Cory Doctorow - Eastern Standard Tribe
C >>
Cory Doctorow >> Eastern Standard Tribe
Pages:
1 | 2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12
Call me Art ("not my real name"). I am an agent-provocateur in the Eastern
Standard Tribe, though I've spent most of my life in GMT-9 and at various
latitudes of Zulu, which means that my poor pineal gland has all but forgotten
how to do its job without that I drown it in melatonin precursors and treat it
to multi-hour nine-kilolumen sessions in the glare of my travel lantern.
The tribes are taking over the world. You can track our progress by the rise of
minor traffic accidents. The sleep-deprived are terrible, terrible drivers.
Daylight savings time is a widowmaker: stay off the roads on Leap Forward day!
Here is the second character in the morality play. She's the love interest. Was.
We broke up, just before I got sent to the sanatorium. Our circadians weren't
compatible.
4.
April 3, 2022 was the day that Art nearly killed the first and only woman he
ever really loved. It was her fault.
Art's car was running low on lard after a week in the Benelux countries, where
the residents were all high-net-worth cholesterol-conscious codgers who guarded
their arteries from the depredations of the frytrap as jealously as they
squirreled their money away from the taxman. He was, therefore, thrilled and
delighted to be back on British soil, Greenwich+0, where grease ran like water
and his runabout could be kept easily and cheaply fuelled and the vodka could
run down his gullet instead of into his tank.
He was in the Kensington High Street on a sleepy Sunday morning, GMT0300h --
2100h back in EDT -- and the GPS was showing insufficient data-points to even
gauge traffic between his geoloc and the Camden High where he kept his rooms.
When the GPS can't find enough peers on the relay network to color its maps with
traffic data, you know you've hit a sweet spot in the city's uber-circadian, a
moment of grace where the roads are very nearly exclusively yours.
So he whistled a jaunty tune and swilled his coffium, a fad that had just made
it to the UK, thanks to the loosening of rules governing the disposal of heavy
water in the EU. The java just wouldn't cool off, remaining hot enough to
guarantee optimal caffeine osmosis right down to the last drop.
If he was jittery, it was no more so than was customary for ESTalists at GMT+0,
and he was driving safely and with due caution. If the woman had looked out
before stepping off the kerb and into the anemically thin road, if she hadn't
been wearing stylish black in the pitchy dark of the curve before the Royal
Garden Hotel, if she hadn't stepped *right in front of his runabout*, he would
have merely swerved and sworn and given her a bit of a fright.
But she didn't, she was, she did, and he kicked the brake as hard as he could,
twisted the wheel likewise, and still clipped her hipside and sent her
ass-over-teakettle before the runabout did its own barrel roll, making three
complete revolutions across the Kensington High before lodging in the Royal
Garden Hotel's shrubs. Art was covered in scorching, molten coffium, screaming
and clawing at his eyes, upside down, when the porters from the Royal Garden
opened his runabout's upside-down door, undid his safety harness and pulled him
out from behind the rapidly flacciding airbag. They plunged his face into the
ornamental birdbath, which had a skin of ice that shattered on his nose and
jangled against his jawbone as the icy water cooled the coffium and stopped the
terrible, terrible burning.
He ended up on his knees, sputtering and blowing and shivering, and cleared his
eyes in time to see the woman he'd hit being carried out of the middle of the
road on a human travois made of the porters' linked arms of red wool and gold
brocade.
"Assholes!" she was hollering. "I could have a goddamn spinal injury! You're not
supposed to move me!"
"Look, Miss," one porter said, a young chap with the kind of fantastic dentition
that only an insecure teabag would ever pay for, teeth so white and flawless
they strobed in the sodium streetlamps. "Look. We can leave you in the middle of
the road, right, and not move you, like we're supposed to. But if we do that,
chances are you're going to get run over before the paramedics get here, and
then you certainly *will* have a spinal injury, and a crushed skull besides,
like as not. Do you follow me?"
"You!" she said, pointing a long and accusing finger at Art. "You! Don't you
watch where you're going, you fool! You could have killed me!"
