Unwirer

Cory

New story text:

He grinned despite himself. Marcel was good at fonzing dishes into place with one well-placed whack, could crack him up when the winter slush was turning his mood to pitch. He was a good kid, basically. Hot head. Like Roscoe, once.

"C'mon c'mon c'mon," Marcel said, and he could picture the kid pogoing up and down in a phone-booth, heard his boots crunching on rock-salt.

He covered the receiver and turned to Sylvie, who had a bemused smirk that wasn't half cute on her. "You wanna hit the road, right?" She nodded. "You wanna write about how unwirers get made? I could bring along the kid I'm 'prenticing-up, you like." Through the cellphone, he heard Marcel shouting "Yes! Yes! YES!" and imagined the kid punching the air and pounding the booth's walls triumphantly.

"It's a good angle," she said. "*You* want him along, right?"

He held the receiver in the air so that they could both hear the hollers coming down the line. "I don't think I could live with him if I didn't take him," he said, "so yeah."

She nodded and bit her upper lip, just where the scar was, an oddly canine gesture that thrust her chin forward and made her look slightly belligerent. "Let's do it."

He clamped the phone back to his head. "Marcel! Calm down, twerp! Breathe. OK. You gonna be good if I take you along?"

"So good, man, so very very very very good, you won't believe --"

"You gonna be *safe*, I bring you along?"

"Safe as houses. Won't breathe without your permission. Man, you are the *best* --"

"Yeah, I am. Four PM. Bring the stuff."

Whole story to date:

The cops caught Roscoe as he was tightening the butterfly bolts on the dish antenna he'd pitoned into the rock-face opposite the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. They were State Troopers, not Fed radio cops, and they pulled their cruiser onto the soft shoulder of the freeway, braking a few feet short of the soles of his boots. It took Roscoe a moment to tighten the bolts down properly before he could let go of the dish and roll over to face the cops, but he knew from the crunch of their boots on the road-salt and the creak of their cold holsters that they were the law.

"Be right with you, officers," he hollered into the gale-force winds that whipped along the rockface. The antenna was made from a surplus pizza-dish satellite rig, a polished tomato soup can and a length of co-ax that descended to a pigtail with the right fitting for a wireless card. All perfectly legal, mostly.

He tightened the last of the bolts and slid back on his belly, off the insulated thermarest he'd laid between his chest and the frozen ground. The cops' heads were wreathed in the steam of their exhalations, and one of them was nervously flicking his -- no, *her* -- handcuffs around on her belt.

"Everything all right, sir?" the other one said, in a flat upstate New York accent. A townie. He stretched his gloved hand out and pulled Roscoe to his feet.

"Yeah, just fine," he said. "I like to watch winter birds on the river. Forgot my binox today, but I still got some good sightings."

"Winter birds, huh?" The cop was giving him a bemused look.

"Winter birds."

The cop leaned over the railing and took a long look down. "Huh. Better you shouldn't do it by the roadside, sir," he said. "Never know when someone's going to skid out and drive off onto the shoulder -- you could be crushed." He waved at his partner, who retreated into the steamy warmth of the cruiser. "All right, then," he said. "When does your node go up?"

Roscoe smiled and dared a wink. "I'll be finished aligning the dish in about an hour. I've got line of sight from here to a repeater on a support on the Rainbow Bridge, and from there down the Rainbow Street corridor. Some good tall buildings there, line of sight to most of downtown, at least when the trees are bare. Leaves and wireless don't mix."

"My place is 4th and Walnut. Think you'll get there?" Roscoe relaxed imperceptibly, certain now that this wasn't a bust.

"Hope so. Sooner rather than later."

"That'd be great. My kids are emailing me out of house and home." The cop looked uncomfortable and cleared his throat. "Still, you might want to finish this one then go home and stay there for a while. DA's office, they've got some kind of hot shot from the FCC in town preaching the gospel and, uh, getting heavy on bird watchers. That sort of thing."

Roscoe sucked in his lower lip. "I may do just that," he conceded. "And thank you for the warning."

The cop waved as he turned away. "My pleasure, sir."

#

Roscoe drove home slowly, and not just because of the snow and compacted slush on the roads. *A hot shot from the FCC* sounded like the inquisition come to town. Roscoe's lifelong mistrust of radio cops had metastaized into surging hatred three years ago, when they busted him behind a Federal telecoms rap.

