Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow (graded readers TXT) 📕

"You're a good man, Kurt. Don't forget it."

Kurt ground his fists into his eyes and groaned. "I'm such a fuck-up," he said.

Alan tugged Kurt's hand away from his face. "Stop that. You're an extraordinary person. I've never met anyone who has the gifts you possess, and I've met some gifted people. You should be very proud of the work you're doing, and you should be with someone who's equally proud of you."

Kurt visibly inflated. "Thanks, man." They gripped one another's hands for a moment. Kurt swiped at his moist eyes with the sleeve of his colorless grey sweatshirt. "Okay, it's way past my bedtime," he said. "You gonna go to the bookstore today?"

"Absolutely. Thanks for setting them up."

"It was about time I did some of the work, after you got the nut-shop and the cheese place and the Salvadoran pupusa place."

"Kurt, I'm just doing the work that you set in motion. It's all you, this project. I'm just your helper. Sleep well."

Andy watched him slouch off toward home, reeling a little from sleep deprivation and emotional exhaustion. He forked up the rest of his omelet, looked reflexively up at the blinkenlights on the AP over the Greek's sign, just above the apostrophe, where he'd nailed it up two months before. Since then, he'd nailed up five more, each going more smoothly than the last. At this rate, he'd have every main drag in the Market covered by summer. Sooner, if he could offload some of the labor onto one of Kurt's eager kids.

He went back to his porch then, and watched the Market wake up. The traffic was mostly bicycling bankers stopping for a fresh bagel on their way down to the business district. The Market was quite restful. It shuffled like an old man in carpet slippers, setting up streetside produce tables, twiddling the dials of its many radios looking for something with a beat. He watched them roll past, the Salvadoran pupusa ladies, Jamaican Patty Kings, Italian butchers, Vietnamese pho-tenders, and any number of thrift-store hotties, crusty-punks, strung-out artistes, trustafarians and pretty-boy skaters.

As he watched them go past, he had an idea that he'd better write his story soon, or maybe never. Maybe never nothing: Maybe this was his last season on earth. Felt like that, apocalyptic. Old debts, come to be settled.

He shuffled upstairs and turned on the disused computer, which had sat on his desk for months and was therefore no longer top-of-the-line, no longer nearly so exciting, no longer so fraught with promise. Still, he made himself sit in his seat for two full hours before he allowed himself to get up, shower, dress, and head over to the anarchist bookstore, taking a slow route that gave him the chance to eyeball the lights on all the APs he'd installed.

The anarchist bookstore opened lackadaisically at 11 or eleven-thirty or sometimes noon, so he'd brought along a nice old John D. MacDonald paperback with a gun-toting bikini girl on the cover to read. He liked MacDonald's books: You could always tell who the villainesses were because the narrator made a point of noting that they had fat asses. It was as good a way as any to shorthand the world, he thought.

The guy who came by to open the store was vaguely familiar to Alfred, a Kensington stalwart of about forty, whose thrifted slacks and unraveling sweater weren't hip so much as they were just plain old down and out. He had a frizzed-out, no-cut haircut, and carried an enormous army-surplus backpack that sagged with beat-up lefty books and bags of organic vegetariania.

"Hi there!" Arnold said pocketing the book and dusting off his hands.

"Hey," the guy said into his stringy beard, fumbling with a keyring. "I'll be opening up in a couple minutes, okay? I know I'm late. It's a bad day. okay?"

Arnold held his hands up, palms out. "Hey, no problem at all! Take as much time as you need. I'm in no hurry."

The anarchist hustled around inside the shop, turning on lights, firing up the cash-register and counting out a float, switching on the coffee machine. Alan waited patiently by the doorway, holding the door open with his toe when the clerk hauled out a rack of discounted paperbacks and earning a dirty look for his trouble.

"Okay, we're open," the anarchist said looking Alan in the toes. He turned around and banged back into the shop and perched himself behind the counter, opening a close-typed punk newspaper and burying his nose in it.

Adam walked in behind him and stood at the counter, politely, waiting. The anarchist looked up from his paper and shook his head exasperatedly. "Yes?"

Alan extended his hand. "Hi, I'm Archie, I work with Kurt, over on Augusta?"

The anarchist stared at his hand, then shook it limply.

"Okay," he said.

"So, Kurt mentioned that he'd spoken to your collective about putting a wireless repeater up over your sign?"

The anarchist shook his head. "We decided not to do that, okay." He went back to his paper.

Andrew considered him for a moment. "So, what's your name?"

"I don't like to give out my name," the anarchist said. "Call me Waldo, all right?"

"All right," Andy said smiling. "That's fine by me. So, can I ask why you decided not to do it?"

"It doesn't fit with our priorities. We're here to make print materials about the movement available to the public. They can get Internet access somewhere else. Internet access is for people who can afford computers, anyway."