Art shook water off his face and blew a mist from his dripping moustache.
"Sorry," he said, weakly. She had an American accent, Californian maybe, a
litigious stridency that tightened his sphincter like an alum enema and
miraculously flensed him of the impulse to argue.
"Sorry?" she said, as the porters lowered her gently to the narrow strip turf
out beside the sidewalk. "Sorry? Jesus, is that the best you can do?"
"Well you *did* step out in front of my car," he said, trying to marshal some
spine.
She attempted to sit up, then slumped back down, wincing. "You were going too
fast!"
"I don't think so," he said. "I'm pretty sure I was doing 45 -- that's five
clicks under the limit. Of course, the GPS will tell for sure."
At the mention of empirical evidence, she seemed to lose interest in being
angry. "Give me a phone, will you?"
Mortals may be promiscuous with their handsets, but for a tribalist, one's
relationship with one's comm is deeply personal. Art would have sooner shared
his underwear. But he *had* hit her with his car. Reluctantly, Art passed her
his comm.
The woman stabbed at the handset with the fingers of her left hand, squinting at
it in the dim light. Eventually, she clamped it to her head. "Johnny? It's
Linda. Yes, I'm still in London. How's tricks out there? Good, good to hear.
How's Marybeth? Oh, that's too bad. Want to hear how I am?" She grinned
devilishly. "I just got hit by a car. No, just now. Five minutes ago. Of course
I'm hurt! I think he broke my hip -- maybe my spine, too. Yes, I can wiggle my
toes. Maybe he shattered a disc and it's sawing through the cord right now.
Concussion? Oh, almost certainly. Pain and suffering, loss of enjoyment of life,
missed wages..." She looked up at Art. "You're insured, right?"
Art nodded, miserably, fishing for an argument that would not come.
"Half a mil, easy. Easy! Get the papers going, will you? I'll call you when the
ambulance gets here. Bye. Love you too. Bye. Bye. Bye, Johnny. I got to go.
Bye!" She made a kissy noise and tossed the comm back at Art. He snatched it out
of the air in a panic, closed its cover reverentially and slipped it back in his
jacket pocket.
"C'mere," she said, crooking a finger. He knelt beside her.
"I'm Linda," she said, shaking his hand, then pulling it to her chest.
"Art," Art said.
"Art. Here's the deal, Art. It's no one's fault, OK? It was dark, you were
driving under the limit, I was proceeding with due caution. Just one of those
things. But *you* did hit *me*. Your insurer's gonna have to pay out -- rehab,
pain and suffering, you get it. That's going to be serious kwan. I'll go splits
with you, you play along."
Art looked puzzled.
"Art. Art. Art. Art, here's the thing. Maybe you were distracted. Lost. Not
looking. Not saying you were, but maybe. Maybe you were, and if you were, my
lawyer's going to get that out of you, he's going to nail you, and I'll get a
big, fat check. On the other hand, you could just, you know, cop to it. Play
along. You make this easy, we'll make this easy. Split it down the middle, once
my lawyer gets his piece. Sure, your premiums'll go up, but there'll be enough
to cover both of us. Couldn't you use some ready cash? Lots of zeroes. Couple
hundred grand, maybe more. I'm being nice here -- I could keep it all for me."
"I don't think --"
"Sure you don't. You're an honest man. I understand, Art. Art. Art, I
understand. But what has your insurer done for you, lately? My uncle Ed, he got
caught in a threshing machine, paid his premiums every week for forty years,
what did he get? Nothing. Insurance companies. They're the great satan. No one
likes an insurance company. Come on, Art. Art. You don't have to say anything
now, but think about it, OK, Art?"
She released his hand, and he stood. The porter with the teeth flashed them at
him. "Mad," he said, "just mad. Watch yourself, mate. Get your solicitor on the
line, I were you."
He stepped back as far as the narrow sidewalk would allow and fired up his comm
and tunneled to a pseudonymous relay, bouncing the call off a dozen mixmasters.
