Chapter 12

"Not just pedantic," the graybeard said. "If you have a *lot* of these boxes in known locations with known nominal throughput, you can use them as a kind of sensor array. When throughput drops between point foo and point bar, it will tell you something about the physical world between foo and bar."

Kurt looked up from his screen with a thoughtful look. "Huh?"

"Like, whether a tree had lost its leaves in the night. Or whether there were a lot of people standing around in a normally desolate area. Or whether there are lots of devices operating between foo and bar that are interfering with them."

Kurt nodded slowly. "The packets we lose could be just as interesting as the packets we don't lose," he said.

A light went on in Alan's head. "We could be like jazz critics, listening to the silences instead of the notes," he said. They all looked at him.

"That's very good," Lyman said. "Like a jazz critic." He smiled.

Alan smiled back.

"What are we seeing, Craig?" Lyman said.

"Kurt," Alan said.

"Right, Kurt," he said. "Sorry."

"We're seeing the grid here. See how the access points go further up the spectrum the more packets they get? I'm associated with that bad boy right there." He gestured to the box blinking silently in the middle of the board room table. "And it's connected to one other, which is connected to a third."

Lyman picked up his phone and dialed a speed-dial number. "Hey, can you unplug the box on my desk?"

A moment later, one of the boxes on the display winked out. "Watch this," Kurt said, as the remaining two boxes were joined by a coruscating line. "See that? Self-healing. Minimal packet loss. Beautiful."

"That's hot," Lyman said. "That makes me all wet."

They chuckled nervously at his crudity. "Seriously."

"Here," Kurt said, and another window popped up, showing twenty or more boxes with marching ant trails between them. "That's a time-lapse of the Kensington network. The boxes are running different versions of the firmware, so you can see that in some edge cases, you get a lot more oscillation between two similar signals. We fixed that in the new version."

The graybeard said, "How?"

"We flip a coin," Kurt said, and grinned. "These guys in Denmark ran some simulations, proved that a random toss-up worked as well as any other algorithm, and it's a lot cheaper, computationally."

"So what's going on just to the northeast of center?"

Alan paid attention to the patch of screen indicated. Three access points were playing musical chairs, dropping signal and reacquiring it, dropping it again.

Kurt shrugged. "Bum hardware, I think. We've got volunteers assembling those boxes, from parts."

"Parts?"

Kurt's grin widened. "Yeah. From the trash, mostly. I dumpster-dive for 'em."

They grinned back. "That's very hot," Lyman said.

"We're looking at normalizing the parts for the next revision," Alan said. "We want to be able to use a single distro that works on all of them."

"Oh, sure," Lyman said, but he looked a little disappointed, and so did Kurt.

"Okay, it works," Lyman said. "It works?" he said, nodding the question at his posse. They nodded back. "So what can we do for you?"

Alan chewed his lip, caught himself at it, stopped. He'd anticipated a slugfest, now he was getting strokes.

"How come you're being so nice to us?" Kurt said. "You guys are The Man." He shrugged at Alan. "Someone had to say it."

Lyman smiled. "Yeah, we're the phone company. Big lumbering dinosaur that is thrashing in the tarpit. The spazz dinosaur that's so embarrassed all the other dinosaurs that none of them want to rescue us."

"Heh, spazz dinosaur," the East Indian woman said, and they all laughed.

"Heh," Kurt said. "But seriously."

"Seriously," Lyman said. "Seriously. Think a second about the scale of a telco. Of this telco. The thousands of kilometers of wire in the ground. Switching stations. Skilled linesmen and cable-pullers. Coders. Switches. Backhaul. Peering arrangements. We've got it all. Ever get on a highway and hit a flat patch where you can't see anything to the horizon except the road and the telephone poles and the wires? Those are *our wires*. It's a lot of goodness, especially for a big, evil phone company.

"So we've got a lot of smart hackers. A lot of cool toys. A gigantic budget. The biggest network any of us could ever hope to manage -- like a model train set the size of a city.

"That said, we're hardly nimble. Moving a Bell is like shifting a battleship by tapping it on the nose with a toothpick. It can be done, but you can spend ten years doing it and still not be sure if you've made any progress. From the outside, it's easy to mistake 'slow' for 'evil.' It's easy to make that mistake from the inside, too.

