An intriguing tale of friendship between an Earthman and an alien memorabilia hunters.

Craphound had wicked yard-sale karma, for a rotten, filthy alien bastard. He was too good at panning out the single grain of gold in a raging river of uselessness for me not to like him — respect him, anyway. But then he found the cowboy trunk. It was two months' rent to me and nothing but some squirrelly alien kitsch-fetish to Craphound.

So I did the unthinkable. I violated the Code. I got into a bidding war with a buddy. Never let them tell you that women poison friendships: in my experience, wounds from women-fights heal quickly; fights over garbage leave nothing behind but scorched earth.

Craphound spotted the sign — his karma, plus the goggles in his exoskeleton, gave him the advantage when we were doing 80 kmh on some stretch of back-highway in cottage country. He was riding shotgun while I drove, and we had the radio on to the CBC's summer-Saturday programming: eight weekends with eight hours of old radio dramas: “The Shadow,” “Quiet Please,” “Tom Mix,” “The Crypt-Keeper” with Bela Lugosi. It was hour three, and Bogey was phoning in his performance on a radio adaptation of The African Queen. I had the windows of the old truck rolled down so that I could smoke without fouling Craphound's breather. My arm was hanging out the window, the radio was booming, and Craphound said “Turn around! Turn around, now, Jerry, now, turn around!”

When Craphound gets that excited, it's a sign that he's spotted a rich vein. I checked the side-mirror quickly, pounded the brakes and spun around. The transmission creaked, the wheels squealed, and then we were creeping along the way we'd come.

“There,” Craphound said, gesturing with his long, skinny arm. I saw it. A wooden A-frame real-estate sign, a piece of hand-lettered cardboard stuck overtop of the realtor's name:

EAST MUSKOKA VOLUNTEER FIRE-DEPT

LADIES AUXILIARY RUMMAGE SALE

SAT 25 JUNE

“Hoo-eee!” I hollered, and spun the truck onto the dirt road. I gunned the engine as we cruised along the tree-lined road, trusting Craphound to spot any deer, signs, or hikers in time to avert disaster. The sky was a perfect blue and the smells of summer were all around us. I snapped off the radio and listened to the wind rushing through the truck. Ontario is beautiful in the summer.

“There!” Craphound shouted. I hit the turn-off and down-shifted and then we were back on a paved road. Soon, we were rolling into a country fire-station, an ugly brick barn. The hall was lined with long, folding tables, stacked high. The mother lode!

Craphound beat me out the door, as usual. His exoskeleton is programmable, so he can record little scripts for it like: move left arm to door handle, pop it, swing legs out to running-board, jump to ground, close door, move forward. Meanwhile, I'm still making sure I've switched off the headlights and that I've got my wallet.

Two blue-haired grannies had a card-table set up out front of the hall, with a big tin pitcher of lemonade and three boxes of Tim Horton assorted donuts. That stopped us both, since we share the superstition that you always buy food from old ladies and little kids, as a sacrifice to the crap-gods. One of the old ladies poured out the lemonade while the other smiled and greeted us.

“Welcome, welcome! My, you've come a long way for us!”

“Just up from Toronto, ma'am,” I said. It's an old joke, but it's also part of the ritual, and it's got to be done.

“I meant your friend, sir. This gentleman.”

Craphound smiled without baring his gums and sipped his lemonade. “Of course I came, dear lady. I wouldn't miss it for the worlds!” His accent is pretty good, but when it comes to stock phrases like this, he's got so much polish you'd think he was reading the news.

The biddie blushed and giggled, and I felt faintly sick. I walked off to the tables, trying not to hurry. I chose my first spot, about halfway down, where things wouldn't be quite so picked-over. I grabbed an empty box from underneath and started putting stuff into it: four matched highball glasses with gold crossed bowling-pins and a line of black around the rim; an Expo '67 wall-hanging that wasn't even a little faded; a shoebox full of late sixties O-Pee-Chee hockey cards; a worn, wooden-handled steel cleaver that you could butcher a steer with.

I picked up my box and moved on: a deck of playing cards copyrighted '57, with the logo for the Royal Canadian Dairy, Bala Ontario printed on the backs; a fireman's cap with a brass badge so tarnished I couldn't read it; a three-story wedding-cake trophy for the 1974 Eastern Region Curling Championships. The cash-register in my mind was ringing, ringing, ringing. God bless the East Muskoka Volunteer Fire Department Ladies' Auxiliary.

I'd mined that table long enough. I moved to the other end of the hall. Time was, I'd start at the beginning and turn over each item, build one pile of maybes and another pile of definites, try to strategise. In time, I came to rely on instinct and on the fates, to whom I make my obeisances at every opportunity.

Let's hear it for the fates: a genuine collapsible top-hat; a white-tipped evening cane; a hand-carved cherry-wood walking stick; a beautiful black lace parasol; a wrought-iron lightning rod with a rooster on top; all of it in an elephant-leg umbrella-stand. I filled the box, folded it over, and started on another.

I collided with Craphound. He grinned his natural grin, the one that showed row on row of wet, slimy gums, tipped with writhing, poisonous suckers. “Gold! Gold!” he said, and moved along. I turned my head after him, just as he bent over the cowboy trunk.

I sucked air between my teeth. It was magnificent: a leather-bound miniature steamer trunk, the leather worked with lariats, Stetson hats, war-bonnets and six-guns. I moved toward him, and he popped the latch. I caught my breath.

On top, there was a kid's cowboy costume: miniature leather chaps, a tiny Stetson, a pair of scuffed white-leather cowboy boots with long, worn spurs affixed to the heels. Craphound moved it reverently to the table and continued to pull more magic from the trunk's depths: a stack of cardboard-bound Hopalong Cassidy 78s; a pair of tin six-guns with gunbelt and holsters; a silver star that said Sheriff; a bundle of Roy Rogers comics tied with twine, in mint condition; and a leather satchel filled with plastic cowboys and Indians, enough to re-enact the Alamo.

“Oh, my God,” I breathed, as he spread the loot out on the table.

“What are these, Jerry?” Craphound asked, holding up the 78s.

“Old records, like LPs, but you need a special record player to listen to them.” I took one out of its sleeve. It gleamed, scratch-free, in the overhead fluorescents.

“I got a 78 player here,” said a member of the East Muskoka Volunteer Fire Department Ladies' Auxiliary. She was short enough to look Craphound in the eye, a hair under five feet, and had a skinny, rawboned look to her. “That's my Billy's things, Billy the Kid we called him. He was dotty for cowboys when he was a boy. Couldn't get him to take off that fool outfit — nearly got him thrown out of school. He's a lawyer now, in Toronto, got a fancy office on Bay Street. I called him to ask if he minded my putting his cowboy things in the sale, and you know what? He didn't know what I was talking about! Doesn't that beat everything? He was dotty for cowboys when he was a boy.”

It's another of my rituals to smile and nod and be as polite as possible to the erstwhile owners of crap that I'm trying to buy, so I smiled and nodded and examined the 78 player she had produced. In lariat script, on the top, it said, “Official Bob Wills Little Record Player,” and had a crude watercolour of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys grinning on the front. It was the kind of record player that folded up like a suitcase when you weren't using it. I'd had one as a kid, with Yogi Bear silkscreened on the front.

Billy's mom plugged the yellowed cord into a wall jack and took the 78 from me, touched the stylus to the record. A tinny ukelele played, accompanied by horse-clops, and then a narrator with a deep, whisky voice said, “Howdy, Pardners! I was just settin' down by the ole campfire. Why don't you stay an' have some beans, an' I'll tell y'all the story of how Hopalong Cassidy beat the Duke Gang when they come to rob the Santa Fe.”

In my head, I was already breaking down the cowboy trunk and its contents, thinking about the minimum bid I'd place on each item at Sotheby's. Sold individually, I figured I could get over two grand for the contents. Then I thought about putting ads in some of the Japanese collectors' magazines, just for a lark, before I sent the lot to the auction house. You never can tell. A buddy I knew had sold a complete packaged set of Welcome Back, Kotter action figures for nearly eight grand that way. Maybe I could buy a new truck. . .

“This is wonderful,” Craphound said, interrupting my reverie. “How much would you like for the collection?”

I felt a knife in my guts. Craphound had found the cowboy trunk, so that meant it was his. But he usually let me take the stuff with street-value — he was interested in everything, so it hardly mattered if I picked up a few scraps with which to eke out a living.

Billy's mom looked over the stuff. “I was hoping to get twenty dollars for the lot, but if that's too much, I'm willing to come down.”

“I'll give you thirty,” my mouth said, without intervention from my brain.

They both turned and stared at me. Craphound was unreadable behind his goggles.

Billy's mom broke the silence. “Oh, my! Thirty dollars for this old mess?”

“I will pay fifty,” Craphound said.

“Seventy-five,” I said.

“Oh, my,” Billy's mom said.

“Five hundred,” Craphound said.

