Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, Cory Doctorow [best historical fiction books of all time txt] 📗
- Author: Cory Doctorow
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“This is good Vietnamese.”
“Better than Chinatown?”
“Better situated,” Kurt said. “If you’re going dumpster diving afterward. I’m gonna take your cherry, buddy.” He clapped a hand on Alan’s shoulder. Real people didn’t touch Alan much. He didn’t know if he liked it.
“God,” Alan said. “This is so sudden.” But he was happy about it. He’d tried to picture what Kurt actually did any number of times, but he was never very successful. Now he was going to actually go out and jump in and out of the garbage. He wondered if he was dressed for it, picturing bags of stinky kitchen waste, and decided that he was willing to sacrifice his jeans and the old Gap shirt he’d bought one day after the shirt he’d worn to the store—the wind-up toy store?—got soaked in a cloudburst.
The Vietnamese food was really good, and the family who ran the restaurant greeted Kurt like an old friend. The place was crawling with cops, a new two or three every couple minutes, stopping by to grab a salad roll or a sandwich or a go-cup of pho. “Cops always know where to eat fast and cheap and good,” Kurt mumbled around a mouthful of pork chop and fried rice. “That’s how I found this place, all the cop cars in the parking lot.”
Alan slurped up the last of his pho and chased down the remaining hunks of rare beef with his chopsticks and dipped them in chili sauce before popping them in his mouth. “Where are we going?” he asked.
Kurt jerked his head in the direction of the great outdoors. “Wherever the fates take us. I just drive until I get an itch and then I pull into a parking lot and hit the dumpsters. There’s enough dumpsters out this way, I could spend fifty or sixty hours going through them all, so I’ve got to be selective. I know how each company’s trash has been running—lots of good stuff or mostly crap—lately, and I trust my intuition to take me to the right places. I’d love to go to the Sega or Nintendo dumpsters, but they’re like Stalag Thirteen—razorwire and motion-sensors and armed guards. They’re the only companies that take secrecy seriously.” Suddenly he changed lanes and pulled up the driveway of an industrial complex.
“Spidey-sense is tingling,” he said, as he killed his lights and crept forward to the dumpster. “Ready to lose your virginity?” he said, lighting a cigarette.
“I wish you’d stop using that metaphor,” Alan said. “Ick.”
But Kurt was already out of the Buick, around the other side of the car, pulling open Alan’s door.
“That dumpster is full of cardboard,” he said, gesturing. “It’s recycling. That one is full of plastic bottles. More recycling. This one,” he said, oofing as he levered himself over it, talking around the maglight he’d clenched between his teeth, “is where they put the good stuff. Looky here.”
Alan tried to climb the dumpster’s sticky walls, but couldn’t get a purchase. Kurt, standing on something in the dumpster that crackled, reached down and grabbed him by the wrist and hoisted him up. He scrambled over the dumpster’s transom and fell into it, expecting a wash of sour kitchen waste to break over him, and finding himself, instead, amid hundreds of five-inch cardboard boxes.
“What’s this?” he asked.
Kurt was picking up the boxes and shaking them, listening for the rattle. “This place is an import/export wholesaler. They throw out a lot of defective product, since it’s cheaper than shipping it all back to Taiwan for service. But my kids will fix it and sell it on eBay. Here,” he said, opening a box and shaking something out, handing it to him. He passed his light over to Alan, who took it, unmindful of the drool on the handle.
It was a rubber duckie. Alan turned it over and saw it had a hard chunk of metal growing out of its ass.
“More of these, huh?” Kurt said. “I found about a thousand of these last month. They’re USB keychain drives, low-capacity, like 32MB. Plug them in and they show up on your desktop like a little hard drive. They light up in all kinds of different colors. The problem is, they’ve all got a manufacturing defect that makes them glow in just one color—whatever shade the little gel carousel gets stuck on.
“I’ve got a couple thousand of these back home, but they’re selling briskly. Go get me a couple cardboard boxes from that dumpster there and we’ll snag a couple hundred more.”
Alan gawped. The dumpster was seven feet cubed, the duckies a few inches on a side. There were thousands and thousands of duckies in the dumpster: more than they could ever fit into the Buick. In a daze, he went off and pulled some likely flattened boxes out of the trash and assembled them, packing them with the duckies that Kurt passed down to him from atop his crunching, cracking mound of doomed duckies that he was grinding underfoot.
Once they’d finished, Kurt fussed with moving the boxes around so that everything with a bootprint was shuffled to the bottom. “We don’t want them to know that we’ve been here or they’ll start hitting the duckies with a hammer before they pitch ’em out.”
He climbed into the car and pulled out a bottle of window cleaner and some paper towels and wiped off the steering wheel and the dash and the handle of his flashlight, then worked a blob of hand sanitizer into his palms, passing it to Alan when he was done.
