The window nearest Seri burst from the impact of a rifle butt. She cringed, but did her best to emulate the calm policewomen. “There are women here,” said one of them. “Have respect.”
Someone’s brown scarred hand reached in through the window for the door latch, pulling the door open; “I’m a woman,” the Numingari said. “You can come out on this side. The men are over there. Out, please.”
Yes, she was a woman. And she had three soldiers with her, all with weapons. The policewomen put their weapons back on safe and left the vehicle, one of them behind Seri and one of them before, and the Numingari soldiers searched them—with odious familiarity, but no shaming exposure—and sent them back into the limo, minus only the side arms they had carried.
The woman who had broken the window closed the door and smiled through the broken frame. “They’ll have the road cleared in an hour or two,” she said. “Wait here. You won’t be bothered again.” In the background Seri could hear men exclaiming over their booty. Look, look, twelve-gigabyte storage camera. We love the Demon States. At least their technology we love. One of the policewomen took a deep breath, as though to calm herself.
After some minutes it was quiet, and one of the policewomen got out of the limo. Seri followed her, anxious to see what had happened. She could see the captured hikers gathered in a little knot, and counted them as she hurried toward them. All of them there. All of them standing. Nobody hurt, not that she could see, but the convoy commander was coming toward them as well, so Seri hung back a bit to preserve her modesty.
“Everyone uninjured?” demanded the commander, sounding deeply disgusted—at having been ambushed, Seri supposed, not at the absence of casualties. “Good! I’m sorry to inform you that your equipment is gone, all of it. You’ll be feeding bandits in these mountains for weeks.”
“Damn it!” said Georg. “That’s expensive gear! We were under your protection!”
“Hold your tongue,” said the convoy commander sharply. “Without your recording devices we have no evidence that you spied on our industry, and no reason to risk an incident by holding you. The government will put you on a commercial flight out of Bishkek. You can complain to your governments when you get home, though personally I think you should be grateful.”
He was clearly not interested in engaging in any further conversation. Turning from the little group of hikers he caught sight of Seri standing there with a policewoman beside her, and climbed the few steps of the little slope to join her.
“You’ve had a scare for nothing, I’m afraid,” he said. “But there’s no reason to ask you to come in to Bishkek now. No evidence, no case, no statement. We’ll probably have someone up in a week or two to interview you, but for now you might as well go back to your workstation. We’ll probably still be waiting for the road to clear when your driver gets back.”
“Thank you, Commander.” It was a long and tiresome trip into Bishkek. She was anxious to get back to her lab; she had work to do. “Could I say good-bye to them? I thought I’d be speaking to them again before I left Bishkek, you see.”
He caught the policewoman’s eye, and she shrugged. “Don’t be too long,” he said, then added: “I do not envy them, returning home to the Demon States. It must be terrible to live there.”
“Yes, terrible,” lied Seri.
The policewoman didn’t bother to come with her. Since she was in plain sight, there was little danger of her being compromised, and now that there was to be no case, the police had lost interest in what the hikers might say.
“Damn it, Seri, we could have been killed!”
“Oh, yes, and you climb mountains,” she retorted. “On purpose. Still, it’s been nice to see you again. You’ll be out of the country in no time. Relatively speaking.”
“I can’t say it’s been a particularly fascinating trip,” Paul said, looking at her more directly than she was accustomed, now that she was home. “What do you do for amusement up here, anyway?”
She knew what he was trying to find out. “We have plenty to do,” she assured him. “Reading material. Technical manuals. Flow diagrams. Wonderful stuff. I never tire of it. Trust me. Why, I’ve got some specifications waiting for me in my lab right now that will keep us going for months.”
That was the message: Trust me. I’ve got it.
He smiled. “I’m glad to hear it. I don’t believe you,” he said in a voice loud enough to be overheard, “but I’m glad to hear it.”
But he’d caught the message. He did believe her. Those cameras had had thirty-gigabyte storage disks when Mushir had examined them, not the twelve-gigabyte disks that currently resided within them. Everything had hinged upon Mushir examining only the three cameras, without bothering with the disk-magazine, and thankfully, he’d done just that.
