Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow (best reads .txt) 📕

second helpings. Beg you for 'em! So no, I don't think it'll be too
obvious. They'll mock up the whole system and march right into MassPike with it,
grinning like idiots. Don't worry about a thing."

"OK, OK. I get it. I won't worry."

Art signalled the counterman for their bill. The counterman waved distractedly
in the manner of a harried restaurateur dealing with his regulars, and said
something in Korean to the busgirl, who along with the Vietnamese chef and the
Congolese sous chef, lent the joint a transworld sensibility that made it a
favorite among the painfully global darlings of O'Malley House. The bus-girl
found a pad and started totting up numbers, then keyed them into a Point-of-Sale
terminal, which juiced Art's comm with an accounting for their lunch. This
business with hand-noting everything before entering it into the PoS had driven
Art to distraction when he'd first encountered it. He'd assumed that the
terminal's UI was such that a computer-illiterate busgirl couldn't reliably key
in the data without having it in front of her, and for months he'd cited it in
net-bullshit sessions as more evidence of the pervasive user-hostility that
characterized the whole damned GMT.

He'd finally tried out his rant on the counterman, one foreigner to another,
just a little Briton-bashing session between two refugees from the Colonial
Jackboot. To his everlasting surprise, the counterman had vigorously defended
the system, saying that he liked the PoS data-entry system just fine, but that
the stack of torn-off paper stubs from the busgirl's receipt book was a good
visualization tool, letting him eyeball the customer volume from hour to hour by
checking the spike beside the till, and the rubberbanded stacks of yellowing
paper lining his cellar's shelves gave him a wonderfully physical evidence of
the growing success of his little eatery. There was a lesson there, Art knew,
though he'd yet to codify it. User mythology was tricky that way.

Every time Art scribbled a tip into his comm and squirted it back at the PoS, he
considered this little puzzle, eyes unfocusing for a moment while his vision
turned inwards. As his eyes snapped back into focus, he noticed the young lad
sitting on the long leg of the ell formed by the counter. He had bully short
hair and broad shoulders, and a sneer that didn't quite disappear as he shoveled
up the dhal with his biodegradable bamboo disposable spork.

He knew that guy from somewhere. The guy caught him staring and they locked eyes
for a moment, and in that instant Art knew who the guy was. It was Tom, whom he
had last seen stabbing at him with a tazer clutched in one shaking fist, face
twisted in fury. Tom wasn't wearing his killsport armor, just nondescript
athletic wear, and he wasn't with Lester and Tony, but it was him. Art watched
Tom cock his head to jog his memory, and then saw Tom recognize him. Uh-oh.

"We have to go. Now," he said to Fede, standing and walking away quickly, hand
going to his comm. He stopped short of dialing 999, though -- he wasn't up for
another police-station all-nighter. He got halfway up Picadilly before looking
over his shoulder, and he saw Fede shouldering his way through the lunchtime
crowd, looking pissed. A few paces behind him came Tom, face contorted in a
sadistic snarl.

Art did a little two-step of indecision, moving towards Fede, then away from
him. He met Tom's eyes again, and Tom's ferocious, bared teeth spurred him on.
He turned abruptly into the tube station, waved his comm at a turnstile and dove
into the thick of the crowd heading down the stairs to the Elephant and Castle
platform. His comm rang.

"What is *wrong* with you, man?" Fede said.

"One of the guys who mugged me," he hissed. "He was sitting right across from
us. He's a couple steps behind you. I'm in the tube station. I'll ride a stop
and catch a cab back to the office."

"He's behind me? Where?"

Art's comm lit up with a grainy feed from Fede's comm. It jiggled as Fede
hustled through the crowd.

"Jesus, Fede, stop! Don't go to the goddamned tube station -- he'll follow you
here."

"Where do you want me to go? I got to go back to the office."

"Don't go there either. Get a cab and circle the block a couple times. Don't
lead him back."

"This is stupid. Why don't I just call the cops?"

"Don't bother. They won't do shit. I've been through this already. I just want
to lose that guy and not have him find me again later."

"Christ."

Art squeaked as Tom filled his screen, then passed by, swinging his head from
side to side with saurian rage.

"What?" Fede said.

"That was him. He just walked past you. He must not know you're with me. Go back
to the office, I'll meet you there."

"That dipshit? Art, he's all of five feet tall!"

"He's a fucking psycho, Fede. Don't screw around with him or he'll give you a
Tesla enema."

Fede winced. "I hate tazers."

"The train is pulling in. I'll talk to you later."

"OK, OK."

Art formed up in queue with the rest of the passengers and shuffled through the
gas chromatograph, tensing up a little as it sniffed his personal space for
black powder residue. Once on board, he tore a sani-wipe from the roll in the
ceiling, ignoring the V/DT ad on it, and grabbed the stainless steel rail with
it, stamping on the drifts of sani-wipe mulch on the train's floor.