I opened my mouth, and shut it. Craphound had built his stake on Earth by selling a complicated biochemical process for non-chlorophyll photosynthesis to a Saudi banker. I wouldn't ever beat him in a bidding war. “A thousand dollars,” my mouth said.

“Ten thousand,” Craphound said, and extruded a roll of hundreds from somewhere in his exoskeleton.

“My Lord!” Billy's mom said. “Ten thousand dollars!”

The other pickers, the firemen, the blue haired ladies all looked up at that and stared at us, their mouths open.

“It is for a good cause.” Craphound said.

“Ten thousand dollars!” Billy's mom said again.

Craphound's digits ruffled through the roll as fast as a croupier's counter, separated off a large chunk of the brown bills, and handed them to Billy's mom.

One of the firemen, a middle-aged paunchy man with a comb-over appeared at Billy's mom's shoulder.

“What's going on, Eva?” he said.

“This. . .gentleman is going to pay ten thousand dollars for Billy's old cowboy things, Tom.”

The fireman took the money from Billy's mom and stared at it. He held up the top note under the light and turned it this way and that, watching the holographic stamp change from green to gold, then green again. He looked at the serial number, then the serial number of the next bill. He licked his forefinger and started counting off the bills in piles of ten. Once he had ten piles, he counted them again. “That's ten thousand dollars, all right. Thank you very much, mister. Can I give you a hand getting this to your car?”

Craphound, meanwhile, had re-packed the trunk and balanced the 78 player on top of it. He looked at me, then at the fireman.

“I wonder if I could impose on you to take me to the nearest bus station. I think I'm going to be making my own way home.”

The fireman and Billy's mom both stared at me. My cheeks flushed. “Aw, c'mon,” I said. “I'll drive you home.”

“I think I prefer the bus,” Craphound said.

“It's no trouble at all to give you a lift, friend,” the fireman said.

I called it quits for the day, and drove home alone with the truck only half-filled. I pulled it into the coach-house and threw a tarp over the load and went inside and cracked a beer and sat on the sofa, watching a nature show on a desert reclamation project in Arizona, where the state legislature had traded a derelict mega-mall and a custom-built habitat to an alien for a local-area weather control machine.

#

The following Thursday, I went to the little crap-auction house on King Street. I'd put my finds from the weekend in the sale: lower minimum bid, and they took a smaller commission than Sotheby's. Fine for moving the small stuff.

Craphound was there, of course. I knew he'd be. It was where we met, when he bid on a case of Lincoln Logs I'd found at a fire-sale.

I'd known him for a kindred spirit when he bought them, and we'd talked afterwards, at his place, a sprawling, two-storey warehouse amid a cluster of auto-wrecking yards where the junkyard dogs barked, barked, barked.

Inside was paradise. His taste ran to shrines — a collection of fifties bar kitsch that was a shrine to liquor; a circular waterbed on a raised podium that was nearly buried under seventies bachelor pad-inalia; a kitchen that was nearly unusable, so packed it was with old barn-board furniture and rural memorabilia; a leather-appointed library straight out of a Victorian gentlemen's club; a solarium dressed in wicker and bamboo and tiki-idols. It was a hell of a place.

Craphound had known all about the Goodwills and the Sally Anns, and the auction houses, and the kitsch boutiques on Queen Street, but he still hadn't figured out where it all came from.

“Yard sales, rummage sales, garage sales,” I said, reclining in a vibrating naughahyde easy-chair, drinking a glass of his pricey single-malt that he'd bought for the beautiful bottle it came in.

“But where are these? Who is allowed to make them?” Craphound hunched opposite me, his exoskeleton locked into a coiled, semi-seated position.

“Who? Well, anyone. You just one day decide that you need to clean out the basement, you put an ad in the Star, tape up a few signs, and voila, yard sale. Sometimes, a school or a church will get donations of old junk and sell it all at one time, as a fundraiser.”

“And how do you locate these?” he asked, bobbing up and down slightly with excitement.

“Well, there're amateurs who just read the ads in the weekend papers, or just pick a neighbourhood and wander around, but that's no way to go about it. What I do is, I get in a truck, and I sniff the air, catch the scent of crap and vroom!, I'm off like a bloodhound on a trail. You learn things over time: like stay away from Yuppie yard sales, they never have anything worth buying, just the same crap you can buy in any mall.”

“Do you think I might accompany you some day?”

“Hell, sure. Next Saturday? We'll head over to Cabbagetown — those old coach houses, you'd be amazed what people get rid of. It's practically criminal.”

“I would like to go with you on next Saturday very much Mr Jerry Abington.” He used to talk like that, without commas or question marks. Later, he got better, but then, it was all one big sentence.

“Call me Jerry. It's a date, then. Tell you what, though: there's a Code you got to learn before we go out. The Craphound's Code.”

“What is a craphound?”

“You're lookin' at one. You're one, too, unless I miss my guess. You'll get to know some of the local craphounds, you hang around with me long enough. They're the competition, but they're also your buddies, and there're certain rules we have.”

And then I explained to him all about how you never bid against a craphound at a yard-sale, how you get to know the other fellows' tastes, and when you see something they might like, you haul it out for them, and they'll do the same for you, and how you never buy something that another craphound might be looking for, if all you're buying it for is to sell it back to him. Just good form and common sense, really, but you'd be surprised how many amateurs just fail to make the jump to pro because they can't grasp it.

#

There was a bunch of other stuff at the auction, other craphounds' weekend treasures. This was high season, when the sun comes out and people start to clean out the cottage, the basement, the garage. There were some collectors in the crowd, and a whole whack of antique and junk dealers, and a few pickers, and me, and Craphound. I watched the bidding listlessly, waiting for my things to come up and sneaking out for smokes between lots. Craphound never once looked at me or acknowledged my presence, and I became perversely obsessed with catching his eye, so I coughed and shifted and walked past him several times, until the auctioneer glared at me, and one of the attendants asked if I needed a throat lozenge.

My lot came up. The bowling glasses went for five bucks to one of the Queen Street junk dealers; the elephant-foot fetched $350 after a spirited bidding war between an antique dealer and a collector — the collector won; the dealer took the top-hat for $100. The rest of it came up and sold, or didn't, and at end of the lot, I'd made over $800, which was rent for the month plus beer for the weekend plus gas for the truck.

Craphound bid on and bought more cowboy things — a box of super-eight cowboy movies, the boxes mouldy, the stock itself running to slime; a Navajo blanket; a plastic donkey that dispensed cigarettes out of its ass; a big neon armadillo sign.

One of the other nice things about that place over Sotheby's, there was none of this waiting thirty days to get a cheque. I queued up with the other pickers after the bidding was through, collected a wad of bills, and headed for my truck.

I spotted Craphound loading his haul into a minivan with handicapped plates. It looked like some kind of fungus was growing over the hood and side-panels. On closer inspection, I saw that the body had been covered in closely glued Lego.

Craphound popped the hatchback and threw his gear in, then opened the driver's side door, and I saw that his van had been fitted out for a legless driver, with brake and accelerator levers. A paraplegic I knew drove one just like it. Craphound's exoskeleton levered him into the seat, and I watched the eerily precise way it executed the macro that started the car, pulled the shoulder-belt, put it into drive and switched on the stereo. I heard tape-hiss, then, loud as a b-boy cruising Yonge Street, an old-timey cowboy voice: “Howdy pardners! Saddle up, we're ridin'!” Then the van backed up and sped out of the lot.

I get into the truck and drove home. Truth be told, I missed the little bastard.

#

Some people said that we should have run Craphound and his kin off the planet, out of the Solar System. They said that it wasn't fair for the aliens to keep us in the dark about their technologies. They say that we should have captured a ship and reverse-engineered it, built our own and kicked ass.

Some people!

First of all, nobody with human DNA could survive a trip in one of those ships. They're part of Craphound's people's bodies, as I understand it, and we just don't have the right parts. Second of all, they were sharing their tech with us — they just weren't giving it away. Fair trades every time.

It's not as if space was off-limits to us. We can any one of us visit their homeworld, just as soon as we figure out how. Only they wouldn't hold our hands along the way.

#

I spent the week haunting the “Secret Boutique,” AKA the Goodwill As-Is Centre on Jarvis. It's all there is to do between yard sales, and sometimes it makes for good finds. Part of my theory of yard-sale karma holds that if I miss one day at the thrift shops, that'll be the day they put out the big score. So I hit the stores diligently and came up with crapola. I had offended the fates, I knew, and wouldn't make another score until I placated them. It was lonely work, still and all, and I missed Craphound's good eye and obsessive delight.

I was at the cash-register with a few items at the Goodwill when a guy in a suit behind me tapped me on the shoulder.

“Sorry to bother you,” he said. His suit looked expensive, as did his manicure and his haircut and his wire-rimmed glasses. “I was just wondering where you found that.” He gestured at a rhinestone-studded ukelele, with a cowboy hat wood-burned into the body. I had picked it up with a guilty little thrill, thinking that Craphound might buy it at the next auction.

