Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow (best pdf ebook reader txt) 📕
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- Author: Cory Doctorow
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He fell silent and they all stared at each other for a moment. Kurt’s mouth hung open.
“I’m not old,” he said finally.
“You’re older than me,” the kid said. His tone softened. “Look, I’m not trying to be cruel here, but you’re generation-blind. The Internet is great, but it’s not the last great thing we’ll ever invent. My pops was a mainframe guy, he thought PCs were toys. You’re a PC guy, so you think my phone is a toy.”
Alan looked off into the corner of the back room of Kurt’s shop for a while, trying to marshal his thoughts. Back there, among the shelves of milk crates stuffed with T-shirts and cruft, he had a thought.
“Okay,” he said. “Fair enough. It may be that today, in the field, there’s a lot of free expression being enabled with phones. But at the end of the day"—he thought of Lyman—"this is the phone company we’re talking about. Big lumbering dinosaur that is thrashing in the tar pit. The spazz dinosaur that’s so embarrassed all the other dinosaurs that none of them want to rescue it.
“Back in the sixties, these guys sued to keep it illegal to plug anything other than their rental phones into their network. But more to the point, you get a different kind of freedom with an Internet network than a phone-company network—even if the Internet network lives on top of the phone-company network.
“If you invent a new way of using the phone network—say, a cheaper way of making long-distance calls using voice-over-IP, you can’t roll that out on the phone network without the permission of the carrier. You have to go to him and say, ‘Hey, I’ve invented a way to kill your most profitable line of business, can you install it at your switching stations so that we can all talk long distance for free?’
“But on the net, anyone can invent any application that he can get his buddies to use. No central authority had to give permission for the Web to exist: A physicist just hacked it together one day, distributed the software to his colleagues, and in just a very short while, people all over the world had the Web.
“So the net can live on top of the phone network and it can run voice-calling as an application, but it’s not tied to the phone network. It doesn’t care whose wires or wireless it lives on top of. It’s got all these virtues that are key to free expression. That’s why we care about this.”
The kid nodded as he talked, impatiently, signaling in body language that even Alan could read that he’d heard this already.
“Yes, in this abstract sense, there are a bunch of things to like about your Internet over there. But I’m talking about practical, nonabstract, nontheoretical stuff over here. The real world. I can get a phone for free. I can talk to everyone with it. I can say anything I want. I can use it anywhere. Sure, the phone company is a giant conspiracy by The Man to keep us down. But can you really tell me with a straight face that because I can’t invent the Web for my phone or make free long distance calls I’m being censored?”
“Of course not,” Kurt said. Alan put a steadying hand on his shoulder. “Fine, it’s not an either-or thing. You can have your phones, I can have my Internet, and we’ll both do our thing. It’s not like the absence of the Web for phones or high long-distance charges are good for free expression, Christ. We’re trying to unbreak the net so that no one can own it or control it. We’re trying to put it on every corner of the city, for free, anonymously, for anyone to use. We’re doing it with recycled garbage, and we’re paying homeless teenagers enough money to get off the street as part of the program. What’s not to fucking like?”
The kid scribbled hard on his pad. “Now you’re giving me some quotes I can use. You guys need to work on your pitch. ‘What’s not to fucking like?’ That’s good.”
He and Link saw each other later that day, and Link still had his two little girls with him, sitting on the patio at the Greek’s, drinking beers, and laughing at his jokes.
“Hey, you’re the guy with the books,” one of them said when he passed by.
He stopped and nodded. “That’s me, all right,” he said.
Link picked at the label of his beer bottle and added to the dandruff of shredded paper in the ashtray before him. “Hey, Abe,” he said.
“Hey, Link,” he said. He looked down at the little girls’ bags. “You’ve made some finds,” he said. “Congratulations.”
They were wearing different clothes now—double-knit neon pop-art dresses and horn-rim shades and white legs flashing beneath the tabletop. They kicked their toes and smiled and drank their beers, which seemed comically large in their hands.
Casually, he looked to see who was minding the counter at the Greek’s and saw that it was the idiot son, who wasn’t smart enough to know that serving liquor to minors was asking for bad trouble.
“Where’s Krishna?” he asked.
One girl compressed her heart-shaped lips into a thin line.
And so she resolved to help her brother, because when it’s your fault that something has turned to shit, you have to wash shit. And so she resolved to help her brother, which meant that, step one, she had to get him to stop screwing up.
“He took off,” the girl said. Her pancake makeup had sweated away during the day and her acne wasn’t so bad that she’d needed it. “He took off running, like he’d forgotten something important. Looked scared.”
“Why don’t you go get more beers,” Link said angrily, cutting her off, and Alan had an intuition that Link had become Krishna’s Renfield, a recursion of Renfields, each nesting inside the last like Russian dolls in reverse: Big Link inside medium Krishna inside the stump that remained of Darrel.
And that meant that she had to take him out of the company of his bad companions, which she would accomplish through the simple expedient of scaring the everlasting fuck out of them.