"But I don't let it get me down. It's *good* for a Bell to be slow and plodding, most of the time. You don't want to go home and discover that we've dispatched the progress-ninjas to upgrade all your phones with video screens and a hush mode that reads your thoughts. Most of our customers still can't figure out voice mail. Some of them can't figure out touch-tone dialing. So we're slow. Conservative. But we can do lots of killer R&D, we can roll out really hot upgrades on the back end, and we can provide this essential service to the world that underpins its ability to communicate. We're not just cool, we're essential.

"So you come in and you show us your really swell and interesting meshing wireless data boxes, and I say, 'That is damned cool.' I think of ways that it could be part of a Bell's business plan in a couple decades' time."

"A couple decades?" Kurt squawked. "Jesus Christ, I expect to have a chip in my brain and a jetpack in a couple decades' time."

"Which is why you'd be an idiot to get involved with us," Lyman said.

"Who wants to get involved with you?" Kurt said.

"No one," Alan said, putting his hands on the table, grateful that the conflict had finally hove above the surface. "That's not what we're here for."

"Why are you here, Alvin?" Lyman said.

"We're here because we're going into the moving-data-around trade, in an ambitious way, and because you folks are the most ambitious moving-data-around tradespeople in town. I thought we'd come by and let you know what we're up to, see if you have any advice for us."

"Advice, huh?"

"Yeah. You've got lots of money and linesmen and switches and users and so forth. You probably have some kind of well-developed cosmology of connectivity, with best practices and philosophical ruminations and tasty metaphors. And I hear that you, personally, are really good at making geeks and telcos play together. Since we're going to be a kind of telco" -- Kurt startled and Alan kicked him under the table -- "I thought you could help us get started right."

"Advice," Lyman said, drumming his fingers. He stood up and paced.

"One: don't bother. This is at least two orders of magnitude harder than you think it is. There aren't enough junk computers in all of Toronto's landfills to blanket the city in free wireless. The range is nothing but three hundred feet, right? Less if there are trees and buildings, and this city is all trees and buildings.

"Two: don't bother. The liability here is stunning. The gear you're building is nice and all, but you're putting it into people's hands and you've got no idea what they're going to do with it. They're going to hack in bigger antennae and signal amplifiers. The radio cops will be on your ass day and night.

"What's more, they're going to open it up to the rest of the world and any yahoo who has a need to hide what he's up to is going to use your network to commit unspeakable acts -- you're going to be every pirate's best friend and every terrorist's safest haven.

"Three: don't bother. This isn't going to work. You've got a cute little routing algorithm that runs with three nodes, and you've got a model that may scale up to 300, but by the time you get to 30 thousand, you're going to be hitting so much latency and dropping so many packets on the floor and incurring so much signaling overhead that it'll be a gigantic failure.

"You want my advice? Turn this into a piece of enterprise technology: a cheap way of rolling out managed solutions in hotels and office towers and condos -- building-wide meshes, not city-wide. Those guys will pay -- they pay a hundred bucks per punchdown now for wired networking, so they'll gladly cough up a thousand bucks a floor for these boxes, and you'll only need one on every other story. And those people *use* networks, they're not joe consumer who doesn't have the first clue what to do with a network connection."

Kurt had stiffened up when the rant began, and once he heard the word "consumer," he began to positively vibrate. Alan gave him a warning nudge with his elbow.

"You're shitting me, right?" Kurt said.

"You asked me for advice --" Lyman said, mildly.

"You think we're going to bust our balls to design and deploy all this hardware so that business hotels can save money on cable-pullers? Why the hell would we want to do that?"

"Because it pays pretty well," Lyman said. He was shaking his head a little, leaning back from the table, and his posse picked up on it, going slightly restless and fidgety, with a room-wide rustle of papers and clicking of pens and laptop latches.