“Second floor, in the toy section.”

“There wasn't anything else like it, was there?”

”'Fraid not,” I said, and the cashier picked it up and started wrapping it in newspaper.

“Ah,” he said, and he looked like a little kid who'd just been told that he couldn't have a puppy. “I don't suppose you'd want to sell it, would you?”

I held up a hand and waited while the cashier bagged it with the rest of my stuff, a few old clothbound novels I thought I could sell at a used book-store, and a Grease belt-buckle with Olivia Newton John on it. I led him out the door by the elbow of his expensive suit.

“How much?” I had paid a dollar.

“Ten bucks?”

I nearly said, “Sold!” but I caught myself. “Twenty.”

“Twenty dollars?”

“That's what they'd charge at a boutique on Queen Street.”

He took out a slim leather wallet and produced a twenty. I handed him the uke. His face lit up like a lightbulb.

#

It's not that my adulthood is particularly unhappy. Likewise, it's not that my childhood was particularly happy.

There are memories I have, though, that are like a cool drink of water. My grandfather's place near Milton, an old Victorian farmhouse, where the cat drank out of a milk-glass bowl; and where we sat around a rough pine table as big as my whole apartment; and where my playroom was the draughty barn with hay-filled lofts bulging with farm junk and Tarzan-ropes.

There was Grampa's friend Fyodor, and we spent every evening at his wrecking-yard, he and Grampa talking and smoking while I scampered in the twilight, scaling mountains of auto-junk. The glove-boxes yielded treasures: crumpled photos of college boys mugging in front of signs, roadmaps of far-away places. I found a guidebook from the 1964 New York World's Fair once, and a lipstick like a chrome bullet, and a pair of white leather ladies' gloves.

Fyodor dealt in scrap, too, and once, he had half of a carny carousel, a few horses and part of the canopy, paint flaking and sharp torn edges protruding; next to it, a Korean-war tank minus its turret and treads, and inside the tank were peeling old pinup girls and a rotation schedule and a crude Kilroy. The control-room in the middle of the carousel had a stack of paperback sci-fi novels, Ace Doubles that had two books bound back-to-back, and when you finished the first, you turned it over and read the other. Fyodor let me keep them, and there was a pawn-ticket in one from Macon, Georgia, for a transistor radio.

My parents started leaving me alone when I was fourteen and I couldn't keep from sneaking into their room and snooping. Mom's jewelry box had books of matches from their honeymoon in Acapulco, printed with bad palm-trees. My Dad kept an old photo in his sock drawer, of himself on muscle-beach, shirtless, flexing his biceps.

My grandmother saved every scrap of my mother's life in her basement, in dusty Army trunks. I entertained myself by pulling it out and taking it in: her Mouse Ears from the big family train-trip to Disneyland in '57, and her records, and the glittery pasteboard sign from her sweet sixteen. There were well-chewed stuffed animals, and school exercise books in which she'd practiced variations on her signature for page after page.

It all told a story. The penciled Kilroy in the tank made me see one of those Canadian soldiers in Korea, unshaven and crew-cut like an extra on MAS*H, sitting for bored hour after hour, staring at the pinup girls, fiddling with a crossword, finally laying it down and sketching his Kilroy quickly, before anyone saw.

The photo of my Dad posing sent me whirling through time to Toronto's Muscle Beach in the east end, and hearing the tinny AM radios playing weird psychedelic rock while teenagers lounged on their Mustangs and the girls sunbathed in bikinis that made their tits into torpedoes.

It all made poems. The old pulp novels and the pawn ticket, when I spread them out in front of the TV, and arranged them just so, they made up a poem that took my breath away.

#

After the cowboy trunk episode, I didn't run into Craphound again until the annual Rotary Club charity rummage sale at the Upper Canada Brewing Company. He was wearing the cowboy hat, sixguns and the silver star from the cowboy trunk. It should have looked ridiculous, but the net effect was naive and somehow charming, like he was a little boy whose hair you wanted to muss.

I found a box of nice old melamine dishes, in various shades of green — four square plates, bowls, salad-plates, and a serving tray. I threw them in the duffel-bag I'd brought and kept browsing, ignoring Craphound as he charmed a salty old Rotarian while fondling a box of leather-bound books.

I browsed a stack of old Ministry of Labour licenses — barber, chiropodist, bartender, watchmaker. They all had pretty seals and were framed in stark green institutional metal. They all had different names, but all from one family, and I made up a little story to entertain myself, about the proud mother saving her sons' accreditations and framing hanging them in the spare room with their diplomas. “Oh, George Junior's just opened his own barbershop, and little Jimmy's still fixing watches. . .”

I bought them.

In a box of crappy plastic Little Ponies and Barbies and Care Bears, I found a leather Indian headdress, a wooden bow-and-arrow set, and a fringed buckskin vest. Craphound was still buttering up the leather books' owner. I bought them quick, for five bucks.

“Those are beautiful,” a voice said at my elbow. I turned around and smiled at the snappy dresser who'd bought the uke at the Secret Boutique. He'd gone casual for the weekend, in an expensive, L.L. Bean button-down way.

“Aren't they, though.”

“You sell them on Queen Street? Your finds, I mean?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes at auction. How's the uke?”

“Oh, I got it all tuned up,” he said, and smiled the same smile he'd given me when he'd taken hold of it at Goodwill. “I can play 'Don't Fence Me In' on it.” He looked at his feet. “Silly, huh?”

“Not at all. You're into cowboy things, huh?” As I said it, I was overcome with the knowledge that this was “Billy the Kid,” the original owner of the cowboy trunk. I don't know why I felt that way, but I did, with utter certainty.

“Just trying to re-live a piece of my childhood, I guess. I'm Scott,” he said, extending his hand.

Scott? I thought wildly. Maybe it's his middle name? “I'm Jerry.”

The Upper Canada Brewery sale has many things going for it, including a beer garden where you can sample their wares and get a good BBQ burger. We gently gravitated to it, looking over the tables as we went.

“You're a pro, right?” he asked after we had plastic cups of beer.

“You could say that.”

“I'm an amateur. A rank amateur. Any words of wisdom?”

I laughed and drank some beer, lit a cigarette. “There's no secret to it, I think. Just diligence: you've got to go out every chance you get, or you'll miss the big score.”

He chuckled. “I hear that. Sometimes, I'll be sitting in my office, and I'll just know that they're putting out a piece of pure gold at the Goodwill and that someone else will get to it before my lunch. I get so wound up, I'm no good until I go down there and hunt for it. I guess I'm hooked, eh?”

“Cheaper than some other kinds of addictions.”

“I guess so. About that Indian stuff — what do you figure you'd get for it at a Queen Street boutique?”

I looked him in the eye. He may have been something high-powered and cool and collected in his natural environment, but just then, he was as eager and nervous as a kitchen-table poker-player at a high-stakes game.

“Maybe fifty bucks,” I said.

“Fifty, huh?” he asked.

“About that,” I said.

“Once it sold,” he said.

“There is that,” I said.

“Might take a month, might take a year,” he said.

“Might take a day,” I said.

“It might, it might.” He finished his beer. “I don't suppose you'd take forty?”

I'd paid five for it, not ten minutes before. It looked like it would fit Craphound, who, after all, was wearing Scott/Billy's own boyhood treasures as we spoke. You don't make a living by feeling guilty over eight hundred percent markups. Still, I'd angered the fates, and needed to redeem myself.

“Make it five,” I said.

He started to say something, then closed his mouth and gave me a look of thanks. He took a five out of his wallet and handed it to me. I pulled the vest and bow and headdress out my duffel.

He walked back to a shiny black Jeep with gold detail work, parked next to Craphound's van. Craphound was building onto the Lego body, and the hood had a miniature Lego town attached to it.

Craphound looked around as he passed, and leaned forward with undisguised interest at the booty. I grimaced and finished my beer.

#

I met Scott/Billy three times more at the Secret Boutique that week.

He was a lawyer, who specialised in alien-technology patents. He had a practice on Bay Street, with two partners, and despite his youth, he was the senior man.

I didn't let on that I knew about Billy the Kid and his mother in the East Muskoka Volunteer Fire Department Ladies' Auxiliary. But I felt a bond with him, as though we shared an unspoken secret. I pulled any cowboy finds for him, and he developed a pretty good eye for what I was after and returned the favour.

The fates were with me again, and no two ways about it. I took home a ratty old Oriental rug that on closer inspection was a 19th century hand-knotted Persian; an upholstered Turkish footstool; a collection of hand-painted silk Hawaiiana pillows and a carved Meerschaum pipe. Scott/Billy found the last for me, and it cost me two dollars. I knew a collector who would pay thirty in an eye-blink, and from then on, as far as I was concerned, Scott/Billy was a fellow craphound.

“You going to the auction tomorrow night?” I asked him at the checkout line.

“Wouldn't miss it,” he said. He'd barely been able to contain his excitement when I told him about the Thursday night auctions and the bargains to be had there. He sure had the bug.

