Wireless

by Charles Stross

  2600 out of his pocket. The hacker magazine (shut down by a court injunction last year) was a good recognition signal—plus, having it didn’t violate the letter of his parole.

  Roscoe 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 blond hair, brown eyes, freckles.

  Must be straight out of J-school. “Have a seat. Coffee?”

  “Yes please.” She put something like a key ring down, then waved a hand, trying to catch the waitress’s eye. Roscoe looked at the key ring. Very black, very small, very Nokia. Rumor said they were giving them away in cereal boxes in France.

  “Suppose you tell me why you wanted to meet up,” Roscoe said quietly. “Up front. I can tell you right now that I’m out on parole, and I’ve got no intention of doing anything that puts me back inside.”

  The waitress ambled over, pad in hand. Sylvie ordered a coffee. “What were you charged with?” she said. “If you don’t mind my asking.”

  Roscoe snorted.

  Score one for the cool lady—some folks he’d met ran a mile the instant he mentioned being a con. “I was accused of infringement with a side order of black crypto, but plea-bargained it down to unlawful emissions.” Score two—she smiled. It was a weak joke, but it took some of the sting out of it. “Strictly no-collar crime.” He took another mouthful of coffee. “So what is it you’re doing up here?”

  “I’m working on a story about some aspects of unwiring that don’t usually make the national press,” she said, as the waitress came over, empty mug in one hand and jug in the other. Roscoe held his up for a refill.

  “Credentials?”

  “I could give you a phone number, but would you trust it?”

  “Point.” Roscoe leaned back against the elderly vinyl seat.

  Young, but cynical.

  “Well,” she added, “I can do better.” She pulled out a notepad and began scribbling. “

  This is my editor’s name and address. You can look up his number. If you place a call and ask for him, you’ll get put through—you’re on the list of interview subjects I left him. Next, here’s my—no, an—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 about the uncontrolled net. “Finally, here’s my press pass.”

  “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, and we can take it from there?”

  She closed her eyes for a moment. Then she dangled her key ring again, just a flash of matte black plastic. “These are everywhere in Europe these days, along with these.” She opened her purse, and he caught a glimpse of a sliver of curved metal, like a boomerang, in the shape of the Motorola batwing logo mark. “They’re meshing wireless repeaters. Once you’ve got a critical mass, you can relay data from anywhere to anywhere. Teenagers are whacking them up on the sides of buildings, tangling them in tree branches, sticking them to their windows. The telcos there are screaming blue murder, of course. Business is down forty percent in Finland, sixty in France. Euros are using the net for telephone calls, instant messaging, file-sharing—the wireline infrastructure is looking more and more obsolete every day. Even the ISPs are getting 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 in France. To hear my paper describe it, though, you’d think they were starving in the streets: it’s like the received wisdom about Canadian socialized health care. Everyone knows it doesn’t work—except for the Canadians, who think we’re goddamned barbarians for not adopting it.

  “I just got back from a month in the field in the EU. I’ve got interviews in the can with CEOs, with street thugs, with grand-mothers, and with regulators, all saying the same thing: unmetered communications are the secret engine of the economy, of liberty. The highest-quality ‘content’ isn’t hundred-million-dollar movies; it’s conversations with other people. Crypto is a tool of ‘privacy’ ”—she pronounced it in the British way, “prihv-icy,” making the word seem even more alien to his ears—“not piracy.”

  “The unwirers are heroes in Europe. You hear them talk, it’s like listening to a course in

  US constitutional freedoms. But here, you people are crooks, cable thieves, pirates, abettors of terrorists. I want to change that.”

  That evening, Marcel picked a fight with Roscoe over supper. It started low key, as Roscoe sliced up the pizza. “What are you planning this week?”

  Roscoe shifted two slices onto his plate before he answered. “More dishes. Got a couple of folks to splice in downtown if I want to hook up East Aurora—there’re some black spots there, but I figure with some QOS-based routing and a few more repeaters, we can clear them up. Why?”

  Marcel toyed with a strand of cooling cheese. “It’s, like, boring. When are you going to run a new fat pipe in?”

  “When the current one’s full.” Roscoe rolled a slice into a tube and bit into an end, deftly turning the roll to keep the cheese and sauce on the other end from oozing over his hand. “You know damn well the Feds would like nothing better than to drive a ditch-witch through a fiber drop from the border. ’Sides, got the journalist to think about.”

  “I could take over part of the fiber-pull,” Marcel said.

  “I don’t think so.” Roscoe put his plate down.

  “But I could—” Marcel looked at him. “What’s wrong?”

  “Security,” Roscoe grunted. “Goddamnit, you can’t just waltz up to some guy who’s looking at twenty-to-life and say, ‘Hi, Roscoe sent me, howzabout you and me run some dark fiber over the border, huh?’ Some of the guys in this game are, huh, you wouldn’t want to meet them on a dark night. And others are just plain paranoid. They wouldn’t want to meet you. Fastest way to convince ’em the FCC is trying to shut them down.”

  “You could introduce me,” Marcel said after a brief pause.

  Roscoe laughed, a short bark. “In your dreams, son.”

