughput between the routers and the laptop.
“Not just pedantic,” the graybeard said. “If you have a lot of these boxes in known locations with known nominal throughput, you can use them as a kind of sensor array. When throughput drops between point foo and point bar, it will tell you something about the physical world between foo and bar.”
Kurt looked up from his screen with a thoughtful look. “Huh?”
“Like, whether a tree had lost its leaves in the night. Or whether there were a lot of people standing around in a normally desolate area. Or whether there are lots of devices operating between foo and bar that are interfering with them.”
Kurt nodded slowly. “The packets we lose could be just as interesting as the packets we don’t lose,” he said.
A light went on in Alan’s head. “We could be like jazz critics, listening to the silences instead of the notes,” he said. They all looked at him.
“That’s very good,” Lyman said. “Like a jazz critic.” He smiled.
Alan smiled back.
“What are we seeing, Craig?” Lyman said.
“Kurt,” Alan said.
“Right, Kurt,” he said. “Sorry.”
“We’re seeing the grid here. See how the access points go further up the spectrum the more packets they get? I’m associated with that bad boy right there.” He gestured to the box blinking silently in the middle of the board room table. “And it’s connected to one other, which is connected to a third.”
Lyman picked up his phone and dialed a speed-dial number. “Hey, can you unplug the box on my desk?”
A moment later, one of the boxes on the display winked out. “Watch this,” Kurt said, as the remaining two boxes were joined by a coruscating line. “See that? Self-healing. Minimal packet loss. Beautiful.”
“That’s hot,” Lyman said. “That makes me all wet.”
They chuckled nervously at his crudity. “Seriously.”
“Here,” Kurt said, and another window popped up, showing twenty or more boxes with marching ant trails between them. “That’s a time-lapse of the Kensington network. The boxes are running different versions of the firmware, so you can see that in some edge cases, you get a lot more oscillation between two similar signals. We fixed that in the new version.”
The graybeard said, “How?”
“We flip a coin,” Kurt said, and grinned. “These guys in Denmark ran some simulations, proved that a random toss-up worked as well as any other algorithm, and it’s a lot cheaper, computationally.”
“So what’s going on just to the northeast of center?”
Alan paid attention to the patch of screen indicated. Three access points were playing musical chairs, dropping signal and reacquiring it, dropping it again.
Kurt shrugged. “Bum hardware, I think. We’ve got volunteers assembling those boxes, from parts.”
“Parts?”
Kurt’s grin widened. “Yeah. From the trash, mostly. I dumpster-dive for ’em.”
They grinned back. “That’s very hot,” Lyman said.
“We’re looking at normalizing the parts for the next revision,” Alan said. “We want to be able to use a single distro that works on all of them.”
“Oh, sure,” Lyman said, but he looked a little disappointed, and so did Kurt.
“Okay, it works,” Lyman said. “It works?” he said, nodding the question at his posse. They nodded back. “So what can we do for you?”
Alan chewed his lip, caught himself at it, stopped. He’d anticipated a slugfest, now he was getting strokes.
“How come you’re being so nice to us?” Kurt said. “You guys are The Man.” He shrugged at Alan. “Someone had to say it.”
Lyman smiled. “Yeah, we’re the phone company. Big lumbering dinosaur that is thrashing in the tarpit. The spazz dinosaur that’s so embarrassed all the other dinosaurs that none of them want to rescue us.”
“Heh, spazz dinosaur,” the East Indian woman said, and they all laughed.
“Heh,” Kurt said. “But seriously.”
“Seriously,” Lyman said. “Seriously. Think a second about the scale of a telco. Of this telco. The thousands of kilometers of wire in the ground. Switching stations. Skilled linesmen and cable-pullers. Coders. Switches. Backhaul. Peering arrangements. We’ve got it all. Ever get on a highway and hit a flat patch where you can’t see anything to the horizon except the road and the telephone poles and the wires? Those are our wires. It’s a lot of goodness, especially for a big, evil phone company.
