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What
follows are the first four scenes of "Eastern Standard Tribe," a
novel-in-progress. Think of them as zero-day warez, a public alpha
of a novel that will go feature-complete in December. The premise
of this book is also the premise of an article that will appear
in the November issue of Wired magazine.
I once had a Tai Chi instructor who explained the difference between
Chinese and Western medicine thus: "Western medicine is based
on corpses, things that you discover by cutting up dead bodies and
pulling them apart. Chinese medicine is based on living flesh, things
observed from vital, moving humans."
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 an hallucinatory hypperreal clarity. Like now as
I sit here in underwear on the roof of a sanitorium 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. Like now as I sit here with a pencil
up my nose, thinking about homebrew lobotomies and wouldn't it be
nice if I gave myself one.
Deep breath.
The difference between Chinese medicine and Western medicine is
the dissection versus the observation of the thing in motion. The
difference between reading a story and studying a story is the difference
between living the story and killing the story and looking at its
guts.
School! We sat in English class and we dissected the stories that
I'd escaped into, lay open their abdomens and tagged their organs,
covered their genitals with polite sterile drapes, recorded dutiful
notes en masse that told us what the story was about, but
never what the story was. Stories are propaganda, virii that
slide past your critical immune system and insert themselves directly
into your emotions. Kill them and cut them open and they're as naked
as a nightclub in daylight.
The theme. The first step in dissecting a story is euthanizing
it: "What is the theme of this story?"
Let me kill my story before I start it, so that I can dissect it
and understand it. The theme of this story is: "Would you rather
be smart or happy?"
This is a work of propaganda. It's a story about choosing smarts
over happiness. Except if I give the pencil a push: then it's a
story about choosing happiness over smarts. It's a morality play,
and the first character is about to take the stage. He's a foil
for the theme, so he's drawn in simple lines. Here he is:
Art Berry was born to argue.
There are born assassins. Bred to kill, raised on cunning and speed,
they are the stuff of legend, remorseless and unstoppable. There
are born ballerinas, confectionery girls whose parents subject them
to rigors every bit as intense as the tripwire and poison on which
the assassins are reared. There are children born to practice medicine
or law; children born to serve their nations and die heroically
in the noble tradition of their forebears; children born to tread
the boards or shred the turf or leave smoking rubber on the racetrack.
Art's earliest memory: A dream. He is stuck in the waiting room
of one of the innumerable doctors who attended him in his infancy.
He is perhaps three, and his attention span is already as robust
as it will ever be, and in his dream -- which is fast becoming a
nightmare -- he is bored silly.
The only adornment in the waiting room is an empty cylinder that
once held toy blocks. Its label colorfully illustrates the blocks,
which look like they'd be a hell of a lot of fun, if someone hadn't
lost them all.
Near the blocks is a trio of older children, infinitely fascinating.
They confer briefly, then do something to the cylinder, and
it unravels, extruding into the third dimension, turning into a
stack of blocks.
Aha! thinks Art. This is another piece of the secret knowledge
that older people posses, the strange magic that is used to operate
cars and elevators and shoelaces.
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.
By the age of five, he was stuck in a sort of perpetual terrible
twos, fearlessly shouting "no" at the world's every rule,
arguing the morals and reason behind them until the frustrated adults
whom he was picking on gave up and swatted him or told him that
that was just how it was.
In the Easter of his sixth year, an itchy-suited and hard-shoed
visit to church with his Gran turned into a raging holy war that
had the parishoners and the clergy arguing with him in teams and
relays.
It started innocently enough: "Why does God care if we take
off our hats, Gran?" But the nosy ladies in the nearby pews
couldn't bear to simply listen in, and the argument spread like
ripples on a pond, out as far as the pulpit, where the priest decided
to squash the whole line of inquiry with some half-remembered philosophical
word games from Descartes in which the objective truth of reality
is used to prove the benificence of God and vice-versa, and culminates
with "I think therefore I am." Father Stavropoulos even
managed to work it into the thread of the sermon, but before he
could go on, Art's shrill little voice answered from within the
congregation.
Amazingly, the six year old had managed to assimilate all of Descartes'
fairly tricksy riddles in as long as it took to describe them, and
then went on to use those same arguments to prove the necessary
cruelty of God, followed by the necessary non-existence of the Supreme
Being, and Gran tried to take him home then, but the priest -- who'd
watched Jesuits play intellectual table-tennis and recognized a
natural when he saw one -- called him to the pulpit, whence Art
took on the entire congregation, singly and in bunches, as they
assailed his reasoning and he built it back up, laying rhetorical
traps that they blundered into with all the cunning of a cabbage.
