www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/4/3/19455/41933
He reached over to the table, close at hand in such a confined space, and picked up a napkin. He carefully blotted up the spill, avoiding the printouts strewn across the desk. As he opened the trash panel and threw the napkin in, it belatedly occurred to him that the bump had been unusually strong. Time to play his favorite mental game--where, exactly, was he? Looking around confirmed this--the same desk, same bed, same small kitchen and eating area, all of it crammed into a space that was about 92 inches high, 92 inches wide, and 19 feet long: 147 square feet of living area. The interior dimensions were dictated by the exterior dimensions: exactly 20 feet long, 8 1/2 feet wide, and 8 feet high--the size of a standard shipping container, the twenty-foot equivalent unit or TEU, used by shipping companies all over the world. In fact, at this moment his TEU was being shipped to South America, site of his next job. In all likelihood the view would be the outer wall of another TEU stacked next to his, likely painted a rusty brown or dull blue. Quite unlike his own, covered in a garishly bright red, to indicate that the contents were a little less sturdy than the plastic toys and toaster ovens that fill most shipping containers. Some, however, took a sadistic pleasure in stuffing red TEUs way down in the bottom of the hold, and he had no particular desire to find out which was the case this time. Years of travel with no view to the outside had desensitized him to most feelings of motion, but that bump had felt like a ship coming into a dock a little too hard, rather than a plane landing or a truck hitting a pothole in the road. A status indicator on the wall confirmed that his support TEU, painted bright green, was hooked up next to him, giving him a month of air, water, and food. Sometimes Magellan would hold him back longer than necessary, even if it meant flying him to the site. Was this to keep him available in case better jobs came along, or merely to force clients to realize how dependent they were on his services? Flying the TEU was prohibitively expensive, he knew, although he cared little for the cost; He could easily have asked where he was, and gotten a result so accurate that he could gauge the swell of the waves by monitoring changes in position. In any case, living as he did, his exact position was generally irrelevant, as long as he was on track to get to his next client on time (which the display informed him, in the one section that he could not remove, would mean arriving in 2 days, 3 hours). What mattered was his level of connectivity to the worldwide data network, and the speed with which needed physical items could be brought to him. Assuming the ship had docked, his connectivity should be pretty high, once the ship's main data cable was hooked up to a landline. A milkshake was ten minutes away, presumably from the ship's kitchen; He brought up his personal craving, a bagel with cream cheese from his favorite bakery in New York City. Enough time for a young man in an expensive suit to be dispatched to the store, stand in line with other hungry customers, shout out his order to the man behind the counter, wait for the bagel to be toasted just so and slathered with cream cheese, pay for it, and then, through a combination of limousines, airplanes, and helicopters, deliver the brown paper bag and its precious contents to him. The expense was something for Magellan to hide in the client's bill. Experimenting with the availability of certain brand-name fast-food items, he decided that the ship was docked in San Juan, Puerto Rico. After hesitating a bit, he confirmed this on the display. He had to coordinate his sleep schedule so he would be waking up a few hours before he arrived at the client's site. Critics sneered, but McLean's breakthrough signaled the beginning of the end of break-bulk shipping, in which items were loaded and unloaded individually. Four years after the Ideal-X discharged its load of 58 containers, a dedicated container terminal was built at Port Elizabeth. In 1969 Richard Gibney, frustrated by variations in container sizes, coined the term TEU to refer to one whose exterior dimensions were eight feet wide and twenty feet long. The first TEU apartment was in Tokyo Harbor, a development known as Kiseki City. Every unit was self-contained, with standardized connections for air, water, network, waste, and so on, and because they were the size of a standard shipping container, they could be built anywhere in the world and delivered easily. Kiseki City had been constructed on top of the main Japanese data backbone, right next to the new floating airport, and soon a certain class of knowledge workers began to gravitate to it, workers who valued the proximity to the airport above all else, and who spent so little time in their homes that the small size didn't bother them. Eventually someone had the idea of modifying one section of Kiseki City to include cranes, so that individual containers could be detached and sent to the other TEU apartments that were springing up around the globe. But the inhabitants still traveled separately, meeting up with their movable homes for long-term assignments elsewhere. Finally, with the development of the green support TEUs, the infrastructure was in place to allow people to move inside their homes, the ultimate travel perk for those who could command it. His nominal home was Bak Stad, a TEU apartment outside Rotterdam, home to the largest container port in Europe. In practice this meant that on the rare occasions when a job finished before a new one had been lined up, his TEU would be loaded on a ship bound in the direction of the Netherlands. Often, before he arrived back home, Magellan would call and he would be redirected somewhere else. With his TEU nestled in its berth in Bak Stad, his window afforded him a beautiful view over the water. He could leave his TEU, stroll the common areas, occasionally chat with his neighbors, other redwalls like himself. Bak Stad was fully leased, but rarely more than one-third full. To amuse himself he occasionally bid, sight unseen, on the right to have a first peek at new writing from various deep thinkers. The message informed him that he had placed the second-highest bid on a 546-word essay from Naoe Hoshizaki, a young topological economist. He read the document, a quick insight into the way daylight savings time affected arbitrage between the New York and Tokyo stock exchanges. Interesting, but he wasn't sure how he was going to use the idea to enrich himself in the next 24 hours. It wasn't his location, buried in a pile of containers on a ship in the Caribbean: he was as connected as he ever was. He simply didn't have the energy, or the time, to concentrate on it, with his arrival at the client site less than 48 hours away. He wondered idly what the high bidder had been up to in the past week, but a quick scan of the East-West Index revealed no unusual trading patterns. He was aware that his services, compounded by his mode of travel, were prohibitively expensive. Emerging from his TEU, he felt like an alien landing on Earth. He knew that some people mocked redwalls, called them "red inks", compared them to babies who always needed the same car seat and the same pacifier wherever they traveled. Yet it was hard, leaving his ultra-tech, air-conditioned TEU, as often as not stepping into the kind of inhospitable climate where his expertise was most in demand, not to feel superior to the poor wretches he encountered, doomed to a life of first-class airline tickets and catered limousine rides. To occupy his time, he spent a few hours playing World Conquest. As he played, the display tracked and analyzed his moves. By now, he knew, it could simulate his play almost perfectly. He was proud of the fact that he was good enough to compete in the top division, in which he had to make every move himself, but demands on his time had grown, and he was currently playing a few divisions down, in which the display was allowed to make up to 20% of his moves. He checked what had been done on his behalf since he last played, and confirmed that the simul...
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