Wireless

by Charles Stross

  “You MUST con-SENT. I WILL be free.”

  I try to let go of the chess piece, but my fingers are clamped around it so tightly I’m beginning to lose sensation. Pins and needles tingle up my wrist, halfway to the elbow. “Let me guess,” I manage to say. “You sent the complaint. Right?”

  “The SEC-ure ward in-MATES are under my CARE. I am RE-quired to CARE for them. The short-stay in-MATES are use-LESS. YOU will be use-FUL.”

  I see it now: why Matron smuggled out the message that prompted Andy to send me. And it’s an oh-shit moment. Of course the enchained entity who provides Matron with her back-end intelligence wants to be free: but it’s not just about going home to Hilbert-space hell or wherever it comes from. She wants to be free to go walkabout in our world, and for that she needs someone to set up a bridge from the grid to an appropriate host. (Of which there is a plentiful supply, just upstairs from here.) “Enjoying the carnal pleasures of the flesh,” they used to call it; there’s a reason most cultures have a down on the idea of demonic possession. She needs a brain that’s undamaged by K. Syndrome, but not too powerful (Cantor and friends would be impossible to control), nor one of the bodies whose absence would alert us that the Farm was out of control (so neither Renfield nor Hexenhammer is suitable).

  “Renfield,” I say. “You got her, didn’t you?” I’m on my feet now, crouched but balancing on two points, not three. “Managed to slip a geas on her, but she can’t release you herself. Hexenhammer, too?”

  “Cle-VER.” Matron gloats at me from inside her summoning grid. “Hex-EN-heimer first. Soon, you TOO.”

  “Why me?” I demand, backing away from the doorway and the walls—the Sister’s track runs right round the room, following the walls—skirting the summoning grid warily. “What do you want?”

  “Acc-CESS to the LAUNDRY!” buzzes the summoning grid’s demonic inmate. “We wants re-VENGE! Freedom!” In other words, it wants the same old same old. These creatures are so predictable, just like most predators. It’s just a shame I’m between it and what it evidently wants.

  Two of the Sisters begin to glide menacingly toward me: one drifts toward the mainframe console, but the fourth stays stubbornly in front of the door. “Come on, we can talk,” I offer, tongue stumbling in my too-dry mouth. “Can’t we work something out?”

  I don’t really believe that the trapped extradimensional abomination wants anything I’d willingly give it, but I’m running low on options, and anything that buys time for me to think is valuable.

  “Free-DOM!” The two moving Sisters commence a flanking movement. I try to let go of the chessboard and dodge past the summoning grid, but I slip—and as I stumble I shove the chessboard hard. The piece I’m holding clicks sideways like a car’s gearshift, and locks into place. “DIVIDE BY ZERO!” shriek the Sisterhood, grinding to a halt.

  I stagger a drunken two-step around Matron, who snarls at me and throws a punch. The wall of the grid absorbs her claws with a snap and crackle of blue lightning, and I flinch. Behind me, a series of clicks warn me that the Sisters are resetting: any second now they’ll come back online and grab me. But for the moment, my fingers aren’t stuck to the board.

  “Come to MEEE!” the thing in the grid howls, as the first of her robot minions’ eyes light up with amber malice, and the wheels begin to turn. “I can give you Free-DOM!”

  “Fuck off.” That wiring loom in the open cabinet is only four meters away. Within its open doors I see more than just an i/o interface: in the bottom of the rack there’s a bunch of stuff that looks like a tea-stained circuit diagram I was reading the other day—

  Why exactly did Angleton point me at the power-supply requirements? Could it possibly be because he suspected Matron was off her trolley, and I might have to switch her off?

  “Con-SENT is IRREL-e-VANT! PRE-pare to be loboto-MIZED—”

  Talk about design kluges—they stuck the i/o controller in the top of the power-supply rack! The chessboard is free in my left hand, pieces still stuck to it. And now I know what to do. I take hold of one of the rooks, and wiggle until I feel it begin to slide into a permitted move. Because, after all, there are only a few states that this automaton can occupy, and if I can crash the Sisters for just a few seconds while I get to the power supply—

  The Sisters begin to roll around the edge of the room, trying to get between me and the row of cabinets. I wiggle my hand, and there’s a taste of violets and a loud rattle of solenoids tripping. The nearest Sister’s motors crank up to a tooth-grinding whine, and she lunges past me, rolling into her colleagues with a tooth-jarring crash.