Father Stavropoulos laughed and clarified the points when they were
stuttered out by some marble-mouthed rhetorical amateur from the
audience, then sat back and marvelled as Art did his thing. Not
much was getting done vis-a-vis sermonizing, and there was still
the Communion to be administered, but God knew it had been a long
time since the congregation was engaged so thoroughly with coming
to grips with God and what their faith meant.
Afterwards, when Art was returned to his scandalized, thin-lipped
Gran, Father Stavropoulos made a point of warmly embracing her and
telling her that Art was welcome at his pulpit any time, and suggested
a future in the seminary. Gran was amazed, and blushed under her
Sunday powder, and the clawed hand on his shoulder became a caress.
The theme of this story is choosing smarts over happiness, or maybe
happiness over smarts. Art's a good guy. He's smart as hell. That's
his schtick. If he were a cartoon character, he'd be the pain-in-the-ass
poindexter who is all the time dispelling the mysteries that fascinate
his buddies. It's not easy being Art's friend.
Which is, of course, how Art ("not his real name") ended
up sitting 45 stories over the woodsy Massachusetts countryside,
hot August wind ruffling his hair and blowing up the legs of his
boxers, pencil in his nose, euthanizing his story prepatory to dissecting
it. In order to preserve the narrative integrity, Art ("not
his real name") may take some liberties with the truth. This
is autobiographical fiction, after all, not an autobiography.
Call me Art ("not my real name"). I am an agent-provocatuer
in the Eastern Standard Tribe, though I've spent most of my life
in GMT-9 and at various latitudes of Zulu, which means that my poor
pineal gland has all but forgotten how to do its job without that
I drown it in melatonin precursors and treat it to multi-hour nine
kilolumen sessions in the glare of my travel lantern.
The tribes are taking over the world. You can track our progress
by the rise of minor traffic accidents. The sleep-deprived are terrible,
terrible drivers. Daylight savings time is a widowmaker: stay off
the roads on Leap Forward day!
Here is the second character in the morality play. She's the love
interest. Was. We broke up, just before I got sent to the sanitorium.
Our circadians weren't compatible.
April 3, 2022 was the day that Art nearly killed the first and
only woman he ever really loved. It was her fault.
Art's car was running low on lard after a week in the Benelux countries,
where the residents were all high-net-worth cholesterol-conscious
codgers who guarded their arteries from the depredations of the
frytrap as jealously as they squirrelled their money away from the
taxman. He was, therefore, thrilled and delighted to be back on
British soil, Greenwich+0, where grease ran like water and his runabout
could be kept easily and cheaply fuelled and the vodka could run
down his gullet instead of into his tank.
He was in the Kensington High on a sleepy Sunday morning, GMT0300h
-- 2100h back in EDT -- and the GPS was showing insufficient data-points
to even gauge traffic between his geoloc and the Camden High where
he kept his rooms. 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.
So he whistled a jaunty tune and swilled his coffium, a fad that
had just made it to the UK, thanks to the loosening of rules governing
the disposal of heavy water in the EU. The java just wouldn't cool
off, remaining hot enough to guarantee optimal caffeine osmosis
right down to the last drop.
If he was jittery, it was no moreso than was customary for ESTalists
at GMT+0, and he was driving safely and with due caution. If the
woman had looked out before stepping off the kerb, if she hadn't
been wearing stylish black in the pitchy dark of the London streets,
if she hadn't stepped right in front of his runabout, he
would have merely swerved and swore and given her a bit of a fright.
But she didn't, she was, she did, and he kicked the brake as hard
as he could, twisted the wheel likewise, and still clipped her hipside
and sent her ass-over-teakettle before the runabout did its own
Immelman roll, making three complete revolutions across the Kensington
High before lodging in the Royal Gardens Hotel's shrubs. Art was
covered in scorching, molten coffium, screaming and clawing at his
eyes, upside down, when the porters from the Royal Gardens opened
his runabout's upside-down door, undid his safety harness and pulled
him out from behind the rapidly flacciding airbag. They plunged
his face into the ornamental birdbath, which had a skin of ice that
shattered on his nose and jangled against his jawbone as the icy
water cooled the coffium and stopped the terrible, terrible burning.
He ended up on his knees, sputtering and blowing and shivering,
and cleared his eyes in time to see the woman he'd hit being carried
out of the middle of the road on a human travois made of the porters'
linked arms of red wool and gold brocade.
"Assholes!" she was hollering. "I could have a goddamn
spinal injury! You're not supposed to move me!"
