The rain let up by afternoon, leaving a crystalline, fresh-mown air hanging over the Market.Andrew sat in his office by his laptop and watched the sun come out. He needed to find Ed, needed to find Frank, needed to find Grant, but he was out of practice when it came to the ways of the mountain and its sons. Whenever he tried to imagine a thing to do next, his mind spun and the worldless howling thing inside him stirred. The more he tried to remember what it was like to be a son of the mountain, the more he felt something he’d worked very hard for, his delicate normalcy, slipping away.So he put his soaked clothes in the dryer, clamped his laptop under his arm, and went out. He moped around the park and the fountain, but the stroller moms whose tots were splashing in the wading pool gave him sufficient dirty looks that he walked up to the Greek’s, took a table on the patio, and ordered a murderously strong cup of coffee.He opened up the screen and rotated around the little café table until the screen was in the shade and his wireless card was aligned for best reception from the yagi antenna poking out of his back window. He opened up a browser and hit MapQuest, then brought up a street-detailed map of the Market. He pasted it into his CAD app and started to mark it up, noting all the different approaches to his house that Davey might take the next time he came. The maps soothed him, made him feel like a part of the known world.Augusta Avenue and Oxford were both out; even after midnight, when the stores were all shuttered, there was far too much foot traffic for Davey to pass by unnoticed. But the alleys that mazed the back ways were ideal. Some were fenced off, some were too narrow to pass, but most of them—he’d tried to navigate them by bicycle once and found himself utterly lost. He’d had to turn around slowly until he spotted the CN Tower and use it to get his bearings.He poked at the map, sipping the coffee, then ordering another from the Greek’s son, who hadn’t yet figured out that he was a regular and so sneered at his laptop with undisguised contempt. “Computers, huh?” he said. “Doesn’t anyone just read a book anymore?”“I used to own a bookstore,” Alan said, then held up a finger and moused over to his photo album and brought up the thumbnails of his old bookstore. “See?”The Greek’s son, thirty with a paunch and sweat-rings under the pits of his white “The Greek’s” T-shirt, sat down and looked at the photos. “I remember that place, on Harbord Street, right?”Alan smiled. “Yup. We lost the store when they blew up the abortion clinic next door,” he said. “Insurance paid out, but I wasn’t ready to start over with another bookstore.”The Greek’s son shook his head. “Another coffee, right?”“Right,” Alan said.Alan went back to the map, realigning the laptop for optimal reception again.“You got a wireless card in that?” a young guy at the next table asked. He was dressed in Kensington Market crusty-punk chic, tatts and facial piercings, filth-gray bunchoffuckinggoofs tee, cutoffs, and sweaty high boots draped with chains.“Yeah,” Alan said. He sighed and closed the map window. He wasn’t getting anywhere, anyway.“And you get service here? Where’s your access point?” Crusty-punk or no, he sounded as nerdy as any of the Web-heads you’d find shopping for bargains on CD blanks on College Street.“Three blocks that way,” Alan said, pointing. “Hanging off my house. The network name is ‘walesave.’”“Shit, that’s you?” the kid said. “Goddammit, you’re clobbering our access points!”“What access point?”“Accesspoints. ParasiteNet.” He indicated a peeling sticker on the lapel of his cut-down leather jacket showing a skull with crossed radio towers underneath it. “I’m trying to get a mesh-net running though all of the Market, and you’re hammering me. Jesus, I was ready to rat you out to the radio cops at the Canadian Radio and Television Commission. Dude, you’ve got to turn down the freakinggainon those things.”“What’s a mesh-net?”The kid moved his beer over to Alan’s table and sat down. “Okay, so pretend that your laptop is the access point. It radiates more or less equally in all directions, depending on your antenna characteristics and leaving out the RF shadows that microwaves and stucco and cordless phones generate.” He arranged the coffee cup and the beer at equal distances from the laptop, then moved them around to demonstrate the coverage area. “Right, so what happens if I’m out of range, overhere—” he put his beer back on his own table—"and you want to reach me? Well, you could just turn up the gain on your access point, either by increasing the power so that it radiates farther in all directions, or by focusing the transmissions so they travel farther in a line of sight.”“Right,” Alan said, sipping his coffee.“Right. So both of those approaches suck. If you turn up the power, you radiate over everyone else’s signal, so if I’ve got an access pointhere"—he held his fist between their tables—"no one can hear it because you’re drowning it out. It’s like you’re shouting so loud that no one else can carry on a conversation.”“So why don’t you just use my network? I want to be able to get online anywhere in the Market, but that means that anyone can, right?”The crusty-punk waved his hand dismissively. “Sure, whatever. But what happens if your network gets shut down? Or if you decide to start eavesdropping on other people? Or if someone wants to get to the printer in her living room? It’s no good.”