Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

by Cory Doctorow

beproductive." Kurt's mouth opened, and Alan held his hand up. "Not thatI'm proposing that we do that. I just mean there's plenty of good that'sbeen done so far. What we need is some publicity for it, some criticalmass, and some way that we can get ordinary people involved. We can'tfit a critical mass into your front room and put them to work."

  "So what do we get them to do?"

  "It's a good question. There's something I saw online the other day Iwanted to show you. Why don't we go home and get connected?"

  "There's still plenty of good diving out there. No need to go homeanyway -- I know a place."

  They drove off into a maze of cul-de-sacs and cheaply built, gaudymonster homes with triple garages and sagging rain gutters. The streetshad no sidewalks and the inevitable basketball nets over every garageshowed no signs of use.

  Kurt pulled them up in front of a house that was indistinguishable fromthe others and took the laptop from under the Buick's seat, plugging itinto the cigarette lighter and flipping its lid.

  "There's an open network here," Kurt said as he plugged in the wirelesscard. He pointed at the dormer windows in the top room.

  "How the hell did you find that?" Alan said, looking at the darkenedwindow. There was a chain-link gate at the side of the house, and in theback an aboveground pool.

  Kurt laughed. "These 'security consultants'" -- he made little quoteswith his fingers -- "wardrove Toronto. They went from one end of thecity to the other with a GPS and a wireless card and logged all the openaccess points they found, then released a report claiming that all ofthose access points represented ignorant consumers who were leavingthemselves vulnerable to attacks and making Internet connectionsavailable to baby-eating terrorists.

  "One of the access points they identified was *mine*, for chrissakes,and mine was open because I'm a crazy fucking anarchist, not because I'man ignorant 'consumer' who doesn't know any better, and that got me tothinking that there were probably lots of people like me around, runningopen APs. So one night I was out here diving and I *really* was tryingto remember who'd played the Sundance Kid in Butch Cassidy, and I knewthat if I only had a net connection I could google it. I had a stumbler,an app that logged all the open WiFi access points that I came intorange of, and a GPS attachment that I'd dived that could interface withthe software that mapped the APs on a map of Toronto, so I could justbelt the machine in there on the passenger seat and go driving arounduntil I had a list of all the wireless Internet that I could see fromthe street.

  "So I got kind of bored and went back to diving, and then I did what Iusually do at the end of the night, I went driving around someresidential streets, just to see evidence of humanity after a night inthe garbage, and also because the people out here sometimes put out nicesofas and things.

  "When I got home, I looked at my map and there were tons of accesspoints out by the industrial buildings, and some on the commercialstrips, and a few out here in the residential areas, but the one withthe best signal was right here, and when I clicked on it, I saw that thename of the network was 'ParasiteNet.'"

  Alan said, "Huh?" because ParasiteNet was Kurt's name for his wirelessproject, though they hadn't used it much since Alan got involved andthey'd gotten halfway legit. But still.

  "Yeah," Kurt said. "That's what I said -- huh? So I googled ParasiteNetto see what I could find, and I found an old message I'd posted totoronto.talk.wireless when I was getting started out, a kind ofmanifesto about what I planned to do, and Google had snarfed it up andthis guy, whoever he is, must have read it and decided to name hisnetwork after it.

  "So I figger: This guy *wants* to share packets with me, for sure, andso I always hunt down this AP when I want to get online."

  "You've never met him, huh?"

  "Never. I'm always out here at two a.m. or so, and there's never a lighton. Keep meaning to come back around five some afternoon and ring thebell and say hello. Never got to it."

  Alan pursed his lips and watched Kurt prod at the keyboard.

  "He's got a shitkicking net connection, though -- tell you what. Feelslike a T1, and the IP address comes off of an ISP in Waterloo. You needa browser, right?"

  Alan shook his head. "You know, I can't even remember what it was Iwanted to show you. There's some kind of idea kicking at me now,though..."

