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- Author: Cory Doctorow
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“It’s practically solid-state,” Kurt said, nearly shouted, after he’d powered down the third box and found that the other two—previously routing and humming along happily—refused to come back up into their known-good state. He gave Alan a dirty look, as though his insistence on preflighting were the root of their problems.
The street-kid who’d spoken up had jumped when Kurt raised his voice, then cringed away. Now as Kurt began to tear around the shop, looking through boxes of CDs and dropping things on the floor, the kid all but cowered, and the other three all looked down at the table.
“I’ll just reinstall,” Kurt said. “That’s the beauty of these things. It’s a standard distro, I just copy it over, and biff-bam, it’ll come right back up. No problem. Take me ten minutes. We’ve got plenty of time.”
Then, five minutes later, “Shit, I forgot that this one has a different mo-bo than the others.”
“Mo-bo?” Alan said, amused. He’d spotted the signs of something very finicky gone very wrong and he’d given up any hope of actually doing the demo, so he’d settled in to watch the process without rancor and to learn as much as he could.
“Motherboard,” Kurt said, reaching for a spool of blank CDs. “Just got to patch the distribution, recompile, burn it to CD, and reboot, and we’re on the road.”
Ten minutes later, “Shit.”
“Yes?” Alan said.
“Back off, okay?”
“I’m going to call them and let them know we’re going to be late.”
“We’re not going to be late,” Kurt said, his fingers going into claws on the keyboard.
“We’re already late,” Alan said.
“Shit,” Kurt said.
“Let’s do this,” Alan said. “Let’s bring down the two that you’ve got working and show them those, and explain the rest.”
They’d had a fight, and Kurt had insisted, as Alan had suspected he would, that he was only a minute or two away from bringing everything back online. Alan kept his cool, made mental notes of the things that went wrong, and put together a plan for avoiding all these problems the next time around.
“Is there a spare?” Alan said.
Kurt sneered and jerked a thumb at his workbench, where another junction box sat, bunny-ear antennae poking out of it. Alan moved it into his tub. “Great,” he said. “Tested, right?”
“All permutations tested and ready to go. You know, you’re not the boss around here.”
“I know it,” he said. “Partners.” He clapped Kurt on the shoulder, ignoring the damp gray grimy feeling of the clammy T-shirt under his palm.
The shoulder under his palm sagged. “Right,” Kurt said. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Alan said. “You’ve been hard at it. I’ll get loaded while you wash up.
Kurt sniffed at his armpit. “Whew,” he said. “Yeah, okay.”
When Kurt emerged from the front door of his storefront ten minutes later, he looked like he’d at least made an effort. His mohawk and its fins were slicked back and tucked under a baseball hat, his black jeans were unripped and had only one conservative chain joining the wallet in his back pocket to his belt loop. Throw in a clean t-shirt advertising an old technology conference instead of the customary old hardcore band and you had an approximation of the kind of geek that everyone knew was in possession of secret knowledge and hence must be treated with attention, if not respect.
“I feel like such a dilbert,” he said.
“You look totally disreputable,” Alan said, hefting the tub of their access points into the bed of his truck and pulling the bungees tight around it. “Punk as fuck.”
Kurt grinned and ducked his head. “Stop it,” he said. “Flatterer.”
“Get in the truck,” Alan said.
Kurt drummed his fingers nervously on his palms the whole way to Bell offices. Alan grabbed his hand and stilled it. “Stop worrying,” he said. “This is going to go great.”
“I still don’t understand why we’re doing this,” Kurt said. “They’re the phone company. They hate us, we hate them. Can’t we just leave it that way?”
“Don’t worry, we’ll still all hate each other when we get done.”
“So why bother?” He sounded petulant and groggy, and Alan reached under his seat for the thermos he’d had filled at the Greek’s before heading to Kurt’s place. “Coffee,” he said, and handed it to Kurt, who groaned and swigged and stopped bitching.
“Why bother is this,” Alan said. “We’re going to get a lot of publicity for doing this.” Kurt snorted into the thermos. “It’s going to be a big deal. You know how big a deal this can be. We’re going to communicate that to the press, who will communicate it to the public, and then there will be a shitstorm. Radio cops, telco people, whatever—they’re going to try to discredit us. I want to know what they’re liable to say.”
“Christ, you’re dragging me out for that? I can tell you what they’ll say. They’ll drag out the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse: kiddie porn, terrorists, pirates, and the mafia. They’ll tell us that any tool for communicating that they can’t tap, log, and switch off is irresponsible. They’ll tell us we’re stealing from ISPs. It’s what they say every time someone tries this: Philly, New York, London. All around the world same song.”
Alan nodded. “That’s good background—thanks. I still want to know how they say it, what the flaws are in their expression of their argument. And I wanted us to run a demo for some people who we could never hope to sway—that’s a good audience for exposing the flaws in the show. This’ll be a good prep session.”
“So I pulled an all-nighter and busted my nuts to produce a demo for a bunch of people we don’t care about? Thanks a lot.”
