Chapter 11

"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 café 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 show them those, and explain the rest."

They'd had a fight, and Kurt had insisted, as Alan had suspected he would, that he was only a minute or two away from bringing everything back online. Alan kept his cool, made mental notes of the things that went wrong, and put together a plan for avoiding all these problems the next time around.

"Is there a spare?" Alan said.

Kurt sneered and jerked a thumb at his workbench, where another junction box sat, bunny-ear antennae poking out of it. Alan moved it into his tub. "Great," he said. "Tested, right?"

"All permutations tested and ready to go. You know, you're not the boss around here."

"I know it," he said. "Partners." He clapped Kurt on the shoulder, ignoring the damp gray grimy feeling of the clammy T-shirt under his palm.

The shoulder under his palm sagged. "Right," Kurt said. "Sorry."

"Don't be," Alan said. "You've been hard at it. I'll get loaded while you wash up.

Kurt sniffed at his armpit. "Whew," he said. "Yeah, okay."

When Kurt emerged from the front door of his storefront ten minutes later, he looked like he'd at least made an effort. His mohawk and its fins were slicked back and tucked under a baseball hat, his black jeans were unripped and had only one conservative chain joining the wallet in his back pocket to his belt loop. Throw in a clean t-shirt advertising an old technology conference instead of the customary old hardcore band and you had an approximation of the kind of geek that everyone knew was in possession of secret knowledge and hence must be treated with attention, if not respect.

"I feel like such a dilbert," he said.

"You look totally disreputable," Alan said, hefting the tub of their access points into the bed of his truck and pulling the bungees tight around it. "Punk as fuck."

Kurt grinned and ducked his head. "Stop it," he said. "Flatterer."

"Get in the truck," Alan said.

Kurt drummed his fingers nervously on his palms the whole way to Bell offices. Alan grabbed his hand and stilled it. "Stop worrying," he said. "This is going to go great."

"I still don't understand why we're doing this," Kurt said. "They're the phone company. They hate us, we hate them. Can't we just leave it that way?"

"Don't worry, we'll still all hate each other when we get done."

"So why bother?" He sounded petulant and groggy, and Alan reached under his seat for the thermos he'd had filled at the Greek's before heading to Kurt's place. "Coffee," he said, and handed it to Kurt, who groaned and swigged and stopped bitching.

"Why bother is this," Alan said. "We're going to get a lot of publicity for doing this." Kurt snorted into the thermos. "It's going to be a big deal. You know how big a deal this can be. We're going to communicate that to the press, who will communicate it to the public, and then there will be a shitstorm. Radio cops, telco people, whatever -- they're going to try to discredit us. I want to know what they're liable to say."

"Christ, you're dragging me out for that? I can tell you what they'll say. They'll drag out the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse: kiddie porn, terrorists, pirates, and the mafia. They'll tell us that any tool for communicating that they can't tap, log, and switch off is irresponsible. They'll tell us we're stealing from ISPs. It's what they say every time someone tries this: Philly, New York, London. All around the world same song."

Alan nodded. "That's good background -- thanks. I still want to know *how* they say it, what the flaws are in their expression of their argument. And I wanted us to run a demo for some people who we could never hope to sway -- that's a good audience for exposing the flaws in the show. This'll be a good prep session."

"So I pulled an all-nighter and busted my nuts to produce a demo for a bunch of people we don't care about? Thanks a lot."

Alan started to say something equally bitchy back, and then he stopped himself. He knew where this would end up -- a screaming match that would leave both of them emotionally overwrought at a time when they needed cool heads. But he couldn't think of what to tell Kurt in order to placate him. All his life, he'd been in situations like this: confronted by people who had some beef, some grievance, and he'd had no answer for it. Usually he could puzzle out the skeleton of their cause, but sometimes -- times like this -- he was stumped.

He picked at the phrase. *I pulled an all-nighter*. Kurt pulled an all-nighter because he'd left this to the last minute, not because Alan had surprised him with it. He knew that, of course. Was waiting, then, for Alan to bust him on it. To tell him, *This is your fault, not mine.* To tell him *If this demo fails, it's because you fucked off and left it to the last minute.* So he was angry, but not at Alan, he was angry at himself.

