a hurry.You'll have to rob me later, all right?"
Lester chuckled wryly. "Still a clever bastard. You look like you're having somehard times, my old son. Maybe that you're not even worth robbing, eh?"
"Right. I'm skint. Sorry. Nice running into you, now I must be going." He triedto pull away, but Lester's fingers dug into his biceps, emphatically, painfully.
"Hear you ran into Tom, led him a merry chase. You know, I spent a whole week inthe nick on account of you."
Art jerked his arm again, without effect. "You tried to rob me, Les. You knewthe job was dangerous when you took it, all right? Now let me go -- I've got atrain to catch."
"Holidays? How sweet. Thought you were broke, though?"
A motorized scooter pulled up in the kerb lane beside them. It was piloted by asmart young policewoman with a silly foam helmet and outsized pads on her kneesand elbows. She looked like the kid with the safety-obsessed mom who inflictscriminally dorky fashions on her daughter, making her the neighborhoodlaughingstock.
"Everything all right, gentlemen?"
Lester's eyes closed, and he sighed a put-upon sigh that was halfway to a groan.
"Oh, yes, officer," Art said. "Peter and I were just making some plans to seeour auntie for supper tonight."
Lester opened his eyes, then the corners of his mouth incremented upwards."Yeah," he said. "'Sright. Cousin Alphonse is here all the way from Canada andAuntie's mad to cook him a proper English meal."
The policewoman sized them up, then shook her head. "Sir, begging your pardon,but I must tell you that we have clubs in London where a gentleman such asyourself can find a young companion, legally. We thoroughly discourage makingsuch arrangements on the High Street. Just a word to the wise, all right?"
Art blushed to his eartips. "Thank you, Officer," he said with a weak smile."I'll keep that in mind."
The constable gave Lester a hard look, then revved her scooter and pulled intotraffic, her arm slicing the air in a sharp turn signal.
"Well," Lester said, once she was on the roundabout, "*Alphonse*, seems likeyou've got reason to avoid the law, too."
"Can't we just call it even? I did you a favor with the law, you leave me be?"
"Oh, I don't know. P'raps I should put in a call to our friend PC McGivens. Healready thinks you're a dreadful tosser -- if you've reason to avoid the law,McGivens'd be bad news indeed. And the police pay very well for the rightinformation. I'm a little financially embarrassed, me, just at this moment."
"All right," Art said. "Fine. How about this: I will pay you 800 Euros, which Iwill withdraw from an InstaBank once I've got my ticket for the Chunnel train toCalais in hand and am ready to get onto the platform. I've got all of fifteenquid in my pocket right now. Take my wallet and you'll have cabfare home.Accompany me to the train and you'll get a month's rent, which is more than thepolice'll give you."
"Oh, you're a villain, you are. What is it that the police will want to talk toyou about, then? I wouldn't want to be aiding and abetting a real criminal --could mean trouble."
"I beat the piss out of my coworker, Lester. Now, can we go? There's a plane inParis I'm hoping to catch."
31.
I have a brand-new translucent Sony Veddic, a series 12. I bought it on credit-- not mine, mine's sunk; six months of living on plastic and kitingbalance-payments with new cards while getting the patents filed on the eight newgizmos that constitute HumanCare's sole asset has blackened my good name withthe credit bureaus.
I bought it with the company credit card. The *company credit card*. Our localBaby Amex rep dropped it off himself after Doc Szandor faxed over the signedcontract from the Bureau of Health. Half a million bucks for a proof-of-conceptinstall at the very same Route 128 nuthatch where I'd been "treated." If thatworks, we'll be rolling out a dozen more installs over the next year: smartdoors, public drug-prescription stats, locator bracelets that let "clients" --I've been learning the nuthouse jargon, and have forcibly removed "patient" frommy vocabulary -- discover other clients with similar treatment regimens on theward, bells and whistles galore.
