Makers - Cory Doctorow

[ [p] [/p][h2]Dedication:[/h2] [p][/p] [p] For “the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things.” [/p] [p] [/p][hr /] [p][/p] ]

[ [p] [/p][h2]PART I[/h2] [p][/p] [p] Suzanne Church almost never had to bother with the blue blazer these days. Back at the height of the dot-boom, she’d put on her business journalist drag—blazer, blue sailcloth shirt, khaki trousers, loafers—just about every day, putting in her obligatory appearances at splashy press-conferences for high-flying IPOs and mergers. These days, it was mostly work at home or one day a week at the San Jose Mercury News’s office, in comfortable light sweaters with loose necks and loose cotton pants that she could wear straight to yoga after shutting her computer’s lid. [/p] [p] Blue blazer today, and she wasn’t the only one. There was Reedy from the NYT’s Silicon Valley office, and Tribbey from the WSJ, and that despicable rat-toothed jumped-up gossip columnist from one of the UK tech-rags, and many others besides. Old home week, blue blazers fresh from the dry-cleaning bags that had guarded them since the last time the NASDAQ broke 5,000. [/p] [p] The man of the hour was Landon Kettlewell—the kind of outlandish prep-school name that always seemed a little made up to her—the new CEO and front for the majority owners of Kodak/Duracell. The despicable Brit had already started calling them Kodacell. Buying the company was pure Kettlewell: shrewd, weird, and ethical in a twisted way. [/p] [p] “Why the hell have you done this, Landon?” Kettlewell asked himself into his tie-mic. Ties and suits for the new Kodacell execs in the room, like surfers playing dress-up. “Why buy two dinosaurs and stick ’em together? Will they mate and give birth to a new generation of less-endangered dinosaurs?” [/p] [p] He shook his head and walked to a different part of the stage, thumbing a PowerPoint remote that advanced his slide on the jumbotron to a picture of a couple of unhappy cartoon brontos staring desolately at an empty nest. “Probably not. But there is a good case for what we’ve just done, and with your indulgence, I’m going to lay it out for you now.” [/p] [p] “Let’s hope he sticks to the cartoons,” Rat-Toothed hissed beside her. His breath smelled like he’d been gargling turds. He had a not-so-secret crush on her and liked to demonstrate his alpha-maleness by making half-witticisms into her ear. “They’re about his speed.” [/p] [p] She twisted in her seat and pointedly hunched over her computer’s screen, to which she’d taped a thin sheet of polarized plastic that made it opaque to anyone shoulder-surfing her. Being a halfway attractive woman in Silicon Valley was more of a pain in the ass than she’d expected, back when she’d been covering rustbelt shenanigans in Detroit, back when there was an auto industry in Detroit. [/p] [p] The worst part was that the Brit’s reportage was just spleen-filled editorializing on the lack of ethics in the valley’s board-rooms (a favorite subject of hers, which no doubt accounted for his fellow-feeling), and it was also the crux of Kettlewell’s schtick. The spectacle of an exec who talked ethics enraged Rat-Toothed more than the vilest baby-killers. He was the kind of revolutionary who liked his firing squads arranged in a circle. [/p] [p] “I’m not that dumb, folks,” Kettlewell said, provoking a stagey laugh from Mr Rat-Tooth. “Here’s the thing: the market had valued these companies at less than their cash on hand. They have twenty billion in the bank and a 16 billion dollar market-cap. We just made four billion dollars, just by buying up the stock and taking control of the company. We could shut the doors, stick the money in our pockets, and retire.” [/p] [p] Suzanne took notes. She knew all this, but Kettlewell gave good sound-bite, and talked slow in deference to the kind of reporter who preferred a notebook to a recorder. “But we’re not gonna do that.” He hunkered down on his haunches at the edge of the stage, letting his tie dangle, staring spacily at the journalists and analysts. “Kodacell is bigger than that.” He’d read his email that morning then, and seen Rat-Toothed’s new moniker. “Kodacell has goodwill. It has infrastructure. Administrators. Physical plant. Supplier relationships. Distribution and logistics. These companies have a lot of useful plumbing and a lot of priceless reputation. [/p] [p] “What we don’t have is a product. There aren’t enough buyers for batteries or film—or any of the other stuff we make—to occupy or support all that infrastructure. These companies slept through the dot-boom and the dot-bust, trundling along as though none of it mattered. There are parts of these businesses that haven’t changed since the fifties. [/p] [p] “We’re not the only ones. Technology has challenged and killed businesses from every sector. Hell, IBM doesn’t make computers anymore! The very idea of a travel agent is inconceivably weird today! And the record labels, oy, the poor, crazy, suicidal, stupid record labels. Don’t get me started. [/p] [p] “Capitalism is eating itself. The market works, and when it works, it commodifies or obsoletes everything. That’s not to say that there’s no money out there to be had, but the money won’t come from a single, monolithic product line. The days of companies with names like ’General Electric’ and ’General Mills’ and ’General Motors’ are over. The money on the table is like krill: a billion little entrepreneurial opportunities that can be discovered and exploited by smart, creative people. [/p] [p] “We will brute-force the problem-space of capitalism in the twenty first century. Our business plan is simple: we will hire the smartest people we can find and put them in small teams. They will go into the field with funding and communications infrastructure—all that stuff we have left over from the era of batteries and film—behind them, capitalized to find a place to live and work, and a job to do. A business to start. Our company isn’t a project that we pull together on, it’s a network of like-minded, cooperating autonomous teams, all of which are empowered to do whatever they want, provided that it returns something to our coffers. We will explore and exhaust the realm of commercial opportunities, and seek constantly to refine our tactics to mine those opportunities, and fill our hungry belly. This company isn’t a company anymore: this company is a network, an approach, a sensibility.” [/p] [p] Suzanne’s fingers clattered over her keyboard. The Brit chuckled nastily. “Nice talk, considering he just made a hundred thousand people redundant,” he said. Suzanne tried to shut him out: yes, Kettlewell was firing a company’s worth of people, but he was also saving the company itself. The prospectus had a decent severance for all those departing workers, and the ones who’d taken advantage of the company stock-buying plan would find their pensions augmented by whatever this new scheme could rake in. If it worked. [/p] [p] “Mr Kettlewell?” Rat-Toothed had clambered to his hind legs. [/p] [p] “Yes, Freddy?” Freddy was Rat-Toothed’s given name, though Suzanne was hard pressed to ever retain it for more than a few minutes at a time. Kettlewell knew every business-journalist in the Valley by name, though. It was a CEO thing. [/p] [p] “Where will you recruit this new workforce from? And what kind of entrepreneurial things will they be doing to ’exhaust the realm of commercial activities’?” [/p] [p] “Freddy, we don’t have to recruit anyone. They’re beating a path to our door. This is a nation of manic entrepreneurs, the kind of people who’ve been inventing businesses from video arcades to photomats for centuries.” Freddy scowled skeptically, his jumble of grey tombstone teeth protruding. “Come on, Freddy, you ever hear of the Grameen Bank?” [/p] [p] Freddy nodded slowly. “In India, right?” [/p] [p] “Bangladesh. Bankers travel from village to village on foot and by bus, finding small co-ops who need tiny amounts of credit to buy a cellphone or a goat or a loom in order to grow. The bankers make the loans and advise the entrepreneurs, and the payback rate is fifty times higher than the rate at a regular lending institution. They don’t even have a written lending agreement: entrepreneurs—real, hard-working entrepreneurs—you can trust on a handshake.” [/p] [p] “You’re going to help Americans who lost their jobs in your factories buy goats and cellphones?” [/p] [p] “We’re going to give them loans and coordination to start businesses that use information, materials science, commodified software and hardware designs, and creativity to wring a profit from the air around us. Here, catch!” He dug into his suit-jacket and flung a small object toward Freddy, who fumbled it. It fell onto Suzanne’s keyboard. [/p] [p] She picked it up. It looked like a keychain laser-pointer, or maybe a novelty light-saber. [/p] [p] “Switch it on, Suzanne, please, and shine it, oh, on that wall there.” Kettlewell pointed at the upholstered retractable wall that divided the hotel ballroom into two functional spaces. [/p] [p] Suzanne twisted the end and pointed it. A crisp rectangle of green laser-light lit up the wall. [/p] [p] “Now, watch this,” Kettlewell said. [/p] [p] NOW WATCH THIS [/p] [p] The words materialized in the middle of the rectangle on the distant wall. [/p] [p] “Testing one two three,” Kettlewell said. [/p] [p] TESTING ONE TWO THREE [/p] [p] “Donde esta el bano?” [/p] [p] WHERE IS THE BATHROOM [/p] [p] “What is it?” said Suzanne. Her hand wobbled a little and the distant letters danced. [/p] [p] WHAT IS IT [/p] [p] “This is a new artifact designed and executed by five previously out-of-work engineers in Athens, Georgia. They’ve mated a tiny Linux box with some speaker-independent continuous speech recognition software, a free software translation engine that can translate between any of twelve languages, and an extremely high-resolution LCD that blocks out words in the path of the laser-pointer. [/p] [p] “Turn this on, point it at a wall, and start talking. Everything said shows up on the wall, in the language of your choosing, regardless of what language the speaker was speaking.” [/p] [p] All the while, Kettlewell’s words were scrolling by in black block caps on that distant wall: crisp, laser-edged letters. [/p] [p] “This thing wasn’t invented. All the parts necessary to make this go were just lying around. It was assembled. A gal in a garage, her brother the marketing guy, her husband overseeing manufacturing in Belgrade. They needed a couple grand to get it all going, and they’ll need some life-support while they find their natural market. [/p] [p] “They got twenty grand from Kodacell this week. Half of it a loan, half of it equity. And we put them on the payroll, with benefits. They’re part freelancer, part employee, in a team with backing and advice from across the whole business. [/p] [p] “It was easy to do once. We’re going to do it ten thousand times this year. We’re sending out talent scouts, like the artists and representation people the record labels used to use, and they’re going to sign up a lot of these bands for us, and help them to cut records, to start businesses that push out to the edges of business. [/p] [p] “So, Freddy, to answer your question, no, we’re not giving them loans to buy cellphones and goats.” [/p] [p] Kettlewell beamed. Suzanne twisted the laser-pointer off and made ready to toss it back to the stage, but Kettlewell waved her off. [/p] [p] “Keep it,” he said. It was suddenly odd to hear him speak without the text crawl on that distant wall. She put the laser pointer in her pocket and reflected that it had the authentic feel of cool, disposable technology: the kind of thing on its way from a startup’s distant supplier to the schwag bags at high-end technology conferences to blister-packs of six hanging in the impulse aisle at Fry’s. [/p] [p] She tried to imagine the technology conferences she’d been to with the addition of the subtitling and translation and couldn’t do it. Not conferences. Something else. A kids’ toy? A tool for Starbucks-smashing anti-globalists, planning strategy before a WTO riot? She patted her pocket. [/p] [p] Freddy hissed and bubbled like a teakettle beside her, fuming. “What a cock,” he muttered. “Thinks he’s going to hire ten thousand teams to replace his workforce, doesn’t say a word about what that lot is meant to be doing now he’s shitcanned them all. Utter bullshit. Irrational exuberance gone berserk.” [/p] [p] Suzanne had a perverse impulse to turn the wand back on and splash Freddy’s bilious words across the ceiling, and the thought made her giggle. She suppressed it and kept on piling up notes, thinking about the structure of the story she’d file that day. [/p] [p] Kettlewell pulled out some charts and another surfer in a suit came forward to talk money, walking them through the financials. She’d read them already and decided that they were a pretty credible bit of fiction, so she let her mind wander. [/p] [p] She was a hundred miles away when the ballroom doors burst open and the unionized laborers of the former Kodak and the former Duracell poured in on them, tossing literature into the air so that it snowed angry leaflets. They had a big drum and a bugle, and they shook tambourines. The hotel rent-a-cops occasionally darted forward and grabbed a protestor by the arm, but her colleagues would immediately swarm them and pry her loose and drag her back into the body of the demonstration. Freddy grinned and shouted something at Kettlewell, but it was lost in the din. The journalists took a lot of pictures. [/p] [p] Suzanne closed her computer’s lid and snatched a leaflet out of the air. WHAT ABOUT US? it began, and talked about the workers who’d been at Kodak and Duracell for twenty, thirty, even forty years, who had been conspicuously absent from Kettlewell’s stated plans to date. [/p] [p] She twisted the laser-pointer to life and pointed it back at the wall. Leaning in very close, she said, “What are your plans for your existing workforce, Mr Kettlewell?” [/p] [p] WHAT ARE YOUR PLANS FOR YOUR EXISTING WORKFORCE MR KETTLEWELL [/p] [p] She repeated the question several times, refreshing the text so that it scrolled like a stock ticker across that upholstered wall, an illuminated focus that gradually drew all the attention in the room. The protestors saw it and began to laugh, then they read it aloud in ragged unison, until it became a chant: WHAT ARE YOUR PLANS—thump of the big drum—FOR YOUR EXISTING WORKFORCE thump MR thump KETTLEWELL? [/p] [p] Suzanne felt her cheeks warm. Kettlewell was looking at her with something like a smile. She liked him, but that was a personal thing and this was a truth thing. She was a little embarrassed that she had let him finish his spiel without calling him on that obvious question. She felt tricked, somehow. Well, she was making up for it now. [/p] [p] On the stage, the surfer-boys in suits were confabbing, holding their thumbs over their tie-mics. Finally, Kettlewell stepped up and held up his own laser-pointer, painting another rectangle of light beside Suzanne’s. [/p] [p] “I’m glad you asked that, Suzanne,” he said, his voice barely audible. [/p] [p] I’M GLAD YOU ASKED THAT SUZANNE [/p] [p] The journalists chuckled. Even the chanters laughed a little. They quieted down. [/p] [p] “I’ll tell you, there’s a downside to living in this age of wonders: we are moving too fast and outstripping the ability of our institutions to keep pace with the changes in the world.” [/p] [p] Freddy leaned over her shoulder, blowing shit-breath in her ear. “Translation: you’re ass-fucked, the lot of you.” [/p] [p] TRANSLATION YOUR ASS FUCKED THE LOT OF YOU [/p] [p] Suzanne yelped as the words appeared on the wall and reflexively swung the pointer around, painting them on the ceiling, the opposite wall, and then, finally, in miniature, on her computer’s lid. She twisted the pointer off. [/p] [p] Freddy had the decency to look slightly embarrassed and he slunk away to the very end of the row of seats, scooting from chair to chair on his narrow butt. On stage, Kettlewell was pretending very hard that he hadn’t seen the profanity, and that he couldn’t hear the jeering from the protestors now, even though it had grown so loud that he could no longer be heard over it. He kept on talking, and the words scrolled over the far wall. [/p] [p] THERE IS NO WORLD IN WHICH KODAK AND DURACELL GO ON MAKING FILM AND BATTERIES [/p] [p] THE COMPANIES HAVE MONEY IN THE BANK BUT IT HEMORRHAGES OUT THE DOOR EVERY DAY [/p] [p] WE ARE MAKING THINGS THAT NO ONE WANTS TO BUY [/p] [p] THIS PLAN INCLUDES A GENEROUS SEVERANCE FOR THOSE STAFFERS WORKING IN THE PARTS OF THE BUSINESS THAT WILL CLOSE DOWN [/p] [p] —Suzanne admired the twisted, long-way-around way of saying, “the people we’re firing.” Pure CEO passive voice. She couldn’t type notes and read off the wall at the same time. She whipped out her little snapshot and monkeyed with it until it was in video mode and then started shooting the ticker. [/p] [p] BUT IF WE ARE TO MAKE GOOD ON THAT SEVERANCE WE NEED TO BE IN BUSINESS [/p] [p] WE NEED TO BE BRINGING IN A PROFIT SO THAT WE CAN MEET OUR OBLIGATIONS TO ALL OUR STAKEHOLDERS SHAREHOLDERS AND WORKFORCE ALIKE [/p] [p] WE CAN’T PAY A PENNY IN SEVERANCE IF WE’RE BANKRUPT [/p] [p] WE ARE HIRING 50000 NEW EMPLOYEES THIS YEAR AND THERE’S NOTHING THAT SAYS THAT THOSE NEW PEOPLE CAN’T COME FROM WITHIN [/p] [p] CURRENT EMPLOYEES WILL BE GIVEN CONSIDERATION BY OUR SCOUTS [/p] [p] ENTREPRENEURSHIP IS A DEEPLY AMERICAN PRACTICE AND OUR WORKERS ARE AS CAPABLE OF ENTREPRENEURIAL ACTION AS ANYONE [/p] [p] I AM CONFIDENT WE WILL FIND MANY OF OUR NEW HIRES FROM WITHIN OUR EXISTING WORKFORCE [/p] [p] I SAY THIS TO OUR EMPLOYEES IF YOU HAVE EVER DREAMED OF STRIKING OUT ON YOUR OWN EXECUTING ON SOME AMAZING IDEA AND NEVER FOUND THE MEANS TO DO IT NOW IS THE TIME AND WE ARE THE PEOPLE TO HELP [/p] [p] Suzanne couldn’t help but admire the pluck it took to keep speaking into the pointer, despite the howls and bangs. [/p] [p] “C’mon, I’m gonna grab some bagels before the protestors get to them,” Freddy said, plucking at her arm—apparently, this was his version of a charming pickup line. She shook him off authoritatively, with a whip-crack of her elbow. [/p] [p] Freddy stood there for a minute and then moved off. She waited to see if Kettlewell would say anything more, but he twisted the pointer off, shrugged, and waved at the hooting protestors and the analysts and the journalists and walked off-stage with the rest of the surfers in suits. [/p] [p] She got some comments from a few of the protestors, some details. Worked for Kodak or Duracell all