With the information that they had smuggled into the country Seri could have the Iskamir reactor safely converted to cold fusion within a matter of months, so long as Mushir’s party remained in control of intelligence and procurement in Bishkek.
Prizmak would notice; he wasn’t stupid, but with luck he’d draw his own conclusions and keep quiet. They needed him there. As long as Prizmak was there, the government still had deniability if the Wells of the Desert discovered the defiance of its client state too soon.
If that happened—if the secret came out—Seri would die, and most of her staff would be purged, but it wouldn’t stop the Demon States from conspiring with the clients of the Wells of the Desert to replace fossil fuels with cold fusion across the globe.
“I’d better go,” Seri said diffidently, looking back over her shoulder to where the policewomen were waiting for her by the limo. “I can’t say I’ll be seeing you.” Don’t come back; it would just arouse suspicions. “Take care of yourselves.”
“And you, Seri,” John answered for the group. “Take very good care.” Be careful.
Smiling, Seri turned away, to go back to her work up on the mountain. We didn’t come this far by being careless.
It had been thirty years since the Demon States had mastered the first crude elements of cold fusion. Thirty years of economic chaos in the Middle East. Thirty years of polarization between the privileged states and the have-not states that were too undeveloped to be able to exploit the new discovery, remaining totally dependent on the Wells of the Desert while the Demon States closed its own oil fields down.
But a country could not embargo knowledge, and ideas could not be stopped by ideology. Cold fusion would come to the Tian Shan. If it should mean her life, she would gladly surrender it, because whether the snow that fell in the year of her death covered an honored grave or a dishonored corpse, it would fall clean again from Heaven, and the shadow of the Wells of the Desert would no longer fall across the Kyrgyz steppe.
Revision Point
We have postulated that cold fusion became possible, practical, inexpensive, and widespread in the late 1990s, which led us to wonder what effect it would have on the oil-rich and everything-else-poor countries of the Middle East.
Cold fusion for the purposes of this story refers to the claim that a nuclear (fusion) reaction can be initiated and sustained in a very basic, stable environment available to almost anybody with a fully chopped chemistry lab set; something that would solve the world’s needs for clean, safe, cheap energy. Greeted with a mixture of exultation and ferocious skepticism when its attainment was announced in March of 1989 (by Fleishmann and Pons, University of Utah), discredited in the popular and scientific press since, its true believers continue to chip away at the “proofs” of its implausibility—if ever there was a subject fit for what-if speculation, cold fusion is it. What impact might a successful demonstration have had on economic and political structures currently supported by conventional fuel economies? It takes infrastructure to configure infrastructure to take advantage of advances in technology. Maybe a successful demonstration of cold fusion would have ushered in the Golden Age of peace and prosperity on this planet—or maybe it would have looked
something a little more like this.
M.R. and S.R.M.
UNWIRER
by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross
THE cops caught Roscoe as he was tightening the butterfly bolts on the dish antenna he’d pitoned into the rock face opposite the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. The crunch of their boots on the road-salt and the creak of their cold holsters told him they were the law, but they were only state troopers, not fed radio cops.
“Be right with you, officers,” he hollered into the wind. The antenna was made from a surplus satellite rig, a polished tomato soup can, and a pigtail with the right fitting for a wireless card. All perfectly legal, mostly.
He tightened the last of the bolts, squirted them with lock-tite, and slid back on his belly, off the insulated thermarest. The cops’ heads were wreathed in the steam of their exhalations, and one of them was nervously flicking his—no, her—handcuffs around on her belt.
“Everything all right, sir?” the other one said, in a flat upstate New York accent. A townie. He stretched out his gloved hand and pulled Roscoe to his feet.
“Yeah, just fine,” Roscoe said. “I like to watch winter birds on the river.”
“Winter birds, huh?” The cop gave him a bemused look.
“Winter birds.”
The cop leaned over the railing and took a long look down. “Huh. Better you shouldn’t do it by the roadside, sir,” he said. “Never know when someone’s going to skid out and drive off onto the shoulder—you could be crushed.” He waved at his partner, who gave them a hard look and retreated into the steamy warmth of the cruiser. “All right, then,” he said. “When does your node go up?”
