Cory Doctorow

“ They haven't even started work on the bat-house. There are bugout saucers hovering all around it, with giant foam-solvent tanks mounted under their bellies. A small crowd has gathered.
I take off my jacket and lay it on the strip of grass by the sidewalk across the street from the bat-house. I pull off my soaked t-shirt and feel a rare breeze across my chest, as soothing as a kiss on a fevered forehead. I ball up the shirt, then lay down on my jacket, using the shirt as a pillow.
The bat-house is empty, its eyes staring blind, vertical to infinity. ”

“ Dan came by in the evenings and it was like old times, running down the pros and cons of Whuffie and Bitchunry and life in general, sitting on my porch with a sweating pitcher of lemonade.
On the last night, he presented me with a clever little handheld, a museum piece that I recalled fondly from the dawning days of the Bitchun Society. It had much of the functionality of my defunct systems, in a package I could slip in my shirt pocket. It felt like part of a costume, like the turnip watches the Ben Franklin streetmosphere players wore at the American Adventure. ”

“ I'm sweating freely — no air-conditioning in the stairwell, nor is there anything to mop up the sweat rolling down my body, filling the crack of my ass, coursing down my legs. I press my face to the cool painted cinderblock walls, one cheek and then the other, and continue on.
When I finally open the door that leads out onto the pebbled roof, the dawn cool is balm. Fingers of light are hauling the sunrise up over the horizon. I step onto the roof and feel the pebbles dig into the soft soles of my feet, cool as the bottom of the riverbed whence they'd been dredged. ”

“ This isn't to say that copyright is bad, but that there's such a thing as good copyright and bad copyright, and that sometimes, too much good copyright is a bad thing. It's like chilis in soup: a little goes a long way, and too much spoils the broth.
From the Luther Bible to the first phonorecords, from radio to the pulps, from cable to MP3, the world has shown that its first preference for new media is its "democratic-ness" — the ease with which it can reproduced. ”

“ Whenever a new technology has disrupted copyright, we've changed copyright. Copyright isn't an ethical proposition, it's a utilitarian one. There's nothing moral about paying a composer tuppence for the piano-roll rights, there's nothing immoral about not paying Hollywood for the right to videotape a movie off your TV. They're just the best way of balancing out so that people's physical property rights in their VCRs and phonographs are respected and so that creators get enough of a dangling carrot to go on making shows and music and books and paintings. ”

“ They just can’t get over hating us, even though we don’t even know they exist. Off-world, they can pretend that they’re still living rough and hard.” He rubbed his chin again, his hard calluses grating over his whiskers. “But for me, the real rough life is right here, on-world. The little enclaves, each one is like an alternate history of humanity—what if we’d taken the Free Energy, but not deadheading? What if we’d taken deadheading, but only for the critically ill, not for people who didn’t want to be bored on long bus-rides? Or no hyperlinks, no ad-hocracy, no Whuffie? ”

“ I hate the fact that fans who want to do what readers have always done are expected to play in the same system as all these hotshot agents and lawyers. It's just stupid to say that an elementary school classroom should have to talk to a lawyer at a giant global publisher before they put on a play based on one of my books. It's ridiculous to say that people who want to "loan" their electronic copy of my book to a friend need to get a license to do so. Loaning books has been around longer than any publisher on Earth, and it's a fine thing. ”

“ Why didn't I just leave London when I could, come home, move in with Gran, get a regular job? Why didn't I swear off the whole business of secrecy and provocation?
I was too smart for my own good. I could always argue myself into doing the sexy, futuristic thing instead of being a nice, mundane, nonaffiliated individual. Too smart to settle down, take a job and watch TV after work, spend two weeks a year at the cottage and go online to find movie listings. Too smart is too restless and no happiness, ever, without that it's chased by obsessive maundering moping about what comes next. ”

“ She sluiced off the airplane grease that had filled her pores on the long flight from San Jose to Miami and changed into a cheap sun-dress and a pair of flip-flops that she’d bought at the Thunderbird Flea Market and headed down to their place.
Tjan opened the door with a flourish and she stepped in and stopped short. When she’d left, the place had been a reflection of their jumbled lives: gizmos, dishes, parts, tools and clothes strewn everywhere in a kind of joyful, eye-watering hyper-mess, like an enormous kitchen junk-drawer. ”

