Cory Doctorow

“ 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. ”

“ Riding up Yonge Street, the city lights had seemed charming and understated; even the porn marquees felt restrained after a week in New York. Art ate a steak as big as his head and fell into a postprandial torpor whence he emerged only briefly to essay a satisfied belch. Meanwhile, Gran and Linda nattered away like old friends, making plans for the week: the zoo, the island, a day trip to Niagara Falls, a ride up the CN Tower, all the touristy stuff that Art had last done in elementary school. ”

“ So I'm coopering up all these user studies with weasels from the legal departments at the studios, where they just slaver all over this stuff, talking about how warm it all makes them feel to make sure that they're compensating artists and how grateful they are for the reminders to keep their software up to date and shit. I'm modeling a system that has a clickthrough every time you cue up a new song, too. It's going to be perfect: the rights-societies are going to love it, and I've handpicked the peer review group at V/DT, stacked it up with total assholes who love manuals and following rules. ”

“ You're cranky and subrational most of the time. Close your eyes on the freeway and dreams paint themselves on the back of your lids, demanding their time, almost as heavy as gravity, almost as remorseless. There's a lot of flaming and splitting and vitriol in the Tribes. They're more fractured than a potsherd. Tribal anthropologists have built up incredible histories of the fissioning of the Tribes since they were first recognized — most of 'em are online; you can look 'em up. We stab each other in the back routinely and with no more provocation than a sleepdep hallucination. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Linda says, conversationally.
"I believe I do," Art says, and he does.
Linda pulls the back of his head to hers with one arm, and with the other, she half-shrugs out of her robe. Art pulls his shirt up to his armpits, feels the scorching softness of her chest on his, and groans. His erection grinds into her mons through his Jockey shorts, and he groans again as she sucks his tongue into her mouth and masticates it just shy of hard enough to hurt.
She breaks off and reaches down for the waistband of his Jockeys and his whole body arches in anticipation.
Then his comm rings. ”

“ Fede was halfway out of Art's chair when Art bounded into the office. Fede's face was gratifyingly pale, his eyes thoroughly wide and scared. Art didn't bother to slow down, just slammed into Fede, bashing foreheads with him. Art smelled a puff of his own travel sweat and Fede's spicy Lilac Vegetal, saw blood welling from Fede's eyebrow. ”

“ Art smiled. Trap baited and sprung. "OK. So institutional loyalty — loyalty to a Tribe or a nation — that's not an important social norm. As far as you're concerned, we could abandon all pretense of institutional loyalty." Art dropped his voice. "You could go to work for the Jersey boys, sabotaging Virgin/Deutsche Telekom, just because they're willing to pay you to do it. Nothing to do with Tribal loyalty, just a job."
Fede looked uncomfortable, sensing the impending rhetorical headlock. He nodded cautiously.
"Which means that the Jersey boys have no reason to be loyal to you. It's just a job. ”

“ We sat on stoops in Brooklyn with old ladies who talked softly in the gloaming of the pollution-tinged sunsets while their grandchildren chased each other down the street. We joined a pickup game of street-hockey in Boston, yelling "Car!" and clearing the net every time a fartmobile turned into the cul-de-sac.
We played like kids. I got commed during working hours and my evenings were blissfully devoid of buzzes, beeps and alerts. It surprised the hell out of me when I discovered Fede's treachery and Linda's complicity and found myself flying cattle class to London to kick Fede's ass. ”

“ Thinking of war-drivers as a collective memory was like staring at an optical illusion and seeing the vase emerge from the two faces. Art's entire perception of the problem involuted itself in his mind. ”

“ 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. ”

“ You come on all patronizing when I talk about being loyal to the Tribe, and you're certainly not loyal to V/DT, nor are you loyal to Jersey. What greater purpose are you loyal to?"
"Well, humanity, for starters."
"Really. What's that when it's at home?"
"Huh?"
"How do you express loyalty to something as big and abstract as 'humanity'?"
"Well, that comes down to morals, right? Not doing things that poison the world.
Paying taxes. Change to panhandlers. Supporting charities." Fede drummed his
fingers on his thighs. "Not murdering or raping, you know. Being a good person. ”

“ Why am I so damned eager to be rescued from my rooftop aerie? I am sunburned and sad, but I am more free than I have been in weeks.
2. Why am I so reluctant to take further action in the service of getting someone up onto the roof? I could topple a ventilator chimney by moving the cinderblocks that hold its apron down and giving it the shoulder. I could dump rattling handfuls of gravel down its maw and wake the psychotics below.
I could, but I won't. Maybe I don't want to go back just yet.
They cooked it up between them. The Jersey customers, Fede, and Linda. I should have known better. ”

