Cory Doctorow - Eastern Standard Tribe

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"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 the street. We joined a pickup game
of street-hockey in Boston, yelling "Car!" and clearing the net every time a
fartmobile turned into the cul-de-sac.

We played like kids. I got commed during working hours and my evenings were
blissfully devoid of buzzes, beeps and alerts. It surprised the hell out of me
when I discovered Fede's treachery and Linda's complicity and found myself
flying cattle class to London to kick Fede's ass. What an idiot I am.

I have never won an argument with Fede. I thought I had that time, of course,
but I should have known better. I was hardly back in Boston for a day before the
men with the white coats came to take me away.

They showed up at the Novotel, soothing and grim, and opened my room's keycard
reader with a mental-hygiene override. There were four of them, wiry and fast
with the no-nonsense manner of men who have been unexpectedly hammered by
outwardly calm psychopaths. That I was harmlessly having a rare cigarette on the
balcony, dripping from the shower, made no impression on them. They dropped
their faceplates, moved quickly to the balcony and boxed me in.

One of them recited a Miranda-esque litany that ended with "Do you understand."
It wasn't really a question, but I answered anyway. "No! No I don't! Who the
hell are you, and what are you doing in my fucking hotel room?"

In my heart, though, I knew. I'd lived enough of my life on the hallucinatory
edge of sleepdep to have anticipated this moment during a thousand freakouts. I
was being led away to the sanatorium, because someone, somewhere, had figured
out about the scurrying hamsters in my brain. About time.

As soon as I said the f-word, the guns came out. I tried to relax. I knew
intuitively that this could either be a routine and impersonal affair, or a
screaming, kicking, biting nightmare. I knew that arriving at the intake in a
calm frame of mind would make the difference between a chemical straightjacket
and a sleeping pill.

The guns were nonlethals, and varied: two kinds of nasty aerosol, a dart-gun,
and a tazer. The tazer captured my attention, whipping horizontal lightning in
the spring breeze. The Tesla enema, they called it in London. Supposedly
club-kids used them recreationally, but everyone I knew who'd been hit with one
described the experience as fundamentally and uniquely horrible.

I slowly raised my hands. "I would like to pack a bag, and I would like to see
documentary evidence of your authority. May I?" I kept my voice as calm as I
could, but it cracked on "May I?"

The reader of the litany nodded slowly. "You tell us what you want packed and
we'll pack it. Once that's done, I'll show you the committal document, all
right?"

"Thank you," I said.

They drove me through the Route 128 traffic in the sealed and padded compartment
in the back of their van. I was strapped in at the waist, and strapped over my
shoulders with a padded harness that reminded me of a rollercoaster restraint.
We made slow progress, jerking and changing lanes at regular intervals. The
traffic signature of 128 was unmistakable.

The intake doctor wanded me for contraband, drew fluids from my various parts,
and made light chitchat with me along the way. It was the last time I saw him.
Before I knew it, a beefy orderly had me by the arm and was leading me to my
room. He had a thick Eastern European accent, and he ran down the house rules
for me in battered English. I tried to devote my attention to it, to forget the
slack-eyed ward denizens I'd passed on my way in. I succeeded enough to
understand the relationship of my legcuff, the door frame and the elevators. The
orderly fished in his smock and produced a hypo.

"For sleepink," he said.

Panic, suppressed since my arrival, welled up and burst over. "Wait!" I said.
"What about my things? I had a bag with me."

"Talk to doctor in morning," he said, gesturing with the hypo, fitting it with a
needle-and-dosage cartridge and popping the sterile wrap off with a thumbswitch.
"Now, for sleepink." He advanced on me.

I'd been telling myself that this was a chance to rest, to relax and gather my
wits. Soon enough, I'd sort things out with the doctors and I'd be on my way.
I'd argue my way out of it. But here came Boris Badinoff with his magic needle,
and all reason fled. I scrambled back over the bed and pressed against the
window.

"It's barely three," I said, guessing at the time in the absence of my comm.
"I'm not tired. I'll go to sleep when I am."

"For sleepink," he repeated, in a more soothing tone.