He made a conscious effort to control his breathing, willed his heart to stop
pounding. He was still juiced with adrenaline, and his mind raced. He needed to
do something constructive with his time, but his mind kept wandering. Finally,
he gave in and let it wander.

Something about the counterman, about his slips of paper, about the MassPike. It
was knocking around in his brain and he just couldn't figure out how to bring it
to the fore. The counterman kept his slips in the basement so that he could sit
among them and see how his business had grown, every slip a person served, a
ring on the till, money in the bank. Drivers on the MassPike who used traffic
jams to download music from nearby cars and then paid to license the songs. Only
they didn't. They circumvented the payment system in droves, running bootleg
operations out of their cars that put poor old Napster to shame for sheer
volume. Some people drove in promiscuous mode, collecting every song in every
car on the turnpike, cruising the tunnels that riddled Boston like mobile pirate
radio stations, dumping their collections to other drivers when it came time to
quit the turnpike and settle up for their music at the toll booth.

It was these war-drivers that MassPike was really worried about. Admittedly,
they actually made the system go. Your average fartmobile driver had all of ten
songs in his queue, and the short-range, broadband connection you had on
MassPike meant that if you were stuck in a jam of these cars, your selection
would be severely limited. The war-drivers, though, were mobile jukeboxes. The
highway patrol had actually seized cars with over 300,000 tracks on their
drives. Without these fat caches on the highway, MassPike would have to spend a
fortune on essentially replicating the system with their own mobile libraries.

The war-drivers were the collective memory of the MassPike's music-listeners.

Ooh, there was a tasty idea. The collective memory of MassPike. Like Dark Ages
scholars, memorizing entire texts to preserve them against the depredations of
barbarism, passing their collections carefully from car to car. He'd
investigated the highway patrol reports on these guys, and there were hints
there, shadowy clues of an organized subculture, one with a hierarchy, where
newbies tricked out their storage with libraries of novel and rare tuneage in a
bid to convince the established elite that they were worthy of joining the
collective memory.

Thinking of war-drivers as a collective memory was like staring at an optical
illusion and seeing the vase emerge from the two faces. Art's entire perception
of the problem involuted itself in his mind. He heard panting and realized it
was him; he was hyperventilating.

If these guys were the collective memory of the MassPike, that meant that they
were performing a service, reducing MassPike's costs significantly. That meant
that they were tastemakers, injecting fresh music into the static world of
Boston drivers. Mmmm. Trace that. Find out how influential they were. Someone
would know -- the MassPike had stats on how songs migrated from car to car. Even
without investigating it, Art just *knew* that these guys were offsetting
millions of dollars in marketing.

So. So. So. So, *feed* that culture. War-drivers needed to be devoted to make it
into the subculture. They had to spend four or five hours a day cruising the
freeways to accumulate and propagate their collections. They couldn't *leave*
the MassPike until they found someone to hand their collections off to.

What if MassPike *rewarded* these guys? What if MassPike charged *nothing* for
people with more than, say 50,000 tunes in their cache? Art whipped out his comm
and his keyboard and started making notes, snatching at the silver rail with his
keyboard hand every time the train jerked and threatened to topple him. That's
how the tube cops found him, once the train reached Elephant and Castle and they
did their rounds, politely but firmly rousting him.

13.

I am already in as much trouble as I can be, I think. I have left my room, hit
and detonated some poor cafeteria hash-slinger's fartmobile, and certainly
damned some hapless secret smoker to employee Hades for his security lapses.
When I get down from here, I will be bound up in a chemical straightjacket. I'll
be one of the ward-corner droolers, propped up in a wheelchair in front of the
video, tended twice daily for diaper changes, feeding and re-medication.

That is the worst they can do, and I'm in for it. This leaves me asking two
questions:

1. Why am I so damned eager to be rescued from my rooftop aerie? I am sunburned
and sad, but I am more free than I have been in weeks.

2. Why am I so reluctant to take further action in the service of getting
someone up onto the roof? I could topple a ventilator chimney by moving the
cinderblocks that hold its apron down and giving it the shoulder. I could dump
rattling handfuls of gravel down its maw and wake the psychotics below.

I could, but I won't. Maybe I don't want to go back just yet.

They cooked it up between them. The Jersey customers, Fede, and Linda. I should
have known better.

When I landed at Logan, I was full of beans, ready to design and implement my
war-driving scheme for the Jersey customers and advance the glorious cause of
the Eastern Standard Tribe. I gleefully hopped up and down the coast, chilling
in Manhattan for a day or two, hanging out with Gran in Toronto.

That Linda followed me out made it all even better. We rented cars and drove
them from city to city, dropping them off at the city limits and switching to
top-grade EST public transit, eating top-grade EST pizza, heads turning to
follow the impeccably dressed, buff couples that strolled the
pedestrian-friendly streets arm in arm. We sat on stoops in Brooklyn with old
ladies who talked softly in the gloaming of the pollution-tinged sunsets while
their grandchildren chased each other down