"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.