Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town Part 49

"Buck up," Alan said. "We could spend another two years just helping people in the Market use what we've installed, and it would still be productive." Kurt's mouth opened, and Alan held his hand up. "Not that I'm proposing that we do that. I just mean there's plenty of good that's been done so far. What we need is some publicity for it, some critical ma.s.s, and some way that we can get ordinary people involved. We can't fit a critical ma.s.s into your front room and put them to work."

"So what do we get them to do?"

"It's a good question. There's something I saw online the other day I wanted to show you. Why don't we go home and get connected?"

"There's still plenty of good diving out there. No need to go home anyway -- I know a place."

They drove off into a maze of cul-de-sacs and cheaply built, gaudy monster homes with triple garages and sagging rain gutters. The streets had no sidewalks and the inevitable basketball nets over every garage showed no signs of use.

Kurt pulled them up in front of a house that was indistinguishable from the others and took the laptop from under the Buick's seat, plugging it into the cigarette lighter and flipping its lid.

"There's an open network here," Kurt said as he plugged in the wireless card. He pointed at the dormer windows in the top room.

"How the h.e.l.l did you find that?" Alan said, looking at the darkened window. There was a chain-link gate at the side of the house, and in the back an aboveground pool.

Kurt laughed. "These 'security consultants'" -- he made little quotes with his fingers -- "wardrove Toronto. They went from one end of the city to the other with a GPS and a wireless card and logged all the open access points they found, then released a report claiming that all of those access points represented ignorant consumers who were leaving themselves vulnerable to attacks and making Internet connections available to baby-eating terrorists.

"One of the access points they identified was *mine*, for chrissakes, and mine was open because I'm a crazy f.u.c.king anarchist, not because I'm an ignorant 'consumer' who doesn't know any better, and that got me to thinking that there were probably lots of people like me around, running open APs. So one night I was out here diving and I *really* was trying to remember who'd played the Sundance Kid in Butch Ca.s.sidy, and I knew that if I only had a net connection I could google it. I had a stumbler, an app that logged all the open WiFi access points that I came into range of, and a GPS attachment that I'd dived that could interface with the software that mapped the APs on a map of Toronto, so I could just belt the machine in there on the pa.s.senger seat and go driving around until I had a list of all the wireless Internet that I could see from the street.

"So I got kind of bored and went back to diving, and then I did what I usually do at the end of the night, I went driving around some residential streets, just to see evidence of humanity after a night in the garbage, and also because the people out here sometimes put out nice sofas and things.

"When I got home, I looked at my map and there were tons of access points out by the industrial buildings, and some on the commercial strips, and a few out here in the residential areas, but the one with the best signal was right here, and when I clicked on it, I saw that the name of the network was 'ParasiteNet.'"

Alan said, "Huh?" because ParasiteNet was Kurt's name for his wireless project, though they hadn't used it much since Alan got involved and they'd gotten halfway legit. But still.

"Yeah," Kurt said. "That's what I said -- huh? So I googled ParasiteNet to see what I could find, and I found an old message I'd posted to toronto.talk.wireless when I was getting started out, a kind of manifesto about what I planned to do, and Google had snarfed it up and this guy, whoever he is, must have read it and decided to name his network after it.

"So I figger: This guy *wants* to share packets with me, for sure, and so I always hunt down this AP when I want to get online."

"You've never met him, huh?"

"Never. I'm always out here at two a.m. or so, and there's never a light on. Keep meaning to come back around five some afternoon and ring the bell and say h.e.l.lo. Never got to it."

Alan pursed his lips and watched Kurt prod at the keyboard.

"He's got a s.h.i.+tkicking net connection, though -- tell you what. Feels like a T1, and the IP address comes off of an ISP in Waterloo. You need a browser, right?"

Alan shook his head. "You know, I can't even remember what it was I wanted to show you. There's some kind of idea kicking at me now, though..."

Kurt s.h.i.+fted his laptop to the back seat, mindful of the cords and the antenna. "What's up?"

"Let's do some more driving around, let it perk, okay? You got more dumpsters you want to show me?"

"Brother, I got dumpsters for weeks. Months. Years."

It was the wardriving, of course. Alan called out the names of the networks that they pa.s.sed as they pa.s.sed them, watching the flags pop up on the map of Toronto. They drove the streets all night, watched the sun go up, and the flags multiplied on the network.

Alan didn't even have to explain it to Kurt, who got it immediately. They were close now, thinking together in the feverish drive-time on the night-dark streets.