He'd lost his job and spent the best part of six months inside, though he'd originally been looking at a from a five year contributory infringement stretch -- compounded to twenty by the crypto running on the access-point under the "use a cypher, go to jail" statute -- to second degree tarriff evasion. His public defender had been worse than useless, but the ACLU had filed an amicus on his behalf, which led the judge to knock the beef down to criminal trespass and unlawful emission, six months and two years' probation, two years in which he wasn't allowed to program a goddamn microwave oven, let alone admin the networks that had been his trade. Prison hadn't been as bad for him as it could have been -- unwirers got respect -- but while he was inside Janice filed for divorce, and by the time he got out he'd lost everything he'd spent the last decade building -- his marriage, his house, his savings, his career. Everything except for the unwiring.

It was this experience that had turned him from a freewheeling geek into what FCC Chairman Valenti called "one of the copyright crooks whose illegal pirate networks provide safe havens to terrorists across the homeland." And so it was with a shudder and a glance over his shoulder that he climbed the front steps and put his key in the lock of the house he and Marcel rented.

Marcel looked up from his laptop as Roscoe stamped through the living-room.

"Slushy boots! For chrissakes, Roscoe, I just cleaned."

Roscoe turned to look at the salty brown slush he'd tracked over the painted floor and shook his head.

"Sorry," he said, lamely, and sat down on the floor to take his heavy steel-shank Kodiaks off. He carried them back to the doormat and then grabbed a roll of paper towels from the kitchen and started wiping up the mess. The landlord used cheap enamel paint on the floor and the road-salt could eat through to the scuffed wood in half an hour.

"And paper towels, God, it's like you've got a personal vendetta against the forests. There's a rag-bag under the sink, as you'd know if you ever did any cleaning around this place."

"Ease the fuck off, kid, you sound like my goddamned ex-wife," Roscoe said, giving the floor a vicious swipe. "Just ease back and let me do my thing, all right? It didn't go so good."

Marcel set his machine down reverently on the small hearthrug beside his Goodwill recliner. "What happened?"

Roscoe related his run-in with the law quickly. Marcel shook his head slowly.

"I bet it's bullshit. Ever since Tijuana, everyone's seeing spooks." The ISPs on the Tijuana side of the San Ysidro border-crossing had been making good coin off of unwirer-symptathizers who'd pointed their antennae across the chain-link fence. La Migra tried tightening the fence-gauge up to act as a Faraday cage, but they just went over it with point-to-point links that were resistent to the noise from the 2.4GHz light-standards that the INS erected at its toll-booths. Finally, the radio cops got tired of ferretting out the high-gain antennae on the San Diego side and they'd Ruby-Ridged the whole operation, killing ten "terrorists" in a simultaneous strike with Mexican narcs who'd raided the ISPs under the rubric of shutting down narcotraficante activity. TELMEX had screamed blue murder when their fiber had been cut by the simple expedient of driving a backhoe through the main conduit, and had pulled lineage contracts with rogue ISPs all along the Rio Grande.

Roscoe shook his head. "Bullshit or not, you going to take any chances?" He straightened up slowly. "Believe me, there's one place you don't want to go."

"Okay, okay, take it easy man." Marcel waved his hands at Roscoe placatingly. "I hear what you're saying."

"I hope you do." Roscoe dumped the wad of towels in the kitchen trash and stomped back into the living room, then dropped himself on the sofa. "Listen, when I was your age I thought it couldn't happen to me, neither. Now look at me." He started thumbing his way through the stack of old magazines on the coffee table.

"I'm looking at you." Marcel grinned. "Listen, there was a call while you were out."

"A call?" Roscoe paused with his hand on a collector's copy of *2600: The Hacker Quarterly*.

"Some woman, said she wanted to talk to you. I took her number."

"Uh-huh." Roscoe put the magazine back down. *Heads it's Janice, tails it's her lawyer*, he thought. It was shaping up to be that kind of day; a tire-slashing and an hour of alimonial recriminations would complete it neatly. Marcel pointed at the yellow pad next to the elderly dial phone. "Ah, shit. I suppose I should find out what it's about."

The number, when he looked at it, wasn't familar. That didn't mean much -- Janice was capable of moving and her pathologically aggro lawyer seemed to carry a new cellphone every time he saw her -- but it was hopeful. Roscoe dialed. "Hello? Roscoe. Who am I talking to?"

A stranger's voice: "Hi there! I was talking to your roommate about an hour ago? I'm Sylvie Smith. I was given your name by a guy called Buzz who told me you put him on the backbone."

Roscoe tensed. Odds were that this Sylvie Smith was just another innocent kiddee looking to leech a first-mile feed, but after this morning's run-in with the law he was taking nothing for granted.

"Are you a law enforcement officer federal employee police officer lawyer FCC or FBI agent?" he asked, running the words together, knowing that if she was any of the above she'd probably lie -- but it might help sway a jury towards letting him off if this was a sting.

