Eastern Standard Tribe

"Tribes are agendas. Aesthetics. Ethos. Traditions. Ways of getting things done. They're competitive. They may not all be based on time-zones. There are knitting Tribes and vampire fan-fiction Tribes and Christian rock tribes, but they've always existed. Mostly, these tribes are little more than a sub-culture. It takes time-zones to amplify the cultural fissioning of fan-fiction or knitting into a full-blown conspiracy. Their interests are commercial, industrial, cultural, culinary. A Tribesman will patronize a fellow Tribesman's restaurant, or give him a manufacturing contract, or hire his taxi. Not because of xenophobia, but because of homophilia: I know that my Tribesman's taxi will conduct its way through traffic in a way that I'm comfortable with, whether I'm in San Francisco, Boston, London or Calcutta. I know that the food will be palatable in a Tribal restaurant, that a book by a Tribalist will be a good read, that a gross of widgets will be manufactured to the exacting standards of my Tribe.

"Like I said, though, unless you're at ground zero, in the Tribe's native time zone, your sleep sched is just raped. You live on sleepdep and chat and secret agentry until it's second nature. You're cranky and subrational most of the time. Close your eyes on the freeway and dreams paint themselves on the back of your lids, demanding their time, almost as heavy as gravity, almost as remorseless. There's a lot of flaming and splitting and vitriol in the Tribes. They're more fractured than a potsherd. Tribal anthropologists have built up incredible histories of the fissioning of the Tribes since they were first recognized-most of 'em are online; you can look 'em up. We stab each other in the back routinely and with no more provocation than a sleepdep hallucination.

"Which is how I got here. I'm a member of the Eastern Standard Tribe. We're centered around New York, but we're ramified up and down the coast, Boston and Toronto and Philly, a bunch of Montreal Anglos and some wannabes in upstate New York, around Buffalo and Schenectady. I was doing Tribal work in London, serving the Eastern Standard Agenda, working with a couple of Tribesmen, well, one Tribesman and my girlfriend, who I thought was unaffiliated. Turns out, though, that they're both double agents. They sold out to the Pacific Daylight Tribe, lameass phonies out in LA, slick Silicon Valley bizdev sharks, pseudo hipsters in San Franscarcity. Once I threatened to expose them, they set me up, had me thrown in here."

I looked around proudly, having just completed a real fun little excursion through a topic near and dear to my heart. Mount Rushmore looked back at me, stony and bovine and uncomprehending.

"Baby," Lucy said, rolling her eyes again, "you need some new meds."

"Could be," I said. "But this is for real. Is there a comm on the ward? We can look it up together."

"Oh, that

'all prove it, all right. Nothing but truth online."

"I didn't say that. There're peer-reviewed articles about the Tribes. It was a lead story on the CBC's social science site last year."

"Uh huh, sure. Right next to the sasquatch videos."

"I'm talking about the CBC, Lucy. Let's go look it up."

Lucy mimed taking an invisible comm out of her cleavage and prodding at it with an invisible stylus. She settled an invisible pair of spectacles on her nose and nodded sagely. "Oh yeah, sure, really interesting stuff."

I realized that I was arguing with a crazy person and turned to the doctor. "You must have read about the Tribes, right?"

The doctor acted as if he hadn't heard me. "That's just fascinating, Art. Thank you for sharing that. Now, here's a question I'd like you to think about, and maybe you can tell us the answer tomorrow: What are the ways that your friends-the ones you say betrayed you-used to show you how much they respected you and liked you? Think hard about this. I think you'll be surprised by the conclusions you come to."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Just what I said, Art. Think hard about how you and your friends interacted and you'll see that they really like you."

"Did you hear what I just said? Have you heard of the Tribes?"

"Sure, sure. But this isn't about the Tribes, Art. This is about you and-" he consulted his comm, "Fede and Linda. They care about you a great deal and they're terribly worried about you. You just think about it. Now," he said, recrossing his legs, "Fatima, you told us yesterday about your mother and I asked you to think about how she feels. Can you tell the group what you found out?"

But Fatima was off in med-land, eyes glazed and mouth hanging slack. Manuel nudged her with his toe, then, when she failed to stir, aimed a kick at her shin. The doctor held a hand out and grabbed Manuel's slippered toe. "That's all right, let's move on to Lucy."