"No, that's all right. I'm tired enough. Long night last night. I'll just lie
down and nap now, all right? No need for needles, OK?"

He grabbed my wrist. I tried to tug it out of his grasp, to squirm away. There's
a lot of good, old-fashioned dirty fighting in Tai Chi -- eye-gouging, groin
punches, hold-breaks and come-alongs -- and they all fled me. I thrashed like a
fish on a line as he ran the hypo over the crook of my elbow until the
vein-sensing LED glowed white. He jabbed down with it and I felt a prick. For a
second, I thought that it hadn't taken effect -- I've done enough chemical sleep
in my years with the Tribe that I've developed quite a tolerance for most
varieties -- but then I felt that unmistakable heaviness in my eyelids, the
melatonin crash that signalled the onslaught of merciless rest. I collapsed into
bed.

I spent the next day in a drugged stupor. I've become quite accustomed to
functioning in a stupor over the years, but this was different. No caffeine, for
starters. They fed me and I had a meeting with a nice doctor who ran it down for
me. I was here for observation pending a competency hearing in a week. I had
seven days to prove that I wasn't a danger to myself or others, and if I could,
the judge would let me go.

"It's like I'm a drug addict, huh?" I said to the doctor, who was used to non
sequiturs.

"Sure, sure it is." He shifted in the hard chair opposite my bed, getting ready
to go.

"No, really, I'm not just running my mouth. It's like this: *I* don't think I
have a problem here. I think that my way of conducting my life is perfectly
harmless. Like a speedfreak who thinks that she's just having a great time,
being ultraproductive and coming out ahead of the game. But her friends, they're
convinced she's destroying herself -- they see the danger she's putting herself
in, they see her health deteriorating. So they put her into rehab, kicking and
screaming, where she stays until she figures it out.

"So, it's like I'm addicted to being nuts. I have a nonrational view of the
world around me. An *inaccurate* view. You are meant to be the objective
observer, to make such notes as are necessary to determine if I'm seeing things
properly, or through a haze of nutziness. For as long as I go on taking my drug
-- shooting up my craziness -- you keep me here. Once I stop, once I accept the
objective truth of reality, you let me go. What then? Do I become a recovering
nutcase? Do I have to stand ever-vigilant against the siren song of craziness?"

The doctor ran his hands through his long hair and bounced his knee up and down.
"You could put it that way, I guess."

"So tell me, what's the next step? What is my optimum strategy for providing
compelling evidence of my repudiation of my worldview?"

"Well, that's where the analogy breaks down. This isn't about anything
demonstrable. There's no one thing we look for in making our diagnosis. It's a
collection of things, a protocol for evaluating you. It doesn't happen
overnight, either. You were committed on the basis of evidence that you had made
threats to your coworkers due to a belief that they were seeking to harm you."

"Interesting. Can we try a little thought experiment, Doctor? Say that your
coworkers really *were* seeking to harm you -- this is not without historical
precedent, right? They're seeking to sabotage you because you've discovered some
terrible treachery on their part, and they want to hush you up. So they provoke
a reaction from you and use it as the basis for an involuntary committal. How
would you, as a medical professional, distinguish that scenario from one in
which the patient is genuinely paranoid and delusional?"

The doctor looked away. "It's in the protocol -- we find it there."

"I see," I said, moving in for the kill. "I see. Where would I get more
information on the protocol? I'd like to research it before my hearing."

"I'm sorry," the doctor said, "we don't provide access to medical texts to our
patients."

"Why not? How can I defend myself against a charge if I'm not made aware of the
means by which my defense is judged? That hardly seems fair."

The doctor stood and smoothed his coat, turned his badge's lanyard so that his
picture faced outwards. "Art, you're not here to defend yourself. You're here so
that we can take a look at you and understand what's going on. If you have been
set up, we'll discover it --"

"What's the ratio of real paranoids to people who've been set up, in your
experience?"

"I don't keep stats on that sort of thing --"

"How many paranoids have been released because they were vindicated?"

"I'd have to go through my case histories --"

"Is it more than ten?"

"No, I wouldn't think so --"

"More than five?"

