Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year Volume 5 An anthology of stories

Cory Doctorow is the co-editor of the popular Boing Boing website (boingboing.net), a co-founder of the internet search-engine company OpenCola.com, and until recently was the outreach coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org). In 2001, he won the John W. Campbell Award as the year’s Best New Writer. His stories have appeared in Asimov’s , Science Fiction Age , The Infinite Matrix , On Spec , Salon, and elsewhere, and were collected in A Place So Foreign and Eight More and Overclocked . His well-received first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom , won the Locus Award as Best First Novel, and was followed shortly by a second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe , then by Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town , Little Brother, and Makers . Doctorow’s other books include The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction , written with Karl Schroeder, a guide to Essential Blogging , written with Shelley Powers, and, most recently, Content: Selected Essays of Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future . His most recent book is novel For the Win .

There is a phone, there is a phone, there is a phone like no phone that was ever hatched by the feverish imaginations of the world’s phone manufacturers, a phone so small and so featureful and so perfect for my needs that it couldn’t possibly have lasted. And it didn’t. And so now I hunt the phone, and now I have

found

the

phone!

I saw it sitting in the window of the Cash Converters in the Kentish Town High Street. This little pawn-shop was once a tube-station, believe it or not, used as a bomb-shelter during the Blitz, and you can still find photos of the brave Sons and Daughters of England sleeping in ranks on the platform rolled up in blankets like subterranean grubs waiting to hatch, sheltering from Hitler’s bombers as they screamed overhead. Now the top of the station is a pawn-broker’s, and around the back there’s a “massage parlour” that offers discreet services for the discerning gentleman.

I am no gentleman, but I am discerning. And what I was discerning right now is a HTC Screenparty Mark I phone, circa 2014, running some ancient and crumbly version of Google’s Android operating system and there, right there , on the back panel, is a pair of fisheye lenses: one is the camera. The other is the projector .

That’s the business, that projector. The Screenparty I was the first-ever phone ever delivered with a little high-powered projector built into it, and the only Android phone that had one, because ten minutes after it shipped, Apple dusted off some old patent on putting projectors in handheld devices and used the patent to beat the Screenparty I to death. And yes, there were projectors in the iPhones that followed, but you couldn’t do what I planned on doing with an iPhone, not with all the spyware and copyright rubbish that Apple’s evil wizards have crammed into their pocket-sized jailers.

I had to have that Screenparty. So I squared up my shoulders and pulled my scarf tighter around my neck, and I thought, You are a respectable fellow, you are a respectable fellow. You did not eat garbage this morning. You did not sleep in an abandoned building. You did not grow up on a council estate. You are a bloody toff . A deep breath—fog in the cold air—and I was through the door, winking back at the CCTV that peered down at me from the ceiling, then smiling my best smile at the lad behind the counter, who looks like any kid from my estate, skinny and jug-eared with too many spots that are the color that spots go when you pick at them.

“Hello there, my son,” I said, putting on the voice that a toff would use if he wanted to sound like he was being matey and not at all superior.

The lad grinned. “You like the phone, mister? Saw you lookin’ at it. Just got it in, that one.”

“It’s a funny little thing. I remember when they first came out. Never worked very well. But they were good fun, when they did.”

The lad reached into the window—the shop was that small, he didn’t even have to get off his chair—and plucked out the phone. I saw that it was absolutely cherry—mint condition, the plastic film still covering the screen. Which meant that the battery was almost certainly in good nick, too. That was good—no one made batteries for the Screenparty anymore. He handed it to me and fished behind the counter for a mains-cable, then passed that over, too. I plugged one into the other and hit the power button. The phone chimed, began to play its animation and then the projector lit up, splashing its startup routine on the ceiling’s grimy acoustic tiles, a montage of happy people all over the world watching movies that were being projected from their happy little phones and played against nearby walls.

I waited for it to finish booting up its ancient operating system with something like nostalgia, seeing old icons and chrome I hadn’t seen since I was a boy. Then I tapped around and finally said, “You won’t be wanting much for this, I suppose. A fiver?” It was worth more than five pounds, but I was betting that the lad didn’t really know what it was worth, and by starting the bidding very low, I reckoned I could keep the final price from going too high. (Well, it couldn’t go too high, since all I had in my pocket was ten pounds plus some change).

The boy shook his head and made to put the phone away. “You’re having a laugh. Something like this, worth a lot more than five quid.”

I shrugged. “If that’s how you feel.” I sprinkled a little wave at him and turned for the door.

“Wait!” he said. “What about twenty?”

I snorted. “Son,” I said. “That phone was obsolete four years ago. It’s a miracle that it even works. If it breaks, no one’ll be able to mend it. Can’t even buy a battery for it. Five pounds is a good price for a little fun, a gizmo that you can amuse the boys with at the pub.”

He took the phone out of the window. “I got all the packaging and whatnot, too. Came in from a storage locker that went into arrears, the company sold off the contents for the back-rent. Will you go ten?”

I shook my head. “Five is my offer.” I had noticed something when I came into the shop, a little ace in the hole, and so now I fished it out. “Five, and a bit of information.”

The boy rolled his eyes. I upped my mental estimate of him a little. Pawnbrokers must get every chancer and twit in the world coming over their threshold with some baroque hustle or other.

“I’ll give you the information and you can decide if you think it’s worth it, how about that?”

The boy narrowed his eyes, nodded a fraction of an inch.

“That game back there, that old DSi cartridge in its box, just there?” I pointed, then quickly put my hand back down. I forgot about the new cuts there, a little run-in with some barbed wire, not the sort of thing a toff would have. The boy reached into his case and pulled it out: Star Wars Cantina Dance Off , he said, setting it down on the glass. The box was a little scuffed, but still presentable.

“Google it,” I said. He snorted and turned around to get his phone. In one smooth motion, I dropped the Screenparty in my pocket with one hand and opened the door with the other. One step backwards took me over the threshold, and I pivoted on my back foot so I was facing forward and did a runner, lighting off up the Kentish Town High Street toward the back streets, down the canal embankment, and off along the towpath. As I ran, I thumbed my panic button in my coat pocket and the infra-red LEDs sewn into my jacket all went to max intensity, blinding ever CCTV I passed.