Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town Part 24

"I thought I'd never get it done," Kurt said. "I was so sleepy, I felt like I was half-baked. Couldn't concentrate."

*You were up all night because you left it to the last minute*, Alan thought. But Kurt knew that, was waiting to be rea.s.sured about it. "I don't know how you get as much done as you do. Must be really hard."

"It's not so bad," Kurt said, dragging on his cigarette and not quite disguising his grin. "It gets easier every time."

"Yeah, we're going to get this down to a science someday," Alan said. "Something we can teach anyone to do."

"That would be so cool," Kurt said, and put his boots up on the dash. "G.o.d, you could pick all the parts you needed out of the trash, throw a little methodology at them, and out would pop this thing that destroyed the phone company."

"This is going to be a fun meeting," Alan said.

"s.h.i.+t, yeah. They're going to be terrified of us."

"Someday. Maybe it starts today."

The Bell boardroom looked more like a retail operation than a back office, decked out in brand-consistent livery, from the fabric-dyed rag carpets to the avant-garde lighting fixtures. They were given espressos by the young secretary-barista whose skirt-and-top number was some kind of reinterpreted ravewear outfit toned down for a corporate workplace.

"So this is the new Bell," Kurt said, once she had gone. "Our tax dollars at work."

"This is good work," Alan said, gesturing at the blown-up artwork of pan-ethnic models who were extraordinary- but not beautiful-looking on the walls. The Bell redesign had come at the same time as the telco was struggling back from the brink of bankruptcy, and the marketing firm they'd hired to do the work had made its name on the strength of the campaign. "Makes you feel like using a phone is a really futuristic, cutting-edge activity," he said.

His contact at the semiprivatized corporation was a young kid who shopped at one of his proteges' designer furniture store. He was a young turk who'd made a name for himself quickly in the company through a couple of ISP acquisitions at fire-sale prices after the dot-bomb, which he'd executed flawlessly, integrating the companies into Bell's network with hardly a hiccup. He'd been very polite and guardedly enthusiastic when Alan called him, and had invited him down to meet some of his colleagues.

Though Alan had never met him, he recognized him the minute he walked in as the person who had to go with the confident voice he'd heard on the phone.

"Lyman," he said, standing up and holding out his hand. The guy was slightly Asian-looking, tall, with a sharp suit that managed to look casual and expensive at the same time.

He shook Alan's hand and said, "Thanks for coming down." Alan introduced him to Kurt, and then Lyman introduced them both to his colleagues, a gender-parity posse of young, smart-looking people, along with one graybeard (literally -- he had a Unix beard of great rattiness and gravitas) who had no fewer than seven devices on his belt, including a line tester and a GPS.

Once they were seated, Alan snuck a look at Kurt, who had narrowed his eyes and cast his gaze down onto the business cards he'd been handed. Alan hadn't been expecting this -- he'd figured on finding himself facing down a group of career bureaucrats -- and Kurt was clearly thrown for a loop, too.

"Well, Alan, Kurt, it's nice to meet you," Lyman said. "I hear you're working on some exciting stuff."

"We are," Alan said. "We're building a city-wide mesh wireless network using unlicensed spectrum that will provide high-speed, Internet connectivity absolutely gratis."

"That's ambitious," Lyman said, without the skepticism that Alan had a.s.sumed would greet his statement. "How's it coming?"

"Well, we've got a bunch of Kensington Market covered," Alan said. "Kurt's been improving the hardware design and we've come up with something cheap and reproducible." He opened his tub and handed out the access points, housed in gray high-impact plastic junction boxes.

Lyman accepted one solemnly and pa.s.sed it on to his graybeard, then pa.s.sed the next to an East Indian woman in horn-rim gla.s.ses whose bitten-down fingernails immediately popped the latch and began lightly stroking the hardware inside, tracing the connections. The third landed in front of Lyman himself.

"So, what do they do?"

