The Dilettantes Read Online Free Page B

janitor.”
    “Possible space theme … a dystopian future, maybe?”
    “What?
How did you know that?”
    It wasn’t much of a guess. Camera crews eager for a Canadian tax break were always floating around the campus, and half of what was filmed at SFU turned the campus into FBI headquarters or the home base for robot dictatorships thanks to Arthur Erickson, whose architectural style was built around concrete and right angles. Tracy was just using her home-field advantage.
    “Okay, okay,” the woman conceded. “Go on. What’ll it cost me?”
    “The public has a right to know these things,” Tracy said. “Information wants to be free, you know.”
    “It does? Fuck. Fuck, okay, shit. Listen, if I just let you in right now to photocopy your stuff, will you keep quiet?”
    “Hm. That sounds reasonable.”
    “I’ll even throw in a hat. An official one. Only the crew are supposed to have them.”
    “Deal,” Tracy said.
    The woman sighed with relief. “Good. Fine. Meet me back here tonight and I’ll have it ready. If I’m not here, check inside this plant.” Tracy took a step forward, but the woman jutted out her arm again. “You’ll have to give me your phone, though. No pictures. I’ll give it back on your way out.”
    Tracy handed it over and brushed past. “There’s no camera on it.”
    “Yeah, that’s what the guy in Seattle said,” the woman called after her. “And duck down, would you? If the monkeys see a human on set it’ll wreck their focus.”

3
COMIC SANS
    Here’s how it happened.
    For a few months, there had been distant rumblings around campus that the
Metro
, a free daily that had been blanketing the Greater Vancouver area with celebrity-strewn garbage tumbleweeds for over a year, had plans to expand to Burnaby Mountain. The thing was shockingly well read. Discarded copies pooled by the dozens in back corners of buses and SkyTrains, and even though you were never more than an arm’s length away from one, the company employed fleets of retirees and the recently paroled to stand in green aprons in the middle of sidewalks all over the city, bothering people into taking a copy. They repeated the same phrases over and over again. “Free
Metro.”
“Paper?” In this respect they had more than a little in common with the panhandlers a couple of feet farther down the block. Each had their slogans. But it was obvious who was flooded with business, and who was literally starved for it.
    So far the Burnaby campus had been immune to the daily’s charms, for the same reason it would have also shrugged off Noah’s flood: it had the higher ground. SFU , Ark-free Since 1965. True, it was nearly impossible to get decent take-out delivered up the mountain, but the upside was that the commute also scared off most unwanted solicitors. As a result,
The Peak
, SFU’S official student newspaper,had enjoyed a near-total monopoly. Its only rivals were a sporadically published newsletter by and for business students called
The Buzz!
, and a pamphlet written in Mandarin that, despite impressive distribution numbers, not one person had ever been seen reading.
    But now it looked like the
Metro
was making a real play for a presence at SFU . Rick,
The Peak’s
business manager and resident grown-up, heard through one of his channels that the daily would be setting up a booth at Clubs Days, complete with banners and confetti. There’d be an entire squad of fresh-faced excitables wearing headbands and green jumpsuits, ready to chat up passersby and even cartwheel for a paycheque. If things went well there—and really, how could they not?—they’d leave dozens of shiny
Metro
boxes in their wake, scattered down the mountain like breadcrumbs. Apron-clad reverse-panhandlers wouldn’t be far behind.
    The Peak
had two major things to fear from this new competition. One was advertising. Ad dollars were scarce to begin with, and the
Metro
was sure to take a significant chunk of them—and that wasn’t even counting