“Want to get together for dinner beforehand? The Rotterdam's got a good patio.”

He did, and we did, and I had a glass of framboise that packed a hell of a kick and tasted like fizzy raspberry lemonade; and doorstopper fries and a club sandwich.

I had my nose in my glass when he kicked my ankle under the table. “Look at that!”

It was Craphound in his van, cruising for a parking spot. The Lego village had been joined by a whole postmodern spaceport on the roof, with a red-and-blue castle, a football-sized flying saucer, and a clown's head with blinking eyes.

I went back to my drink and tried to get my appetite back.

“Was that an extee driving?”

“Yeah. Used to be a friend of mine.”

“He's a picker?”

“Uh-huh.” I turned back to my fries and tried to kill the subject.

“Do you know how he made his stake?”

“The chlorophyll thing, in Saudi Arabia.”

“Sweet!” he said. “Very sweet. I've got a client who's got some secondary patents from that one. What's he go after?”

“Oh, pretty much everything,” I said, resigning myself to discussing the topic after all. “But lately, the same as you — cowboys and Injuns.”

He laughed and smacked his knee. “Well, what do you know? What could he possibly want with the stuff?”

“What do they want with any of it? He got started one day when we were cruising the Muskokas,” I said carefully, watching his face. “Found a trunk of old cowboy things at a rummage sale. East Muskoka Volunteer Fire Department Ladies' Auxiliary.” I waited for him to shout or startle. He didn't.

“Yeah? A good find, I guess. Wish I'd made it.”

I didn't know what to say to that, so I took a bite of my sandwich.

Scott continued. “I think about what they get out of it a lot. There's nothing we have here that they couldn't make for themselves. I mean, if they picked up and left today, we'd still be making sense of everything they gave us in a hundred years. You know, I just closed a deal for a biochemical computer that's no-shit 10,000 times faster than anything we've built out of silicon. You know what the extee took in trade? Title to a defunct fairground outside of Calgary — they shut it down ten years ago because the midway was too unsafe to ride. Doesn't that beat all? This thing is worth a billion dollars right out of the gate, I mean, within twenty-four hours of the deal closing, the seller can turn it into the GDP of Bolivia. For a crummy real-estate dog that you couldn't get five grand for!”

It always shocked me when Billy/Scott talked about his job — it was easy to forget that he was a high-powered lawyer when we were jawing and fooling around like old craphounds. I wondered if maybe he wasn't Billy the Kid; I couldn't think of any reason for him to be playing it all so close to his chest.

“What the hell is some extee going to do with a fairground?”

#

Craphound got a free Coke from Lisa at the check-in when he made his appearance. He bid high, but shrewdly, and never pulled ten-thousand-dollar stunts. The bidders were wandering the floor, previewing that week's stock, and making notes to themselves.

I rooted through a box-lot full of old tins, and found one with a buckaroo at the Calgary Stampede, riding a bucking bronc. I picked it up and stood to inspect it. Craphound was behind me.

“Nice piece, huh?” I said to him.

“I like it very much,” Craphound said, and I felt my cheeks flush.

“You're going to have some competition tonight, I think,” I said, and nodded at Scott/Billy. “I think he's Billy; the one whose mother sold us — you — the cowboy trunk.”

“Really?” Craphound said, and it felt like we were partners again, scoping out the competition. Suddenly I felt a knife of shame, like I was betraying Scott/Billy somehow. I took a step back.

“Jerry, I am very sorry that we argued.”

I sighed out a breath I hadn't known I was holding in. “Me, too.”

“They're starting the bidding. May I sit with you?”

And so the three of us sat together, and Craphound shook Scott/Billy's hand and the auctioneer started into his harangue.

It was a night for unusual occurrences. I bid on a piece, something I told myself I'd never do. It was a set of four matched Li'l Orphan Annie Ovaltine glasses, like Grandma's had been, and seeing them in the auctioneer's hand took me right back to her kitchen, and endless afternoons passed with my colouring books and weird old-lady hard candies and Liberace albums playing in the living room.

“Ten,” I said, opening the bidding.

“I got ten, ten,ten, I got ten, who'll say twenty, who'll say twenty, twenty for the four.”

Craphound waved his bidding card, and I jumped as if I'd been stung.

“I got twenty from the space cowboy, I got twenty, sir will you say thirty?”

I waved my card.

“That's thirty to you sir.”

“Forty,” Craphound said.

“Fifty,” I said even before the auctioneer could point back to me. An old pro, he settled back and let us do the work.

“One hundred,” Craphound said.

“One fifty,” I said.

The room was perfectly silent. I thought about my overextended MasterCard, and wondered if Scott/Billy would give me a loan.

“Two hundred,” Craphound said.

Fine, I thought. Pay two hundred for those. I can get a set on Queen Street for thirty bucks.

The auctioneer turned to me. “The bidding stands at two. Will you say two-ten, sir?”

I shook my head. The auctioneer paused a long moment, letting me sweat over the decision to bow out.

“I have two — do I have any other bids from the floor? Any other bids? Sold, $200, to number 57.” An attendant brought Craphound the glasses. He took them and tucked them under his seat.

#

I was fuming when we left. Craphound was at my elbow. I wanted to punch him — I'd never punched anyone in my life, but I wanted to punch him.

We entered the cool night air and I sucked in several lungfuls before lighting a cigarette.

“Jerry,” Craphound said.

I stopped, but didn't look at him. I watched the taxis pull in and out of the garage next door instead.

“Jerry, my friend,” Craphound said.

“What?” I said, loud enough to startle myself. Scott, beside me, jerked as well.

“We're going. I wanted to say goodbye, and to give you some things that I won't be taking with me.”

“What?” I said again, Scott just a beat behind me.

“My people — we're going. It has been decided. We've gotten what we came for.”

Without another word, he set off towards his van. We followed along behind, shell-shocked.

Craphound's exoskeleton executed another macro and slid the panel-door aside, revealing the cowboy trunk.

“I wanted to give you this. I will keep the glasses.”

“I don't understand,” I said.

“You're all leaving?” Scott asked, with a note of urgency.

“It has been decided. We'll go over the next twenty-four hours.”

“But why?” Scott said, sounding almost petulant.

“It's not something that I can easily explain. As you must know, the things we gave you were trinkets to us — almost worthless. We traded them for something that was almost worthless to you — a fair trade, you'll agree — but it's time to move on.”

Craphound handed me the cowboy trunk. Holding it, I smelled the lubricant from his exoskeleton and the smell of the attic it had been mummified in before making its way into his hands. I felt like I almost understood.

“This is for me,” I said slowly, and Craphound nodded encouragingly. “This is for me, and you're keeping the glasses. And I'll look at this and feel. . .”

“You understand,” Craphound said, looking somehow relieved.

And I did. I understood that an alien wearing a cowboy hat and sixguns and giving them away was a poem and a story, and a thirtyish bachelor trying to spend half a month's rent on four glasses so that he could remember his Grandma's kitchen was a story and a poem, and that the disused fairground outside Calgary was a story and a poem, too.

“You're craphounds!” I said. “All of you!”

Craphound smiled so I could see his gums and I put down the cowboy trunk and clapped my hands.

#

Scott recovered from his shock by spending the night at his office, crunching numbers talking on the phone, and generally getting while the getting was good. He had an edge — no one else knew that they were going.

He went pro later that week, opened a chi-chi boutique on Queen Street, and hired me on as chief picker and factum factotum.

Scott was not Billy the Kid. Just another Bay Street shyster with a cowboy jones. From the way they come down and spend, there must be a million of them.

Our draw in the window is a beautiful mannequin I found, straight out of the Fifties, a little boy we call The Beaver. He dresses in chaps and a Sheriff's badge and sixguns and a miniature Stetson and cowboy boots with worn spurs, and rests one foot on a beautiful miniature steamer trunk whose leather is worked with cowboy motifs.

He's not for sale at any price.

#doctorow

CC BY-ND-NC 1.0

Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of many books, most recently RADICALIZED and WALKAWAY, science fiction for adults; HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM, nonfiction about monopoly and conspiracy; IN REAL LIFE, a graphic novel; and the picture book POESY THE MONSTER SLAYER. His latest book is ATTACK SURFACE, a standalone adult sequel to LITTLE BROTHER; his next nonfiction book is CHOKEPOINT CAPITALISM, with Rebecca Giblin, about monopoly and fairness in the creative arts labor market, (Beacon Press, 2022). In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.

1. According to you and apart from the number of words, what is the main difference between a short story and a novel?

Here's the answer I gave to the LA Public Library:

A short story is like traveling with a carry-on bag, it can only contain your essentials. A novel is like hiring movers to load your whole life into a shipping container. A novella is like checking a bag or two, with enough room for some optional comfort items you're not sure you'll need but which you'll be glad to have.

2. What's your favorite short story?

I'm mistrustful of people who have solitary literary favorites – inevitably the text turns out to be the Bible, Mein Kampf, or Atlas Shrugged. I have hundreds of favorite short stories, one for every occasion.

