Chapter 6

"I'd like to speak to Krishna," Alan said from under the hood of his poncho.

There was an awkward silence. Finally, Natalie said, "He's not home."

"I don't believe you," Alan said. "And it's urgent, and I'm not in the mood to play around. Can you get Krishna for me, Natalie?"

"I told you," she said, not meeting his eyes, "he's not here."

"That's enough," Alan said in his boss voice, his more-in-anger-than-in-sorrow voice. "Get him, Natalie. You don't need to be in the middle of this -- it's not right for him to ask you to. Get him."

Natalie closed the door and he heard the deadbolt turn. *Is she going to fetch him, or is she locking me out?*

He was on the verge of hammering the buzzer again, but he got his answer. Krishna opened the door and stepped onto the dripping porch, bulling Alan out with his chest.

He smiled grimly at Alan and made a well-go-on gesture.

"What did you see?" Alan said, his voice tight but under control.

"Saw you and that fat guy," Krishna said. "Saw you rooting around in the park. Saw him disappear down the fountain."

"He's my brother," Alan said.

"So what, he ain't heavy? He's fat, but I expect there's a reason for that. I've seen your kind before, Adam. I don't like you, and I don't owe you any favors." He turned and reached for the screen door.

"No," Alan said, taking him by the wrist, squeezing harder than was necessary. "Not yet. You said, 'Lost another one.' What other one, Krishna? What else did you see?"

Krishna gnawed on his neatly trimmed soul patch. "Let go of me, Andrew," he said, almost too softly to be heard over the rain.

"Tell me what you saw," Alan said. "Tell me, and I'll let you go." His other hand balled into a fist. "Goddammit, *tell me*!" Alan yelled, and twisted Krishna's arm behind his back.

"I called the cops," Krishna said. "I called them again and they're on their way. Let me go, freak show."

"I don't like you, either, Krishna," Alan said, twisting the arm higher. He let go suddenly, then stumbled back as Krishna scraped the heel of his motorcycle boot down his shin and hammered it into the top of his foot.

He dropped to one knee and grabbed his foot while Krishna slipped into the house and shot the lock. Then he hobbled home as quickly as he could. He tried to pace off the ache in his foot, but the throbbing got worse, so he made himself a drippy ice pack and sat on the sofa in the immaculate living room and rocked back and forth, holding the ice to his bare foot.

#

At five, Davey graduated from torturing animals to beating up on smaller children. Alan took him down to the school on the day after Labor Day, to sign him up for kindergarten. He was wearing his stiff new blue jeans and sneakers, his knapsack stuffed with fresh binders and pencils. Finding out about these things had been Alan's first experience with the wide world, a kindergartner sizing up his surroundings at speed so that he could try to fit in. David was a cute kid and had the benefit of Alan's experience. He had a foxy little face and shaggy blond hair, all clever smiles and awkward winks, and for all that he was still a monster.

They came and got Alan twenty minutes after classes started, when his new home-room teacher was still briefing them on the rules and regulations for junior high students. He was painfully aware of all the eyes on his back as he followed the office lady out of the portable and into the old school building where the kindergarten and the administration was housed.

"We need to reach your parents," the office lady said, once they were alone in the empty hallways of the old building.

"You can't," Alan said. "They don't have a phone."

"Then we can drive out to see them," the office lady said. She smelled of artificial floral scent and Ivory soap, like the female hygiene aisle at the drugstore.

"Mom's still real sick," Alan said, sticking to his traditional story.

"Your father, then," the office lady said. He'd had variations on this conversation with every office lady at the school, and he knew he'd win it in the end. Meantime, what did they want?

"My dad's, you know, gone," he said. "Since I was a little kid." That line always got the office ladies, "since I was a little kid," made them want to write it down for their family Christmas newsletters.

The office lady smiled a powdery smile and put her hand on his shoulder. "All right, Alan, come with me."

Davey was sitting on the dusty sofa in the vice principal's office. He punched the sofa cushion rhythmically. "Alan," he said when the office lady led him in.

"Hi, Dave," Alan said. "What's going on?"

"They're stupid here. I hate them." He gave the sofa a particularly vicious punch.

"I'll get Mr Davenport," the office lady said, and closed the door behind her.

