Cory Doctorow - Liberation Spectrum

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Liberation spectrum

By Cory Doctorow

The tiny multinational lumbered across the Niagara Falls border in its tour

bus, Lee-Daniel at the wheel, sipping iced mocha from the flexible straw

threaded through the eyelets on his jacket. All the way since the Akwesahsne

debacle, he'd been steadily consuming the lethal blend of bittersweet

chocolate and espresso and reciting mnemonic sleep-dep chants. But after

twenty straight hours he was in deadly danger of falling straight to sleep and

head-onning the bus into a Jersey barrier. Or a bullet train. Or a minivan.

On U.S. soil, he pulled the bus over at a temporary roadhouse and set the

handbrake. He eased off the driver's perch, chafing his narrow ass to get the

blood flowing, and gave forth a drawn-out "gaaaah" as pins and needles stabbed

his sweat- marinated muscles. He heard the multinational rousing itself behind

him. First, the major investors in the front row. Then the rest of the board

of directors in the row behind them. Then four rows of middle managers and

finally the great mass of frontline workers, techs, customer service reps,

troubleshooters, antennamen, switchwomen, chicken pluckers and left-handed

bottle stretchers.

Lee-Daniel flipped the windows to transparent and let the sun shine in,

provoking groans from the corporation. MacDiarmid, the angel investor who'd

been in since the multinational had been able to fit in a sedan, threw a

strong arm around Lee-Daniel's shoulders. "You OK?" he said. The tone had

phony solicitousness. MacDiarmid had been a stand-up guy through half a dozen

disasters, from hostile takeover attempts to roadblocks to high-speed engine

failure, and Lee-Daniel knew a fake when he heard it.

"I'm fixing to lay down and die," Lee-Daniel said, stretching theatrically,

his pipe-cleaner arms straining.

"I'm street-legal in New York," Mac said. "How about I drive the bus for the

next couple shifts?" His black hair was showing grey now, but his eyebrows

were still fierce and black, his eyes still sharp in their nest of

whiskey-cured crow's-feet.

"No!" Lee-Daniel said. He never ceded the wheel -- it was his damned company

and he'd drive the damned bus. Lee-Daniel saw the shareholder confidence

eroding before his eyes.

"Just for a while, OK? Not permanent, just for a day or two, just long enough

for you to get over the sleep deficit and regrow some stomach lining."

It was hard being the CEO of a mobile multinational. The shareholder oversight

was murder. "Come on, Mac," he said. "I can drive the bus. One thing I can

always do, I can drive the fucking bus."

MacDiarmid looked closely at him, then smiled and gave him a burly man-hug

that smelled of sandalwood soap and good liquor. "Yeah, of course, of course."

"Thanks, Mac," Lee-Daniel said. "How about we get some eats?" He put his hand

on the geometry reader beside the wheel, re- authenticated to the bus, then

hit the hatches. Doors hissed open at the back, at the front, at the middle,

fresh dusty air rushing in all at once in an ear-popping whoosh. The bus knelt

ponderously and the company piled out.

MacDiarmid hustled away to join the rest of the investors, his exquisite

handmade leather shoes slapping the paving, the cuffs of his wool tailor-made

slacks shushing over their gleaming uppers, and as Lee-Daniel locked the bus

down and armed it up, he watched the angel investor whisper in his

co-shareholders' ears. Lee-Daniel couldn't hear the words, but six years at

the wheel of Cognitive Radio Inc. had schooled him well in the body language

of investors and he knew his days with CogRad were numbered. The roadhouse was

the kind of TAZ that got less entertaining by the second. Lee-Daniel stood in

the blinking vegaslights for an eternity while he authenticated to the

roadhouse-area-network, surrounded by generic ads while the giant vending

machine figured out who he was and what to sell him. Once the wall spat out

his token -- poker chips adorned with grinning, dancing anthropomorphic

dollar, euro and yen symbols -- the walls around him leapt to delighted life,

pitching their wares hard. He struggled with the rest of the corporation to

make out the actual nature of the products behind the pitch and locate a

tuna-melt and wave his chip at it.

The sandwich appeared in a slot by his feet and when he bent to fetch it, he

was bombarded with upsell ads set into the floor tiles: "Lee-Daniel! People

who bought tuna-melts also bought thousand-hour power cells. People who bought

OralCare mouth kits also bought MyGuts brand edible oscopycams. People who

bought banana-melatonin rice-shakes also bought tailormade sailcloth shirts by

Figaro's of London and Rangoon."

It only got worse then, as he sat down at a crowded table with middle managers

in need of reassurance, while swatting away the buzzing aerostats that

probabalistically routed towards those diners with the highest credit ratings,

delivering pitches whose tone and content had been honed by genetic algorithms

that sharpened them to maximal intrusiveness and intriguingness. It took

vicious, darwinian computation to make a high colonic sound like an afternoon

at a spa.

"No one else will say it," said Joey Riel, a 17-year-old Metis whose fluency

in English, French and Ojibwa had made him the youngest middle manager in

CogRad history, eight months before. "So I will. That was fucked up. Too

fucked up."

His griping had been constant since his promotion up from antennaman and

getting caught between the Mohawk Warriors' plan to seize the radio spectrum

on their territory and the trigger-happy Provincial cops had only intensified

it.

Further down the arcade, the investors were waving their tokens over a trading

table, playing the instant futures market. An aerostat overhead mirrored the

gameplay, and as Lee-Daniel watched, MacDiarmid doubled his money on a

short-odds bet on two cherries and a lemon, then Earnshaw lost big when his

long-odds investment on uranium and coal came back with two windmills and a

photovoltaic array.

"Amen to that, bro," said Elaine, who ran the surveyors. She was all lean

muscle and blackfly repellent and mail-order outdoorwear, handily capable of

living off the land for weeks while trekking the bush, homing in on optimal

repeater locations. At the Akwesahsne Sovereign, she'd broken the hearts of a

half dozen starry-eyed Mohawk Warriors who'd puppydogged after her as she

shlepped the length and breadth of their territory, warchalking neon arrows to

indicate RF shadows cast by especially leafy trees and outcroppings of granite

Canadian Shield. That was before the Sûreté du Québec arrived on the scene and

it all went pear shaped.

"It won't happen again," said Mortimer, the security man. Lee-Daniel had been

protecting the old dodderer from the board of directors, who saw him as an

insurance nightmare. Mortimer's hands shook, he was nightblind, and he was 98

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Cory Doctorow - Liberation Spectrum

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