“ I pass the morning with my comm, till I come to the pict of Mum and Dad and their Process buds on the jetway to the shuttle at Aristide, ascending to the heavens as humanity's reps. They're both naked and arm-in-arm and as chaste as John and Yoko, and my eyes fill up with tears. I crawl back into my fort and sleep and dream about buzzing Chestnut Ave in a shuttle with a payload of solvent, melting down all the houses into trickles that disappear into the sewers. ”

“ Regardless of whether you think these are real problems or merely hysterical fears, they are nevertheless the province of lobbies and interest groups that are far more influential than Hollywood and big content are on their best days, and every one of them will arrive at the same place -- "can't you just make us a general purpose computer that runs all the programs, except the ones that scare and anger us? Can't you just make us an Internet that transmits any message over any protocol between any two points, unless it upsets us?" ”

“ They left the diner in a sleepdep haze and squinted into the sunrise and grinned at each other and burped up eggs and sausages and bacon and coffee and headed toward Kurt’s Buick.
“Hang on,” Alan said. “Let’s have a walk, okay?” The city smelled like morning, dew and grass and car-exhaust and baking bread and a whiff of the distant Cadbury’s factory oozing chocolate miasma over the hills and the streetcar tracks. Around them, millions were stirring in their beds, clattering in their kitchens, passing water, and taking on vitamins. ”

“ When you live with a crew for years, you become a different person. We'd be out at sea, nothing but water as far as the eye could see, and we'd be playing cards on-deck. We'd told each other every joke we knew already, and every story about home, and we knew that deck of cards so well, which one had salt-water stains on the back and which one turned up at corner and which one had been torn, and we'd just scream at the sun, so bored! ”

“ I said, what happened, what happened to me?
“You’re out of the ad-hoc,” he said. “You’re out of Whuffie. You’re bottomed-out,” he said.
This is how you hit bottom in Walt Disney World, in a hotel with the hissing of the monorail and the sun streaming through the window, the hooting of the steam engines on the railroad and the distant howl of the recorded wolves at the Haunted Mansion. The world drops away from you, recedes until you’re nothing but a speck, a mote in blackness. ”

“ It's embarrassing to see all these writers and musicians and artists bemoaning the fact that art just got this wicked new feature: the ability to be shared without losing access to it in the first place. It's like watching restaurant owners crying down their shirts about the new free lunch machine that's feeding the world's starving people because it'll force them to reconsider their business-models. ”

“ There was one in the little coach house in the back of his place, behind the collapsed boxes and the bicycle pump. As he ran across the street, he saw Krishna, sitting on his porch, watching him with a hint of a smile.
“Lost another one, huh?” he said. He looked as if he’d been awake all night, now hovering on the brink of sleepiness and wiredness. A roll of thunder crashed and a sheet of rain hurtled out of the sky.
Alan never thought of himself as a violent person. Even when he’d had to throw the occasional troublemaker out of his shops, he’d done so with an almost cordial force. ”

“ The saucers lift off to-the-second on-time. The crowd, which has grown, sighs collectively as the saucers disappear over the haze, then a fine mist of solvent rains down on our heads. It's as salty as sea-water, and the bat-house trembles as it begins to melt. Streams of salty water course down its sides.
The top of the building comes into view, the saucers chasing it down as it dissolves, spraying a steady blast of solvent. ”

“ The explanation, like all good propaganda, is stirring and stilted, and not particularly accurate, and gummy as the hook from a top-40 song, sticky in your mind in the sleep-deprived noontime when the world takes on a hallucinatory hypperreal clarity. Like now as I sit here in my underwear on the roof of a sanatorium in the back woods off Route 128, far enough from the perpetual construction of Boston that it's merely a cloud of dust like a herd of distant buffalo charging the plains. ”

“ The triviality of copyright tells you that when other sectors of the economy start to evince concerns about the internet and the PC, that copyright will be revealed for a minor skirmish, and not a war. Why would other sectors nurse grudges against computers? Well, because the world we live in today is made of computers. We don't have cars anymore, we have computers we ride in; we don't have airplanes anymore, we have flying Solaris boxes with a big bucketful of SCADA controllers (laughter) ; a 3D printer is not a device, it's a peripheral, and it only works connected to a computer ”

“ He was pushing them out to the world’s living rooms. Even the deleted rides from the glory days of the goth Fantasyland, in time-limited miniature. If he’d still been at Disney Parks, he would have loved this idea. It was just what he loved, the knowledge that he was sharing experience with his people around the world, part of a tribe even if he couldn’t see them.
Now, in the era of the ride, he could see how dumb this was. How thin and shallow and commercial. Why should they have to pay some giant evil corporation to convene their community? ”

