Once they were seated, Alan snuck a look at Kurt, who had narrowed his
eyes and cast his gaze down onto the business cards he'd been
handed. Alan hadn't been expecting this -- he'd figured on finding
himself facing down a group of career bureaucrats -- and Kurt was
clearly thrown for a loop, too.
"Well, Alan, Kurt, it's nice to meet you," Lyman said. "I hear you're
working on some exciting stuff."
"We are," Alan said. "We're building a city-wide mesh wireless network
using unlicensed spectrum that will provide high-speed, Internet
connectivity absolutely gratis."
"That's ambitious," Lyman said, without the skepticism that Alan had
assumed would greet his statement. "How's it coming?"
"Well, we've got a bunch of Kensington Market covered," Alan
said. "Kurt's been improving the hardware design and we've come up with
something cheap and reproducible." He opened his tub and handed out the
access points, housed in gray high-impact plastic junction boxes.
Lyman accepted one solemnly and passed it on to his graybeard, then
passed the next to an East Indian woman in horn-rim glasses whose
bitten-down fingernails immediately popped the latch and began lightly
stroking the hardware inside, tracing the connections. The third landed
in front of Lyman himself.
"So, what do they do?"
Alan nodded at Kurt. Kurt put his hands on the table and took a
breath.
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