Alan didn’t bother to point out that as Kurt had worked, he’d transferred the flashlight from his mouth to his hands and back again a dozen times—he thought he understood that this ritual was about Kurt assuring himself that he was not sinking down to the level of rummies and other garbage pickers.
As if reading his mind, Kurt said, “You see those old rum-dums pushing a shopping cart filled with empty cans down Spadina? Fucking morons—they could be out here pulling LCDs that they could turn around for ten bucks a pop, but instead they’re rooting around like raccoons in the trash, chasing after nickel deposits.”
“But then what would you pick?”
Kurt stared at him. “You kidding me? Didn’t you see? There’s a hundred times more stuff than I could ever pull. Christ, if even one of them had a squint of ambition, we could double the amount we save from the trash.”
“You’re an extraordinary person,” Alan said. He wasn’t sure he meant it as a compliment. After all, wasn’t he an extraordinary person, too?
Alan was stunned when they found a dozen hard drives that spun up and revealed themselves to be of generous capacity and moreover stuffed with confidential looking information when he plugged them into the laptop that Kurt kept under the passenger seat.
He was floored when they turned up three slightly elderly Toshiba laptops, each of which booted into a crufty old flavor of Windows, and only one of which had any obvious material defects: a starred corner in its LCD.
He was delighted by the dumpsters full of plush toys, by the lightly used office furniture, by the technical books and the CDs of last year’s software. The smells were largely inoffensive—Kurt mentioned that the picking was better in winter when the outdoors was one big fridge, but Alan could hardly smell anything except the sour smell of an old dumpster and occasionally a whiff of coffee grounds.
They took a break at the Vietnamese place for coconut ice and glasses of sweet iced coffee, and Kurt nodded at the cops in the restaurant. Alan wondered why Kurt was so pleasant with these cops out in the boonies but so hostile to the law in Kensington Market.
“How are we going to get connectivity out of the Market?” Kurt said. “I mean, all this work, and we’ve hardly gotten four or five square blocks covered.”
“Buck up,” Alan said. “We could spend another two years just helping people in the Market use what we’ve installed, and it would still be productive.” Kurt’s mouth opened, and Alan held his hand up. “Not that I’m proposing that we do that. I just mean there’s plenty of good that’s been done so far. What we need is some publicity for it, some critical mass, and some way that we can get ordinary people involved. We can’t fit a critical mass into your front room and put them to work.”
“So what do we get them to do?”
“It’s a good question. There’s something I saw online the other day I wanted to show you. Why don’t we go home and get connected?”
“There’s still plenty of good diving out there. No need to go home anyway—I know a place.”
They drove off into a maze of cul-de-sacs and cheaply built, gaudy monster homes with triple garages and sagging rain gutters. The streets had no sidewalks and the inevitable basketball nets over every garage showed no signs of use.
Kurt pulled them up in front of a house that was indistinguishable from the others and took the laptop from under the Buick’s seat, plugging it into the cigarette lighter and flipping its lid.
“There’s an open network here,” Kurt said as he plugged in the wireless card. He pointed at the dormer windows in the top room.
“How the hell did you find that?” Alan said, looking at the darkened window. There was a chain-link gate at the side of the house, and in the back an aboveground pool.
Kurt laughed. “These ‘security consultants’"—he made little quotes with his fingers—"wardrove Toronto. They went from one end of the city to the other with a GPS and a wireless card and logged all the open access points they found, then released a report claiming that all of those access points represented ignorant consumers who were leaving themselves vulnerable to attacks and making Internet connections available to baby-eating terrorists.
“One of the access points they identified was mine, for chrissakes, and mine was open because I’m a crazy fucking anarchist, not because I’m an ignorant ‘consumer’ who doesn’t know any better, and that got me to thinking that there were probably lots of people like me around, running open APs. So one night I was out here diving and I really was trying to remember who’d played the Sundance Kid in Butch Cassidy, and I knew that if I only had a net connection I could google it. I had a stumbler, an app that logged all the open WiFi access points that I came into range of, and a GPS attachment that I’d dived that could interface with the software that mapped the APs on a map of Toronto, so I could just belt the machine in there on the passenger seat and go driving around until I had a list of all the wireless Internet that I could see from the street.
“So I got kind of bored and went back to diving, and then I did what I usually do at the end of the night, I went driving around some residential streets, just to see evidence of humanity after a night in the garbage, and also because the people out here sometimes put out nice sofas and things.
“When I got home, I looked at my map and there were tons of access points out by the industrial buildings, and some on the commercial strips, and a few out here in the residential areas, but the one with the best signal was right here, and when I clicked on it, I saw that the name of the network was ‘ParasiteNet.’”
Alan said, “Huh?” because ParasiteNet was Kurt’s name for his wireless project, though they hadn’t used it much since Alan got involved and they’d gotten halfway legit. But still.
“Yeah,” Kurt said. “That’s what I said—huh? So I googled ParasiteNet to see what I could find, and I found an old message I’d posted to toronto.talk.wireless when I was getting started out, a kind of manifesto about what
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