“ If you love freedom, if you think the human condition is dignified by privacy, by the right to be left alone, by the right to explore your weird ideas provided you don't hurt others, then you have common cause with the kids whose web-browsers and cell phones are being used to lock them up and follow them around.
If you believe that the answer to bad speech is more speech -- not censorship -- then you have a dog in the fight.
If you believe in a society of laws, a land where our rulers have to tell us the rules, and have to follow them too, then you're part of the same struggle that kids fight when they argue for the right to live under the same Bill of Rights that adults have. ”

“ Davey crouched among the bones at the very back of the cave, his back to them, shoulders hunched.
The golems stood stock still as Marci and he crept up on Davey. So intent was he on his work that he didn’t notice them, even as they loomed over his shoulder, staring down on the thing he held in his hands.
It was Alan’s thumb, and growing out of it—Allen. Tiny, the size of a pipe-cleaner man, and just as skinny, but perfectly formed, squirming and insensate, face contorted in a tiny expression of horror. ”

“ The nostalgia filled her up like a balloon expanding in her chest. She hadn’t ever seen a computer until she was ten years old, and that had been the size of a chest-freezer, with less capability than one of the active printed-computer cards that came in glossy fashion magazines with come-ons for perfume and weight-loss.
The world had been stood on its head so many times in the intervening thirty-plus years that it was literally dizzying—or was that the beer having a delayed effect? ”

“ My knees and shins are grooved with deep, parallel cuts, gritted with gravel and grime. Standing hurts so much that I go back to my knees, holler again at the pain in my legs as I grind more gravel into my cuts, and again as I tear my face open some more. I end up fetal on my side, sticky with blood and weeping softly with an exquisite self-pity that is more than the cuts and bruises, more than the betrayal, more than the foreknowledge of punishment. I am weeping for myself, and my identity, and my smarts over happiness and the thought that I would indeed choose happiness over smarts any day. ”

“ The Magic Kingdom was all closed up and every last guest had been chased out the gate underneath the Main Street train station, and we were able to breathe a heavy sigh of relief, shuck parts of our costumes, and relax together while the cicadas sang.
I was more than a century old, but there was still a kind of magic in having my arm around the warm, fine shoulders of a girl by moonlight, hidden from the hustle of the cleaning teams by the turnstiles, breathing the warm, moist air. Lil plumped her head against my shoulder and gave me a butterfly kiss under my jaw. ”

“ The best games were the ones at the Scout Camps out of town: a hundred teenagers, boys and girls, fighting the Friday night traffic, swapping stories, playing handheld games, showing off for hours. Then debarking to stand in the grass before a group of older men and women in bad-ass, home-made armor, dented and scarred, like armor must have been in the old days, not like it's portrayed in the movies, but like a soldier's uniform after a month in the bush. ”

“ The reluctant winter made every day feel like the day before a holiday weekend. The bankers and the retail slaves coming into and out of the Market had a festive air.
He waved at the neighbors, and Link waved back, and then so did Natalie, and he hefted his sack of coffees from the Greek’s suggestively, and Mimi shut her curtains with a snap, but Natalie and Link smiled, and a moment later they were sitting in twig chairs on his porch in their jammies, watching the world go past as the sun began to boil the air and the coffee tasted as good as it smelled. ”

“ There had been a time, those first days when they’d rebuilt Fantasyland, when he’d really felt like he was part of the magic. No, The Magic, with capital letters. Something about the shared experience of going to a place with people and having an experience with them, that was special. It must be why people went to church. Not that Disney had been a religion for him, exactly. But when he watched the park he’d grown up attending take on the trappings that adorned his favorite clubs, his favorite movies and games—man, it had been a piece of magic. ”

“ If you don't hit the fast-forward button, the car starts grabbing everything it can from the peer, all the music on the stereo, and cues it up for continued play. Once that pool is exhausted, it queries your peer for a list of its peers — the cars that it's getting its music from — and sees if any of them are in range, and downloads from them. So, it's like you're exploring a taste-network, doing an automated, guided search through traffic for the car whose owner has collected the music you most want to listen to. ”