“So we’ve got a lot of smart hackers. A lot of cool toys. A gigantic budget. The biggest network any of us could ever hope to manage – like a model train set the size of a city.
“That said, we’re hardly nimble. Moving a Bell is like shifting a battleship by tapping it on the nose with a toothpick. It can be done, but you can spend ten years doing it and still not be sure if you’ve made any progress. From the outside, it’s easy to mistake ’slow’ for ’evil.’ It’s easy to make that mistake from the inside, too.
“But I don’t let it get me down. It’s good for a Bell to be slow and plodding, most of the time. You don’t want to go home and discover that we’ve dispatched the progress-ninjas to upgrade all your phones with video screens and a hush mode that reads your thoughts. Most of our customers still can’t figure out voice mail. Some of them can’t figure out touch-tone dialing. So we’re slow. Conservative. But we can do lots of killer R&D, we can roll out really hot upgrades on the back end, and we can provide this essential service to the world that underpins its ability to communicate. We’re not just cool, we’re essential.
“So you come in and you show us your really swell and interesting meshing wireless data boxes, and I say, ’That is damned cool.’ I think of ways that it could be part of a Bell’s business plan in a couple decades’ time.”
“A couple decades?” Kurt squawked. “Jesus Christ, I expect to have a chip in my brain and a jetpack in a couple decades’ time.”
“Which is why you’d be an idiot to get involved with us,” Lyman said.
“Who wants to get involved with you?” Kurt said.
“No one,” Alan said, putting his hands on the table, grateful that the conflict had finally hove above the surface. “That’s not what we’re here for.”
“Why are you here, Alvin?” Lyman said.
“We’re here because we’re going into the moving-data-around trade, in an ambitious way, and because you folks are the most ambitious moving-data-around tradespeople in town. I thought we’d come by and let you know what we’re up to, see if you have any advice for us.”
“Advice, huh?”
“Yeah. You’ve got lots of money and linesmen and switches and users and so forth. You probably have some kind of well-developed cosmology of connectivity, with best practices and philosophical ruminations and tasty metaphors. And I hear that you, personally, are really good at making geeks and telcos play together. Since we’re going to be a kind of telco” – Kurt startled and Alan kicked him under the table – “I thought you could help us get started right.”
“Advice,” Lyman said, drumming his fingers. He stood up and paced.
“One: don’t bother. This is at least two orders of magnitude harder than you think it is. There aren’t enough junk computers in all of Toronto’s landfills to blanket the city in free wireless. The range is nothing but three hundred feet, right? Less if there are trees and buildings, and this city is all trees and buildings.
“Two: don’t bother. The liability here is stunning. The gear you’re building is nice and all, but you’re putting it into people’s hands and you’ve got no idea what they’re going to do with it. They’re going to hack in bigger antennae and signal amplifiers. The radio cops will be on your ass day and night.
“What’s more, they’re going to open it up to the rest of the world and any yahoo who has a need to hide what he’s up to is going to use your network to commit unspeakable acts – you’re going to be every pirate’s best friend and every terrorist’s safest haven.
“Three: don’t bother. This isn’t going to work. You’ve got a cute little routing algorithm that runs with three nodes, and you’ve got a model that may scale up to 300, but by the time you get to 30 thousand, you’re going to be hitting so much latency and dropping so many packets on the floor and incurring so much signaling overhead that it’ll be a gigantic failure.
“You want my advice? Turn this into a piece of enterprise technology: a cheap way of rolling out managed solutions in hotels and office towers and condos – building-wide meshes, not city-wide. Those guys will pay – they pay a hundred bucks per punchdown now for wired networking, so they’ll gladly cough up a thousand bucks a floor for these boxes, and you’ll only need one on every other story. And those people use networks, they’re not joe consumer who doesn’t have the first clue what to do with a network connection.”
Kurt had stiffened up when the rant began, and once he heard the word “consumer,” he began to positively vibrate. Alan gave him a warning nudge with his elbow.
“You’re shitting me, right?” Kurt said.
“You asked me for advice –” Lyman said, mildly.
