Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow (best thriller novels of all time .txt) 📗
- Author: Cory Doctorow
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“So I figger: This guy wants to share packets with me, for sure, and so 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 light on. Keep meaning to come back around five some afternoon and ring the bell 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. Feels like a T1, and the IP address comes off of an ISP in Waterloo. You need a browser, right?”
Alan shook his head. “You know, I can’t even remember what it was I wanted 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 the antenna. “What’s up?”
“Let’s do some more driving around, let it perk, okay? You got more dumpsters 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 the networks that they passed as they passed them, watching the flags pop up on the map of Toronto. They drove the streets all night, watched the sun go up, and the flags multiplied on the network.
Alan didn’t even have to explain it to Kurt, who got it immediately. They were close now, thinking together in the feverish drive-time on the night-dark streets.
“Here’s the thing,” Kurt said as they drank their coffees at the Vesta Lunch, a grimy 24-hour diner that Alan only seemed to visit during the smallest hours of the morning. “I started off thinking, well, the cell companies are screwed up because they think that they need to hose the whole city from their high towers with their powerful transmitters, and my little boxes will be lower-power and smarter and more realistic and grassroots and democratic.”
“Right,” Alan said. “I was just thinking of that. What could be more democratic than just encouraging people to use their own access points and 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 by bridging down at the big cage at 151 Front Street, but we can still play around with hardware. And convincing the people who already know why WiFi is cool to join up has got to be easier than convincing shopkeepers who’ve never heard of wireless to let us put antennae and boxes on their walls.”
“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 his cracked stool and the waitress gave him a dirty look. “Gimme some apple pie, please,” he said. “This is the best part: it’s going to violate the hell out of everyone’s contracts with their ISPs—they sell you an all-you-can-eat Internet connection and then tell you that they’ll cut off your service if you’re too hungry. Well, fuck that! It’s not just community networking, it’ll be civil disobedience against shitty service-provider terms of service!”
There were a couple early morning hard-hats in the diner who looked up from their yolky eggs to glare at him. Kurt spotted them and waved. “Sorry, boys. Ever get one of those ideas that’s so good, you can’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’re gonna be a lot of fun today, I can tell.”
They left the diner in a sleepdep haze and squinted into the sunrise and grinned at each other and burped up eggs and sausages and bacon and coffee and headed toward Kurt’s Buick.
“Hang on,” Alan said. “Let’s have a walk, okay?” The city smelled like morning, dew and grass and car-exhaust and baking bread and a whiff of the distant Cadbury’s factory oozing chocolate miasma over the hills and the streetcar tracks. Around them, millions were stirring in their beds, clattering in their kitchens, passing water, and taking on vitamins. It invigorated him, made him feel part of something huge and all-encompassing, like being in his father the mountain.
“Up there,” Kurt said, pointing to a little playground atop the hill that rose sharply up Dupont toward Christie, where a herd of plastic rocking horses swayed creakily in the breeze.
“Up there,” Alan agreed, and they set off, kicking droplets of dew off the 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 a cigarette and blew plumes into the shafting light and they admired the effect of the wind whipping it away.
“I think this will work,” Alan said. “We’ll do something splashy for the press, get a lot of people to change the names of their networks—more people will use the networks, more will create them… It’s a good plan.”
Kurt nodded. “Yeah. We’re smart guys.”
Something smashed into Alan’s head and bounced to the dirt below the climber. A small, sharp rock. Alan reeled and tumbled from the climber, stunned, barely managing to twist to his side before landing. The air whooshed out of his lungs and tears sprang into his eyes.
Gingerly, he touched his head. His fingers came away wet. Kurt was shouting something, but he couldn’t hear it. Something moved in the bushes, moved into his line of sight. Moved deliberately into his line of sight.
Danny. He had another rock in his hand and he wound up and pitched it. It hit Alan in the forehead and his head snapped back and he grunted.
Kurt’s feet landed in the dirt a few inches from his eyes, big boots a-jangle with chains. Davey flitted out of the bushes and onto the plastic rocking-horses, jumping from the horse to the duck to the chicken, leaving the big springs beneath them to rock and creak. Kurt took two steps toward him, but Davey was away, under the chain link fence and over the edge of the hill leading down to Dupont Street.
“You okay?” Kurt said, crouching down beside him, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Need a doctor?”
“No doctors,” Alan said. “No doctors. I’ll be okay.”