their lives. Gave everything to the company. Took voluntary pay-cuts under the old management five times in ten years to keep the business afloat, now facing layoffs as a big fat thank-you-suckers. So many kids. Such and such a mortgage. [/p] [p] She knew these stories from Detroit: she’d filed enough copy with varying renditions of it to last a lifetime. Silicon Valley was supposed to be different. Growth and entrepreneurship—a failed company was just a stepping-stone to a successful one, can’t win them all, dust yourself off and get back to the garage and start inventing. There’s a whole world waiting out there! [/p] [p] Mother of three. Dad whose bright daughter’s university fund was raided to make ends meet during the “temporary” austerity measures. This one has a Down’s Syndrome kid and that one worked through three back surgeries to help meet production deadlines. [/p] [p] Half an hour before she’d been full of that old Silicon Valley optimism, the sense that there was a better world a-borning around her. Now she was back in that old rustbelt funk, with the feeling that she was witness not to a beginning, but to a perpetual ending, a cycle of destruction that would tear down everything solid and reliable in the world. [/p] [p] She packed up her laptop and stepped out into the parking lot. Across the freeway, she could make out the bones of the Great America fun-park roller-coasters whipping around and around in the warm California sun. [/p] [p] These little tech-hamlets down the 101 were deceptively utopian. All the homeless people were miles north on the streets of San Francisco, where pedestrian marks for panhandling could be had, where the crack was sold on corners instead of out of the trunks of fresh-faced, friendly coke-dealers’ cars. Down here it was giant malls, purpose-built dot-com buildings, and the occasional fun-park. Palo Alto was a university-town theme-park, provided you steered clear of the wrong side of the tracks, the East Palo Alto slums that were practically shanties. [/p] [p] Christ, she was getting melancholy. She didn’t want to go into the office—not today. Not when she was in this kind of mood. She would go home and put her blazer back in the closet and change into yoga togs and write her column and have some good coffee. [/p] [p] She nailed up the copy in an hour and emailed it to her editor and poured herself a glass of Napa red (the local vintages in Michigan likewise left something to be desired) and settled onto her porch, overlooking the big reservoir off 280 near San Mateo. [/p] [p] The house had been worth a small fortune at the start of the dot-boom, but now, in the resurgent property boom, it was worth a large fortune and then some. She could conceivably sell this badly built little shack with its leaky hot-tub for enough money to retire on, if she wanted to live out the rest of her days in Sri Lanka or Nebraska. [/p] [p] “You’ve got no business feeling poorly, young lady,” she said to herself. “You are as well set-up as you could have dreamed, and you are right in the thick of the weirdest and best time the world has yet seen. And Landon Kettlewell knows your name.” [/p] [p] She finished the wine and opened her computer. It was dark enough now with the sun set behind the hills that she could read the screen. The Web was full of interesting things, her email full of challenging notes from her readers, and her editor had already signed off on her column. [/p] [p] She was getting ready to shut the lid and head for bed, so she pulled her mail once more. [/p] [p] From: kettlewell-l@skunkworks.kodacell.com [/p] [p] To: schurch@sjmercury.com [/p] [p] Subject: Embedded journalist? [/p] [p] Thanks for keeping me honest today, Suzanne. It’s the hardest question we’re facing today: what happens when all the things you’re good at are no good to anyone anymore? I hope we’re going to answer that with the new model. [/p] [p] You do good work, madam. I’d be honored if you’d consider joining one of our little teams for a couple months and chronicling what they do. I feel like we’re making history here and we need someone to chronicle it. [/p] [p] I don’t know if you can square this with the Merc, and I suppose that we should be doing this through my PR people and your editor, but there comes a time about this time every night when I’m just too goddamned hyper to bother with all that stuff and I want to just DO SOMETHING instead of ask someone else to start a process to investigate the possibility of someday possibly maybe doing something. [/p] [p] Will you do something with us, if we can make it work? 100 percent access, no oversight? Say you will. Please. [/p] [p] Your pal, [/p] [p] Kettlebelly [/p] [p] She stared at her screen. It was like a work of art; just look at that return address, “kettlewell-l@skunkworks.kodacell.com”—for kodacell.com to be live and accepting mail, it had to have been registered the day before. She had a vision of Kettlewell checking his email at midnight before his big press-conference, catching Freddy’s column, and registering kodacell.com on the spot, then waking up some sysadmin to get a mail server answering at skunkworks.kodacell.com. Last she’d heard, Lockheed-Martin was threatening to sue anyone who used their trademarked term “Skunk Works” to describe a generic R&D department. That meant that Kettlewell had moved so fast that he hadn’t even run this project by legal. She was willing to bet that he’d already ordered new business-cards with the address on them. [/p] [p] There was a guy she knew, an editor at a mag who’d assigned himself a plum article that he’d run on his own cover. He’d gotten a book-deal out of it. A half-million dollar book-deal. If Kettlewell was right, then the exclusive book on the inside of the first year at Kodacell could easily make that advance. And the props would be mad, as the kids said. [/p] [p] Kettlebelly! It was such a stupid frat-boy nickname, but it made her smile. He wasn’t taking himself seriously, or maybe he was, but he wasn’t being a pompous ass about it. He was serious about changing the world and frivolous about everything else. She’d have a hard time being an objective reporter if she said yes to this. [/p] [p] She couldn’t possibly decide at this hour. She needed a night’s sleep and she had to talk this over with the Merc. If she had a boyfriend, she’d have to talk it over with him, but that wasn’t a problem in her life these days. [/p] [p] She spread on some expensive duty-free French wrinkle-cream and brushed her teeth and put on her nightie and double-checked the door locks and did all the normal things she did of an evening. Then she folded back her sheets, plumped her pillows and stared at them. [/p] [p] She turned on her heel and stalked back to her computer and thumped the spacebar until the thing woke from sleep. [/p] [p] From: schurch@sjmercury.com [/p] [p] To: kettlewell-l@skunkworks.kodacell.com [/p] [p] Subject: Re: Embedded journalist? [/p] [p] Kettlebelly: that is one dumb nickname. I couldn’t possibly associate myself with a grown man who calls himself Kettlebelly. [/p] [p] So stop calling yourself Kettlebelly, immediately. If you can do that, we’ve got a deal. [/p] [p] Suzanne [/p] [p] There had come a day when her readers acquired email and the paper ran her address with her byline, and her readers had begun to write her and write her and write her. Some were amazing, informative, thoughtful notes. Some were the vilest, most bilious trolling. In order to deal with these notes, she had taught herself to pause, breathe, and re-read any email message before clicking send. [/p] [p] The reflex kicked in now and she re-read her note to Kettlebelly—Kettlewell!—and felt a crimp in her guts. Then she hit send. [/p] [p] She needed to pee, and apparently had done for some time, without realizing it. She was on the toilet when she heard the ping of new incoming mail. [/p] [p] From: kettlewell-l@skunkworks.kodacell.com [/p] [p] To: schurch@sjmercury.com [/p] [p] Subject: Re: Embedded journalist? [/p] [p] I will never call myself Kettlebelly again. [/p] [p] Your pal, [/p] [p] Kettledrum. [/p] [p] Oh-shit-oh-shit-oh-shit. She did a little two-step at her bed’s edge. Tomorrow she’d go see her editor about this, but it just felt right, and exciting, like she was on the brink of an event that would change her life forever. [/p] [p] It took her three hours of mindless Web-surfing, including a truly dreary Hot-Or-Not clicktrance and an hour’s worth of fiddling with tweets from the press-conference, before she was able to lull herself to sleep. As she nodded off, she thought that Kettlewell’s insomnia was as contagious as his excitement. [/p] [p] [/p][hr /] [p][/p] [p] Hollywood, Florida’s biggest junkyard was situated in the rubble of a half-built ghost-mall off Taft Street. Suzanne’s Miami airport rental car came with a GPS, but the little box hadn’t ever heard of the mall; it was off the map. So she took a moment in the sweltering parking-lot of her coffin hotel to call her interview subject again and get better coordinates. [/p] [p] “Yeah, it’s ’cause they never finished building the mall, so the address hasn’t been included in the USGS maps. The open GPSes all have these better maps made by geohackers, but the rental car companies have got a real hard-on for official map-data. Morons. Hang on, lemme get my GPS out and I’ll get you some decent lat-long.” [/p] [p] His voice had a pleasant, youthful, midwestern sound, like a Canadian newscaster: friendly and enthusiastic as a puppy. His name was Perry Gibbons, and if Kettlewell was to be believed, he was the most promising prospect identified by Kodacell’s talent-scouts. [/p] [p] The ghost-mall was just one of many along Taft Street, ranging in size from little corner plazas to gigantic palaces with broken-in atria and cracked parking lots. A lot of the malls in California had crashed, but they’d been turned into flea-markets or day-cares, or, if they’d been abandoned, they hadn’t been abandoned like this, left to go to ruin. This reminded her of Detroit before she’d left, whole swaths of the inner city emptied of people, neighborhoods condemned and bulldozed and, in a couple of weird cases, actually farmed by enterprising city-dwellers who planted crops, kept livestock, and rode their mini tractors beneath the beam of the defunct white-elephant monorail. [/p] [p] The other commonality this stretch of road shared with Detroit was the obesity of the people she passed. She’d felt a little self-conscious that morning, dressing in a light short-sleeved blouse and a pair of shorts—nothing else would do, the weather was so hot and drippy that even closed-toe shoes would have been intolerable. At 45, her legs had slight cellulite saddlebags and her tummy wasn’t the washboard it had been when she was 25. But here, on this stretch of road populated by people so fat they could barely walk, so fat that they were de-sexed marshmallows with faces like inflatable toys, she felt like a toothpick. [/p] [p] The GPS queeped when she came up on the junkyard, a sprawling, half-built discount mall whose waist-high walls had been used to parcel out different kinds of sorted waste. The mall had been planned with wide indoor boulevards between the shops wide enough for two lanes of traffic, and she cruised those lanes now in the hertzmobile, looking for a human. Once she reached the center of the mall—a dry fountain filled with dusty Christmas-tree ornaments—she stopped and leaned on the horn. [/p] [p] She got out of the car and called, “Hello? Perry?” She could have phoned him but it always seemed so wasteful spending money on airtime when you were trying to talk to someone within shouting range. [/p] [p] “Suzanne!” The voice came from her left. She shielded her eyes from the sun’s glare and peered down a spoke of mall-lane and caught her first glimpse of Perry Gibbons. He was standing in the basket of a tall cherry-picker, barechested and brown. He wore a sun-visor and big work gloves, and big, baggy shorts whose pockets jangled as he shinnied down the crane’s neck. [/p] [p] She started toward him tentatively. Not a lot of business-reporting assignments involved spending time with half-naked, sun-baked dudes in remote southern junkyards. Still, he sounded nice. [/p] [p] “Hello!” she called. He was young, 22 or 23, and already had squint-creases at the corners of his eyes. He had a brace on one wrist and his steel-toed boots were the mottled grey of a grease-puddle on the floor of a muffler and brake shop. [/p] [p] He grinned and tugged off a glove, stuck out his hand. “A pleasure. Sorry for the trouble finding this place. It’s not easy to get to, but it’s cheap as hell.” [/p] [p] “I believe it.” She looked around again—the heaps of interesting trash, the fountain-dish filled with thousands of shining ornaments. The smell was a mixture of machine-oil and salt, jungle air, Florida swamp and Detroit steel. “So, this place is pretty cool. Looks like you’ve got pretty much everything you could imagine.” [/p] [p] “And then some.” This was spoken by another man, one who puffed heavily up from behind her. He was enormous, not just tall but fat, as big around as a barrel. His green tee-shirt read IT’S FUN TO USE LEARNING FOR EVIL! in blocky, pixelated letters. He took her hand and shook it. “I love your blog,” he said. “I read it all the time.” He had three chins, and eyes that were nearly lost in his apple cheeks. [/p] [p] “Meet Lester,” Perry said. “My partner.” [/p] [p] “Sidekick,” Lester said with a huge wink. “Sysadmin slash hardware hacker slash dogsbody slashdot org.” [/p] [p] She chuckled. Nerd humor. Ar ar ar. [/p] [p] “Right, let’s get started. You wanna see what I do, right?” Perry said. [/p] [p] “That’s right,” Suzanne said. [/p] [p] “Lead the way, Lester,” Perry said, and gestured with an arm, deep into the center of the junkpile. “All right, check this stuff out as we go.” He stuck his hand through the unglazed window of a never-built shop and plucked out a toy in a battered box. “I love these things,” he said, handing it to her. [/p] [p] She took it. It was a Sesame Street Elmo doll, labeled BOOGIE WOOGIE ELMO. [/p] [p] “That’s from the great Elmo Crash,” Perry said, taking back the box and expertly extracting the Elmo like he was shelling a nut. “The last and greatest generation of Elmoid technology, cast into an uncaring world that bought millions of Li’l Tagger washable graffiti kits instead after Rosie gave them two thumbs up on her Christmas shopping guide. [/p] [p] “Poor Elmo was an orphan, and every junkyard in the world has mountains of mint-in-package BWEs, getting rained on, waiting to start their long, half-million-year decomposition. [/p] [p] “But check this out.” He flicked a multitool off his belt and extracted a short, sharp scalpel-blade. He slit the grinning, disco-suited Elmo open from chin to groin and shucked its furry exterior and the foam tissue that overlaid its skeleton. He slid the blade under the plastic cover on its ass and revealed a little printed circuit board. [/p] [p] “That’s an entire Atom processor on a chip, there,” he said. “Each limb and the head have their own subcontrollers. There’s a high-powered digital-to-analog rig for letting him sing and dance to new songs, and an analog-to-digital converter array for converting spoken and danced commands to motions. Basically, you dance and sing for Elmo and he’ll dance and sing back for you.” [/p] [p] Suzanne nodded. She’d missed that toy, which was a pity. She had a five year old goddaughter in Minneapolis who would have loved a Boogie Woogie Elmo. [/p] [p] They had come to a giant barn, set at the edge of a story-and-a-half’s worth of anchor store. “This used to be where the contractors kept their heavy equipment,” Lester rumbled, aiming a car-door remote at the door, which queeped and opened. [/p] [p] Inside, it was cool and bright, the chugging air-conditioners efficiently blasting purified air over the many work-surfaces. The barn was a good 25 feet tall, with a loft and a catwalk circling it halfway up. It was lined with metallic shelves stacked neatly with labeled boxes of parts scrounged from the junkyard. [/p] [p] Perry set Elmo down on a workbench and worked a miniature USB cable into his chest-cavity. The other end terminated with a PDA with a small rubberized photovoltaic cell on the front. [/p] [p] “This thing is running InstallParty—it can recognize any hardware and build and install a Linux distro on it without human intervention. They used a ton of different suppliers for the BWE, so every one is a little different, depending on who was offering the cheapest parts the day it was built. InstallParty doesn’t care, though: one-click and away it goes.” The PDA was doing all kinds of funny dances on its screen, montages of playful photoshopping of public figures matted into historical fine art. [/p] [p] “All done. Now, have a look—this is a Linux computer with some of the most advanced robotics ever engineered. No sweatshop stuff, either, see this? The solder is too precise to be done by hand—that’s because it’s from India. If it was from Cambodia, you’d see all kinds of wobble in the solder: that means that tiny, clever hands were used to create it, which means that somewhere in the device’s karmic history, there’s a sweatshop full of crippled children inhaling solder fumes until they keel over and are dumped in a ditch. This is the good stuff. [/p] [p] “So we have this karmically clean robot with infinitely malleable computation and a bunch of robotic capabilities. I’ve turned these things into wall-climbing monkeys; I’ve modded them for a woman from the University of Miami at the Jackson Memorial who used their capability to ape human motions in physiotherapy programs with nerve-damage cases. But the best thing I’ve done with them so far is the Distributed Boogie Woogie Elmo Motor Vehicle Operation Cluster. Come on,” he said, and took off deeper into the barn’s depths. [/p] [p] They came to a dusty, stripped-down Smart car, one of those tiny two-seat electric cars you could literally buy out of a vending machine in Europe. It was barely recognizable, having been reduced to its roll-cage, drive-train and control-panel. A gang of naked robot Elmos were piled into it. [/p] [p] “Wake up boys, time for a demo!” Perry shouted, and they sat up and made canned, tinny Elmo “oh boy” noises, climbing into position on the pedals, around the wheel, and on the gear-tree. [/p] [p] “I got the idea when I was teaching an Elmo to play Mario Brothers. I thought it’d get a decent diggdotting. I could get it to speedrun all of the first level using an old paddle I’d found and rehabilitated, and I