"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.
"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."