Alan held up his hand. "Lyman, I'm sorry, we've been unclear. We're not doing this as a money-making venture --" Kurt snorted. "It's about serving the public interest. We want to give our neighbors access to tools and ideas that they wouldn't have had before. There's something fundamentally undemocratic about charging money for communications: It means that the more money you have, the more you get to communicate. So we're trying to fix that, in some small way. We are heartily appreciative of your advice, though --"

Lyman held up a hand. "Sorry, Alan, I don't mean to interrupt, but there was something I wanted to relate to you two, and I've got to go in about five minutes." Apparently, the meeting was at an end. "And I had made myself a note to tell you two about this when I discovered it last week. Can I have the floor?"

"Of course," Alan said.

"I took a holiday last week," Lyman said. "Me and my girlfriend. We went to Switzerland to see the Alps and to visit her sister, who's doing something for the UN in Geneva. So her sister, she's into, I don't know, saving children from vampires in Afghanistan or something, and she has Internet access at the office, and can't see any reason to drop a connection in at home. So there I was, wandering the streets of Geneva at seven in the morning, trying to find a WiFi connection so I can get my email and find out how many ways I can enlarge my penis this week.

"No problem -- outside every hotel and most of the cafés, I can find a signal for a network called Swisscom. I log on to the network and I fire up a browser and I get a screen asking me for my password. Well, I don't have one, but after poking around, I find out that I can buy a card with a temporary password on it. So I wait until some of the little smoke shops open and start asking them if they sell Swisscom Internet Cards, in my terrible, miserable French, and after chuckling at my accent, they look at me and say, 'I have no clue what you're talking about,' shrug, and go back to work.

"Then I get the idea to go and ask at the hotels. The first one, the guy tells me that they only sell cards to guests, since they're in short supply. The cards are in short supply! Three hotels later, they allow as how they'll sell me a 30-minute card. Oh, that's fine. Thirty whole minutes of connectivity. Whoopee. And how much will that be? Only about a zillion Swiss pesos. Don't they sell cards of larger denominations? Oh sure, two hours, 24 hours, seven days -- and each one costs about double the last, so if you want, you can get a seven day card for about as much as you'd spend on a day's worth of connectivity in 30-minute increments -- about three hundred dollars Canadian for a week, just FYI.

"Well, paying 300 bucks for a week's Internet is ghastly, but very Swiss, where they charge you if you have more than two bits of cheese at breakfast, and hell, I could afford it. But three hundred bucks for a day's worth of 30-minute cards? Fuck that. I was going to have to find a seven-day card or bust. So I ask at a couple more hotels and finally find someone who'll explain to me that Swisscom is the Swiss telco, and that they have a retail storefront a couple blocks away where they'd sell me all the cards I wanted, in whatever denominations I require.

"By this time, it's nearly nine a.m. and I'm thinking that my girlfriend and her sister are probably up and eating a big old breakfast and wondering where the fuck I am, but I've got too much invested in this adventure to give up when I'm so close to finding the treasure. And so I hied myself off to the Swisscom storefront, which is closed, even though the sign says they open at nine and by now it's nine-oh-five, and so much for Swiss punctuality. But eventually this sneering kid with last year's faux-hawk comes out and opens the door and then disappears up the stairs at the back of the show room to the second floor, where I follow him. I get up to his counter and say, '*Pardonnez moi*,' but he holds up a hand and points behind me and says, 'Numero!' I make an elaborate shrug, but he just points again and says, '*Numero*!' I shrug again and he shakes his head like he's dealing with some kind of unbelievable moron, and then he steps out from behind his counter and stalks over to a little touchscreen. He takes my hand by the wrist and plants my palm on the touchscreen and a little ribbon of paper with zero-zero-one slides out. I take it and he goes back behind his counter and says, '*Numero un*!'

"I can tell this is not going to work out, but I need to go through the motions. I go to the counter and ask for a seven-day card. He opens his cash drawer and paws through a pile of cards, then smiles and shakes his head and says, sorry, all sold out. My girlfriend is probably through her second cup of coffee and reading brochures for nature walks in the Alps at this point, so I say, fine, give me a one-day card. He takes a moment to snicker at my French, then says, so sorry, sold out those, too. Two hours? Nope. Half an hour? Oh, those we got.

