"But we decided that it was stupid," Kurt said. "No one needed to draw a
map of the Web -- it just grew and people found its weird corners on
their own. Networks don't *need* centralized authority, that's just the
chains on your mind talking --"
"The chains on my mind?" The kid snorted.
Alan held his hands up placatingly. "Wait a second," he said. "Let's
take a step back here and talk about *values*. The project here is about
free expression and cooperation. Sure, it'd be nice to have a city-wide
network, but in my opinion, it's a lot more important to have a city
full of people working on that network because they value expression and
understand how cooperation gets us more of that."
"And we'll get this free expression how?"
"By giving everyone free Internet access."
The kid laughed and shook his head. "That's a weird kind of 'free,' if
you don't mind my saying so." He flipped over his phone. "I mean, it's
like, 'Free speech if you can afford a two-thousand-dollar laptop and
want to sit down and type on it.'"
"I can build you a desktop out of garbage for twenty bucks," Kurt
said. "We're drowning in PC parts."
"Sure, whatever. But what kind of free expression is that? Free
expression so long as you're sitting at home with your PC plugged into
the wall?"
"Well, it's not like we're talking about displacing all the other kinds
of expression," Alan said. "This is in addition to all the ways you've
had to talk --"
"Right, like this thing," the kid said. He reached into his pocket and
took out a small phone. "This was free -- not twenty dollars, not even
two thousand dollars -- just free, from the phone company, in exchange
for a one-year contract. Everyone's got one of these. I went trekking in
India, you see people using these out in the bush. And you know what
they use them for? Speech! Not speech-in-quotes meaning some kind of
abstract expression, but actual *talking.*"
The kid leaned forward and planted his hands on his knees and suddenly
he was a lot harder to dismiss as some subculture-addled intern. He had
that fiery intensity that Alan recognized from himself, from Kurt, from
the people who believe.
Alan thought he was getting an inkling into why this particular intern
had responded to his press release: Not because he was too ignorant to
see through the bullshit, but just the opposite.
"But that's communication through the *phone company*," Kurt said,
wonderment in his voice that his fellow bohemian couldn't see how
sucktastic that proposition was. "How is that free speech?"
The kid rolled his eyes. "Come off it. You old people, you turn up your
noses whenever someone ten years younger than you points out that cell
phones are actually a pretty good way for people to communicate with
each other -- even subversively. I wrote a term paper last year on this
stuff: In Kenya, electoral scrutineers follow the ballot boxes from the
polling place to the counting house and use their cell phones to sound
the alarm when someone tries to screw with them. In the Philippines,
twenty thousand people were mobilized in 15 minutes in front of the
presidential palace when they tried to shut down the broadcast of the
corruption hearings.
"And yet every time someone from my generation talks about how important
phones are to democracy, there's always some old pecksniff primly
telling us that our phones don't give us *real* democracy. It's so much
bullshit."
He fell silent and they all stared at each other for a moment. Kurt's
mouth hung open.
"I'm not old," he said finally.
"You're older than me," the kid said. His tone softened. "Look, I'm not
trying to be cruel here, but you're generation-blind. The Internet is
great, but it's not the last great thing we'll ever invent. My pops was
a mainframe guy, he thought PCs were toys. You're a PC guy, so you think
my phone is a toy."
Alan looked off into the corner of the back room of Kurt's shop for a
while, trying to marshal his thoughts. Back there, among the shelves of
milk crates stuffed with T-shirts and cruft, he had a thought.
"Okay," he said. "Fair enough. It may be that today, in the field,
there's a lot of free expression being enabled with phones. But at the
end of the day" -- he thought of Lyman -- "this is the *phone company*
we're talking about. Big lumbering dinosaur that is thrashing in the tar
pit. The spazz dinosaur that's so embarrassed all the other dinosaurs
that none of them want to rescue it.
"Back in the sixties, these guys sued to keep it illegal to plug
anything other than their rental phones into their network. But more to
the point, you get a different kind of freedom with an Internet network
than a phone-company network -- even if the Internet network lives on
top of the phone-company network.
"If you invent a new way of using the phone network -- say, a cheaper
way of making long-distance calls using voice-over-IP, you can't roll
that out on the phone network without the permission of the carrier. You
have to go to him and say, 'Hey, I've invented a way to kill your most
profitable line of business, can you install it at your switching
stations so that we can all talk long distance for free?'
"But on the net, anyone can invent any application that he can get his
buddies to use. No central authority had to give permission for the Web
to exist: A physicist just hacked it together one day, distributed the
software to his colleagues, and in just a very short while, people all
over the world had the Web.
"So the net can live on top of the phone network and it can run
voice-calling as an application, but it's not tied to the phone
network. It doesn't care whose wires or wireless it lives on top
of. It's got all these virtues that are key to free expression. That's
why we care about this."
