With a Little Help (23 page)

Read With a Little Help Online

Authors: Cory Doctorow

Tags: #Science Fiction, #Fiction, #Dystopian

BOOK: With a Little Help
4.98Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

With a Little Help,
Cory Doctorow
Liberation Spectrum

The tiny multinational lumbered across the Niagara Falls border in its tour-bus, Lee-Daniel at the wheel, sipping iced mocha from the flexible straw that he'd threaded through a series of eyelets on his jacket. He'd been driving all the way since Akwesahsne, reciting mnemonic sleep-dep chants and steadily consuming the lethal blend of bittersweet chocolate and espresso, but after 20 straight hours he was in deadly danger of falling straight to sleep and head-onning the bus into a Jersey barrier or a bullet train or a minivan.

Once they were on US soil, he pulled the bus over at a temporary roadhouse and set the handbrake. He eased himself out of the driver's perch, chafing his narrow ass and thighs to get the blood flowing there again, and gave forth a drawn out "
gaaaah
" as the pins and needles stabbed into his sweat-marinated muscles. He heard the rest of the company rousing itself behind him. First, the investors in the front row, then the rest of the board of directors in the row behind them, then four rows of middle-managers and finally the great mass of front-line workers, techs, customer service reps, trouble-shooters, antennamen, switchwomen, chicken-pluckers and left-handed bottle-stretchers.

He flipped the windows to transparent and let the sun shine in, provoking groans from the company. MacDiarmid, the angel investor who'd been in since the multinational had been able to fit in a sedan, threw a strong arm around Lee-Daniel's shoulders. "You OK?" he said. The tone had phony solicitousness; MacDiarmid and Lee-Daniel had been through half a dozen disasters, from hostile takeover attempts to roadblocks to high-speed engine failure, and Lee-Daniel knew a fake when he heard it.

"I'm fixing to lay down and die," Lee-Daniel said, stretching theatrically, his pipe-cleaner arms straining. "You're street-legal in New York, right? How about you drive the bus for the next couple shifts?"

"Seriously?" MacDiarmid said. His black hair was showing grey now, but his eyebrows were still fierce and black, his eyes still sharp in their nest of whiskey-cured crows-feet.

It was rare for Lee-Daniel to cede the wheel to anyone else -- it was his damned company and he'd drive the damned bus. Lee-Daniel saw the shareholder confidence eroding before his eyes.

"Just for a while, OK? Not permanent, just for a day or two, just long enough for me to get over the sleep-deficit and re-grow some stomach lining." It was hard being CEO of a mobile multinational. The shareholder oversight was murder.

MacDiarmid looked closely at him, then smiled and gave him a burly man-hug that smelled of sandalwood soap and good liquor. "Yeah, of course, of course. I'll put it to the Board Meeting tonight at dinner. Can't have the CEO burning out at the wheel, that's what I'll say, don't worry about it, LD."

"Thanks, Mac," Lee-Daniel said. "How about we get some eats?" He put his hand on the geometry-reader beside the wheel, re-authenticated to the bus, then hit the hatches. Doors hissed open at the back, at the front, at the middle, fresh dusty air rushing in all at once in an ear-popping whoosh. The bus knelt ponderously and the company piled out.

MacDiarmid hustled away to join the rest of the investors, his exquisite hand-made leather shoes slapping the paving, the cuffs of his wool tailor-made slacks shushing over their gleaming upper, and as Lee-Daniel locked the bus down and armed it up, he watched the angel investor whisper in his co-shareholders' ears. Lee-Daniel couldn't hear the words, but six years at the wheel of Cognitive Radio, Inc. had schooled him well in the body-language of investors and he knew his days with CogRad were numbered.

#

The roadhouse was the kind of TAZ that got less entertaining at the square of the amount of time spent within its animated walls. The first minute was painful, an overbright eternity of authenticating to the roadhouse-area-network and establishing credit with the system. Once they had their tokens -- poker-chips adorned with grinning, dancing anthropomorphic dollar, Euro and Yen symbols -- there came the second minute, twice as horrible as the first, as they struggled in the guts of the giant vending machine, trying to fathom the actual products represented by the branded messages that tailored themselves to your personal demographic, your stated and implicit preferences, the messages that danced across your field of vision as you perused the racks in the roadhouse's aisles.

