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

officer."

PC DeMoss gave him a reproachful look.

"I'm sorry, all right?" Art said. "I lack the foresight to empty my bladder
before being accosted in the street. That being said, can we arrive at some kind
of solution?" In his head, Art was already writing an angry letter to the
*Times*, dripping with sarcasm.

"Just a moment, sir," PC DeMoss said. He conferred briefly with his partner,
leaving Art to stare ruefully at their backs and avoid Linda's gaze. When he
finally met it, she gave him a sunny smile. It seemed that she -- at least --
wasn't angry any more.

"Come this way, please, sir," PC DeMoss said, striking off for the High Street.
"There's a pub 'round the corner where you can use the facilities."

9.

It was nearly dawn before they finally made their way out of the police station
and back into the street. After identifying Les from an online rogues' gallery,
Art had spent the next six hours sitting on a hard bench, chording desultorily
on his thigh, doing some housekeeping.

This business of being an agent-provocateur was complicated in the extreme,
though it had sounded like a good idea when he was living in San Francisco and
hating every inch of the city, from the alleged pizza to the fucking! drivers!
-- in New York, the theory went, drivers used their horns by way of shouting
"Ole!" as in, "Ole! You changed lanes!" "Ole! You cut me off!" "Ole! You're
driving on the sidewalk!" while in San Francisco, a honking horn meant, "I wish
you were dead. Have a nice day. Dude."

And the body language was all screwed up out west. Art believed that your entire
unconscious affect was determined by your upbringing. You learned how to stand,
how to hold your face in repose, how to gesture, from the adults around you
while you were growing up. The Pacific Standard Tribe always seemed a little
bovine to him, their facial muscles long conditioned to relax into a kind of
spacey, gullible senescence.

Beauty, too. Your local definition of attractive and ugly was conditioned by the
people around you at puberty. There was a Pacific "look" that was indefinably
off. Hard to say what it was, just that when he went out to a bar or got stuck
on a crowded train, the girls just didn't seem all that attractive to him.
Objectively, he could recognize their prettiness, but it didn't stir him the way
the girls cruising the Chelsea Antiques Market or lounging around Harvard Square
could.

He'd always felt at a slight angle to reality in California, something that was
reinforced by his continuous efforts in the Tribe, from chatting and gaming
until the sun rose, dragging his caffeine-deficient ass around to his clients in
a kind of fog before going home, catching a nap and hopping back online at 3 or
4 when the high-octane NYC early risers were practicing work-avoidance and
clattering around with their comms.

Gradually, he penetrated deeper into the Tribe, getting invites into private
channels, intimate environments where he found himself spilling the most private
details of his life. The Tribe stuck together, finding work for each other,
offering advice, and it was only a matter of time before someone offered him a
gig.

That was Fede, who practically invented Tribal agent-provocateurs. He'd been
working for McKinsey, systematically undermining their GMT-based clients with
plausibly terrible advice, creating Achilles' heels that their East-coast
competitors could exploit. The entire European trust-architecture for relay
networks had been ceded by Virgin/Deutsche Telekom to a scrappy band of AT&T
Labs refugees whose New Jersey headquarters hosted all the cellular reputation
data that Euros' comms consulted when they were routing their calls. The Jersey
clients had funneled a nice chunk of the proceeds to Fede's account in the form
of rigged winnings from an offshore casino that the Tribe used to launder its
money.

Now V/DT was striking back, angling for a government contract in Massachusetts,
a fat bit of pork for managing payments to rightsholders whose media was
assessed at the MassPike's tollbooths. Rights-societies were a fabulous
opportunity to skim and launder and spindle money in plenty, and Virgin's
massive repertoire combined with Deutsche Telekom's Teutonic attention to detail
was a tough combination to beat. Needless to say, the Route 128-based Tribalists
who had the existing contract needed an edge, and would pay handsomely for it.

London nights seemed like a step up from San Francisco mornings to Art --
instead of getting up at 4AM to get NYC, he could sleep in and chat them up
through the night. The Euro sensibility, with its many nap-breaks, statutory
holidays and extended vacations seemed ideally suited to a double agent's life.

But Art hadn't counted on the Tribalists' hands-on approach to his work. They
obsessively grepped his daily feed of spreadsheets, whiteboard-output, memos and
conversation reports for any of ten thousand hot keywords, querying him for
deeper detail on trivial, half-remembered bullshit sessions with the V/DT's user
experience engineers. His comm buzzed and blipped at all hours, and his payoff
was dependent on his prompt response. They were running him ragged.

Four hours in the police station gave Art ample opportunity to catch up on the
backlog of finicky queries. Since the accident, he'd been distracted and tardy,
and had begun to invent his responses, since it all seemed so trivial to him
anyway.

Fede had sent him about a thousand nagging notes reminding him to generate a new
key and phone with the fingerprint. Christ. Fede had been with McKinsey for most
of his adult life, and he was superparanoid about being exposed and disgraced in
their ranks. Art's experience with the other McKinsey people around the office
suggested that the notion of any of those overpaid buzzword-slingers sniffing
their traffic was about as likely as a lightning strike. Heaving a dramatic sigh
for his own benefit, he began the lengthy process of generating enough
randomness to seed the key, mashing the keyboard, whispering nonsense syllables,
and pointing the comm's camera lens at arbitrary corners of the police station.
After ten minutes of crypto-Tourette's, the comm announced that he'd been
sufficiently random and prompted him for a passphrase. Jesus. What a pain in the
ass. He struggled to recall all the words to the theme song from a CBC sitcom
he'd watched as a kid, and then his comm went into a full-on churn as it
laboriously re-ciphered all of his stored files with the new key, leaving Art to
login while he waited.