was trying to figure out what to do next. The dead mall across the way is a drive-in theater, and I was out front watching the silent movies, and one of them showed all these cute little furry animated whatevers collectively driving a car. It’s a really old sight-gag, I mean, like racial memory old. I’d seen the Little Rascals do the same bit, with Alfalfa on the wheel and Buckwheat and Spanky on the brake and clutch and the doggy working the gearshift. [/p] [p] “And I thought, Shit, I could do that with Elmos. They don’t have any networking capability, but they can talk and they can parse spoken commands, so all I need is to designate one for left and one for right and one for fast and one for slow and one to be the eyes, barking orders and they should be able to do this. And it works! They even adjust their balance and centers of gravity when the car swerves to stay upright at their posts. Check it out.” He turned to the car. “Driving Elmos, ten-HUT!” They snapped upright and ticked salutes off their naked plastic noggins. “In circles, DRIVE,” he called. The Elmos scrambled into position and fired up the car and in short order they were doing donuts in the car’s little indoor pasture. [/p] [p] “Elmos, HALT” Perry shouted and the car stopped silently, rocking gently. “Stand DOWN.” The Elmos sat down with a series of tiny thumps. [/p] [p] Suzanne found herself applauding. “That was amazing,” she said. “Really impressive. So that’s what you’re going to do for Kodacell, make these things out of recycled toys?” [/p] [p] Lester chuckled. “Nope, not quite. That’s just for starters. The Elmos are all about the universal availability of cycles and apparatus. Everywhere you look, there’s devices for free that have everything you need to make anything do anything. [/p] [p] “But have a look at part two, c’mere.” He lumbered off in another direction, and Suzanne and Perry trailed along behind him. [/p] [p] “This is Lester’s workshop,” Perry said, as they passed through a set of swinging double doors and into a cluttered wonderland. Where Perry’s domain had been clean and neatly organized, Lester’s area was a happy shambles. His shelves weren’t orderly, but rather, crammed with looming piles of amazing junk: thrift-store wedding dresses, plaster statues of bowling monkeys, box kites, knee-high tin knights-in-armor, seashells painted with American flags, presidential action-figures, paste jewelry and antique cough-drop tins. [/p] [p] “You know how they say a sculptor starts with a block of marble and chips away everything that doesn’t look like a statue? Like he can see the statue in the block? I get like that with garbage: I see the pieces on the heaps and in roadside trash and I can just see how it can go together, like this.” [/p] [p] He reached down below a work-table and hoisted up a huge triptych made out of three hinged car-doors stood on end. Carefully, he unfolded it and stood it like a screen on the cracked concrete floor. [/p] [p] The inside of the car-doors had been stripped clean and polished to a high metal gleam that glowed like sterling silver. Spot-welded to it were all manner of soda tins, pounded flat and cut into gears, chutes, springs and other mechanical apparatus. [/p] [p] “It’s a mechanical calculator,” he said proudly. “About half as powerful as Univac. I milled all the parts using a laser-cutter. What you do is, fill this hopper with GI Joe heads, and this hopper with Barbie heads. Crank this wheel and it will drop a number of M&Ms equal to the product of the two values into this hopper, here.” He put three scuffed GI Joe heads in one hopper and four scrofulous Barbies in another and began to crank, slowly. A music-box beside the crank played a slow, irregular rendition of “Pop Goes the Weasel” while the hundreds of little coin-sized gears turned, flipping switches and adding and removing tension to springs. After the weasel popped a few times, twelve brown M&Ms fell into an outstretched rubber hand. He picked them out carefully and offered them to her. “It’s OK. They’re not from the trash,” he said. “I buy them in bulk.” He turned his broad back to her and heaved a huge galvanized tin washtub full of brown M&Ms in her direction. “See, it’s a bit-bucket!” he said. [/p] [p] Suzanne giggled in spite of herself. “You guys are hilarious,” she said. “This is really good, exciting nerdy stuff.” The gears on the mechanical computer were really sharp and precise; they looked like you could cut yourself on them. When they ground over the polished surfaces of the car-doors, they made a sound like a box of toothpicks falling to the floor: click-click, clickclickclick, click. She turned the crank until twelve more brown M&Ms fell out. [/p] [p] “Who’s the Van Halen fan?” [/p] [p] Lester beamed. “Might as well jump—JUMP!” He mimed heavy-metal air-guitar and thrashed his shorn head up and down as though he were headbanging with a mighty mane of hair-band locks. “You’re the first one to get the joke!” he said. “Even Perry didn’t get it!” [/p] [p] “Get what?” Perry said, also grinning. [/p] [p] “Van Halen had this thing where if there were any brown M&Ms in their dressing room they’d trash it and refuse to play. When I was a kid, I used to dream about being so famous that I could act like that much of a prick. Ever since, I’ve afforded a great personal significance to brown M&Ms.” [/p] [p] She laughed again. Then she frowned a little. “Look, I hate to break this party up, but I came here because Kettlebelly—crap, Kettlewell—said that you guys exemplified everything that he wanted to do with Kodacell. This stuff you’ve done is all very interesting, it’s killer art, but I don’t see the business-angle. So, can you help me out here?” [/p] [p] “That’s step three,” Perry said. “C’mere.” He led her back to his workspace, to a platform surrounded by articulated arms terminated in webcams, like a grocery scale in the embrace of a metal spider. “three-d scanner,” he said, producing a Barbie head from Lester’s machine and dropping it on the scales. He prodded a button and a nearby screen filled with a three-dimensional model of the head, flattened on the side where it touched the surface. He turned the head over and scanned again and now there were two digital versions of the head on the screen. He moused one over the other until they lined up, right-clicked a drop-down menu, selected an option and then they were merged, rotating. [/p] [p] “Once we’ve got the three-d scan, it’s basically Plasticine.” He distorted the Barbie head, stretching it and squeezing it with the mouse. “So we can take a real object and make this kind of protean hyper-object out of it, or drop it down to a wireframe and skin it with any bitmap, like this.” More fast mousing—Barbie’s head turned into a gridded mesh, fine filaments stretching off along each mussed strand of plastic hair. Then a Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup label wrapped around her like a stocking being pulled over her head. There was something stupendously weird and simultaneously very comic about the sight, the kind of inherent comedy in a cartoon stretched out on a blob of Silly Putty. [/p] [p] “So we can build anything out of interesting junk, with any shape, and then we can digitize the shape. Then we can do anything we like with the shape. Then we can output the shape.” He typed quickly and another machine, sealed and mammoth like an outsized photocopier, started to grunt and churn. The air filled with a smell like Saran Wrap in a microwave. [/p] [p] “The goop we use in this thing is epoxy-based. You wouldn’t want to build a car out of it, but it makes a mean doll-house. The last stage of the output switches to inks, so you get whatever bitmap you’ve skinned your object with baked right in. It does about one cubic inch per minute, so this job should be almost done now.” [/p] [p] He drummed his fingers on top of the machine for a moment and then it stopped chunking and something inside it went clunk. He lifted a lid and reached inside and plucked out the barbie head, stretched and distorted, skinned with a Campbell’s Soup label. He handed it to Suzanne. She expected it to be warm, like a squashed penny from a machine on Fisherman’s Wharf, but it was cool and had the seamless texture of a plastic margarine tub and the heft of a paperweight. [/p] [p] “So, that’s the business,” Lester said. “Or so we’re told. We’ve been making cool stuff and selling it to collectors on the web for you know, gigantic bucks. We move one or two pieces a month at about ten grand per. But Kettlebelly says he’s going to industrialize us, alienate us from the product of our labor, and turn us into an assembly line.” [/p] [p] “He didn’t say any such thing,” Perry said. Suzanne was aware that her ears had grown points. Perry gave Lester an affectionate slug in the shoulder. “Lester’s only kidding. What we need is a couple of dogsbodies and some bigger printers and we’ll be able to turn out more modest devices by the hundred or possibly the thousand. We can tweak the designs really easily because nothing is coming off a mold, so there’s no setup charge, so we can do limited runs of a hundred, redesign, do another hundred. We can make ’em to order. “ [/p] [p] “And we need an MBA,” Lester said. “Kodacell’s sending us a business manager to help us turn junk into pesos.” [/p] [p] “Yeah,” Perry said, with a worried flick of his eyes. “Yeah, a business manager.” [/p] [p] “So, I’ve known some business geeks who aren’t total assholes,” Lester said. “Who care about what they’re doing and the people they’re doing it with. Respectful and mindful. It’s like lawyers—they’re not all scumbags. Some of them are totally awesome and save your ass.” [/p] [p] Suzanne took all this in, jotting notes on an old-fashioned spiral-bound shirt-pocket notebook. “When’s he arriving?” [/p] [p] “Next week,” Lester said. “We’ve cleared him a space to work and everything. He’s someone that Kettlewell’s people recruited up in Ithaca and he’s going to move here to work with us, sight unseen. Crazy, huh?” [/p] [p] “Crazy,” Suzanne agreed. [/p] [p] “Right,” Perry said. “That’s next week, and this aft we’ve got some work to do, but now I’m ready for lunch. You guys ready for lunch?” [/p] [p] Something about food and really fat guys, it seemed like an awkward question to Suzanne, like asking someone who’d been horribly disfigured by burns if he wanted to toast a marshmallow. But Lester didn’t react to the question—of course not, he had to eat, everyone had to eat. [/p] [p] “Yeah, let’s do the IHOP.” Lester trundled back to his half of the workspace, then came back with a cane in one hand. “There’s like three places to eat within walking distance of here if you don’t count the mobile Mexican burrito wagon, which I don’t, since it’s a rolling advertisement for dysentery. The IHOP is the least objectionable of those.” [/p] [p] “We could drive somewhere,” Suzanne said. It was coming up on noon and the heat once they got outside into the mall’s ruins was like the steam off a dishwasher. She plucked at her blouse a couple of times. [/p] [p] “It’s the only chance to exercise we get,” Perry said. “It’s pretty much impossible to live or work within walking distance of anything down here. You end up living in your car.” [/p] [p] And so they hiked along the side of the road. The sidewalk was a curious mix of old and new, the concrete unworn but still overgrown by tall sawgrass thriving in the Florida heat. It brushed up against her ankles, hard and sharp, unlike the grass back home. [/p] [p] They were walking parallel to a ditch filled with sluggish, brackish water and populated by singing frogs, ducks, ibises, and mosquitoes in great number. Across the way were empty lots, ghost-plazas, dead filling stations. Behind one of the filling stations, a cluster of tents and shacks. [/p] [p] “Squatters?” she asked, pointing to the shantytown. [/p] [p] “Yeah,” Perry said. “Lots of that down here. Some of them are the paramilitary wing of the AARP, old trailer-home retirees who’ve run out of money and just set up camp here. Some are bums and junkies, some are runaways. It’s not as bad as it looks—they’re pretty comfy in there. We bring ’em furniture and other good pickings that show up at the junkyard. The homeless with the wherewithal to build shantytowns, they haven’t gone all animal like the shopping cart people and the scary beachcombers.” He waved across the malarial ditch to an old man in a pair of pressed khaki shorts and a crisp Bermuda shirt. “Hey Francis!” he called. The old man waved back. “We’ll have some IHOP for you ’bout an hour!” The old man ticked a salute off his creased forehead. [/p] [p] “Francis is a good guy. Used to be an aerospace engineer if you can believe it. Wife had medical problems and he went bust taking care of her. When she died, he ended up here in his double-wide and never left. Kind of the unofficial mayor of this little patch.” [/p] [p] Suzanne stared after Francis. He had a bit of a gimpy leg, a limp she could spot even from here. Beside her, Lester was puffing. No one was comfortable walking in Florida, it seemed. [/p] [p] It took another half hour to reach the IHOP, the International House of Pancakes, which sat opposite a mini-mall with only one still-breathing store, a place that advertised 99-cent t-shirts, which struck Suzanne as profoundly depressing. There was a junkie out front of 99-Cent Tees, a woman with a leathery tan and a tiny tank-top and shorts that made her look a little like a Tenderloin hooker, but not with that rat’s-nest hair, not even in the ’Loin. She wobbled uncertainly across the parking lot to them. [/p] [p] “Excuse me,” she said, with an improbable Valley Girl accent. “Excuse me? I’m hoping to get something to eat, it’s for my kid, she’s nursing, gotta keep my strength up.” Her naked arms and legs were badly tracked out, and Suzanne had a horrified realization that among the stains on her tank-top were a pair of spreading pools of breast milk, dampening old white, crusted patches over her sagging breasts. “For my baby. A dollar would help, a dollar.” [/p] [p] There were homeless like this in San Francisco, too. In San Jose as well, she supposed, but she didn’t know where they hid. But something about this woman, cracked out and tracked out, it freaked her out. She dug into her purse and got out a five dollar bill and handed it to the homeless woman. The woman smiled a snaggletoothed stumpy grin and reached for it, then, abruptly, grabbed hold of Suzanne’s wrist. Her grip was damp and weak. [/p] [p] “Don’t you fucking look at me like that. You’re not better than me, bitch!” Suzanne tugged free and stepped back quickly. “That’s right, run away! Bitch! Fuck you! Enjoy your lunch!” [/p] [p] She was shaking. Perry and Lester closed ranks around her. Lester moved to confront the homeless woman. [/p] [p] “The fuck you want lard ass? You wanna fuck with me? I got a knife, you know, cut your ears off and feed ’em to ya.” [/p] [p] Lester cocked his head like the RCA Victor dog. He towered over the skinny junkie, and was five or six times wider than her. [/p] [p] “You all right?” he said gently. [/p] [p] “Oh yeah, I’m just fine,” she said. “Why, you looking for a party?” [/p] [p] He laughed. “You’re joking—I’d crush you!” [/p] [p] She laughed too, a less crazy, more relaxed sound. Lester’s voice was a low, soothing rumble. “I don’t think my friend thinks she’s any better than you. I think she just wanted to help you out.” [/p] [p] The junkie flicked her eyes back and forth. “Listen can you spare a dollar for my baby?” [/p] [p] “I think she just wanted to help you. Can I get you some lunch?” [/p] [p] “Fuckers won’t let me in—won’t let me use the toilet even. It’s not humane. Don’t want to go in the bushes. Not dignified to go in the bushes.” [/p] [p] “That’s true,” he said. “What if I get you some take out, you got a shady place you could eat it? Nursing’s hungry work.” [/p] [p] The junkie cocked her head. Then she laughed. “Yeah, OK, yeah. Sure—thanks, thanks a lot!” [/p] [p] Lester motioned her over to the menu in the IHOP window and waited with her while she picked out a helping of caramel-apple waffles, sausage links, fried eggs, hash browns, coffee, orange juice and a chocolate malted. “Is that all?” he said, laughing, laughing, both of them laughing, all of them laughing at the incredible, outrageous meal. [/p] [p] They went in and waited by the podium. The greeter, a black guy with corn-rows, nodded at Lester and Perry like an old friend. “Hey Tony,” Lester said. “Can you get us a go-bag with some take-out for the lady outside before we sit down?” He recited the astounding order. [/p] [p] Tony shook his head and ducked it. “OK, be right up,” he said. “You want to sit while you’re waiting?” [/p] [p] “We’ll wait here, thanks,” Lester said. “Don’t want her to think we’re bailing on her.” He turned and waved at her. [/p] [p] “She’s mean, you know—be careful.” [/p] [p] “Thanks, Tony,” Lester said. [/p] [p] Suzanne marveled at Lester’s equanimity. Nothing got his goat. The doggie bag arrived. “I put some extra napkins and a couple of wet-naps in there,” Tony said, handing it to him. [/p] [p] “Great!” Lester said. “You guys sit down, I’ll be back in a second.” [/p] [p] Perry motioned for Suzanne to follow him to a booth. He laughed. “Lester’s a good guy,” he said. “The best guy I know, you know?” [/p] [p] “How do you know him?” she asked, taking out her notepad. [/p] [p] “He was the sysadmin at a company that was making three-d printers, and I was a tech at a company that was buying them, and the products didn’t work, and I spent a lot of time on the phone with him troubleshooting them. We’d get together in our off-hours and hack around with neat little workbench projects, stuff we’d come up with at work. When both companies went under, we got a bunch of their equipment at bankruptcy auctions. Lester’s uncle owned the junkyard and he offered us space to set up our workshops and the rest is history.” [/p] [p] Lester joined them again. He was laughing. “She is funny,” he said. “Kept hefting the sack and saying, ’Christ what those bastards put on a plate, no wonder this country’s so goddamned fat!’” Perry laughed, too. Suzanne chuckled nervously and looked away. [/p] [p] He slid into the booth next to her and put a hand on her shoulder. “It’s OK. I’m a guy who weighs nearly 400 pounds. I know I’m a big, fat guy. If I was sensitive about it, I couldn’t last ten minutes. I’m not proud of being as big as I am, but I’m not ashamed either. I’m OK with it.” [/p] [p] “You wouldn’t lose weight if you could?” [/p] [p] “Sure, why not? But I’ve concluded it’s not an option anymore. I was always a fat