  Kurt shifted his laptop to the back seat, mindful of the cords and theantenna. "What's up?"

  "Let's do some more driving around, let it perk, okay? You got moredumpsters you want to show me?"

  "Brother, I got dumpsters for weeks. Months. Years."

  #

  It was the wardriving, of course. Alan called out the names of thenetworks that they passed as they passed them, watching the flags pop upon the map of Toronto. They drove the streets all night, watched the sungo up, and the flags multiplied on the network.

  Alan didn't even have to explain it to Kurt, who got itimmediately. They were close now, thinking together in the feverishdrive-time on the night-dark streets.

  "Here's the thing," Kurt said as they drank their coffees at the VestaLunch, a grimy 24-hour diner that Alan only seemed to visit during thesmallest hours of the morning. "I started off thinking, well, the cellcompanies are screwed up because they think that they need to hose thewhole city from their high towers with their powerful transmitters, andmy little boxes will be lower-power and smarter and more realistic andgrassroots and democratic."

  "Right," Alan said. "I was just thinking of that. What could be moredemocratic than just encouraging people to use their own access pointsand their own Internet connections to bootstrap the city?"

  "Yeah," Kurt said.

  "Sure, you won't get to realize your dream of getting a free Internet bybridging down at the big cage at 151 Front Street, but we can still playaround with hardware. And convincing the people who *already* know whyWiFi is cool to join up has got to be easier than convincing shopkeeperswho've never heard of wireless to let us put antennae and boxes on theirwalls."

  "Right," Kurt said, getting more excited. "Right! I mean, it's just ego,right? Why do we need to *control* the network?" He spun around on hiscracked stool and the waitress gave him a dirty look. "Gimme some applepie, please," he said. "This is the best part: it's going to violate thehell out of everyone's contracts with their ISPs -- they sell you anall-you-can-eat Internet connection and then tell you that they'll cutoff your service if you're too hungry. Well, fuck that! It's not justcommunity networking, it'll be civil disobedience against shittyservice-provider terms of service!"

  There were a couple early morning hard-hats in the diner who looked upfrom their yolky eggs to glare at him. Kurt spotted them andwaved. "Sorry, boys. Ever get one of those ideas that's so good, youcan't help but do a little dance?"

  One of the hard-hats smiled. "Yeah, but his wife always turns me down."He socked the other hard-hat in the shoulder.

  The other hard-hat grunted into his coffee. "Nice. Very nice. You'regonna be a *lot* of fun today, I can tell."

  They left the diner in a sleepdep haze and squinted into the sunrise andgrinned at each other and burped up eggs and sausages and bacon andcoffee and headed toward Kurt's Buick.

  "Hang on," Alan said. "Let's have a walk, okay?" The city smelled likemorning, dew and grass and car-exhaust and baking bread and a whiff ofthe distant Cadbury's factory oozing chocolate miasma over the hills andthe streetcar tracks. Around them, millions were stirring in their beds,clattering in their kitchens, passing water, and taking on vitamins. Itinvigorated him, made him feel part of something huge andall-encompassing, like being in his father the mountain.

  "Up there," Kurt said, pointing to a little playground atop the hillthat rose sharply up Dupont toward Christie, where a herd of plasticrocking horses swayed creakily in the breeze.

  "Up there," Alan agreed, and they set off, kicking droplets of dew offthe grass beside the sidewalk.

  The sunrise was a thousand times more striking from atop the climber,filtered through the new shoots on the tree branches. Kurt lit acigarette and ble
w plumes into the shafting light and they admired theeffect of the wind whipping it away.

  "I think this will work," Alan said. "We'll do something splashy for thepress, get a lot of people to change the names of their networks -- morepeople will use the networks, more will create them... It's a goodplan."

  Kurt nodded. "Yeah. We're smart guys."

  Something smashed into Alan's head and bounced to the dirt below theclimber. A small, sharp rock. Alan reeled and tumbled from the climber,stunned, barely