Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow Read Free Book Online Page B

detail was a tough combination to beat. Needless to say, the Route 128-based Tribalists who had the existing contract needed an edge, and would pay handsomely for it.
    London nights seemed like a step up from San Francisco mornings to Art -- instead of getting up at 4AM to get NYC, he could sleep in and chat them up through the night. The Euro sensibility, with its many nap-breaks, statutory holidays and extended vacations seemed ideally suited to a double agent's life.
    But Art hadn't counted on the Tribalists' hands-on approach to his work. They obsessively grepped his daily feed of spreadsheets, whiteboard-output, memos and conversation reports for any of ten thousand hot keywords, querying him for deeper detail on trivial, half-remembered bullshit sessions with the V/DT's user experience engineers. His comm buzzed and blipped at all hours, and his payoff was dependent on his prompt response. They were running him ragged.
    Four hours in the police station gave Art ample opportunity to catch up on the backlog of finicky queries. Since the accident, he'd been distracted and tardy, and had begun to invent his responses, since it all seemed so trivial to him anyway.
    Fede had sent him about a thousand nagging notes reminding him to generate a new key and phone with the fingerprint. Christ. Fede had been with McKinsey for most of his adult life, and he was superparanoid about being exposed and disgraced in their ranks. Art's experience with the other McKinsey people around the office suggested that the notion of any of those overpaid buzzword-slingers sniffing their traffic was about as likely as a lightning strike. Heaving a dramatic sigh for his own benefit, he began the lengthy process of generating enough randomness to seed the key, mashing the keyboard, whispering nonsense syllables, and pointing the comm's camera lens at arbitrary corners of the police station. After ten minutes of crypto-Tourette's, the comm announced that he'd been sufficiently random and prompted him for a passphrase. Jesus. What a pain in the ass. He struggled to recall all the words to the theme song from a CBC sitcom he'd watched as a kid, and then his comm went into a full-on churn as it laboriously re-ciphered all of his stored files with the new key, leaving Art to login while he waited.
    Trepan: Afternoon!
    Colonelonic: Hey, Trepan. How's it going?
    Trepan: Foul. I'm stuck at a copshop in London with my thumb up my ass. I got mugged.
    Colonelonic: Yikes! You OK?
    Ballgravy: Shit!
    Trepan: Oh, I'm fine -- just bored. They didn't hurt me. I commed 999 while they were running their game and showed it to them when they got ready to do the deed, so they took off.
    ##Colonelonic laughs
    Ballgravy: Britain==ass. Lon-dong.
    Colonelonic: Sweet!
    Trepan: Thanks. Now if the cops would only finish the paperwork...
    Colonelonic: What are you doing in London, anyway?
    Ballgravy: Ass ass ass
    Colonelonic: Shut up, Bgravy
    Ballgravy: Blow me
    Trepan: What's wrong with you, Ballgravy? We're having a grown-up conversation here
    Ballgravy: Just don't like Brits.
    Trepan: What, all of them?
    Ballgravy: Whatever -- all the ones I've met have been tight-ass pricks
    ##Colonelonic: (private) He's just a troll, ignore him
    /private Colonelonic: Watch this
    Trepan: How many?
    Ballgravy: How many what?
    Trepan: Have you met?
    Ballgravy: Enough
    Trepan: > 100?
    Ballgravy: No
    Trepan: > 50?
    Ballgravy: No
    Trepan: > 10?
    Ballgravy: Around 10
    Trepan: Where are you from?
    Ballgravy: Queens
    Trepan: Well, you're not going to believe this, but you're the tenth person from Queens I've met -- and you're all morons who pick fights with strangers in chat-rooms
    Colonelonic: Queens==ass
    Trepan: Ass ass ass
    Ballgravy: Fuck you both
    ##Ballgravy has left channel #EST.chatter
    Colonelonic: Nicely done
    Colonelonic: He's been boring me stupid for the past hour, following me from channel to channel
    Colonelonic: What are you doing in London, anyway?
    Trepan: Like I said, waiting for