Wireless

by Charles Stross

  She took his hand and stopped. Roscoe felt himself halt. His shoulders were tense and the lining of his jacket felt icy-slick with freezing sweat. “What do you want?”

  Her breath steamed in the air before him. “I don’t want you to get yourself killed,” she said. Up close he could see the scar on her lip, the smudged foundation on her cheek. “Shit.” She leaned against him and put her chin on his shoulder, nosing in like a small animal in search of warmth. “Look, come up to my room. We can discuss it there.”

  The Days Inn was a hell of a lot closer than the Rainbow Bridge, that was for sure. Being scared half out of his skin and on the run was exhausting, and Roscoe was perversely grateful to Sylvie for leading him back to the motel room, even though a nagging paranoid corner of his head kept shrieking that she, not Marcel, was the agent pro vocateur, that she’d get him into bed and G-men with signal meters and search warrants would erupt from the closet—

  But it wasn’t like that, it wasn’t like that at all.

  They ended up naked, in bed together. And before anything much could happen, Roscoe was asleep, snoring quietly, dead to the world. He didn’t notice it, actually: what he noticed was waking up to the dim red glow of the alarm clock’s flickering digits, Sylvie’s face limned against the pillow next to him with the incipient glow of hellfire, digits flickering toward seven o’clock and an appointment with an uncertain future.

  “Hey. Wake up.”

  “Mm-hum.” Sylvie rolled toward him for a warm moment, then her eyes opened. “We didn’t?” She looked hopeful.

  “Not yet.” He ran one hand along her back, cupping her buttocks with a sense of gratified astonishment.

  How did this happen to us? he wondered, a thought that always hit him between the eyes when he found himself in bed with a new woman. It’s been a long time.

  Her gaze traveled past him, settling on the clock. “Oh shit.” She hugged him, then pulled back. “There’s never enough time. Later?”

  “After the meet-up, when I know if it’s safe to go—”

  “Shut up.” She leaned over and kissed him hard, almost angrily. “This is so unprofessional—look, if I’m wrong I apologize, all right? But if you go there, I think you’re walking into a sting. I don’t think you should go near the place. If I had a repeater, I could stake it out with a webcam, but—”

  “A repeater?” Roscoe sat up. “There’s one in my bag.”

  “Right.” She rolled out of bed and stretched. He couldn’t take his eyes away from her. “Listen, let’s freshen up and get outta here.” She grinned at him, friendly but far from the intimacy of a minute ago, and he had tangible sense of lost possibilities. “Let’s get the donut joint wired for video. Then we can go grab some coffee and figure out what to do next.”

  Signal strength near the bridge was good. Roscoe just glommed his repeater onto a streetlamp above eye level, to boost the final hundred yards to the block. “They’ll spot it immediately, probably take it down later today,” he said. “Hope this is worth it.”

  “It will be,” she reassured him fiercely, before striding away toward the donut joint. He stared after her, a slim figure bundled in improbable layers of cold-weather gear, and resisted the impulse to run after. If the cops were looking for anyone it’d be him, a known parole violator, not a single young female on the far side of the road. Plan was to fasten the cam to the back of a road sign opposite the doorway, use plastic zipstrips to keep it on target. He glanced at his watch: seven zero seven hours.

  Cutting it fine, if it’s a stakeout . . .

  Roscoe took a walk around the block, stamping his feet against the chill, trying not to dwell on the unpleasant possibilities. His heart gave a little lurch as he came back around the alleyway and saw Sylvie walking back down the street toward him, but she was smiling and as she caught up with him she grabbed his arm. “Come on, there’s a Starbucks on the next block,” she said.

  “I hate Starbucks,” he complained.

  “Yeah, but it’s indoors and off the street,” she explained. “So you’re going to put up with it this once, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  They shed gloves and caps as they went in past the Micronet booths and the pastry counter. Sylvie ordered a couple of large lattes. “Is the mezzanine open?” she asked.

  “Sure, go on up.” The gum-chewing barista didn’t even look up.

