Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town - Cory Doctorow (best classic books to read .txt) 📗

grass through his legs, digging to loose soil, digging to a cold hand.

A cold hand, protruding from the snow now, from the soil, some of the snow red-brown with blood. A skinny, freckled hand, a fingernail missing, torn off leaving behind an impression, an inverse fingernail. A hand, an arm. Not attached to anything. He set it to one side, dug, found another hand. Another arm. A leg. A head.

She was beaten, bruised, eyes swollen and two teeth missing, ear torn, hair caked with blood. Her beautiful head fell from his shaking cold hands. He didn't want to dig anymore, but he had to, because it was the secret, and it had to be kept, and --

-- he buried her in Caleb, piled dirt grass snow on her parts, and his eyes were dry and he didn't sob.

It was a long autumn and a long winter and a long spring that year, unwiring the Market. Alan fell into the familiar rhythm of the work of a new venture, rising early, dossing late, always doing two or three things at once: setting up meetings, sweet-talking merchants, debugging his process on the fly.

His first victory came from the Greek, who was no pushover. The man was over seventy, and had been pouring lethal coffee and cheap beer down the throats of Kensington's hipsters for decades and had steadfastly refused every single crackpot scheme hatched by his customers.

"Larry," Andy said, "I have a proposal for you and you're going to hate it."

"I hate it already," the Greek said. His dapper little mustache twitched. It was not even seven a.m. yet, and the Greek was tinkering with the guts of his espresso delivery system, making it emit loud hisses and tossing out evil congealed masses of sin-black coffee grounds.

"What if I told you it wouldn't cost you anything?"

"Maybe I'd hate it a little less."

"Here's the pitch," Alan said, taking a sip of the thick, steaming coffee the Greek handed to him in a minuscule cup. He shivered as the stuff coated his tongue. "Wow."

The Greek gave him half a smile, which was his version of roaring hilarity.

"Here's the pitch. Me and that punk kid, Kurt, we're working on a community Internet project for the Market."

"Computers?" the Greek said.

"Yup," Alan said.

"Pah," the Greek said.

Anders nodded. "I knew you were going to say that. But don't think of this as a computer thing, okay? Think of this as a free speech thing. We're putting in a system to allow people all over the Market -- and someday, maybe, the whole city -- to communicate for free, in private, without permission from anyone. They can send messages, they can get information about the world, they can have conversations. It's like a library and a telephone and a caf� all at once."

Larry poured himself a coffee. "I hate when they come in here with computers. They sit forever at their tables, and they don't talk to nobody, it's like having a place full of statues or zombies."

"Well, sure," Alan said. "If you're all alone with a computer, you're just going to fall down the rabbit hole. You're in your own world and cut off from the rest of the world. But once you put those computers on the network, they become a way to talk to anyone else in the world. For free! You help us with this network -- all we want from you is permission to stick up a box over your sign and patch it into your power, you won't even know it's there -- and those customers won't be antisocial, they'll be socializing, over the network."

"You think that's what they'll do if I help them with the network?"

He started to say, Absolutely, but bit it back, because Larry's bullshit antennae were visibly twitching. "No, but some of them will. You'll see them in here, talking, typing, typing, talking. That's how it goes. The point is that we don't know how people are going to use this network yet, but we know that it's a social benefit."

"You want to use my electricity?"

"Well, yeah."

"So it's not free."

"Not entirely," Alan said. "You got me there."

"Aha!" the Greek said.

"Look, if that's a deal breaker, I'll personally come by every day and give you a dollar for the juice. Come on, Larry -- the box we want to put in, it's just a repeater to extend the range of the network. The network already reaches to here, but your box will help it go farther. You'll be the first merchant in the Market to have one. I came to you first because you've been here the longest. The others look up to you. They'll see it and say, 'Larry has one, it must be all right.'"

The Greek downed his coffee and smoothed his mustache. "You are a bullshit artist, huh? All right, you put your box in. If my electricity bills are too high, though, I take it down."

"That's a deal," Andy said. "How about I do it this morning, before you get busy? Won't take more than a couple minutes."

The Greek's was midway between his place and Kurt's, and Kurt hardly stirred when he let himself in to get an access point from one of the chipped shelving units before going back to his place to get his ladder and Makita drill. It took him most of the morning to get it securely fastened over the sign, screws sunk deep enough into the old, spongy wood to survive the build up of ice and snow that would come with the winter. Then he had to wire it into the sign, which took longer than he thought it would, too, but then it was done, and the idiot lights started blinking on the box Kurt had assembled.

"And what, exactly, are you doing up there, Al?" Kurt said, when he finally stumbled out of bed and down the road for his afternoon breakfast coffee.