“You think we’re going to bust our balls to design and deploy all this hardware so that business hotels can save money on cable-pullers? Why the hell would we want to do that?”
“Because it pays pretty well,” Lyman said. He was shaking his head a little, leaning back from the table, and his posse picked up on it, going slightly restless and fidgety, with a room-wide rustle of papers and clicking of pens and laptop latches.
Alan held up his hand. “Lyman, I’m sorry, we’ve been unclear. We’re not doing this as a money-making venture –” Kurt snorted. “It’s about serving the public interest. We want to give our neighbors access to tools and ideas that they wouldn’t have had before. There’s something fundamentally undemocratic about charging money for communications: It means that the more money you have, the more you get to communicate. So we’re trying to fix that, in some small way. We are heartily appreciative of your advice, though –”
Lyman held up a hand. “Sorry, Alan, I don’t mean to interrupt, but there was something I wanted to relate to you two, and I’ve got to go in about five minutes.” Apparently, the meeting was at an end. “And I had made myself a note to tell you two about this when I discovered it last week. Can I have the floor?”
“Of course,” Alan said.
“I took a holiday last week,” Lyman said. “Me and my girlfriend. We went to Switzerland to see the Alps and to visit her sister, who’s doing something for the UN in Geneva. So her sister, she’s into, I don’t know, saving children from vampires in Afghanistan or something, and she has Internet access at the office, and can’t see any reason to drop a connection in at home. So there I was, wandering the streets of Geneva at seven in the morning, trying to find a WiFi connection so I can get my email and find out how many ways I can enlarge my penis this week.
“No problem – outside every hotel and most of the caf?s, I can find a signal for a network called Swisscom. I log on to the network and I fire up a browser and I get a screen asking me for my password. Well, I don’t have one, but after poking around, I find out that I can buy a card with a temporary password on it. So I wait until some of the little smoke shops open and start asking them if they sell Swisscom Internet Cards, in my terrible, miserable French, and after chuckling at my accent, they look at me and say, ’I have no clue what you’re talking about,’ shrug, and go back to work.
“Then I get the idea to go and ask at the hotels. The first one, the guy tells me that they only sell cards to guests, since they’re in short supply. The cards are in short supply! Three hotels later, they allow as how they’ll sell me a 30-minute card. Oh, that’s fine. Thirty whole minutes of connectivity. Whoopee. And how much will that be? Only about a zillion Swiss pesos. Don’t they sell cards of larger denominations? Oh sure, two hours, 24 hours, seven days – and each one costs about double the last, so if you want, you can get a seven day card for about as much as you’d spend on a day’s worth of connectivity in 30-minute increments – about three hundred dollars Canadian for a week, just FYI.
“Well, paying 300 bucks for a week’s Internet is ghastly, but very Swiss, where they charge you if you have more than two bits of cheese at breakfast, and hell, I could afford it. But three hundred bucks for a day’s worth of 30-minute cards? Fuck that. I was going to have to find a seven-day card or bust. So I ask at a couple more hotels and finally find someone who’ll explain to me that Swisscom is the Swiss telco, and that they have a retail storefront a couple blocks away where they’d sell me all the cards I wanted, in whatever denominations I require.
“By this time, it’s nearly nine a.m. and I’m thinking that my girlfriend and her sister are probably up and eating a big old breakfast and wondering where the fuck I am, but I’ve got too much invested in this adventure to give up when I’m so close to finding the treasure. And so I hied myself off to the Swisscom storefront, which is closed, even though the sign says they open at nine and by now it’s nine-oh-five, and so much for Swiss punctuality. But eventually this sneering kid with last year’s faux-hawk comes out and opens the door and then disappears up the stairs at the back of the show room to the second floor, where I follow him. I get up to his counter and say, ’Pardonnez moi,’ but he holds up a hand and points behind me and says, ’Numero!’ I make an elaborate shrug, but he just points again and says, ’Numero!’ I shrug again and he shakes his head like he’s dealing with some kind of unbelievable moron, and then he steps out from behind his counter and stalks over to a little touchscreen. He takes my hand by the wrist and plants my palm on the touchscreen and a little ribbon of paper with zero-zero-one slides out. I take it and he goes back behind his counter and says, ’Numero un!’