"Think about this for a second. I am sitting there with my laptop in hand, at six in the morning, on a Swiss street, connected to Swisscom's network, a credit card in my other hand, wishing to give them some money in exchange for the use of their network, and instead I have to go chasing up and down every hotel in Geneva for a card, which is not to be found. So I go to the origin of these cards, the Swisscom store, and they're sold out, too. This is not a T-shirt or a loaf of bread: there's no inherent scarcity in two-hour or seven-day cards. The cards are just a convenient place to print some numbers, and all you need to do to make more numbers is pull them out of thin air. They're just numbers. We have as many of them as we could possibly need. There's no sane, rational universe in which all the 'two-hour' numbers sell out, leaving nothing behind but '30-minute' numbers.

"So that's pretty bad. It's the kind of story that net-heads tell about Bell-heads all around the world. It's the kind of thing I've made it my business to hunt down and exterminate here wherever I find it. So I just wrote off my email for that week and came home and downloaded a hundred thousand spams about my cock's insufficient dimensions and went in to work and I told everyone I could find about this, and they all smiled nervously and none of them seemed to find it as weird and ridiculous as me, and then, that Friday, I went into a meeting about our new high-speed WiFi service that we're piloting in Montreal and the guy in charge of the program hands out these little packages to everyone in the meeting, a slide deck and some of the marketing collateral and -- a little prepaid 30-minute access card.

"That's what we're delivering. Prepaid cards for Internet access. *Complet avec* number shortages and business travelers prowling the bagel joints of Rue St Urbain looking for a shopkeeper whose cash drawer has a few seven-day cards kicking around.

"And you come in here, and you ask me, you ask the ruling Bell, what advice do we have for your metro-wide free info-hippie wireless dumpster-diver anarcho-network? Honestly -- I don't have a fucking clue. We don't have a fucking clue. We're a telephone company. We don't know how to give away free communications -- we don't even know how to charge for it."

"That was refreshingly honest," Kurt said. "I wanna shake your hand."

He stood up and Lyman stood up and Lyman's posse stood up and they converged on the doorway in an orgy of handshaking and grinning. The graybeard handed over the access point, and the East Indian woman ran off to get the other two, and before they knew it, they were out on the street.

"I liked him," Kurt said.

"I could tell," Alan said.

"Remember you said something about an advisory board? How about if we ask him to join?"

"That is a *tremendous* and deeply weird idea, partner. I'll send out the invite when we get home."

#

Kurt said that the anarchist bookstore would be a slam dunk, but it turned out to be the hardest sell of all.

"I spoke to them last month, they said they were going to run it down in their weekly general meeting. They love it. It's anarcho-radio. Plus, they all want high-speed connectivity in the store so they can webcast their poetry slams. Just go on by and introduce yourself, tell 'em I sent you."

Ambrose nodded and skewered up a hunk of omelet and swirled it in the live yogurt the Greek served, and chewed. "All right," he said, "I'll do it this afternoon. You look exhausted, by the way. Hard night in the salt mines?"

Kurt looked at his watch. "I got about an hour's worth of diving in. I spent the rest of the night breaking up with Monica."

"Monica?"

"The girlfriend."

"Already? I thought you two just got together last month."

Kurt shrugged. "Longest fucking month of my life. All she wanted to do was go clubbing all night. She hated staying over at my place because of the kids coming by in the morning to work on the access points."

"I'm sorry, pal," Andy said. He never knew what to do about failed romance. He'd had no experience in that department since the seventh grade, after all. "You'll find someone else soon enough."

"Too soon!" Kurt said. "We screamed at each other for five hours before I finally got gone. It was probably my fault. I lose my temper too easy. I should be more like you."

"You're a good man, Kurt. Don't forget it."

Kurt ground his fists into his eyes and groaned. "I'm such a fuck-up," he said.

Alan tugged Kurt's hand away from his face. "Stop that. You're an extraordinary person. I've never met anyone who has the gifts you possess, and I've met some gifted people. You should be very proud of the work you're doing, and you should be with someone who's equally proud of you."

Kurt visibly inflated. "Thanks, man." They gripped one another's hands for a moment. Kurt swiped at his moist eyes with the sleeve of his colorless grey sweatshirt. "Okay, it's way past my bedtime," he said. "You gonna go to the bookstore today?"