3. What's your favorite short story written by you?

Same again! I'm very fond of MANY of my stories: Unauthorized Bread, 0wnz0red, The Man Who Sold the Moon, Anda's Game, I, Robot, I, Row-boat, The Martian Chronicles, and more.

#doctorow #shortinterviews

Copy this story.

The coppers smashed my father's printer when I was eight. I remember the hot, cling-film-in-a-microwave smell of it, and Da's look of ferocious concentration as he filled it with fresh goop, and the warm, fresh-baked feel of the objects that came out of it.

The coppers came through the door with truncheons swinging, one of them reciting the terms of the warrant through a bullhorn. One of Da's customers had shopped him. The ipolice paid in high-grade pharmaceuticals — performance enhancers, memory supplements, metabolic boosters. The kind of things that cost a fortune over the counter; the kind of things you could print at home, if you didn't mind the risk of having your kitchen filled with a sudden crush of big, beefy bodies, hard truncheons whistling through the air, smashing anyone and anything that got in the way.

They destroyed grandma's trunk, the one she'd brought from the old country. They smashed our little refrigerator and the purifier unit over the window. My tweetybird escaped death by hiding in a corner of his cage as a big, booted foot crushed most of it into a sad tangle of printer-wire.

Da. What they did to him. When he was done, he looked like he'd been brawling with an entire rugby side. They brought him out the door and let the newsies get a good look at him as they tossed him in the car. All the while a spokesman told the world that my Da's organized-crime bootlegging operation had been responsible for at least 20 million in contraband, and that my Da, the desperate villain, had resisted arrest.

I saw it all from my phone, in the remains of the sitting room, watching it on the screen and wondering how, just how anyone could look at our little flat and our terrible, manky estate and mistake it for the home of an organized crime kingpin. They took the printer away, of course, and displayed it like a trophy for the newsies. Its little shrine in the kitchenette seemed horribly empty. When I roused myself and picked up the flat and rescued my poor peeping tweetybird, I put a blender there. It was made out of printed parts, so it would only last a month before I'd need to print new bearings and other moving parts. Back then, I could take apart and reassemble anything that could be printed.

By the time I turned 18, they were ready to let Da out of prison. I'd visited him three times — on my tenth birthday, on his fiftieth, and when Ma died. It had been two years since I'd last seen him and he was in bad shape. A prison fight had left him with a limp, and he looked over his shoulder so often it was like he had a tic. I was embarrassed when the minicab dropped us off in front of the estate, and tried to keep my distance from this ruined, limping skeleton as we went inside and up the stairs.

“Lanie,” he said, as he sat me down. “You're a smart girl, I know that. You wouldn't know where your old Da could get a printer and some goop?”

I squeezed my hands into fists so tight my fingernails cut into my palms. I closed my eyes. “You've been in prison for ten years, Da. Ten. Years. You're going to risk another ten years to print out more blenders and pharma, more laptops and designer hats?”

He grinned. “I'm not stupid, Lanie. I've learned my lesson. There's no hat or laptop that's worth going to jail for. I'm not going to print none of that rubbish, never again.” He had a cup of tea, and he drank it now like it was whisky, a sip and then a long, satisfied exhalation. He closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair.

“Come here, Lanie, let me whisper in your ear. Let me tell you the thing that I decided while I spent ten years in lockup. Come here and listen to your stupid Da.”

I felt a guilty pang about ticking him off. He was off his rocker, that much was clear. God knew what he went through in prison. “What, Da?” I said, leaning in close.

“Lanie, I'm going to print more printers. Lots more printers. One for everyone. That's worth going to jail for. That's worth anything.”

#doctorow

Some rights reserved under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license

Image: Printers – Trousset encyclopedia

Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him. (Cardinal de Richelieu) Greg landed at SFO at 8PM, but by the time he made it to the front of the customs line it was after midnight. He had it good — he'd been in first class, first off the plane, brown as a nut and loose-limbed after a month on the beach at Cabo, SCUBA diving three days a week, bumming around and flirting with French college girls the rest of the time. When he'd left San Francisco a month before, he'd been a stoop-shouldered, pot-bellied wreck — now he was a bronze god, drawing appreciative looks from the stews at the front of the plane.

In the four hours he spent in the customs line, he fell from god back to man. His warm buzz wore off, the sweat ran down the crack of his ass, and his shoulders and neck grew so tense that his upper back felt like a tennis racket. The batteries on his iPod died after the third hour, leaving him with nothing to do except eavesdrop on the middle-aged couple ahead of him.

“They've starting googling us at the border,” she said. “I told you they'd do it.”

“I thought that didn't start until next month?” The man had brought a huge sombrero on board, carefully stowing it in its own overhead locker, and now he was stuck alternately wearing it and holding it.

Googling at the border. Christ. Greg vested out from Google six months before, cashing in his options and “taking some me time,” which turned out to be harder than he expected. Five months later, what he'd mostly done is fix his friends' PCs and websites, and watch daytime TV, and gain ten pounds, which he blamed on being at home, instead of in the Googleplex, with its excellent 24-hour gym.

The writing had been on the wall. Google had a whole pod of lawyers in charge of dealing with the world's governments, and scumbag lobbyists on the Hill to try to keep the law from turning them into the world's best snitch. It was a losing battle. The US Government had spent $15 billion on a program to fingerprint and photograph visitors at the border, and hadn't caught a single terrorist. Clearly, the public sector was not equipped to Do Search Right.

The DHS officers had bags under their eyes as they squinted at their screens, prodding mistrustfully at their keyboards with sausage fingers. No wonder it was taking four hours to get out of the goddamned airport.

“Evening,” he said, as he handed the man his sweaty passport. The man grunted and swiped it, then stared at his screen, clicking. A lot. He had a little bit of dried food in the corner of his mouth and his tongue crept out and licked at it as he concentrated.

“Want to tell me about June, 1998?”

Greg turned his head this way and that. “I'm sorry?”

“You posted a message to alt.burningman on June 17, 1998 about your plan to attend Burning Man. You posted, 'Would taking shrooms be a really bad idea?'”

#

It was 3AM before they let him out of the “secondary screening” room. The interrogator was an older man, so skinny he looked like he'd been carved out of wood. His questions went a lot further than the Burning Man shrooms. They were just the start of Greg's problems.

“I'd like to know more about your hobbies. Are you interested in model rocketry?”

“What?”

“Model rocketry.”

“No,” Greg said. “No, I'm not.” Thinking of all the explosives that model rocketry people surrounded themselves with.

The man made a note, clicked some more. “You see, I ask because I see a heavy spike of ads for model rocketry supplies showing up alongside your search results and Google mail.”

Greg felt his guts spasm. “You're looking at my searches and email?” He hadn't touched a keyboard in a month, but he knew that what you put into the searchbar was more intimate than what you told your father-confessor. He'd seen enough queries to know that.

“Calm down, please. No, I'm not looking at your searches.” The man made a bitter lemon face and went on in a squeaky voice. “That would be unconstitutional. You weren't listening to me. We see the ads that show up when you read your mail and do your searching. I have a brochure explaining it, I'll give it to you when we're through here.”

“But the ads don't mean anything — I get ads for Ann Coulter ringtones whenever I get email from my friend who lives in Coulter, Iowa!”

The man nodded. “I understand, sir. And that's just why I'm here talking to you, instead of just looking at this screen. Why do you suppose model rocket ads show up so frequently for you?”

He thought for a moment. “OK, just do this. Go to Google and search for 'coffee fanciers', all right?” He'd been very active in the group, helping them build out the site for their coffee-of-the-month subscription service. The blend they were going to launch with was called “Jet Fuel.” “Jet Fuel” and “Launch” — that'd probably make Google barf up model rocket ads. Not that he would know — he blocked all the ads in his browser.

#

They were in the home stretch when the carved man found the Hallowe'en photos. They were buried three screens deep in the search results for “Greg Lupinski,” and Greg hadn't noticed them.

“It was a Gulf War themed party,” he said. “In the Castro.”

“And you're dressed as —?”

“A suicide bomber.” Just saying the words in an airport made him nervous, as though uttering them would cause the handcuffs to come out.

“Come with me, Mr Lupinski.”

#

The search lasted a long time. They swabbed him in places he didn't know he had. He asked about a lawyer. They told him that he could call all the lawyers he wanted once he was out of the Customs sterile area.

“Good night, Mr Lupinski.” This was a new interrogator, a man who'd wanted to know about the reason that he'd sought both night diving and deep diving specialist certification from the PADI instructor in Cabo. The guy implied that Greg had been training to be an al-Qaeda frogman, and didn't seem to believe that Greg had just wanted to do all the certifications he could, pursuing diving the way he pursued everything: thoroughly.

But now the man with the frogman fantasy was bidding him a good night and releasing him from the secondary screening area. His suitcases stood alone by the baggage carousel. When he picked them up, he saw that they had been opened and then inexpertly closed. Some of his clothes stuck out from around the edges.

