Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

by Cory Doctorow

climbed into the car and he put thepedal down, all the way to Toronto, stopping only once for gas andcigarettes after he smoked all the ones left in her pack.

  When they cleared the city limits and drove under the viaduct atDanforth Avenue, getting into the proper downtown, he eased off theParkway and into the city traffic, taking the main roads with their highbuildings and stoplights and people, people, people.

  "We're going home?" she said. The last thing she'd said was, "Are youhungry?" fourteen hours before and he'd only shook his head.

  "Yes," he said.

  "Oh," she said.

  Was Krishna home? She was rooting in her purse now, and he knew that shewas looking for her knife.

  "You staying with me?" he said.

  "Can I?" she said. They were at a red light, so he looked into hereyes. They were shiny and empty as marbles.

  "Yes," he said. "Of course. And I will have a word with Krishna."

  She looked out the window. "I expect he'll want to have a word with you,too."

  #

  Link rang his doorbell one morning while he was hunched over hiscomputer, thinking about the story he was going to write. When he'dmoved into the house, he'd felt the shape of that story. All the whilethat he'd sanded and screwed in bookcases, it had floated just below thesurface, its silhouette discernible through the ripples.

  But when Adam left Mimi watching television and sat at his desk in theevening with the humming, unscuffed, and gleaming laptop before him,fingers poised over the keys, nothing came. He tapped out an openingsentence,

  I suspect that my father is dead

  and deleted it. Then undid the delete.

  He called up The Inventory and stroked the spacebar with his thumb,paging through screensful of pictures and keywords and pricetags andscanned-in receipts. He flipped back to the story and deleted hissentence.

  My dead brother had been hiding out on the synagogue's roof forGod knows how long.

  The last thing he wanted was to write an autobiography. He wanted towrite a story about the real world, about the real people who inhabitedit. He hit the delete key.

  The video-store girl never got bored behind her counter, becauseshe could always while away the hours looking up the rentalhistories of the popular girls who'd shunned her in high school.

  That's when Link rang his doorbell and he startled guiltily and quit thetext editor, saving the opening sentence. Which had a lot of promise, hethought.

  "Link!" he said. "Come in!"

  The kid had put on ten or fifteen pounds since they'd first met, and nolonger made Alan want to shout, *Someone administer a sandwich* stat*!*Most of it was muscle from hard riding as a bike messenger, a gig thatLink had kept up right through the cold winter, dressing up like agore-tex Martian in tights and ski goggles and a fleece that showedhints of purple beneath its skin of crusted road salt and pollution.

  Andrew had noticed the girls in the Market and at Kurt's shop noticingLink, whose spring wardrobe showed off all that new muscle to neweffect, and gathered from the various hurt looks and sulks from thevarious girls that Link was getting more ass than a toilet-seat.

  Her brother spent the winter turning into the kind of stud thatshe'd figured out how to avoid before she finished high school,and it pained her to see the hordes of dumb-bunnies makinggoo-goo eyes at him.

  That would be a good second sentence for his story.

  "You okay, Abby?" Link said, looking concerned. Albert realized thathe'd been on another planet for a moment there.

  "Sorry, just fell down a rabbit hole," he said, flapping his armscomically. "I was writing " -- felt *good* to say that -- "and I'm in abit of a, how you say, creative fog."

  Link took a step back. "I don't want to disturb you," he said.

  But for all that, she still approved his outfits before he leftthe house, refusing to let him succumb to the ephemeral awfultrendiness of mesh-back caps and too-tight boy-scout jamboreeshirts. Instead, she put him into slightly fitted cotton shirtsthat emphasized his long lean belly and his broad shoulders.

  "Don't sweat it. I could use a break. Come in and have a drink orsomething." He checked the yellowing face of the tick-tock clock he kepton the mantelpiece and saw that it was just past noon. "Past lunchtime,that means that it's okay to crack a beer. You want a beer?"

  And for all that, her brother still managed to come home lookinglike some kind of frat-rat pussy-hound, the kind of boy she'dalways hoped he wouldn't be.

  "Beer would be great," Link said. He stepped into the cool of the livingroom and blinked as his eyes adjusted. "This really is a hell of aplace," he said, looking around at the glass cases, the teetering stacksof books that Andrew had pulled down and not reshelved, making zigguratsof them instead next to all the chairs.

  "What can I do for you?" Adam said, handing him a glass of Upper CanadaLager with a little wedge of lime. He'd bought a few cases of beer thatweek and had been going through them steadily in the living room, pagingthrough the most favored of his books, trying to find something, thoughhe wasn't sure what.

  Link sipped. "Summer's here," he said.

  "Yeah," Alan said.

  "Well, the thing is, summer. I'm going to be working longer hours and,you know, evenings. Well. I mean. I'm 19 years old, Andy."

  Alan raised an eyebrow and sat back in his chair. "What's the messageyou're trying to convey to me, Link?"

  "I'm not going to be going around your friend's shop anymore. I reallyhad fun doing it all year, but I want to try something different with myspare time this summer, you understand?"

  "Sure," Alan said. He'd had kids quit on him before. That's what kidsdid. Attention spans.

