Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town Part 57

He should write the story down. He went back upstairs and sat down at the keyboard and pecked out the sentences that had come to him, but they seemed very sterile there aglow on the screen, in just the same way that they'd felt restless and alive a moment before. The sunny day beamed through the study window and put a glare up on his screen that made it hard to type, and when he moved to the other side of the desk, he found himself looking out the window at the city and the spring.

He checked his calendar and his watch and saw that he only had a couple hours before the reporter from NOW magazine came by. The reporter -- a summer intern -- was the only person to respond to his all-fluff press release on the open network. He and Kurt had argued about the wording all night and when he was done, he almost pitched it out, as the editorial thrash had gutted it to the point of meaninglessness.

Oh well. The breeze made the new leaves in the trees across the street sway, and now the sun was in his eyes, and the sentences were inert on the screen.

He closed the lid of the laptop and grabbed his coat and left the house as fast as he could, obscurely worried that if he didn't leave then, he wouldn't get out all day.

As he got closer to Kurt's storefront, he slowed down. The crowds were thick, laughing suburban kids and old men in b.u.t.toned-up cardigans and fisherman's caps and subcultural tropical fish of all kinds: Goths and punks and six kinds of ravers and hippies and so forth.

He spied Link sitting on the steps leading up to one of the above-shop apartments, pa.s.sing a cigarette to a little girl who sat between his knees. Link didn't see him, he was laughing at something the boy behind him said. Alan looked closer. It was Krishna, except he'd shaved his head and was wearing a hoodie with glittering piping run along the double seams, a kind of future-sarcastic raver jumper that looked like it had been abandoned on the set of *s.p.a.ce: 1999*.

Krishna had his own little girl between *his* knees, with heart-shaped lips and thick matte concealer over her zits. His hand lay casually on her shoulder, and she brushed her cheek against it.

Alan felt the air whuff out of him as though he'd been punched in the stomach, and he leaned up against the side of a fruit market, flattening himself there. He turned his head from side to side, expecting to see Mimi, and wanting to rush out and s.h.i.+eld her from the sight, but she was nowhere to be seen, and anyway, what business was it of his?

And then he spied Natalie, standing at the other end of the street, holding on to the handles of one of the show bicycles out front of Bikes on Wheels. She was watching her brother closely, with narrowed eyes.

It was her fault, in some way. Or at least she thought it was. She'd caught him looking at Internet p.o.r.n and laughed at him, humiliating him, telling him he should get out and find a girl whose last name wasn't "Jpeg."

He saw that her hands were clenched into fists and realized that his were, too.

It was her fault in some way, because she'd seen the kind of person he was hanging out with and she hadn't done a thing about it.

He moved into the crowd and waded through it, up the street on the opposite side from his neighbors. He closed in on Natalie and ended up right in front of her before she noticed he was there.

"Oh!" she said, and blushed hard. She'd been growing out her hair for a couple months and it was long enough to clip a couple of barrettes to. With the hair, she looked less skinny, a little older, a little less vulnerable. She tugged at a hank of it absently. "Hi."

"We going to do anything about that?" he said, jerking his head toward the steps. Krishna had his hand down the little girl's top now, cupping her breast, then laughing when she slapped it away.

She shrugged, bit her lip. She shook her head angrily. "None of my business. None of *your* business."

She looked at her feet. "Look, there's a thing I've been meaning to tell you. I don't think I can keep on volunteering at the shop, okay? I've got stuff to do, a.s.signments, and I'm taking some extra s.h.i.+fts at the store --"

He held up a hand. "I'm grateful for all the work you've done, Natalie. You don't need to apologize."

"Okay," she said. She looked indecisively around, then seemed to make up her mind and she hugged him hard. "Take care of yourself, okay?"

It struck him as funny. "I can take care of myself just fine, don't worry about me for a second. You still looking for fas.h.i.+on work? I think Tropical will be hiring for the summer. I could put in that phone-call."