Roscoe smiled and dared a wink. “I’ll be finished aligning the dish in about an hour. I’ve got line of sight from here to a repeater on a support on the Rainbow Bridge, and from there down the Rainbow Street corridor. Some good tall buildings there, line of sight to most of downtown.”
“My place is Fourth and Walnut. Think you’ll get there?” Roscoe relaxed imperceptibly, certain now that this wasn’t a bust.
“Hope so. Sooner rather than later.”
“That’d be great. My kids are e-mailing me out of house and home.” The cop looked uncomfortable and cleared his throat. “Still, you might want to stay home for a while. DA’s office, they’ve got some kind of hotshot from the FCC in town, uh, getting heavy on bird watchers.”
Roscoe sucked in his lower lip. “I may do just that,” he conceded. “And thank you for the warning.”
The cop waved as he turned away. “My pleasure, sir.”
Roscoe drove home slowly, and not just because of the compacted slush on the roads. A hotshot from the FCC sounded like the inquisition. Roscoe’s lifelong mistrust of radio cops had blossomed into hatred three years ago, when they busted him behind a federal telecoms rap.
He’d lost his job and spent six months inside, plus two years’ probation, during which he wasn’t allowed to program a goddamn microwave oven, let alone admin the networks that had been his trade. And he’d gotten off lightly—on paper. While he was inside, Janice filed for divorce. She kept the small house and he got the big house.
Roscoe was in a bad mood as he climbed the front steps of the house he and Marcel rented.
“Slushy boots! For chrissakes, Roscoe, I just cleaned.”
Roscoe stared at the salty brown slush he’d tracked over the painted floor and shook his head.
“Sorry,” he said lamely. He sat down on the floor to shuck his heavy steel-shank Kodiaks. “Just ease back, all right? It didn’t go so good.”
Marcel set his machine down on the hearthrug. “What happened?”
Roscoe related his run-in with the law quickly. Marcel shook his head.
“I bet it’s bullshit. Ever since Tijuana, everyone’s seeing spooks.” The ISPs on the Tijuana side of the San Ysidro border crossing had been making good coin off unwirer sympathizers who’d pointed their antennae across the chain-link fence. La Migra tried tightening up the fence gauge to act as a faraday cage, but they just went over it with point-to-point links. Finally, the radio cops had Ruby-Ridged the whole operation, killing ten “terrorists” in a simultaneous strike with Mexican narcs who’d raided the ISPs under the rubric of shutting down narcotraficante activity.
Roscoe shook his head. “Bullshit or not, you going to take any chances? Believe me, there’s one place you don’t want to go. Listen, when I was your age, I thought it couldn’t happen to me either. Now look at me.” He started thumbing his way through the stack of old magazines on the coffee table.
“I’m looking at you.” Marcel grinned. “There was a call while you were out.”
“A call?”
“Some woman, said she wanted to talk to you. I took her number.”
“Uh-huh.” Roscoe put the magazine back down. Heads it’s Janice, tails it’s her lawyer, he thought. It was shaping up to be that kind of day; a tire slashing and an hour of alimonial recriminations would complete it neatly. “Ah, shit. Get it over with.”
The number was unfamiliar. That didn’t mean much—Janice’s frothingly aggro lawyer seemed to carry a new cellular every time he saw her—but it was hopeful. Roscoe dialed. “Hello? Roscoe here. Who am I talking to?”
A stranger’s voice: “Hi there! I was talking to your roommate about an hour ago? I’m Sylvie Smith. I was given your name by Buzz—he told me you put him on the backbone.”
Roscoe tensed. Odds were that this Sylvie Smith was just looking to leech a first-mile feed, but after this morning’s run-in with the law he was taking nothing for granted.
“Are you a law enforcement officer federal employee police officer lawyer FCC or FBI agent?” he asked, running the words together, knowing that if she was any of the above she’d probably lie—but it might help sway a jury toward letting him off if he was targeted by a sting.