kid, and so I never got good at sports, never got that habit. Now I’ve got this huge deficit when I sit down to exercise, because I’m lugging around all this lard. Can’t run more than a few steps. Walking’s about it. Couldn’t join a pick-up game of baseball or get out on the tennis court. I never learned to cook, either, though I suppose I could. But mostly I eat out, and I try to order sensibly, but just look at the crap they feed us at the places we can get to—there aren’t any health food restaurants in the strip malls. Look at this menu,” he said, tapping a pornographic glossy picture of a stack of glistening waffles oozing with some kind of high-fructose lube. “Caramel pancakes with whipped cream, maple syrup and canned strawberries. When I was a kid, we called that candy. These people will sell you an eight dollar, 18 ounce plate of candy with a side of sausage, eggs, biscuits, bacon and a pint of orange juice. Even if you order this stuff and eat a third of it, a quarter of it, that’s probably too much, and when you’ve got a lot of food in front of you, it’s pretty hard to know when to stop.” [/p] [p] “Sure, will-power. Will-power nothing. The thing is, when three quarters of America are obese, when half are dangerously obese, like me, years off our lives from all the fat—that tells you that this isn’t a will-power problem. We didn’t get less willful in the last fifty years. Might as well say that all those people who died of the plague lacked the will-power to keep their houses free of rats. Fat isn’t moral, it’s epidemiological. There are a small number of people, a tiny minority, whose genes are short-circuited in a way that makes them less prone to retaining nutrients. That’s a maladaptive trait through most of human history—burning unnecessary calories when you’ve got to chase down an antelope to get more, that’s no way to live long enough to pass on your genes! So you and Perry over here with your little skinny selves, able to pack away transfats and high-fructose corn-syrup and a pound of candy for breakfast at the IHOP, you’re not doing this on will-power—you’re doing it by expressing the somatotype of a recessive, counter-survival gene. [/p] [p] “Would I like to be thinner? Sure. But I’m not gonna let the fact that I’m genetically better suited to famine than feast get to me. Speaking of, let’s eat. Tony, c’mere, buddy. I want a plate of candy!” He was smiling, and brave, and at that moment, Suzanne thought that she could get a crush on this guy, this big, smart, talented, funny, lovable guy. Then reality snapped back and she saw him as he was, sexless, lumpy, almost grotesque. The overlay of his, what, his inner beauty on that exterior, it disoriented her. She looked back over her notes. [/p] [p] “So, you say that there’s a third coming out to work with you?” [/p] [p] “To live with us,” Perry said. “That’s part of the deal. Geek houses, like in the old college days. We’re going to be a power-trio: two geeks and a suit, lean and mean. The suit’s name is Tjan, and he’s Singaporean by way of London by way of Ithaca, where Kettlebelly found him. We’ve talked on the phone a couple times and he’s moving down next week.” [/p] [p] “He’s moving down without ever having met you?” [/p] [p] “Yeah, that’s the way it goes. It’s like the army or something for us: once you’re in you get dispatched here or there. It was in the contract. We already had a place down here with room for Tjan, so we put some fresh linen on the guest-bed and laid in an extra toothbrush.” [/p] [p] “It’s a little nervous-making,” Lester said. “Perry and I get along great, but I haven’t had such good luck with business-types. It’s not that I’m some kind of idealist who doesn’t get the need to make money, but they can be so condescending, you know?” [/p] [p] Suzanne nodded. “That’s a two-way street, you know. ’Suits’ don’t like being talked down to by engineers.” [/p] [p] Lester raised a hand. “Guilty as charged.” [/p] [p] “So what’re you planning to do for the rest of the week?” It was Wednesday, and she’d counted on getting this part of the story by Saturday, but here she was going to have to wait, clearly, until this Tjan arrived. [/p] [p] “Same stuff as we always do. We build crazy stuff out of junk, sell it to collectors, and have fun. We could go to the Thunderbird Drive In tonight if you want, it’s a real classic, flea-market by day and drive in by night, practically the last one standing.” [/p] [p] Perry cut in. “Or we could go to South Beach and get a good meal, if that’s more your speed.” [/p] [p] “Naw,” Suzanne said. “Drive in sounds great, especially if it’s such a dying breed. Better get a visit in while there’s still time.” [/p] [p] They tried to treat her but she wouldn’t let them. She never let anyone buy her so much as a cup of coffee. It was an old journalism-school drill, and she was practically the only scribbler she knew who hewed to it: some of the whores on the Silicon Valley papers took in free computers, trips, even spa days!—but she had never wavered. [/p] [p] [/p][hr /] [p][/p] [p] The afternoon passed quickly and enchantingly. Perry was working on a knee-high, articulated Frankenstein monster built out of hand-painted seashells from a beach-side kitsch market. They said GOD BLESS AMERICA and SOUVENIR OF FLORIDA and CONCH REPUBLIC and each had to be fitted out for a motor custom built to conform to its contours. [/p] [p] “When it’s done, it will make toast.” [/p] [p] “Make toast?” [/p] [p] “Yeah, separate a single slice off a loaf, load it into a top-loading slice-toaster, depress the lever, time the toast-cycle, retrieve the toast and butter it. I got the idea from old-time backup-tape loaders. This plus a toaster will function as a loosely coupled single system.” [/p] [p] “OK, that’s really cool, but I have to ask the boring question, Perry. Why? Why build a toast-robot?” [/p] [p] Perry stopped working and dusted his hands off. He was really built, and his shaggy hair made him look younger than his crows-feet suggested. He turned a seashell with a half-built motor in it over and spun it like a top on the hand-painted WEATHER IS HERE/WISH YOU WERE BEAUTIFUL legend. [/p] [p] “Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? The simple answer: people buy them. Collectors. So it’s a good hobby business, but that’s not really it. [/p] [p] “It’s like this: engineering is all about constraint. Given a span of foo feet and materials of tensile strength of bar, build a bridge that doesn’t go all fubared. Write a fun video-game for an eight-bit console that’ll fit in 32K. Build the fastest airplane, or the one with the largest carrying capacity... But these days, there’s not much traditional constraint. I’ve got the engineer’s most dangerous luxury: plenty. All the computational cycles I’ll ever need. Easy and rapid prototyping. Precision tools. [/p] [p] “Now, it may be that there is a suite of tasks lurking in potentia that demand all this resource and more—maybe I’m like some locomotive engineer declaring that 60 miles per hour is the pinnacle of machine velocity, that speed is cracked. But I don’t see many of those problems—none that interest me. [/p] [p] “What I’ve got here are my own constraints. I’m challenging myself, using found objects and making stuff that throws all this computational capacity at, you know, these trivial problems, like car-driving Elmo clusters and seashell toaster-robots. We have so much capacity that the trivia expands to fill it. And all that capacity is junk-capacity, it’s leftovers. There’s enough computational capacity in a junkyard to launch a space-program, and that’s by design. Remember the iPod? Why do you think it was so prone to scratching and going all gunky after a year in your pocket? Why would Apple build a handheld technology out of materials that turned to shit if you looked at them cross-eyed? It’s because the iPod was only meant to last a year! [/p] [p] “It’s like tailfins—they were cool in the Tailfin Cretaceous, but wouldn’t it have been better if they could have disappeared from view when they became aesthetically obsolete, when the space age withered up and blew away? Oh, not really, obviously, because it’s nice to see a well-maintained land-yacht on the highway every now and again, if only for variety’s sake, but if you’re going to design something that is meant to be au fait then presumably you should have some planned obsolescence in there, some end-of-lifing strategy for the aesthetic crash that follows any couture movement. Here, check this out.” [/p] [p] He handed her a white brick, the size of a deck of cards. It took her a moment to recognize it as an iPod. “Christ, it’s huge,” she said. [/p] [p] “Yeah, isn’t it just. Remember how small and shiny this thing was when it shipped? ’A thousand songs in your pocket!’” [/p] [p] That made her actually laugh out loud. She fished in her pocket for her earbuds and dropped them on the table where they clattered like M&Ms. “I think I’ve got about 40,000 songs on those. Haven’t run out of space yet, either.” [/p] [p] He rolled the buds around in his palm like a pair of dice. “You won’t—I stopped keeping track of mine after I added my hundred-thousandth audiobook. I’ve got a bunch of the Library of Congress in mine as high-rez scans, too. A copy of the Internet Archive, every post ever made on Usenet... Basically, these things are infinitely capacious, given the size of the media we work with today.” He rolled the buds out on the workbench and laughed. “And that’s just the point! Tomorrow, we’ll have some new extra fat kind of media and some new task to perform with it and some new storage medium that will make these things look like an old iPod. Before that happens, you want this to wear out and scuff up or get lost—” [/p] [p] “I lose those things all the time, like a set a month.” [/p] [p] “There you go then! The iPods were too big to lose like that, but just look at them.” The iPod’s chrome was scratched to the point of being fogged, like the mirror in a gas-station toilet. The screen was almost unreadable for all the scratches. “They had scratch-proof materials and hard plastics back then. They chose to build these things out of Saran Wrap and tin-foil so that by the time they doubled in capacity next year, you’d have already worn yours out and wouldn’t feel bad about junking them. [/p] [p] “So I’m building a tape-loading seashell robot toaster out of discarded obsolete technology because the world is full of capacious, capable, disposable junk and it cries out to be used again. It’s a potlatch: I have so much material and computational wealth that I can afford to waste it on frivolous junk. I think that’s why the collectors buy it, anyway.” [/p] [p] “That brings us back to the question of your relationship with Kodacell. They want to do what, exactly, with you?” [/p] [p] “Well, we’ve been playing with some mass-production techniques, the three-d printer and so on. When Kettlebelly called me, he said that he wanted to see about using the scanner and so on to make a lot of these things, at a low price-point. It’s pretty perverse when you think about it: using modern technology to build replicas of obsolete technology rescued from the dump, when these replicas are bound to end up back here at the dump!” He laughed. He had nice laugh-lines around his eyes. “Anyway, it’s something that Lester and I had talked about for a long time, but never really got around to. Too much like retail. It’s bad enough dealing with a couple dozen collectors who’ll pay ten grand for a sculpture: who wants to deal with ten thousand customers who’ll go a dollar each for the same thing?” [/p] [p] “But you figure that this Tjan character will handle all the customer stuff?” [/p] [p] “That’s the idea: he’ll run the business side, we’ll get more time to hack; everyone gets paid. Kodacell’s got some micro-sized marketing agencies, specialized PR firms, creative shippers, all kinds of little three-person outfits that they’ve promised to hook us up with. Tjan interfaces with them, we do our thing, enrich the shareholders, get stock ourselves. It’s supposed to be all upside. Hell, if it doesn’t work we can just walk away and find another dump and go back into the collectors’ market.” [/p] [p] He picked up his half-finished shell and swung a lamp with a magnifying lens built into it over his workspace. “Hey, just a sec, OK? I’ve just figured out what I was doing wrong before.” He took up a little tweezers and a plastic rod and probed for a moment, then daubed some solder down inside the shell’s guts. He tweezed a wire to a contact and the shell made a motorized sound, a peg sticking out of it began to move rhythmically. [/p] [p] “Got it,” he said. He set it down. “I don’t expect I’m going to be doing many more of these projects after next week. This kind of design, we could never mass-produce it.” He looked a little wistful, and Suzanne suppressed a smile. What a tortured artiste this Florida junkyard engineer was! [/p] [p] As the long day drew to a close, they went out for a walk in the twilight’s cool in the yard. The sopping humidity of the day settled around them as the sun set in a long summer blaze that turned the dry fountain full of Christmas ornaments into a luminescent bowl of jewels. [/p] [p] “I got some real progress today,” Lester said. He had a cane with him and he was limping heavily. “Got the printer to output complete mechanical logical gates, all in one piece, Almost no assembly, just daisy-chain them on a board. And I’ve been working on a standard snap-on system for lego-bricking each gate to the next. It’s going to make it a lot easier to ramp up production.” [/p] ]

[p] Lester held up a hand. “We don’t have any market research, Kettlewell, because we don’t have a business-manager on the team anymore. Perry’s been taking that over as well as his regular work, and he’s been working himself sick for you. We’re flying by the seat of our pants here because you haven’t sent us a pilot.” [/p] [p] “You need an MBA to tell you not to turn your workplace into a slum?” Kettlewell said. He was boiling. Suzanne very carefully pulled out her pad and wrote this down. It was all she had, but sometimes it was enough. [/p] [p] Kettlewell noticed. “Get out,” he said. “I want to talk with these two alone.” [/p] [p] “No,” Suzanne said. “That’s not our deal. I get to document everything. That’s the deal.” [/p] [p] Kettlewell glared at her, and then he deflated. He sagged and took two steps to the chair behind Perry’s desk and collapsed into it. [/p] [p] “Put the notebook away, Suzanne, please?” [/p] [p] She silently shook her head at him. He locked eyes with her for a moment, then nodded curtly. She resumed writing. [/p] [p] “Guys, the major shareholders are going to start dumping their stock this week. A couple of pension funds, a merchant bank. It’s about ten, fifteen percent of the company. When that happens, our ticker price is going to fall by sixty percent or more.” [/p] [p] “They’re going to short us because they don’t like what we’ve done here?” Perry said. “Christ, that’s ridiculous!” [/p] [p] Kettlewell sighed and put his face in his hands, scrubbed at his eyes. “No, Perry, no. They’re doing it because they can’t figure out how to value us. Our business units have an industry-high return on investment, but there’s not enough of them. We’ve only signed a thousand teams and we wanted ten thousand, so ninety percent of the money we had to spend is sitting in the bank at garbage interest rates. We need to soak up that money with big projects—the Hoover Dam, Hong Kong Disneyland, the Big Dig. All we’ve got are little projects.” [/p] [p] “So it’s not our fault then, is it?” Lester said. Perry was staring out the window. [/p] [p] “No, it’s not your fault, but this doesn’t help. This is a disaster waiting to turn into a catastrophe.” [/p] [p] “Calm down, Landon,” Perry said. “Calm down for a sec and listen to me, OK?” [/p] [p] Kettlewell looked at him and sighed. “Go ahead.” [/p] [p] “There are more than a billion squatters worldwide. San Francisco has been giving out tents and shopping carts ever since they ran out of shelter beds in the nineties. From Copenhagen to Capetown, there are more and more people who are going off the grid, often in the middle of cities.” [/p] [p] Suzanne nodded. “They farm Detroit, in the ruins of old buildings. Raise crops and sell them. Chickens, too. Even pigs.” [/p] [p] “There’s something there. These people have money, like I said. They buy and sell in the stream of commerce. They often have to buy at a premium because the services and goods available to them are limited—think of how a homeless person can’t take advantage of bulk-packaged perishables because she doesn’t have a fridge. They are the spirit of ingenuity, too—they mod their cars, caves, anything they can find to be living quarters. They turn RVs into permanent homes. They know more about tents, sleeping bags and cardboard than any UN SHELTER specialist. These people need housing, goods, appliances, you name it. It’s what Tjan used to call a green-field market: no one else knows it’s there. You want something you can spend ungodly amounts of money on? This is it. Get every team in the company to come up with products for these people. Soak up every cent they spend. Better us providing them with quality goods at reasonable prices than letting them get ripped off by the profiteers who have a captive market. This plant is a living lab: this is the kind of market intelligence you can’t buy, right here. We should set up more of these. Invite squatters all over the country to move onto our grounds, test out our products, help us design, build and market them. We can recruit traveling salespeople to go door to door in the shanties and take orders. Shit, man, you talk about the Grameen Bank all the time—why not go into business providing these people with easy microcredit without preying on them the way the banks do? Then we could loan them money to buy things that we sell them that they use to better their lives and earn more money so they can pay us back and buy more things and borrow more money—” [/p] [p] Kettlewell held up a hand. “I like the theory. It’s a nice story. But I have to sell this to my Board, and they want more than stories: where can I get the research to back this up?” [/p] [p] “We’re it,” Perry said. “This place, right here. There’s no numbers to prove what I’m saying is right because everyone who knows it’s right is too busy chasing after it and no one else believes it. But right here, if we’re allowed to do this—right here we can prove it. We’ve got the capital in our account, we’re profitable, and we can roll those profits back into