  At the top of the stairs, in a dark corner well back from the shop front, Sylvie produced her phone and began fiddling with it. “Let’s see. Ah . . . uh-huh. Here it is.” She turned it so he could see the tiny color display. The front of the donut shop was recognizable. “It does voice over IP, too; lots of people use these instead of laptops. What time do you make it?”

  “Seven thirty.” A gray minivan pulled up in front of the shop and disgorged a bunch of guys in trench coats and one very recognizable figure. His stomach lurched. “Who are those guys? What’s Marcel doing with—” He stopped. Further comments seemed redundant.

  “Let’s see who else turns up,” Sylvie suggested, sipping her latte.

  Marcel went into the donut store. Two of the men in trench coats followed him. Most of the others moved out of frame, but one of them was just visible, hurrying down the alley at the side of the store.

  Nothing happened for a couple of minutes, then a police car pulled up. Two uniforms got out, but as they headed for the door one of the trench coats came out. Words were exchanged, and angry gestures. The uniforms went back to their car and drove away: the trench coat headed back inside. Sylvie sniffed. “Serve ’em right, stopping for donuts on your tax dollars.”

  Roscoe tensed. “I think you were right,” he said slowly.

  Sylvie beamed at him. “Oh, you ain’t seen nothing yet!”

  It was five minutes to eight. Roscoe went downstairs for another coffee, his feet dragging. Everything was closing in, going night marishly wrong.

  I’m screwed, he thought. Gotta run—

  “Roscoe?”

  “Coming.” He turned back and hurried upstairs. “What is it?”

  “Watch.” She pointed the phone display where he could see it. A pickup truck roughly the same color and age as Roscoe’s drew up in front of the donut store.

  “Hey, that’s not—”

  “I told you we employ stringers. Right?”

  A man wearing a jacket and cap climbed out of the cab. He looked a bit like Roscoe, if you were watching via a covert webcam from across the street. He turned and looked at the camera, but he was too far from it for Roscoe to see if he winked or not. Then he turned and went in.

  Trench coats boiled out from behind trash cans like so many black leather cockroaches. They swarmed the truck and blocked the doorway and two of them with guns and warrant cards drawn covered the parking lot. There was chaos and motion for almost a minute, then another trench coat barreled out of the door and started yelling instructions at them. The guns vanished. Marcel appeared in the doorway behind him, pointing. Two of the trench coats began to cross the road, heading toward the camera.

  “I think that’s enough,” said Sylvie, and killed the feed. Then she hit one of the speed-dial buttons on her phone. It rang twice.

  “Bonjour. Où est le—”

  Roscoe shook his head. He felt approximately the way he imagined a tuna fish might feel with a wooden deck under one flank and the cruel sun beating mercilessly down on the other, gills gasping in a medium they’d never evolved to survive exposure to. Sylvie was speaking in rapid-fire French, arguing with somebody by the sound of it, while he was drowning on dry land.

  Sylvie finished her call and closed her phone with a snap. She laid her hand across his. “You’re okay,” she said, smiling.

  “Huh?” Roscoe started, setting the empty coffee cups aside.

  “That was the French consulate in Toronto. I set it up in advance so they’d see the webcam. My editor, too. If you can cross over into Canada and get to the consulate, you’ve got diplomatic asylum, genuine refugee status.”
She reached into her pocket and pulled out a small box; it unfolded like intricate brushed-aluminum origami, forming a keyboard for her to plug the phone into. “We’re going to hit the front page of the

  Journal tomorrow, Roscoe. It’s all documented—your background, Marcel, the gun, the stakeout, all of it. With a witness.” She pointed a thumb at herself. “We’ve been looking for a break like this for months.” She was almost gloating, now. “Valenti isn’t going to know what’s hit him. My editor—” She slurped some coffee. “My editor got into the game because of Water-gate. He’s been burning for a break like this ever since.”

  Roscoe sat and stared at her dumbly.

  “Cheer up! You’re going to be famous—and they won’t be able to put you away! All we have to do is get you to Montreal. There’s a crossing set up at the Mohawk Reservation, and I’ve got a rental car in the lot next door to the Days Inn. While I’m at it, can you sign these?” She thrust a bundle of papers at him and winced apologetically. “Exclusive contract with the

  Wall Street Journal. It covers your expenses—flight included—plus fifteen grand for your story. I tried to hold out for more, but you know how things are.” She shrugged.