“No.” She sounded amused. “I’m a journalist.”
“Then you should be familiar with CALEA,” he said, bridling at the condescension in her voice. CALEA was the wiretap law that required switch-vendors to put snoopware into every hop in the phone network. It was bad enough in and of itself, but it made the snoop-proof code built into the BeOS access points he had hidden around town doubly illegal.
“Paranoid, much?” she said.
“I have nothing to be paranoid about,” he said, spelling it out like he was talking to a child. “I am a law-abiding citizen, complying with the terms of my parole. If you are a journalist, I’d be happy to chat. In person.”
“I’m staying at the Days Inn on Main Street,” she said. “It’s a dump, but it’s got a view of the Falls,” she said in a hokey secret-agent voice, making it plain that she meant, “It’s line of sight to a Canadian wireless repeater.”
“I can be there in twenty. Turn left out the front door and meet me at the diner that’s fifty yards down the road,” he said, hanging up.
Marcel looked up from his machine. “What?”
“I’m out. See you later.”
Roscoe took a booth by the window and was halfway down his first mug of coffee when someone leaned over him. “Hi,” she said.
“You must be Sylvie.” He registered a confused impression of bleached blonde hair, brown eyes, freckles. Must be straight out of J-school. “Have a seat. Coffee?”
“Yes, please.” She put down something like a key ring then waved a hand, trying to catch the waitress’ eye. Roscoe looked at the key ring. Very black, very small, very Nokia.
“Suppose you tell me why you wanted to meet up,” Roscoe said quietly. “Up front. I’m on parole, and I’ve got no intention of violating it.”
Sylvie ordered a coffee from the waitress. “What’d you do?”
Roscoe snorted. “I was accused of infringement with a side order of black crypto, but plea-bargained it down to unlawful emissions. Strictly a no-collar crime.” It was the truth, though he’d originally been looking at a five-year stretch for contributory infringement, compounded to twenty
by the crypto running on the access point (“use a cypher, go to jail”), until the ACLU mugged the judge with an amicus brief. The eventual plea bargain took it down to criminal trespass and unlawful emission, six months and two years, so that it merely cost him his home, his job, his savings, his wife. . . .
He took another mouthful of coffee to cover his feelings. “So what are you doing here?”
“I’m working on a story about some aspects of unwiring that don’t usually make the mainstream press,” she said, as the waitress came over. Roscoe held up his mug for a refill.
She pulled out a notepad and began scribbling. “This is my editor’s name and address. You can look it up. If you ask for him, you’ll get put through—you’re on a list of interview subjects I sent him. Next, here’s my e-mail address.” Roscoe blinked—it was a handle on a famous Finnish anonymous remixer. “Get a friend to ping it and ask me something.” It was worth five to twenty for black crypto—anonymity was the FCC’s worst nightmare.
“Okay, I’ll check these out.” He met her eyes. “Now, why don’t you tell me why the Wall Street Journal is interested in a burned out ex-con and ex-unwirer?”
She dangled her key ring again, a flash of matte black plastic. “These are everywhere in Europe. Like these,” she opened her purse and he caught a glimpse of a sliver of curved metal, like a boomerang. Or the Motorola batwing mark. “Meshing wireless repeaters. Teenagers are whacking them up on the sides of buildings, sticking them to their windows. The telcos are screaming: their business is way down. Wired infrastructure is on the way out. Even the ISPs are nervous.”
Roscoe tried to hide his grin. To be an unwirer in the streets of Paris, operating with impunity, putting the telcos, the Hollywood studios, and the ISPs on notice that there was no longer any such thing as a “consumer”—that yesterday’s couch potatoes are today’s participants!
“We’ve got ten years’ worth of editorials in our morgue about the destruction of the European entertainment and telco market and the wisdom of our National Information Infrastructure here in the US, but it’s starting to ring hollow. The European governments are ignoring the telcos! The device and services market being built on top of the freenets is accounting for nearly half the GDP growth in the French economy. To hear my paper describe it, though, you’d think they were starving in the streets.
ReVISIONS Page 21