nearest shelving unit and grabbed a PC mini-tower with the lid off. “But did you ever do this?” He stuck the machine under Alan’s nose and swung the gooseneck desk lamp over it. It was a white-box PC, generic commodity hardware, with a couple of network cards.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a junk access point! I made it out of trash! The only thing I bought were the network cards—two wireless, one Ethernet. It’s running a FreeBSD distribution off a CD, so the OS can never get corrupted. It’s got lots of sweet stuff in the distro, and all you need to do is plug it in, point the antennae in opposite directions, and you’re up. It does its own power management, it automagically peers with other access points if it can find ’em, and it does its own dynamic channel selection to avoid stepping on other access points.”

Alan turned his head this way and that, making admiring noises. “You made this, huh?”

“For about eighty bucks. It’s my fifteenth box. Eventually, I wanna have a couple hundred of these.”

“Ambitious,” Alan said, handing the box back. “How do you pay for the parts you have to buy? Do you have a grant?”

“A grant? Shit, no! I’ve got a bunch of street kids who come in and take digital pix of the stuff I have no use for, research them online, and post them to eBay. I split the take with them. Brings in a couple grand a week, and I’m keeping about fifty street kids fed besides. I go diving three times a week out in Concord and Oakville and Richmond Hill, anywhere I can find an industrial park. If I had room, I’d recruit fifty more kids—I’m bringing it in faster than they can sell it.”

“Why don’t you just do less diving?”

“Are you kidding me? It’s all I can do not to go out every night! You wouldn’t believe the stuff I find—all I can think about is all the stuff I’m missing out on. Some days I wish that my kids were less honest; if they ripped off some stuff, I’d have room for a lot more.”

Alan laughed. Worry for Edward and Frederick and George nagged at him, impotent anxiety, but this was just so fascinating. Fascinating and distracting, and, if not normal, at least not nearly so strange as he could be. He imagined the city gridded up with junk equipment, radiating Internet access from the lakeshore to the outer suburbs. The grandiosity took his breath away.

“Look,” Kurt said, spreading out a 

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