  "Right. And, well, you know: I never really understood what we were*doing*..."

  "Which part?"

  "The WiFi stuff --"

  "Well, you see --"

  "Stop, okay? I've heard you explain it ten times now and I still don'tget it. Maybe after a semester or two of electrical engineering it'llmake more sense."

  "Okay," Adam said, smiling broadly to show no hard feelings. "Hey," hesaid, carefully. "If you didn't understand what we were doing, then whydid you do it?"

  Link cocked his head, as if examining him for traces of sarcasm, thenlooked away. "I don't know. It was exciting, even if I didn't quite getit. Everyone else seemed to get it, sort of, and it was fun to workalongside of them, and sometimes the money was okay."

  Which is why she decided to --Damn, what did she decide to do? That was shaping up to be a really goodopener.

  Which is why she wasn't surprised when he didn't come home forthree nights in a row.

  Aha.

  "No hard feelings, Link," Adam said. "I'm really grateful for the helpyou gave us and I hope you'll think about helping again in the fall..."

  But on the fourth night, she got worried, and she startedcalling his friends. They were all poor students, so none ofthem had land-line numbers you could look up in the phone book,but that was okay, since they all had accounts with the videostore where she worked, with their deadbeat pre-paid mobilenumbers listed.

  "Yeah, that sounds great, you know, September, it gets dark early. Justgot word that I got into Ryerson for the fall, so I'll be takingengineering classes. Maybe I can help out that way?"

  "Perfect," Alan said. Link took a step backward, drained his beer, heldout the glass.

  "Well, thanks," Link said, and turned. Alan reached past him and openedthe door. There were a couple of girls there, little suburban girls ofthe type that you could find by the hatful in the Market on Saturdaymornings, shopping for crazy clothes at the vintage shops. They looked14, but might have been as old as 16 or 17 and just heartbreakinglynaive. Link looked over his shoulder and had the decency to lookslightly embarrassed as they smiled at him.

  "Okay, thanks, then," he said, and one of the girls looked past him toget a glimpse inside the house. Andy instinctively stepped aside to giveher a better view of his showroom and he was about to offer her a sodabefore he ca
ught himself.

  "You've got a nice place," she said. "Look at all those books!"

  Her friend said, "Have you read all those books?" She was wearing thickconcealer over her acne, but she had a round face and heart-shaped lipsthat he wouldn't have been surprised to see on the cover of amagazine. She said it with a kind of sneer.

  Link said, "Are you kidding? What's the point of a houseful of booksyou've already read?"

  They both laughed adoringly -- if Adam was feeling uncharitable, he'dsay it was simpering, not laughing, and took off for the excitingthrongs in the Market.

  Alan watched them go, with Link's empty glass in one hand and his fullglass in the other. It was hot out in the Market, sunny, and it feltlike the spring had rushed up on him and taken him by surprise when hewasn't looking. He had owned the house for more than a year now, and thestory only had three or four paragraphs to it (and none of them werewritten down yet!).

  "You can't wash shit," is what her mother said when she calledhome and asked what she should do about her brother. "That kid'sbeen a screw-up since he was five years old."

  He should write the story down. He went back upstairs and sat down atthe keyboard and pecked out the sentences that had come to him, but theyseemed very sterile there aglow on the screen, in just the same way thatthey'd felt restless and alive a moment before. The sunny day beamedthrough the study window and put a glare up on his screen that made ithard to type, and when he moved to the other side of the desk, he foundhimself looking out the window at the city and the spring.

  He checked his calendar and his watch and saw that he only had a couplehours before the reporter from NOW magazine came by. The reporter -- asummer intern -- was the only person to respond to his all-fluff pressrelease on the open network. He and Kurt had argued about the wordingall night and when he was done, he almost pitched it out, as theeditorial thrash had gutted it to the point of meaninglessness.

  Oh well. The breeze made the new leaves in the trees across the streetsway, and now the sun was in his eyes, and the sentences were inert onthe screen.

  He closed the lid of the laptop and grabbed his coat and left the houseas fast as he could, obscurely worried that if he didn't leave then, hewouldn't get out all day.

  #

  As he got closer to Kurt's storefront, he slowed down. The crowds werethick, laughing suburban kids and old men in buttoned-up cardigans andfisherman's caps and subcultural tropical fish of all kinds: Goths andpunks and six kinds of ravers and hippies and so forth.

  He spied Link sitting on the steps leading up to one of the above-shopapartments, passing a cigarette to a little girl who sat between hisknees. Link didn't see him, he was laughing at something the boy behindhim said. Alan looked closer. It was Krishna, except he'd shaved hishead and was wearing a hoodie with glittering piping run along thedouble seams, a kind of future-sarcastic raver jumper that looked likeit had been abandoned on the set of *Space: 1999*.

  Krishna had his own little girl between *his* knees, with heart-shapedlips and thick matte concealer over her zits. His hand lay casually onher shoulder, and she brushed her cheek against it.

  Alan felt the air whuff out of him as though he'd been punched in thestomach, and he leaned up against the side of a fruit market, flatteninghimself there. He turned his head from side to side, expecting to seeMimi, and wanting to rush out and shield her from the sight, but she wasnowhere to be seen, and anyway, what business was it of his?

