ReVISIONS (29 page)

He'd lost his job and spent six months inside, plus two years' probation, during which he wasn't allowed to program a goddamn microwave oven, let alone admin the networks that had been his trade. And he'd gotten off lightly—on paper. While he was inside, Janice filed for divorce. She kept the small house and he got the big house.

Roscoe was in a bad mood as he climbed the front steps of the house he and Marcel rented.

“Slushy boots! For chrissakes, Roscoe, I just cleaned.”

Roscoe stared at the salty brown slush he'd tracked over the painted floor and shook his head.

“Sorry,” he said lamely. He sat down on the floor to shuck his heavy steel-shank Kodiaks. “Just ease back, all right? It didn't go so good.”

Marcel set his machine down on the hearthrug. “What happened?”

Roscoe related his run-in with the law quickly. Marcel shook his head.

“I bet it's bullshit. Ever since Tijuana, everyone's seeing spooks.” The ISPs on the Tijuana side of the San Ysidro border crossing had been making good coin off unwirer sympathizers who'd pointed their antennae across the chain-link fence. La Migra tried tightening up the fence gauge to act as a faraday cage, but they just went over it with point-to-point links. Finally, the radio cops had Ruby-Ridged the whole operation, killing ten “terrorists” in a simultaneous strike with Mexican narcs who'd raided the ISPs under the rubric of shutting down narcotraficante activity.

Roscoe shook his head. “Bullshit or not, you going to take any chances? Believe me, there's one place you don't want to go. Listen, when I was your age, I thought it couldn't happen to me either. Now look at me.” He started thumbing his way through the stack of old magazines on the coffee table.

“I'm looking at you.” Marcel grinned. “There was a call while you were out.”

“A call?”

“Some woman, said she wanted to talk to you. I took her number.”

“Uh-huh.” Roscoe put the magazine back down.
Heads it's Janice, tails it's her lawyer
, he thought. It was shaping up to be that kind of day; a tire slashing and an hour of alimonial recriminations would complete it neatly. “Ah, shit. Get it over with.”

The number was unfamiliar. That didn't mean much—Janice's frothingly aggro lawyer seemed to carry a new cellular every time he saw her—but it was hopeful. Roscoe dialed. “Hello? Roscoe here. Who am I talking to?”

A stranger's voice: “Hi there! I was talking to your roommate about an hour ago? I'm Sylvie Smith. I was given your name by Buzz—he told me you put him on the backbone.”

Roscoe tensed. Odds were that this Sylvie Smith was just looking to leech a first-mile feed, but after this morning's run-in with the law he was taking nothing for granted.

“Are you a law enforcement officer federal employee police officer lawyer FCC or FBI agent?” he asked, running the words together, knowing that if she was any of the above she'd probably lie—but it might help sway a jury toward letting him off if he was targeted by a sting.

“No.” She sounded amused. “I'm a journalist.”

“Then you should be familiar with CALEA,” he said, bridling at the condescension in her voice. CALEA was the wiretap law that required switch-vendors to put snoopware into every hop in the phone network. It was bad enough in and of itself, but it made the snoop-proof code built into the BeOS access points he had hidden around town doubly illegal.

“Paranoid, much?” she said.

“I have nothing to be paranoid about,” he said, spelling it out like he was talking to a child. “I am a law-abiding citizen, complying with the terms of my parole. If you
are
a journalist, I'd be happy to chat. In person.”

“I'm staying at the Days Inn on Main Street,” she said. “It's a dump, but it's got a
view of the Falls
,” she said in a hokey secret-agent voice, making it plain that she meant, “It's line of sight to a Canadian wireless repeater.”

“I can be there in twenty. Turn left out the front door and meet me at the diner that's fifty yards down the road,” he said, hanging up.

Marcel looked up from his machine. “What?”

“I'm out. See you later.”

 

Roscoe took a booth by the window and was halfway down his first mug of coffee when someone leaned over him. “Hi,” she said.

“You must be Sylvie.” He registered a confused impression of bleached blonde hair, brown eyes, freckles.
Must be straight out of J-school
. “Have a seat. Coffee?”

“Yes, please.” She put down something like a key ring then waved a hand, trying to catch the waitress' eye. Roscoe looked at the key ring. Very black, very small, very Nokia.

“Suppose you tell me why you wanted to meet up,” Roscoe said quietly. “Up front. I'm on parole, and I've got no intention of violating it.”

Sylvie ordered a coffee from the waitress. “What'd you do?”

Roscoe snorted. “I was
accused
of infringement with a side order of black crypto, but plea-bargained it down to unlawful emissions. Strictly a no-collar crime.” It was the truth, though he'd originally been looking at a five-year stretch for contributory infringement, compounded to twenty by the crypto running on the access point (“use a cypher, go to jail”), until the ACLU mugged the judge with an amicus brief. The eventual plea bargain took it down to criminal trespass and unlawful emission, six months and two years, so that it merely cost him his home, his job, his savings, his wife. . . .

He took another mouthful of coffee to cover his feelings. “So what are you doing here?”

“I'm working on a story about some aspects of unwiring that don't usually make the mainstream press,” she said, as the waitress came over. Roscoe held up his mug for a refill.

She pulled out a notepad and began scribbling. “
This
is my editor's name and address. You can look it up. If you ask for him, you'll get put through—you're on a list of interview subjects I sent him. Next, here's my e-mail address.” Roscoe blinked—it was a handle on a famous Finnish anonymous remixer. “Get a friend to ping it and ask me something.” It was worth five to twenty for black crypto—anonymity was the FCC's worst nightmare.