"Art, I don't think --"

"Have *any* paranoids ever been vindicated? Is this observation period anything
more than a formality en route to committal? Come on, Doctor, just let me know
where I stand."

"Art, we're on your side here. If you want to make this easy on yourself, then
you should understand that. The nurse will be in with your lunch and your meds
in a few minutes, then you'll be allowed out on the ward. I'll speak to you
there more, if you want."

"Doctor, it's a simple question: Has anyone ever been admitted to this facility
because it was believed he had paranoid delusions, and later released because he
was indeed the center of a plot?"

"Art, it's not appropriate for me to discuss other patients' histories --"

"Don't you publish case studies? Don't those contain confidential information
disguised with pseudonyms?"

"That's not the point --"

"What *is* the point? It seems to me that my optimal strategy here is to
repudiate my belief that Fede and Linda are plotting against me -- *even* if I
still believe this to be true, even if it *is* true -- and profess a belief that
they are my good and concerned friends. In other words, if they are indeed
plotting against me, I must profess to a delusional belief that they aren't, in
order to prove that I am not delusional."

"I read *Catch-22* too, Art. That's not what this is about, but your attitude
isn't going to help you any here." The doctor scribbled on his comm briefly,
tapped at some menus. I leaned across and stared at the screen.

"That looks like a prescription, Doctor."

"It is. I'm giving you a mild sedative. We can't help you until you're calmer
and ready to listen."

"I'm perfectly calm. I just disagree with you. I am the sort of person who
learns through debate. Medication won't stop that."

"We'll see," the doctor said, and left, before I could muster a riposte.

I was finally allowed onto the ward, dressed in what the nurses called "day
clothes" -- the civilian duds that I'd packed before leaving the hotel, which an
orderly retrieved for me from a locked closet in my room. The clustered nuts
were watching slackjaw TV, or staring out the windows, or rocking in place,
fidgeting and muttering. I found myself a seat next to a birdy woman whose long
oily hair was parted down the middle, leaving a furrow in her scalp lined with
twin rows of dandruff. She was young, maybe twenty-five, and seemed the least
stuporous of the lot.

"Hello," I said to her.

She smiled shyly, then pitched forward and vomited copiously and noisily between
her knees. I shrank back and struggled to keep my face neutral. A nurse hastened
to her side and dropped a plastic bucket in the stream of puke, which was still
gushing out of her mouth, her thin chest heaving.

"Here, Sarah, in here," the nurse said, with an air of irritation.

"Can I help?" I said, ridiculously.

She looked sharply at me. "Art, isn't it? Why aren't you in Group? It's after
one!"

"Group?" I asked.

"Group. In that corner, there." She gestured at a collection of sagging sofas
underneath one of the ward's grilled-in windows. "You're late, and they've
started without you."

There were four other people there, two women and a young boy, and a doctor in
mufti, identifiable by his shoes -- not slippers -- and his staff of office, the
almighty badge-on-a-lanyard.

Throbbing with dread, I moved away from the still-heaving girl to the sofa
cluster and stood at its edge. The group turned to look at me. The doctor
cleared his throat. "Group, this is Art. Glad you made it, Art. You're a little
late, but we're just getting started here, so that's OK. This is Lucy, Fatima,
and Manuel. Why don't you have a seat?" His voice was professionally smooth and
stultifying.

I sank into a bright orange sofa that exhaled a cloud of dust motes that danced
in the sun streaming through the windows. It also exhaled a breath of trapped
ancient farts, barf-smell, and antiseptic, the *parfum de asylum* that gradually
numbed my nose to all other scents on the ward. I folded my hands in my lap and
tried to look attentive.

"All right, Art. Everyone in the group is pretty new here, so you don't have to
worry about not knowing what's what. There are no right or wrong things. The
only rules are that you can't interrupt anyone, and if you want to criticize,
you have to criticize the idea, and not the person who said it. All right?"

"Sure," I said. "Sure. Let's get started."

"Well, aren't you eager?" the doctor said warmly. "OK. Manuel was just telling
us about his friends."

