Cory Doctorow

“ There are no elevators on the planet I live on now — the wild gravity and wilder windstorms don't permit buildings of more than one story — but even if there were, they wouldn't be like this lift, like a human lift, like one of the fifty that ran the vertical length of the bat-house. ”

“ I don't like my Dad — he's always shouting, and I think he's the reason we ended up here. He's batshit — he gets angry too easy. And my Mom is batshit now, even if she wasn't batshit before, because of him. I don't feel like their son. I feel like I just share an apt with these two crazy people I don't like very much. And none of my mates are any good, either. They're all either like my Dad — loud and crazy, or like my Mom, quiet and crazy. Everyone's crazy."
"That may be true, Chet. But you can still like cra-zy peo-ple."
"Do you like 'em?"
The Amazing Robotron's idiot lights rippled. ”

“ He spoke as he tinkered with his apparatus, which hummed alarmingly and occasionally sent a tortured arc of electricity into the guy who thought he was Nicola Tesla's chest.
It happened three times in a row, and he stamped his foot in frustration, and said, "Oh, do cut it out," apparently to one of his machines.
I'd been jumping every time he got zapped, but this time, I had to giggle. He whirled on me. "I am not trying to be amusing. One thing you people never realize is that the current has a will, it has a mind, and you have to keep it in check with a firm hand." ”

“ I still don't know how it is artists will earn a living in the age of the Internet, but I remain convinced that the way to find out is to do basic science: that is, to do stuff and observe the outcome. That's what I'm doing here. The thing to remember is that the very *worst* thing you can do to me as an artist is to not read my work — to let it languish in obscurity and disappear from posterity. Most of the fiction I grew up on is out-of-print, and this is doubly true for the short stories. ”

“ Chet nodded. He wondered who Nicola Tesla was, and filed away the name Gaylord for making fun of, later. In doing so, he began to normalize the experience, to structure it as a story he could tell the other kids, after. The guy, the ocean, the hair. Gaylord.
A ball of lightning leapt from Tesla/Ballozos's fingertips and danced over their heads. It bounced around the room furiously, then stopped to hover in front of Chet. His clothes stood away from his body, snapping as though caught in a windstorm. Seen up close, the ball was an infinite pool of shifting electricity, like an ocean of energy. ”

“ My hair was drying out, and starting to raise skywards, and the guy who thought he was Nicola Tesla went over to his apparatus and flipped a giant knife switch. The ocean stirred, a puff of sand rose from its bottom, and then, the coral on the ocean's edge moved. ”

“ Nudity was not a big deal for the kids of the bat-house — the kind of adult who you wouldn't trust in such circumstances didn't end up in bat-houses — the bugouts had a different place for them.
"Go on, lad, give it a try. It's simply marvelous, I tell you!"
Unsteadily, Chet climbed the spiral stairs leading up to the tank, clutching the handrail, chewing the gum, which fizzed and sparked in his mouth. At the top, there was a small platform. Self-consciously, he stripped, then pulled on the mask and snorkel that hung from a peg. ”

“ I see tall, clacking insect-creatures with walkman headphones across their stomachs. I see squat, rocky creatures smearing pizza slices onto their digestive membranes. I see soft, slithering creatures with Toronto Blue Jays baseball hats suspended in their jelly.
The humans I see are dressed in unisex coveralls, with discreet comms on their wrists or collars, and they don't seem to notice that their city is become a bestiary. ”

“ He's eleven, and it's the tencennial of the Ascension of his homeworld — dirty blue ball, so unworthy, yet — inducted into the Galactic fraternity and the infinite compassion of the bugouts.
The foam, which had been confined to just the newer, Process-enclaves before the Ascension, has spread, as has the cult of the Process For Lasting Happiness. Process is, after all, why the dirty blue ball was judged and found barely adequate for membership. Toronto, which had seen half its inhabitants emigrate on open-ended tours of the wondrous worlds of the bugout domain, is full again. ”

“ Now I can't seem to stand naturally, can't figure out where a not-crazy puts his hands and where a not-crazy puts his eyes. Little Chet and his mates liked to terrorize people in the lifts, play "who farted" and "I'm gonna puke" and "I have to pee" in loud sing-songs, just to watch the other bats squirm.
The guy who thought he was Nicola Tesla thought that these games were unfunny, unsophisticated and unappetizing and little Chet stopped playing them.
I squirt extra money at the babu, after he opens my windows and shows me the shitter and the vid's remote. ”

“ It turns out that, as near as anyone can tell, distributing free electronic versions of books is a great way to sell more of the paper editions, while simultaneously getting the book into the hands of readers who would otherwise not be exposed to my work. ”

“ I've used this trick on my kids. What do I know about their psychology? But you get one, you convince it to explain the rest to you. It helps. Counselors are always from another world — by the time the first generation raised in a bat-house has grown old enough, there aren't any bats' children left to counsel on their homeworld. ”