“ Art waits patiently over the next year for a grownup to show him how the blocks-from-pictures trick works, but none ever does. Many other mysteries are revealed, each one more disappointingly mundane than the last: even flying a plane seemed easy enough when the nice stew let him ride up in the cockpit for a while en route to New York — Art's awe at the complexity of adult knowledge fell away. ”

“ Mostly, these tribes are little more than a sub-culture. It takes time-zones to amplify the cultural fissioning of fan-fiction or knitting into a full-blown conspiracy. Their interests are commercial, industrial, cultural, culinary. A Tribesman will patronize a fellow Tribesman's restaurant, or give him a manufacturing contract, or hire his taxi. Not because of xenophobia, but because of homophilia: I know that my Tribesman's taxi will conduct its way through traffic in a way that I'm comfortable with, whether I'm in San Francisco, Boston, London or Calcutta. ”

“ Bribery, corruption, patent disputes — I'd been gratified to discover that my name had been removed from the patent applications, sparing me the nightly hounding Fede and Linda and her fucking ex had been subjected to on my comm as the legal net tightened around them.
I end up laughing so hard that Caitlin gets out of the car and walks around to my side, opens the door, and pulls me bodily to the passenger side. She serenely ignores the blaring of the horns from the aggravated, psychotic Boston drivers stacked up behind us, walks back to the driver's side and takes the wheel. ”

“ I've got a good twenty, thirty thousand on my car right now! You're saying I could plunder anyone else's stereo at will, for free, and keep it, while I'm stuck in traffic, and because I'm a — what'd you call it, a super-peer? — a super-peer, it's all free and legal? Damn!"
"Well, it may be a while before you see it on the East Coast. It'll probably roll out in LA first, then San Francisco, Seattle..."
"What? Why?"
"It's a long story," I say. "And it ends with me on the roof of a goddamned nuthouse on Route 128 doing a one-man tribute to the Three Stooges." ”

“ The energy bev is kicking in and making his heart race and his pulse throb in his throat and he's so unbearably hyperkinetic that he turns the coffee table on its end in the galley kitchen and clears a space in the living room that's barely big enough to spin around in, and starts to work through a slow, slow set of Tai Chi, so slow that he barely moves at all, except that inside he can feel the moving, can feel the muscles' every flex and groan as they wind up release, move and swing and slide. ”

“ It's a terrible thing for a mother to live longer than her daughter."
His Gran says this every year. Art still hasn't figured out how to respond to it. Time for another stab at it. "I'm glad you're still here, Gran."
Wrong thing. Gran is sobbing now. Art drops his eyes from Linda's and looks at the crazy weft and woof of the faded old Oriental rug. "Oh, Gran," he says. "I'm sorry."
In truth, Art has mourned and buried his mother. He was raised just fine by his Gran, and when he remembers his mother, he is more sad about not being sad than sad about her. ”

“ Because of the Tribes."
Fede quirked him half a smile. "Sure, the Tribes."
"What does that mean?"
"Art, you know that stuff is four-fifths' horseshit, right? It's just a game.
When it comes down to your personal welfare, you can't depend on time zones.
This is more job than calling, you know."
Art squirmed and flushed. "Lots of us take this stuff seriously, Fede. It's not just a mind-game. Doesn't loyalty mean anything to you?"
Fede laughed nastily. "Loyalty! If you're doing all of this out of loyalty, then why are you drawing a paycheck? Look, I'd rather that this go to Jersey. ”

“ She is afire, he is afire, their bodies are talking to each other in some secret language of shifting centers of gravity and unconscious pheromones, and his face tilts down towards her, slowly with all the time in the world. ”

“ When the GPS can't find enough peers on the relay network to color its maps with traffic data, you know you've hit a sweet spot in the city's uber-circadian, a moment of grace where the roads are very nearly exclusively yours. ”

“ Slowly but surely, we begin to mediate almost all of our communication over networks. Why walk down the hallway to ask a coworker a question, when you can just send email? You don't need to interrupt them, and you can keep going on your own projects, and if you forget the answer, you can just open the message again and look at the response. There're all kinds of ways to interact with our friends over the network: we can play hallucinogenic games, chat, send pictures, code, music, funny articles, metric fuckloads of porn... ”