At home, he saw that all the fake “pre-Colombian” statues had been broken, and that his white cotton Mexican shirt — folded and fresh from his laundry-lady — had a boot-print in the middle of it. His clothes no longer smelled of Mexico. Now they smelled of airports and machine oil.

The mailman had dropped an entire milk-crate of mail off at his place that day, but he couldn't even begin to confront it. All he could think of, as the sun rose over the Mission, turning the Victorian houses they called “painted ladies” vivid colors, was what it meant to be googled.

He wasn't going to sleep. No way. He needed to talk about this. And there was only one person who he could talk to, and luckily, she was usually awake around now.

#

Maya had started at Google two years after him, but had gotten a much bigger grant of stock than he had. She knew exactly what she was going to do with it, too, once she vested: take her dogs and her girlfriend and head to Florence, for good. Learn Italian, take in the museums, sit in the cafes. It was she who'd convinced him to go to Mexico: anywhere, she said, anywhere that he could reboot his existence.

Maya had two giant chocolate Labs and a very, very patient girlfriend who'd put up with anything except being dragged around Dolores Park at 6AM by 350 pounds of drooling brown canine.

She went for her Mace as he jogged towards her, then did a double-take and threw her arms open, dropping the leashes and stamping on them with one sneaker, a practiced gesture. “Where's the rest of you? Dude, you look hawt!”

He took the hug, suddenly self-conscious of the way he smelled after a night of invasive googling. “Maya,” he said. “Maya, what do you know about the DHS?”

She stiffened and the dogs whined. She looked around, then nodded up at the tennis courts. “Top of the light standard there, don't look, there. That's one of our muni WiFi access points. Wide-angle webcam. Face away from it when you talk. Lip-readers.”

He parsed this out slowly. Google's free municipal WiFi program was a hit in every city where it played, and in the grand scheme of things, it hadn't cost much to put WiFi access points up on light standards and other power-ready poles around town. Especially not when measured against the ability to serve ads to people based on where they were sitting. He hadn't paid much attention when they'd made the webcams on all those access points public — there'd been a day's worth of blogstorm while people looked out over their childhood streets or patrolled prostitution strolls, fingering johns, but it had blown over.

Now he felt — watched.

Feeling silly, he kept his lips together and mumbled, “You're joking.”

“Come with me,” she said, facing squarely away from the pole.

#

The dogs weren't happy about having their walks cut short, and they let it be known in the kitchen as Maya fixed coffee for them — barking, banging into the table and rocking it. Maya's girlfriend Laurie called out from the bedroom and Maya went back to talk to her, then emerged, looking flustered.

“It started with China,” she said. “Once we moved our servers onto the mainland, they went under Chinese jurisdiction. They could google everyone going through our servers.” Greg knew what that meant: if you visited a page with Google ads on it, if you used Google maps, if you used Google mail — even if you sent mail to a gmail account — Google was collecting your info, forever.

“They were using us to build profiles of people. Not arresting them, you understand. But when they had someone they wanted to arrest, they'd come to us for a profile and find a reason to bust them. There's hardly anything you can do on the net that isn't illegal in China.”

Greg shook his head. “Why did they put the servers in China?”

“The government said they'd block them if they didn't. And Yahoo was there.” They both made a face. Somewhere along the way, Google had become obsessed with Yahoo, more worried about what the competition was doing than how they were performing. “So we did it. But a lot of us didn't like the idea.”

She sipped her coffee and lowered her voice. One of the dogs whined. “I made it my 20 percent project.” Googlers were supposed to devote 20 percent of their time to blue-sky projects. “Me and my pod. We call it the googlecleaner. It goes deep into the database and statistically normalizes you. Your searches, your gmail histograms, your browsing patterns. All of it.”

“The search ads?”

“Ah,” she grimaced. “Yes, the DHS. So we brokered a compromise with the DHS. They'd stop asking to go fishing in our search records and we'd let them see what ads got displayed for you.”

Greg felt sick. “Why? Don't tell me Yahoo was doing it already —”

“No, no. Well, yes. Sure. Yahoo was already doing it. But that wasn't it. You know, Republicans hate Google. We are overwhelmingly registered Democrat. So we're doing what we can to make peace with them before they clobber us. This isn't PII —” Personally Identifying Information, the toxic smog of the information age “— it's just metadata. So it's only slightly evil.”

“If it's all so innocuous, why all this cloak-and-dagger stuff?”

She sighed and hugged the dog that was butting her with his huge, anvil-shaped head. “The spooks are like pubic lice. They get everywhere. Once we let them in, everything suddenly got a lot more — secret. Some of our meetings have to have spooks present, it's like being in some Soviet ministry, with a political officer always there, watching everything. And the security clearance. Now we're divided into these two camps: the cleared and the suspect. We all know who isn't cleared, but no one knows why. I'm cleared. Lucky me — being a homo no longer disqualifies you for access to seekrit crap. No cleared person wants to even eat lunch with an un-clearable. And every now and again, one of your teammates will get pulled off your project 'for security reasons', whatever that means.”

Greg felt very tired. “So now I'm feeling lucky I got out of the airport alive. I suppose I might have ended up in Gitmo if it had gone badly, huh?”

She was staring at him intently, her eyes flicking from side to side. He waited, but she didn't say anything.

“What?”

“What I'm about to tell you, you can't ever repeat it, OK?”

“Um, OK? You're not going to tell me you're a deep-cover Al-Quaeda suicide bomber?”

“Nothing so simple. Here's the thing: the airport DHS scrutiny is a gating function. It lets the spooks narrow down their search criteria. Once you get pulled aside for secondary at the border, you become a 'person of interest,' and they never, ever let up. They'll check the webcams for your face and gait. Read your mail. Log your searches.”

“I thought you said the courts wouldn't let them —”

“The courts won't let them indiscriminately google you. But once you get into the system, it becomes a selective search. All legal. And once they start googling you, they always find something.”

“You mean to say they've got a boiler-room of midwestern housewives reading the email of everyone who ever got a second look at the border? Sounds like the world's shittiest job.”

“If only. No, this is all untouched by human hands. All your data is fed into a big hopper that checks for 'suspicious patterns' and gradually builds the case against you, using deviation from statistical norms to prove that you're guilty of something. It's just a variation of the way we spot search-spammers” — the “optimizers” who tried to get their Viagra scams and Ponzi schemes to come to the top of the search results “— but instead of lowering your search rank, we increase your probability of being sent to Syria. And of course, they google all of us, everyone who works on anything 'sensitive.'”

“Naturally,” Greg said. He felt like he was going to throw up. He felt like never using a search engine again. “How the hell did this happen? It's such a good place. 'Don't be evil,' right?” That was the corporate motto, and for Greg, it had been a huge part of his reason for taking his fresh-minted computer science PhD from Stanford directly to Google.

Maya's laugh was bitter and cynical. “Don't be evil? Come on, Greg. Don't you remember what it was like when we started censoring the Chinese search results, and we all asked how that could be anything but evil? The company line was hilarious: 'We're not doing evil — we're giving them access to a better search tool! If we showed them search results they couldn't get to, that would just frustrate them. It would be a bad user experience'. If we hadn't lost our don't-be-evil cherry by then, we surely did the day we took that one.”

“Now what?” Greg pushed a dog away from him and Maya looked hurt.

“Now you're a person of interest, Greg. Googlestalked. Now, you live your life with someone watching over your shoulder, all the time. You know the mission statement, right? 'Organize all human knowledge.' That's everything. Give it five years, we'll know how many turds were in the bowl before you flushed. Combine that with automated suspicion of anyone who matches a statistical picture of a bad guy and you're —”

“I'm scroogled.”

“Totally.”

“Thanks, Maya,” he said. “Thanks anyway.”

“Sit down,” she said. The dog that had been bumping at his legs was at it again. Maya took both dogs down the hall to the bedroom and he heard her muffled argument with her girlfriend. She came back without the dogs.

“I can fix this,” she said in a whisper so low it was practically a hiss. “I can googleclean you.”

“But you're under constant scrutiny —”

“By DHS agents. Once they fired all non-native-born Americans from the DHS, it got a lot fatter and stupider. I can googleclean you, Greg.”

“I don't want you to get into trouble.”

She shook her head. “I'm already doomed. I built the googlecleaner. Every day since then has been borrowed time — now it's just a matter of waiting for someone to point out my expertise and history to the DHS and, oh, I don't know. Whatever it is they do to people like me in the War on Abstract Nouns.”

Greg remembered the questioning at the airport. The search. His shirt, the bootprint in the middle of it.

“Do it,” he said.

#

The ads were weird. He hadn't really paid attention to them in years. The blocker got rid of most of them, but Google changed its code often enough that their little text ads showed up on a lot of his pages. They stayed subliminal mostly — only clunkers like that Ann Coulter ringtone ad made it past his eyes into his brain.