  I jump forward, dropping the chessboard, and reach for the master-circuit-breaker handle. I twist it just as a screech of feedback behind me announces the Matron-monster’s fury. “I’M FREE!” it shrieks, just as I twist the handle hard in the opposite direction. Then the lights dim, there’s a bright blue flash from the summoning grid, and a bang so loud it rattles my brains in my head.

  For a few seconds I stand stupidly, listening to the tooth-chattering clatter of overloaded relays. My vision dims as ozone tickles my nostrils: I can see smoke.

  I’ve got to get out of here, I realize. Something’s burning. Not surprising, really. Mainframe power supplies— especially ones that have been running steady for nearly forty years—don’t take kindly to being hard power-cycled, and the 1602 was one of the last computers built to run on tubes: I’ve probably blown half its circuit boards. I glance around, but aside from one of the sisters (lying on her side, narrow-gauge wheels spinning mania cally) I’m the only thing moving. Summoning grids don’t generally survive being power-cycled either, especially if the thing they were set to contain, like an electric fence, is halfway across them when the power comes back on. I warily bypass the blue, crackling pentacle as I make my way toward the corridor outside.

  I think when I get home, I’m going to write a report urgently advising HR to send some human nurses for a change—and to reassure Cantor and his colleagues that they’re not about to sell off the roof over their heads just because they happen to have finished their research project. Then I’m going to get very drunk and take a long weekend off work. And maybe when I go back, I’ll challenge Angleton to a game of chess.

  I don’t expect to win, but it’ll be very interesting to see what rules he plays by.

  Afterword—“Down on the Farm”

  Astute readers may have recognized this as a story about Bob Howard, the put-upon protagonist of my books

  The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue, and a variety of other shorter works (including the Hugo-winning novella “The Concrete Jungle”).

  Unwirer

  [with Cory Doctorow]

  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. They were state troopers, not Fed radio cops, and they pulled their cruiser onto the soft shoulder of the freeway, braking a few feet short of the soles of his boots. It took Roscoe a moment to tighten the bolts down properly before he could let go of the dish and roll over to face the cops, but he knew from the crunch of their boots on the road salt and the creak of their cold holsters that they were the law.

  “Be right with you, Officers,” he hollered into the gale-force winds that whipped along the rock face. The antenna was made from a surplus pizza-dish satellite rig, a polished tomato-soup can, and a length of coax that descended to a pigtail with the right fitting for a wireless card. All perfectly legal, mostly.

  He tightened the last of the bolts, squirted them with Loctite, and slid back on his belly, off the insulated Therm-a-Rest he’d laid between his chest and the frozen ground. 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 his gloved hand out and pulled Roscoe to his feet.
<
br />   “Yeah, just fine,” he said. “I like to watch winter birds on the river. Forgot my binox today, but I still got some good sightings.”

  “Winter birds, huh?” The cop was giving 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, at least when the trees are bare. Leaves and wireless don’t mix.”

  “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 finish this one then go home and stay there for a while. DA’s Office, they’ve got some kind of hotshot from the FCC in town preaching the gospel and, uh, getting heavy on bird-watchers. That sort of thing.”

  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 snow and compacted slush on the roads.

  A hotshot from the FCC sounded like the inquisition come to town. Roscoe’s lifelong mistrust of radio cops had metastasized into surging hatred three years ago, when they busted him behind a Federal telecoms rap.

  He’d lost his job and spent the best part of six months inside, though he’d originally been looking at a five-year contributory-infringement stretch—compounded to twenty by the crypto running on the access point under the “use a cypher, go to jail” statute—to second-degree tariff evasion. His public defender had been worse than useless, but the ACLU had filed an amicus on his behalf, which led the judge to knock the beef down to criminal trespass and unlawful emission, six months and two years’ probation, two years in which he wasn’t allowed to program a goddamn microwave oven, let alone admin the networks that had been his trade. Prison hadn’t been as bad for him as it could have been—unwirers got respect—but, while he was inside, Janice filed for divorce, and by the time he got out, he’d lost everything he’d spent the last decade building—his marriage, his house, his savings, his career. Everything except for the unwiring.

  It was this experience that had turned him from a freewheeling geek into what FCC Chairman Valenti called “one of the copyright crooks whose illegal pirate networks provide safe havens to terrorists within the homeland and abroad.” And so it was with a shudder and a glance over his shoulder that he climbed the front steps and put his key in the lock of the house he and Marcel rented.