"No." She sounded almost amused. "I'm a journalist."

"Then you should be familiar with CALEA," he said, bridling at the condecension in her voice. CALEA was the wiretap bill, required switch-vendors to put snoopware into every hop in the phone network. It was bad enough in and of itself, but it made the noncompliant routing code that was built into the BeOS. access-points he had hidden in a bus-locker doubly illegal and hence even harder to lay hands on.

"Paranoid, much?" she said.

"I have nothing to be paranoid about," he said, spelling it out like he was talking to a child. "I am a law-abiding citizen, complying with the terms of my parole. If you *are* a journalist, I'd be happy to chat. In person."

"I'm staying at the Days Inn on Main Street," she said. "It's a dump, but it's got a *view of the Falls*," she said in a hokey secret-agent voice, making it plain that she meant, "It's line of sight to a repeater for a Canadian wireless router."

"I can be there in twenty," he said.

"Room 208," she said. "Knock twice, then once, then three times." Then she giggled. "Or just send me an SMS."

"See you then," he said.

Marcel looked up from his machine, an IBM box manufactured for the US market. It was the size of a family Bible, and styled for the corporate market. Like all unwirers, he lusted furiously after the brushed-aluminium slivers that Be was cranking out in France, but they were *way* too conspicuous here.

Roscoe pointed at the wireless card protruding from the slot on the side nearest him. "You're violating security," he said. "I could get sent up again just for being in the same room as that." He was past being angry, though. In the joint, he'd met real crooks who could maintain real project secrecy. The cowboy kids he worked with on the outside thought that secrecy meant talking out of the side of your mouth in conspiratorial whispers while winking tourretically.

Marcel blushed. "It was a mistake, OK?" He popped the card. "I'll stash it."

#

The Days Inn was, indeed, a dump and doubt nagged at Roscoe as he reached for the front door. If she was a Fed there might be more ways she could nail him than just by arresting him in the same room as an illegal wireless card. So when Roscoe turned around and drove a diner along the block from the motel he pulled over, then went inside to look for a wired phone.

"Room 208, please ... hi there. If you'd care to come outside, there's a diner about fifty yards down the road. Just turn left out of the lobby. I'm already there." He hung up before she could ask any awkward questions, then headed for a booth by the window. Almost as an afterthought, he pulled the copy of *2600* out of his pocket. The hacker magazine (shut down by a court injunction the year before) was, he'd found, a really good recognition signal -- plus, having it didn't violate the letter of his parole.

Roscoe was halfway down his first mug of coffee when someone leaned over him. "Hi," she said.

"You must be Sylvie." He registered a confused impression of bleached blonde hair, brown eyes, freckles. *Must be straight out of J-school*. "Have a seat. Coffee?"

"Yes please." She put something like a keyring down then waved a hand, trying to catch the waitress's eye. Roscoe looked at the keyring. Very black, very small, very Nokia. Rumour said they were giving them away in cereal packets in France.

"Suppose you tell me why you wanted to meet up," Roscoe said quietly. "Up front. I can tell you right now that I'm out on parole, and I've got no intention of doing anything that puts me back inside."

The waitress ambled over, pad in hand. Sylvie ordered a coffee. "What were you charged with?" she said. "If you don't mind me asking."

Roscoe snorted. "I was *accused* of infringement with a side order of black crypto, but pled down to unlawful emissions. Strictly no-collar crime." He took another mouthful of coffee. "So what is it you're doing up here?"

"I'm working on a story about some aspects of unwiring that don't usually make the national press," she said, as the waitress came over, empty mug in one hand and jug in the other. Roscoe held his up for a refill.

"Credentials?"

"I could give you a phone number, but would you trust it?"

"Point." Roscoe leaned back against the elderly vinyl seat. *Young, but cynical.*

"Well," she said, "I can do better." She pulled out a notepad and began scribbling. "*This* is my editor's name and address. *You* can look up his number. If you place a call and ask for him you'll get put through -- you're on the list of interview subjects I left him. Next, here's my -- no, an -- email address." Roscoe blinked -- it was a handle on a famous Finnish anonymous remixer. "Get a friend to ping it and ask me something." It was worth five to twenty for black crypto -- anonymity was the FCC's scariest bogeyman in the net-pantheon. "Finally, here's my press pass."

"Okay, I'll check these out." He met her eyes. "Now, why don't you tell me why the Wall Street Journal is interested in a burned out ex-con and ex-unwirer, and we can take it from there?"