“ Chet's comm died somewhere in the lightning strike, but the emergency crews that took him away and looked in his ears and poked him in the chest and gave him pills take him back to the Royal York in a saucer, bridging the distance in a few minutes, touching down on Front Street. The Royal York's doorman doesn't bat an eye as he gets the door for him.
The elevator ride is fine. He is still wrapped in the silence of his deafness, but it's a comforting, centering silence.
Once Chet is back in his room, he fires up the vid and starts writing a letter to The Amazing Robotron. ”

“ They're hardly the worse for wear — when I'm in my exoskeleton on my new planet, I don't bother with clothes.
#
The ocean seemed too fragile to be real. All that caged water, held behind a flimsy-seeming sheet of clear foam, the corners joined with strips of thick gasket-rubber. Standing there at its base, Chet was terrified that it would burst and drown him — he actually felt the push of water, the horrid, dying wriggles of the fish as they were washed over his body.
"Say there, son. Hello?"
Chet looked up. Nicola Tesla's hair was standing on end, comically. ”

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1. Definitions
a. "Collective Work" means a work, such as a periodical issue, anthology or encyclopedia, in which the Work in its entirety in unmodified form, along with a number of other contributions, constituting separate and independent works in themselves, are assembled into a collective whole. ”

“ Chet thought that he understood some of what was going on. Maybe he'd be able to explain it to The Amazing Robotron.
#
I never thought I'd say this, but I miss my exoskeleton. My feet ache, my legs ache, my ass aches, and I'm hot and thirsty and my waterbottle is empty. I'm not even past Bloor Street, not even a tenth of the way to the bat-house.
#
The Amazing Robotron seemed thoughtful as I ratted out my chums. "So, I think they need each other. The big one needs the little one, to feel important. The little one needs the big one, so that he can feel useful. ”

“ Some said it was an architectural error, others said it was part of the bat-house's heating scheme. Up in nosebleed country, on the 120th level, it was almost empty: sparsely populated by the very battiest bats, though as more and more humans were found batty, they pushed inexorably upwards.
Chet rode the lift to the 125th floor and walked casually to the end of the hallway. At this height, the hallways were bare foam, without the long-wear carpet and fake plants that adorned the low-altitude territories. ”

“ I don't think I wanna be a pilot no more. One of my buds tole me that you end up all fugged up with time an' that, that you come home an' it's the next century an' everyone you know is dead."
"That is one thing that hap-pens to some ex-plor-a-tor-y pilots, Chet. Have you thought a-bout any o-ther poss-i-bil-i-ties?"
"Kinda. I guess." I tried not to think about the 125th story and the ocean. I was thinking so hard, I stopped thinking about what I was saying to The Amazing Robotron. "Maybe I could be a counselor, like, and help kids." ”

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“ Master Affeltranger, you may not realize it to look at me, but I have some very important friends, out there in the Great Beyond. With important friends, you can make a whole block of apts simply disappear from the record-books. You can make tremendous energy consumption vanish, likewise. ”

“ Gingerly, he stood and stretched, then sighed tremendously.
"Chet, Chet, Chet. I hope I didn't frighten you too badly. This is Old Sparky, an exact replica of the electric chair at Sing-Sing Prison in New York. Edison, thief and charlatan that he was, insisted that his DC current was safer than my AC, and they built a chair that used my beautiful current to execute criminals, by the hundreds.
"Nicola Tesla and I became one when I was eight years old, and I received a tremendous shock from an electrified fence. ”

“ Losing a couple bucks to people who would have bought the book save for the availability of the free electronic text is no big deal, at least when compared to the horror that is being irrelevant and unread. ”

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“ I don't have time to argue with a child."
I climbed into the ocean, and the silence embraced me, and the water tingled with electricity, and my consciousness floated away from my body and soared over an alien world. Like a broken circuit, I disconnected from the world around me.
#
Chet's father came home with a can of beer in his hand and the rest of the six-pack in his gut. He walked over to the vid, where Chet was researching the life of Nicola Tesla, which took forever, since he had to keep linking back to simple tutorials on physics, history, and electrical engineering. ”

“ Nothing. Why is that?"
"Your mo-ther is. . . ." The Amazing Robotron fumbled for a word, buried somewhere deep in the hypnotic English lexicon baked into its brain. "Your mo-ther has a prob-lem, and she needs your aff-ec-tion now more than e-ver. What-ev-er rea-son she has for her si-lence, it is not you. Your mo-ther and fa-ther love you, and dream of the day when you leave here and make your own way through the gal-ax-y."
Of course his parents loved him, he supposed, in an abstract kind of way. ”

“ Then his robot-voice came out of the grille on his face. "I think that you would be a ve-ry good coun-sel-or, Chet."
"Yeh?" I said. It was the first time that The Amazing Robotron had told me he thought I'd be good at anything. Hell, it was the first time he'd expressed any opinion about anything I'd said.
"Yes, Chet. Be-ing a coun-sel-or is a ve-ry good way to help your-self un-der-stand what we have done to you by put-ting you in the Cen-ter." ”