more R&D for the future of the company.” [/p] [p] Suzanne was writing so fast she was getting a hand cramp. Perry had never given speeches like this, even a month before. Tjan’s leaving had hurt them all, but the growth it had precipitated in Perry was stunning. [/p] [p] Kettlewell argued more, but Perry was a steamroller and Suzanne was writing down what everyone said and that kept it all civil, like a silent camera rolling in the corner of the room. No one looked at her, but she was the thing they were conspicuously not looking at. [/p] [p] Francis took the news calmly. “Sound business strategy. Basically, it’s what I’ve been telling you to do all along, so I’m bound to like it.” [/p] [p] It took a couple weeks to hive off the Home Aware stuff to some of the other Kodacell business-units. Perry flew a bunch, spending days in Minnesota, Oregon, Ohio, and Michigan overseeing the retooling efforts that would let him focus on his new project. [/p] [p] By the time he got back, Lester had retooled their own workspace, converting it to four functional areas: communications, shelter, food and entertainment. “They were Francis’s idea,” he said. Francis’s gimpy leg was bothering him more and more, but he’d overseen the work from a rolling ergonomic office-chair. “It’s his version of the hierarchy of needs—stuff he knows for sure we can sell.” [/p] [p] It was the first time the boys had launched something new without knowing what it was, where they’d started with a niche and decided to fill it instead of starting with an idea and looking for a niche for it. [/p] [p] “You’re going to underestimate the research time,” Francis said during one of their flip-chart brainstorms, where they had been covering sheet after sheet with ideas for products they could build. “Everyone underestimates research time. Deciding what to make is always harder than making it.” He’d been drinking less since he’d gotten involved in the retooling effort, waking earlier, bossing around his young-blood posse to get him paper, bricks, Tinkertoys. [/p] [p] He was right. Suzanne steadily recorded the weeks ticking by as the four competing labs focus-grouped, designed, tested and scrapped all manner of “tchotchkes for tramps,” as Freddy had dubbed it in a spiraling series of ever-more-bilious columns. But the press was mostly positive: camera crews liked to come by and shoot the compound. One time, the pretty black reporter from the night of the fire came by and said very nice things during her standup. Her name was Maria and she was happy to talk shop with Suzanne, endlessly fascinated by a “real” journalist who’d gone permanently slumming on the Internet. [/p] [p] “The problem is that all this stuff is too specialized, it has too many prerequisites,” Perry said, staring at a waterproof, cement-impregnated bag that could be filled with a hose, allowed to dry, and used as a self-contained room. “This thing is great for refugees, but it’s too one-size-fits all for squatters. They have to be able to heavily customize everything they use to fit into really specialized niches.” [/p] [p] More squatters had arrived to take up residence with them—families, friends, a couple of dodgy drifters—and a third story was going onto the buildings in the camp. They were even more Dr Seussian than the first round, idiosyncratic structures that had to be built light to avoid crushing the floors below them, hanging out over the narrow streets, corkscrewing like vines seeking sun. [/p] [p] He kept staring, and would have been staring still had he not heard the sirens. Three blue-and-white Broward County sheriff’s cars were racing down the access road into their dead mall, sirens howling, lights blazing. [/p] [p] They screeched to a halt at the shantytown’s edge and their doors flew open. Four cops moved quickly into the shantytown, while two more worked the radios, sheltering by the cars. [/p] [p] “Jesus Christ,” Perry said. He ran for the door, but Suzanne grabbed him. [/p] [p] “Don’t run toward armed cops,” she said. “Don’t do anything that looks threatening. Slow down, Perry.” [/p] [p] He took a couple deep breaths. Then he looked around his lab for a while, frantically muttering, “Where the fuck did I put it?” [/p] [p] “Use Home Aware,” she said. He shook his head, grimaced, went to a keyboard and typed MEGAPHONE. One of the lab-drawers started to throb with a white glow. [/p] [p] He pulled out the megaphone and went to his window. [/p] [p] “ATTENTION POLICE,” he said. “THIS IS THE LEASEHOLDER FOR THIS PROPERTY. WHY ARE YOU RUNNING AROUND WITH YOUR GUNS DRAWN? WHAT IS GOING ON?” [/p] [p] The police at the cars looked toward the workshop, then back to the shantytown, then back to the workshop. [/p] [p] “SERIOUSLY. THIS IS NOT COOL. WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?” [/p] [p] One of the cops grabbed the mic for his own loudhailer. “THIS IS THE BROWARD COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT. WE HAVE RECEIVED INTELLIGENCE THAT AN ARMED FUGITIVE IS ON THESE PREMISES. WE HAVE COME TO RETRIEVE HIM.” [/p] [p] “WELL, THAT’S WEIRD. NONE OF THE CHILDREN, CIVILIANS AND HARDWORKING PEOPLE HERE ARE FUGITIVES AS FAR AS I KNOW. CERTAINLY THERE’S NO ONE ARMED AROUND HERE. WHY DON’T YOU GET BACK IN YOUR CARS AND I’LL COME OUT AND WE’LL RESOLVE THIS LIKE CIVILIZED PEOPLE, OK?” [/p] [p] The cop shook his head and reached for his mic again, and then there were two gunshots, a scream, and a third. [/p] [p] Perry ran for the door and Suzanne chased after him, trying to stop him. The cops at the cars were talking intently into their radios, though it was impossible to know if they were talking to their comrades in the shantytown or to their headquarters. Perry burst out of the factory door and there was another shot and he spun around, staggered back a step, and fell down like a sack of grain. There was blood around his head. Suzanne stuck her hand in her mouth to stifle a scream and stood helplessly in the doorway of the workshop, just a few paces from Perry. [/p] [p] Lester came up behind her and firmly moved her aside. He lumbered deliberately and slowly and fearlessly to Perry’s side, knelt beside him, touched him gently. His face was grey. Perry thrashed softly and Suzanne let out a sound like a cry, then remembered herself and took out her camera and began to shoot and shoot and shoot: the cops, Lester with Perry like a tragic Pieta, the shantytowners running back and forth screaming. Snap of the cops getting out of their cars, guns in hands, snap of them fanning out around the shantytown, snap of them coming closer and closer, snap of a cop pointing his gun at Lester, ordering him away from Perry, snap of a cop approaching her. [/p] [p] “It’s live,” she said, not looking up from the viewfinder. “Going out live to my blog. Daily readership half a million. They’re watching you now, every move. Do you understand?” [/p] [p] The officer said, “Put the camera down, ma’am.” [/p] [p] She held the camera. “I can’t quote the First Amendment from memory, not exactly, but I know it well enough that I’m not moving this camera. It’s live, you understand—every move is going out live, right now.” [/p] [p] The officer stepped back, turned his head, muttered in his mic. [/p] [p] “There’s an ambulance coming,” he said. “Your friend was shot with a nonlethal rubber bullet.” [/p] [p] “He’s bleeding from the head,” Lester said. “From the eye.” [/p] [p] Suzanne shuddered. [/p] [p] Ambulance sirens in the distance. Lester stroked Perry’s hair. Suzanne took a step back and panned it over Perry’s ruined face, bloody and swollen. The rubber bullet must have taken him either right in the eye or just over it. [/p] [p] “Perry Mason Gibbons was unarmed and posed no threat to Sheriff’s Deputy Badge Number 5724—” she zoomed in on it—“when he was shot with a rubber bullet in the eye. He is unconscious and bloody on the ground in front of the workshop where he has worked quietly and unassumingly to invent and manufacture new technologies.” [/p] [p] The cop knew when to cut his losses. He turned aside and walked back into the shantytown, leaving Suzanne to turn her camera on Perry, on the EMTs who evacced him to the ambulance, on the three injured shantytowners who were on the ambulance with him, on the corpse they wheeled out on his own gurney, one of the newcomers to the shantytown, a man she didn’t recognize. [/p] [p] They operated on Perry all that night, gingerly tweezing fragments of bone from his shattered left orbit out of his eye and face. Some had floated to the back of the socket and posed a special risk of brain damage, the doctor explained into her camera. [/p] [p] Lester was a rock, sitting silently in the waiting room, talking calmly and firmly with the cops and over the phone to Kettlewell and the specially impaneled board-room full of Kodacell lawyers who wanted to micromanage this. Rat-Toothed Freddy filed a column in which he called her a “grandstanding bint,” and accused Kodacell of harboring dangerous fugitives. He’d dug up the fact that one of the newcomers to the shantytown—not the one they’d killed, that was a bystander—was wanted for holding up a liquor-store with a corkscrew the year before. [/p] [p] Lester unscrewed his earphone and scrubbed at his eyes. Impulsively, she leaned over and gave him a hug. He stiffened up at first but then relaxed and enfolded her in his huge, warm arms. She could barely make her arms meet around his broad, soft back—it was like hugging a giant loaf of bread. She squeezed tighter and he did too. He was a good hugger. [/p] [p] “You holding in there, kiddo?” she said. [/p] [p] “Yeah,” he murmured into her neck. “No.” He squeezed tighter. “As well as I need to, anyway.” [/p] [p] The doctor pried them apart to tell them that the EEG and fMRI were both negative for any brain-damage, and that they’d managed to salvage the eye, probably. Kodacell was springing for all the care he needed, cash money, no dorking around with the fucking HMO, so the doctors had put him through every machine on the premises in a series of farcically expensive tests. [/p] [p] “I hope they sue the cops for the costs,” the doctor said. She was Pakistani or Bangladeshi, with a faint accent, and very pretty even with the dark circles under her eyes. “I read your columns,” she said, shaking Suzanne’s hand. “I admire the work you do,” she said, shaking Lester’s hand. “I was born in Delhi. We were squatters who were given a deed to our home and then evicted because we couldn’t pay the taxes. We had to build again, in the rains, outside of the city, and then again when we were evicted again.” [/p] [p] She had two brothers who were working for startups like Kodacell’s, but run by other firms: one was backed by McDonald’s, the other by the AFL-CIO’s investment arm. Suzanne did a little interview with her about her brothers’ projects—a bike-helmet that had been algorithmically evolved for minimum weight and maximum protection; a smart skylight that deformed itself to follow light based on simple phototropic controllers. The brother working on bike-helmets was riding a tiger and could barely keep up with orders; he was consuming about half of the operational capacity of the McDonald’s network and climbing fast. [/p] [p] Lester joined in, digging on the details. He’d been following the skylights in blogs and on a list or two, and he’d heard of the doctor’s brother, which really tweaked her, she was visibly proud of her family. [/p] [p] “But your work is most important. Things for the homeless. We get them in here sometimes, hurt, off the ambulances. We usually turn them away again. The ones who sell off the highway medians and at the traffic lights.” Suzanne had seen them, selling homemade cookies, oranges, flowers, newspapers, plasticky toys, sad or beautiful handicrafts. She had a carved coconut covered in intricate scrimshaw that she’d bought from a little girl who was all skin and bones except for her malnourished pot-belly. [/p] [p] “They get hit by cars?” [/p] [p] “Yes,” the doctor said. “Deliberately, too. Or beaten up.” [/p] [p] Perry was moved out of the operating theater to a recovery room and then to a private room and by then they were ready to collapse, though there was so much email in response to her posts that she ended up pounding on her computer’s keyboard all the way home as Lester drove them, squeezing the bridge of his nose to stay awake. She didn’t even take her clothes off before collapsing into bed. [/p] [p] [/p][hr /] [p][/p] [p] “They need the tools to make any other tools,” is what Perry said when he returned from the hospital, the side of his head still swaddled in bandages that draped over his injured eye. They’d shaved his head at his insistence, saying that he wasn’t going to try to keep his hair clean with all the bandages. It made him look younger, and his fine skull-bones stood out through his thin scalp when he finally came home. Before he’d looked like a outdoorsman engineer: now he looked like a radical, a pirate. [/p] [p] “They need the tools that will let them build anything else, for free, and use it or sell it.” He gestured at the rapid prototyping machines they had, the three-d printer and scanner setups. “I mean something like that, but I want it to be capable of printing out the parts necessary to assemble another one. Machines that can reproduce themselves.” [/p] [p] Francis shifted in his seat. “What are they supposed to do with those?” [/p] [p] “Everything,” Perry said, his eye glinting. “Make your kitchen fixtures. Make your shoes and hat. Make your kids’ toys—if it’s in the stores, it should be a downloadable too. Make toolchests and tools. Make it and build it and sell it. Make other printers and sell them. Make machines that make the goop we feed into the printers. Teach a man to fish, Francis, teach a man to fucking fish. No top-down ’solutions’ driven by ’market research’”—his finger-quotes oozed sarcasm—“the thing that we need to do is make these people the authors of their own destiny.” [/p] [p] They put up the sign that night: AUTHOR OF YOUR OWN DESTINY, hung over the workshop door. Suzanne trailed after Perry transcribing the rants that spilled out of his mouth as he explained it to Lester and Francis, and then to Kettlewell when he called, and then to the pretty young black lady from the TV who by now had figured out that there was a real story in her backyard, then to an NPR man on the phone, and then to a CNN crew who drove in from Miami and filmed the shantytown and the workshop like Japanese tourists at Disney World, never having ventured into the skanky, failed strip-mall suburbs just outside of town. [/p] [p] Francis had a protege who had a real dab touch with the 3-D printers. The manufacturer, Lester’s former employer, had been out of business for two years by then, so all the service on the machines had to be done on the premises. Francis’s protege—the one who claimed his mother had pushed his father under a bus, his name was Jason—watched Lester work on recalcitrant machines silently for a couple days, then started to hand him the tool he needed next without having to be asked. Then he diagnosed a problem that had stumped Lester all morning. Then he suggested an improvement to the feedstock pump that increased the mean time between failures by a couple hours. [/p] [p] “No, man, no, not like that,” Jason said to one of the small gang of boys he was bossing. “Gently, or you’ll snap it off.” The boy snapped it off and Jason pulled another replacement part out of a tub and said, “See, like this,” and snapped it on. The small gang of boys regarded him with something like awe. [/p] [p] “How come no girls?” Suzanne said as she interviewed him while he took a smoke-break. Perry had banned cigarettes from all indoor workshops, nominally to keep flames away from the various industrial chemicals and such, but really just to encourage the shantytowners to give up the habit that they couldn’t afford anyway. He’d also leaned on the shantytowners who’d opened up small shops in their houses to keep cigs out of the town, without a lot of success. [/p] [p] “Girls aren’t interested in this stuff, lady.” [/p] [p] “You think?” There was a time when she would have objected, but it was better to let these guys say it out loud, hear themselves say it. [/p] [p] “No. Maybe where you come from, OK? Don’t know. But here girls are different. They do good in school but when they have babies they’re done. I mean, hey, it’s not like I don’t want girls in the team, they’d be great. I love girls. They fuckin’ work, you know. No bullshit, no screwing around. But I know every girl in this place and none of ’em are even interested, OK?” [/p] [p] Suzanne cocked one eyebrow just a little and Jason shifted uncomfortably. He scratched his bare midriff and shuffled. “I do, all of them. Why would they? One girl, a roomful of boys, it’d be gross. They’d act like jerks. There’s no way we’d get anything done.” [/p] [p] Suzanne lifted her eyebrow one hair higher. He squirmed harder. [/p] [p] “So all right, that’s not their fault. But I got enough work, all right? Too much to do without spending time on that. It’s not like any girls have asked to join up. I’m not keeping them out.” [/p] [p] Suzanne jotted a couple of notes, keeping perfectly mum. [/p] [p] “Well, I’d like to have them in the workshop, OK? Maybe I should ask some of them if they’d come. Shit, if I can teach these apes, I can teach a girl. They’re smart. Girls’d make this place a little better to work in. Lots of them trying to support their families, so they need the money, too.” [/p] [p] There was a girl there by the afternoon. The next day, there were two more. They seemed like quick studies, despite their youth and their lip-gloss. Suzanne approved. [/p] [p] [/p][hr /] [p][/p] [p] Lester stayed long enough to see the first prototype printer-printers running, then he lit out with a duffel bag jammed into the back of his modded Smart car. “Where are you going?” Suzanne said as Perry looked on gloomily. “I’ll come and visit you. I want to follow your story.” Truth be told, she was sorry to see him go, very sorry. He was such a rock, such an anchor for Perry’s new crazy pirate energy and for the madness around them. He hadn’t given much notice (not to her—Perry didn’t seem that surprised). [/p] [p] “I can’t really talk about it,” he said. “Nondisclosure.” [/p] [p] “So it’s a new job,” she said. “You’re going to work for Tjan?” Tjan’s Westinghouse operation was fully rocking. He had fifty teams up the eastern seaboard, ten in the midwest and was rumored to have twice as many in Eastern Europe. [/p] [p] He grinned. “Oh, Suzanne, don’t try to journalist me.” He reached out and