The third minute was twice as horrible as the first two minutes, as you finalized your selections by waving your poker-chip at different displays, then tried to take receipt of your goods from the floor-level fulfillment chutes while fending off the imprecations of the upsell displays set into the floor-tiles. "Lee-Daniel! People who bought tuna-melts also bought thousand-hour power-cells. People who bought OralCare mouth-kits also bought MyGuts brand edible oscopycams. People who bought banana-melatonin rice-shakes also bought tailor-made sailcloth shirts by Figaro's of London and Rangoon."

The horribleness of the roadhouse went asymptotic to infinity at minute four, as you sat down and tried to eat your rubbery tuna-melt hunkered down at a table crowded with middle-managers in need of reassurance while swatting away the buzzing aerostats that probabilistically routed towards those diners with the highest credit ratings, delivering pitches whose tone and content had been honed by genetic algorithms that sharpened them to maximal intrusiveness and intriguingness. It took a genetic algorithm to make a high colonic sound like an afternoon at a spa.

"I'm getting too old for this shit," said Joey Riel, a 17-year-old metis whose fluency in English, French and Ojibwa had made him the youngest middle manager in CogRad history, eight months before. He'd started griping about his road-weariness within days of his promotion up from antennaman. It made him fit in with the other, older middle managers, who were coffee-soured lifers whose time on the road had drummed out any footloose spirit they might have once possessed.

Further down the arcade, the investors were waving their tokens over a trading table, playing the instant futures market. An aerostat overhead mirrored the gameplay, and as Lee-Daniel watched, MacDiarmid doubled his money on a short-odds bet on two cherries and a lemon, then Earnshaw lost big when his long-odds investment on uranium and coal came back with two windmills and a photovoltaic array.

"Amen to that, bro," said Elaine, who ran two squads of surveyors. She was all lean muscle and blackfly repellent and mail-order outdoorwear, handily capable of living off the land for weeks while trekking the bush, homing in on optimal repeater locations. At the Akwesahsne Sovereign, she'd broken the hearts of a half-dozen starry-eyed Mohawk Warriors who'd puppydogged after her as she shlepped the length and breadth of their territory, warchalking neon arrows to indicate RF shadows cast by especially leafy trees and outcroppings of granite Canadian Shield. That was before the Surete du Quebec arrived on the scene and it all went pear-shaped.

"Me, too," said Mortimer, the security man who really
was
too old for this shit, Lee-Daniel reflected, scratching at his fussy little caterpillar moustache. He'd been protecting the old dodderer from the Board of Directors, who saw him as an insurance nightmare. Mortimer's hands shook, he was nightblind, and he was 98 years old, and there wasn't enough rejuve in the world to give him the mental flexibility required by the modern age. Lee-Daniel had stripped him of his sidearms, even the nonlethals, at the same time as he'd promoted Joey Riel. Now Mortimer carried a loudhailer through which he could bark orders in his old cop voice, the voice that made your asshole clench up and your shoulders itch for a soon-come bullet.

The investors howled again, and the aerostat told them all that MacDiarmid had cleaned up bigtime, paying out 100-to-1 on an investment in Shell Oil collectibles -- two derricks and a shell. The Series A/Series B investors crowded around him, giving him awe-struck back-slaps. The other two might be the fronts for gigafunds, but that was all they were: fronts. They were the Voice of the Money while the company was on the road, junior associates who needed to make a good score on their wanderjahr if they wanted to make partner. Mac was solo money, a shrewd individual investor who'd acquired his 15-share in CogRad with no more investment than a year's worth of gas and roadhouse meals while Lee-Daniel was getting the show on the road.

"The rich get richer and the poor get children," Joey Riel said, shaking his head at the investors and the board carrying MacDiarmid off to a private dining room for their dinner and nightly board-meeting.