He was, after all, in deep cover as a GMTalist, and it wouldn't do to have his
enciphered packets' destination in the clear -- a little traffic analysis and
his cover'd be blown. He velcroed the keyboard to his thigh and started
chording.
Trepan: Any UK solicitors on the channel?
Gink-Go: Lawyers. Heh. Kill 'em all. Specially eurofag fixers.
Junta: Hey, I resemble that remark
Trepan: Junta, you're a UK lawyer?
Gink-Go: Use autocounsel, dude. L{ia|awye}rs suck. Channel #autocounsel.
Chatterbot with all major legal systems on the backend.
Trepan: Whatever. I need a human lawyer.
Trepan: Junta, you there?
Gink-Go: Off raping humanity.
Gink-Go: Fuck lawyers.
Trepan: /shitlist Gink-Go
##Gink-Go added to Trepan's shitlist. Use '/unshit Gink-Go' to see messages
again
Gink-Go:
Gink-Go:
Gink-Go:
Gink-Go:
##Gink-Go added to Junta's shitlist. Use '/unshit Gink-Go' to see messages again
##Gink-Go added to Thomas-hawk's shitlist. Use '/unshit Gink-Go' to see messages
again
##Gink-Go added to opencolon's shitlist. Use '/unshit Gink-Go' to see messages
again
##Gink-Go added to jackyardbackoff's shitlist. Use '/unshit Gink-Go' to see
messages again
##Gink-Go added to freddy-kugel's shitlist. Use '/unshit Gink-Go' to see
messages again
opencolon: Trolls suck. Gink-Go away.
Gink-Go:
Gink-Go:
Gink-Go:
##Gink-Go has left channel #EST.chatter
Junta: You were saying?
##Junta (private) (file transfer)
##Received credential from Junta. Verifying. Credential identified: "Solicitor,
registered with the Law Society to practice in England and Wales, also
registered in Australia."
Trepan: /private Junta I just hit a woman while driving the Kensington High
Street. Her fault. She's hurt. Wants me to admit culpability in exchange for
half the insurance. Advice?
##Junta (private): I beg your pardon?
Trepan: /private Junta She's crazy. She just got off the phone with some kinda
lawyer in the States. Says she can get $5*10^5 at least, and will split with me
if I don't dispute.
##Junta (private): Bloody Americans. No offense. What kind of instrumentation
recorded it?
Trepan: /private Junta My GPS. Maybe some secams. Eyewitnesses, maybe.
##Junta (private): And you'll say what, exactly? That you were distracted?
Fiddling with something?
Trepan: /private Junta I guess.
##Junta (private): You're looking at three points off your licence. Statutory
increase in premiums totalling EU 2*10^5 over five years. How's your record?
##Transferring credential "Driving record" to Junta. Receipt confirmed.
##Junta (private): Hmmm.
##Junta (private): Nothing outrageous. _Were_ you distracted?
Trepan: /private Junta I guess. Maybe.
##Junta (private): You guess. Well, who would know better than you, right? My
fee's 10 percent. Stop guessing. You _were_ distracted. Overtired. It's late.
Regrettable. Sincerely sorry. Have her solicitor contact me directly. I'll meet
you here at 1000h GMT/0400h EDT and go over it with you, yes? Agreeable?
Trepan: /private Junta Agreed. Thanks.
##Junta (private) (file transfer)
##Received smartcontract from Junta. Verifying. Smartcontract "Representation
agreement" verified.
Trepan: /join #autocounsel
counselbot: Welcome, Trepan! How can I help you?
##Transferring smartcontract "Representation agreement" to counselbot. Receipt
confirmed.
Trepan: /private counselbot What is the legal standing of this contract?
##counselbot (private): Smartcontract "Representation agreement" is an ISO
standard representation agreement between a client and a solicitor for purposes
of litigation in the UK.
##autocounsel (private) (file transfer)
##Received "representation agreement faq uk 2.3.2 2JAN22" from autocounsel.
Trepan: /join #EST.chatter
Trepan: /private Junta It's a deal
##Transferring key-signed smartcontract "Representation agreement" to Junta.