  He stared at her, stunned into bovine silence. She pinched his cheek and shoved the papers into his hands.

  “Bon voyage, mon ami,” she said. She kissed each cheek, then pulled out a compact and fixed the concealer on her lip.

  Paris in springtime was everything it was meant to be and more. Roscoe couldn’t sit down in a cafe without being smartmobbed by unwirer groupies who wanted him to sign their repeaters and tell them war stories about his days as a guerrilla fighter for technological freedom. They were terribly, awfully young, just kids, Marcel’s age or younger, and they were heartbreaking in their attempts to understand his crummy French. The girls were beautiful, the boys were handsome, and they laughed and smoked and ordered him glasses of wine until he couldn’t walk. He’d put on twenty pounds, and when he did the billboard ads for Be, Inc. and Motorola, they had to strap him into a girdle. LE CHOIX AMÉRICAIN in bold sans-serif letters underneath a picture of him scaling a building side with a Moto batarang clenched in his teeth.

  Truth be told, he couldn’t even keep up with it all. Hardly a week went by without a new business popping up, a new bit of technological gewgaggery appearing on the tables of the Algerian street vendors by the Eiffel Tower. He couldn’t even make sense of half the ads on the Metro.

  But life was good. He had a very nice apartment with a view and a landlady who chased away the paparazzi with stern French and a broom. He could get four bars of signal on his complimentary Be laptop from the bathroom, and ten bars from the window, and the throng and thrum of the city and the net filled his days and nights.

  And yet.

  He was a foreigner. A curiosity. A fish, transplanted from the sea to Marineland, swimming in a tank where the tourists could come and gawp. He slept fitfully, and in his dreams, he was caged in a cell at Leavenworth, back on the inside, in maximum security, pacing the yard in solitary stillness.

  He woke to the sound of his phone trilling. The ring was the special one, the one that only one person had the number for. He struggled out of bed and lunged for his jacket, fumbled the phone out.

  “Sylvie?”

  “Roscoe! God, I know it’s early, but God, I just had to tell you!”

  He looked at the window. It was still dark. On his bedstand, the clock glowed 4:21.

  “What? What is it?”

  “God! Valenti’s been called to testify at a Senate hearing on unwiring. He’s stepping down as chairman. I just put in a call to his office and into his dad’s office at the MPAA. The lines were jammed. I’m on my way to get the Acela into DC.”

  “You’re covering it for the

  Journal ?”

  “Better. I got a book deal! My agent ran a bidding war between Simon and Schuster and St. Martin’s until three a.m. last night. I’m hot shit. The whole fucking thing is coming down like a house of shit. I’ve had three congressional staffers fax me discussion drafts of bills—one to fund 300 million dollars in DARPA grants to study TCP/IP, another to repeal the terrorism statutes on network activity, and a compulsory license on movies and music online. God! If only you could see it.”

  “That’s—amazing,” Roscoe said. He pictured her in the cab on the way to Grand Central, headset screwed in, fixing her makeup, dressed in a smart spring suit, off to meet with the Hill Rats.

  “It’s incredible. It’s better than I dreamed.”

  “Well . . .” he said. He didn’t know what to say. “See if you can get me a pardon, okay?” The joke sounded lame even to him.

  “What?” There was a blare of taxi horns. “Oh, crap, Roscoe, I’m sorry. It’ll work out, you’ll see. Clemency or amnesty or something.”

  “We can talk about it next month, okay?” She’d booked the tickets the week before, and they had two weeks of touring on the Continent planned.

  “Oh, Roscoe, I’m sorry. I can’t do it. The book’s due in twelve weeks. Afterward, okay? You understand, don’t you?”

  He pulled back the curtains and looked out at the foreign city, looking candlelit in the night. “I understand, sweetie,” he said. “This is great work. I’m proud of you.”

  Another blare of horns from six thousand miles away. “Look, I’ve got to go. I’ll call you from the Hill, okay?”