"Those Mohawks got you all full of bolshy horseshit, didn't they?" Mortimer said. The Mohawk Warrior Society talked a good anarcho-syndicalist line. Most of the Sovereigns that CogRad unwired were interested in setting up a local telco as part of some economic development scheme -- as far as they were concerned, tax-free packets were the new tax-free cigarettes.

But the Mohawk Warriors in Quebec were in it for the samizdata. They had big plans for their cognitive radio network. They'd peered with two upstate New York networks and an Algerian satellite backbone, and they were reselling enciphered proxy-time on their network to anyone who wanted it, providing an anonymizing relay for any and all data, regardless of origin, destination or payload.

Lee-Daniel knew he should have gotten them to pay upfront. Nothing got the blackshirts interested in private wireless networking like routing suspicious real-time chatter between Burmese guerrilla cells and suspected movie-swappers in DC. But that wasn't how CogRadio had been built. The native bands that were desperate enough to assert that their ancestral treaties didn't encompass the RF spectrum couldn't afford to lay out cash for CogRadio's hardware, training and remote administration. CogRadio was as much a bank as a technology startup.

But the Canadian government took a hard line on anything that looked like separatism. Four CogRadio employees who'd been unlucky enough to get stuck on the wrong side of the barricades during one of the Warriors' traditional shoot-outs with the Surete wouldn't be coming back to work for 10-to-15, eight with good behavior.

With the investors off out of sight, the managers and the front-liners shucked their veneer of civility and began to get wild, ordering drinks and health-insurance-invalidating carbo-treats. Elaine sucked down three tequila cartons and glared bleary hostility at him.

"The fuck do you know about
anything
, hey?" she said. "You're supposed to be in charge of things, but you don't take a shit without clearing it with those bastards." She jerked her head over her shoulder at the closed door of the private dining room. "And when you
do
make a decision, you fuck it up." The smell of old sweat and booze made his eyes water.

Mortimer hitched himself erect, creaking up from his seat. "That's enough of that," he said in his cop-voice, laying a still-strong hand on Elaine's shoulder. "If you don't like your job, you can give notice, but you'll keep it polite as long as you're working here."

Elaine tried to shake his hand off, but he kept his grasp firm. Lee-Daniel had been through one or two of these in the first year, and he knew that Mortimer knew what he was doing. Things could get awfully heated up at times like this.

"You're hurting me," Elaine said. "Let go."

"Apologize to the man," Mortimer said, the voice of authority. "You're out of line."

Joey Riel leapt on Mortimer's back, his arms locked around Mortimer's neck. "Don't you touch her, you pig," he hissed. Mortimer took hold of Joey's thumb and twisted it into a come-along and Joey let go, dancing around and clutching his hand.

"You broke my fucking thumb!" he said, and then Elaine was on her feet, shouting incoherently, right up in Mortimer's face, darting her head at him like a striking cobra. The front liners broke off their gaming and boozing and necking and rushed over, hooting for blood.

Lee-Daniel felt the old adrenalin, the "leadership" brain-reward that he got when it all came down to a crisis. He jumped up on their table, scattering their dinners' active packaging, which curled and waved as it flapped to the floor, cycling through its upsell ads.

"Enough!" he roared. It wasn't a cop-voice, but it was a voice nevertheless -- the voice of the man who signs the paycheck, the disappointed father who was going to turn the bus around and take the company home
this instant
if he didn't get respect. Lee-Daniel didn't have to use that voice often, but its rarity was part of its effectiveness.

It didn't work. Elaine still shouted, Joey Riel was digging through the drifts of trash for a weapon, and the front-liners were still cheering their bosses on. "
Enough
!" he said again, just to check, but it didn't work any better the second time around.

He got down off the table and circled Mortimer, who had the mic for his loudhailer clipped to his belt. Lee-Daniel snatched it up and hit the Talk button, dialing the volume up to max with his thumb.

Other books

Selected Short Fiction by DICKENS, CHARLES
Rough Justice by Lisa Scottoline
Fulfilled by Allyson Young
Bal Masque by Fleeta Cunningham
No Alarms by Beckett, Bernard
J Roars by Eck, Emily
Wizard's Education (Book 2) by James Eggebeen