Trepan: Afternoon!

Colonelonic: Hey, Trepan. How's it going?

Trepan: Foul. I'm stuck at a copshop in London with my thumb up my ass. I got
mugged.

Colonelonic: Yikes! You OK?

Ballgravy: Shit!

Trepan: Oh, I'm fine -- just bored. They didn't hurt me. I commed 999 while they
were running their game and showed it to them when they got ready to do the
deed, so they took off.

##Colonelonic laughs

Ballgravy: Britain==ass. Lon-dong.

Colonelonic: Sweet!

Trepan: Thanks. Now if the cops would only finish the paperwork...

Colonelonic: What are you doing in London, anyway?

Ballgravy: Ass ass ass

Colonelonic: Shut up, Bgravy

Ballgravy: Blow me

Trepan: What's wrong with you, Ballgravy? We're having a grown-up conversation
here

Ballgravy: Just don't like Brits.

Trepan: What, all of them?

Ballgravy: Whatever -- all the ones I've met have been tight-ass pricks

##Colonelonic: (private) He's just a troll, ignore him

private Colonelonic: Watch this

Trepan: How many?

Ballgravy: How many what?

Trepan: Have you met?

Ballgravy: Enough

Trepan: > 100?

Ballgravy: No

Trepan: > 50?

Ballgravy: No

Trepan: > 10?

Ballgravy: Around 10

Trepan: Where are you from?

Ballgravy: Queens

Trepan: Well, you're not going to believe this, but you're the tenth person from
Queens I've met -- and you're all morons who pick fights with strangers in
chat-rooms

Colonelonic: Queens==ass

Trepan: Ass ass ass

Ballgravy: Fuck you both

##Ballgravy has left channel #EST.chatter

Colonelonic: Nicely done

Colonelonic: He's been boring me stupid for the past hour, following me from
channel to channel

Colonelonic: What are you doing in London, anyway?

Trepan: Like I said, waiting for the cops

Colonelonic: But why are you there in the first place

Trepan: /private Colonelonic It's a work thing. For EST.

##Colonelonic: (private) No shit?

Trepan: /private Colonelonic Yeah. Can't really say much more, you understand

##Colonelonic: (private) Cool! Any more jobs? One more day at Merril-Lynch and
I'm gonna kill someone

Trepan: /private Colonelonic Sorry, no. There must be some perks though.

##Colonelonic: (private) I can pick fights with strangers in chat rooms! Also, I
get to play with Lexus-Nexus all I want

Trepan: /private Colonelonic That's pretty rad, anyway

##Ballgravy has joined channel #EST.chatter

Ballgravy: Homos

Trepan: Oh Christ, are you back again, Queens?

Colonelonic: I've gotta go anyway

Trepan: See ya

##Colonelonic has left channel #EST.chatter

##Trepan has left channel #EST.chatter

Art stood up and blinked. He approached the desk sergeant and asked if he
thought it would be much longer. The sergeant fiddled with a comm for a moment,
then said, "Oh, we're quite done with you sir, thank you." Art repressed a
vituperative response, counted three, then thanked the cop.

He commed Linda.

"What's up?"

"They say we're free to go. I think they've been just keeping us here for shits
and giggles. Can you believe that?"

"Whatever -- I've been having a nice chat with Constable McGivens. Constable, is
it all right if we go now?"

There was some distant, English rumbling, then Linda giggled. "All right, then.
Thank you so much, officer!

"Art? I'll meet you at the front doors, all right?"

"That's great," Art said. He stretched. His ass was numb, his head throbbed, and
he wanted to strangle Linda.

She emerged into the dawn blinking and grinning, and surprised him with a long,
full-body hug. "Sorry I was so snappish before," she said. "I was just scared.
The cops say that you were quite brave. Thank you."

Art's adrenals dry-fired as he tried to work up a good angry head of steam, then
he gave up. "It's all right."

"Let's go get some breakfast, OK?"

10.

The parking-lot is aswarm with people, fire engines and ambulances. There's a
siren going off somewhere down in the bowels of the sanatorium, and still I
can't get anyone to look up at the goddamned roof.

I've tried hollering myself hoarse into the updrafts from the cheery blaze, but
the wind's against me, my shouts rising up past my ears. I've tried dropping
more pebbles, but the winds whip them away, and I've learned my lesson about
half-bricks.

Weirdly, I'm not worried about getting into trouble. I've already been
involuntarily committed by the Tribe's enemies, the massed and devious forces of
the Pacific Daylight Tribe and the Greenwich Mean Tribe. I am officially Not
Responsible. Confused and Prone to Wandering. Coo-Coo for Coco-Puffs. It's not
like I hurt anyone, just decremented the number of roadworthy fartmobiles by
one.

I got up this morning at four, awakened by the tiniest sound from the ward
corridors, a wheel from a pharmaceuticals tray maybe. Three weeks on medically
prescribed sleepytime drugs have barely scratched the surface of the damage
wrought by years of circadian abuse. I'd been having a fragile shadow of a
dream, the ghost of a REM cycle, and it was the old dream, the dream of the
doctor's office and the older kids who could manage