"They're not my friends," Manuel said angrily. "They're the reason I'm here. I
hate them."

"Go on," the doctor said.

"I already *told* you, yesterday! Tony and Musafir, they're trying to get rid of
me. I make them look bad, so they want to get rid of me."

"Why do you think you make them look bad?"

"Because I'm better than them -- I'm smarter, I dress better, I get better
grades, I score more goals. The girls like me better. They hate me for it."

"Oh yeah, you're the cat's ass, pookie," Lucy said. She was about fifteen,
voluminously fat, and her full lips twisted in an elaborate sneer as she spoke.

"Lucy," the doctor said patiently, favoring her with a patronizing smile.
"That's not cool, OK? Criticize the idea, not the person, and only when it's
your turn, OK?"

Lucy rolled her eyes with the eloquence of teenagedom.

"All right, Manuel, thank you. Group, do you have any positive suggestions for
Manuel?"

Stony silence.

"OK! Manuel, some of us are good at some things, and some of us are good at
others. Your friends don't hate you, and I'm sure that if you think about it,
you'll know that you don't hate them. Didn't they come visit you last weekend?
Successful people are well liked, and you're no exception. We'll come back to
this tomorrow -- why don't you spend the time until then thinking of three
examples of how your friends showed you that they liked you, and you can tell us
about it tomorrow?"

Manuel stared out the window.

"OK! Now, Art, welcome again. Tell us why you're here."

"I'm in for observation. There's a competency hearing at the end of the week."

Linda snorted and Fatima giggled.

The doctor ignored them. "But tell us *why* you think you ended up here."

"You want the whole story?"

"Whatever parts you think are important."

"It's a Tribal thing."

"I see," the doctor said.

"It's like this," I said. "It used to be that the way you chose your friends was
by finding the most like-minded people you could out of the pool of people who
lived near to you. If you were lucky, you lived near a bunch of people you could
get along with. This was a lot more likely in the olden days, back before, you
know, printing and radio and such. Chances were that you'd grow up so immersed
in the local doctrine that you'd never even think to question it. If you were a
genius or a psycho, you might come up with a whole new way of thinking, and if
you could pull it off, you'd either gather up a bunch of people who liked your
new idea or you'd go somewhere else, like America, where you could set up a
little colony of people who agreed with you. Most of the time, though, people
who didn't get along with their neighbors just moped around until they died."

"Very interesting," the doctor said, interrupting smoothly, "but you were going
to tell us how you ended up here."

"Yeah," Lucy said, "this isn't a history lesson, it's Group. Get to the point."

"I'm getting there," I said. "It just takes some background if you're going to
understand it. Now, once ideas could travel more freely, the chances of you
finding out about a group of people somewhere else that you might get along with
increased. Like when my dad was growing up, if you were gay and from a big city,
chances were that you could figure out where other gay people hung out and go
and --" I waved my hands, "be *gay*, right? But if you were from a small town,
you might not even know that there was such a thing as being gay -- you might
think it was just a perversion. But as time went by, the gay people in the big
cities started making a bigger and bigger deal out of being gay, and since all
the information that the small towns consumed came from big cities, that
information leaked into the small towns and more gay people moved to the big
cities, built little gay zones where gay was normal.

"So back when the New World was forming and sorting out its borders and
territories, information was flowing pretty well. You had telegraphs, you had
the Pony Express, you had thousands of little newspapers that got carried around
on railroads and streetcars and steamers, and it wasn't long before everyone
knew what kind of person went where, even back in Europe and Asia. People
immigrated here and picked where they wanted to live based on what sort of
people they wanted to be with, which ideas they liked best. A lot of it was
religious, but that was just on the surface -- underneath it all was aesthetics.
You wanted to go somewhere where the girls were pretty in the way you understood
prettiness, where the food smelled like food and not garbage, where shops sold
goods you could recognize. Lots of other factors were at play, too, of course --
jobs and Jim Crow laws and whatnot, but the tug of finding people like you is
like gravity. Lots of things work against gravity, but gravity always wins in
the end -- in the end, everything collapses. In the end, everyone ends up with
the people that are most like them that they can find."

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