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

/> I bought it with the company credit card. The *company credit card*. Our local
Baby Amex rep dropped it off himself after Doc Szandor faxed over the signed
contract from the Bureau of Health. Half a million bucks for a proof-of-concept
install at the very same Route 128 nuthatch where I'd been "treated." If that
works, we'll be rolling out a dozen more installs over the next year: smart
doors, public drug-prescription stats, locator bracelets that let "clients" --
I've been learning the nuthouse jargon, and have forcibly removed "patient" from
my vocabulary -- discover other clients with similar treatment regimens on the
ward, bells and whistles galore.

I am cruising the MassPike with HumanCare's first-ever employee, who is, in
turn, holding onto HumanCare's first-ever paycheck. Caitlin's husband has been
very patient over the past six months as she worked days fixing the ailing
machinery at the sanitarium and nights prototyping my designs. He's been
likewise patient with my presence on his sagging living-room sofa, where I've
had my nightly ten-hour repose faithfully since my release. Caitlin and I have
actually seen precious little of each other considering that I've been living
under her roof. (Doc Szandor's Cambridge apartment is hardly bigger than my room
at the hospital, and between his snoring and the hard floor, I didn't even last
a whole night there.) We've communicated mostly by notes commed to her fridge
and prototypes left atop my suitcase of day-clothes and sharp-edged toiletries
at the foot of my makeshift bed when she staggered in from her workbench while I
snored away the nights. Come to think of it, I haven't really seen much of Doc
Szandor, either -- he's been holed up in his rooms, chatting away on the EST
channels.

I am well rested. I am happy. My back is loose and my Chi is flowing. I am
driving my few belongings to a lovely two-bedroom -- one to sleep in, one to
work in -- flat overlooking Harvard Square, where the pretty co-eds and their
shaggy boyfriends tease one another in the technical argot of a dozen abstruse
disciplines. I'm looking forward to picking up a basic physics, law, medicine
and business vocabulary just by sitting in my window with my comm, tapping away
at new designs.

We drive up to a toll plaza and I crank the yielding, human-centric steering
wheel toward the EZPass lane. The dealer installed the transponder and gave me a
brochure explaining the Sony Family's approach to maximum driving convenience.
But as I approach the toll gate, it stays steadfastly down.

The Veddic's HUD flashes an instruction to pull over to the booth. A bored
attendant leans out of the toll booth and squirts his comm at me, and the HUD
comes to life with an animated commercial for the new, improved TunePay service,
now under direct MassPike management.

The TunePay scandal's been hot news for weeks now. Bribery, corruption, patent
disputes -- I'd been gratified to discover that my name had been removed from
the patent applications, sparing me the nightly hounding Fede and Linda and her
fucking ex had been subjected to on my comm as the legal net tightened around
them.

I end up laughing so hard that Caitlin gets out of the car and walks around to
my side, opens the door, and pulls me bodily to the passenger side. She serenely
ignores the blaring of the horns from the aggravated, psychotic Boston drivers
stacked up behind us, walks back to the driver's side and takes the wheel.

"Thanks," I tell her, and lay a hand on her pudgy, freckled arm.

"You belong in a loony bin, you know that?" she says, punching me in the thigh
harder than is strictly necessary.

"Oh, I know," I say, and dial up some music on the car stereo.

--

Acknowledgements

This novel was workshopped by the Cecil Street Irregulars, the Novelettes and
the Gibraltar Point gang, and received excellent feedback from the first readers
on the est-preview list (especially Pat York). Likewise, I'm indebted to all the
people who read and commented on this book along the way.

Thanks go to my editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, for reading this so quickly --
minutes after I finished it! Likewise to my agent, Don Maass, thank you.

Thanks to Irene Gallo and Shelley Eshkar for knocking *two* out of the park with
their cover-designs for my books.

Thanks to my co-editors at Boing Boing and all the collaborators I've written
with, who've made me a better writer.

Thanks, I suppose, to the villains in my life, who inspired me to write this
book rather than do something ugly that I'd regret.

Thanks to Paul Boutin for commissioning the *Wired* article of the same name.

Thanks to the readers and bloggers and Tribespeople who cared enough to check
out my first book and liked it enough to check out this one.

Thanks to Creative Commons for the licenses that give me the freedom to say
"Some Rights Reserved."

--

Bio

Cory Doctorow (www.craphound.com) is the author of Down and Out in the Magic
Kingdom, A Place So Foreign and Eight More, and The Complete Idiot's Guide to
Publishing Science Fiction (with Karl Schroeder). He was raised in Toronto and
lives in San Francisco, where he works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation
(www.eff.org), a civil liberties group. He's a journalist, editorialist and
blogger. Boing Boing (boingboing.net), the weblog he co-edits, is the most
linked-to blog on the Net, according to Technorati. He won the John W. Campbell
Award for Best New Writer at the 2000 Hugos. You can download this book for free
from craphound.com/est.

--

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Publication Date: 06-24-2010

All Rights Reserved