“I can tell this is not going to work out, but I need to go through the motions. I go to the counter and ask for a seven-day card. He opens his cash drawer and paws through a pile of cards, then smiles and shakes his head and says, sorry, all sold out. My girlfriend is probably through her second cup of coffee and reading brochures for nature walks in the Alps at this point, so I say, fine, give me a one-day card. He takes a moment to snicker at my French, then says, so sorry, sold out those, too. Two hours? Nope. Half an hour? Oh, those we got.
“Think about this for a second. I am sitting there with my laptop in hand, at six in the morning, on a Swiss street, connected to Swisscom’s network, a credit card in my other hand, wishing to give them some money in exchange for the use of their network, and instead I have to go chasing up and down every hotel in Geneva for a card, which is not to be found. So I go to the origin of these cards, the Swisscom store, and they’re sold out, too. This is not a T-shirt or a loaf of bread: there’s no inherent scarcity in two-hour or seven-day cards. The cards are just a convenient place to print some numbers, and all you need to do to make more numbers is pull them out of thin air. They’re just numbers. We have as many of them as we could possibly need. There’s no sane, rational universe in which all the ’two-hour’ numbers sell out, leaving nothing behind but ’30-minute’ numbers.
“So that’s pretty bad. It’s the kind of story that net-heads tell about Bell-heads all around the world. It’s the kind of thing I’ve made it my business to hunt down and exterminate here wherever I find it. So I just wrote off my email for that week and came home and downloaded a hundred thousand spams about my cock’s insufficient dimensions and went in to work and I told everyone I could find about this, and they all smiled nervously and none of them seemed to find it as weird and ridiculous as me, and then, that Friday, I went into a meeting about our new high-speed WiFi service that we’re piloting in Montreal and the guy in charge of the program hands out these little packages to everyone in the meeting, a slide deck and some of the marketing collateral and – a little prepaid 30-minute access card.
“That’s what we’re delivering. Prepaid cards for Internet access. Complet avec number shortages and business travelers prowling the bagel joints of Rue St Urbain looking for a shopkeeper whose cash drawer has a few seven-day cards kicking around.
“And you come in here, and you ask me, you ask the ruling Bell, what advice do we have for your metro-wide free info-hippie wireless dumpster-diver anarcho-network? Honestly – I don’t have a fucking clue. We don’t have a fucking clue. We’re a telephone company. We don’t know how to give away free communications – we don’t even know how to charge for it.”
“That was refreshingly honest,” Kurt said. “I wanna shake your hand.”
He stood up and Lyman stood up and Lyman’s posse stood up and they converged on the doorway in an orgy of handshaking and grinning. The greybeard handed over the access point, and the East Indian woman ran off to get the other two, and before they knew it, they were out on the street.
“I liked him,” Kurt said.
“I could tell,” Alan said.
“Remember you said something about an advisory board? How about if we ask him to join?”
“That is a tremendous and deeply weird idea, partner. I’ll send out the invite when we get home.”
Kurt said that the anarchist bookstore would be a slam dunk, but it turned out to be the hardest sell of all.
“I spoke to them last month, they said they were going to run it down in their weekly general meeting. They love it. It’s anarcho-radio. Plus, they all want high-speed connectivity in the store so they can webcast their poetry slams. Just go on by and introduce yourself, tell ’em I sent you.”
Ambrose nodded and skewered up a hunk of omelet and swirled it in the live yogurt the Greek served, and chewed. “All right,” he said, “I’ll do it this afternoon. You look exhausted, by the way. Hard night in the salt mines?”
Kurt looked at his watch. “I got about an hour’s worth of diving in. I spent the rest of the night breaking up with Monica.”
“Monica?”
“The girlfriend.”
“Already? I thought you two just got together last month.”
Kurt shrugged. “Longest fucking month of my life. All she wanted to do was go clubbing all night. She hated staying over at my place because of the kids coming by in the morning to work on the access points.”
