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

consistency of mud-brick. Sara told Kurt that they'd have
ten minutes, and Alan had told him that he could take it all. Alan'd
spent the day reading on the net, remembering the arguments that had
swayed the most people, talking it over. He was determined that Kurt
would win this fight.

"There's this ship going down, and it's signaling S-O-S, S-O-S, but the
message didn't get out, because the shipping lanes were full of other
ships with other radios, radios that clobbered the *Titanic*'s
signal. That's because there were no rules for radio back then, so
anyone could light up any transmitter and send out any signal at any
frequency. Imagine a room where everyone shouted at the top of their
lungs, nonstop, while setting off air horns.

"After that, they decided that fed regulators would divide up the radio
spectrum into bands, and give those bands to exclusive licensees who'd
know that their radio waves would reach their destination without being
clobbered, because any clobberers would get shut down by the cops.

"But today, we've got a better way: We can make radios that are capable
of intelligently cooperating with each other. We can make radios that
use databases or just finely tuned listeners to determine what bands
aren't in use, at any given moment, in any place. They can talk between
the gaps in other signals. They can relay messages for other
radios. They can even try to detect the presence of dumb radio devices,
like TVs and FM tuners, and grab the signal they're meant to be
receiving off of the Internet and pass it on, so that the dumb device
doesn't even realize that the world has moved on.

"Now, the original radio rules were supposed to protect free expression
because if everyone was allowed to speak at once, no one would be
heard. That may have been true, but it was a pretty poor system as it
went: Mostly, the people who got radio licenses were cops, spooks, and
media barons. There aren't a lot of average people using the airwaves to
communicate for free with one another. Not a lot of free speech.

"But now we have all this new technology where computers direct the
operation of flexible radios, radios whose characteristics are
determined by software, and it's looking like the scarcity of the
electromagnetic spectrum has been pretty grossly overstated. It's hard
to prove, because now we've got a world where lighting up a bunch of
smart, agile radios is a crime against the 'legit' license-holders.

"But Parliament's not going to throw the airwaves open because no
elected politician can be responsible for screwing up the voters'
televisions, because that's the surest-fire way to not get
reelected. Which means that when you say, 'Hey, our freedom of speech is
being clobbered by bad laws,' the other side can say, 'Go study some
physics, hippie, or produce a working network, or shut up.'

"The radios we're installing now are about one millionth as smart as
they could be, and they use one millionth as much spectrum as they could
without stepping on anyone else's signal, but they're legal, and they're
letting more people communicate than ever. There are people all over the
world doing this, and whenever the policy wonks go to the radio cops to
ask for more radio spectrum to do this stuff with, they parade people
like us in front of them. We're like the Pinocchio's nose on the face of
the radio cops: They say that only their big business buddies can be
trusted with the people's airwaves, and we show them up for giant
liars."

He fell silent and looked at them. Adam held his breath.

Sara nodded and broke the silence. "You know, that sounds pretty cool,
actually."

#

Kurt insisted on putting up that access point, while Alan and Lyman
steadied the ladder. Sara came out and joked with Lyman, and Alan got
distracted watching them, trying to understand this notion of "cousins."
They had an easy rapport, despite all their differences, and spoke in a
shorthand of family weddings long past and crotchety relatives long
dead.

So none of them were watching when Kurt overbalanced and dropped the
Makita, making a wild grab for it, foot slipping off the rung, and
toppled backward. It was only Kurt's wild bark of panic that got Adam to
instinctively move, to hold out his arms and look up, and he caught Kurt
under the armpits and gentled him to the ground, taking the weight of
Kurt's fall in a bone-jarring crush to his rib cage.

"You okay?" Alan said once he'd gotten his breath back.

"Oof," Kurt said. "Yeah."

They were cuddled together on the sidewalk, Kurt atop him, and Lyman and
Sara bent to help them apart. "Nice catch," Lyman said. Kurt was helped
to his feet, and he declared that he'd sprained his ankle and nothing
worse, and they helped him back to his shop, where a couple of his kids
doted over him, getting him an ice pack and a pillow and his laptop and
one of the many dumpster-dived discmen from around the shop and some of
the CDs of old punk bands that he favored.

There he perched, growly as a wounded bear, master of his kingdom, for
the next two weeks, playing online and going twitchy over the missed
dumpsters going to the landfill every night without his expert picking
over. Alan visited him every day and listened raptly while Kurt gave him
the stats for the day's network usage, and Kurt beamed proud the whole
while.

#

One morning, Alan threw a clatter of toonies down on the Greek's counter
and walked around the Market, smelling the last night's staggering
pissers and the morning's blossoms.