  Marcel dropped his fork, clattering. “You’re going to take your pet blonde on a repeater splice and show her everything, and you’re afraid to let me help you run a new fat pipe in? What’s the matter, I don’t smell good enough?”

  “Listen.” Roscoe stood up, and Marcel tensed—but rather than move toward him, Roscoe turned to the pizza box. “Get the

  Wall Street Journal on our side, and we have some credibility. A crack in the wall. Legitimacy. Do you know what that means, kid? You can’t buy it. But run another fat pipe into town, and we have a idle capacity, upstream dealers who want to know what the hell we’re pissing around with, another fiber or laser link to lose to cop-induced backhoe fade, and about fifty percent higher probability of the whole network getting kicked over because the mundanes will rat us out to the FCC over their TV reception. Do you want that?” He picked another cooling pizza slice out of the box. “Do you really want that?”

  “What I want isn’t important, is it, Ross? Not as important as you getting a chance to fuck that reporter, right?”

  “Up yours.” Roscoe returned to his seat, shoulders set defensively. “Fuck you very much.” They finished the meal in silence, then Roscoe headed out to his evening class in conversational
French. Marcel, he figured, was just jealous because he wasn’t getting to do any of the secret-agent stuff. Being an unwirer was a lot less romantic than it sounded, and the first rule of unwiring was nobody talks about unwiring. Maybe Marcel would get there one day, assuming his big mouth didn’t get everyone around him arrested first.

  Sylvie’s hotel room had a cigarette-burns-and-must squalor that reminded Roscoe of jail.

  “Bonjour, m’sieu,” she said as she admitted him.

  “Bon soir, madame,” he said. “Commentava?”

  “Oy,” she said. “My grandmother woulda said, ‘You’ve got a no-accent on you like a Litvak.’ Lookee here, the treasures of the Left Bank.” She handed him the Motorola batarang he’d glimpsed earlier. The underside had a waxed-paper peel-off strip, and when he lifted a corner, his thumb stuck so hard to the tackiness beneath that he lost the top layer of skin when he pulled it loose. He turned it over in his hands.

  “How’s it powered?”

  “Dirt-cheap photovoltaics charging a polymer cell—they’re printed in layers, the entire case is a slab of battery plus solar cell. It doesn’t draw too many amps, only sucks juice when it’s transmitting. Put one in a subway car, and you’ve got an instant ad hoc network that everyone in the car can use. Put one in the next car, and they’ll mesh. Put one on the platform, and you’ll get connectivity with the train when it pulls in. Sure, it won’t run for more than a few hours in total darkness—but how often do folks network in the blackout?”

  “Shitfire,” he said, stroking the matte finish in a way that bordered on the erotic.

  She grinned. She was slightly snaggletoothed, and he noticed a scar on her upper lip from a cleft-palate operation that must have been covered up with concealer earlier. It made her seem more human, more vulnerable. “Total cost of goods is about three euros, and Moto’s margin is five hundred percent. But some Taiwanese knockoffs have already appeared that slice that in half. Moto’ll have to invent something new next year if it wants to keep that profit.”

  “They will,” Roscoe said, still stroking the batarang. He transferred it to his armpit and unslung his luggable laptop. “Innovation is still legal there.” The laptop sank into the orange bedspread and the soft mattress beneath it.

  “You could do some real damage with one of these, I bet,” she said.

  “With a thousand of them, maybe,” he said. “If they were a little less conspicuous.”

  Her chest began to buzz. She slipped a wee phone from her breast pocket and answered it. “Yes?” She handed the phone to Roscoe. “It’s for you.” She made a curious face at him.

  He clamped it to his ear. “Who is this?”

  “Eet eez eye, zee masked avenger, doer of naughty deeds and wooer of reporters’ hearts.”

  “Marcel?”

  “Yes, boss.”

  “You shouldn’t be calling me on this number.” He remembered the yellow pad, sitting on his bedside table. Marcel did all the dusting.

  “Sorry, boss,” he said. He giggled.

  “Have you been drinking?” Marcel and he had bonded over many, many beers since they’d met in a bar in Utica, but Roscoe didn’t drink these days. Drinking made you sloppy.

  “No, no,” he said. “Just in a good mood is all. I’m sorry we fought, darlin’, can we kiss and make up?”

  “What do you want, Marcel?”

  “I want to be in the story, dude. Hook me up! I want to be famous!”

  He grinned despite himself. Marcel was good at fonzing dishes into place with one well-placed whack, could crack him up when the winter slush was turning his mood to pitch. He was a good kid, basically. Hothead. Like Roscoe, once.

  “C’mon c’mon c’mon,” Marcel said, and he could picture the kid pogoing up and down in a phone booth, heard his boots crunching on rock salt.

  He covered the receiver and turned to Sylvie, who had a bemused smirk that wasn’t half-cute on her. “You wanna hit the road, right?” She nodded. “You wanna write about how unwirers get made? I could bring along the kid I’m ’prenticing-up, you like.” Through the cell phone, he heard Marcel shouting, “Yes! Yes! YES!” and imagined the kid punching the air and pounding the booth’s walls triumphantly.

  “It’s a good angle,” she said. “

  You want him along, right?”

