“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 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.