“So, what, you want me to switch to focused antennae?”“That’s no good. If you used a focused signal, you’re going to have to be perfectly aligned if you’re going to talk back to your base, so unless you want to provide a connection to one tiny pinpoint somewhere a couple kilometers away, it won’t do you any good.”“There’s no solution, then? I should just give up?”The crusty-punk held up his hands. “Hell, no! There’s just nocentralizedsolution. You can’t be Superman, blanketing the whole world with wireless using your almighty antennaprick, but so what? That’s what mesh networks are for. Check it out.” He arranged the beer and the laptop and the coffee cup so that they were strung out along a straight line. “Okay, you’re the laptop and I’m the coffee cup. We both have a radio and we want to talk to each other.“Wecouldturn up the gain on our radios so that they can shout loud enough to be heard at this distance, but that would drown out this guy here.” He gestured at the now-empty beer. “Wecoulduse a focused antenna, but if I move a little bit off the beam"—he nudged the coffee cup to one side -- “we’re dead. But there’s a third solution.”“We ask the beer to pass messages around?”“Fucking right we do! That’s the mesh part. Every station on the network getstworadios—one for talking in one direction, the other for relaying in the other direction. The more stations you add, the lower the power on each radio—and the more pathways you get to carry your data.”Alan shook his head.“It’s a fuckin’ mind-blower, isn’t it?”“Sure,” Alan said. “Sure. But does it work? Don’t all those hops between pointaand pointbslow down the connection?”“A little, sure. Not so’s you’d notice. They don’t have to go that far—the farthest any of these signals has to travel is 151 Front Street.”“What’s at 151 Front?”“TorIx—the main network interchange for the whole city! We stick an antenna out a window there and downlink it into the cage where UUNet and PSINet meet—voila, instant 11-megabit city-wide freenet!”“Where do you get the money for that?”“Who said anything about money? How much do you think UUNet and PSI charge each other to exchange traffic with one another? Who benefits when UUNet and PSI cross-connect? Is UUNet the beneficiary of PSI’s traffic, or vice versa? Internet access only costs money at theedge—and with a mesh-net, there is no edge anymore. It’s penetration at the center, just like the Devo song.”“I’m Adrian,” Alan said.“I’m Kurt,” the crusty-punk said. “Buy me a beer, Adrian?”“It’d be my pleasure,” Alan said.
The rain let up by afternoon, leaving a crystalline, fresh-mown air hanging over the Market.
Andrew sat in his office by his laptop and watched the sun come out. He needed to find Ed, needed to find Frank, needed to find Grant, but he was out of practice when it came to the ways of the mountain and its sons. Whenever he tried to imagine a thing to do next, his mind spun and the worldless howling thing inside him stirred. The more he tried to remember what it was like to be a son of the mountain, the more he felt something he’d worked very hard for, his delicate normalcy, slipping away.
So he put his soaked clothes in the dryer, clamped his laptop under his arm, and went out. He moped around the park and the fountain, but the stroller moms whose tots were splashing in the wading pool gave him sufficient dirty looks that he walked up to the Greek’s, took a table on the patio, and ordered a murderously strong cup of coffee.
He opened up the screen and rotated around the little café table until the screen was in the shade and his wireless card was aligned for best reception from the yagi antenna poking out of his back window. He opened up a browser and hit MapQuest, then brought up a street-detailed map of the Market. He pasted it into his CAD app and started to mark it up, noting all the different approaches to his house that Davey might take the next time he came. The maps soothed him, made him feel like a part of the known world.
Augusta Avenue and Oxford were both out; even after midnight, when the stores were all shuttered, there was far too much foot traffic for Davey to pass by unnoticed. But the alleys that mazed the back ways were ideal. Some were fenced off, some were too narrow to pass, but most of them—he’d tried to navigate them by bicycle once and found himself utterly lost. He’d had to turn around slowly until he spotted the CN Tower and use it to get his bearings.
He poked at the map, sipping the coffee, then ordering another from the Greek’s son, who hadn’t yet figured out that he was a regular and so sneered at his laptop with undisguised contempt. “Computers, huh?” he said. “Doesn’t anyone just read a book anymore?”
“I used to own a bookstore,” Alan said, then held up a finger and moused over to his photo album and brought up the thumbnails of his old bookstore. “See?”
The Greek’s son, thirty with a paunch and sweat-rings under the pits of his white “The Greek’s” T-shirt, sat down and looked at the photos. “I remember that place, on Harbord Street, right?”
Alan smiled. “Yup. We lost the store when they blew up the abortion clinic next door,” he said. “Insurance paid out, but I wasn’t ready to start over with another bookstore.”
The Greek’s son shook his head. “Another coffee, right?”
“Right,” Alan said.
Alan went back to the map, realigning the laptop for optimal reception again.