Now the clunkers were everywhere: Intelligent Design Facts, Online Seminary Degree, Terror Free Tomorrow, Porn Blocker Software, Homosexuality and Satan. He clicked through a couple of these and found himself in some kind of alternate universe Internet, full of weird opinions about the evils of being gay, the certainty of the young Earth, the need for eternal national vigilance.

Then he started to notice something weird about the search results themselves. After unpacking his suitcase and opening his mail, he spent two weeks sitting at home on his ass, surfing. His pre-Mexico belly was reemerging, so he decided to do something about it. No burritos for lunch today — he'd go to that holistic place Maya had told him about. Vegan low-fat cuisine couldn't possibly be as gross as it sounded.

“Did you mean 'Hungarian Restaurants'?”

He snorted. No, he'd meant “holistic restaurants,” you dumbass search-engine. It nagged at him. He pulled up his search history and went back through the results, printing out the pages. Then he logged out of his Google account and went back through the same searches, comparing the results to the logged-in pages. The differences were striking. A search for “democratic primary” pointed to anti-Hillary rants on angry blogs when he was logged in, and to information on volunteering for the DNC when he was logged out. Searching for “abortion clinic” while logged out listed the nearest Planned Parenthood office; searching while logged in gave him information about Campaign Life, ProLife.com, and the ProLife alliance. Good thing he wasn't pregnant.

This was Maya's googlecleaner at work. It was like the stories of people who asked their TiVos to record an episode of “Queer Eye” and then got inundated with suggestions for other “gay shows” — “My TiVo thinks I'm gay,” was the title of one article he remembered. Google had been experimenting with “personalized” search results before he left the country — here it was, in all its glory.

Google thought he was a conservative Christian Republican who supported the War on Terror and many other abstract nouns.

He logged out of Google — that was simple. Five minutes later, he logged in again. His entire address book was in there. He logged out again. Logged back in. His calendar — when was his parents' anniversary again? Logged out. Logged back in. Needed his bookmarked locations in Maps. Logged out.

He stopped trying. Google was where his friendships lived — all those people he stayed connected to on Orkut. It was where his relationships lived: all that archived email, all those addresses in his address-book. It was his family photos, his bookmarks. Hell, his search history — his real search history — was like an outboard brain, remembering which parts of the unplumbable Internet he cared about, so that he didn't have to remember it the hard way, with the meat in his skull.

Google had a copy of him — all the parts of him that navigated the world and the people in it. Google owned that copy, and without it, he couldn't be himself anymore. He'd just have to stay logged in.

#

Greg mashed the keys on the laptop next to his bed, bringing the screen to life. He squinted at the toolbar clock: 4:13AM! Christ, who was pounding on his door at this hour?

He shouted “Coming!” in a muzzy voice and pulled on a robe and slippers. He shuffled down the hallway, turning on lights as he went, squinting. At the door, he squinted through the peephole, peering at — Maya.

He undid the chains and the deadbolt and yanked the door open and Maya rushed in past him, followed by the dogs, followed by her girlfriend, Laurie, whom he'd last seen at a Christmas party at Google, in a fabulous cocktail dress and an elaborate up-do. Now she was wearing a freebie Google Summer of Code sweatshirt, jeans, and a frown that started between her eyebrows and intensified all the way down her face.

Maya was sheened with sweat, her hair sticking to her forehead. She scrubbed at her eyes, which were red and lined.

“Pack a bag,” she said, in a hoarse croak.

“What?”

“Whatever you can't live without. A couple changes of clothes. Anything you're sentimental about — shoebox of pictures, your grandfather's razor, whatever. But keep it small, something you can carry. We're traveling light.”

“Maya, what are you —”

She took him by the shoulders. “Do. It,” she said. “Don't ask questions right now. There's no time.”

“Where do you want to —”

“Mexico, probably. Don't know yet. Pack, dammit.” She pushed past him into his bedroom and started yanking open drawers.

“Maya,” he said, sharply, “I'm not going anywhere until you tell me what's going on.”

She glared at him and pushed her hair away from her face. “The googlecleaner lives. I shut it down, walked away from it, after I did you. It was too dangerous to use anymore. But I still get buginizer notifications when new bugs get filed against it, I'm still in B as the project's owner. Someone filed eight bugs against it this week. Someone's used it six times to smear six very specific accounts.”

“Who's using it?”

“Well, I'll give you a hint. Let me tell you who's been cleaned this week —” She listed six candidates, four Republican and two Democrat, who were all in the running for the primaries.

“Googlers are blackwashing political candidates?”

“Not Googlers. This is all coming from offsite. The IP block is registered in DC. And the IPs are all also used by Gmail users. And those Gmail users —”

“You spied on gmail accounts?”

“I'm leaving in two minutes, with or without you. You can interrupt me to ask me questions, or you can listen.” She gave him another look. Laurie stood in the door of the bedroom, holding the dogs by the collars and looking down at the floor.

“Good. OK. Yes. I did spy on their email. Of course I did. Everyone does it, now and again, and for a lot worse reasons than this.

“It's our lobbying firm. The ones who invented the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Remember them? It was a stink when we hired them, but Google couldn't afford to be 'that company full of registered Democrats' forever. We needed friends in Congress. These guys could do it for us.”

“But they're ruining politicians' careers!”

“Yeah. They certainly are. And who benefits when they do that?”

Laurie spoke, at last. “Other politicians.”

He felt his pulse beating in his temples. “We should tell someone.”

“Yeah,” Maya said. “How? They know everything about us. They can see every search. Every email. Every time we've been caught on the webcams. Who is in our social network — you know that if you've got more than fifteen Orkut buddies, it's statistically certain that you're no more than three steps to someone who's contributed money to a 'terrorist' cause? Remember the airport? Imagine a lot more of that.”

“Maya,” he said, carefully. “I think you're over-reacting. You don't need to go to Mexico. You can just quit. We can do a startup together or something. Or you can move to the country and raise dogs. Whatever. This is crazy —”

“They came to see me today,” she said. “At work. Two of the political officers — the minders who monitor our sensitive projects. And they asked me a lot of very heavy questions.”

“About the googlecleaner?”

“About my friends and family. About my search history. About my political beliefs.”

“Jesus.”

“They were sending me a message. They were letting me know that they were onto me. They're watching every click and every search. It's time to go — time to get out of range.”

“There's a Google office in Mexico, you know.”

“Are you coming, Greg? We're going now.”

“Laurie, what do you think of this?”

Laurie thumped the dogs between the shoulders. “Maya showed me what Google knows about me. It's like there's a little me in there, a copy of me. Like I'm pinned down under a jar with a ball of ether. My parents left East Germany in '65 — they used to tell me about the Stasi. They'd put everything about you in your file — even unpatriotic jokes. Lately I've been feeling...watched. All the time. Like I can't live without leaving a trail. Like I'm throwing off a smog of data and it can't be gotten rid of.”

“We're going now, Greg. Now. Are you coming?”

Greg looked at the dogs. “I've got some pesos left over,” he said. “You take them. Be careful, OK?”

She looked like she was going to slug him. Then she softened and gave him a ferocious hug. “Be careful yourself,” she whispered in his ear.

#

They came for him a week later. At home, in the middle of the night, just as he'd imagined it. Their knock was nothing like Maya's tentative, nervous thump. They went bang-bang-bang, confident, knowing that they had every right to be there and not caring who else came after them.

Two men. One stayed by the door and didn't say anything. The other was a smiler, short and rumpled, in a sports coat with a small stain on one lapel and a cloisonné American flag on the other. “Computer Fraud and Abuse Act,” he said, by way of introduction. “'Exceeding authorized access, and by means of such conduct having obtained information.' Ten years for a first offense, ever since the PATRIOT Act extended it. I have it on the best of authority that what you and your friend did to your Google records qualifies. And oh, what will come out in the trial. All the stuff you whitewashed out of your profile.”

Greg had been playing this scene out in his head for a week. He'd had all kinds of brave things to say, planned out in advance. He'd even written some down, to see how they looked. It had given him something to do while the knots in his stomach tightened, while he waited to hear from Maya.

“I'd like to call a lawyer,” is all he managed. It came out in a whisper.

“You can do that,” the man said. “But hear me out first.”

Greg found his voice. “I'd like to see your badge.”

The man's basset-hound face lit up as he hissed a laugh. “Oh, Greg, buddy. I'm not a cop. I work for —” He named the DC firm in Google's employ. The inventors of swiftboating. “You're a Googler. You're part of the family. We couldn't send the police after you without talking with you first. There's an offer I'd like to make.”

Greg made coffee. It gave him something to do with his hands while he tried to find that bravery he'd been honing all week. “I'll go to the press,” he said. “I've written this all up. I'll go straight to them.”