Receipt confirmed.
Trepan: /quit Gotta go, thanks!
##Trepan has left channel #EST.chatter "Gotta go, thanks!"
5.
Once the messy business of negotiating EU healthcare for foreign nationals had
been sorted out with the EMTs and the Casualty Intake triage, once they'd both
been digested and shat out by a dozen diagnostic devices from X-rays to MRIs,
once the harried house officers had impersonally prodded them and presented them
both with hardcopy FAQs for their various injuries (second-degree burns, mild
shock for Art; pelvic dislocation, minor kidney bruising, broken femur,
whiplash, concussion and mandible trauma for Linda), they found themselves in
adjacent beds in the recovery room, which bustled as though it, too, were
working on GMT-5, busy as a 9PM restaurant on a Saturday night.
Art had an IV taped to the inside of his left arm, dripping saline and tranqs,
making him logy and challenging his circadians. Still, he was the more mobile of
the two, as Linda was swaddled in smartcasts that both immobilized her and
massaged her, all the while osmosing transdermal antiinflammatories and
painkillers. He tottered the two steps to the chair at her bedside and shook her
hand again.
"Don't take this the wrong way, but you look like hell," he said.
She smiled. Her jaw made an audible pop. "Get a picture, will you? It'll be good
in court."
He chuckled.
"No, seriously. Get a picture."
So he took out his comm and snapped a couple pix, including one with nightvision
filters on to compensate for the dimmed recovery room lighting. "You're a cool
customer, you know that?" he said, as he tucked his camera away.
"Not so cool. This is all a coping strategy. I'm pretty shook up, you want to
know the truth. I could have died."
"What were you doing on the street at three AM anyway?"
"I was upset, so I took a walk, thought I'd get something to eat or a beer or
something."
"You haven't been here long, huh?"
She laughed, and it turned into a groan. "What the hell is wrong with the
English, anyway? The sun sets and the city rolls up its streets. It's not like
they've got this great tradition of staying home and surfing cable or anything."
"They're all snug in their beds, farting away their lentil roasts."
"That's it! You can't get a steak here to save your life. Mad cows, all of 'em.
If I see one more gray soy sausage, I'm going to kill the waitress and eat
*her*."
"You just need to get hooked up," he said. "Once we're out of here, I'll take
you out for a genuine blood pudding, roast beef and oily chips. I know a place."
"I'm drooling. Can I borrow your phone again? Uh, I think you're going to have
to dial for me."
"That's OK. Give me the number."
She did, and he cradled his comm to her head. He was close enough to her that he
could hear the tinny, distinctive ringing of a namerican circuit at the other
end. He heard her shallow breathing, heard her jaw creak. He smelled her
shampoo, a free-polymer new-car smell, smelled a hint of her sweat. A cord stood
out on her neck, merging in an elegant vee with her collarbone, an arrow
pointing at the swell of her breast under her paper gown.
"Toby, it's Linda."
A munchkin voice chittered down the line.
"Shut up, OK. Shut up. Shut. I'm in the hospital." More chipmunk. "Got hit by a
car. I'll be OK. No. Shut up. I'll be fine. I'll send you the FAQs. I just
wanted to say. . ." She heaved a sigh, closed her eyes. "You know what I wanted
to say. Sorry, all right? Sorry it came to this. You'll be OK. I'll be OK. I
just didn't want to leave you hanging." She sounded groggy, but there was a sob
there, too. "I can't talk long. I'm on a shitload of dope. Yes, it's good dope.
I'll call you later. I don't know when I'm coming back, but we'll sort it out
there, all right? OK. Shut up. OK. You too."
She looked up at Art. "My boyfriend. Ex-boyfriend. Not sure who's leaving who at
this point. Thanks." She closed her eyes. Her eyelids were mauve, a tracery of
pink veins. She snored softly.
Art set an alarm that would wake him up in time to meet his lawyer, folded up
his comm and crawled back into bed. His circadians swelled and crashed against
the sides of his skull, and before he knew it, he was out.
6.