“I’m sorry, pal,” Andy said. He never knew what to do about failed romance. He’d had no experience in that department since the seventh grade, after all. “You’ll find someone else soon enough.”
“Too soon!” Kurt said. “We screamed at each other for five hours before I finally got gone. It was probably my fault. I lose my temper too easy. I should be more like you.”
“You’re a good man, Kurt. Don’t forget it.”
Kurt ground his fists into his eyes and groaned. “I’m such a fuck-up,” he said.
Alan tugged Kurt’s hand away from his face. “Stop that. You’re an extraordinary person. I’ve never met anyone who has the gifts you possess, and I’ve met some gifted people. You should be very proud of the work you’re doing, and you should be with someone who’s equally proud of you.”
Kurt visibly inflated. “Thanks, man.” They gripped one another’s hands for a moment. Kurt swiped at his moist eyes with the sleeve of his colorless grey sweatshirt. “Okay, it’s way past my bedtime,” he said. “You gonna go to the bookstore today?”
“Absolutely. Thanks for setting them up.”
“It was about time I did some of the work, after you got the nut-shop and the cheese place and the Salvadoran pupusa place.”
“Kurt, I’m just doing the work that you set in motion. It’s all you, this project. I’m just your helper. Sleep well.”
Andy watched him slouch off toward home, reeling a little from sleep deprivation and emotional exhaustion. He forked up the rest of his omelet, looked reflexively up at the blinkenlights on the AP over the Greek’s sign, just above the apostrophe, where he’d nailed it up two months before. Since then, he’d nailed up five more, each going more smoothly than the last. At this rate, he’d have every main drag in the Market covered by summer. Sooner, if he could offload some of the labor onto one of Kurt’s eager kids.
He went back to his porch then, and watched the Market wake up. The traffic was mostly bicycling bankers stopping for a fresh bagel on their way down to the business district. The Market was quite restful. It shuffled like an old man in carpet slippers, setting up streetside produce tables, twiddling the dials of its many radios looking for something with a beat. He watched them roll past, the Salvadoran pupusa ladies, Jamaican Patty Kings, Italian butchers, Vietnamese pho-tenders, and any number of thrift-store hotties, crusty-punks, strung-out artistes, trustafarians and pretty-boy skaters.
As he watched them go past, he had an idea that he’d better write his story soon, or maybe never. Maybe never nothing: Maybe this was his last season on earth. Felt like that, apocalyptic. Old debts, come to be settled.
He shuffled upstairs and turned on the disused computer, which had sat on his desk for months and was therefore no longer top-of-the-line, no longer nearly so exciting, no longer so fraught with promise. Still, he made himself sit in his seat for two full hours before he allowed himself to get up, shower, dress, and head over to the anarchist bookstore, taking a slow route that gave him the chance to eyeball the lights on all the APs he’d installed.
The anarchist bookstore opened lackadaisically at 11 or eleven-thirty or sometimes noon, so he’d brought along a nice old John D. MacDonald paperback with a gun-toting bikini girl on the cover to read. He liked MacDonald’s books: You could always tell who the villainesses were because the narrator made a point of noting that they had fat asses. It was as good a way as any to shorthand the world, he thought.
The guy who came by to open the store was vaguely familiar to Alfred, a Kensington stalwart of about forty, whose thrifted slacks and unraveling sweater weren’t hip so much as they were just plain old down and out. He had a frizzed-out, no-cut haircut, and carried an enormous army-surplus backpack that sagged with beat-up lefty books and bags of organic vegetariania.
“Hi there!” Arnold said pocketing the book and dusting off his hands.
“Hey,” the guy said into his stringy beard, fumbling with a keyring. “I’ll be opening up in a couple minutes, okay? I know I’m late. It’s a bad day. okay?”
Arnold held his hands up, palms out. “Hey, no problem at all! Take as much time as you need. I’m in no hurry.”