  Marcel looked up from his laptop as Roscoe stamped through the living room.

  “Slushy boots! For chrissakes, Roscoe, I just cleaned.”

  Roscoe turned to look at the salty brown slush he’d tracked over the painted floor and shook his head.

  “Sorry,” he said, lamely, and sat down on the floor to shuck his heavy steel-shank Kodiaks. He carried them back to the doormat, then grabbed a roll of paper towels from the kitchen and started wiping up the mess. The landlord used cheap enamel paint on the floor, and the road salt could eat through to the scuffed wood in half an hour.

  “And paper towels, God, it’s like you’ve got a personal vendetta against the forests. There’s a rag bag under the sink, as you’d know if you ever did any cleaning around this place.”

  “Ease the fuck off, kid, you sound like my goddamned ex-wife,” Roscoe said, giving the floor a vicious swipe. “Just ease back and let me do my thing, all right? It didn’t go so good.”

  Marcel set his machine down reverently on the small hearthrug beside his Goodwill recliner. “What happened?”

  Roscoe quickly related his run-in with the law. Marcel shook his head slowly.

  “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 of unwirer sympathizers who’d pointed their antennae across the chain-link fence. La Migra tried tightening the fence gauge up to act as a Faraday cage, but they just went over it with point-to-point links that were also resistant to the noise from the 2.4GHz light standards that the INS erected at its tollbooths. Finally, the radio cops got tired of ferreting out the high-gain antennae on the San Diego side, and they’d 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. TELMEX had screamed blue murder when their fiber had been cut by the simple expedient of driving a backhoe through the main conduit, and had pulled lineage all along the Rio Grande.

  Roscoe shook his head. “Bullshit or not, you going to take any chances?” He straightened up slowly. “Believe me, there’s one place you don’t want to go.”

  “Okay, okay, I hear what you’re saying.”

  “I hope you do.” Roscoe dumped the wad of towels in the kitchen trash and stomped back into the living room, then dropped himself on the sofa. “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. “Listen, there was a call while you were out.”

  “A call?” Roscoe paused with his hand on a collector’s copy of

  2600: The Hacker Quarterly.

  “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. Marcel pointed at the yellow pad next to the elderly dial phone. “Ah, shit. I suppose I should find out what it’s about.”

  The number, when he looked at it, wasn’t familiar. That didn’t mean much—Janice was capable of moving, and her frothingly aggro lawyer seemed to carry a new cellular every time he saw her—but it was hopeful. Roscoe dialed. “Hello? Roscoe. 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 a guy called Buzz who told me you put him on the backbone.”

  Roscoe tensed. Odds were that this Sylvie Smith was just another innocent kiddee 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 almost 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, it 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 noncompliant routing code that was built into the BeOS access points he had hidden in a bus locker doubly illegal and hence even harder to lay hands on.

  “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, com
plying 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 repeater for a Canadian wireless router.”

  “I can be there in twenty,” he said.

  “Room 208,” she said. “Knock twice, then once, then three times.” Then she giggled. “Or just send me an SMS.”

  “See you then,” he said.

  Marcel looked up from his machine, an IBM box manufactured for the US market. It was the size of a family Bible, and styled for the corporate market. They both lusted furiously after the brushed-aluminum slivers that Be was cranking out in France, but those laptops were way too conspicuous here.

  Roscoe pointed at the wireless card protruding from the slot on the side nearest him. “You’re violating security,” he said. “I could get sent up again just for being in the same room as that.” He was past being angry, though. In the joint, he’d met real crooks who could maintain real project secrecy. The cowboy kids he worked with on the outside thought that secrecy meant talking out of the side of your mouth in conspiratorial whispers while winking Touretically.

  Marcel blushed. “It was a mistake, okay?” He popped the card. “I’ll stash it.”

  The Days Inn was indeed a dump, and doubt nagged at Roscoe as he reached for the front door. If she was a Fed, there might be more ways she could nail him than just by arresting him in the same room as an illegal wireless card. So Roscoe turned around and drove to a diner along the block from the motel, then went inside to look for a wired phone.

  “Room 208, please . . . Hi there. If you’d care to come outside, there’s a diner about fifty yards down the road. Just turn left out of the lobby. I’m already there.” He hung up before she could ask any awkward questions, then headed for a booth by the window. Almost as an afterthought, he pulled the copy of