Eastern Standard Tribe

by Cory Doctorow

down the hall toask your buddy where he wants to go for lunch, but that's a small price to pay.

  "So you're a fish out of water. You live in Arizona, but you're sixteen yearsold and all your neighbors are eighty-five, and you get ten billion channels ofmedia on your desktop. All the good stuff -- everything that tickles you --comes out of some clique of hyperurban club-kids in South Philly. They're makingcool art, music, clothes. You read their mailing lists and you can tell thatthey're exactly the kind of people who'd really appreciate you for who you are.In the old days, you'd pack your bags and hitchhike across the country and moveto your community. But you're sixteen, and that's a pretty scary step.

  "Why move? These kids live online. At lunch, before school, and all night,they're comming in, talking trash, sending around photos, chatting. Online, youcan be a peer. You can hop into these discussions, play the games, chord withone hand while chatting up some hottie a couple thousand miles away.

  "Only you can't. You can't, because they chat at seven AM while they're gettingready for school. They chat at five PM, while they're working on their homework.Their late nights end at three AM. But those are their *local* times, not yours.If you get up at seven, they're already at school, 'cause it's ten there.

  "So you start to f with your sleep schedule. You get up at four AM so you canchat with your friends. You go to bed at nine, 'cause that's when they go tobed. Used to be that it was stock brokers and journos and factory workers whodid that kind of thing, but now it's anyone who doesn't fit in. The geniuses andlunatics to whom the local doctrine tastes wrong. They choose their peers basedon similarity, not geography, and they keep themselves awake at the same time asthem. But you need to make some nod to localness, too -- gotta be at work witheveryone else, gotta get to the bank when it's open, gotta buy your groceries.You end up hardly sleeping at all, you end up sneaking naps in the middle of theday, or after dinner, trying to reconcile biological imperatives with culturalones. Needless to say, that alienates you even further from the folks at home,and drives you more and more into the arms of your online peers of choice.

  "So you get the Tribes. People all over the world who are really secret agentsfor some other time zone, some other way of looking at the world, some otherzeitgeist. Unlike other tribes, you can change allegiance by doing nothing morethat resetting your alarm clock. Like any tribe, they are primarily loyal toeach other, and anyone outside of the tribe is only mostly human. That may soundextreme, but this is what it comes down to.

  "Tribes are *agendas*. Aesthetics. Ethos. Traditions. Ways of getting thingsdone. They're competitive. They may not all be based on time-zones. There areknitting Tribes and vampire fan-fiction Tribes and Christian rock tribes, butthey've always existed. Mostly, these tribes are little more than a sub-culture.It takes time-zones to amplify the cultural fissioning of fan-fiction orknitting into a full-blown conspiracy. Their interests are commercial,industrial, cultural, culinary. A Tribesman will patronize a fellow Tribesman'srestaurant, or give him a manufacturing contract, or hire his taxi. Not becauseof xenophobia, but because of homophilia: I know that my Tribesman's taxi willconduct its way through traffic in a way that I'm comfortable with, whether I'min San Francisco, Boston, London or Calcutta. I know that the food will bepalatable in a Tribal restaurant, that a book by a Tribalist will be a goodread, that a gross of widgets will be manufactured to the exacting standards ofmy Tribe.

  "Like I said, though, unless you're at ground zero, in the Tribe's native timezone, your sleep sched is just *raped*. You live on sleepdep and chat and secretagentry until it's second nature. You're cranky and subrational most of thetime. Close your eyes on the freeway and dreams paint themselves on the back ofyour lids, demanding their time, almost as heavy as gravity, almost asremorseless. There's a lot of flaming and splitting and vitriol in the Tribes.They're more fractured than a potsherd. Tribal anthropologists have built upincredible histories of the fissioning of the Tribes since they were firstrecognized -- most of 'em are online; you can look 'em up. We stab each other inthe back routinely and with no more provocation than a sleepdep hallucination.

