“Eventually?” The kid took on a look of intense, teenaged skepticism. He claimed to be 20, but he looked about 17 and had been the puck in an intense game of eyeball hockey among the cute little punk girls who’d been volunteering in the shopfront when he’d appeared.
“That’s the end-goal, a citywide network with all-we-can eat free connectivity, fully anonymized and hardened against malicious attackers and incidental environmental interference.” Alan steepled his fingers and tried to look serious and committed.
“Okay, that’s the goal.”
“But it’s not going to be all or nothing. We want to make the community a part of the network. Getting people energized about participating in the network is as important as providing the network itself—hell, the network is people. So we’ve got this intermediate step, this way that everyone can pitch in.”
“And that is, what, renaming your network to ParasiteNet?”
Kurt nodded vigorously. “Zactly.”
“And how will I find these ParasiteNet nodes? Will there be a map or something with all this information on it?”
Alan nodded slowly. “We’ve been thinking about a mapping application—”
“But we decided that it was stupid,” Kurt said. “No one needed to draw a map of the Web—it just grew and people found its weird corners on their own. Networks don’t need centralized authority, that’s just the chains on your mind talking—”
“The chains on my mind?” The kid snorted.