Eastern Standard Tribe, Cory Doctorow [reading e books TXT] 📗

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##Gink-Go has left channel #EST.chatter

Junta: You were saying?

##Junta (private) (file transfer)

##Received credential from Junta. Verifying. Credential identified: "Solicitor,
registered with the Law Society to practice in England and Wales, also
registered in Australia."

Trepan: /private Junta I just hit a woman while driving the Kensington High
Street. Her fault. She's hurt. Wants me to admit culpability in exchange for
half the insurance. Advice?

##Junta (private): I beg your pardon?

Trepan: /private Junta She's crazy. She just got off the phone with some kinda
lawyer in the States. Says she can get $5*10^5 at least, and will split with me
if I don't dispute.

##Junta (private): Bloody Americans. No offense. What kind of instrumentation
recorded it?

Trepan: /private Junta My GPS. Maybe some secams. Eyewitnesses, maybe.

##Junta (private): And you'll say what, exactly? That you were distracted?
Fiddling with something?

Trepan: /private Junta I guess.

##Junta (private): You're looking at three points off your licence. Statutory
increase in premiums totalling EU 2*10^5 over five years. How's your record?

##Transferring credential "Driving record" to Junta. Receipt confirmed.

##Junta (private): Hmmm.

##Junta (private): Nothing outrageous. _Were_ you distracted?

Trepan: /private Junta I guess. Maybe.

##Junta (private): You guess. Well, who would know better than you, right? My
fee's 10 percent. Stop guessing. You _were_ distracted. Overtired. It's late.
Regrettable. Sincerely sorry. Have her solicitor contact me directly. I'll meet
you here at 1000h GMT/0400h EDT and go over it with you, yes? Agreeable?

Trepan: /private Junta Agreed. Thanks.

##Junta (private) (file transfer)

##Received smartcontract from Junta. Verifying. Smartcontract "Representation
agreement" verified.

Trepan: /join #autocounsel

counselbot: Welcome, Trepan! How can I help you?

##Transferring smartcontract "Representation agreement" to counselbot. Receipt
confirmed.

Trepan: /private counselbot What is the legal standing of this contract?

##counselbot (private): Smartcontract "Representation agreement" is an ISO
standard representation agreement between a client and a solicitor for purposes
of litigation in the UK.

##autocounsel (private) (file transfer)

##Received "representation agreement faq uk 2.3.2 2JAN22" from autocounsel.

Trepan: /join #EST.chatter

Trepan: /private Junta It's a deal

##Transferring key-signed smartcontract "Representation agreement" to Junta.
Receipt confirmed.

Trepan: /quit Gotta go, thanks!

##Trepan has left channel #EST.chatter "Gotta go, thanks!"

5.

Once the messy business of negotiating EU healthcare for foreign nationals had
been sorted out with the EMTs and the Casualty Intake triage, once they'd both
been digested and shat out by a dozen diagnostic devices from X-rays to MRIs,
once the harried house officers had impersonally prodded them and presented them
both with hardcopy FAQs for their various injuries (second-degree burns, mild
shock for Art; pelvic dislocation, minor kidney bruising, broken femur,
whiplash, concussion and mandible trauma for Linda), they found themselves in
adjacent beds in the recovery room, which bustled as though it, too, were
working on GMT-5, busy as a 9PM restaurant on a Saturday night.

Art had an IV taped to the inside of his left arm, dripping saline and tranqs,
making him logy and challenging his circadians. Still, he was the more mobile of
the two, as Linda was swaddled in smartcasts that both immobilized her and
massaged her, all the while osmosing transdermal antiinflammatories and
painkillers. He tottered the two steps to the chair at her bedside and shook her
hand again.

"Don't take this the wrong way, but you look like hell," he said.

She smiled. Her jaw made an audible pop. "Get a picture, will you? It'll be good
in court."

He chuckled.

"No, seriously. Get a picture."

So he took out his comm and snapped a couple pix, including one with nightvision
filters on to compensate for the dimmed recovery room lighting. "You're a cool
customer, you know that?" he said, as he tucked his camera away.

"Not so cool. This is all a coping strategy. I'm pretty shook up, you want to
know the truth. I could have died."

"What were you doing on the street at three AM anyway?"

"I was upset, so I took a walk, thought I'd get something to eat or a beer or
something."

"You haven't been here long, huh?"

She laughed, and it turned into a groan. "What the hell is wrong with the
English, anyway? The sun sets and the city rolls up its streets. It's not like
they've got this great tradition of staying home and surfing cable or anything."

"They're all snug in their beds, farting away their lentil roasts."

"That's it! You can't get a steak here to save your life. Mad cows, all of 'em.
If I see one more gray soy sausage, I'm going to kill the waitress and eat
*her*."

"You just need to get hooked up," he said. "Once we're out of here, I'll take
you out for a genuine blood pudding, roast beef and oily chips. I know a place."

"I'm drooling. Can I borrow your phone again? Uh, I think you're going to have
to dial for me."

"That's OK. Give me the number."