“ If you keep on believing it, you’re going to lose the Mansion, the Liberty Belle, Tom Sawyer Island—all of it. All the history we have with this place—all the history that the billions who’ve visited it have—it’s going to be destroyed and replaced with the sterile, thoughtless shit that’s taken over the Hall. Once that happens, there’s nothing left that makes this place special. Anyone can get the same experience sitting at home on the sofa! What happens then, huh? How much longer do you think this place will stay open once the only people here are you?”
Debra smiled condescendingly. ”

“ Alan worked through the long Toronto winter at his sanding. The house had been gutted by the previous owners, who’d had big plans for the building but had been tempted away by a job in Boston. They’d had to sell fast, and no amount of realtor magic—flowers on the dining-room table, soup simmering on the stove—could charm away the essential dagginess of the gutted house, the exposed timbers with sagging wires and conduit, the runnels gouged in the floor by careless draggers of furniture. Alan got it for a song, and was delighted by his fortune. ”

“ And for every kid who’s having a blood-sugar meltdown after consuming half a quart of high-fructose lube slathered on a cinnamon bun, there’s another who is standing open-mouthed with complete bodily wonder, at some stupendous spectacle, clearly forming neuronal connections of a sort that will create the permanent predisposition to an appreciation of spectacle, wonder, and beauty.
This is the kind of place where you have to love the sin and hate the sinner. The company may sue and resort to dirty tricks, but it’s also chock full of real artists making real art. ”

“ Dan took me back to the room and put me to bed with a transdermal soporific that knocked me out for the rest of the day. When I woke, the moon was over the Seven Seas Lagoon and the monorail was silent.
I stood on the patio for a while, thinking about all the things this place had meant to me for more than a century: happiness, security, efficiency, fantasy. All of it gone. It was time I left. Maybe back to space, find Zed and see if I could make her happy again. Anywhere but here. Once Dan was dead—God, it was sinking in finally—I could catch a ride down to the Cape for a launch. ”

“ Davey came to him that night and pinned him in the light of the flashlight. He woke staring up into the bright bulb, shielding his eyes. He groped out for the light, but Darryl danced back out of reach, keeping the beam in his eyes. The air crackled with the angry grinding of its hand-dynamo.
He climbed out of bed naked and felt around on the floor. He had a geode there, he’d broken it and polished it by hand, and it was the size of a softball, the top smooth as glass, the underside rough as a coconut’s hide. ”

“ These people need housing, goods, appliances, you name it. It’s what Tjan used to call a green-field market: no one else knows it’s there. You want something you can spend ungodly amounts of money on? This is it. Get every team in the company to come up with products for these people. Soak up every cent they spend. Better us providing them with quality goods at reasonable prices than letting them get ripped off by the profiteers who have a captive market. This plant is a living lab: this is the kind of market intelligence you can’t buy, right here. ”

“ Marci stood and dusted herself off. Alan stared at his knees.
“She’s horrible, isn’t she?” said the voice, and a great, thick hand appeared in his field of vision. He shook it tentatively, noting the heavy class ring and the thin, plain wedding band. He looked up slowly.
Marci’s father was short but powerfully built, like the wrestlers on the other kids’ lunchboxes at school. He had a shock of curly black hair that was flecked with dandruff, and a thick bristling mustache that made him look very fierce, though his eyes were gentle and bookish behind thick glasses. ”

“ Capitalism is eating itself. The market works, and when it works, it commodifies or obsoletes everything. That’s not to say that there’s no money out there to be had, but the money won’t come from a single, monolithic product line. The days of companies with names like ’General Electric’ and ’General Mills’ and ’General Motors’ are over. The money on the table is like krill: a billion little entrepreneurial opportunities that can be discovered and exploited by smart, creative people. ”

“ Slowly, slowly, she leaned toward him, curling her wing round his far shoulder like a blanket or a lover’s arm, head coming to rest on his chest, breath hot on his nipple through the thin fabric of his T-shirt.
“Alan?” she murmured into his chest.
“Yes?”
“What are we?” she said.
“Huh?”
“Are we human? Where do we come from? How did we get here? Why do I have wings?” ”

“ Death looked at his feet. Sammy bubbled with rage. If you couldn’t trust your own people, you were lost. There were already enough people around the park looking for a way to wrong-foot him.
“Death, I’m talking to you. For Christ’s sake, don’t be such a goddamned baby. You shut down the goddamned rides and send those glue-sniffers home. I want a wrecking crew here by lunchtime.”
Death Waits looked at his feet some more. His floppy black wings of hair covered his face, but from the snuffling noises, Sammy knew there was some crying going on underneath all that hair. ”