"Here's the thing," Kurt said as they drank their coffees at the Vesta Lunch, a grimy 24-hour diner that Alan only seemed to visit during the smallest hours of the morning. "I started off thinking, well, the cell companies are screwed up because they think that they need to hose the whole city from their high towers with their powerful transmitters, and my little boxes will be lower-power and smarter and more realistic and gra.s.sroots and democratic."

"Right," Alan said. "I was just thinking of that. What could be more democratic than just encouraging people to use their own access points and their own Internet connections to bootstrap the city?"

"Yeah," Kurt said.

"Sure, you won't get to realize your dream of getting a free Internet by bridging down at the big cage at 151 Front Street, but we can still play around with hardware. And convincing the people who *already* know why WiFi is cool to join up has got to be easier than convincing shopkeepers who've never heard of wireless to let us put antennae and boxes on their walls."

"Right," Kurt said, getting more excited. "Right! I mean, it's just ego, right? Why do we need to *control* the network?" He spun around on his cracked stool and the waitress gave him a dirty look. "Gimme some apple pie, please," he said. "This is the best part: it's going to violate the h.e.l.l out of everyone's contracts with their ISPs -- they sell you an all-you-can-eat Internet connection and then tell you that they'll cut off your service if you're too hungry. Well, f.u.c.k that! It's not just community networking, it'll be civil disobedience against s.h.i.+tty service-provider terms of service!"

There were a couple early morning hard-hats in the diner who looked up from their yolky eggs to glare at him. Kurt spotted them and waved. "Sorry, boys. Ever get one of those ideas that's so good, you can't help but do a little dance?"

One of the hard-hats smiled. "Yeah, but his wife always turns me down."

He socked the other hard-hat in the shoulder.

The other hard-hat grunted into his coffee. "Nice. Very nice. You're gonna be a *lot* of fun today, I can tell."

They left the diner in a sleepdep haze and squinted into the sunrise and grinned at each other and burped up eggs and sausages and bacon and coffee and headed toward Kurt's Buick.

"Hang on," Alan said. "Let's have a walk, okay?" The city smelled like morning, dew and gra.s.s and car-exhaust and baking bread and a whiff of the distant Cadbury's factory oozing chocolate miasma over the hills and the streetcar tracks. Around them, millions were stirring in their beds, clattering in their kitchens, pa.s.sing water, and taking on vitamins. It invigorated him, made him feel part of something huge and all-encompa.s.sing, like being in his father the mountain.

"Up there," Kurt said, pointing to a little playground atop the hill that rose sharply up Dupont toward Christie, where a herd of plastic rocking horses swayed creakily in the breeze.

"Up there," Alan agreed, and they set off, kicking droplets of dew off the gra.s.s beside the sidewalk.

The sunrise was a thousand times more striking from atop the climber, filtered through the new shoots on the tree branches. Kurt lit a cigarette and blew plumes into the shafting light and they admired the effect of the wind whipping it away.

"I think this will work," Alan said. "We'll do something splashy for the press, get a lot of people to change the names of their networks -- more people will use the networks, more will create them... It's a good plan."

Kurt nodded. "Yeah. We're smart guys."

Something smashed into Alan's head and bounced to the dirt below the climber. A small, sharp rock. Alan reeled and tumbled from the climber, stunned, barely managing to twist to his side before landing. The air whooshed out of his lungs and tears sprang into his eyes.

Gingerly, he touched his head. His fingers came away wet. Kurt was shouting something, but he couldn't hear it. Something moved in the bushes, moved into his line of sight. Moved deliberately into his line of sight.

Danny. He had another rock in his hand and he wound up and pitched it. It hit Alan in the forehead and his head snapped back and he grunted.

Kurt's feet landed in the dirt a few inches from his eyes, big boots a-jangle with chains. Davey flitted out of the bushes and onto the plastic rocking-horses, jumping from the horse to the duck to the chicken, leaving the big springs beneath them to rock and creak. Kurt took two steps toward him, but Davey was away, under the chain link fence and over the edge of the hill leading down to Dupont Street.

"You okay?" Kurt said, crouching down beside him, putting a hand on his shoulder. "Need a doctor?"

"No doctors," Alan said. "No doctors. I'll be okay."

They inched their way back to the car, the world spinning around them. The hard-hats met them on the way out of the Vesta Lunch and their eyes went to Alan's bloodied face. They looked away. Alan felt his kins.h.i.+p with the woken world around him slip away and knew he'd never be truly a part of it.