hugged her in a cloud of her father’s cologne. “You’re fantastic, you know that? No, I’m not going to a job. It’s a thing that’s an amazing opportunity, you know?” [/p] [p] She didn’t, but then he was gone and boy did she miss him. [/p] [p] Perry and she went out for dinner in Miami the next night with a PhD candidate from Pepperdine’s B-school, eating at the same deco patio that she’d dined at with Tjan. Perry wore a white shirt open to reveal his tangle of wiry chest hair and the waitress couldn’t keep her eyes off of him. He had a permanent squint now, and a scar that made his eyebrow into a series of small hills. [/p] [p] “I was just in Greensboro, Miss,” the PhD candidate said. He was in his mid-twenties, young and slick, his only nod to academe a small goatee. “I used to spend summers there with my grandpa.” He talked fast, flecks of spittle in the corners of his mouth, eyes wide, fork stabbing blindly at the bits of crab-cake on his plate. “There wasn’t anything left there, just a couple gas-stations and a 7-Eleven, shit, they’d even closed the Wal-Mart. But now, but now, it’s alive again, it’s buzzing and hopping. Every empty storefront is full of people playing and tinkering, just a little bit of money in their pockets from a bank or a company or a fund. They’re doing the dumbest things, mind you: tooled-leather laptop cases, switchblade knives with thumb drives in the handles, singing and dancing lawn-Santas that yodel like hillbillies.” [/p] [p] “I’d buy a tooled-leather laptop case,” Perry said, swilling a sweaty bottle of beer. He waggled his funny eyebrow and rubbed his fuzzy scalp. [/p] [p] “The rate of employment is something like ninety-five percent, which it hasn’t been in like a hundred years. If you’re not inventing stuff, you’re keeping the books for someone who is, or making sandwiches for them, or driving delivery vehicles around. It’s like a tiny, distributed gold rush.” [/p] [p] “Or like the New Deal,” Suzanne said. That was how she’d come to invite him down, after she’d read his paper coining the term New Work to describe what Perry was up to, comparing it to Roosevelt’s public-investment plan that spent America free of the Depression. [/p] [p] “Yeah, exactly, exactly! I’ve got research that shows that one in five Americans is employed in the New Work industry. Twenty percent!” [/p] [p] Perry’s lazy eye opened a little wider. “No way,” he said. [/p] [p] “Way,” the PhD candidate said. He finished his caipirinha and shook the crushed ice at a passing waiter, who nodded and ambled to the bar to get him a fresh one. “You should get on the road and write about some of these guys,” he said to Suzanne. “They need some ink, some phosphors. They’re pulling up stakes and moving to the small towns their parents came from, or to abandoned suburbs, and just doing it. Bravest fucking thing you’ve seen in your life.” [/p] [p] The PhD candidate stayed out the week, and went home with a suitcase full of the parts necessary to build a three-d printer that could print out all of the parts necessary to build a three-d printer. [/p] [p] Lester emailed her from wherever it was he’d gone, and told her about the lovely time he was having. It made her miss him sharply. Perry was hardly ever around for her now, buried in his work, buried with the kids from the shantytown and with Francis. She looked over her last month’s blogs and realized that she’d been turning in variations on the same theme for all that time. She knew it was time to pack a duffel bag of her own and go see the bravest fucking thing she’d seen in her life. [/p] [p] “Bye, Perry,” she said, stopping by his workbench. He looked up at her and saw the bag and his funny eyebrow wobbled. [/p] [p] “Leaving for good?” he said. He sounded unexpectedly bitter. [/p] [p] “No!” she said. “No! Just a couple weeks. Going to get the rest of the story. But I’ll be back, count on it.” [/p] [p] He grunted and slumped. He was looking a lot older now, and beaten down. His hair, growing out, was half grey, and he’d gotten gaunt, his cheekbones and forehead springing out of his face. On impulse, she gave him a hug like the ones she’d shared with Lester. He returned it woodenly at first, then with genuine warmth. “I will be back, you know,” she said. “You’ve got plenty to do here, anyway.” [/p] [p] “Yeah,” he said. “Course I do.” [/p] [p] She kissed him firmly on the cheek and stepped out the door and into her car and drove to Miami International. [/p] [p] [/p][hr /] [p][/p] [p] Tjan met her at Logan and took her bag. “I’m surprised you had the time to meet me,” she said. The months had been good to him, slimming down his pot-belly and putting a twinkle in his eye. [/p] [p] “I’ve got a good organization,” he said, as they motored away toward Rhode Island, through strip-mall suburbs and past boarded-up chain restaurants. Everywhere there were signs of industry: workshops in old storefronts, roadside stands selling disposable music players, digital whoopee cushions, and so forth. “I barely have to put in an appearance.” [/p] [p] Tjan yawned hugely and constantly. “Jet-lag,” he apologized. “Got back from Russia a couple days ago.” [/p] [p] “Did you see your kids?” she said. “How’s business there?” [/p] [p] “I saw my kids,” he said, and grinned. “They’re amazing, you know that? Good kids, unbelievably smart. Real little operators. The older one, Lyenitchka, is running a baby-sitting service—not baby-sitting herself, you see, but recruiting other kids to do the sitting for her while she skims a management fee and runs the quality control.” [/p] [p] “She’s your daughter all right,” she said. “So tell me everything about the Westinghouse projects.” [/p] [p] She’d been following them, of course, lots of different little startups, each with its own blogs and such. But Tjan was quite fearless about taking her through their profits and losses and taking notes on it all kept her busy until she reached her hotel. Tjan dropped her off and promised to pick her up the next morning for a VIP tour of the best of his teams, and she went to check in. [/p] [p] She was in the middle of receiving her key when someone grabbed her shoulder and squeezed it. “Suzanne bloody Church! What are you doing here, love?” [/p] [p] The smell of his breath was like a dead thing, left to fester. She turned around slowly, not wanting to believe that of all the hotels in rural Rhode Island, she ended up checking into the same one as Rat-Toothed Freddy. [/p] [p] “Hey, Freddy,” she said. Seeing him gave her an atavistic urge to stab him repeatedly in the throat with the hotel stick-pen. He was unshaven, his gawky Adam’s apple bobbing up and down, and he swallowed and smiled wetly. “Nice to see you.” [/p] [p] “Fantastic to see you, too! I’m here covering a shareholder meeting for Westinghouse, is that what you’re here for, too?” [/p] [p] “No,” she said. She knew the meeting was on that week, but hadn’t planned on attending it. She was done with press conferences, preferring on-the-ground reporting. “Well, nice to see you.” [/p] [p] “Oh, do stay for a drink,” he said, grinning more widely, exposing those grey teeth in a shark’s smile. “Come on—they have a free cocktail hour in this place. I’ll have to report you to the journalist’s union if you turn down a free drink.” [/p] [p] “I don’t think ’bloggers’ have to worry about the journalist’s union,” she said, making sarcastic finger-quotes in case he didn’t get the message. He still didn’t. He laughed instead. [/p] [p] “Oh, love, I’m sure they’ll still have you even if you have lapsed away from the one true faith.” [/p] [p] “Good night, Freddy,” was all she could manage to get out without actually hissing through her teeth. [/p] [p] “OK, good night,” he said, moving in to give her a hug. As he loomed toward her, she snapped. [/p] [p] “Freeze, mister. You are not my friend. I do not want to touch you. You have poor personal hygiene and your breath smells like an overflowing camp-toilet. You write vicious personal attacks on me and on the people I care about. You are unfair, meanspirited, and you write badly. The only day I wouldn’t piss on you, Freddy, is the day you were on fire. Now get the fuck out of my way before I kick your tiny little testicles up through the roof of your reeking mouth.” [/p] [p] She said it quietly, but the desk-clerks behind her overheard it anyway and giggled. Freddy’s smile only wobbled, but then returned, broader than ever. [/p] [p] “Well said,” he said and gave her a single golf-clap. “Sleep well, Suzanne.” [/p] [p] She boiled all the way to her room and when she came over hungry, she ordered in room service, not wanting to take the chance that Rat-Toothed Freddy would still be in the lobby. [/p] [p] [/p][hr /] [p][/p] [p] Tjan met her as she was finishing her coffee in the breakfast room. She hadn’t seen Freddy yet. [/p] [p] “I’ve got five projects slated for you to visit today,” Tjan said, sliding into the booth beside her. Funnily now that he was in the cold northeast, he was dressing like a Floridian in blue jeans and a Hawai’ian barkcloth shirt with a bright spatter of pineapples and Oscar Mayer Wienermobiles. Back in Florida, he’d favored unflattering nylon slacks and white shirts with ironed collars. [/p] [p] The projects were fascinating and familiar. The cultural differences that distinguished New England New Work from Florida New Work were small but telling: a lot more woodcraft, in a part of the country where many people had grown up in their grandfathers’ woodworking shops. A little more unreflexive kitsch, like the homely kittens and puppies that marched around the reactive, waterproof, smash-proof screens integrated into a bio-monitoring crib. [/p] [p] At the fourth site, she was ambushed by a flying hug. Tjan laughed as she nearly went down under the weight of a strong, young woman who flung her arms around Suzanne’s neck. “Holy crap it’s good to see you!” [/p] [p] Suzanne untangled herself and got a look at her hugger. She had short mousy hair, twinkling blue eyes, and was dressed in overalls and a pretty flowered blouse, scuffed work boots and stained and torn work-gloves. “Uh...” she said, then it clicked. “Fiona?” [/p] [p] “Yeah! Didn’t Tjan tell you I was here?” The last time she’d seen this woman, she was weeping over pizza and getting ready to give up on life. Now she was practically vibrating. [/p] [p] “Uh, no,” she said, shooting a look at Tjan, who was smiling like the Buddha and pretending to inspect a pair of shoes with gyroscopically stabilized retractable wheels in the heels. [/p] [p] “I’ve been here for months! I went back to Oregon, like you told me to, and then I saw a recruiting ad for Westinghouse and I sent them my CV and then I got a videoconference interview and then, bam, I was on an airplane to Rhode Island!” [/p] [p] Suzanne blinked. I told you to go back to Oregon? Well, maybe she had. That was a lifetime ago. [/p] [p] The workshop was another dead mall, this one a horseshoe of storefronts separated by flimsy gyprock. The Westinghousers had cut through the walls with drywall knives to join all the stores together. The air was permeated with the familiar Saran-Wrap-in-a-microwave tang of three-d printers. The parking lot was given over to some larger apparatus and a fantastical children’s jungle-gym in the shape of a baroque, spired pirate fortress, with elegantly curved turrets, corkscrew sky-bridges, and flying buttresses crusted over with ornate, grotesque gargoyles. Children swarmed over it like ants, screeching with pleasure. [/p] [p] “Well, you’re looking really good, Fiona,” Suzanne said. Still not great with people, she thought. Fiona, though, was indeed looking good, and beaming. She wasn’t wearing the crust of cosmetics and hair-care products she’d affected in the corporate Silicon Valley world. She glowed pink. [/p] [p] “Suzanne,” Fiona said, getting serious now, taking her by the shoulders and looking into her eyes. “I can’t thank you enough for this. This has saved my life. It gave me something to live for. For the first time in my life, I am doing something I’m proud of. I go to bed every night thankful and happy that I ended up here. Thank you, Suzanne. Thank you.” [/p] [p] Suzanne tried not to squirm. Fiona gave her another long hug. “It’s all your doing,” Suzanne said at last. “I just told you about it. You’ve made this happen for you, OK?” [/p] [p] “OK,” Fiona said, “but I still wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you. I love you, Suzanne.” [/p] [p] Ick. Suzanne gave her another perfunctory hug and got the hell out of Dodge. [/p] [p] [/p][hr /] [p][/p] [p] “What’s with the jungle-gym?” It really had been something, fun and Martian-looking. [/p] [p] “That’s the big one,” Tjan said with a big grin. “Most people don’t even notice it, they think it’s daycare or something. Well, that’s how it started out, but then some of the sensor people started noodling with jungle-gym components that could tell how often they were played with. They started modding the gym every night, adding variations on the elements that saw the most action, removing the duds. Then the CAD people added an algorithm that would take the sensor data and generate random variations on the same basis. Finally, some of the robotics people got in on the act so that the best of the computer-evolved designs could be instantiated automatically: now it’s a self-modifying jungle-gym. The kids love it. It is the crack cocaine of jungle-gyms, though we won’t be using that in the marketing copy, of course.” [/p] [p] “Of course,” Suzanne said drily. She’d automatically reached for her notepad and started writing when Tjan started talking. Now, reviewing her notes, she knew that she was going to have to go back and get some photos of this. She asked Tjan about it. [/p] [p] “The robots go all night, you know. Not much sleep if you do that.” [/p] [p] No going back to the hotel to see Freddy, what a pity. “I’ll grab a couple blankets from the hotel to keep warm,” she said. [/p] [p] “Oh, you needn’t,” he said. “That crew has a set of bleachers with gas-heaters for the night crew and their family to watch from. It’s pretty gorgeous, if you ask me.” [/p] [p] They had a hasty supper of burgers at a drive-through and then went back to the jungle-gym project. Suzanne ensconced herself at someone’s vacated desk for a couple hours and caught up on email before finally emerging as the sun was dipping swollen and red behind the mall. She set herself up on the bleachers, and Fiona found her with a thermos of coffee and a flask of whisky. They snuggled under a blanket amid a small crowd of geeks, an outdoor slumber party under the gas-heaters’ roar. [/p] [p] Gradually, the robots made an appearance. Most of them humped along like inchworms, carrying chunks of new playground apparatus in coils of their long bodies. Some deployed manipulator arms, though they didn’t have much by way of hands at their ends. “We just use rare-earth magnets,” Fiona said. “Less fiddly than trying to get artificial vision that can accurately grasp the bars.” [/p] [p] Tjan nudged her and pointed to a new tower that was going up. The robots were twisting around themselves to form a scaffold, while various of their number crawled higher and higher, snapping modular pieces of high-impact plastic together with snick sounds that were audible over the whine of their motors. [/p] [p] Suzanne switched on her camera’s night-vision mode and got shooting. “Where did you get all these robots?” [/p] [p] Tjan grinned. “It’s an open design—the EPA hired Westinghouse to build these to work on sensing and removing volatile organic compounds on Superfund sites. Because we did the work for the government, we had to agree not to claim any design copyright or patents in the outcome. There’s a freaking warehouse full of this stuff at Westinghouse, all kinds of crazy things that Westinghouse abandoned because they weren’t proprietary enough and they were worried that they’d have to compete on the open market if they tried to productize them. Suits us just fine, though.” [/p] [p] The field was aswarm with glinting metal inchworm robots now, shifting back and forth, boiling and roiling and picking up enormous chunks of climber like cartoon ants carrying away a picnic basket. The playground was being transformed before her eyes, in ways gross and subtle, and it was enchanting to watch. [/p] [p] “Can I go out and have a look?” she said. “I mean, is it safe?” [/p] [p] “Sure,” Fiona said. “Of course! Our robots won’t harm you; they just nuzzle you and then change direction.” [/p] [p] “Still, try to stay out of their way,” Tjan said. “Some of that stuff they’re moving around is heavy.” [/p] [p] So she waded out onto the playground and carefully picked her way through the robot swarm. Some crawled over her toes. A couple twined between her feet and nearly tripped her up and once she stepped on one and it went still and waited politely for her to step off. [/p] [p] Once in the thick of it all, she switched on her video and began to record through the night filter. Standing there amid the whirl and racket and undulating motion of the jungle gym as it reconfigured itself, she felt like she’d arrived at some posthuman future where the world no longer needed her or her kind. Like humanity’s creations had evolved past their inventors. [/p] [p] She was going to have to do a lot of writing before bed. [/p] [p] Freddy was checking out in the lobby when Tjan dropped her off at 5AM. It was impossible to sneak past him, and he gave her a nasty, bucktoothed smile as she passed by him. It distracted her and made the writing come more slowly, but she was a pro and her readers had sent in a lot of kind mail, and there was one from Lester, still away on his mysterious errand but sounding happier than he had in months, positively giddy. [/p] [p] She set the alarm-clock so that she could be awake for her next stop, outside of North Carolina’s Research Triangle, where some local millionaires had backed a dozen New Work teams. [/p] [p] Another three weeks of this stuff and she’d get to go home—Florida. The condo was home now, and the junkyard. Hot and sticky and inventive and ever-changing. She fell asleep thinking of it and smiling. [/p] [p] It was two weeks more before Lester caught up with her, in Detroit of all places. Going back to the old place hadn’t been her idea, she’d been dragged back by impassioned pleas from the local Ford and GM New Work teams, who were second-generation-unemployed, old rust-belt families who’d rebooted with money from the companies that had wrung their profit from their ancestors and abandoned them. [/p] [p] The big focus in the rustbelt was eradicating the car. Some