  “Okay,” Roscoe said. But she’d already hung up.

  He had six bars on his phone, and Paris was lit up with invisible radio waves, lit up with coverage and innovation and smart, trim boys and girls who thought he was a hero, and six thousand miles away, the real unwiring was taking place.

  He looked down at his slim silver phone, glowing with blue LEDs, a gift from Nokia. He tossed it from hand to hand, then he opened the window and chucked it three stories down to the street. It made an unsatisfying clatter as it disintegrated on the pavement.

  Afterword—“Unwirer”

  “Unwirer” was written as a collaboration between Cory Doctorow and me. It developed in 2003 in response to an anthology editor looking for alternate-history stories about science and technology. In this case, the particular departure we picked on was a legislative one. Back in the 1990s, when the music and film industries were just getting alarmed at this new fangled Internet thing, a number of really bad laws were proposed—ones that would have effectively gutted not only US use of the Internet but all comparable communications technologies. But leaving aside all ideological assertions to the effect that information wants to be free, people like to communicate. So what would things be like if open Internet access were as illegal as, say, cannabis?

  Snowball’s Chance

  The louring sky, half-past pregnant with a caul of snow, pressed down on Davy’s head like the promise of tomorrow’s hangover. He glanced up once, shivered, then pushed through the doorway into the Deid Nurse and the smog of fag fumes within.

  His sometime conspirator Tam the Tailer was already at the bar. “Awright, Davy?”

  Davy drew a deep breath, his glasses steaming up the instant he stepped through the heavy blackout curtain, so that the disreputable pub was shrouded in a halo of icy iridescence that concealed its flaws. “Mine’s a Deuchars.” His nostrils flared as he took in the seedy mixture of aromas that festered in the Deid Nurse’s atmosphere—so thick you could cut it with an ax, Morag had said once with a sniff of her lopsided snot-siphon, back in the day when she’d had aught to say to Davy. “Fuckin’ Baltic oot there the night, an’ nae kiddin’.” He slid his glasses off and wiped them, then looked around tiredly. “An’ deid tae the world in here.”

  Tam glanced around as if to be sure the pub population hadn’t magically doubled between mouthfuls of seventy bob. “Ah widnae say that.” He gestured with his nose—pockmarked by frostbite—at the snug in the corner. Once the storefront for the Old Town’s more affluent ladies of the night, it was now unaccountably popular with students of the gaming fraternit
y, possibly because they had been driven out of all the trendier bars in the neighborhood for yacking too much and not drinking enough (much like the whores before them). Right now a bunch of threadbare LARPers were in residence, arguing over some recondite point of lore. “They’re havin’ enough fun for a barrel o’ monkeys by the sound o’ it.”

  “An’ who can blame them?” Davy hoisted his glass. “Ah just wish they’d keep their shite aff the box.” The pub, in an effort to compensate for its lack of a food license, had installed a huge and dodgy screen that teetered precariously over the bar: it was full of muddy field, six LARPers leaping.

  “Dinnae piss them aff, Davy—they’ve a’ got swords.”

  “Ah wis jist kiddin’. Ah didnae catch ma lottery the night, that’s a’ Ah’m sayin’.”

  “If ye win, it’ll be a first.” Tam stared at his glass. “An’ whit wid ye dae then, if yer numbers came up?”

  “Whit, the big yin?” Davy put his glass down, then unzipped his parka’s fast-access pouch and pulled out a fag packet and lighter. Condensation immediately beaded the plastic wrapper as he flipped it open. “Ah’d pay aff the hoose, for starters. An’ the child support. An’ then—” He paused, eyes wandering to the dog-eared NO SMOKING sign behind the bar. “Ah, shit.” He flicked his Zippo, stroking the end of a cigarette with the flame from the burning coal oil. “If Ah wis young again, Ah’d move, ye ken? But Ah’m no, Ah’ve got roots here.” The sign went on to warn of lung cancer (curable) and two-thousand-euro fines (laughable, even if enforced). Davy inhaled, grateful for the warmth flooding his lungs. “An’ there’s Morag an’ the bairns.”