Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow (best pdf ebook reader txt) 📕

Kurt lived in the back of a papered-over storefront on Oxford. The front two-thirds were a maze of peeling, stickered-over stamped-metal shelving units piled high with junk tech: ancient shrink-wrapped software, stacked up low-capacity hard drives, cables and tapes and removable media. Alan tried to imagine making sense of it all, flowing it into The Inventory, and felt something like vertigo.

In a small hollow carved out of the back, Kurt had arranged a cluttered desk, a scuffed twin bed and a rack of milk crates filled with t-shirts and underwear.

Alan picked his way delicately through the store and found himself a seat on an upturned milk crate. Kurt sat on the bed and grinned expectantly.

“So?” he said.

“So what?” Alan said.

“So what is this! Isn’t it great?”

“Well, you sure have a lot of stuff, I’ll give you that,” Alan said.

“It’s all dumpstered,” Kurt said casually.

“Oh, you dive?” Alan said. “I used to dive.” It was mostly true. Alan had always been a picker, always on the lookout for bargoons, even if they were sticking out of someone’s trash bin. Sometimes especially if they were sticking out of someone’s trash bin—seeing what normal people threw away gave him a rare glimpse into their lives.

Kurt walked over to the nearest shelving unit and grabbed a PC mini-tower with the lid off. “But did you ever do this?” He stuck the machine under Alan’s nose and swung the gooseneck desk lamp over it. It was a white-box PC, generic commodity hardware, with a couple of network cards.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a junk access point! I made it out of trash! The only thing I bought were the network cards—two wireless, one Ethernet. It’s running a FreeBSD distribution off a CD, so the OS can never get corrupted. It’s got lots of sweet stuff in the distro, and all you need to do is plug it in, point the antennae in opposite directions, and you’re up. It does its own power management, it automagically peers with other access points if it can find ’em, and it does its own dynamic channel selection to avoid stepping on other access points.”

Alan turned his head this way and that, making admiring noises. “You made this, huh?”

“For about eighty bucks. It’s my fifteenth box. Eventually, I wanna have a couple hundred of these.”

“Ambitious,” Alan said, handing the box back. “How do you pay for the parts you have to buy? Do you have a grant?”

“A grant? Shit, no! I’ve got a bunch of street kids who come in and take digital pix of the stuff I have no use for, research them online, and post them to eBay. I split the take with them. Brings in a couple grand a week, and I’m keeping about fifty street kids fed besides. I go diving three times a week out in Concord and Oakville and Richmond Hill, anywhere I can find an industrial park. If I had room, I’d recruit fifty more kids—I’m bringing it in faster than they can sell it.”

“Why don’t you just do less diving?”

“Are you kidding me? It’s all I can do not to go out every night! You wouldn’t believe the stuff I find—all I can think about is all the stuff I’m missing out on. Some days I wish that my kids were less honest; if they ripped off some stuff, I’d have room for a lot more.”

Alan laughed. Worry for Edward and Frederick and George nagged at him, impotent anxiety, but this was just so fascinating. Fascinating and distracting, and, if not normal, at least not nearly so strange as he could be. He imagined the city gridded up with junk equipment, radiating Internet access from the lakeshore to the outer suburbs. The grandiosity took his breath away.

“Look,” Kurt said, spreading out a map of Kensington Market on the unmade bed. “I’ve got access points here, here, here, and here. Another eight or ten and I’ll have the whole Market covered. Then I’m going to head north, cover the U of T campus, and push east towards Yonge Street. Bay Street and University Avenue are going to be tough—how can I convince bankers to let me plug this by their windows?”

“Kurt,” Alan said, “I suspect that the journey to University Avenue is going to be a lot slower than you expect it to be.”

Kurt jutted his jaw out. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“There’s a lot of real estate between here and there. A lot of trees and high-rises, office towers and empty lots. You’re going to have to knock on doors every couple hundred meters—at best—and convince them to let you install one of these boxes, made from garbage, and plug it in, to participate in what?”

“Democratic communication!” Kurt said.

“Ah, well, my guess is that most of the people who you’ll need to convince won’t really care much about that. Won’t be able to make that abstract notion concrete.”

Kurt mumbled into his chest. Alan could see that he was fuming.

“Just because you don’t have the vision to appreciate this—”

Alan held up his hand. “Stop right there. I never said anything of the sort. I think that this is big and exciting and looks like a lot of fun. I think that ringing doorbells and talking people into letting me nail an access point to their walls sounds like a lot of fun. Really, I’m not kidding.

“But this is a journey, not a destination. The value you’ll get out of this will be more in the doing than the having done. The having done’s going to take decades, I’d guess. But the doing’s going to be something.” Alan’s smile was so broad it ached. The idea had seized him. He was drunk on it.

The buzzer sounded and Kurt got up to answer it. Alan craned his neck to see a pair of bearded neohippies in rasta hats.

“Are you Kurt?” one asked.

“Yeah, dude, I’m Kurt.”

“Marcel told us that we could make some money here? We’re trying to raise bus fare to Burning Man? We could really use the work?”

“Not today, but maybe tomorrow,” Kurt said. “Come by around lunchtime.”

“You sure you can’t use us today?”

“Not today,” Kurt said. “I’m busy today.”

“All right,” the other said, and they slouched away.

“Word of mouth,” Kurt said, with a jingling shrug. “Kids just turn up, looking for work with the trash.”

“You think they’ll come back tomorrow?” Alan was pretty good at evaluating kids and they hadn’t looked very reliable.

“Those two? Fifty-fifty chance. Tell you what, though: there’s always enough kids and enough junk to go around.”

“But you need to make arrangements to get your access points mounted and powered. You’ve got to sort it out with people who own stores and houses.”

“You want to knock on doors?” Kurt said.

“I think I would,” Alan said. “I suspect it’s a possibility. We can start with the shopkeepers, though.”

“I haven’t had much luck with merchants,” Kurt said, shrugging his shoulders. His chains jingled and a whiff of armpit wafted across the claustrophobic hollow. “Capitalist pigs.”

“I can’t imagine why,” Alan said.