The kid nodded as he talked, impatiently, signaling in body language
that even Alan could read that he'd heard this already.
"Yes, in this abstract sense, there are a bunch of things to like about
your Internet over there. But I'm talking about practical, nonabstract,
nontheoretical stuff over here. The real world. I can get a phone for
*free*. I can talk to *everyone* with it. I can say *anything* I want. I
can use it *anywhere*. Sure, the phone company is a giant conspiracy by
The Man to keep us down. But can you really tell me with a straight face
that because I can't invent the Web for my phone or make free long
distance calls I'm being censored?"
"Of course not," Kurt said. Alan put a steadying hand on his
shoulder. "Fine, it's not an either-or thing. You can have your phones,
I can have my Internet, and we'll both do our thing. It's not like the
absence of the Web for phones or high long-distance charges are *good*
for free expression, Christ. We're trying to unbreak the net so that no
one can own it or control it. We're trying to put it on every corner of
the city, for free, anonymously, for anyone to use. We're doing it with
recycled garbage, and we're paying homeless teenagers enough money to
get off the street as part of the program. What's not to fucking like?"
The kid scribbled hard on his pad. "*Now* you're giving me some quotes I
can use. You guys need to work on your pitch. 'What's not to fucking
like?' That's good."
#
He and Link saw each other later that day, and Link still had his two
little girls with him, sitting on the patio at the Greek's, drinking
beers, and laughing at his jokes.
"Hey, you're the guy with the books," one of them said when he passed
by.
He stopped and nodded. "That's me, all right," he said.
Link picked at the label of his beer bottle and added to the dandruff of
shredded paper in the ashtray before him. "Hey, Abe," he said.
"Hey, Link," he said. He looked down at the little girls' bags. "You've
made some finds," he said. "Congratulations."
They were wearing different clothes now -- double-knit neon pop-art
dresses and horn-rim shades and white legs flashing beneath the
tabletop. They kicked their toes and smiled and drank their beers, which
seemed comically large in their hands.
Casually, he looked to see who was minding the counter at the Greek's
and saw that it was the idiot son, who wasn't smart enough to know that
serving liquor to minors was asking for bad trouble.
"Where's Krishna?" he asked.
One girl compressed her heart-shaped lips into a thin line.
And so she resolved to help her brother, because when it's your
fault that something has turned to shit, you have to wash
shit. And so she resolved to help her brother, which meant that,
step one, she had to get him to stop screwing up.
"He took off," the girl said. Her pancake makeup had sweated away during
the day and her acne wasn't so bad that she'd needed it. "He took off
running, like he'd forgotten something important. Looked scared."
"Why don't you go get more beers," Link said angrily, cutting her off,
and Alan had an intuition that Link had become Krishna's Renfield, a
recursion of Renfields, each nesting inside the last like Russian dolls
in reverse: Big Link inside medium Krishna inside the stump that
remained of Darrel.
And that meant that she had to take him out of the company of
his bad companions, which she would accomplish through the
simple expedient of scaring the everlasting fuck out of them.
She sulked off and the remaining girl looked down at her swinging toes.
"Where'd he go, Link?" Alan said. If Krishna was in a hurry to go
somewhere or see something, he had an idea of what it was about.
Link's expression closed up like a door slamming shut. "I don't know,"
he said. "How should I know?"
The other girl scuffed her toes and took a sip of her beer.
Their gazes all flicked down to the bottle.
"The Greek would bar you for life if he knew you were bringing underaged
drinkers into here," Alan said.
"Plenty of other bars in the Market," Link said, shrugging his newly
broad shoulders elaborately.
Trey was the kid who'd known her brother since third grade and
whose puberty-induced brain damage had turned him into an utter
turd. She once caught him going through the bathroom hamper,
fetishizing her panties, and she'd shouted at him and he'd just
ducked and grinned a little-boy grin that she had been incapable
of wiping off his face, no matter how she raged. She would enjoy
this.
"And they all know the Greek," Alan said. "Three, two, one." He turned
on his heel and began to walk away.
"Wait!" Link called. The girl swallowed a giggle. He sounded desperate
and not cool at all anymore.
Alan stopped and turned his body halfway, looking impatiently over his
shoulder.
Link mumbled something.
"What?"
"Behind Kurt's place," Link said. "He said he was going to go look
around behind Kurt's place."
"Thank you, Link," he said. He turned all the way around and got down to
eye level with the other girl. "Nice to meet you," he said. He wanted to
tell her, *Be careful* or *Stay alert* or *Get out while the getting's
good*, but none of that seemed likely to make much of an impression on
her.
She smiled and her friend came back with three beers. "You've got a
great house," she said.