mazed the back ways wereideal. Some were fenced off, some were too narrow to pass, but most ofthem -- he'd tried to navigate them by bicycle once and found himselfutterly lost. He'd had to turn around slowly until he spotted the CNTower and use it to get his bearings.
He poked at the map, sipping the coffee, then ordering another from theGreek's son, who hadn't yet figured out that he was a regular and sosneered at his laptop with undisguised contempt. "Computers, huh?" hesaid. "Doesn't anyone just read a book anymore?"
"I used to own a bookstore," Alan said, then held up a finger and mousedover to his photo album and brought up the thumbnails of his oldbookstore. "See?"
The Greek's son, thirty with a paunch and sweat-rings under the pits ofhis white "The Greek's" T-shirt, sat down and looked at the photos. "Iremember that place, on Harbord Street, right?"
Alan smiled. "Yup. We lost the store when they blew up the abortionclinic next door," he said. "Insurance paid out, but I wasn't ready tostart over with another bookstore."
The Greek's son shook his head. "Another coffee, right?"
"Right," Alan said.
Alan went back to the map, realigning the laptop for optimal receptionagain.
"You got a wireless card in that?" a young guy at the next tableasked. He was dressed in Kensington Market crusty-punk chic, tatts andfacial piercings, filth-gray bunchoffuckinggoofs tee, cutoffs, andsweaty high boots draped with chains.
"Yeah," Alan said. He sighed and closed the map window. He wasn'tgetting anywhere, anyway.
"And you get service here? Where's your access point?" Crusty-punk orno, he sounded as nerdy as any of the Web-heads you'd find shopping forbargains on CD blanks on College Street.
"Three blocks that way," Alan said, pointing. "Hanging off my house. Thenetwork name is 'walesave.'"
"Shit, that's you?" the kid said. "Goddammit, you're clobbering ouraccess points!"
"What access point?"
"Access *points*. ParasiteNet." He indicated a peeling sticker on thelapel of his cut-down leather jacket showing a skull with crossed radiotowers underneath it. "I'm trying to get a mesh-net running though allof the Market, and you're hammering me. Jesus, I was ready to rat youout to the radio cops at the Canadian Radio and TelevisionCommission. Dude, you've got to turn down the freaking *gain* on thosethings."
"What's a mesh-net?"
The kid moved his beer over to Alan's table and sat down. "Okay, sopretend that your laptop is the access point. It radiates more or lessequally in all directions, depending on your antenna characteristics andleaving out the RF shadows that microwaves and stucco and cordlessphones generate." He arranged the coffee cup and the beer at equaldistances from the laptop, then moved them around to demonstrate thecoverage area. "Right, so what happens if I'm out of range, over *here*--" he put his beer back on his own table -- "and you want to reach me?Well, you could just turn up the gain on your access point, either byincreasing the power so that it radiates farther in all directions, orby focusing the transmissions so they travel farther in a line ofsight."
"Right," Alan said, sipping his coffee.
"Right. So both of those approaches suck. If you turn up the power, youradiate over everyone else's signal, so if I've got an access point*here*" -- he held his fist between their tables -- "no one can hear itbecause you're drowning it out. It's like you're shouting so loud thatno one else can carry on a conversation."
"So why don't you just use my network? I want to be able to get onlineanywhere in the Market, but that means that anyone can, right?"
The crusty-punk waved his hand dismissively. "Sure, whatever. But whathappens if your network gets shut down? Or if you decide to starteavesdropping on other people? Or if someone wants to get to the printerin her living room? It's no good."
"So, what, you want me to switch to focused antennae?"
"That's no good. If you used a focused signal, you're going to have tobe perfectly aligned if you're going to talk back to your base, sounless you want to provide a connection to one tiny pinpoint somewhere acouple kilometers away, it won't do you any good."
"There's no solution, then? I should just give up?"
