repeater to extend the range of the network. Thenetwork already reaches to here, but your box will help it gofarther. You'll be the first merchant in the Market to have one. I cameto you first because you've been here the longest. The others look up toyou. They'll see it and say, 'Larry has one, it must be all right.'"
The Greek downed his coffee and smoothed his mustache. "You are abullshit artist, huh? All right, you put your box in. If my electricitybills are too high, though, I take it down."
"That's a deal," Andy said. "How about I do it this morning, before youget busy? Won't take more than a couple minutes."
The Greek's was midway between his place and Kurt's, and Kurt hardlystirred when he let himself in to get an access point from one of thechipped shelving units before going back to his place to get his ladderand Makita drill. It took him most of the morning to get it securelyfastened over the sign, screws sunk deep enough into the old, spongywood to survive the build up of ice and snow that would come with thewinter. Then he had to wire it into the sign, which took longer than hethought it would, too, but then it was done, and the idiot lightsstarted blinking on the box Kurt had assembled.
"And what, exactly, are you doing up there, Al?" Kurt said, when hefinally stumbled out of bed and down the road for his afternoonbreakfast coffee.
"Larry's letting us put up an access point," he said, wiping the pigeonshit off a wire preparatory to taping it down. He descended the ladderand wiped his hands off on his painter's pants. "That'll be ten bucks,please."
Kurt dug out a handful of coins and picked out enough loonies andtoonies to make ten dollars, and handed it over. "You talked the Greekinto it?" he hissed. "How?"
"I kissed his ass without insulting his intelligence."
"Neat trick," Kurt said, and they had a little partner-to-partnerhigh-five. "I'd better login to that thing and get it onto the network,huh?"
"Yeah," Anders said. "I'm gonna order some lunch, lemme get yousomething."
#
What they had done, was they had hacked the shit out of those boxes thatKurt had built in his junkyard of a storefront of an apartment.
"These work?" Alan said. He had three of them in a big catering tub fromhis basement that he'd sluiced clean. The base stations no longer lookedlike they'd been built out of garbage. They'd switched to low-powerMini-ATX motherboards that let them shrink the hardware down to smallenough to fit in a 50-dollar all-weather junction box from CanadianTire.
Adam vaguely recognized the day's street-kids as regulars who'd beenhanging around the shop for some time, and they gave him the hairyeyeball when he had the audacity to question Kurt. These kids of Kurt'sweren't much like the kids he'd had working for him over the years. Theymight be bright, but they were a lot...angrier. Some of the girls werecutters, with knife scars on their forearms. Some of the boys lookedlike they'd been beaten up a few times too many on the streets, likethey were spoiling for a fight. Alan tried to unfocus his eyes when hewas in the front of Kurt's shop, to not see any of them too closely.
"They work," Kurt said. He smelled terrible, a combination of garbageand sweat, and he had the raccoon-eyed jitters he got when he stayed upall night. "I tested them twice."
"You built me a spare?" Alan said, examining the neat lines of hot gluethat gasketed the sturdy rubberized antennae in place, masking theslightly melted edges left behind by the drill press.
"You don't need a spare," Kurt said. Alan knew that when he got touchylike this, he had to be very careful or he'd blow up, but he wasn'tgoing to do another demo Kurt's way. They'd done exactly one of those,at a Toronto District School Board superintendents meeting, when Alanhad gotten the idea of using schools' flagpoles and backhaul as testbeds for building out the net. It had been a debacle, needless tosay. Two of the access points had been permanently installed on eitherend of Kurt's storefront and the third had been in storage for a monthsince it was last tested.
One of the street kids, a boy with a pair of improbably enormous ravershoes, looked up at Alan. "We've tested these all. They work."
Kurt puffed up and gratefully socked the kid in the shoulder. "We did."
"Fine," Adam said patiently. "But can we make sure they work now?"
"They'll work," Kurt had said when Alan told him that he wanted to testthe access points out before they took them to the meeting. "It'spractically solid-state. They're running off the standarddistribution. There's almost no configuration."
Which may or may not have been true -- it certainly sounded plausible toAlan's lay ear -- but it didn't change the fact that once they poweredup the third box, the other two seized up and died. The blinking networklights fell still, and as Kurt hauled out an old VT-100 terminal andplugged it into the serial ports on the backs of his big, ugly,bestickered, and cig-burned PC cases, it became apparent that they hadceased to honor all requests for routing, association, deassociation,DHCP leases, and the myriad of other networking services provided for bythe software.
"It's practically solid-state," Kurt said, nearly *shouted*, after he'dpowered down the third box and found that the other two -- previouslyrouting and humming along happily -- refused to come back up into theirknown-good state. He gave Alan a dirty look, as though his insistence onpreflighting were the root of their problems.
The street-kid who'd spoken up had jumped when Kurt raised his voice,then cringed away. Now as Kurt began to tear around the shop, lookingthrough boxes of CDs and dropping things on the floor, the kid all butcowered, and the other three all looked down at the table.
"I'll just reinstall," Kurt said. "That's the beauty of thesethings. It's a standard distro, I just copy it over, and biff-bam, it'llcome right back up. No problem. Take me ten minutes. We've got plenty oftime."
Then, five minutes later, "Shit, I forgot that this one has a differentmo-bo than the others."
"Mo-bo?" Alan said, amused. He'd spotted the signs of something veryfinicky gone very wrong and he'd given up any hope of actually doing thedemo, so he'd settled in to watch the process without rancor and tolearn as much as he could.
"Motherboard," Kurt said, reaching for a spool of blank CDs. "Just gotto patch the distribution, recompile, burn it to CD, and reboot, andwe're on the road."
Ten minutes later, "Shit."
"Yes?" Alan said.
"Back off, okay?"
"I'm going to call them and let them know we're going to be late."
"We're *not* going to be late," Kurt said, his fingers going into clawson the keyboard.
"We're already late," Alan said.
"Shit," Kurt said.
"Let's do this," Alan said. "Let's bring down the two that you've gotworking and show them those, and explain the rest."
They'd had a fight, and Kurt had insisted, as Alan had suspected hewould, that he was only a minute or two away from bringing everythingback online. Alan kept his cool, made mental notes of the things thatwent wrong, and put together a plan for avoiding all these problems thenext time around.
"Is there a spare?" Alan said.
Kurt sneered and jerked a thumb at his workbench, where another junctionbox sat, bunny-ear antennae poking out of it. Alan moved it into histub. "Great," he said. "Tested, right?"
"All permutations tested and ready to go. You know, you're not the bossaround here."
"I know it," he said. "Partners." He clapped Kurt on the shoulder,ignoring the damp gray grimy feeling of the clammy T-shirt under hispalm.
The shoulder under his palm sagged. "Right," Kurt said. "Sorry."
"Don't be," Alan said. "You've been hard at it. I'll get loaded whileyou wash up.
Kurt sniffed at his armpit. "Whew," he said. "Yeah, okay."
When Kurt emerged from the front door of his storefront ten minuteslater, he looked like he'd at least made an effort. His mohawk and itsfins were slicked back and tucked under a baseball hat, his black jeanswere unripped and had only one conservative chain joining the wallet inhis back pocket to his belt loop. Throw in a clean t-shirt advertisingan old technology conference inste
ad of the customary old hardcore bandand you had an approximation of the kind of geek that everyone knew wasin possession of secret knowledge and hence must be treated withattention, if not respect.
"I feel like such a dilbert," he said.
"You look totally disreputable," Alan said, hefting the tub of theiraccess points into the bed of his truck and pulling the bungees tightaround