The anarchist hustled around inside the shop, turning on lights, firing up the cash-register and counting out a float, switching on the coffee machine. Alan waited patiently by the doorway, holding the door open with his toe when the clerk hauled out a rack of discounted paperbacks and earning a dirty look for his trouble.
“Okay, we’re open,” the anarchist said looking Alan in the toes. He turned around and banged back into the shop and perched himself behind the counter, opening a close-typed punk newspaper and burying his nose in it.
Adam walked in behind him and stood at the counter, politely, waiting. The anarchist looked up from his paper and shook his head exasperatedly. “Yes?”
Alan extended his hand. “Hi, I’m Archie, I work with Kurt, over on Augusta?”
The anarchist stared at his hand, then shook it limply.
“Okay,” he said.
“So, Kurt mentioned that he’d spoken to your collective about putting a wireless repeater up over your sign?”
The anarchist shook his head. “We decided not to do that, okay.” He went back to his paper.
Andrew considered him for a moment. “So, what’s your name?”
“I don’t like to give out my name,” the anarchist said. “Call me Waldo, all right?”
“All right,” Andy said smiling. “That’s fine by me. So, can I ask why you decided not to do it?”
“It doesn’t fit with our priorities. We’re here to make print materials about the movement available to the public. They can get Internet access somewhere else. Internet access is for people who can afford computers, anyway.”
“Good point,” Art said. “That’s a good point. I wonder if I could ask you to reconsider, though? I’d love a chance to try to explain why this should be important to you.”
“I don’t think so,” Waldo said. “We’re not really interested.”
“I think you would be interested, if it were properly explained to you.”
Waldo picked up his paper and pointedly read it, breathing heavily.
“Thanks for your time,” Avi said and left.
“That’s bullshit,” Kurt said. “Christ, those people –”
“I assumed that there was some kind of politics,” Austin said, “and I didn’t want to get into the middle of it. I know that if I could get a chance to present to the whole group, that I could win them over.”
Kurt shook his head angrily. His shop was better organized now, with six access points ready to go and five stuck to the walls as a test bed for new versions of the software. A couple of geeky Korean kids were seated at the communal workbench, eating donuts and wrestling with drivers.
“It’s all politics with them. Everything. You should hear them argue about whether it’s cool to feed meat to the store cat! Who was working behind the counter?”
“He wouldn’t tell me his name. He told me to call him –”
“Waldo.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, that could be any of about six of them, then. That’s what they tell the cops. They probably thought you were a narc or a fed or something.”
“I see.”
“It’s not total paranoia. They’ve been busted before – it’s always bullshit. I raised bail for a couple of them once.”
Andrew realized that Kurt thought he was offended at being mistaken for a cop, but he got that. He was weird – visibly weird. Out of place wherever he was.
“So they owe me. Let me talk to them some more.”
“Thanks, Kurt. I appreciate it.”
“Well, you’re doing all the heavy lifting these days. It’s the least I can do.”
Alan clapped a hand on his shoulder. “None of this would exist without you, you know.” He waved his hand to take in the room, the Korean kids, the whole Market. “I saw a bunch of people at the Greek’s with laptops, showing them around to each other and drinking beers. In the park, with PDAs. I see people sitting on their porches, typing in the twilight. Crouched in doorways. Eating a bagel in the morning on a bench. People are finding it, and it’s thanks to you.”
Kurt smiled a shy smile. “You’re just trying to cheer me up,” he said.
“Course I am,” Andy said. “You deserve to be full of cheer.”
“Don’t bother,” Andy said. “Seriously, it’s not worth it. We’ll just find somewhere else to locate the repeater. It’s not worth all the bullshit you’re getting.”
“Screw that. They told me that they’d take one. They’re the only ones I talked into it. My contribution to the effort. And they’re fucking anarchists – they’ve got to be into this. It’s totally irrational!” He was almost crying.
“I don’t want you to screw up your friendships, Kurt. They’ll come around on their own. You’re turning yourself inside out over this, and it’s just not worth it. Come on, it’s cool.” He turned around his laptop and showed the picture to Kurt. “Check it out, people with tails. An entire gallery of them!” There were lots of pictures like that on the net. None of people without belly buttons, though.
