Eastern Standard Tribe
an extract from the novel
by Cory Doctorow
"Utterly contemporary and deeply peculiar
-- a hard combination to beat (or, these days, to find)."
- William Gibson
"Cory Doctorow knocks me out. In a good way."
- Pat Cadigan
"Cory Doctorow is just far enough ahead of
the game to give you that authentic chill of the future, and close
enough to home for us to know that he's talking about where we live
as well as where we're going to live; a connected world full of disconnected
people. One of whom is about to lobotomise himself through the nostril
with a pencil. Funny as hell and sharp as steel."
- Warren Ellis

1.
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 a hallucinatory hypperreal clarity. Like now as I sit here in my
underwear on the roof of a sanatorium 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, laid 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:

2.
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 cylinder 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, on waking. This is another piece of the secret knowledge
that older people possess, 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 parishioners
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 beneficence
of God and vice-versa, and culminates with "I think therefore I am."
Father Ferlenghetti 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's
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 nonexistence 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 Ferlenghetti laughed and clarified the
points when they were stuttered out by some marble-mouthed rhetorical
amateur from the audience, then sat back and marveled 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 Ferlenghetti 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.

3.
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 preparatory 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-provocateur 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 sanatorium. Our circadians
weren't compatible.

4.
April 3, 2012 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 squirreled 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 Street 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 more so 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 and into the anemically
thin road, if she hadn't been wearing stylish black in the pitchy dark
of the curve before the Royal Garden Hotel, if she hadn't stepped right
in front of his runabout, he would have merely swerved and sworn
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 barrel
roll, making three complete revolutions across the Kensington High before
lodging in the Royal Garden Hotel's shrubs. Art was covered in scorching,
molten coffium, screaming and clawing at his eyes, upside down, when
the porters from the Royal Garden 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 paramedics 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
and miraculously flensed him of the impulse to argue.
"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 marshal 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, fishing for an argument that would not come.
"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 comm
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 go 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 back as far as the narrow sidewalk would allow and fired
up his comm and tunneled 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 UK solicitors on the channel?
Gink-Go: Lawyers. Heh. Kill 'em all. Specially eurofag fixers.
Junta: Hey, I resemble that remark
Trepan: Junta, you're a UK 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:
Solicitor, registered with the Law Society to practice in England
and Wales, also registered in Australia.
Trepan: /private Junta I just hit a woman while driving the Kensington
High Street. Her fault. She's hurt. 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 licence.
Statutory increase in premiums totalling EU 2*10^5 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 a
solicitor 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!

5.
Once the messy business of negotiating EU healthcare for
foreign nationals had been sorted out with the EMTs and the Casualty
Intake triage, once they'd both been digested and shat out by a dozen
diagnostic devices from X-rays to MRIs, once the harried house officers
had impersonally prodded them and presented them both with hardcopy
FAQs for their various injuries (second-degree burns, mild shock for
Art; pelvic dislocation, minor kidney bruising, broken femur, whiplash,
concussion and mandible trauma for Linda), they found themselves in
adjacent beds in the recovery room, which bustled as though it, too,
were working on GMT-5, busy as a 9PM restaurant on a Saturday night.
Art had an IV taped to the inside of his left arm, dripping saline
and tranqs, making him logy and challenging his circadians. Still, he
was the more mobile of the two, as Linda was swaddled in smartcasts
that both immobilized her and massaged her, all the while osmosing transdermal
antiinflammatories and painkillers. He tottered the two steps to the
chair at her bedside and shook her hand again.
"Don't take this the wrong way, but you look like hell," he said.
She smiled. Her jaw made an audible pop. "Get a picture, will you?
It'll be good in court."
He chuckled.
"No, seriously. Get a picture."
So he took out his comm and snapped a couple pix, including one with
nightvision filters on to compensate for the dimmed recovery room lighting.
"You're a cool customer, you know that?" he said, as he tucked his camera
away.
"Not so cool. This is all a coping strategy. I'm pretty shook up, you
want to know the truth. I could have died."
"What were you doing on the street at three AM anyway?"
"I was upset, so I took a walk, thought I'd get something to eat or
a beer or something."
"You haven't been here long, huh?"
She laughed, and it turned into a groan. "What the hell is wrong with
the English, anyway? The sun sets and the city rolls up its streets.
It's not like they've got this great tradition of staying home and surfing
cable or anything."
"They're all snug in their beds, farting away their lentil roasts."
"That's it! You can't get a steak here to save your life. Mad cows,
all of 'em. If I see one more gray soy sausage, I'm going to kill the
waitress and eat her."
"You just need to get hooked up," he said. "Once we're out of here,
I'll take you out for a genuine blood pudding, roast beef and oily chips.
I know a place."
"I'm drooling. Can I borrow your phone again? Uh, I think you're going
to have to dial for me."
"That's OK. Give me the number."
She did, and he cradled his comm to her head. He was close enough to
her that he could hear the tinny, distinctive ringing of a namerican
circuit at the other end. He heard her shallow breathing, heard her
jaw creak. He smelled her shampoo, a free-polymer new-car smell, smelled
a hint of her sweat. A cord stood out on her neck, merging in an elegant
vee with her collarbone, an arrow pointing at the swell of her breast
under her paper gown.
"Toby, it's Linda."
A munchkin voice chittered down the line.
"Shut up, OK. Shut up. Shut. I'm in the hospital." More chipmunk. "Got
hit by a car. I'll be OK. No. Shut up. I'll be fine. I'll send you the
FAQs. I just wanted to say. . ." She heaved a sigh, closed her eyes.
"You know what I wanted to say. Sorry, all right? Sorry it came to this.
You'll be OK. I'll be OK. I just didn't want to leave you hanging."
She sounded groggy, but there was a sob there, too. "I can't talk long.
I'm on a shitload of dope. Yes, it's good dope. I'll call you later.
I don't know when I'm coming back, but we'll sort it out there, all
right? OK. Shut up. OK. You too."
She looked up at Art. "My boyfriend. Ex-boyfriend. Not sure who's leaving
who at this point. Thanks." She closed her eyes. Her eyelids were mauve,
a tracery of pink veins. She snored softly.
Art set an alarm that would wake him up in time to meet his lawyer,
folded up his comm and crawled back into bed. His circadians swelled
and crashed against the sides of his skull, and before he knew it, he
was out.
...continues

© Cory Doctorow 2004
Eastern Standard Tribe is published by Tor
Books (March 2004, ISBN: 0765307596).
Order online using these links and infinity
plus will benefit:
...Eastern Standard Tribe, hardback, from Amazon.com
or Amazon.co.uk.

Elsewhere in infinity plus:
Elsewhere on the web:
- Cory Doctorow's website, craphound.com,
includes full texts of both Eastern Standard Tribe and his
first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, along with
lots more good stuff.
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