"Absolutely. Thanks for setting them up."

"It was about time I did some of the work, after you got the nut-shop and the cheese place and the Salvadoran pupusa place."

"Kurt, I'm just doing the work that you set in motion. It's all you, this project. I'm just your helper. Sleep well."

Andy watched him slouch off toward home, reeling a little from sleep deprivation and emotional exhaustion. He forked up the rest of his omelet, looked reflexively up at the blinkenlights on the AP over the Greek's sign, just above the apostrophe, where he'd nailed it up two months before. Since then, he'd nailed up five more, each going more smoothly than the last. At this rate, he'd have every main drag in the Market covered by summer. Sooner, if he could offload some of the labor onto one of Kurt's eager kids.

He went back to his porch then, and watched the Market wake up. The traffic was mostly bicycling bankers stopping for a fresh bagel on their way down to the business district. The Market was quite restful. It shuffled like an old man in carpet slippers, setting up streetside produce tables, twiddling the dials of its many radios looking for something with a beat. He watched them roll past, the Salvadoran pupusa ladies, Jamaican Patty Kings, Italian butchers, Vietnamese pho-tenders, and any number of thrift-store hotties, crusty-punks, strung-out artistes, trustafarians and pretty-boy skaters.

As he watched them go past, he had an idea that he'd better write his story soon, or maybe never. Maybe never nothing: Maybe this was his last season on earth. Felt like that, apocalyptic. Old debts, come to be settled.

He shuffled upstairs and turned on the disused computer, which had sat on his desk for months and was therefore no longer top-of-the-line, no longer nearly so exciting, no longer so fraught with promise. Still, he made himself sit in his seat for two full hours before he allowed himself to get up, shower, dress, and head over to the anarchist bookstore, taking a slow route that gave him the chance to eyeball the lights on all the APs he'd installed.

The anarchist bookstore opened lackadaisically at 11 or eleven-thirty or sometimes noon, so he'd brought along a nice old John D. MacDonald paperback with a gun-toting bikini girl on the cover to read. He liked MacDonald's books: You could always tell who the villainesses were because the narrator made a point of noting that they had fat asses. It was as good a way as any to shorthand the world, he thought.

The guy who came by to open the store was vaguely familiar to Alfred, a Kensington stalwart of about forty, whose thrifted slacks and unraveling sweater weren't hip so much as they were just plain old down and out. He had a frizzed-out, no-cut haircut, and carried an enormous army-surplus backpack that sagged with beat-up lefty books and bags of organic vegetariania.

"Hi there!" Arnold said pocketing the book and dusting off his hands.

"Hey," the guy said into his stringy beard, fumbling with a keyring. "I'll be opening up in a couple minutes, okay? I know I'm late. It's a bad day. okay?"

Arnold held his hands up, palms out. "Hey, no problem at all! Take as much time as you need. I'm in no hurry."

The anarchist hustled around inside the shop, turning on lights, firing up the cash-register and counting out a float, switching on the coffee machine. Alan waited patiently by the doorway, holding the door open with his toe when the clerk hauled out a rack of discounted paperbacks and earning a dirty look for his trouble.

"Okay, we're open," the anarchist said looking Alan in the toes. He turned around and banged back into the shop and perched himself behind the counter, opening a close-typed punk newspaper and burying his nose in it.

Adam walked in behind him and stood at the counter, politely, waiting. The anarchist looked up from his paper and shook his head exasperatedly. "Yes?"

Alan extended his hand. "Hi, I'm Archie, I work with Kurt, over on Augusta?"

The anarchist stared at his hand, then shook it limply.

"Okay," he said.

"So, Kurt mentioned that he'd spoken to your collective about putting a wireless repeater up over your sign?"

The anarchist shook his head. "We decided not to do that, okay." He went back to his paper.

Andrew considered him for a moment. "So, what's your name?"

"I don't like to give out my name," the anarchist said. "Call me Waldo, all right?"

"All right," Andy said smiling. "That's fine by me. So, can I ask why you decided not to do it?"