Kurt took a pull off his beer. “Disgusting,” he said and clicked through the gallery.
The Greek looked over their shoulder. “It’s real?”
“It’s real, Larry,” Alan said. “Freaky, huh?”
“That’s terrible,” the Greek said. “Pah.” There were five or six other network users out on the Greek’s, and it was early yet. By five-thirty, there’d be fifty of them. Some of them brought their own power strips so that they could share juice with their coreligionists.
“You really want me to give up?” Kurt asked, once the Greek had given him a new beer and a scowling look over the litter of picked-at beer label on the table before him.
“I really think you should,” Alan said. “It’s a poor use of time.”
Kurt looked ready to cry again. Adam had no idea what to say.
“Okay,” Kurt said. “Fine.” He finished his beer in silence and slunk away.
But it wasn’t fine, and Kurt wouldn’t give it up. He kept on beating his head against the blank wall, and every time Alan saw him, he was grimmer than the last.
“Let it go,” Adam said. “I’ve done a deal with the vacuum-cleaner repair guy across the street.” A weird-but-sweet old Polish Holocaust survivor who’d listened attentively to Andy’s pitch before announcing that he’d been watching all the hardware go up around the Market and had simply been waiting to be included in the club. “That’ll cover that corner just fine.”
“I’m going to throw a party,” Kurt said. “Here, in the shop. No, I’ll rent out one of the warehouses on Oxford. I’ll invite them, the kids, everyone who’s let us put up an access point, a big mill-and-swill. Buy a couple kegs. No one can resist free beer.”
Alan had started off frustrated and angry with Kurt, but this drew him up and turned him around. “That is a fine idea,” he said. “We’ll invite Lyman.”
Lyman had taken to showing up on Alan’s stoop in the morning sometimes, on his way to work, for a cup of coffee. He’d taken to showing up at Kurt’s shop in the afternoon, sometimes, on his way home from work, to marvel at the kids’ industry. His greybeard had written some code that analyzed packet loss and tried to make guesses about the crowd density in different parts of the Market, and Lyman took a proprietary interest in it, standing out by Bikes on Wheels or the Portuguese furniture store and watching the data on his PDA, comparing it with the actual crowds on the street.
He’d only hesitated for a second when Andrew asked him to be the inaugural advisor on ParasiteNet’s board, and once he’d said yes, it became clear to everyone that he was endlessly fascinated by their little adhocracy and its experimental telco potential.
“This party sounds like a great idea,” he said. He was buying the drinks, because he was the one with five-hundred-dollar glasses and a full-suspension racing bike. “Lookit that,” he said.
From the Greek’s front window, they could see Oxford Street and a little of Augusta, and Lyman loved using his PDA and his density analysis software while he sat, looking from his colored map to the crowd scene. “Lookit the truck as it goes down Oxford and turns up Augusta. That signature is so distinctive, I could spot it in my sleep. I need to figure out how to sell this to someone – maybe the cops or something.” He tipped Andy a wink.
Kurt opened and shut his mouth a few times, and Lyman slapped his palm down on the table. “You look like you’re going to bust something,” he said. “Don’t worry. I kid. Damn, you’ve got you some big, easy-to-push buttons.”
Kurt made a face. “You wanted to sell our stuff to luxury hotels. You tried to get us to present at the SkyDome. You’re capable of anything.”
“The SkyDome would be a great venue for this stuff,” Lyman said settling into one of his favorite variations of bait-the-anarchist.
“The SkyDome was built with tax-dollars that should have been spent on affordable housing, then was turned over to rich pals of the premier for a song, who then ran it into the ground, got bailed out by the province, and then it got turned over to different rich pals. You can just shut up about the goddamned SkyDome. You’d have to break both of my legs and carry me to get me to set foot in there.”
“About the party,” Adam said. “About the party.”
“Yes, certainly,” Lyman said. “Kurt, behave.”
Kurt belched loudly, provoking a scowl from the Greek.
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