"Good point," Art said. "That's a good point. I wonder if I could ask you to reconsider, though? I'd love a chance to try to explain why this should be important to you."

"I don't think so," Waldo said. "We're not really interested."

"I think you would be interested, if it were properly explained to you."

Waldo picked up his paper and pointedly read it, breathing heavily.

"Thanks for your time," Avi said and left.

"That's bullshit," Kurt said. "Christ, those people --"

"I assumed that there was some kind of politics," Austin said, "and I didn't want to get into the middle of it. I know that if I could get a chance to present to the whole group, that I could win them over."

Kurt shook his head angrily. His shop was better organized now, with six access points ready to go and five stuck to the walls as a test bed for new versions of the software. A couple of geeky Korean kids were seated at the communal workbench, eating donuts and wrestling with drivers.

"It's all politics with them. Everything. You should hear them argue about whether it's cool to feed meat to the store cat! Who was working behind the counter?"

"He wouldn't tell me his name. He told me to call him --"

"Waldo."

"Yeah."

"Well, that could be any of about six of them, then. That's what they tell the cops. They probably thought you were a narc or a fed or something."

"I see."

"It's not total paranoia. They've been busted before -- it's always bullshit. I raised bail for a couple of them once."

Andrew realized that Kurt thought he was offended at being mistaken for a cop, but he got that. He was weird -- visibly weird. Out of place wherever he was.

"So they owe me. Let me talk to them some more."

"Thanks, Kurt. I appreciate it."

"Well, you're doing all the heavy lifting these days. It's the least I can do."

Alan clapped a hand on his shoulder. "None of this would exist without you, you know." He waved his hand to take in the room, the Korean kids, the whole Market. "I saw a bunch of people at the Greek's with laptops, showing them around to each other and drinking beers. In the park, with PDAs. I see people sitting on their porches, typing in the twilight. Crouched in doorways. Eating a bagel in the morning on a bench. People are finding it, and it's thanks to you."

Kurt smiled a shy smile. "You're just trying to cheer me up," he said.

"Course I am," Andy said. "You deserve to be full of cheer."

"Don't bother," Andy said. "Seriously, it's not worth it. We'll just find somewhere else to locate the repeater. It's not worth all the bullshit you're getting."

"Screw that. They told me that they'd take one. They're the only ones I talked into it. My contribution to the effort. And they're fucking anarchists -- they've got to be into this. It's totally irrational!" He was almost crying.

"I don't want you to screw up your friendships, Kurt. They'll come around on their own. You're turning yourself inside out over this, and it's just not worth it. Come on, it's cool." He turned around his laptop and showed the picture to Kurt. "Check it out, people with tails. An entire gallery of them!" There were lots of pictures like that on the net. None of people without belly buttons, though.

Kurt took a pull off his beer. "Disgusting," he said and clicked through the gallery.

The Greek looked over their shoulder. "It's real?"

"It's real, Larry," Alan said. "Freaky, huh?"

"That's terrible," the Greek said. "Pah." There were five or six other network users out on the Greek's, and it was early yet. By five-thirty, there'd be fifty of them. Some of them brought their own power strips so that they could share juice with their coreligionists.

"You really want me to give up?" Kurt asked, once the Greek had given him a new beer and a scowling look over the litter of picked-at beer label on the table before him.

"I really think you should," Alan said. "It's a poor use of time."

Kurt looked ready to cry again. Adam had no idea what to say.

"Okay," Kurt said. "Fine." He finished his beer in silence and slunk away.

But it wasn't fine, and Kurt wouldn't give it up. He kept on beating his head against the blank wall, and every time Alan saw him, he was grimmer than the last.

"Let it go," Adam said. "I've done a deal with the vacuum-cleaner repair guy across the street." A weird-but-sweet old Polish Holocaust survivor who'd listened attentively to Andy's pitch before announcing that he'd been watching all the hardware go up around the Market and had simply been waiting to be included in the club. "That'll cover that corner just fine."

"I'm going to throw a party," Kurt said. "Here, in the shop. No, I'll rent out one of the warehouses on Oxford. I'll invite them, the kids, everyone who's let us put up an access point, a big mill-and-swill. Buy a couple kegs. No one can resist free beer."

Alan had started off frustrated and angry with Kurt, but this drew him up and turned him around. "That is a fine idea," he said. "We'll invite Lyman."

Lyman had taken to showing up on Alan's stoop in the morning sometimes, on his way to work, for a cup of coffee. He'd taken to showing up at Kurt's shop in the afternoon, sometimes, on his way home from work, to marvel at the kids' industry. His greybeard had written some code that analyzed packet loss and tried to make guesses about the crowd density in different parts of the Market, and Lyman took a proprietary interest in it, standing out by Bikes on Wheels or the Portuguese furniture store and watching the data on his PDA, comparing it with the actual crowds on the street.

He'd only hesitated for a second when Andrew asked him to be the inaugural advisor on ParasiteNet's