She closed her eyes for a moment. Then she dangled her keyring again, just a flash of matte black plastic. "These are everywhere in Europe these days, along with these," she opened her purse and he caught a glimpse of a sliver of curved metal, like a boomerang, in the shape of the Motorola batwing logo-mark. "They're meshing wireless repeaters. Once you've got a critical mass, you can relay data from anywhere to anywhere. Teenagers are whacking them up on the sides of buildings, tangling them in tree-branches, sticking them to their windows. The telcos there are screaming blue murder, of course. Business is down 40 percent in Finland, 60 in France. They're using the net for telephone calls, instant messaging, file-sharing -- the wireline infrastructure is looking more and more obsolete every day. Even the ISPs are getting nervous."

Roscoe tried to hide his grin. To be an unwirer in the streets of Paris, operating with impunity, putting the telcos, the Hollywood studios and the ISPs on notice that there was no longer any such thing as a "consumer" -- that yesterday's couch potatoes are today's *participants*!

"We've got ten years' worth of editorials in our morgue about the destruction of the European entertainment and telco market and the wisdom of our National Information Infrastructure here in the US, but it's starting to ring hollow. The European governments are *ignoring* the telcos! The device and services market being built on top of the freenets is accounting for nearly half the GDP in France. To hear *my* paper describe it, though, you'd think they were starving in the streets: it's like the received wisdom about Canadian socialized healthcare. Everyone *knows* it doesn't work -- except for the Canadians, who think we're goddamned *barbarians* for not adopting it.

"I just got back from a month in the field in the EU. I've got interviews in the can with CEOs, with street-thugs, with grandmothers and with regulators, all saying the same thing: unmetered communications are the secret engine of the economy and of liberty. The highest-quality 'content' isn't 100-million-dollar movies, it's conversations with other people. Crypto is a tool of 'privacy'" -- she pronounced it in the British way, prihv-icy, making the word seem even more alien to his ears -- "not piracy.

"The unwirers are heroes in Europe. You hear them talk, it's like listening to a course in *US* constitutional freedoms. They talk like the letters-column in that dead old magazine." She tapped a finger on the cover of his *2600*. "But here, you people are crooks, cable-thieves, pirates, abetters of terrorists. I want to change that."

#

That evening, Marcel picked a fight with Roscoe over dinner. It started low key, as Roscoe sliced up the pizza. "What are you planning this week?"

Roscoe shifted two slices onto his plate before he answered. "More dishes. Got a couple of folks to splice in downtown if I want to hook up East Aurora -- there're some black spots there, but I figure with some QoS-based routing and a few more repeaters we can clear them up. Why?"

Marcel toyed with a strand of cooling cheese. "It's, like, boring. When are you going to run a new fat pipe in?"

"When the current one's full." Roscoe rolled a slice into a tube and bit into an end, deftly turning the roll to keep the cheese and sauce on the other end from oozing over his hand. "You know damn well the feds would like nothing better than to drive a ditch-witch through a fiber drop from the border. 'Sides, got the journalist to think about."

"I could take over part of the fiber-pull," Marcel said.

"I don't think so." Roscoe put his plate down.

"But I could --" Marcel looked at him. "What's wrong?"

"Security," Roscoe grunted. "Goddamnit, you can't just waltz up to some guy who's looking at 20 to life and say 'Hi, Roscoe sent me, howzabout you and me run some dark fiber over the border, huh?' Some of the guys in this game are, huh, you wouldn't want to meet them on a dark night. Are you with me? And others are just plain paranoid. They wouldn't want to meet *you*. Fastest way to convince 'em the DA's office is trying to shut them down."

"You could introduce me," Marcel said after a brief pause.

Roscoe laughed, a short bark. "In your dreams, son."

Marcel dropped his fork, clattering. "You're going to take your pet blonde on a repeater splice and show her everything and you're afraid to let me help you run a new fat pipe in? What's the matter, I don't smell good enough?"

"Listen." Roscoe stood up, and Marcel tensed -- but rather than move towards him, Roscoe turned to the pizza box. "Get the *Wall Street Journal* on our side and we have some credibility. A crack in the wall. Legitimacy. Do you know what that means, kid? You can't buy it. But run another fat pipe into town and we have a idle capacity, upstream dealers who want to know what the hell we're pissing around with, another fiber or laser link to lose to cop-induced backhoe fade, and about fifty percent higher probability of the whole network getting kicked over because the mundanes will rat us out to the FCC over their TV reception. Do you want that?" He picked another cooling pizza slice out of the box. "Do you really want that?"

"What I want isn't important, is it, Ross? Not as important as you getting a chance to fuck that reporter, right?"