  He held the receiver in the air so that they could both hear the hollers coming down the line. “I don’t think I could live with him if I didn’t take him,” he said. “So yeah.”

  She nodded and bit her upper lip, just where the scar was, an oddly canine gesture that thrust her chin forward and made her look slightly belligerent. “Let’s do it.”

  He clamped the phone back to his head. “Marcel! Calm down, twerp! Breathe. Okay. You gonna be good if I take you along?”

  “So good, man, so very very very very good, you won’t believe—”

  “You gonna be safe, I bring you along?”

  “Safe as houses. Won’t breathe without your permission. Man, you are the best—”

  “Yeah, I am. Four o’clock. Bring the stuff.”

  They hit the road closer to five than four. It was chilly, and the gathering clouds and intermittent breeze promised more snow after dark when Roscoe parked outside the apartment. Marcel was ready and waiting, positively jumping up and down as soon as Roscoe opened the door. “Let’s go, man!”

  Back in the cab, Sylvie was making notes on a palmtop. “Hi,” she said guardedly, making eye contact with Marcel.

  “Hi yourself.” Marcel smiled. “Where we going tonight, man? I brought the stuff.” He dumped Roscoe’s toolbox and a bag containing a bunch of passive repeaters on the bench seat next to him.

  “We’re heading for East Aurora.” Roscoe looked over his shoulder as he backed the truck into the street, barely noticing Sylvie watching him. “There’s a low hill there that’s blocking signal to the mesh near Chestnut Hill, and we’re going to do something about that.”

  “Great!” Marcel shuffled about to get comfortable as Roscoe cautiously drove along the icy road. “Hey, isn’t there a microwave mast up there?”

  “Yeah.” Roscoe saw Sylvie was making notes. “By the way, if you could keep from saying exactly where we’re placing the repeaters? In your article? Otherwise, FCC’ll just take ’em down.”

  “Okay.” Sylvie put her pocket computer down. It was one of those weird Brit designs with the folding keyboards and built-in wireless that had trashed Palm all over Europe. “So you’re going to, what? String a bunch of repeaters along a road around the hillside?”

  “Pretty much that, exactly. Should only need two or three at the most, and it’s wooded around there. I figure an hour for each, and we can be home by nine, grab some Chinese on the way.”

  “Why don’t we use the microwave mast?” Marcel said.

  “Huh?”

  “The microwave mast,” he repeated. “We go up there, we put one repeater on it, and we bounce signal over the hill, no need to go round the bushes.”

  “I don’t think so,” Roscoe said absently. “Criminal trespass.”

  “But it’d save time! And they’d never look up there, it’ll look just like any other phone-company dish—”

  Roscoe sighed. “I am so not hearing this.” He paused for a few seconds, merging with another lane of traffic. “Listen, if we get caught climbing a tree by the roadside, I can drop the cans and say I was bird-spotting. They’ll never find them. But if I get caught climbing a phone-company microwave tower, that is criminal trespass, and they’ll probably nail me for felony theft of service, and felony possession of unlicensed devices—they’ll find the cans for sure, it’s like a parking lot around the base of those things—and parole breach. I’ll be back in prison while you’re still figuring out how to hitchhike home. So enough about saving time, okay? Doing twenty to life is not saving time.”

  “Okay,” Marcel said, “we’ll do it your way.” He crossed his arms and stared out the window at the passing trees under their winter ca
ul of snow.

  “How many unwirers are there working in the area?” Sylvie said, breaking the silence.

  Marcel said, “Just us,” at the same moment as Roscoe said, “Dozens.” Sylvie laughed.

  “We’re solo,” Roscoe said, “but there are lots of other solos in the area. It’s not a conspiracy, you know—more like an emergent form of democracy.”

  Sylvie looked up from her palmtop. “That’s from a manifesto, isn’t it?”

  Roscoe pinked. “Guilty as charged. Got it from Barlow’s

  Letters from Prison. I read a lot of prison lit. Before I went into the joint.”

  “Amateurs plagiarize, artists steal,” she said. “Might as well steal from the best. Barlow talks a mean stick. You know he wrote lyrics for the Grateful Dead?”

  “Yeah,” Roscoe said. “I got into unwiring through some deadhead tape-traders who were importing open recorders from Germany to tape to shows. One of them hooked me up with—someone—who could get French networking gear. It was just a few steps from there to fun-loving criminal, undermining the body politic.”

  Marcel came out of his sulk when they got to the site. He loaded up his backpack and a surveyor’s tripod and was the model of efficiency as he lined up the bank shot around the hill that would get their signal out and about.

  Sylvie hung back with Roscoe, who was taking all the gear through a series of tests, using his unwieldy laptop and two homemade antennae to measure signal strength. “Got to get it right the first time. Don’t like to revisit a site after it’s set up. Dog returning to its vomit and all.”

  She took out her key ring and dangled it in the path of the business end of the repeater Roscoe was testing. “I’m getting good directional signal,” she said, turning the key ring so he could see the glowing blue LEDs arranged to form the distinctive Nokia “N.”

  Roscoe reached for the fob. “These are just wicked,” he said.