"Larry's letting us put up an access point," he said, wiping the pigeon shit off a wire preparatory to taping it down. He descended the ladder and wiped his hands off on his painter's pants. "That'll be ten bucks, please."

Kurt dug out a handful of coins and picked out enough loonies and toonies to make ten dollars, and handed it over. "You talked the Greek into it?" he hissed. "How?"

"I kissed his ass without insulting his intelligence."

"Neat trick," Kurt said, and they had a little partner-to-partner high-five. "I'd better login to that thing and get it onto the network, huh?"

"Yeah," Anders said. "I'm gonna order some lunch, lemme get you something."

What they had done, was they had hacked the shit out of those boxes that Kurt had built in his junkyard of a storefront of an apartment.

"These work?" Alan said. He had three of them in a big catering tub from his basement that he'd sluiced clean. The base stations no longer looked like they'd been built out of garbage. They'd switched to low-power Mini-ATX motherboards that let them shrink the hardware down to small enough to fit in a 50-dollar all-weather junction box from Canadian Tire.

Adam vaguely recognized the day's street-kids as regulars who'd been hanging around the shop for some time, and they gave him the hairy eyeball when he had the audacity to question Kurt. These kids of Kurt's weren't much like the kids he'd had working for him over the years. They might be bright, but they were a lot...angrier. Some of the girls were cutters, with knife scars on their forearms. Some of the boys looked like they'd been beaten up a few times too many on the streets, like they were spoiling for a fight. Alan tried to unfocus his eyes when he was in the front of Kurt's shop, to not see any of them too closely.

"They work," Kurt said. He smelled terrible, a combination of garbage and sweat, and he had the raccoon-eyed jitters he got when he stayed up all night. "I tested them twice."

"You built me a spare?" Alan said, examining the neat lines of hot glue that gasketed the sturdy rubberized antennae in place, masking the slightly melted edges left behind by the drill press.

"You don't need a spare," Kurt said. Alan knew that when he got touchy like this, he had to be very careful or he'd blow up, but he wasn't going to do another demo Kurt's way. They'd done exactly one of those, at a Toronto District School Board superintendents meeting, when Alan had gotten the idea of using schools' flagpoles and backhaul as test beds for building out the net. It had been a debacle, needless to say. Two of the access points had been permanently installed on either end of Kurt's storefront and the third had been in storage for a month since it was last tested.

One of the street kids, a boy with a pair of improbably enormous raver shoes, looked up at Alan. "We've tested these all. They work."

Kurt puffed up and gratefully socked the kid in the shoulder. "We did."

"Fine," Adam said patiently. "But can we make sure they work now?"

"They'll work," Kurt had said when Alan told him that he wanted to test the access points out before they took them to the meeting. "It's practically solid-state. They're running off the standard distribution. There's almost no configuration."

Which may or may not have been true -- it certainly sounded plausible to Alan's lay ear -- but it didn't change the fact that once they powered up the third box, the other two seized up and died. The blinking network lights fell still, and as Kurt hauled out an old VT-100 terminal and plugged it into the serial ports on the backs of his big, ugly, bestickered, and cig-burned PC cases, it became apparent that they had ceased to honor all requests for routing, association, deassociation, DHCP leases, and the myriad of other networking services provided for by the software.

"It's practically solid-state," Kurt said, nearly shouted, after he'd powered down the third box and found that the other two -- previously routing and humming along happily -- refused to come back up into their known-good state. He gave Alan a dirty look, as though his insistence on preflighting were the root of their problems.

The street-kid who'd spoken up had jumped when Kurt raised his voice, then cringed away. Now as Kurt began to tear around the shop, looking through boxes of CDs and dropping things on the floor, the kid all but cowered, and the other three all looked down at the table.

"I'll just reinstall," Kurt said. "That's the beauty of these things. It's a standard distro, I just copy it over, and biff-bam, it'll come right back up. No problem. Take me ten minutes. We've got plenty of time."

Then, five minutes later, "Shit, I forgot that this one has a different mo-bo than the others."

"Mo-bo?" Alan said, amused. He'd spotted the signs of something very finicky gone very wrong and he'd given up any hope of actually doing the demo, so he'd settled in to watch the process without rancor and to learn as much as he could.

"Motherboard," Kurt said, reaching for a spool of blank CDs. "Just got to patch the distribution, recompile, burn it to CD, and reboot, and we're on the road."

Ten minutes later, "Shit."

"Yes?" Alan said.

"Back off, okay?"

"I'm going to call them and let them know we're going to be late."

"We're not going to be late," Kurt said, his fingers going into claws on the keyboard.

"We're already late," Alan said.

"Shit," Kurt said.

"Let's do this," Alan said. "Let's bring down the two that you've got working and