"Look, miss," one porter said, a young chap with the
kind of fantastic dentition that only an insecure teabag would ever
pay for, teeth so white and flawless they strobed in the sodium
streetlamps. "Look. We can leave you in the middle of the road,
right, and not move you, like we're supposed to. But if we do that,
chances are you're going to get run over before the medics get here,
and then you certainly will have a spinal injury, and a crushed
skull besides, like as not. Do you follow me?"
"You!" she said, pointing a long and accusing finger
at Art. "You! Don't you watch where you're going, you fool!
You could have killed me!"
Art shook water off his face and blew a mist from his dripping
moustache. "Sorry," he said, weakly. She had an American
accent, Californian maybe, a litigious stridency that tightened
his sphincter like an alum enema.
"Sorry?" she said, as the porters lowered her gently
to the narrow strip turf out beside the sidewalk. "Sorry? Jesus,
is that the best you can do?"
"Well you did step out in front of my car," he
said, trying to marshall some spine.
She attempted to sit up, then slumped back down, wincing. "You
were going too fast!"
"I don't think so," he said. "I'm pretty sure I
was doing 45 -- that's five clicks under the limit. Of course, the
GPS will tell for sure."
At the mention of empirical evidence, she seemed to lose interest
in being angry. "Give me a phone, will you?"
Mortals may be promiscuous with their handsets, but for a tribalist,
one's relationship with one's comm is deeply personal. Art would
have sooner shared his underwear. But he had hit her with
his car. Reluctantly, Art passed her his comm.
The woman stabbed at the handset with the fingers of her left hand,
squinting at it in the dim light. Eventually, she clamped it to
her head. "Johnny? It's Linda. Yes, I'm still in London. How's
tricks out there? Good, good to hear. How's Marybeth? Oh, that's
too bad. Want to hear how I am?" She grinned devilishly. "I
just got hit by a car. No, just now. Five minutes ago. Of course
I'm hurt! I think he broke my hip -- maybe my spine, too. Yes, I
can wiggle my toes. Maybe he shattered a disc and it's sawing through
the cord right now. Concussion? Oh, almost certainly. Pain and suffering,
loss of enjoyment of life, missed wages..." She looked up at
Art. "You're insured, right?"
Art nodded, miserably.
"Half a mil, easy. Easy! Get the papers going, will you? I'll
call you when the ambulance gets here. Bye. Love you too. Bye. Bye.
Bye, Johnny. I got to go. Bye!" She made a kissy noise and
tossed the phone back at Art. He snatched it out of the air in a
panic, closed its cover reverentially and slipped it back in his
jacket-pocket.
"C'mere," she said, crooking a finger. He knelt beside
her.
"I'm Linda," she said, shaking his hand, then pulling
it to her chest.
"Art," Art said.
"Art. Here's the deal, Art. It's no one's fault, OK? It was
dark, you were driving under the limit, I was proceeding with due
caution. Just one of those things. But you did hit me.
Your insurer's gonna have to pay out -- rehab, pain and suffering,
you get it. That's going to be serious kwan. I'll got splits with
you, you play along."
Art looked puzzled.
"Art. Art. Art. Art, here's the thing. Maybe you were distracted.
Lost. Not looking. Not saying you were, but maybe. Maybe you were,
and if you were, my lawyer's going to get that out of you, he's
going to nail you, and I'll get a big, fat check. On the other hand,
you could just, you know, cop to it. Play along. You make this easy,
we'll make this easy. Split it down the middle, once my lawyer gets
his piece. Sure, your premiums'll go up, but there'll be enough
to cover both of us. Couldn't you use some ready cash? Lots of zeroes.
Couple hundred grand, maybe more. I'm being nice here -- I could
keep it all for me."
"I don't think --"
"Sure you don't. You're an honest man. I understand, Art.
Art. Art, I understand. But what has your insurer done for you,
lately? My uncle Ed, he got caught in a threshing machine, paid
his premiums every week for forty years, what did he get? Nothing.
Insurance companies. They're the great satan. No one likes an insurance
company. Come on, Art. Art. You don't have to say anything now,
but think about it, OK, Art?"
She released his hand, and he stood. The porter with the teeth
flashed them at him. "Mad," he said, "just mad. Watch
yourself, mate. Get your solicitor on the line, I were you."
He stepped away and fired up his comm and tunnelled to a pseudonymous
relay, bouncing the call off a dozen mixmasters. He was, after all,
in deep cover as a GMTalist, and it wouldn't do to have his enciphered
packets' destination in the clear -- a little traffic analysis and
his cover'd be blown. He velcroed the keyboard to his thigh and
started chording.