"What did you do?" Alan asked.

"She wouldn't let me play!" David said, glaring at him.

"Who wouldn't?"

"A girl! She had the blocks and I wanted to play with them and she wouldn't let me!"

"What did you hit her with?" Alan asked, dreading the answer.

"A block," David said, suddenly and murderously cheerful. "I hit her in the eye!"

Alan groaned. The door opened and the vice principal, Mr. Davenport, came in and sat behind his desk. He was the punishment man, the one that no one wanted to be sent in to see.

"Hello, Alan," he said gravely. Alan hadn't ever been personally called before Mr. Davenport, but Billy got into some spot of precognitive trouble from time to time, rushing out of class to stop some disaster at home or somewhere else in the school. Mr. Davenport knew that Alan was a straight arrow, not someone he'd ever need to personally take an interest in.

He crouched down next to Darren, hitching up his slacks. "You must be David," he said, ducking down low to meet Davey's downcast gaze.

Davey punched the sofa.

"I'm Mr. Davenport," he said, and extended a hand with a big class ring on it and a smaller wedding band.

Davey kicked him in the nose, and the vice principal toppled over backward, whacking his head on the sharp corner of his desk. He tumbled over onto his side and clutched his head. "Mother*fucker*!" he gasped, and Davey giggled maniacally.

Alan grabbed Davey's wrist and bent his arm behind his back, shoving him across his knee. He swatted the little boy on the ass as hard as he could, three times. "Don't you ever --" Alan began.

The vice principal sat up, still clutching his head. "That's enough!" he said, catching Alan's arm.

"Sorry," Alan said. "And David's sorry, too, right?" He glared at David.

"You're a stupid mother*fucker*!" David said, and squirmed off of Alan's lap.

The vice principal's lips tightened. "Alan," he said quietly, "take your brother into the hallway. I am going to write a note that your mother will have to sign before David comes back to school, after his two-week suspension."

David glared at them each in turn. "I'm not coming back to this mother*fucker* place!" he said.

He didn't.

#

The rain let up by afternoon, leaving a crystalline, fresh-mown air hanging over the Market.

Andrew sat in his office by his laptop and watched the sun come out. He needed to find Ed, needed to find Frank, needed to find Grant, but he was out of practice when it came to the ways of the mountain and its sons. Whenever he tried to imagine a thing to do next, his mind spun and the worldless howling thing inside him stirred. The more he tried to remember what it was like to be a son of the mountain, the more he felt something he'd worked very hard for, his delicate normalcy, slipping away.

So he put his soaked clothes in the dryer, clamped his laptop under his arm, and went out. He moped around the park and the fountain, but the stroller moms whose tots were splashing in the wading pool gave him sufficient dirty looks that he walked up to the Greek's, took a table on the patio, and ordered a murderously strong cup of coffee.

He opened up the screen and rotated around the little café table until the screen was in the shade and his wireless card was aligned for best reception from the yagi antenna poking out of his back window. He opened up a browser and hit MapQuest, then brought up a street-detailed map of the Market. He pasted it into his CAD app and started to mark it up, noting all the different approaches to his house that Davey might take the next time he came. The maps soothed him, made him feel like a part of the known world.

Augusta Avenue and Oxford were both out; even after midnight, when the stores were all shuttered, there was far too much foot traffic for Davey to pass by unnoticed. But the alleys that mazed the back ways were ideal. Some were fenced off, some were too narrow to pass, but most of them -- he'd tried to navigate them by bicycle once and found himself utterly lost. He'd had to turn around slowly until he spotted the CN Tower and use it to get his bearings.

He poked at the map, sipping the coffee, then ordering another from the Greek's son, who hadn't yet figured out that he was a regular and so sneered at his laptop with undisguised contempt. "Computers, huh?" he said. "Doesn't anyone just read a book anymore?"

"I used to own a bookstore," Alan said, then held up a finger and moused over to his photo album and brought up the thumbnails of his old bookstore. "See?"

The Greek's son, thirty with a paunch and sweat-rings under the pits of his white "The Greek's" T-shirt, sat down and looked at the photos. "I remember that place, on Harbord Street, right?"