They inched their way back to the car, the world spinning around them. The hard-hats met them on the way out of the Vesta Lunch and their eyes went to Alan’s bloodied face. They looked away. Alan felt his kinship with the woken world around him slip away and knew he’d never be truly a part of it.
He wouldn’t let Kurt walk him up the steps and put him to bed, so instead Kurt watched from the curb until Alan went inside, then gunned the engine and pulled away. It was still morning rush hour, and the Market-dwellers were clacking toward work on hard leather shoes or piling their offspring into minivans.
Alan washed the blood off his scalp and face and took a gingerly shower. When he turned off the water, he heard muffled sounds coming through the open windows. A wailing electric guitar. He went to the window and stuck his head out and saw Krishna sitting on an unmade bed in the unsoundproofed bedroom, in a grimy housecoat, guitar on his lap, eyes closed, concentrating on the screams he was wringing from the instrument’s long neck.
Alan wanted to sleep, but the noise and the throb of his head—going in counterpoint—and the sight of Davey, flicking from climber to bush to hillside, scuttling so quickly Alan was scarce sure he’d seen him, it all conspired to keep him awake.
He bought coffees at the Donut Time on College—the Greek’s wouldn’t be open for hours—and brought it over to Kurt’s storefront, but the lights were out, so he wandered slowly home, sucking back the coffee.
Benny had another seizure halfway up the mountain, stiffening up and falling down before they could catch him.
As Billy lay supine in the dirt, Alan heard a distant howl, not like a wolf, but like a thing that a wolf had caught and is savaging with its jaws. The sound made his neck prickle and when he looked at the little ones, he saw that their eyes were rolling crazily.
“Got to get him home,” Alan said, lifting Benny up with a grunt. The little ones tried to help, but they just got tangled up in Benny’s long loose limbs and so Alan shooed them off, telling them to keep a lookout behind him, look for Davey lurking on an outcropping or in a branch, rock held at the ready.
When they came to the cave mouth again, he heard another one of the screams. Brendan stirred over his shoulders and Alan set him down, heart thundering, looking every way for Davey, who had come back.
“He’s gone away for the night,” Burt said conversationally. He sat up and then gingerly got to his feet. “He’ll be back in the morning, though.”
The cave was destroyed. Alan’s books, Ern-Felix-Grad’s toys were smashed. Their clothes were bubbling in the hot spring in rags and tatters. Brian’s carvings were broken and smashed. Schoolbooks were ruined.
“You all right?” Alan said.
Brian dusted himself off and stretched his arms and legs out. “I’ll be fine,” he said. “It’s not me he’s after.”
Alan stared blankly as the brothers tidied up the cave and made piles of their belongings. The little ones looked scared, without any of the hardness he remembered from that day when they’d fought it out on the hillside.
Benny retreated to his perch, but before the sun set and the cave darkened, he brought a couple blankets down and dropped them beside the nook where Alan slept. He had his baseball bat with him, and it made a good, solid aluminum sound when he leaned it against the wall.
Silently, the small ones crossed the cave with a pile of their own blankets, George bringing up the rear with a torn T-shirt stuffed with sharp stones.
Alan looked at them and listened to the mountain breathe around them. It had been years since his father had had anything to say to them. It had been years since their mother had done anything except wash the clothes. Was there a voice in the cave now? A wind? A smell?
He couldn’t smell anything. He couldn’t hear anything. Benny propped himself up against the cave wall with a blanket around his shoulders and the baseball bat held loose and ready between his knees.
A smell then, on the wind. Sewage and sulfur. A stink of fear.
Alan looked to his brothers, then he got up and left the cave without a look back. He wasn’t going to wait for Davey to come to him.
The night had come up warm, and the highway sounds down at the bottom of the hill mingled with the spring breeze in the new buds on the trees and the new needles on the pines, the small sounds of birds and bugs foraging in the new year. Alan slipped out the cave mouth and looked around into the twilight, hoping for a glimpse of something out of the ordinary, but apart from an early owl and a handful of fireflies sparking off like distant stars, he saw nothing amiss.
He padded around the mountainside, stooped down low, stopping every few steps to listen for footfalls. At the high, small entrance to the golems’ cave, he paused, lay on his belly, and slowly peered around the fissure.
It had been years since Alvin had come up to the golems’ cave, years since one had appeared in their father’s cave. They had long ago ceased bringing their kills to the threshold of the boys’ cave, ceased leaving pelts in neat piles
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