were building robots that could decommission leaky gas-stations and crater out the toxic soil. Some were building car-disassembly plants that reclaimed materials from the old beasts’ interiors. Between the Ford and GM teams with their latest bail-out and those funded by the UAW out of the settlements they’d won from the auto-makers, Detroit was springing up anew. [/p] [p] Lester emailed her and said that he’d seen on her blog that she was headed to Detroit, and did she want to meet him for dinner, being as he’d be in town too? [/p] [p] They ate at Devil’s Night, a restaurant in one of the reclaimed mansions in Brush Park, a neighborhood of wood-frame buildings that teenagers had all but burned to the ground over several decades’ worth of Halloweens. In Detroit, Devil’s Night was the pre-Halloween tradition of torching abandoned buildings, and all of Brush Park had been abandoned for years, its handsome houses attractive targets for midnight firebugs. [/p] [p] Reclaiming these buildings was an artisanal practice of urethaning the charred wood and adding clever putty, cement, and glass to preserve the look of a burned out hulk while restoring structural integrity. One entire floor of the restaurant was missing, having been replaced by polished tempered one-way glass that let upstairs diners look down on the bald spots and cleavage of those eating below. [/p] [p] Suzanne showed up a few minutes late, having gotten lost wandering the streets of a Detroit that had rewritten its map in the decades since she’d left. She was flustered, and not just because she was running late. There was a lingering awkwardness between her and Lester and her elation at seeing him again had an inescapable undercurrent of dread. [/p] [p] When the waiter pointed out her table, she told him he was mistaken. Lester wasn’t there, some stranger was: short-haired, burly, with a few days’ stubble. He wore a smart blazer and a loose striped cotton shirt underneath. He was beaming at her. [/p] [p] “Suzanne,” he said. [/p] [p] Her jaw literally dropped. She realized she was standing with her mouth open and shut it with a snap. “Lester?” she said, wonderingly. [/p] [p] He got up, still smiling, even laughing a little, and gave her a hug. It was Lester all right. That smell was unmistakable, and those big, warm paws he called hands. [/p] [p] When he let go of her, he laughed again. “Oh, Suzanne, I could not have asked for any better reaction than this. Thank you.” They were drawing stares. Dazedly, she sat down. So did he. [/p] [p] “Lester?” she said again. [/p] [p] “Yes, it’s me,” he said. “I’ll tell you about it over dinner. The waiter wants to take our drink orders.” [/p] [p] Theatrically, she ordered a double Scotch. The waiter rattled off the specials and Suzanne picked one at random. So did Lester. [/p] [p] “So,” he said, patting his washboard tummy. “You want to know how I got to this in ten weeks, huh?” [/p] [p] “Can I take notes?” Suzanne said, pulling out her pad. [/p] [p] “Oh by all means,” he said. “I got a discount on my treatments on the basis that you would end up taking notes.” [/p] [p] The clinic was in St Petersburg, Russia, in a neighborhood filled with Russian dentists who catered to American health tourists who didn’t want to pay US prices for crowns. The treatment hadn’t originated there: The electromuscular stimulation and chemical therapy for skin-tightening was standard for rich new mothers in Hollywood who wanted to get rid of pregnancy bellies. The appetite-suppressing hormones had been used in the Mexican pharma industry for years. Stem-cells had been an effective substitute for steroids when it came to building muscle in professional athletic circles the world round. Genomic therapy using genes cribbed from hummingbirds boosted metabolism so that the body burned 10,000 calories a day sitting still. [/p] [p] But the St Petersburg clinic had ripped, mixed and burned these different procedures to make a single, holistic treatment that had dropped Lester from 400 to 175 pounds in ten weeks. [/p] [p] “Is that safe?” she said. [/p] [p] “Everyone asks that,” he said, laughing. “Yeah, it’s safe if they’re monitoring you and standing by with lots of diagnostic equipment. But if you’re willing to take slower losses, you can go on a way less intensive regime that won’t require supervision. This stuff is the next big grey-market pharma gold. They’re violating all kinds of pharma patents, of course, but that’s what Cuba and Canada are for, right? Inside of a year, every fat person in America is going to have a bottle of pills in his pocket, and inside of two years, there won’t be any fat people.” [/p] [p] She shook her head. “You look... Lester, you look incredible. I’m so proud of you.” [/p] [p] He ducked his head. He really did look amazing. Dropping the weight had taken off ten years, and between that and the haircut and the new clothes, he was practically unrecognizable. [/p] [p] “Does Perry know?” [/p] [p] “Yeah,” Lester said. “I talked it over with him before I opted for it. Tjan had mentioned it in passing, it was a business his ex-wife was tangled up with through her mafiyeh connections, and once I had researched it online and talked to some people who’d had the treatment, including a couple MDs, I decided to just do it.” [/p] [p] It had cost nearly everything he’d made from Kodacell, but it was a small price to pay. He insisted on getting dinner. [/p] [p] Afterward, they strolled through the fragrant evening down Woodward Avenue, past the deco skyscrapers and the plowed fields and community gardens, their livestock pens making soft animal noises. [/p] [p] “It’s wonderful to see you again, Lester,” she said truthfully. She’d really missed him, even though his participation on her message boards had hardly let up (though it had started coming in at weird hours, something explained by the fact that he’d been in Russia). Walking alongside of him, smelling his smell, seeing him only out of the corner of her eye, it was like nothing had changed. [/p] [p] “It’s great to see you again too.” Tentatively, he took her hand in his big paw. His hand was warm but not sweaty, and she realized it had been a long time since anyone had held her hand. Heart pounding, she gave his hand a squeeze. [/p] [p] Their conversation and their walk rambled on, with no outward acknowledgment of the contact of hand on hand, but her hand squeezed his softly now and again, or he squeezed hers, and then they were at her hotel. How did that happen? she asked herself. [/p] [p] But then they were having a nightcap, and then he was in the elevator with her and then he was at the door of her room, and the blood was roaring in her ears as she stuck her credit-card in the reader to open it. [/p] [p] Wait, she tried to say. Lester, hang on a second, is what she tried to say, but her tongue was thick in her mouth. He stepped through the door with her, then said, “Uh, I need to use the bathroom.” [/p] [p] With relief, she directed him to the small water closet. The room was basic—now that she was her own boss, she wasn’t springing for Crowne Plazas and Hiltons, this was practically a coffin—and there was nowhere to sit except the bed. Her laptop was open and there was a lot of email in her inbox, but for once, she didn’t care. She was keenly attuned to the water noises coming from behind the door, each new sound making her jump a little. What was he doing in there, inserting a fucking diaphragm? [/p] [p] She heard him work the latch on the door and she put on her best smile. Her stomach was full of butterflies. He smiled back and sat down on the bed next to her, taking her hand again. His hand was moist from being washed, and a little slippery. She didn’t mind. Wordlessly, she put her head on his barrel chest. His heart was racing, and so was hers. [/p] [p] Gradually, they leaned back, until they were side by side on the bed, her head still on his chest. Moving like she was in a dream, she lifted her head from his chest and stared into his eyes. They were wide and scared. She kissed him, softly. His lips were trembling and unyielding. She kissed him more insistently, running her hands over his chest and shoulders, putting one leg over him. He closed his eyes and kissed her back. He wasn’t bad, but he was scared or nervous and all jittery. [/p] [p] She kissed his throat, breathing in the smell, savoring the rough texture of his three-day beard. Tentatively, he put his hands on her back, stroked her, worked gradually towards her bottom. Then he stopped. [/p] [p] “What’s wrong?” she said, propping herself up on her forearms, still straddling him. [/p] [p] She saw that there were tears in his eyes. [/p] [p] “Lester? What’s wrong?” [/p] [p] He opened his mouth and then shut it. Tears slid off his face into his ears. She blotted them with a corner of hotel-pillow. [/p] [p] She stroked his hair. “Lester?” [/p] [p] He gave out a choked sob and pushed her away. He sat up and put his face in his hands. His back heaved. She stroked his shoulders tentatively. [/p] [p] Finally, he seemed to get himself under control. He sniffled. [/p] [p] “I have to go,” he said. [/p] [p] “Lester, what’s wrong?” [/p] [p] “I can’t do this,” he said. “I...” [/p] [p] “Just tell me,” she said. “Whatever it is, tell me.” [/p] [p] “You didn’t want me before.” He said it simply without accusation, but it stung like he’d slapped her in the face. [/p] [p] “Oh, Lester,” she said, moving to hug him, but he pushed her away. [/p] [p] “I have to go,” he said, drawing himself up to his full height. He was tall, though he’d never seemed it before, but oh, he was tall, six foot four or taller. He filled the room. His eyes were red and swollen, but he put on a smile for her. “Thanks, Suzanne. It was really good to see you again. I’ll see you in Florida.” [/p] [p] She stood up and moved quickly to him, stood on tiptoe to put her arms around his neck and hug him fiercely. He hugged her back and she kissed him on the cheek. [/p] [p] “I’ll see you in Florida,” she said. [/p] [p] And then he was gone. She sat on the edge of her bed and waited for tears, but they didn’t come. So she picked up her laptop and started to work through her mountain of email. [/p] [p] [/p][hr /] [p][/p] [p] When she saw him again, he was coming down the drive leading to the shantytown and the factory. She was having tea in the tea-room that had opened in a corkscrew spire high above the rest of the shantytown. The lady who operated it called herself Mrs Torrence, and she was exquisitely antique but by no means frail, and when she worked the ropes on her dumbwaiter to bring up supplies from the loading area on the ground, her biceps stood at attention like Popeye’s. There was a rumor that Mrs Torrence used to be a man, or still was, under her skirts, but Suzanne didn’t pay attention to it. [/p] [p] Lester came down the drive grinning and bouncing on the balls of his feet. Perry had evidently been expecting him, for he came racing through the shantytown and pelted down the roadway and threw himself at Lester, grabbing him in a crazy, exuberant, whooping hug. Francis gimped out a moment later and gave him a solemn handshake. She hadn’t blogged their meeting in Detroit, so if Francis and Perry knew about Lester’s transformation, they’d found out without hearing it from her. [/p] [p] She finished recording the homecoming from Mrs Torrence’s crow’s nest, then paid the grinning old bag and took the stairs two at a time, hurrying to catch up with Lester and his crowd. [/p] [p] Lester accepted her hug warmly but distantly, letting go a fraction of a second before she did. She didn’t let it get to her. He had drawn a crowd now, with Francis’s protege printer-techs in the innermost circle, and he was recounting the story of his transformation. He had them as spellbound as a roomful of Ewoks listening to C3PO. [/p] [p] “Shit, why don’t we sell that stuff?” Jason said. He’d taken a real interest in the business end of their three-d printer project. [/p] [p] “Too much competition,” Lester said. “There are already a dozen shops tooling up to make bathtub versions of the therapy here in America. Hundreds more in Eastern Europe. There just won’t be any profit in it by the time we get to market. Getting thin on the cheap’s going to be easy. Hell, all it takes to do it is the stuff you’d use for a meth lab. You can buy all that in a kit from a catalog.” [/p] [p] Jason nodded, but looked unconvinced. [/p] [p] Suzanne took Lester’s return as her cue to write about his transformation. She snapped more pics of him, added some video. He gave her ten minutes’ description of the therapies he’d undergone, and named a price for the therapy that was substantially lower than a couple weeks at a Hollywood fat-farm, and far more effective. [/p] [p] The response was amazing. Every TV news-crew in the greater Miami area made a pilgrimage to their factory to film Lester working in a tight t-shirt over a three-d printer, wrangling huge vats of epoxy-mix goop in the sun with sweat beading over his big, straining biceps. [/p] [p] Her message boards exploded. It seemed that a heretofore unsuspected contingent of her growing readership was substantially obese. And they had friends. Lester eventually gave up on posting, just so he could get some work done. They had the printers to the point where they could turn out new printers, but the whole system was temperamental and needed careful nursing. Lester was more interested in what people had to say on the engineering message-boards than chatting with the fatties. [/p] [p] The fatties were skeptical and hopeful in equal measures. The big fight was over whether there was anything to this, whether Lester would keep the weight off, whether the new skinny Lester was really Lester, whether he’d undergone surgery or had his stomach stapled. America’s wallets had been cleaned out by so many snake-oil peddlers with a “cure” for obesity that no one could believe what they saw, no matter how much they wanted to. [/p] [p] Lord, but it was bringing in the readers, not to mention the advertising dollars. The clearing price for a thousand weight-loss ads targeted to affluent, obese English-speakers was over fifty bucks, as compared with her customary CPM of three bucks a thou. Inside of a week, she’d made enough to buy a car. It was weird being her own circulation and ad-sales department, but it wasn’t as hard as she’d worried it might be—and it was intensely satisfying to have such a nose-to-tail understanding of the economics of her production. [/p] [p] “You should go,” Lester told her as she clicked him through her earnings spreadsheet. “Jesus, this is insane. You know that these fatties actually follow me around on the net now, asking me questions in message boards about engineering? The board moderators are asking me to post under an assumed name. Madame, your public has spoken. There is a dire need for your skills in St Petersburg. Go. They have chandeliers in the subways and caviar on tap. All the blini you can eat. Bear steaks.” [/p] [p] She shook her head and slurped at the tea he’d brought her. “You’re joking. It’s all mafiyeh there. Scary stuff. Besides, I’m covering this beat right now, New Work.” [/p] [p] “New Work isn’t going anywhere, Suzanne. We’ll be here when you get back. And this story is one that needs your touch. They’re micro-entrepreneurs solving post-industrial problems. It’s the same story you’ve been covering here, but with a different angle. Take that money and buy yourself a business-class ticket to St Petersburg and spend a couple weeks on the job. You’ll clean up. They could use the publicity, too—someone to go and drill down on which clinics are legit and which ones are clip-joints. You’re perfect for the gig.” [/p] [p] “I don’t know,” she said. She closed her eyes. Taking big chances had gotten her this far and it would take her farther, she knew. The world was your oyster if you could stomach a little risk. [/p] [p] “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, hell yeah. You’re totally right, Lester.” [/p] [p] “Zasterovyeh!” [/p] [p] “What you said!” [/p] [p] “It’s cheers,” he said. “You’ll need to know that if you’re going to make time in Petrograd. Let me go send some email and get you set up. You book a ticket.” [/p] [p] [/p][hr /] [p][/p] [p] And just like that she was off to Russia. Lester insisted that she buy a business-class ticket, and she discovered to her bemusement that British Airways had about three classes above business, presumably with even more exclusive classes reserved to royalty and peers of the realm. She luxuriated in fourteen hours of reclining seats and warm peanuts and in-flight connectivity, running a brief videoconference with Lester just because she could. Tjan had sent her a guide to the hotels and she’d opted for the Pribaltiyskaya, a crumbling Stalin-era four-star of spectacular, Vegasesque dimensions. The facade revealed the tragedy of the USSR’s unrequited love-affair with concrete, as did the cracks running up the walls of the lobby. [/p] [p] They checked her into the hotel with the nosiest questionnaire ever, a two-pager on government stationary that demanded to know her profession, employer, city of birth, details of family, and so forth. An American businessman next to her at the check-in counter saw her puzzling over it. “Just make stuff up,” he said. “I always write that I come from 123 Fake Street, Anytown, California, and that I work as a professional paper-hanger. They don’t check on it, except maybe the mob when they’re figuring out who to mug. First time in Russia?” [/p] [p] “It shows, huh?” [/p] [p] “You get used to it,” he said. “I come here every month on business. You just need to understand that if it seems ridiculous and too bad to be true, it is. They have lots of rules here, but no one follows ’em. Just ignore any unreasonable request and you’ll fit right in.” [/p] [p] “That’s good advice,” she said. He was middle-aged, but so was she, and he had nice eyes and no wedding ring. [/p] [p] “Get a whole night’s sleep, don’t drink the so-called ’champagne’ and don’t change money on the streets. Did you bring melatonin and modafinil?” [/p] [p] She stared blankly at him. “Drugs?” [/p] [p] “Sure. One tonight to sleep, one in the morning to wake up, and do it again tomorrow and you’ll be un-lagged. No booze or caffeine, either, not for the first couple days. Melatonin’s over the counter, even in the States, and modafinil’s practically legal. I have extra, here.” He dug in his travel bag and came up with some generic Walgreens bottles. [/p] [p] “That’s OK,” she said, handing her credit card to a pretty young clerk. “Thanks, though.” [/p] [p] He shook his