Hospitals operate around the clock, but they still have their own circadians.
The noontime staff were still overworked and harried but chipper and efficient,
too, without the raccoon-eyed jitters of the night before. Art and Linda were
efficiently fed, watered and evacuated, then left to their own devices, blinking
in the weak English sunlight that streamed through the windows.
"The lawyers've worked it out, I think," Art said.
"Good. Good news." She was dopamine-heavy, her words lizard-slow. Art figured
her temper was drugged senseless, and it gave him the courage to ask her the
question that'd been on his mind since they'd met.
"Can I ask you something? It may be offensive."
"G'head. I may be offended."
"Do you do. . .this. . .a lot? I mean, the insurance thing?"
She snorted, then moaned. "It's the Los Angeles Lottery, dude. I haven't done it
before, but I was starting to feel a little left out, to tell the truth."
"I thought screenplays were the LA Lotto."
"Naw. A good lotto is one you can win."
She favored him with half a smile and he saw that she had a lopsided, left-hand
dimple.
"You're from LA, then?"
"Got it in one. Orange County. I'm a third-generation failed actor. Grandpa once
had a line in a Hitchcock film. Mom was the ditzy neighbor on a three-episode
Fox sitcom in the 90s. I'm still waiting for my moment in the sun. You live
here?"
"For now. Since September. I'm from Toronto."
"Canadia! Goddamn snowbacks. What are you doing in London?"
His comm rang, giving him a moment to gather his cover story. "Hello?"
"Art! It's Fede!" Federico was another provocateur in GMT. He wasn't exactly
Art's superior -- the tribes didn't work like that -- but he had seniority.
"Fede -- can I call you back?"
"Look, I heard about your accident, and I wouldn't have called, but it's
urgent."
Art groaned and rolled his eyes in Linda's direction to let her know that he,
too, was exasperated by the call, then retreated to the other side of his bed
and hunched over.
"What is it?"
"We've been sniffed. I'm four-fifths positive."
Art groaned again. Fede lived in perennial terror of being found out and exposed
as an ESTribesman, fired, deported, humiliated. He was always at least
three-fifths positive, and the extra fifth was hardly an anomaly. "What's up
now?"
"It's the VP of HR at Virgin/Deutsche Telekom. He's called me in for a meeting
this afternoon. Wants to go over the core hours recommendation." Fede was a
McKinsey consultant offline, producing inflammatory recommendation packages for
Fortune 100 companies. He was working the lazy-Euro angle, pushing for extra
daycare, time off for sick relatives and spouses. The last policy binder he'd
dumped on V/DT had contained enough obscure leave-granting clauses that an
employee who was sufficiently lawyer-minded could conceivably claim 450 days of
paid leave a year. Now he was pushing for the abolishment of "core hours,"
Corporate Eurospeak for the time after lunch but before afternoon naps when
everyone showed up at the office, so that they could get some face-time. Enough
of this, and GMT would be the laughingstock of the world, and so caught up in
internecine struggles that the clear superiority of the stress-feeding EST ethos
would sweep them away. That was the theory, anyway. Of course, there were rival
Tribalists in every single management consulting firm in the world working
against us. Management consultants have always worked on old-boys' networks,
after all -- it was a very short step from interning your frat buddy to
interning your Tribesman.
"That's it? A meeting? Jesus, it's just a meeting. He probably wants you to
reassure him before he presents to the CEO, is all."
"No, I'm sure that's not it. He's got us sniffed -- both of us. He's been going
through the product-design stuff, too, which is totally outside of his
bailiwick. I tried to call him yesterday and his voicemail rolled over to a
boardroom in O'Malley House." O'Malley House was the usability lab, a nice old
row of connected Victorian townhouses just off Picadilly. It was where Art
consulted out of. Also, two-hundred-odd usability specialists, product
designers, experience engineers, cog-psych cranks and other tinkerers with the
mind. They were the hairface hackers of Art's generation, unmanageable creative
darlings -- no surprise that the VP of HR would have cause to spend a little
face-time with someone there. Try telling Fede that, though.