Alan smiled. "Yup. We lost the store when they blew up the abortion clinic next door," he said. "Insurance paid out, but I wasn't ready to start over with another bookstore."

The Greek's son shook his head. "Another coffee, right?"

"Right," Alan said.

Alan went back to the map, realigning the laptop for optimal reception again.

"You got a wireless card in that?" a young guy at the next table asked. He was dressed in Kensington Market crusty-punk chic, tatts and facial piercings, filth-gray bunchoffuckinggoofs tee, cutoffs, and sweaty high boots draped with chains.

"Yeah," Alan said. He sighed and closed the map window. He wasn't getting anywhere, anyway.

"And you get service here? Where's your access point?" Crusty-punk or no, he sounded as nerdy as any of the Web-heads you'd find shopping for bargains on CD blanks on College Street.

"Three blocks that way," Alan said, pointing. "Hanging off my house. The network name is 'walesave.'"

"Shit, that's you?" the kid said. "Goddammit, you're clobbering our access points!"

"What access point?"

"Access *points*. ParasiteNet." He indicated a peeling sticker on the lapel of his cut-down leather jacket showing a skull with crossed radio towers underneath it. "I'm trying to get a mesh-net running though all of the Market, and you're hammering me. Jesus, I was ready to rat you out to the radio cops at the Canadian Radio and Television Commission. Dude, you've got to turn down the freaking *gain* on those things."

"What's a mesh-net?"

The kid moved his beer over to Alan's table and sat down. "Okay, so pretend that your laptop is the access point. It radiates more or less equally in all directions, depending on your antenna characteristics and leaving out the RF shadows that microwaves and stucco and cordless phones generate." He arranged the coffee cup and the beer at equal distances from the laptop, then moved them around to demonstrate the coverage area. "Right, so what happens if I'm out of range, over *here* --" he put his beer back on his own table -- "and you want to reach me? Well, you could just turn up the gain on your access point, either by increasing the power so that it radiates farther in all directions, or by focusing the transmissions so they travel farther in a line of sight."

"Right," Alan said, sipping his coffee.

"Right. So both of those approaches suck. If you turn up the power, you radiate over everyone else's signal, so if I've got an access point *here*" -- he held his fist between their tables -- "no one can hear it because you're drowning it out. It's like you're shouting so loud that no one else can carry on a conversation."

"So why don't you just use my network? I want to be able to get online anywhere in the Market, but that means that anyone can, right?"

The crusty-punk waved his hand dismissively. "Sure, whatever. But what happens if your network gets shut down? Or if you decide to start eavesdropping on other people? Or if someone wants to get to the printer in her living room? It's no good."

"So, what, you want me to switch to focused antennae?"

"That's no good. If you used a focused signal, you're going to have to be perfectly aligned if you're going to talk back to your base, so unless you want to provide a connection to one tiny pinpoint somewhere a couple kilometers away, it won't do you any good."

"There's no solution, then? I should just give up?"

The crusty-punk held up his hands. "Hell, no! There's just no *centralized* solution. You can't be Superman, blanketing the whole world with wireless using your almighty antennaprick, but so what? That's what mesh networks are for. Check it out." He arranged the beer and the laptop and the coffee cup so that they were strung out along a straight line. "Okay, you're the laptop and I'm the coffee cup. We both have a radio and we want to talk to each other.

"We *could* turn up the gain on our radios so that they can shout loud enough to be heard at this distance, but that would drown out this guy here." He gestured at the now-empty beer. "We *could* use a focused antenna, but if I move a little bit off the beam" -- he nudged the coffee cup to one side -- "we're dead. But there's a third solution."

"We ask the beer to pass messages around?"

"Fucking right we do! That's the mesh part. Every station on the network gets *two* radios -- one for talking in one direction, the other for relaying in the other direction. The more stations you add, the lower the power on each radio -- and the more pathways you get to carry your data."

Alan shook his head.

"It's a fuckin' mind-blower, isn't it?"

"Sure," Alan said. "Sure. But does it work? Don't all those hops between point *a* and point *b* slow down the connection?"

"A little, sure. Not so's you'd notice. They don't have to go that far -- the farthest any of these signals has to travel is 151 Front Street."

"What's at 151 Front?"