The crusty-punk held up his hands. "Hell, no! There's just no*centralized* solution. You can't be Superman, blanketing the wholeworld with wireless using your almighty antennaprick, but so what?That's what mesh networks are for. Check it out." He arranged the beerand the laptop and the coffee cup so that they were strung out along astraight line. "Okay, you're the laptop and I'm the coffee cup. We bothhave a radio and we want to talk to each other.
"We *could* turn up the gain on our radios so that they can shout loudenough to be heard at this distance, but that would drown out this guyhere." He gestured at the now-empty beer. "We *could* use a focusedantenna, but if I move a little bit off the beam" -- he nudged thecoffee cup to one side -- "we're dead. But there's a third solution."
"We ask the beer to pass messages around?"
"Fucking right we do! That's the mesh part. Every station on the networkgets *two* radios -- one for talking in one direction, the other forrelaying in the other direction. The more stations you add, the lowerthe power on each radio -- and the more pathways you get to carry yourdata."
Alan shook his head.
"It's a fuckin' mind-blower, isn't it?"
"Sure," Alan said. "Sure. But does it work? Don't all those hops betweenpoint *a* and point *b* slow down the connection?"
"A little, sure. Not so's you'd notice. They don't have to go that far-- the farthest any of these signals has to travel is 151 Front Street."
"What's at 151 Front?"
"TorIx -- the main network interchange for the whole city! We stick anantenna out a window there and downlink it into the cage where UUNet andPSINet meet -- voila, instant 11-megabit city-wide freenet!"
"Where do you get the money for that?"
"Who said anything about money? How much do you think UUNet and PSIcharge each other to exchange traffic with one another? Who benefitswhen UUNet and PSI cross-connect? Is UUNet the beneficiary of PSI'straffic, or vice versa? Internet access only costs money at the *edge*-- and with a mesh-net, there is no edge anymore. It's penetration atthe center, just like the Devo song."
"I'm Adrian," Alan said.
"I'm Kurt," the crusty-punk said. "Buy me a beer, Adrian?"
"It'd be my pleasure," Alan said.
#
Kurt lived in the back of a papered-over storefront on Oxford. The fronttwo-thirds were a maze of peeling, stickered-over stamped-metal shelvingunits piled high with junk tech: ancient shrink-wrapped software,stacked up low-capacity hard drives, cables and tapes and removablemedia. Alan tried to imagine making sense of it all, flowing it into TheInventory, and felt something like vertigo.
In a small hollow carved out of the back, Kurt had arranged a cluttereddesk, a scuffed twin bed and a rack of milk crates filled with t-shirtsand underwear.
Alan picked his way delicately through the store and found himself aseat on an upturned milk crate. Kurt sat on the bed and grinnedexpectantly.
"So?" he said.
"So what?" Alan said.
"So what is *this*! Isn't it great?"
"Well, you sure have a lot of *stuff,* I'll give you that," Alan said.
"It's all dumpstered," Kurt said casually.
"Oh, you dive?" Alan said. "I used to dive." It was mostly true. Alanhad always been a picker, always on the lookout for bargoons, even ifthey were sticking out of someone's trash bin. Sometimes *especially* ifthey were sticking out of someone's trash bin -- seeing what normalpeople threw away gave him a rare glimpse into their lives.
Kurt walked over to the nearest shelving unit and grabbed a PCmini-tower with the lid off. "But did you ever do this?" He stuck themachine under Alan's nose and swung the gooseneck desk lamp over it. Itwas a white-box PC, generic commodity hardware, with a couple of networkcards.
"What's that?"
"It's a junk access point! I made it out of trash! The only thing Ibought were the netw
ork cards -- two wireless, one Ethernet. It'srunning a FreeBSD distribution off a CD, so the OS can never getcorrupted. It's got lots of sweet stuff in the distro, and all you needto do is plug it in, point the antennae in opposite directions, andyou're up. It does its own power management, it automagically peers withother access points if it can find 'em, and it does