Alan started to say something equally bitchy back, and then he stopped himself. He knew where this would end up—a screaming match that would leave both of them emotionally overwrought at a time when they needed cool heads. But he couldn’t think of what to tell Kurt in order to placate him. All his life, he’d been in situations like this: confronted by people who had some beef, some grievance, and he’d had no answer for it. Usually he could puzzle out the skeleton of their cause, but sometimes—times like this—he was stumped.
He picked at the phrase. I pulled an all-nighter. Kurt pulled an all-nighter because he’d left this to the last minute, not because Alan had surprised him with it. He knew that, of course. Was waiting, then, for Alan to bust him on it. To tell him, This is your fault, not mine. To tell him If this demo fails, it’s because you fucked off and left it to the last minute. So he was angry, but not at Alan, he was angry at himself.
A bunch of people we don’t care about, what was that about? Ah. Kurt knew that they didn’t take him seriously in the real world. He was too dirty, too punk-as-fuck, too much of his identity was wrapped up in being alienated and alienating. But he couldn’t make his dream come true without Alan’s help, either, and so Alan was the friendly face on their enterprise, and he resented that—feared that in order to keep up his appearance of punk-as-fuckitude, he’d have to go into the meeting cursing and sneering and that Alan would bust him on that, too.
Alan frowned at the steering wheel. He was getting better at understanding people, but that didn’t make him necessarily better at being a person. What should he say here?
“That was a really heroic effort, Kurt,” he said, biting his lip. “I can tell you put a lot of work into it.” He couldn’t believe that praise this naked could possibly placate someone of Kurt’s heroic cynicism, but Kurt’s features softened and he turned his face away, rolled down the window, lit a cigarette.
“I thought I’d never get it done,” Kurt said. “I was so sleepy, I felt like I was half-baked. Couldn’t concentrate.”
You were up all night because you left it to the last minute, Alan thought. But Kurt knew that, was waiting to be reassured about it. “I don’t know how you get as much done as you do. Must be really hard.”
“It’s not so bad,” Kurt said, dragging on his cigarette and not quite disguising his grin. “It gets easier every time.”
“Yeah, we’re going to get this down to a science someday,” Alan said. “Something we can teach anyone to do.”
“That would be so cool,” Kurt said, and put his boots up on the dash. “God, you could pick all the parts you needed out of the trash, throw a little methodology at them, and out would pop this thing that destroyed the phone company.”
“This is going to be a fun meeting,” Alan said.
“Shit, yeah. They’re going to be terrified of us.”
“Someday. Maybe it starts today.”
The Bell boardroom looked more like a retail operation than a back office, decked out in brand-consistent livery, from the fabric-dyed rag carpets to the avant-garde lighting fixtures. They were given espressos by the young secretary-barista whose skirt-and-top number was some kind of reinterpreted ravewear outfit toned down for a corporate workplace.
“So this is the new Bell,” Kurt said, once she had gone. “Our tax dollars at work.”
“This is good work,” Alan said, gesturing at the blown-up artwork of pan-ethnic models who were extraordinary- but not beautiful-looking on the walls. The Bell redesign had come at the same time as the telco was struggling back from the brink of bankruptcy, and the marketing firm they’d hired to do the work had made its name on the strength of the campaign. “Makes you feel like using a phone is a really futuristic, cutting-edge activity,” he said.
His contact at the semiprivatized corporation was a young kid who shopped at one of his protégés’ designer furniture store. He was a young turk who’d made a name for himself quickly in the company through a couple of ISP acquisitions at fire-sale prices after the dot-bomb, which he’d executed flawlessly, integrating the companies into Bell’s network with hardly a hiccup. He’d been very polite and guardedly enthusiastic when Alan called him, and had invited him down to meet some of his colleagues.
Though Alan had never met him, he recognized him the minute he walked in as the person who had to go with the confident voice he’d heard on the phone.
“Lyman,” he said, standing up and holding out his hand. The guy was slightly Asian-looking, tall, with a sharp suit that managed to look casual and expensive at the same time.
He shook Alan’s hand and said, “Thanks for coming down.” Alan introduced him to Kurt, and then Lyman introduced them both to his colleagues, a gender-parity posse of young, smart-looking people, along with one graybeard (literally—he had a Unix beard of great rattiness and gravitas) who had no fewer than seven devices on his belt, including a line tester and a GPS.
Once they were seated, Alan snuck a look at Kurt, who had narrowed his eyes and cast his gaze down onto the business cards he’d been handed. Alan hadn’t been expecting this—he’d figured on finding himself facing down a group of career bureaucrats—and Kurt was clearly thrown for a loop, too.
“Well, Alan, Kurt, it’s nice to meet you,” Lyman said. “I hear you’re working on some exciting stuff.”
“We are,” Alan said. “We’re building a city-wide mesh wireless network using unlicensed spectrum that will provide high-speed, Internet connectivity absolutely gratis.”
“That’s ambitious,” Lyman said, without the skepticism that Alan had assumed would greet his statement. “How’s it coming?”
“Well, we’ve got a bunch of Kensington Market covered,” Alan said. “Kurt’s been
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