Eastern Standard Tribe Part 15

"Baby," Lucy said, rolling her eyes again, "you need some new meds."

"Could be," I said. "But this is for real. Is there a comm on the ward? We can look it up together."

"Oh, *that*'all prove it, all right. Nothing but truth online."

"I didn't say that. There're peer-reviewed articles about the Tribes. It was a lead story on the CBC's social science site last year."

"Uh huh, sure. Right next to the sasquatch videos."

"I'm talking about the CBC, Lucy. Let's go look it up."

Lucy mimed taking an invisible comm out of her cleavage and prodding at it with an invisible stylus. She settled an invisible pair of spectacles on her nose and nodded sagely. "Oh yeah, sure, really interesting stuff."

I realized that I was arguing with a crazy person and turned to the doctor. "You must have read about the Tribes, right?"

The doctor acted as if he hadn't heard me. "That's just fascinating, Art. Thank you for sharing that. Now, here's a question I'd like you to think about, and maybe you can tell us the answer tomorrow: What are the ways that your friends -- the ones you say betrayed you -- used to show you how much they respected you and liked you? Think hard about this. I think you'll be surprised by the conclusions you come to."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Just what I said, Art. Think hard about how you and your friends interacted and you'll see that they really like you."

"Did you hear what I just said? Have you heard of the Tribes?"

"Sure, sure. But this isn't about the Tribes, Art. This is about you and --" he consulted his comm, "Fede and Linda. They care about you a great deal and they're terribly worried about you. You just think about it. Now," he said, recrossing his legs, "Fatima, you told us yesterday about your mother and I asked you to think about how *she* feels. Can you tell the group what you found out?"

But Fatima was off in med-land, eyes glazed and mouth hanging slack. Manuel nudged her with his toe, then, when she failed to stir, aimed a kick at her s.h.i.+n. The doctor held a hand out and grabbed Manuel's slippered toe. "That's all right, let's move on to Lucy."

I tuned out as Lucy began an elaborate and well-worn rant about her eating habits, prodded on by the doctor. The enormity of the situation was coming home to me. I couldn't win. If I averred that Fede and Linda were my boon companions, I'd still be found incompetent -- after all, what competent person threatens his boon companions? If I stuck to my story, I'd be found incompetent, and medicated besides, like poor little Fatima, zombified by the psychoactive c.o.c.ktail. Either way, I was stuck.

Stuck on the roof now, and it's getting very uncomfortable indeed. Stuck because I am officially incompetent and doomed and d.a.m.ned to indefinite rest on the ward. Stuck because every pa.s.sing moment here is additional time for the hamsters to run their courses in my mind, piling regret on worry.

Stuck because as soon as I am discovered, I will be stupified by the meds, administered by stern and loving and thoroughly disappointed doctors. I still haven't managed to remember any of their names. They are interchangeable, well shod and endowed with badges on lanyards and soothing and implacable and entirely unappreciative of my rhetorical skills.

Stuck. The sheet-metal chimneys stand tall around the roof, unevenly distributed according to some inscrutable logic that could only be understood with the a.s.sistance of as-built drawings, blueprints, mechanical and structural engineering diagrams. Surely though, they are optimized to wick hot air out of the giant brick pile's guts and exhaust it.

I move to the one nearest the stairwell. It is tarred in place, its ap.r.o.n lined with a double-row of cinderblocks that have pools of brackish water and cobwebs gathered in their holes. I stick my hand in the first and drag it off the ap.r.o.n.

I repeat it.

Now the chimney is standing on its own, in the middle of a nonsensical cinderblock-henge. My hands are dripping with muck and grotendousness. I wipe them off on the pea gravel and then dry them on my boxer shorts, then hug the chimney and lean forward. It gives, slowly, slightly, and springs back. I give it a harder push, really give it my weight, but it won't budge. Belatedly, I realize that I'm standing on its ap.r.o.n, trying to lift myself along with the chimney.

I take a step back and lean way forward, try again. It's awkward, but I'm making progress, bent like an ell, pus.h.i.+ng with my legs and lower back. I feel something pop around my sacrum, know that I'll regret this deeply when my back kacks out completely, but it'll be all for naught if I don't keep! on! pus.h.i.+ng!

Then, suddenly, the chimney gives, its ap.r.o.n swinging up and hitting me in the knees so that I topple forward with it, smas.h.i.+ng my chin on its hood. For a moment, I lie down atop it, like a stupefied lover, awestruck by my own inanity.

