"Cory_Doctorow_Liberation_Spectrum" - читать интересную книгу автора (Doctorow Cory)

"We'd like to speak with you, if we may," he said. Akwesahsne was supposed to be a cakewalk. The Canadian Radio and Television Commission -- Canada's RF feds -- were softies, more worried about ensuring that 30 percent of the entertainment product on the airwaves was "Canadian Content" than with monitoring ultra-low-power, ultra-wide-band cognitive radio experiments in rural Quйbec. The Mohawk Warrior Society, whose reservation was a Siamese twin with another rez in upstate New York, were accustomed to the American way of doing biz, had even underwritten MBAs for a bunch of the bros, which explained the animated growth charts back-linked to hundreds of diverse spreadsheets maintained by research committees across the continental Mohawk Nation infrastructure.

The Mohawk Warriors had raised consciousness. The road signs pointing the way to the rez were augmented with handpainted signage reading "Indian land," and "Sovereign territory."

The CogRadio magic bus pulled up to the guard in the pillbox at the Akwesahsne main gate, abuzz with new-gig energy, the anticipation of thirty skilled professionals who'd been crammed into a bus for four solid days, ready to tear each other's throats out. The gatewoman was all of 17, not that you could tell at first, so crufted up was she with obsolete martian armor/arms and sensory array.

But once she came onto the bus for her customs inspection and removed her immersive headgear, it was obvious that she was no older than the switch girls who drifted in and out of the CogRad bus, using it as a means of making a little e-gold between footloose adventures in the Great American Heartland.

A 17-year-old with a defensive array of fast-acting anti-serotonin misters was a lot less threatening than a 30-year-old would have been, and orders of magnitude less terrifying than a similarly armed innovation-sick 50-year-old would have been. Joey Riel came forward, stinking of something between sweat socks and Doritos, and greeted her in familiar, colloquial French, something flirty by the sound of it, and she gave him a wry, patronizing smile.

"Why do you speak French, Brother? Why not greet me in Kanien'kйha, or Cree, or even Ojibwa? When we speak whiteman words, they make us think whiteman thoughts." She turned to the bus and gave them a long stare. "Hello, whitemen," she continued, "hello, whitewomen. Welcome to the Mohawk Warrior Society autonomous zone. No weapons. No sex with First People. No drinks or drugs. No whiteman tobacco."

"Cook your own meals, wash your own plates, step lightly on the land. You can observe our nightly meetings if you are respectful, but it's more important that you come to the seminars afterwards. There are lectures, role-playing exercises, personal storytelling, theater of the oppressed, newsblogging, warblogging, linkblogging, puppetmaking, outreach, filterbusting. Whiteman guests are welcome here, provided that they're willing to help the cause."

Lee-Daniel had heard variations on this speech before, but they usually came from hotheads who argued against renewing CogRad's maintenance contract, not the official greeter before they'd even started the gig. He knew well enough to take it in stride and move on, but Joey Riel was blushing furiously at having been shot down for insufficient indianity by this highly macha hottie, and so he waved some verbal dick, asking something in Ojibwa, all testicular.

She fixed him with a withering stare. "You're not the first apple I've met," she said. Apple -- red on the outside, white on the inside. "And you're not the most pathetic. But you're an apple and you've forgotten who you are, and that means that you don't mean anything to me except a sad story and a warning to other First People."

Joey Riel's hands balled up into fists and the investors shifted nervously. Lee-Daniel got to his feet and interposed himself between them.

"Ya-tay-hay, madam," he said. "Thank you for your welcome. Can you tell me where I should park the bus? We've got a lot of work to do today, while there's still light to work by."

- - - - - - - - - - - -

"You need to understand, it's not personal," MacDiarmid said, for the third time.

Lee-Daniel set down his ridiculous second-hand crantini carton and climbed slowly to his feet. "You need to understand, Mac, that I don't care if it's personal. Whether you're forcing me out of this company, this company that I built with my own two hands, this company that is hitting every goddamned milestone, this company that is returning good dividends on your preferred stock, whether you're forcing me out because you're not my friend anymore --" he said this in a pinched, Mickey Mouse voice "-- or whether you're forcing me out because you think that it's 'for the best' doesn't matter to me at all. I don't care if you're doing it because you're protecting your investment or because your astrologer told you to, I still won't stand for it."

The Series A and Series B investors, who'd started off looking uncomfortable, visibly squirmed during this. They weren't accustomed to interpersonal conflict in the course of conducting their affairs. But Mac took it all in stride. Angels have to be prepared to slug it out to protect their investment.

"You don't get to stand for it, LD," MacDiarmid said, sipping at a frosty can of slushy ginseng-infused Long Island iced tea. "You don't get a say in it. When the investors are united, you don't have the equity to overrule us. The severance package is generous, the noncompete is lightweight, and you get to go with your dignity intact." He didn't need to add that fighting the board would mean a significant change to that picture. Fuck them and their noncompetition agreement, though -- Lee-Daniel knew that enforcing a U.S./Canada noncompete would be tricky on Sovereign Indian territory.

"What'd they promise you, Mac?" Lee-Daniel asked. He'd shrewdly chosen his investors for their mutual animosity, believing that bitter enemies like the Series A gigafund and the Series B terafund would never come together, and that Mac, who'd been screwed on deals by principals from both funds, would never toss his lot in with them. "What do they have that's worth your throwing away this entire investment?"

"No one's throwing away anything. There comes a point in any business's life cycle where the founders get out of their depth and we need to transition in a professional CEO. You've done a good job with CogRad, LD, and we recognize that, but if we're going to ensure steady growth, we need seasoned leadership."

"Seasoned?" He barked a laugh. "Mac, I invented this business! We're five years ahead of our closest competitors -- who only got that far by copying stuff I invented. Who the hell could possibly be more 'seasoned' than me?"

"You've never run a Fortune Five company," the Series A man said. "You've never had more than fifty people working under you. Executive search firms --"

MacDiarmid waved at hand crusted with three class rings at the gesticulating Series A punk, who barely looked old enough to smoke. He'd only been out of B-school for a year and he'd only been on the bus for a month, but here he was, telling Lee- Daniel that they'd blown corporate funds, money he'd earned, on a slick-ass headhunter who'd spent it getting old frat brothers laid at fancy hotels on Hawai'i while negotiating how much of Lee-Daniel's company they would end up with once they stole his job from him.

The punk shut up.

"Mac," Lee-Daniel said, sitting down again, pulling up a chair. "Come here, Mac, take a seat, talk to me. I want to hear this from you, from the beginning."

Mac stood, exchanging significant looks with the Series A and Series B investors.

"Come on, Mac, screw that. You and me, end-to-end." That was CogRad jargon from back in the old days. The Internet was end-to-end, which meant that any two points could communicate without an intermediary interfering in the bitstream. In CogRad, you didn't talk person-to-person or man-to-man, you talked end-to-end, just like the connectivity they brought to the rez. "I own 15 percent of this company, same as you -- you owe me a decent explanation."