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

the
mind. They were the hairface hackers of Art's generation, unmanageable creative
darlings -- no surprise that the VP of HR would have cause to spend a little
face-time with someone there. Try telling Fede that, though.

"All right, Fede, what do you want me to do?"

"Just -- Just be careful. Sanitize your storage. I'm pushing a new personal key
to you now, too. Here, I'll read you the fingerprint." The key would be an
unimaginably long string of crypto-gibberish, and just to make sure that it
wasn't intercepted and changed en route, Fede wanted to read him a slightly less
long mathematical fingerprint hashed out of it. Once it arrived, Art was
supposed to generate a fingerprint from Fede's new key and compare it to the one
that Fede wanted him to jot down.

Art closed his eyes and reclined. "All right, I've got a pen," he said, though
he had no such thing.

Fede read him the long, long string of digits and characters and he repeated
them back, pretending to be noting them down. Paranoid bastard.

"OK, I got it. I'll get you a new key later today, all right?"

"Do it quick, man."

"Whatever, Fede. Back off, OK?"

"Sorry, sorry. Oh, and feel better, all right?"

"Bye, Fede."

"What was *that*?" Linda had her neck craned around to watch him.

He slipped into his cover story with a conscious effort. "I'm a user-experience
consultant. My coworkers are all paranoid about a deadline."

She rolled her eyes. "Not another one. God. Look, we go out for dinner, don't
say a word about the kerb design or the waiter or the menu or the presentation,
OK? OK? I'm serious."

Art solemnly crossed his heart. "Who else do you know in the biz?"

"My ex. He wouldn't or couldn't shut up about how much everything sucked. He was
right, but so what? I wanted to enjoy it, suckitude and all."

"OK, I promise. We're going out for dinner, then?"

"The minute I can walk, you're taking me out for as much flesh and entrails as I
can eat."

"It's a deal."

And then they both slept again.

7.

Met cute, huh? Linda was short and curvy, dark eyes and pursed lips and an
hourglass figure that she thought made her look topheavy and big-assed, but I
thought she was fabulous and soft and bouncy. She tasted like pepper, and her
hair smelled of the abstruse polymers that kept it hanging in a brusque bob that
brushed her firm, long jawline.

I'm getting a sunburn, and the pebbles on the roof are digging into my ass. I
don't know if I'm going to push the pencil or not, but if I do, it's going to be
somewhere more comfortable than this roof.

Except that the roof door, which I had wedged open before I snuck away from my
attendants and slunk up the firecode-mandated stairwell, is locked. The small
cairn of pebbles that I created in front of it has been strewn apart. It is
locked tight. And me without my comm. Ah, me. I take an inventory of my person:
a pencil, a hospital gown, a pair of boxer shorts and a head full of bad cess. I
am 450' above the summery, muggy, verdant Massachusetts countryside. It is very
hot, and I am turning the color of the Barbie aisle at FAO Schwartz, a kind of
labial pink that is both painful and perversely cheerful.

I've spent my life going in the back door and coming out the side door. That's
the way it is now. When it only takes two years for your job to morph into
something that would have been unimaginable twenty-four months before, it's not
really practical to go in through the front door. Not really practical to get
the degree, the certification, the appropriate experience. I mean, even if you
went back to university, the major you'd need by the time you graduated would be
in a subject that hadn't been invented when you enrolled. So I'm good at back
doors and side doors. It's what the Tribe does for me -- provides me with
entries into places where I technically don't belong. And thank God for them,
anyway. Without the Tribes, *no one* would be qualified to do *anything* worth
doing.

Going out the side door has backfired on me today, though.

Oh. Shit. I peer over the building's edge, down into the parking lot. The cars
are thinly spread, the weather too fine for anyone out there in the real world
to be visiting with their crazy relatives. Half a dozen beaters are parked down
there, methane-breathers that the ESTalists call fartmobiles. I'd been driving
something much the same on that fateful Leap Forward day in London. I left
something out of my inventory: pebbles. The roof is littered, covered with a
layer of gray, round riverstones, about the size of wasabi chickpeas. No one
down there is going to notice me all the way up here. Not without that I give
them a sign. A cracked windshield or two ought to do it.

I gather a small pile of rocks by the roof's edge and carefully take aim. I have
to be cautious. Careful. A pebble dropped from this height -- I remember the
stories about the penny dropped from the top of the CN Tower that sunk six
inches into the concrete below.

I select a small piece of gravel and carefully aim for the windshield of a
little blue Sony Veddic and it's bombs away. I can only follow the stone's
progress for a few seconds before my eyes can no longer disambiguate it from the
surrounding countryside. What little I do see of its trajectory is
disheartening, though: the wind whips it away on an almost horizontal parabola,
off towards Boston. Forgetting all about Newton, I try lobbing and then hurling
the gravel downward, but it gets taken away, off to neverneverland, and the
windscreens remain whole.