She sulked off and the remaining girl looked down at her swinging toes.
“Where’d he go, Link?” Alan said. If Krishna was in a hurry to go somewhere or see something, he had an idea of what it was about.
Link’s expression closed up like a door slamming shut. “I don’t know,” he said. “How should I know?”
The other girl scuffed her toes and took a sip of her beer.
Their gazes all flicked down to the bottle.
“The Greek would bar you for life if he knew you were bringing underaged drinkers into here,” Alan said.
“Plenty of other bars in the Market,” Link said, shrugging his newly broad shoulders elaborately.
Trey was the kid who’d known her brother since third grade and whose puberty-induced brain damage had turned him into an utter turd. She once caught him going through the bathroom hamper, fetishizing her panties, and she’d shouted at him and he’d just ducked and grinned a little-boy grin that she had been incapable of wiping off his face, no matter how she raged. She would enjoy this.
“And they all know the Greek,” Alan said. “Three, two, one.” He turned on his heel and began to walk away.
“Wait!” Link called. The girl swallowed a giggle. He sounded desperate and not cool at all anymore.
Alan stopped and turned his body halfway, looking impatiently over his shoulder.
Link mumbled something.
“What?”
“Behind Kurt’s place,” Link said. “He said he was going to go look around behind Kurt’s place.”
“Thank you, Link,” he said. He turned all the way around and got down to eye level with the other girl. “Nice to meet you,” he said. He wanted to tell her, Be careful or Stay alert or Get out while the getting’s good, but none of that seemed likely to make much of an impression on her.
She smiled and her friend came back with three beers. “You’ve got a great house,” she said.
Her friend said, “Yeah, it’s amazing.”
“Well, thank you,” he said.
“Bye,” they said.
Link’s gaze bored into the spot between his shoulder blades the whole way to the end of the block.
The back-alleys of Kensington were a maze of coach houses, fences, dead ends and narrow doorways. Kids who knew their secrets played ball-hockey nearly undisturbed by cars, junkies turned them into reeking pissoirs, homeless people dossed down in the lees of their low, crazy-angled buildings, teenagers came and necked around corners.
But Alan knew their secrets. He’d seen the aerial maps, and he’d clambered their length and breadth and height with Kurt, checking sight lines for his network, sticking virtual pushpins into the map on his screen where he thought he could get some real benefit out of an access point.
So once he reached Kensington Avenue, he slipped behind a Guyanese patty stand and stepped through a wooden gate and began to make his way to the back of Kurt’s place. Cautiously.
From behind, the riot of colors and the ramshackle signs and subculture of Kensington was revealed as a superfice, a skin stretched over slightly daggy brick two-stories with tiny yards and tumbledown garages. From behind, he could be walking the back ways of any anonymous housing development, a no-personality greyzone of nothing and no one.
The sun went behind a cloud and the whole scene turned into something monochromatic, a black-and-white clip from an old home movie.
Carefully, he proceeded. Carefully, slipping from doorway to doorway, slipping up the alleyway to the next, to the corner that led to the alley that led to Kurt’s. Carefully, listening, watching.
And he managed to sneak up on Krishna and Davey, and he knew that for once, he’d be in the position to throw the rocks.
Krishna sat with his back against the cinderblock wall near Kurt’s back door, knees and hands splayed, head down in a posture of supplication. He had an unlit cigarette in his mouth, which he nervously shifted from corner to corner, like a soggy toothpick. Behind him, standing atop the dented and scabrous garbage cans, Dumont.
He rested his head on his folded arms, which he rested on the sill, and he stood on tiptoe to see in the window.
“I’m hungry,” Krishna said. “I want to go get some food. Can I go and get food and come back?”
“Quiet,” Dewayne said. “Not another fucking word, you sack of shit.” He said it quietly in a neutral tone that was belied by his words. He settled his head back on his folded forearms like a babe settling its head in a bosom and looked back through the window. “Ah,” he said, like he had taken a drink.
Krishna climbed slowly to his feet and stood off a pace or two, staring at Drew. He reached into the pocket of his old bomber jacket and found a lighter and flicked it nervously a couple times.
“Don’t you light that cigarette,” Davey said. “Don’t you dare.”
“How long are we going to be here?” Krishna’s whine was utterly devoid of his customary swagger.
“What kind of person is he?” Davey said. “What kind of person is he? He is in love with my brother, looks at him with cow-eyes when he sees him, hangs on his words like a love-struck girl.” He laughed nastily. “Like your love-struck girl, like she looks at him.
“I wonder if he’s had her yet. Do you think he has?”
“I don’t care,” Krishna said petulantly, and levered himself to his feet. He began to pace and Alan hastily backed himself into the doorway he’d been hiding in. “She’s mine, no matter who she’s fucking. I own her.”
“Look at that,” Darrel said. “Look at him talking to them, his little army, like a general giving them a pep talk. He got that from my brother, I’m sure. Everywhere he goes, he leaves a trail of manipulators who run other people’s lives.”
Alan’s stomach clenched in on itself, and
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