"TorIx -- the main network interchange for the whole city! We stick an antenna out a window there and downlink it into the cage where UUNet and PSINet meet -- voila, instant 11-megabit city-wide freenet!"

"Where do you get the money for that?"

"Who said anything about money? How much do you think UUNet and PSI charge each other to exchange traffic with one another? Who benefits when UUNet and PSI cross-connect? Is UUNet the beneficiary of PSI's traffic, or vice versa? Internet access only costs money at the *edge* -- and with a mesh-net, there is no edge anymore. It's penetration at the center, just like the Devo song."

"I'm Adrian," Alan said.

"I'm Kurt," the crusty-punk said. "Buy me a beer, Adrian?"

"It'd be my pleasure," Alan said.

#

Kurt lived in the back of a papered-over storefront on Oxford. The front two-thirds were a maze of peeling, stickered-over stamped-metal shelving units piled high with junk tech: ancient shrink-wrapped software, stacked up low-capacity hard drives, cables and tapes and removable media. Alan tried to imagine making sense of it all, flowing it into The Inventory, and felt something like vertigo.

In a small hollow carved out of the back, Kurt had arranged a cluttered desk, a scuffed twin bed and a rack of milk crates filled with t-shirts and underwear.

Alan picked his way delicately through the store and found himself a seat on an upturned milk crate. Kurt sat on the bed and grinned expectantly.

"So?" he said.

"So what?" Alan said.

"So what is *this*! Isn't it great?"

"Well, you sure have a lot of *stuff,* I'll give you that," Alan said.

"It's all dumpstered," Kurt said casually.

"Oh, you dive?" Alan said. "I used to dive." It was mostly true. Alan had always been a picker, always on the lookout for bargoons, even if they were sticking out of someone's trash bin. Sometimes *especially* if they were sticking out of someone's trash bin -- seeing what normal people threw away gave him a rare glimpse into their lives.

Kurt walked over to the nearest shelving unit and grabbed a PC mini-tower with the lid off. "But did you ever do this?" He stuck the machine under Alan's nose and swung the gooseneck desk lamp over it. It was a white-box PC, generic commodity hardware, with a couple of network cards.

"What's that?"

"It's a junk access point! I made it out of trash! The only thing I bought were the network cards -- two wireless, one Ethernet. It's running a FreeBSD distribution off a CD, so the OS can never get corrupted. It's got lots of sweet stuff in the distro, and all you need to do is plug it in, point the antennae in opposite directions, and you're up. It does its own power management, it automagically peers with other access points if it can find 'em, and it does its own dynamic channel selection to avoid stepping on other access points."

Alan turned his head this way and that, making admiring noises. "You made this, huh?"

"For about eighty bucks. It's my fifteenth box. Eventually, I wanna have a couple hundred of these."

"Ambitious," Alan said, handing the box back. "How do you pay for the parts you have to buy? Do you have a grant?"

"A grant? Shit, no! I've got a bunch of street kids who come in and take digital pix of the stuff I have no use for, research them online, and post them to eBay. I split the take with them. Brings in a couple grand a week, and I'm keeping about fifty street kids fed besides. I go diving three times a week out in Concord and Oakville and Richmond Hill, anywhere I can find an industrial park. If I had room, I'd recruit fifty more kids -- I'm bringing it in faster than they can sell it."

"Why don't you just do less diving?"

"Are you kidding me? It's all I can do not to go out every night! You wouldn't believe the stuff I find -- all I can think about is all the stuff I'm missing out on. Some days I wish that my kids were less honest; if they ripped off some stuff, I'd have room for a lot more."

Alan laughed. Worry for Edward and Frederick and George nagged at him, impotent anxiety, but this was just so fascinating. Fascinating and distracting, and, if not normal, at least not nearly so strange as he could be. He imagined the city gridded up with junk equipment, radiating Internet access from the lakeshore to the outer suburbs. The grandiosity took his breath away.

"Look," Kurt said, spreading out a map of Kensington Market on the unmade bed. "I've got access points here, here, here, and here. Another eight or ten and I'll have the whole Market covered. Then I'm going to head north, cover the U of T campus, and push east towards Yonge Street. Bay Street and University Avenue are going to be tough -- how can I convince bankers to let me plug this by their windows?"