The smell of blood rouses me. I tentatively reach my hand to my chin and feel the ragged edge of a cut there, opened from the tip and along my jawbone almost to my ear. The cut is too fresh to hurt, but it's bleeding freely and I know it'll sting like a b.a.s.t.a.r.d soon enough. I go to my knees and scream, then scream again as I rend open my chin further.

My knees and s.h.i.+ns are grooved with deep, parallel cuts, gritted with gravel and grime. Standing hurts so much that I go back to my knees, holler again at the pain in my legs as I grind more gravel into my cuts, and again as I tear my face open some more. I end up fetal on my side, sticky with blood and weeping softly with an exquisite self-pity that is more than the cuts and bruises, more than the betrayal, more than the foreknowledge of punishment. I am weeping for myself, and my ident.i.ty, and my smarts over happiness and the thought that I would indeed choose happiness over smarts any day.

Too d.a.m.ned smart for my own good.

14.

"I just don't get it," Fede said.

Art tried to keep the exasperation out of his voice. "It's simple," he said.

"It's like a car radio with a fast-forward b.u.t.ton. You drive around on the Ma.s.sPike, and your car automatically peers with nearby vehicles. It grabs the current song on someone else's stereo and streamloads it. You listen to it. If you don't hit the fast-forward b.u.t.ton, the car starts grabbing everything it can from the peer, all the music on the stereo, and cues it up for continued play.

Once that pool is exhausted, it queries your peer for a list of its peers -- the cars that it's getting its music from -- and sees if any of them are in range, and downloads from them. So, it's like you're exploring a taste-network, doing an automated, guided search through traffic for the car whose owner has collected the music you most want to listen to."

"But I hate your music -- I don't want to listen to the stuff on your radio."

"Fine. That's what the fast-forward b.u.t.ton is for. It skips to another car and starts streamloading off of its drive." Fede started to say something, and Art held up his hand. "And if you exhaust all the available cars, the system recycles, but asks its peers for files collected from other sources. You might hate the songs I downloaded from Al, but the songs I got from Bennie are right up your alley.

"The war-drivers backstop the whole system. They've got the biggest collections on the freeway, and they're the ones most likely to build carefully thought-out playlists. They've got entire genres -- the whole history of the blues, say, from steel cylinders on -- on their drives. So we encourage them. When you go through a paypoint -- a toll booth -- we debit you for the stuff that you didn't fast-forward, the stuff you listened to and kept. Unless, that is, you've got more than, say, 10,000 songs...o...b..ard. Then you go free. It's counterintuitive, I know, but just look at the numbers."

"OK, OK. A radio with a fast-forward b.u.t.ton. I think I get it."

"But?"

"But who's going to want to use this? It's unpredictable. You've got no guarantee you'll get the songs you want to hear."

Art smiled. "Exactly!"

Fede gave him a go-on wave.

"Don't you see? That's the crack-cocaine part! It's the thrill of the chase!

n.o.body gets excited about beating traffic on a back road that's always empty.

But get on the M-5 after a hard day at work and drive it at 100 km/h for two hours without once touching your brakes and it's like G.o.d's reached down and parted the Red Seas for you. You get a sense of *accomplishment*! Most of the time, your car stereo's gonna play the same junk you've always heard, just background sound, but sometimes, ah! Sometimes you'll hit a sweet spot and get the best tunes you've ever heard. If you put a rat in a cage with a lever that doesn't give food pellets, he'll push it once or twice and give up. Set the lever to always deliver food pellets and he'll push it when he gets hungry. Set it to *sometimes* deliver food pellets and he'll bang on it until he pa.s.ses out!"

"Heh," Fede said. "Good rant."

"And?"

"And it's cool." Fede looked off into the middle distance a while. "Radio with a fast-forward b.u.t.ton. That's great, actually. Amazing. Stupendous!" He s.n.a.t.c.hed the axe-head from its box on Art's desk and did a little war dance around the room, whooping. Art followed the dance from his ergonomic chair, swiveling around as the interface tchotchkes that branched from its undersides chittered to keep his various bones and muscles firmly supported.

His office was more like a three-fifths-scale model of a proper office, in Lilliputian London style, so the war dance was less impressive than it might have been with more room to express itself. "You like it, then," Art said, once Fede had run out of steam.

"I do, I do, I do!"

"Great."

"Great."

"So."

"Yes?"

"So what do we do with it? Should I write up a formal proposal and send it to Jersey? How much detail? Sketches? Code fragments? Want me to mock up the interface and the network model?"

Fede c.o.c.ked an eyebrow at him. "What are you talking about?"