“You got a wireless card in that?” a young guy at the next table asked. He was dressed in Kensington Market crusty-punk chic, tatts and facial piercings, filth-gray bunchoffuckinggoofs tee, cutoffs, and sweaty high boots draped with chains.
“Yeah,” Alan said. He sighed and closed the map window. He wasn’t getting anywhere, anyway.
“And you get service here? Where’s your access point?” Crusty-punk or no, he sounded as nerdy as any of the Web-heads you’d find shopping for bargains on CD blanks on College Street.
“Three blocks that way,” Alan said, pointing. “Hanging off my house. The network name is ‘walesave.’”
“Shit, that’s you?” the kid said. “Goddammit, you’re clobbering our access points!”
“What access point?”
“Accesspoints. ParasiteNet.” He indicated a peeling sticker on the lapel of his cut-down leather jacket showing a skull with crossed radio towers underneath it. “I’m trying to get a mesh-net running though all of the Market, and you’re hammering me. Jesus, I was ready to rat you out to the radio cops at the Canadian Radio and Television Commission. Dude, you’ve got to turn down the freakinggainon those things.”
“What’s a mesh-net?”
The kid moved his beer over to Alan’s table and sat down. “Okay, so pretend that your laptop is the access point. It radiates more or less equally in all directions, depending on your antenna characteristics and leaving out the RF shadows that microwaves and stucco and cordless phones generate.” He arranged the coffee cup and the beer at equal distances from the laptop, then moved them around to demonstrate the coverage area. “Right, so what happens if I’m out of range, overhere—” he put his beer back on his own table—"and you want to reach me? Well, you could just turn up the gain on your access point, either by increasing the power so that it radiates farther in all directions, or by focusing the transmissions so they travel farther in a line of sight.”
“Right,” Alan said, sipping his coffee.
“Right. So both of those approaches suck. If you turn up the power, you radiate over everyone else’s signal, so if I’ve got an access pointhere"—he held his fist between their tables—"no one can hear it because you’re drowning it out. It’s like you’re shouting so loud that no one else can carry on a conversation.”
“So why don’t you just use my network? I want to be able to get online anywhere in the Market, but that means that anyone can, right?”
The crusty-punk waved his hand dismissively. “Sure, whatever. But what happens if your network gets shut down? Or if you decide to start eavesdropping on other people? Or if someone wants to get to the printer in her living room? It’s no good.”
“So, what, you want me to switch to focused antennae?”
“That’s no good. If you used a focused signal, you’re going to have to be perfectly aligned if you’re going to talk back to your base, so unless you want to provide a connection to one tiny pinpoint somewhere a couple kilometers away, it won’t do you any good.”
“There’s no solution, then? I should just give up?”
The crusty-punk held up his hands. “Hell, no! There’s just nocentralizedsolution. You can’t be Superman, blanketing the whole world with wireless using your almighty antennaprick, but so what? That’s what mesh networks are for. Check it out.” He arranged the beer and the laptop and the coffee cup so that they were strung out along a straight line. “Okay, you’re the laptop and I’m the coffee cup. We both have a radio and we want to talk to each other.
“Wecouldturn up the gain on our radios so that they can shout loud enough to be heard at this distance, but that would drown out this guy here.” He gestured at the now-empty beer. “Wecoulduse a focused antenna, but if I move a little bit off the beam"—he nudged the coffee cup to one side -- “we’re dead. But there’s a third solution.”
“We ask the beer to pass messages around?”
“Fucking right we do! That’s the mesh part. Every station on the network getstworadios—one for talking in one direction, the other for relaying in the other direction. The more stations you add, the lower the power on each radio—and the more pathways you get to carry your data.”
Alan shook his head.
“It’s a fuckin’ mind-blower, isn’t it?”
“Sure,” Alan said. “Sure. But does it work? Don’t all those hops between pointaand pointbslow down the connection?”
“A little, sure. Not so’s you’d notice. They don’t have to go that far—the farthest any of these signals has to travel is 151 Front Street.”
“What’s at 151 Front?”
“TorIx—the main network interchange for the whole city! We stick an antenna out a window there and downlink it into the cage where UUNet and PSINet meet—voila, instant 11-megabit city-wide freenet!”
“Where do you get the money for that?”
“Who said anything about money? How much do you think UUNet and PSI charge each other to exchange traffic with one another? Who benefits when UUNet and PSI cross-connect? Is UUNet the beneficiary of PSI’s traffic, or vice versa? Internet access only costs money at theedge—and with a mesh-net, there is no edge anymore. It’s penetration at the center, just like the Devo song.”
“I’m Adrian,” Alan said.
“I’m Kurt,” the crusty-punk said. “Buy me a beer, Adrian?”
“It’d be my pleasure,” Alan said.