I am cruising the MassPike with HumanCare's first-ever employee, who is, inturn, holding onto HumanCare's first-ever paycheck. Caitlin's husband has beenvery patient over the past six months as she worked days fixing the ailingmachinery at the sanitarium and nights prototyping my designs. He's beenlikewise patient with my presence on his sagging living-room sofa, where I'vehad my nightly ten-hour repose faithfully since my release. Caitlin and I haveactually seen precious little of each other considering that I've been livingunder her roof. (Doc Szandor's Cambridge apartment is hardly bigger than my roomat the hospital, and between his snoring and the hard floor, I didn't even lasta whole night there.) We've communicated mostly by notes commed to her fridgeand prototypes left atop my suitcase of day-clothes and sharp-edged toiletriesat the foot of my makeshift bed when she staggered in from her workbench while Isnored away the nights. Come to think of it, I haven't really seen much of DocSzandor, either -- he's been holed up in his rooms, chatting away on the ESTchannels.
I am well rested. I am happy. My back is loose and my Chi is flowing. I amdriving my few belongings to a lovely two-bedroom -- one to sleep in, one towork in -- flat overlooking Harvard Square, where the pretty co-eds and theirshaggy boyfriends tease one another in the technical argot of a dozen abstrusedisciplines. I'm looking forward to picking up a basic physics, law, medicineand business vocabulary just by sitting in my window with my comm, tapping awayat new designs.
We drive up to a toll plaza and I crank the yielding, human-centric steeringwheel toward the EZPass lane. The dealer installed the transponder and gave me abrochure explaining the Sony Family's approach to maximum driving convenience.But as I approach the toll gate, it stays steadfastly down.
The Veddic's HUD flashes an instruction to pull over to the booth. A boredattendant leans out of the toll booth and squirts his comm at me, and the HUDcomes to life with an animated commercial for the new, improved TunePay service,now under direct MassPike management.
The TunePay scandal's been hot news for weeks now. Bribery, corruption, patentdisputes -- I'd been gratified to discover that my name had been removed fromthe patent applications, sparing me the nightly hounding Fede and Linda and herfucking ex had been subjected to on my comm as the legal net tightened aroundthem.
I end up laughing so hard that Caitlin gets out of the car and walks around tomy side, opens the door, and pulls me bodily to the passenger side. She serenelyignores the blaring of the horns from the aggravated, psychotic Boston driversstacked up behind us, walks back to the driver's side and takes the wheel.
"Thanks," I tell her, and lay a hand on her pudgy, freckled arm.
"You belong in a loony bin, you know that?" she says, punching me in the thighharder than is strictly necessary.
"Oh, I know," I say, and dial up some music on the car stereo.
--
Acknowledgements
This novel was workshopped by the Cecil Street Irregulars, the Novelettes andthe Gibraltar Point gang, and received excellent feedback from the first readerson the est-preview list (especially Pat York). Likewise, I'm indebted to all thepeople who read and commented on this book along the way.
Thanks go to my editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, for reading this so quickly --minutes after I finished it! Likewise to my agent, Don Maass, thank you.
Thanks to Irene Gallo and Shelley Eshkar for knocking *two* out of the park withtheir cover-designs for my books.
Thanks to my co-editors at Boing Boing and all the collaborators I've writtenwith, who've made me a better writer.
Thanks, I suppose, to the villains in my life, who inspired me to write thisbook rather than do something ugly that I'd regret.
Thanks to Paul Boutin for commissioning the *Wired* article of the same name.
Thanks to the readers and bloggers and Tribespeople who cared enough to checkout my first book and liked it enough to check out this one.
Thanks to Creative Common
s for the licenses that give me the freedom to say"Some Rights Reserved."
--
Bio
Cory Doctorow (www.craphound.com) is the author of Down and Out in the MagicKingdom, A Place So Foreign and Eight More, and The Complete Idiot's Guide toPublishing Science Fiction (with Karl Schroeder). He was raised in Toronto andlives in San Francisco, where he works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation(www.eff.org), a civil liberties group. He's a journalist, editorialist andblogger. Boing Boing (boingboing.net), the weblog he co-edits, is the mostlinked-to blog on the Net, according to Technorati. He won the John W. CampbellAward for Best New Writer
Eastern Standard Tribe Page 32