The guy nodded as if thinking it over. “Well, sure. You could walk into the Chronicle's office in the morning and spill everything you need. They'd try to find a confirming source. They won't find it. Maybe you'll try to show them what your profile looks like today? Well, tell you what, it looks just like it looked the day you landed at SFO. Greg, buddy, why don't you hear me out before you start trying to figure out how to fight me? I'm in the win-win business. I'm in the business of figuring out how to get all parties what they need. I'm very good at it. You don't even want to know what I'm billing Google for this little tete-a-tete. By the way, those are excellent beans, but you want to give them a little rinse first, takes some of the bitterness out and brings up the oils. Here, pass me a colander?”

Greg watched in numb bemusement as the man took off his jacket and hung it over a kitchen chair, then undid his cuffs and rolled them up, slipping a cheap digital watch into his pocket. Then he poured the beans back out of the grinder and into Greg's colander and did things at the sink.

He was a little pudgy, and very pale. He needed a haircut — had unruly curls at his neck. It made Greg relax, somehow. This guy had the social gracelessness of a nerd, felt like a real Googler, obsessed with the minutiae. He knew his way around a coffee-grinder, too.

“We're drafting a team for Building 49 —”

“There is no building 49,” Greg said, automatically.

“Yeah,” the guy said, with a private little smile. “There's no Building 49. And we're putting together a team, with its own buginizer, to own googlecleaner. Maya's code wasn't very efficient. Every time someone runs it, it clobbers the whole farm. And it's got plenty of bugs. We've asked around and there's consensus on this. You'd be the right guy, and it wouldn't matter what you knew if you were back inside —”

“No, I wouldn't,” Greg said. “You're on crack.”

“Hear me out. There's money involved. Good work, too. Smart colleagues. A direction for your life. A chance to participate in the political life of your country —”

Greg gave a bitter laugh. “Unbelievable,” he said. “If you think I'm going to help you smear political candidates in exchange for favors, you're even crazier than I thought.”

“Greg,” he said, “Greg, you're right. That was dumb. No one is going to do that anymore. We're just going to — clean things up a little. For some select people. You know what I mean, right? Every Google profile is a little scary under close inspection. Close inspection is the order of the day in politics. You stand for office and they'll look at your kids, your brothers, your ex-girlfriends. Now that your search history is available to so many people, it won't be that hard to look into that too. Your Orkut network, your old Usenet messages, your searches, all of it.” He loaded the cafetiere and depressed the plunger, his face screwed up in solemn concentration. He held out his hand and Greg got down two coffee mugs — Google mugs, of course — and passed them to him.

“We're going to do for our friends just what Maya did for you. Just give them a little cleanup. Preserve their privacy. That's all — I promise you, that's all.”

Greg sipped the coffee, but didn't taste it. “And whichever candidates you don't clean —”

“Yeah,” the guy said. “Yeah, you're right. It'll be tough for them.”

“You can go now,” Greg said.

“Oh, Greg,” the guy said. He plucked his jacket off his chair-back and shrugged it on, felt in the inside pocket and produced a small stack of paper, folded into quarters. He smoothed it out and put it on the table.

Greg looked quickly and saw the rows of results he'd seen on the DHS man's screen, back at the airport, when this all started. “I don't care,” he said. “Tell the world about my search history. Go ahead. In five years, everyone will have had their search history ruptured. We'll all be guilty.”

“It's not your history,” the man said. He divided the stack into two piles, and pointed to names on the top sheet of each. One was Maya's. The other was a candidate whose campaign Greg had contributed to for the last three elections.

“You get five weeks' vacation a year. You can go to Cabo for the SCUBA. The options package is very generous, too.”

The man sat down and drank some coffee. Greg tried some more of his own. It didn't taste so bad. It was, in fact, more delicious than anything that had ever come out of his kitchen. The man knew what he was doing.

The best years of Greg's life had been spent at Google. Smart people. Amazing work environment. Wonderful technology. Nothing in the world like it. When you worked at G, you had the best model train set in the universe to play with. Organizing all of human knowledge.

“You can pick your team, of course,” the man said.

Greg poured himself another cup of delicious coffee.

#

The new Congress took eleven working days to pass the Securing and Enumerating America's Communications and Hypertext Act, which authorized the DHS and the NSA to outsource up to 80 percent of its intelligence and analysis work to private contractors.

Theoretically, the contracts were open to a competitive bidding process, but within the secure group at Google, in building 49, there was no question of who would win those contracts. If Google had spent $15 billion on a program to catch bad guys at the border, you can bet that they would have caught them — governments just aren't equipped to Do Search Right.

Greg looked himself in the eye that morning as he shaved — the security minders didn't like hacker-stubble, and they weren't shy about telling you so — and realized that today was his first day as a de facto intelligence agent in the US government.

How bad would it be? Wasn't it better to have Google doing this stuff than some ham-fisted spook?

He had himself convinced by the time he parked at the Googleplex, among the hybrid cars and bulging bike-racks. He stopped for an organic smoothie on the way to his desk, then sat down and sipped.

The rumpled man hadn't been to the G since Greg went back to work, but it often felt like his influence was all around them in building 49. He wasn't any less rumpled today — he could have been wrapped in saran-wrap on the day he brought Greg back to work and refrigerated for all that he hadn't changed a hair.

“Hi, Greg,” he said, sliding into the chair next to his. His podmates stood up in unison and left the room.

“Just tell me what it is,” Greg said. “Just spit it out. You want me to pwn NORAD and start World War III, right?”

“Nothing so obvious,” the man said, patting his shoulder. “Just a little search-job.”

“Yeah?”

“There's a person we want to find. A person who's left the country, apparently headed for Mexico. She knows certain things that are, as of today, classified. She needs to be briefed on her new responsibilities.”

Greg stood up. “I'm not going to find Maya for you.” He pulled on his jacket.

“There are plenty of people here who will. It's up to you, though. You can work here with her, being productive, or you can find out just how rotten life can get — while she works here, being productive with your co-workers.”

Greg stared at him, his hands balled into fists.

“Come on,” the rumpled man said. “Greg, we both know how this goes. When you said yes to me in your kitchen, you lost the option of saying no. It's not so bad, is it? Who would you rather have doing the nation's intelligence: you and your pals here in the Valley, or a bunch of straight-edge code-grinders in Virginia?”

Greg turned on his heel and left. He made it all the way to the parking lot before he stopped and kicked a wall so hard he felt something give way in his foot.

Then he limped back to his desk, hung his jacket on his chair, and logged back in.

#

It was a week later when his key-card failed to open the door to Building 49. The idiot red LED shone at him every time he swiped it. He swiped it and swiped it. Any other building and there'd be someone to tailgate on, people trickling in and out all day. But the Googlers in 49 only emerged for meals, and sometimes not even that.

Swipe, swipe, swipe.

“Greg, can I see you, please?”

The rumpled man hadn't shaved in a couple of days. He put an arm around Greg's shoulders and Greg smelled his citrusy aftershave. It was the same cologne that his divemaster in Baja had worn when they went out to the bars in the evening. Greg couldn't remember his name. Juan-Carlos? Juan-Luis?

The man's arm around his shoulders was firm, steering him away from the door, out onto the immaculate lawn, past the kitchen's herb garden. “We're giving you a couple of days off,” he said.

Greg felt a cold premonition that sank all the way to his balls. “Why?” Had he done something wrong? Was he going to jail?

“It's Maya.” The man turned him around, met his eyes with his bottomless basset-hound gaze. “It's Maya. Killed herself. In Guatemala. I'm sorry, Greg.”

Greg seemed to hurtle away from himself, to a place miles above, a Google Earth view of the Googleplex, looking down on himself and the rumpled man as a pair of dots, two pixels, tiny and insignificant. He willed himself to tear at his hair, to drop to his knees and weep.

From a long way away, he heard himself say, “I don't need any time off. I'm OK.”

From a long way away, he heard the rumpled man insist.

But one-pixel Greg wouldn't be turned aside. The argument persisted for a long time, and then the two pixels moved into Building 49 and the door swung shut behind them.

#doctorow

Afterword

This one came as a commission from Radar magazine — now defunct, a casualty of the 2008 crash, but in 2007, this was the most widely circulated “lifestyle” magazine in the US. They asked me to write about “the day Google became evil.” I didn't want to cheap out and just write about the company selling out to some evil millionaire. If Google ever turned evil, it would be because a) evil had a compelling business-model and b) evil lay at the end of a compelling technical challenge.

I spent a lot of time talking off-the-record to Googlers, who are, to a one, the nicest people I know (OK, one exception springs to mind, but let's not air our dirty laundry in public, right?). I also had an incredibly productive conversation with the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Kevin Bankston, a profound and sharp-witted privacy lawyer.

I wanted to capture a company that was full of good people who do bad. There are lots of these. For example, all the Microsoft employees I know are fantastic and smart and caring and principled. But ethically and technically, most of what comes out of Redmond is a train-wreck. It's anti-synergy: a firm that is far less than the sum of its parts. I could easily see Google turning into that. I wish I understood how groups of good people trying to do good can do bad.

Cory Doctorow

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Picture: Google 2019 corona (some rights reserved)

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