Alan nodded at Kurt. Kurt put his hands on the table and took a breath. "They've got three network interfaces; we can do any combination of wired and wireless cards. The OS is loaded on a flash-card; it auto-detects any wireless cards and auto-configures them to seek out other access points. When it finds a peer, they negotiate a client-server relations.h.i.+p based on current load, and the client then a.s.sociates with the server. There's a key exchange that we use to make sure that rogue APs don't sneak into the mesh, and a self-healing routine we use to switch routes if the connection drops or we start to see too much packet loss."

The graybeard looked up. "It izz a radio vor talking to Gott!" he said. Lyman's posse laughed, and after a second, so did Kurt.

Alan must have looked puzzled, for Kurt elbowed him in the ribs and said, "It's from Indiana Jones," he said.

"Ha," Alan said. That movie had come out long before he'd come to the city -- he hadn't seen a movie until he was almost 20. As was often the case, the reference to a film made him feel like a Martian.

The graybeard pa.s.sed his unit on to the others at the table.

"Does it work?" he said.

"Yeah," Kurt said.

"Well, that's pretty cool," he said.

Kurt blushed. "I didn't write the firmware," he said. "Just stuck it together from parts of other peoples' projects."

"So, what's the plan?" Lyman said. "How many of these are you going to need?"

"Hundreds, eventually," Alan said. "But for starters, we'll be happy if we can get enough to shoot down to 151 Front."

"You're going to try to peer with someone there?" The East Indian woman had plugged the AP into a riser under the boardroom table and was examining its blinkenlights.

"Yeah," Alan said. "That's the general idea." He was getting a little uncomfortable -- these people weren't nearly hostile enough to their ideas.

"Well, that's very ambitious," Lyman said. His posse all nodded as though he'd paid them a compliment, though Alan wasn't sure. Ambitious could certainly be code for "ridiculous."

"How about a demo?" the East Indian woman said.

"Course," Kurt said. He dug out his laptop, a battered thing held together with band stickers and gaffer tape, and plugged in a wireless card. The others started to pa.s.s him back his access points but he shook his head. "Just plug 'em in," he said. "Here or in another room nearby -- that'll be cooler."

A couple of the younger people at the table picked up two of the APs and headed for the hallway. "Put one on my desk," Lyman told them, "and the other at reception."

Alan felt a sudden p.r.i.c.kle at the back of his neck, though he didn't know why -- just a random premonition that they were on the brink of something very bad happening. This wasn't the kind of vision that Brad would experience, that far away look followed by a snap-to into the now, eyes filled with cert.i.tude about the dreadful future. More like a goose walking over his grave, a tickle of badness.

The East Indian woman pa.s.sed Kurt a VGA cable that snaked into the table's guts and down into the riser on the floor. She hit a b.u.t.ton on a remote and an LCD projector mounted in the ceiling began to hum, projecting a rectangle of white light on one wall. Kurt wiggled it into the backside of his computer and spun down the thumbscrews, hit a b.u.t.ton, and then his desktop was up on the wall, ten feet high. His wallpaper was a picture of a group of black-clad, kerchiefed protesters charging a police line of batons and gas-grenades. A closer look revealed that the protester running in the lead was probably Kurt.

He tapped at his touchpad and a window came up, showing relative strength signals for two of the access points. A moment later, the third came online.

"I've been working with this network visualizer app," Kurt said. "It tries to draw logical maps of the network topology, with false coloring denoting packet loss between hops -- that's a pretty good proxy for distance between two APs."

"More like the fade," the graybeard said.

"Fade is a function of distance," Kurt said. Alan heard the dismissal in his voice and knew they were getting into a d.i.c.k-swinging match.

"Fade is a function of geography and topology," the graybeard said quietly.

Kurt waved his hand. "Whatever -- sure. Geography. Topology. Distance. It's a floor wax and a dessert topping."

"I'm not being pedantic," the graybeard said.

"You're not just being pedantic," Lyman said gently, watching the screen on which four animated jaggy boxes were jumbling and dancing as they reported on the throughput between the routers and the laptop.