"All right, Fede, what do you want me to do?"
"Just -- Just be careful. Sanitize your storage. I'm pushing a new personal key
to you now, too. Here, I'll read you the fingerprint." The key would be an
unimaginably long string of crypto-gibberish, and just to make sure that it
wasn't intercepted and changed en route, Fede wanted to read him a slightly less
long mathematical fingerprint hashed out of it. Once it arrived, Art was
supposed to generate a fingerprint from Fede's new key and compare it to the one
that Fede wanted him to jot down.
Art closed his eyes and reclined. "All right, I've got a pen," he said, though
he had no such thing.
Fede read him the long, long string of digits and characters and he repeated
them back, pretending to be noting them down. Paranoid bastard.
"OK, I got it. I'll get you a new key later today, all right?"
"Do it quick, man."
"Whatever, Fede. Back off, OK?"
"Sorry, sorry. Oh, and feel better, all right?"
"Bye, Fede."
"What was *that*?" Linda had her neck craned around to watch him.
He slipped into his cover story with a conscious effort. "I'm a user-experience
consultant. My coworkers are all paranoid about a deadline."
She rolled her eyes. "Not another one. God. Look, we go out for dinner, don't
say a word about the kerb design or the waiter or the menu or the presentation,
OK? OK? I'm serious."
Art solemnly crossed his heart. "Who else do you know in the biz?"
"My ex. He wouldn't or couldn't shut up about how much everything sucked. He was
right, but so what? I wanted to enjoy it, suckitude and all."
"OK, I promise. We're going out for dinner, then?"
"The minute I can walk, you're taking me out for as much flesh and entrails as I
can eat."
"It's a deal."
And then they both slept again.
7.
Met cute, huh? Linda was short and curvy, dark eyes and pursed lips and an
hourglass figure that she thought made her look topheavy and big-assed, but I
thought she was fabulous and soft and bouncy. She tasted like pepper, and her
hair smelled of the abstruse polymers that kept it hanging in a brusque bob that
brushed her firm, long jawline.
I'm getting a sunburn, and the pebbles on the roof are digging into my ass. I
don't know if I'm going to push the pencil or not, but if I do, it's going to be
somewhere more comfortable than this roof.
Except that the roof door, which I had wedged open before I snuck away from my
attendants and slunk up the firecode-mandated stairwell, is locked. The small
cairn of pebbles that I created in front of it has been strewn apart. It is
locked tight. And me without my comm. Ah, me. I take an inventory of my person:
a pencil, a hospital gown, a pair of boxer shorts and a head full of bad cess. I
am 450' above the summery, muggy, verdant Massachusetts countryside. It is very
hot, and I am turning the color of the Barbie aisle at FAO Schwartz, a kind of
labial pink that is both painful and perversely cheerful.
I've spent my life going in the back door and coming out the side door. That's
the way it is now. When it only takes two years for your job to morph into
something that would have been unimaginable twenty-four months before, it's not
really practical to go in through the front door. Not really practical to get
the degree, the certification, the appropriate experience. I mean, even if you
went back to university, the major you'd need by the time you graduated would be
in a subject that hadn't been invented when you enrolled. So I'm good at back
doors and side doors. It's what the Tribe does for me -- provides me with
entries into places where I technically don't belong. And thank God for them,
anyway. Without the Tribes, *no one* would be qualified to do *anything* worth
doing.
Going out the side door has backfired on me today, though.
Oh. Shit. I peer over the building's edge, down into the parking lot. The cars
are thinly spread, the weather too fine for anyone out there in the real world
to be visiting with their crazy relatives. Half a dozen beaters are parked down
there, methane-breathers that the ESTalists call fartmobiles. I'd been driving
something much the same on that fateful Leap Forward day in London. I left
something out of my inventory: pebbles. The roof is littered, covered with a
layer of gray, round riverstones, about the size of wasabi chickpeas. No one
down there is going to notice me all the way up here. Not without that I give
them a sign. A cracked windshield or two ought to do it.
Pages:
1 | 2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12