Trepan: Any EU
lawyers on the channel?
Gink-Go: Lawyers.
Heh. Kill 'em all. Specially eurofag fixers.
Junta: Hey, I
resemble that remark
Trepan: Junta,
you're an EU lawyer?
Gink-Go: Use autocounsel,
dude. L{ia|awye}rs suck. Channel #autocounsel. Chatterbot with all
major legal systems on the backend.
Trepan: Whatever.
I need a human lawyer.
Trepan: Junta,
you there?
Gink-Go: Off raping
humanity.
Gink-Go: Fuck
lawyers.
Trepan: /shitlist
Gink-Go
##Gink-Go added
to Trepan's shitlist. Use '/unshit Gink-Go' to see messages again
Gink-Go: <shitlisted>
Gink-Go: <shitlisted>
Gink-Go: <shitlisted>
Gink-Go: <shitlisted>
##Gink-Go added
to Junta's shitlist. Use '/unshit Gink-Go' to see messages again
##Gink-Go added
to Thomas-hawk's shitlist. Use '/unshit Gink-Go' to see messages
again
##Gink-Go added
to opencolon's shitlist. Use '/unshit Gink-Go' to see messages again
##Gink-Go added
to jackyardbackoff's shitlist. Use '/unshit Gink-Go' to see messages
again
##Gink-Go added
to freddy-kugel's shitlist. Use '/unshit Gink-Go' to see messages
again
opencolon: Trolls
suck. Gink-Go away.
Gink-Go: <shitlisted>
Gink-Go: <shitlisted>
Gink-Go: <shitlisted>
##Gink-Go has
left channel #EST.chatter
Junta: You were
saying?
##Junta (private)
(file transfer)
##Received credential
from Junta. Verifying. Credential identified: "Licensed to
practice private law in the EU, Switzerland, Belarus."
Trepan: /private
Junta I just hit a woman while driving the Kensington High. Her
fault. She's banged up. Wants me to admit culpability in exchange
for half the insurance. Advice?
##Junta (private):
I beg your pardon?
Trepan: /private
Junta She's crazy. She just got off the phone with some kinda lawyer
in the States. Says she can get $5*10^5 at least, and will split
with me if I don't dispute.
##Junta (private):
Bloody Americans. No offense. What kind of instrumentation recorded
it?
Trepan: /private
Junta My GPS. Maybe some secams. Eyewitnesses, maybe.
##Junta (private):
And you'll say what, exactly? That you were distracted? Fiddling
with something?
Trepan: /private
Junta I guess.
##Junta (private):
You're looking at three points off your permit. Statuatory increase
in premiums totalling 2*10^5 Sterling over five years. How's your
record?
##Transferring
credential "Driving record" to Junta. Receipt confirmed.
##Junta (private):
Hmmm.
##Junta (private):
Nothing outrageous. _Were_ you distracted?
Trepan: /private
Junta I guess. Maybe.
##Junta (private):
You guess. Well, who would know better than you, right? My fee's
10 percent. Stop guessing. You _were_ distracted. Overtired. It's
late. Regrettable. Sincerely sorry. Have her solicitor contact me
directly. I'll meet you here at 1000h GMT/0400h EDT and go over
it with you, yes? Agreeable?
Trepan: /private
Junta Agreed. Thanks.
##Junta (private)
(file transfer)
##Received smartcontract
from Junta. Verifying. Smartcontract "Representation agreement"
verified.
Trepan: /join
#autocounsel
counselbot: Welcome,
Trepan! How can I help you?
##Transferring
smartcontract "Representation agreement" to counselbot.
Receipt confirmed.
Trepan: /private
counselbot What is the legal standing of this contract?
##counselbot (private):
Smartcontract "Representation agreement" is an ISO standard
representation agreement between a client and an attorney for purposes
of litigation in the UK.
##autocounsel
(private) (file transfer)
##Received "representation
agreement faq uk 2.3.2 2JAN22" from autocounsel.
Trepan: /join
#EST.chatter
Trepan: /private
Junta It's a deal
##Transferring
key-signed smartcontract "Representation agreement" to
Junta. Receipt confirmed.
Trepan: /quit
Gotta go, thanks!
##Trepan has left
channel #EST.chatter "Gotta go, thanks!
bio:
Cory Doctorow is a science
fiction writer, journalist and technocrat. His first novel, "Down
and Out in the Magic Kingdom," will be published by Tor Books
in the Fall of 2002. He is the co-founder of OpenCola,
Inc. and is the co-editor of BoingBoing
. His last book was The
Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction (co-written
with Karl Schroeder). He lives in San Francisco and Toronto.
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