*A bunch of people we don't care about,* what was that about? Ah. Kurt knew that they didn't take him seriously in the real world. He was too dirty, too punk-as-fuck, too much of his identity was wrapped up in being alienated and alienating. But he couldn't make his dream come true without Alan's help, either, and so Alan was the friendly face on their enterprise, and he resented that -- feared that in order to keep up his appearance of punk-as-fuckitude, he'd have to go into the meeting cursing and sneering and that Alan would bust him on that, too.

Alan frowned at the steering wheel. He was getting better at understanding people, but that didn't make him necessarily better at being a person. What should he say here?

"That was a really heroic effort, Kurt," he said, biting his lip. "I can tell you put a lot of work into it." He couldn't believe that praise this naked could possibly placate someone of Kurt's heroic cynicism, but Kurt's features softened and he turned his face away, rolled down the window, lit a cigarette.

"I thought I'd never get it done," Kurt said. "I was so sleepy, I felt like I was half-baked. Couldn't concentrate."

*You were up all night because you left it to the last minute*, Alan thought. But Kurt knew that, was waiting to be reassured about it. "I don't know how you get as much done as you do. Must be really hard."

"It's not so bad," Kurt said, dragging on his cigarette and not quite disguising his grin. "It gets easier every time."

"Yeah, we're going to get this down to a science someday," Alan said. "Something we can teach anyone to do."

"That would be so cool," Kurt said, and put his boots up on the dash. "God, you could pick all the parts you needed out of the trash, throw a little methodology at them, and out would pop this thing that destroyed the phone company."

"This is going to be a fun meeting," Alan said.

"Shit, yeah. They're going to be terrified of us."

"Someday. Maybe it starts today."

#

The Bell boardroom looked more like a retail operation than a back office, decked out in brand-consistent livery, from the fabric-dyed rag carpets to the avant-garde lighting fixtures. They were given espressos by the young secretary-barista whose skirt-and-top number was some kind of reinterpreted ravewear outfit toned down for a corporate workplace.

"So this is the new Bell," Kurt said, once she had gone. "Our tax dollars at work."

"This is good work," Alan said, gesturing at the blown-up artwork of pan-ethnic models who were extraordinary- but not beautiful-looking on the walls. The Bell redesign had come at the same time as the telco was struggling back from the brink of bankruptcy, and the marketing firm they'd hired to do the work had made its name on the strength of the campaign. "Makes you feel like using a phone is a really futuristic, cutting-edge activity," he said.

His contact at the semiprivatized corporation was a young kid who shopped at one of his protégés' designer furniture store. He was a young turk who'd made a name for himself quickly in the company through a couple of ISP acquisitions at fire-sale prices after the dot-bomb, which he'd executed flawlessly, integrating the companies into Bell's network with hardly a hiccup. He'd been very polite and guardedly enthusiastic when Alan called him, and had invited him down to meet some of his colleagues.

Though Alan had never met him, he recognized him the minute he walked in as the person who had to go with the confident voice he'd heard on the phone.

"Lyman," he said, standing up and holding out his hand. The guy was slightly Asian-looking, tall, with a sharp suit that managed to look casual and expensive at the same time.

He shook Alan's hand and said, "Thanks for coming down." Alan introduced him to Kurt, and then Lyman introduced them both to his colleagues, a gender-parity posse of young, smart-looking people, along with one graybeard (literally -- he had a Unix beard of great rattiness and gravitas) who had no fewer than seven devices on his belt, including a line tester and a GPS.

Once they were seated, Alan snuck a look at Kurt, who had narrowed his eyes and cast his gaze down onto the business cards he'd been handed. Alan hadn't been expecting this -- he'd figured on finding himself facing down a group of career bureaucrats -- and Kurt was clearly thrown for a loop, too.

"Well, Alan, Kurt, it's nice to meet you," Lyman said. "I hear you're working on some exciting stuff."

"We are," Alan said. "We're building a city-wide mesh wireless network using unlicensed spectrum that will provide high-speed, Internet connectivity absolutely gratis."

"That's ambitious," Lyman said, without the skepticism that Alan had assumed would greet his statement. "How's it coming?"

"Well, we've got a bunch of Kensington Market covered," Alan said. "Kurt's been improving the hardware design and we've come up with something cheap and reproducible." He opened his tub and handed out the access points, housed in gray high-impact plastic junction boxes.