"No," she said. "No, that's okay." She looked over his shoulder and her eyes widened. He turned around and saw that Krishna and Link had spotted them, and that Krishna was whispering something in Link's ear that was making Link grin nastily.

"I should go," she said. Krishna's hand was still down the little girl's top, and he jiggled her breast at Alan.

The reporter had two lip piercings, and a matt of close-cropped micro-dreads, and an att.i.tude.

"So here's what I don't get. You've got the Market wired --"

"Unwired," Kurt said, breaking in for the tenth time in as many minutes. Alan shot him a dirty look.

"Unwired, right." The kid made little inverted commas with his fingertips, miming, *Yes, that is a very cute jargon you've invented, dork.* "You've got the Market unwired and you're going to connect up your network with the big interchange down on Front Street."

"Well, *eventually*," Alan said. The story was too complicated. Front Street, the Market, open networks...it had no focus, it wasn't a complete narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. He'd tried to explain it to Mimi that morning, over omelets in his kitchen, and she'd been totally lost.

"Eventually?" The kid took on a look of intense, teenaged skepticism. He claimed to be 20, but he looked about 17 and had been the puck in an intense game of eyeball hockey among the cute little punk girls who'd been volunteering in the shopfront when he'd appeared.

"That's the end-goal, a citywide network with all-we-can eat free connectivity, fully anonymized and hardened against malicious attackers and incidental environmental interference." Alan steepled his fingers and tried to look serious and committed.

"Okay, that's the goal."

"But it's not going to be all or nothing. We want to make the community a part of the network. Getting people energized about partic.i.p.ating in the network is as important as providing the network itself -- h.e.l.l, the network *is* people. So we've got this intermediate step, this way that everyone can pitch in."

"And that is, what, renaming your network to ParasiteNet?"

Kurt nodded vigorously. "Zactly."

"And how will I find these ParasiteNet nodes? Will there be a map or something with all this information on it?"

Alan nodded slowly. "We've been thinking about a mapping application --"

"But we decided that it was stupid," Kurt said. "No one needed to draw a map of the Web -- it just grew and people found its weird corners on their own. Networks don't *need* centralized authority, that's just the chains on your mind talking --"

"The chains on my mind?" The kid snorted.

Alan held his hands up placatingly. "Wait a second," he said. "Let's take a step back here and talk about *values*. The project here is about free expression and cooperation. Sure, it'd be nice to have a city-wide network, but in my opinion, it's a lot more important to have a city full of people working on that network because they value expression and understand how cooperation gets us more of that."

"And we'll get this free expression how?"

"By giving everyone free Internet access."

The kid laughed and shook his head. "That's a weird kind of 'free,' if you don't mind my saying so." He flipped over his phone. "I mean, it's like, 'Free speech if you can afford a two-thousand-dollar laptop and want to sit down and type on it.'"

"I can build you a desktop out of garbage for twenty bucks," Kurt said. "We're drowning in PC parts."

"Sure, whatever. But what kind of free expression is that? Free expression so long as you're sitting at home with your PC plugged into the wall?"

"Well, it's not like we're talking about displacing all the other kinds of expression," Alan said. "This is in addition to all the ways you've had to talk --"

"Right, like this thing," the kid said. He reached into his pocket and took out a small phone. "This was free -- not twenty dollars, not even two thousand dollars -- just free, from the phone company, in exchange for a one-year contract. Everyone's got one of these. I went trekking in India, you see people using these out in the bush. And you know what they use them for? Speech! Not speech-in-quotes meaning some kind of abstract expression, but actual *talking.*"

The kid leaned forward and planted his hands on his knees and suddenly he was a lot harder to dismiss as some subculture-addled intern. He had that fiery intensity that Alan recognized from himself, from Kurt, from the people who believe.

Alan thought he was getting an inkling into why this particular intern had responded to his press release: Not because he was too ignorant to see through the bulls.h.i.+t, but just the opposite.

"But that's communication through the *phone company*," Kurt said, wonderment in his voice that his fellow bohemian couldn't see how sucktastic that proposition was. "How is that free speech?"