"Up yours." Roscoe returned to his seat, shoulders set defensively. "Fuck you very much." They finished the meal in silence, then Roscoe headed out to his evening class in conversational French. Marcel, he figured, was just jealous because he wasn't getting to do any of the secret agent stuff. Being an unwirer was a lot less romantic than it sounded, and the first rule of unwiring was *nobody talks about unwiring*. Maybe Marcel would get there one day, assuming his big mouth didn't get everyone around him arrested first.

#

Sylvie's hotel-room had a cigarette-burns-and-must squalor that reminded Roscoe of jail. "Bonjour, M'sieu," she said as she admitted him.

"Bon soir, madame," he said. "Commentava?"

"Oy," she said. "My granmother woulda said, 'you've got a no-accent on you like a Litvak.' Lookee here, the treasures of the Left Bank." She handed him the Motorola batarang he'd glimpsed earlier. The underside had a waxed-paper peel-off strip and when he lifted a corner, his thumb stuck so hard to the tackiness beneath that he lost the top layer of skin when he pulled it loose. He turned it over in his hands.

"How's it powered?"

"Dirt-cheap photovoltaics charging a polymer cell -- they're printed in layers, the entire case is a slab of battery plus solar cell. It doesn't draw too many amps, only sucks juice when it's transmitting. Put one in a subway car and you've got an instant ad-hoc network that everyone in the car can use. Put one in the next car and they'll mesh. Put one on the platform and you'll get connectivity with the train when it pulls in. Sure it won't run for more than a few hours in total darkness -- but how often do folks network in the blackout?"

"Shitfire," he said, stroking the matte finish in a way that bordered on the erotic.

She grinned. She was slightly snaggletoothed, and he noticed a scar on her upper lip from a cleft-palette operation that must have been covered up with concealer earlier. "Total cost of goods is about three Euros, and Moto's margin is five hundred percent. But some Taiwanese knock-offs have already appeared that slice that in half. Moto'll have to invent something new next year if it wants to keep that profit."

"They will," Roscoe said, still stroking the batarang. He transferred it to his armpit and unslung his luggable laptop. "Innovation is still legal there." The laptop sank into the orange bedspread and the soft mattress beneath it.

"You could do some real damage with one of these, I bet," she said.

"With a thousand of them, maybe," he said. "If they were a little less conspicuous."

Her chest began to buzz. She slipped a wee phone from her breast-pocket and answered it. "Yes?" She handed the phone to Roscoe. "It's for you." She made a curious face at him.

He clamped it to his ear. "Who is this?"

"Eet eez eye, zee masked avenger, doer of naughty deeds and wooer of reporters' hearts."

"Marcel?"

"Yes, boss."

"You shouldn't be calling me on this number." He remembered the yellow pad, sitting on his bedside table. Marcel did all the dusting.

"Sorry, boss," he said. He giggled.

"Have you been drinking?" Marcel and he had bonded over many, many beers since they'd met in a bar in Utica, but Roscoe didn't drink these days. Drinking made you sloppy.

"No, no," he said. "Just in a good mood is all. I'm sorry we fought, darlin', can we kiss and make up?"

"What do you want, Marcel?"

"I want to be in the story, dude. Hook me up! I want to be famous!"

He grinned despite himself. Marcel was good at fonzing dishes into place with one well-placed whack, could crack him up when the winter slush was turning his mood to pitch. He was a good kid, basically. Hot head. Like Roscoe, once.

"C'mon c'mon c'mon," Marcel said, and he could picture the kid pogoing up and down in a phone-booth, heard his boots crunching on rock-salt.

He covered the receiver and turned to Sylvie, who had a bemused smirk that wasn't half cute on her. "You wanna hit the road, right?" She nodded. "You wanna write about how unwirers get made? I could bring along the kid I'm 'prenticing-up, you like." Through the cellphone, he heard Marcel shouting "Yes! Yes! YES!" and imagined the kid punching the air and pounding the booth's walls triumphantly.

"It's a good angle," she said. "*You* want him along, right?"

He held the receiver in the air so that they could both hear the hollers coming down the line. "I don't think I could live with him if I didn't take him," he said, "so yeah."

She nodded and bit her upper lip, just where the scar was, an oddly canine gesture that thrust her chin forward and made her look slightly belligerent. "Let's do it."

He clamped the phone back to his head. "Marcel! Calm down, twerp! Breathe. OK. You gonna be good if I take you along?"

"So good, man, so very very very very good, you won't believe --"

"You gonna be *safe*, I bring you along?"

"Safe as houses. Won't breathe without your permission. Man, you are the *best* --"

"Yeah, I am. Four PM. Bring the stuff."

Word count to date: 4332