She did, and he cradled his comm to her head. He was close enough to her that he
could hear the tinny, distinctive ringing of a namerican circuit at the other
end. He heard her shallow breathing, heard her jaw creak. He smelled her
shampoo, a free-polymer new-car smell, smelled a hint of her sweat. A cord stood
out on her neck, merging in an elegant vee with her collarbone, an arrow
pointing at the swell of her breast under her paper gown.

"Toby, it's Linda."

A munchkin voice chittered down the line.

"Shut up, OK. Shut up. Shut. I'm in the hospital." More chipmunk. "Got hit by a
car. I'll be OK. No. Shut up. I'll be fine. I'll send you the FAQs. I just
wanted to say. . ." She heaved a sigh, closed her eyes. "You know what I wanted
to say. Sorry, all right? Sorry it came to this. You'll be OK. I'll be OK. I
just didn't want to leave you hanging." She sounded groggy, but there was a sob
there, too. "I can't talk long. I'm on a shitload of dope. Yes, it's good dope.
I'll call you later. I don't know when I'm coming back, but we'll sort it out
there, all right? OK. Shut up. OK. You too."

She looked up at Art. "My boyfriend. Ex-boyfriend. Not sure who's leaving who at
this point. Thanks." She closed her eyes. Her eyelids were mauve, a tracery of
pink veins. She snored softly.

Art set an alarm that would wake him up in time to meet his lawyer, folded up
his comm and crawled back into bed. His circadians swelled and crashed against
the sides of his skull, and before he knew it, he was out.

6.

Hospitals operate around the clock, but they still have their own circadians.
The noontime staff were still overworked and harried but chipper and efficient,
too, without the raccoon-eyed jitters of the night before. Art and Linda were
efficiently fed, watered and evacuated, then left to their own devices, blinking
in the weak English sunlight that streamed through the windows.

"The lawyers've worked it out, I think," Art said.

"Good. Good news." She was dopamine-heavy, her words lizard-slow. Art figured
her temper was drugged senseless, and it gave him the courage to ask her the
question that'd been on his mind since they'd met.

"Can I ask you something? It may be offensive."

"G'head. I may be offended."

"Do you do. . .this. . .a lot? I mean, the insurance thing?"

She snorted, then moaned. "It's the Los Angeles Lottery, dude. I haven't done it
before, but I was starting to feel a little left out, to tell the truth."

"I thought screenplays were the LA Lotto."

"Naw. A good lotto is one you can win."

She favored him with half a smile and he saw that she had a lopsided, left-hand
dimple.

"You're from LA, then?"

"Got it in one. Orange County. I'm a third-generation failed actor. Grandpa once
had a line in a Hitchcock film. Mom was the ditzy neighbor on a three-episode
Fox sitcom in the 90s. I'm still waiting for my moment in the sun. You live
here?"

"For now. Since September. I'm from Toronto."

"Canadia! Goddamn snowbacks. What are you doing in London?"

His comm rang, giving him a moment to gather his cover story. "Hello?"

"Art! It's Fede!" Federico was another provocateur in GMT. He wasn't exactly
Art's superior -- the tribes didn't work like that -- but he had seniority.

"Fede -- can I call you back?"

"Look, I heard about your accident, and I wouldn't have called, but it's
urgent."

Art groaned and rolled his eyes in Linda's direction to let her know that he,
too, was exasperated by the call, then retreated to the other side of his bed
and hunched over.

"What is it?"

"We've been sniffed. I'm four-fifths positive."

Art groaned again. Fede lived in perennial terror of being found out and exposed
as an ESTribesman, fired, deported, humiliated. He was always at least
three-fifths positive, and the extra fifth was hardly an anomaly. "What's up
now?"

"It's the VP of HR at Virgin/Deutsche Telekom. He's called me in for a meeting
this afternoon. Wants to go over the core hours recommendation." Fede was a
McKinsey consultant offline, producing inflammatory recommendation packages for
Fortune 100 companies. He was working the lazy-Euro angle, pushing for extra
daycare, time off for sick relatives and spouses. The last policy binder he'd
dumped on V/DT had contained enough obscure leave-granting clauses that an
employee who was sufficiently lawyer-minded could conceivably claim 450 days of
paid leave a year. Now he was pushing for the abolishment of "core hours,"
Corporate Eurospeak for the time after lunch but before afternoon naps when
everyone showed up at the office, so that they could get some face-time. Enough
of this, and GMT would be the laughingstock of the world, and so caught up in
internecine struggles that the clear superiority of the stress-feeding EST ethos
would sweep them away. That was the theory, anyway. Of course, there were rival
Tribalists in every single management consulting firm in the world working
against us. Management consultants have always worked on old-boys' networks,
after all -- it was a very short step from interning your frat buddy to
interning your Tribesman.

"That's it? A meeting? Jesus, it's just a meeting. He probably wants you to
reassure him before he presents to the CEO, is all."

"No, I'm sure that's not it. He's got us sniffed -- both of us. He's been going
through the product-design stuff, too, which is totally outside of his
bailiwick. I tried to call him yesterday and his voicemail rolled over to a
boardroom in O'Malley House." O'Malley House was the usability lab, a nice old
row of connected Victorian townhouses just off Picadilly. It was where Art
consulted out of. Also, two-hundred-odd usability specialists, product
designers, experience engineers, cog-psych cranks and other tinkerers with