  "Which is how I got here. I'm a member of the Eastern Standard Tribe. We'recentered around New York, but we're ramified up and down the coast, Boston andToronto and Philly, a bunch of Montreal Anglos and some wannabes in upstate NewYork, around Buffalo and Schenectady. I was doing Tribal work in London, servingthe Eastern Standard Agenda, working with a couple of Tribesmen, well, oneTribesman and my girlfriend, who I thought was unaffiliated. Turns out, though,that they're both double agents. They sold out to the Pacific Daylight Tribe,lameass phonies out in LA, slick Silicon Valley bizdev sharks, pseudo hipstersin San Franscarcity. Once I threatened to expose them, they set me up, had methrown in here."

  I looked around proudly, having just completed a real fun little excursionthrough a topic near and dear to my heart. Mount Rushmore looked back at me,stony and bovine and uncomprehending.

  "Baby," Lucy said, rolling her eyes again, "you need some new meds."

  "Could be," I said. "But this is for real. Is there a comm on the ward? We canlook it up together."

  "Oh, *that*'all prove it, all right. Nothing but truth online."

  "I didn't say that. There're peer-reviewed articles about the Tribes. It was alead story on the CBC's social science site last year."

  "Uh huh, sure. Right next to the sasquatch videos."

  "I'm talking about the CBC, Lucy. Let's go look it up."

  Lucy mimed taking an invisible comm out of her cleavage and prodding at it withan invisible stylus. She settled an invisible pair of spectacles on her nose andnodded sagely. "Oh yeah, sure, really interesting stuff."

  I realized that I was arguing with a crazy person and turned to the doctor. "Youmust have read about the Tribes, right?"

  The doctor acted as if he hadn't heard me. "That's just fascinating, Art. Thankyou for sharing that. Now, here's a question I'd like you to think about, andmaybe you can tell us the answer tomorrow: What are the ways that your friends-- the ones you say betrayed you -- used to show you how much they respected youand liked you? Think hard about this. I think you'll be surprised by theconclusions you come to."

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "Just what I said, Art. Think hard about how you and your friends interacted andyou'll see that they really like you."

  "Did you hear what I just said? Have you heard of the Tribes?"

  "Sure, sure. But this isn't about the Tribes, Art. This is about you and --" heconsulted his comm, "Fede and Linda. They care about you a great deal andthey're terribly worried about you. You just think about it. Now," he said,recrossing his legs, "Fatima, you told us yesterday about your mother and Iasked you to think about how *she* feels. Can you tell the group what you foundout?"

  But Fatima was off in med-land, eyes glazed and mouth hanging slack. Manuelnudged her with his toe, then, when she failed to stir, aimed a kick at hershin. The doctor held a hand out and grabbed Manuel's slippered toe. "That's allright, let's move on to Lucy."

  I tuned out as Lucy began an elaborate and well-worn rant about her eatinghabits, prodded on by the doctor. The enormity of the situation was coming hometo me. I couldn't win. If I averred that Fede and Linda were my boon companions,I'd still be found incompetent -- after all, what competent person threatens hisboon companions? If I stuck to my story, I'd be found incompetent, and medicatedbesides, like poor little Fatima, zombified by the psychoactive cocktail. Eitherway, I was stuck.

  Stuck on the roof now, and it's getting very uncomfortable indeed. Stuck becauseI am officially incompetent and doomed and damned to indefinite rest on theward. Stuck because every passing moment here is additional time for thehamsters to run their courses in my mind, piling regret on worry.

  Stuck because as soon as I am discovered, I will be stupified by the meds,administered by stern and loving and thoroughly disappointed doctors. I stillhaven't managed to remember any of their names. They are interchangeable, wellshod and endowed with badges on lanya
rds and soothing and implacable andentirely unappreciative of my rhetorical skills.

  Stuck. The sheet-metal chimneys stand tall around the roof, unevenly distributedaccording to some inscrutable logic that could only be understood with theassistance of as-built drawings, blueprints, mechanical and structuralengineering diagrams. Surely though, they are optimized to wick hot air out ofthe giant brick pile's guts and exhaust it.

  I move to the one nearest the stairwell. It is tarred in place, its apron linedwith a double-row of cinderblocks that have pools of brackish water and