Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

by Cory Doctorow

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 Belloffices. Alan grabbed his hand and stilled it. "Stop worrying," hesaid. "This is going to go great."

  "I still don't understand why we're doing this," Kurt said. "They're thephone company. They hate us, we hate them. Can't we just leave it thatway?"

  "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 underhis seat for the thermos he'd had filled at the Greek's before headingto Kurt's place. "Coffee," he said, and handed it to Kurt, who groanedand swigged and stopped bitching.

  "Why bother is this," Alan said. "We're going to get a lot of publicityfor doing this." Kurt snorted into the thermos. "It's going to be a bigdeal. You know how big a deal this can be. We're going to communicatethat to the press, who will communicate it to the public, and then therewill be a shitstorm. Radio cops, telco people, whatever -- they're goingto 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'llsay. They'll drag out the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse: kiddie porn,terrorists, pirates, and the mafia. They'll tell us that any tool forcommunicating that they can't tap, log, and switch off isirresponsible. They'll tell us we're stealing from ISPs. It's what theysay every time someone tries this: Philly, New York, London. All aroundthe 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 theirargument. And I wanted us to run a demo for some people who we couldnever hope to sway -- that's a good audience for exposing the flaws inthe show. This'll be a good prep session."

  "So I pulled an all-nighter and busted my nuts to produce a demo for abunch of people we don't care about? Thanks a lot."

  Alan started to say something equally bitchy back, and then he stoppedhimself. He knew where this would end up -- a screaming match that wouldleave both of them emotionally overwrought at a time when they neededcool heads. But he couldn't think of what to tell Kurt in order toplacate him. All his life, he'd been in situations like this: confrontedby people who had some beef, some grievance, and he'd had no answer forit. Usually he could puzzle out the skeleton of their cause, butsometimes -- times like this -- he was stumped.

  He picked at the phrase. *I pulled an all-nighter*. Kurt pulled anall-nighter because he'd left this to the last minute, not because Alanhad surprised him with it. He knew that, of course. Was waiting, then,for Alan 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 itto the last minute.* So he was angry, but not at Alan, he was angry athimself.

  *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 atunderstanding people, but that didn't make him necessarily better atbeing a person. What should he say here?

  "That was a really heroic effort, Kurt," he said, biting his lip. "I cantell you put a lot of work into it." He couldn't believe that praisethis naked could possibly placate someone of Kurt's heroic cynicism, butKurt's features softened and he turned his face away, rolled down thewindow, lit a cigarette.

  "I thought I'd never get it done," Kurt said. "I was so sleepy, I feltlike 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 quitedisguising his grin. "It gets easier every time."

  "Yeah, we're going to get this down to a science someday," Alansaid. "Something we can teach anyone to do."

  "That would be so cool," Kurt said, and put his boots up on thedash. "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 thatdestroyed 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 backoffice, decked out in brand-consistent livery, from the fabric-dyed ragcarpets to the avant-garde lighting fixtures. They were given espressosby the young secretary-barista whose skirt-and-top number was some kindof reinterpreted ravewear outfit toned down for a corporate workplace.

  "So this is the new Bell," Kurt said, once she had gone. "Our taxdollars at work."

  "This is good work," Alan said, gesturing at the blown-up artwork ofpan-ethnic models who were extraordinary- but not beautiful-looking onthe walls. The Bell redesign had come at the same time as the telco wasstruggling back from the brink of bankruptcy, and the marketing firmthey'd hired to do the work had made its name on the strength of thecampaign. "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 whoshopped at one of his protégés' designer furniture store. He was a youngturk who'd made a name for himself quickly in the company through acouple of ISP acquisitions at fire-sale prices after the dot-bomb, whichhe'd executed flawlessly, integrating the companies into Bell's networkwith hardly a hiccup. He'd been very polite and guardedly enthusiasticwhen Alan called him, and had invited him down to meet some of hiscolleagues.

  Though Alan had never met him, he recognized him the minute he walked inas the person who had to go with the confident voice he'd heard on thephone.

  "Lyman," he said, standing up and holding out his hand. The guy wasslightly Asian-looking, tall, with a sharp suit that managed to lookcasual and expensive at the same time.

  He shook Alan's hand and said, "Thanks for coming down." Alan introducedhim to Kurt, and then Lyman introduced them both to his colleagues, agender-parity posse of young, smart-looking people, along with onegraybeard (literally -- he had a Unix beard of great rattiness andgravitas) who had no fewer than seven devices on his belt, including aline tester and a GPS.

  Once they were seated, Alan snuck a look at Kurt, who had narrowed hiseyes and cast his gaze down onto the business cards he'd beenhanded. Alan hadn't been expecting this -- he'd figured on findinghimself facing down a group of career bureaucrats -- and Kurt wasclearly thrown for a loop, too.

  "Well, Alan, Kurt, it's nice to meet you," Lyman said. "I hear you'reworking on some exciting stuff."

  "We are," Alan said. "We're building a city-wide mesh wireless networkusing unlicensed spectrum that will provide high-speed, Internetconnectivity absolutely gratis."

  "That's ambitious," Lyman said, without the skepticism that Alan hadassumed would greet his statement. "How's it coming?"

  "Well, we've got a bunch of Kensington Market covered," Alansaid. "Kurt's been improving the hardware design and we've come up withsomething cheap and reproducible." He opened his tub and handed out theaccess points, housed in gray high-impact plastic junction boxes.

  Lyman accepted one solemnly and passed it on to his graybeard, thenpassed the next to an East Indian woman in horn-rim glasses whosebitten-down fingernails immediately popped the latch and began lightlystroking the hardware inside, tracing the connections. The third landedin front of Lyman himself.

  "So, what do
they do?"

  Alan nodded at Kurt. Kurt put his hands on the table and took abreath. "They've got three network interfaces; we can do any combinationof wired and wireless cards. The OS is loaded on a flash-card; itauto-detects any wireless cards and auto-configures them to seek outother access points. When it finds a peer, they negotiate aclient-server relationship based on current load, and the client thenassociates