Free A Good Old-Fashioned Future by Bruce Sterling

lock on the garage door squeaked open, and Felix held it open so that Tug could pass inside.
    “The lights are over here,” said Felix, hitting a bank of switches. The cavernous garage was like a vast barn for elephants—there were thirty vehicle-repair bays on either side like stalls; each bay was big enough to have once held a huge green army truck.
    “Hey, Quinonez,” came Revel’s holler. “I ain’t got all day!”
    “Thanks so much, Felix,” said Tug, reaching out to the handsome older man for another handshake. “I’d love to see more of you.”
    “Well, maybe you will,” said Felix softly. “I am not a married man.”
    “That’s lovely,” breathed Tug. The two made full eye contact. No problema.
    Later that afternoon, Tug and Revel settled into a top-floor suite of a Monterey seaside hotel. Tug poured a few buckets of hotel ice onto the artificial jellyfish in his trunk. Revel got back into the compulsive wheeler-dealer mode with his portable phone again, his demands becoming more unseemly and grandiose as he and Tug worked their way, inch by amber inch, through a fifth of Gentleman Jack.
    At three in the morning, Tug crashed headlong into bed, his last conscious memory the clink and scrape of Revel razoring white powder on the suite’s glass-topped coffee-table. He’d hoped to dream that he was in the arms of Felix Quinonez, but instead he dreamed once again about debugging a jellyfish program. He woke with a terrible hangover.
    Whatever substance Revel had snorted—it seemed unlikely to be anything so mundane and antiquated as mere cocaine—it didn’t seem to be bothering him next morning. Revel lustily ordered a big breakfast from room-service.
    As Revel tipped the busboy lavishly and splashed California champagne into their beaker of orange juice, Tug staggered outside the suite to the balcony. The Monterey air was rank with kelp. Large immaculate seagulls slid and twisted along the sea-breeze updrafts at the hotel’s walls. In the distance to the north, a line of California seals sprawled on a rocky wharf like brown slugs on broken concrete. Dead tin-roofed canneries lined the shore to the south, some of them retrofitted into tourist gyp-joints and discos, others empty and at near-collapse.
    Tug huffed at the sea air until the vise-grip loosened at his temples. The world was bright and chaotic and beautiful. He stumbled into the room, bolted down a champagne mimosa and three forkfuls of scrambled eggs.
    “Well, Revel,” he said finally, “I’ve got to hand it to you. Quinonez Motorotive is ideal in every respect.”
    “Oh, I’ve had Monterey in mind since the first time we met here at SIGUSC,” Revel admitted, propping one boot-socked foot on the tabletop. “I took to this place right away. This is my kind of town.” With his lean strangler’s mitts folded over his shallow chest, the young oilman looked surprisingly at peace, almost philosophical. “You ever read any John Steinbeck, Tug?”
    “Steinbeck?”
    “Yeah, the Nobel Prize-winning twentieth-century novelist.”
    “I never figured you for a reading man, Revel.”
    “I got into Steinbeck’s stuff when I first came to Monterey,” Revel said. “Now I’m a big fan of his. Great writer. He wrote a book set right here in Cannery Row … you ever read it? Well, it’s about all these drunks and whores living on the hillsides around here, some pretty interesting folks, and the hero’s this guy who’s kind of their mentor. He’s an ichthyologist who does abortions on the side. Not for the money though, just because it’s the 1940s and he likes to have lots of sex, and abortion happens to be this thing he can hack ’cause of his science background.… Y’see, Tug, in Steinbeck’s day, Cannery Row actually canned a hell of a lot of fish! Sardines. But all the sardines vanished by 1950. Some kind of eco-disaster thing; the sardines never came back at all, not to this day.” He laughed. “So you know what they sell