  And then he spied Natalie, standing at the other end of the street,holding on to the handles of one of the show bicycles out front of Bikeson Wheels. She was watching her brother closely, with narrowed eyes.

  It was her fault, in some way. Or at least she thought itwas. She'd caught him looking at Internet porn and laughed athim, humiliating him, telling him he should get out and find agirl whose last name wasn't "Jpeg."

  He saw that her hands were clenched into fists and realized that hiswere, too.

  It was her fault in some way, because she'd seen the kind ofperson he was hanging out with and she hadn't done a thing aboutit.

  He moved into the crowd and waded through it, up the street on theopposite side from his neighbors. He closed in on Natalie and ended upright in front of her before she noticed he was there.

  "Oh!" she said, and blushed hard. She'd been growing out her hair for acouple months and it was long enough to clip a couple of barrettesto. With the hair, she looked less skinny, a little older, a little lessvulnerable. She tugged at a hank of it absently. "Hi."

  "We going to do anything about that?" he said, jerking his head towardthe steps. Krishna had his hand down the little girl's top now, cuppingher breast, then laughing when she slapped it away.

  She shrugged, bit her lip. She shook her head angrily. "None of mybusiness. None of *your* business."

  She looked at her feet. "Look, there's a thing I've been meaning to tellyou. I don't think I can keep on volunteering at the shop, okay? I'vegot stuff to do, assignments, and I'm taking some extra shifts at thestore --"

  He held up a hand. "I'm grateful for all the work you've done,Natalie. You don't need to apologize."

  "Okay," she said. She looked indecisively around, then seemed to make upher mind and she hugged him hard. "Take care of yourself, okay?"

  It struck him as funny. "I can take care of myself just fine, don'tworry about me for a second. You still looking for fashion work? I thinkTropicál will be hiring for the summer. I could put in that phone-call."

  "No," she said. "No, that's okay." She looked over his shoulder and hereyes widened. He turned around and saw that Krishna and Link had spottedthem, and that Krishna was whispering something in Link's ear that wasmaking Link grin nastily.

  "I should go," she said. Krishna's hand was still down the little girl'stop, and he jiggled her breast at Alan.

  #

  The reporter had two lip piercings, and a matt of close-croppedmicro-dreads, and an attitude.

  "So here's what I don't get. You've got the Market wired --"

  "Unwired," Kurt said, breaking in for the tenth time in as manyminutes. Alan shot him a dirty look.

  "Unwired, right." The kid made little inverted commas with hisfingertips, miming, *Yes, that is a very cute jargon you've invented,dork.* "You've got the Market unwired and you're going to connect upyour network with the big interchange down on Front Street."

  "Well, *eventually*," Alan said. The story was too complicated. FrontStreet, the Market, open networks...it had no focus, it wasn't acomplete narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. He'd tried toexplain it to Mimi that morning, over omelets in his kitchen, and she'dbeen totally lost.

  "Eventually?" The kid took on a look of intense, teenaged skepticism. Heclaimed to be 20, but he looked about 17 and had been the puck in anintense game of eyeball hockey among the cute little punk girls who'dbeen volunteering in the shopfront when he'd appeared.

  "That's the end-goal, a citywide network with all-we-can eat freeconnectivity, fully anonymized and hardened against malicious attackersand incidental environmental interference." Alan steepled his fingersand tried to look serious and committed.

  "Okay, that's the goal."

  "But it's not going to be all or nothing. We want to make the communitya part of the network. Getting people energized about participating inthe network is as important as providing the network itself -- hell, thenetwork *is* people. So we've got this intermediate step, this way thateveryone can pitch in."

  "And that is, what, renaming your network to ParasiteNet?"

  Kurt nodded vigorously. "Zactly."

  "And how will I find these ParasiteNet nodes? Will there be a map orsomething with all this information on it?"

  Alan nodded slowly. "We've been thinking about a mapping application --"

  "But we decided that it was stupid," Kurt said. "No one needed to draw amap of the Web -- it just grew and people found its weird corners ontheir own. Networks don't *need* centralized authority, that's just thechains on your mind talk
ing --"

  "The chains on my mind?" The kid snorted.

  Alan held his hands up placatingly. "Wait a second," he said. "Let'stake a step back here and talk about *values*. The project here is aboutfree expression and cooperation. Sure, it'd be nice to have a city-widenetwork, but in my opinion, it's a lot more important to have a cityfull of people working on that network because they value expression andunderstand how cooperation gets us more of that."

  "And we'll get this free expression how?"

  "By giving everyone free Internet access."

  The kid laughed and shook his head. "That's a weird kind of 'free,' ifyou don't mind my saying so." He flipped over his phone. "I mean, it'slike, 'Free speech if you can afford a two-thousand-dollar laptop andwant to sit down and type on it.'"

  "I can build you a desktop out of garbage for twenty bucks," Kurtsaid. "We're drowning in PC parts."

  "Sure, whatever. But what kind of free expression is that? Freeexpression so long as you're sitting at home with your PC plugged intothe wall?"

  "Well, it's not like we're talking