Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, Cory Doctorow [big ebook reader .txt] 📗

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