I go off to prospect for bigger rocks.

You know the sort of horror movie where the suspense builds and builds and
builds, partially collapsed at regular intervals by something jumping out and
yelling "Boo!" whereupon the heroes have to flee, deeper into danger, and the
tension rises and rises? You know how sometimes the director just doesn't know
when to quit, and the bogeymen keep jumping out and yelling boo, the wobbly
bridges keep on collapsing, the small arms fire keeps blowing out more windows
in the office tower?

It's not like the tension goes away -- it just get boring. Boring tension. You
know that the climax is coming soon, that any minute now Our Hero will face down
the archvillain and either kick his ass or have his ass kicked, the whole world
riding on the outcome. You know that it will be satisfying, with much explosions
and partial nudity. You know that afterward, Our Hero will retire to the
space-bar and chill out and collect kisses from the love interest and that we'll
all have a moment to get our adrenals back under control before the hand pops
out of the grave and we all give a nervous jump and start eagerly anticipating
the sequel.

You just wish it would *happen* already. You just wish that the little climaces
could be taken as read, that the director would trust the audience to know that
Our Hero really does wade through an entire ocean of shit en route to the final
showdown.

I'm bored with being excited. I've been betrayed, shot at, institutionalized and
stranded on the roof of a nuthouse, and I just want the fucking climax to come
by and happen to me, so that I can know: smart or happy.

I've found a half-brick that was being used to hold down the tar paper around an
exhaust-chimney. I should've used that to hold the door open, but it's way the
hell the other side of the roof, and I'd been really pleased with my little
pebbly doorstop. Besides, I'm starting to suspect that the doorjamb didn't fail,
that it was sabotaged by some malevolently playful goon from the sanatorium. An
object lesson or something.

I heft the brick. I release the brick. It falls, and falls, and falls, and hits
the little blue fartmobile square on the trunk, punching a hole through the
cheap aluminum lid.

And the fartmobile explodes. First there is a geyser of blue flame as the tank's
puncture wound jets a stream of ignited assoline skyward, and then it blows back
into the tank and *boom*, the fartmobile is in one billion shards, rising like a
parachute in an updraft. I can feel the heat on my bare, sun-tender skin, even
from this distance.

Explosions. Partial nudity. Somehow, though, I know that this isn't the climax.

8.

Linda didn't like to argue -- fight: yes, argue: no. That was going to be a
problem, Art knew, but when you're falling in love, you're able to rationalize
all kinds of things.

The yobs who cornered them on the way out of a bloody supper of contraband,
antisocial animal flesh were young, large and bristling with testosterone. They
wore killsport armor with strategic transparent panels that revealed their
steroid-curdled muscles, visible through the likewise transparent insets they'd
had grafted in place of the skin that covered their abs and quads. There were
three of them, grinning and flexing, and they boxed in Art and Linda in the
tiny, shuttered entrance of a Boots Pharmacy.

"Evening, sir, evening, miss," one said.

"Hey," Art muttered and looked over the yob's shoulder, trying to spot a secam
or a cop. Neither was in sight.

"I wonder if we could beg a favor of you?" another said.

"Sure," Art said.

"You're American, aren't you?" the third said.

"Canadian, actually."

"Marvelous. Bloody marvelous. I hear that Canada's a lovely place. How are you
enjoying England?"

"I live here, actually. I like it a lot."

"Glad to hear that, sir. And you, Miss?"

Linda was wide-eyed, halfway behind Art. "It's fine."

"Good to hear," the first one said, grinning even more broadly. "Now, as to that
favor. My friends and I, we've got a problem. We've grown bored of our wallets.
They are dull and uninteresting."

"And empty," the third one interjected, with a little, stoned giggle.

"Oh yes, and empty. We thought, well, perhaps you visitors from abroad would
find them suitable souvenirs of England. We thought perhaps you'd like to trade,
like?"

Art smiled in spite of himself. He hadn't been mugged in London, but he'd heard
of this. Ever since a pair of Manchester toughs had been acquitted based on the
claim that their robbery and menacing of a Pakistani couple had been a simple
cross-cultural misunderstanding, crafty British yobs had been taking off
increasingly baroque scores from tourists.

Art felt the familiar buzz that meant he was about to get into an argument, and
before he knew it, he was talking: "Do you really think that'd hold up in court?
I think that even the dimmest judge would be able to tell that the idea of a
Canadian being mistaken about trading two wallets full of cash for three empty
ones was in no way an error in cross-cultural communication. Really now. If
you're going to mug us --"

"Mug you, sir? Dear oh dear, who's mugging you?" the first one said.

"Well, in that case, you won't mind if we say no, right?"

"Well, it would be rather rude," the first said. "After all, we're offering you
a souvenir in the spirit of transatlantic solidarity.