“Okay, I'll check these out.” He met her eyes. “Now, why don't you tell me why the
Wall Street Journal
is interested in a burned out ex-con and ex-unwirer?”

She dangled her key ring again, a flash of matte black plastic. “These are everywhere in Europe. Like these,” she opened her purse and he caught a glimpse of a sliver of curved metal, like a boomerang. Or the Motorola batwing mark. “Meshing wireless repeaters. Teenagers are whacking them up on the sides of buildings, sticking them to their windows. The telcos are screaming: their business is way down. Wired infrastructure is on the way out. Even the ISPs are nervous.”

Roscoe tried to hide his grin. To be an unwirer in the streets of Paris, operating with impunity, putting the telcos, the Hollywood studios, and the ISPs on notice that there was no longer any such thing as a “consumer”—that yesterday's couch potatoes are today's
participants
!

“We've got ten years' worth of editorials in our morgue about the destruction of the European entertainment and telco market and the wisdom of our National Information Infrastructure here in the US, but it's starting to ring hollow. The European governments are
ignoring
the telcos! The device and services market being built on top of the freenets is accounting for nearly half the GDP growth in the French economy. To hear
my
paper describe it, though, you'd think they were starving in the streets.

“I just got back from a month in the field in the EU. I've got interviews in the can with CEOs, with street thugs, with grandmothers and with regulators, all saying the same thing: unmetered communications are the secret engine of the economy, of liberty. The highest quality ‘content' isn't one-hundred-million-dollar movies, it's conversations with other people. Crypto is a tool of privacy not piracy.

“The unwirers are heroes in Europe. But here, you people are pirates, abettors of terrorists. I want to change that.”

Marcel picked a fight over supper: “What are you planning this week?”

“More dishes. Got a couple of folks to splice in downtown if I want to hook up East Aurora—there're some black spots there, but I figure with some QOS-BASED routing and a few more repeaters we can clear them up. Why?”

Marcel toyed with a strand of cooling pizza cheese. “It's boring. When are you going to run a new fat pipe in?”

“When the current one's full. The more we've got, the more there are for the Feds to cut.”

“I could take over part of the fiber-pull,” Marcel said.

“I don't think so.” Roscoe put his plate down.

“But I could—” Marcel looked at him. “What's wrong?”

“Security,” Roscoe grunted. “Goddamnit, you can't just waltz up to some guy who's looking at twenty-to-life and say ‘Hi, Roscoe sent me, howzabout you and me run some dark fiber over the border, huh?' Some of the guys in this game are, huh, you wouldn't want to meet them on a dark night. And others are just plain paranoid.”

“You could introduce me,” Marcel said after a brief pause.

Roscoe laughed, a short bark. “In your dreams.”

Marcel dropped his fork, clattering. “You're going to take your pet blonde on a repeater splice and show her everything, but you won't let me help run a new pipe in? What's the matter, I don't smell good enough?”

“Up yours.” Roscoe finished the meal in silence, then headed out to his evening class in conversational French. Marcel was just jealous because he wasn't getting to do any of the secret agent stuff. Being an unwirer was a lot less romantic than it sounded, and the first rule of unwiring was
nobody talks about unwiring
. Maybe Marcel would get it one day.

 

Sylvie's hotel room had a cigarette-burns-and-must squalor that reminded Roscoe of jail. “Bonjour, m'sieu,” she said as she admitted him.

“Bon soir, madame,” he said. “Commentava?”

“Lookee here, the treasures of the Left Bank.” She handed him the Motorola batarang he'd glimpsed earlier. The underside had a waxed-paper peel-off strip and when he lifted a corner, his thumb stuck so hard to the tackiness beneath that he lost the top layer of skin when he pulled it loose. He turned it over in his hands.

“How's it powered?”

“Photovoltaics charging a polymer cell. The entire case is a slab of battery plus solar cell. It only sucks juice when it's transmitting. Put one in a subway car and you've got an instant ad hoc network that everyone in the car can use. Put one in the next car and they'll mesh. Put one on the platform and you'll get connectivity with the train when it pulls in.”

“Shitfire,” he said, stroking the matte finish in a way that bordered on the erotic.

She grinned. She was slightly snaggletoothed, and he noticed a scar on her upper lip from a cleft-palate operation that must have been covered up with concealer earlier. It made her seem more human, more vulnerable. “Costs three Euros in quantity. Some Taiwanese knockoffs have already appeared that slice that in half. Moto'll have to invent something new next year if it wants to keep that profit.”

“They will,” Roscoe said, still stroking the batarang. He transferred it to his armpit and unslung his luggable laptop. “Innovation is still legal there.” The laptop sank heavily into the bedspread.

Sylvie's chest began to buzz. She slipped a tiny phone from her breast pocket and answered it. “Yes?” She handed it to Roscoe. “It's for you.”

He clamped it to his ear. “Who is this?”

“Eet eez eye, zee masked avenger, doer of naughty deeds and wooer of reporters' hearts.”

“Marcel?”

“Yes, boss.”

“You shouldn't be calling this number.” He remembered the yellow pad, sitting on his bedside table.

“Sorry, boss,” Marcel said. He giggled.

“Have you been drinking?” Marcel and he had bonded over many, many beers when they'd met in a bar in Utica, but Roscoe had cut back lately. Drinking made you sloppy.

“No, no,” he said. “Just in a good mood is all. I'm sorry we fought, darlin', can we kiss and make up?”

“What do you want, Marcel?”

“I want to be in the story, dude. Hook me up! I want to be famous!”

Roscoe grinned despite himself. Marcel was good at fonzing dishes into place with one well-placed whack, could crack him up when the winter slush was turning his mood to pitch. Good kid, basically, but impulsive. Like Roscoe, once.