Lyman accepted one solemnly and passed it on to his graybeard, then passed the next to an East Indian woman in horn-rim glasses whose bitten-down fingernails immediately popped the latch and began lightly stroking the hardware inside, tracing the connections. The third landed in front of Lyman himself.

"So, what do they do?"

Alan nodded at Kurt. Kurt put his hands on the table and took a breath. "They've got three network interfaces; we can do any combination of wired and wireless cards. The OS is loaded on a flash-card; it auto-detects any wireless cards and auto-configures them to seek out other access points. When it finds a peer, they negotiate a client-server relationship based on current load, and the client then associates with the server. There's a key exchange that we use to make sure that rogue APs don't sneak into the mesh, and a self-healing routine we use to switch routes if the connection drops or we start to see too much packet loss."

The graybeard looked up. "It izz a radio vor talking to Gott!" he said. Lyman's posse laughed, and after a second, so did Kurt.

Alan must have looked puzzled, for Kurt elbowed him in the ribs and said, "It's from Indiana Jones," he said.

"Ha," Alan said. That movie had come out long before he'd come to the city -- he hadn't seen a movie until he was almost 20. As was often the case, the reference to a film made him feel like a Martian.

The graybeard passed his unit on to the others at the table.

"Does it work?" he said.

"Yeah," Kurt said.

"Well, that's pretty cool," he said.

Kurt blushed. "I didn't write the firmware," he said. "Just stuck it together from parts of other peoples' projects."

"So, what's the plan?" Lyman said. "How many of these are you going to need?"

"Hundreds, eventually," Alan said. "But for starters, we'll be happy if we can get enough to shoot down to 151 Front."

"You're going to try to peer with someone there?" The East Indian woman had plugged the AP into a riser under the boardroom table and was examining its blinkenlights.

"Yeah," Alan said. "That's the general idea." He was getting a little uncomfortable -- these people weren't nearly hostile enough to their ideas.

"Well, that's very ambitious," Lyman said. His posse all nodded as though he'd paid them a compliment, though Alan wasn't sure. Ambitious could certainly be code for "ridiculous."

"How about a demo?" the East Indian woman said.

"Course," Kurt said. He dug out his laptop, a battered thing held together with band stickers and gaffer tape, and plugged in a wireless card. The others started to pass him back his access points but he shook his head. "Just plug 'em in," he said. "Here or in another room nearby -- that'll be cooler."

A couple of the younger people at the table picked up two of the APs and headed for the hallway. "Put one on my desk," Lyman told them, "and the other at reception."

Alan felt a sudden prickle at the back of his neck, though he didn't know why -- just a random premonition that they were on the brink of something very bad happening. This wasn't the kind of vision that Brad would experience, that far away look followed by a snap-to into the now, eyes filled with certitude about the dreadful future. More like a goose walking over his grave, a tickle of badness.

The East Indian woman passed Kurt a VGA cable that snaked into the table's guts and down into the riser on the floor. She hit a button on a remote and an LCD projector mounted in the ceiling began to hum, projecting a rectangle of white light on one wall. Kurt wiggled it into the backside of his computer and spun down the thumbscrews, hit a button, and then his desktop was up on the wall, ten feet high. His wallpaper was a picture of a group of black-clad, kerchiefed protesters charging a police line of batons and gas-grenades. A closer look revealed that the protester running in the lead was probably Kurt.

He tapped at his touchpad and a window came up, showing relative strength signals for two of the access points. A moment later, the third came online.

"I've been working with this network visualizer app," Kurt said. "It tries to draw logical maps of the network topology, with false coloring denoting packet loss between hops -- that's a pretty good proxy for distance between two APs."

"More like the fade," the graybeard said.

"Fade is a function of distance," Kurt said. Alan heard the dismissal in his voice and knew they were getting into a dick-swinging match.

"Fade is a function of geography and topology," the graybeard said quietly.

Kurt waved his hand. "Whatever -- sure. Geography. Topology. Distance. It's a floor wax and a dessert topping."

"I'm not being pedantic," the graybeard said.

"You're not just being pedantic," Lyman said gently, watching the screen on which four animated jaggy boxes were jumbling and dancing as they reported on the throughput between the routers and the laptop.