"Kurt," Alan said, "I suspect that the journey to University Avenue is going to be a lot slower than you expect it to be."

Kurt jutted his jaw out. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"There's a lot of real estate between here and there. A lot of trees and high-rises, office towers and empty lots. You're going to have to knock on doors every couple hundred meters -- at best -- and convince them to let you install one of these boxes, made from garbage, and plug it in, to participate in what?"

"Democratic communication!" Kurt said.

"Ah, well, my guess is that most of the people who you'll need to convince won't really care much about that. Won't be able to make that abstract notion concrete."

Kurt mumbled into his chest. Alan could see that he was fuming.

"Just because you don't have the vision to appreciate this --"

Alan held up his hand. "Stop right there. I never said anything of the sort. I think that this is big and exciting and looks like a lot of fun. I think that ringing doorbells and talking people into letting me nail an access point to their walls sounds like a *lot* of fun. Really, I'm not kidding.

"But this is a journey, not a destination. The value you'll get out of this will be more in the doing than the having done. The having done's going to take decades, I'd guess. But the doing's going to be something." Alan's smile was so broad it ached. The idea had seized him. He was drunk on it.

The buzzer sounded and Kurt got up to answer it. Alan craned his neck to see a pair of bearded neohippies in rasta hats.

"Are you Kurt?" one asked.

"Yeah, dude, I'm Kurt."

"Marcel told us that we could make some money here? We're trying to raise bus fare to Burning Man? We could really use the work?"

"Not today, but maybe tomorrow," Kurt said. "Come by around lunchtime."

"You sure you can't use us today?"

"Not today," Kurt said. "I'm busy today."

"All right," the other said, and they slouched away.

"Word of mouth," Kurt said, with a jingling shrug. "Kids just turn up, looking for work with the trash."

"You think they'll come back tomorrow?" Alan was pretty good at evaluating kids and they hadn't looked very reliable.

"Those two? Fifty-fifty chance. Tell you what, though: there's always enough kids and enough junk to go around."

"But you need to make arrangements to get your access points mounted and powered. You've got to sort it out with people who own stores and houses."

"You want to knock on doors?" Kurt said.

"I think I would," Alan said. "I suspect it's a possibility. We can start with the shopkeepers, though."

"I haven't had much luck with merchants," Kurt said, shrugging his shoulders. His chains jingled and a whiff of armpit wafted across the claustrophobic hollow. "Capitalist pigs."

"I can't imagine why," Alan said.

#

"Wales Avenue, huh?" Kurt said.

They were walking down Oxford Street, and Alan was seeing it with fresh eyes, casting his gaze upward, looking at the lines of sight from one building to another, mentally painting in radio-frequency shadows cast by the transformers on the light poles.

"Just moved in on July first," Alan said. "Still getting settled in."

"Which house?"

"The blue one, with the big porch, on the corner."

"Sure, I know it. I scored some great plumbing fixtures out of the dumpster there last winter."

"You're welcome," Alan said.

They turned at Spadina and picked their way around the tourist crowds shopping the Chinese importers' sidewalk displays of bamboo parasols and Hello Kitty slippers, past the fogged-up windows of the dim-sum restaurants and the smell of fresh pork buns. Alan bought a condensed milk and kiwi snow-cone from a sidewalk vendor and offered to treat Kurt, but he declined.

"You never know about those places," Kurt said. "How clean is their ice, anyway? Where do they wash their utensils?"

"You dig around in dumpsters for a living," Alan said. "Aren't you immune to germs?"

Kurt turned at Baldwin, and Alan followed. "I don't eat garbage, I pick it," he said. He sounded angry.

"Hey, sorry," Alan said. "Sorry. I didn't mean to imply --"

"I know you didn't," Kurt said, stopping in front of a dry-goods store and spooning candied ginger into a baggie. He handed it to the age-hunched matron of the shop, who dropped it on her scale and dusted her hands on her black dress. Kurt handed her a two-dollar coin and took the bag back. "I'm just touchy, okay? My last girlfriend split because she couldn't get past it. No matter how much I showered, I was never clean enough for her."

"Sorry," Alan said again.

"I heard something weird about that blue house on the corner," Kurt said. "One of my kids told me this morning, he saw something last night when he was in the park."