“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 the edge—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.

Kurt lived in the back of a papered-over storefront on Oxford. The front two-thirds were a maze of peeling, stickered-over stamped-metal shelving units piled high with junk tech: ancient shrink-wrapped software, stacked up low-capacity hard drives, cables and tapes and removable media. Alan tried to imagine making sense of it all, flowing it into The Inventory, and felt something like vertigo.

In a small hollow carved out of the back, Kurt had arranged a cluttered desk, a scuffed twin bed and a rack of milk crates filled with t-shirts and underwear.

Alan picked his way delicately through the store and found himself a seat on an upturned milk crate. Kurt sat on the bed and grinned expectantly.

“So?” he said.

“So what?” Alan said.

“So what is this! Isn’t it great?”

“Well, you sure have a lot of stuff, I’ll give you that,” Alan said.

“It’s all dumpstered,” Kurt said casually.

“Oh, you dive?” Alan said. “I used to dive.” It was mostly true. Alan had always been a picker, always on the lookout for bargoons, even if they were sticking out of someone’s trash bin. Sometimes especially if they were sticking out of someone’s trash bin—seeing what normal people threw away gave him a rare glimpse into their lives.

Kurt walked over to the 

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