Here were his neighbors, multicolored heads at the windows of their
sagging house adjoining his, Link and Natalie in the adjacent windows
farthest from his front door, Mimi's face suspicious at her window, and
was that Krishna behind her, watching over her shoulder, hand between
her wings, fingers tracing the scars depending from the muscles there?

He waved at them. The reluctant winter made every day feel like the day
before a holiday weekend. The bankers and the retail slaves coming into
and out of the Market had a festive air.

He waved at the neighbors, and Link waved back, and then so did Natalie,
and he hefted his sack of coffees from the Greek's suggestively, and
Mimi shut her curtains with a snap, but Natalie and Link smiled, and a
moment later they were sitting in twig chairs on his porch in their
jammies, watching the world go past as the sun began to boil the air and
the coffee tasted as good as it smelled.

"Beautiful day," Natalie said rubbing the duckling fuzz on her scalp and
closing her eyes.

"Found any work yet?" Alan said remembering his promise to put her in
touch with one of his fashionista protégés.

She made a face. "In a video store. Bo-ring."

Link made a rude noise. "You are *so* spoiled. Not just any video store,
she's working at Martian Signal on Queen Street."

Alan knew it, a great shop with a huge selection of cult movies and a
brisk trade in zines, transgressive literature, action figures and
T-shirts.

"It must be great there," he said.

She smiled and looked away. "It's okay." She bit her lip. "I don't think
I like working retail," she said.

"Ah, retail!" he said. "Retail would be fantastic if it wasn't for the
fucking customers."

She giggled.

"Don't let them get to you," he said. "Get to be really smart about the
stock, so that there's always something you know more about than they
do, and when that isn't true, get them to *teach you* more so you'll be
in control the next time."

She nodded.

"And have fun with the computer when it's slow," he said.

"What?"

"A store like that, it's got the home phone number of about seventy
percent of the people in Toronto you'd want to ever hang out with. Most
of your school friends, even the ones you've lost track of. All the
things they've rented. All their old addresses -- you can figure out
who's living together, who gave their apartment to whom, all of that
stuff. That kind of database is way more fun than you realize. You can
get lost in it for months."

She was nodding slowly. "I can see that," she said. She upended her
coffee and set it down. "Listen, Arbus --" she began, then bit her lip
again. She looked at Link, who tugged at his fading pink shock of hair.

"It's nothing," he said. "We get emotionally overwrought about friends
and family. I have as much to apologize for as... Well, I owe you an
apology." They stared at the park across the street, at the damaged
wading pool where Edward had vanished.

"So, sorries all 'round and kisses and hugs, and now we're all friends
again, huh?" Link said. Natalie made a rude noise and ruffled his hair,
then wiped her hand off on his shirt.

Alan, though, solemnly shook each of their hands in turn, and thanked
them. When he was done, he felt as though a weight had been lifted from
him. Next door, Mimi's window slammed shut.

"What is it you're doing around here, Akin?" Link said. "I keep seeing
you running around with ladders and tool belts. I thought you were a
writer. Are you soundproofing the whole Market?"

"I never told you?" Alan said. He'd been explaining wireless networking
to anyone who could sit still and had been beginning to believe that
he'd run it down for every denizen of Kensington, but he'd forgotten to
clue in his own neighbors!

"Right," he said. "Are you seated comfortably? Then I shall begin. When
we connect computers together, we call it a network. There's a *big*
network of millions of computers, called the Internet."

"Even *I* know this," Natalie said.

"Shush," Alan said. "I'll start at the beginning, where I started a year
ago, and work my way forward. It's weird, it's big and it's cool." And
he told them the story, the things he'd learned from Kurt, the arguments
he'd honed on the shopkeepers, the things Lyman had told him.

"So that's the holy mission," he said at last. "You give everyone a
voice and a chance to speak on a level playing field with the rich and
powerful, and you make democracy, which is good."

He looked at Link and Natalie, who were looking to one another rather
intensely, communicating in some silent idiom of sibling body-language.

"Plate-o-shrimp," Natalie said.

"Funny coincidence," Link said.

"We were just talking about this yesterday."

"Spectrum?" Alan quirked his eyebrows.

"No, not exactly," Natalie said. "About making a difference. About holy
missions. Wondering if there were any left."

"I mean," Link said, "riding a bike or renting out videos are honest
ways to make a living and all, and they keep us in beer and rent money,
but they're not --"

"-- *important*." Natalie said.

"Ah," Alan said.

"Ah?"

"Well, that's the thing we all want, right? Making a difference."

"Yeah."

"Which is why you went into fashion," Link said giving her skinny
shoulder a playful shove.

She shoved him back. "And why *you* went into electrical engineering!"

"Okay," Alan said. "It's not necessarily about what career you
pick. It's about how you do what you do. Natalie, you told me you used
to shop at Tropicál."

She nodded.

"You liked it, you used to