head. “It’s your funeral,” he said. “Jet-lag is way worse for you than this stuff. It’s over the counter stateside. I don’t leave home without it. Anyway, I’m in room 1422. If it’s two in the morning and you’re staring at the ceiling and regretting it, call me and I’ll send some down.” [/p] [p] Was he hitting on her? Christ, she was so tired, she could barely see straight. There was no way she was going to need any help getting to sleep. She thanked him again and rolled her suitcase across the cavernous lobby with its gigantic chandeliers and to the elevators. [/p] [p] But sleep didn’t come. The network connection cost a fortune—something she hadn’t seen in years—and the number of worms and probes bouncing off her firewall was astronomical. The connection was slow and frustrating. Come 2AM, she was, indeed, staring at the ceiling. [/p] [p] Would you take drugs offered by a stranger in a hotel lobby? They were in a Walgreens bottle for chrissakes. How bad could they be? She picked up the house-phone on the chipped bedstand and punched his hotel room. [/p] [p] “Lo?” [/p] [p] “Oh Christ, I woke you up,” she said. “I’m sorry.” [/p] [p] “’Sok. Lady from check-in, right? Gimme your room number, I’ll send up a melatonin now and a modafinil for the morning. No sweatski.” [/p] [p] “Uh,” she hadn’t thought about giving a strange man her room number. In for a penny, in for a pound. “2813,” she said. “Thanks.” [/p] [p] “Geoff,” he said. “It’s Geoff. New York—upper West Side. Work in health products.” [/p] [p] “Suzanne,” she said. “Florida, lately. I’m a writer.” [/p] [p] “Good night, Suzanne. Pills are en route.” [/p] [p] “Good night, Geoff. Thanks.” [/p] [p] “Tip the porter a euro, or a couple bucks. Don’t bother with rubles.” [/p] [p] “Oh,” she said. It had been a long time since her last visit overseas. She’d forgotten how much minutiae was involved. [/p] [p] He hung up. She put on a robe and waited. The porter took about fifteen minutes, and handed her a little envelope with two pills in it. He was about fifteen, with a bad mustache and bad skin, and bad teeth that he displayed when she handed him a couple of dollar bills. [/p] [p] A minute later, she was back on the phone. [/p] [p] “Which one is which?” [/p] [p] “Little white one is melatonin. That’s for now. My bad.” [/p] [p] She saw him again in the breakfast room, loading a plate with hard-boiled eggs, potato pancakes, the ubiquitous caviar, salami, and cheeses. In his other hand he balanced a vat of porridge with strawberry jam and enough dried fruit to keep a parrot zoo happy for a month. [/p] [p] “How do you keep your girlish figure if you eat like that?” she said, settling down at his table. [/p] [p] “Ah, that’s a professional matter,” he said. “And I make it a point never to discuss bizniz before I’ve had two cups of coffee.” He poured himself a cup of decaf. “This is number two.” [/p] [p] She picked her way through her cornflakes and fruit salad. “I always feel like I don’t get my money’s worth out of buffet breakfasts,” she said. [/p] [p] “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll make up for you.” He pounded his coffee and poured another cup. “Humanity returns,” he said, rubbing his thighs. “Marthter, the creature waketh!” he said in high Igor. [/p] [p] She laughed. [/p] [p] “You are really into, uh, substances, aren’t you?” she said. [/p] [p] “I am a firm believer in better living through chemistry,” he said. He pounded another coffee. “Ahhh. Coffee and modafinil are an amazing combo.” [/p] [p] She’d taken hers that morning when the alarm got her up. She’d been so tired that it actually made her feel nauseated to climb out of bed, but the modafinil was getting her going. She knew a little about the drug, and figured that if the TSA approved it for use by commercial pilots, it couldn’t be that bad for you. [/p] [p] “So, my girlish figure. I work for a firm that has partners here in Petersburg who work on cutting-edge pharma products, including some stuff the FDA is dragging its heels on, despite widespread acceptance in many nations, this one included. One of these is a pill that overclocks your metabolism. I’ve been on it for a year now, and even though I am a stone calorie freak and pack away five or six thousand calories a day, I don’t gain an ounce. I actually have to remember to eat enough so that my ribs don’t start showing.” [/p] [p] Suzanne watched him gobble another thousand calories. “Is it healthy?” [/p] [p] “Compared to what? Being fat? Yes. Running ten miles a day and eating a balanced diet of organic fruit and nuts? No. But when the average American gets the majority of her calories from soda-pop, ’healthy’ is a pretty loaded term.” [/p] [p] It reminded her of that talk with Lester, a lifetime ago in the IHOP. Slowly, she found herself telling him about Lester’s story. [/p] [p] “Wait a second, you’re Suzanne Church? New Work Church? San Jose Mercury News Church?” [/p] [p] She blushed. “You can’t possibly have heard of me,” she said. [/p] [p] He rolled his eyes. “Sure. I shoulder-surfed your name off the check-in form and did a background check on you last night just so I could chat you up over breakfast.” [/p] [p] It was a joke, but it gave her a funny, creeped-out feeling. “You’re kidding?” [/p] [p] “I’m kidding. I’ve been reading you for freaking years. I followed Lester’s story in detail. Professional interest. You’re the voice of our generation, woman. I’d be a philistine if I didn’t read your column.” [/p] [p] “You’re not making me any less embarrassed, you know.” It took an effort of will to keep from squirming. [/p] [p] He laughed hard enough to attract stares. “All right, I did spend the night googling you. Better?” [/p] [p] “If that’s the alternative, I’ll take famous, I suppose,” she said. [/p] [p] “You’re here writing about the weight loss clinics, then?” [/p] [p] “Yes,” she said. It wasn’t a secret, but she hadn’t actually gone out of her way to mention it. After all, there might not be any kind of story after all. And somewhere in the back of her mind was the idea that she didn’t want to tip off some well-funded newsroom to send out its own investigative team and get her scoop. [/p] [p] “That is fantastic,” he said. “That’s just, wow, that’s the best news I’ve had all year. You taking an interest in our stuff, it’s going to really push it over the edge. You’d think that selling weight-loss to Americans would be easy, but not if it involves any kind of travel: 80 percent of those lazy insular fucks don’t even have passports. Ha. Don’t quote that. Ha.” [/p] [p] “Ha,” she said. “Don’t worry, I won’t. Look, how about this, we’ll meet in the lobby around nine, after dinner, for a cup of coffee and an interview?” She had gone from intrigued to flattered to creeped-out with this guy, and besides, she had her first clinic visit scheduled for ten and it was coming up on nine and who knew what a Russian rush-hour looked like? [/p] [p] “Oh. OK. But you’ve got to let me schedule you for a visit to some of our clinics and plants—just to see what a professional shop we run here. No gold-teeth-shiny-suit places like you’d get if you just picked the top Google AdWord. Really American-standard places, better even, Scandinavian-standard, a lot of our doctors come over from Sweden and Denmark to get out from under the socialist medicine systems there. They run a tight ship, ya shore, you betcha,” he delivered this last in a broad Swedish bork-bork-bork. [/p] ]

[p] “Um,” she said. “It all depends on scheduling. Let’s sort it out tonight, OK?” [/p] [p] “OK,” he said. “Can’t wait.” He stood up with her and gave her a long, two-handed handshake. “It’s a real honor to meet you, Suzanne. You’re one of my real heros, you know that?” [/p] [p] “Um,” she said again. “Thanks, Geoff.” [/p] [p] He seemed to sense that he’d come on too strong. He looked like he was about to apologize. [/p] [p] “That’s really kind of you to say,” she said. “It’ll be good to catch up tonight.” [/p] [p] He brightened. It was easy enough to be kind, after all. [/p] [p] She had the front desk call her a taxi—she’d been repeatedly warned off of gypsy cabs and any vehicle that one procured by means of a wandering tout. She got into the back, had the doorman repeat the directions to Lester’s clinic twice to the cabbie, watched him switch on the meter and checked the tariff, then settled in to watch St Petersburg go flying by. [/p] [p] She switched on her phone and watched it struggle to associate with a Russian network. They were on the road for all of five minutes—long enough to note the looming bulk of the Hermitage and the ripples left by official cars slicing through the traffic with their blue blinking lights—when her phone went nutso. She looked at it—she had ten texts, half a dozen voicemails, a dozen new clipped articles, and it was ringing with a number in New York. [/p] [p] She bumped the New York call to voicemail. She didn’t recognize the number. Besides, if the world had come to an end while she was asleep, she wanted to know some details before she talked to anyone about it. She paged back through the texts in reverse chronological—the last five were increasingly panicked messages from Lester and Perry. Then one from Tjan. Then one from Kettlebelly. They all wanted to discuss “the news” whatever that was. One from her old editor at the Merc asking if she was available for comment about “the news.” Tjan, too. The first one was from Rat-Toothed Freddy, that snake. [/p] [p] “Kodacell’s creditors calling in debts. Share price below one cent. Imminent NASDAQ de-listing. Comments?” [/p] [p] Her stomach went cold, her breakfast congealed into a hard lump. The clipped articles had quotes from Kettlewell (“We will see to it that all our employees are paid, our creditors are reimbursed, and our shareholders are well-done-by through an orderly wind-down”), Perry (“Fuck it—I was doing this shit before Kodacell, don’t expect to stop now”) and Lester (“It was too beautiful and cool to be real, I guess.”) Where she was mentioned, it was usually in a snide context that made her out to be a disgraced pitchwoman for a failed movement. [/p] [p] Which she was. Basically. [/p] [p] Her phone rang. Kettlewell. [/p] [p] “Hi, Kettlewell,” she said. [/p] [p] “Where have you been?” he said. He sounded really edgy. It was the middle of the night in California. [/p] [p] “I’m in St Petersburg,” she said. “In Russia. I only found out about ten seconds ago. What happened?” [/p] [p] “Oh Christ. Who knows? Cascading failure. Fell short of last quarter’s estimates, which started a slide. Then a couple lawsuits filed. Then some unfavorable press. The share price kept falling, and things got worse. Your basic clusterfuck.” [/p] [p] “But you guys had great numbers overall—” [/p] [p] “Sure, if you looked at them our way, they were great. If you looked at them the way the Street looks at them, we were in deep shit. Analysts couldn’t figure out how to value us. Add a little market chaos and some old score-settling assholes, like that fucker Freddy, and it’s a wonder we lasted as long as we did. They’re already calling us the twenty first century Enron.” [/p] [p] “Kettlewell,” she said, “I lived through a couple of these, and something’s not right. When the dotcoms were going under, their CEOs kept telling everyone everything was all right, right up to the last minute. They didn’t throw in the towel. They stood like captains on the bridge of sinking ships.” [/p] [p] “So?” [/p] [p] “So what’s going on here. It sounds like you’re whipped. Why aren’t you fighting? There were lots of dotcoms that tanked, but a few of those deep-in-denial CEOs pulled it off, restructured and came out of it alive. Why are you giving up?” [/p] [p] “Suzanne, oh, Suzanne.” He laughed, but it wasn’t a happy laugh. “You think that this happened overnight? You think that this problem just cropped up yesterday and I tossed in the towel?” [/p] [p] Oh. “Oh.” [/p] [p] “Yeah. We’ve been tanking for months. I’ve been standing on the bridge of this sinking ship with my biggest smile pasted on for two consecutive quarters now. I’ve thrown out the most impressive reality distortion field the business world has ever seen. Just because I’m giving up doesn’t mean I gave up without a fight.” [/p] [p] Suzanne had never been good at condolences. She hated funerals. “Landon, I’m sorry. It must have been very hard—” [/p] [p] “Yeah,” he said. “Well, sure. I wanted you to have the scoop on this, but I had to talk to the press once the story broke, you understand.” [/p] [p] “I understand,” she said. “Scoops aren’t that important anyway. I’ll tell you what. I’ll post a short piece on this right away, just saying, ’Yes, it’s true, and I’m getting details. Then I’ll do interviews with you and Lester and Perry and put up something longer in a couple of hours. Does that work?” [/p] [p] He laughed again, no humor in it. “Yeah, that’ll be fine.” [/p] [p] “Sorry, Kettlewell.” [/p] [p] “No, no,” he said. “No, it’s OK.” [/p] [p] “Look, I just want to write about this in a way that honors what you’ve done over the past two years. I’ve never been present at the birth of anything remotely this important. It deserves to be described well.” [/p] [p] It sounded like he might be crying. There was a snuffling sound. “You’ve been amazing, Suzanne. We couldn’t have done it without you. No one could have described it better. Great deeds are irrelevant if no one knows about them or remembers them.” [/p] [p] Her phone was beeping. She snuck a peek. It was her old editor. “Listen,” she said. “I have to go. There’s a call coming in I have to take. I can call you right back.” [/p] [p] “Don’t,” he said. “It’s OK. I’m busy here anyway. This is a big day.” His laugh was like a dog’s bark. [/p] [p] “Take care of yourself, Kettlewell,” she said. “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.” [/p] [p] “Nil carborundum illegitimis to you, too.” [/p] [p] She clicked over to her editor. “Jimmy,” she said. “Long time no speak. Sorry I missed your calls before—I’m in Russia on a story.” [/p] [p] “Hello, Suzanne,” he said. His voice had an odd, strained quality, or maybe that was just her mood, projecting. “I’m sorry, Suzanne. You’ve been doing good work. The best work of your career, if you ask me. I follow it closely.” [/p] [p] It made her feel a little better. She’d been uncomfortable about the way she and Jimmy had parted ways, but this was vindicating. It emboldened her. “Jimmy, what the hell do I do now?” [/p] [p] “Christ, Suzanne, I don’t know. I’ll tell you what not to do, though. Off the record.” [/p] [p] “Off the record.” [/p] [p] “Don’t do what I’ve done. Don’t hang grimly onto the last planks from the sinking ship, chronicling the last few struggling, sinking schmucks’ demise. It’s no fun being the stenographer for the fall of a great empire. Find something else to cover.” [/p] [p] The words made her heart sink. Poor Jimmy, stuck there in the Merc’s once-great newsroom, while the world crumbled around him. It must have been heartbreaking. [/p] [p] “Thanks,” she said. “You want an interview?” [/p] [p] “What? No, woman. I’m not a ghoul. I wanted to call and make sure you were all right.” [/p] [p] “Jimmy, you’re a prince. But I’ll be OK. I land on my feet. You’ve got someone covering this story, so give her my number and have her call me and I’ll give her a quote.” [/p] [p] “Really, Suzanne—” [/p] [p] “It’s fine, Jimmy.” [/p] [p] “Suzanne,” he said. “We don’t cover that kind of thing from our newsroom anymore. Just local stuff. National coverage comes from the wires or from the McClatchy national newsroom.” [/p] [p] She sucked in air. Could it be possible? Her first thought when Jimmy called was that she’d made a terrible mistake by leaving the Merc, but if this was what the paper had come to, she had left just in time, even if her own life-raft was sinking, it had kept her afloat for a while. [/p] [p] “The offer still stands, Jimmy. I’ll talk to anyone you want to assign.” [/p] [p] “You’re a sweetheart, Suzanne. What are you in Russia for?” [/p] [p] She told him. Screw scoops, anyway. Not like Jimmy was going to send anyone to Russia, he couldn’t even afford to dispatch a reporter to Marin County by the sounds of things. [/p] [p] “What a story!” he said. “Man!” [/p] [p] “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah I guess it is.” [/p] [p] “You guess? Suzanne, this is the single most important issue in practically every American’s life—there isn’t one in a thousand who doesn’t worry endlessly about his weight.” [/p] [p] “Well, I have been getting really good numbers on this.” She named the figure. He sucked air between his teeth. “That’s what the whole freaking chain does on a top story, Suzanne. You’re outperforming fifty local papers combined.” [/p] [p] “Yeah?” [/p] [p] “Hell yeah,” he said. “Maybe I should ask you for a job.” [/p] [p] When he got off the phone, she spoke to Perry, and then to Lester. Lester said that he wanted to go traveling and see his old friends in Russia and that if she was still around in a couple weeks, maybe he’d see her there. Perry was morose and grimly determined. He was on the verge of shipping his three-d printers and he was sure he could do it, even if he didn’t have the Kodacell network for marketing and logistics. He didn’t even seem to register it when she told him that she was going to be spending some time in Russia. [/p] [p] Then she had to go into the clinic and ask intelligent questions and take pictures and record audio and jot notes and pay attention to the small details so that she would be able to write the best account possible. [/p] [p] They dressed well in Russia, in the clinics. Business casual, but well tailored and made from good material. The Europeans knew from textiles, and expert tailoring seemed to be in cheap supply here. [/p] [p] She’d have to get someone to run her up a blue blazer and a white shirt and a decent skirt. It would be nice to get back into grown-up clothes after a couple years’ worth of Florida casual. [/p] [p] She’d see Geoff after dinner that night, get more detail for the story. There was something big here in the medical tourism angle—not just weight loss but gene therapy, too, and voodoo stem-cell stuff and advanced prostheses and even some crazy performance enhancement stuff that had kept Russia out of the past Olympics. [/p] [p] She typed her story notes and answered the phone calls. One special call she returned once she was sitting in her room, relaxed, with a cup of coffee from the in-room coffee-maker. [/p] [p] “Hello, Freddy,” she said. [/p] [p] “Suzanne, darling!” He sounded like he was breathing hard. [/p] [p] “What can I do for you?” [/p] [p] “Just wanted a quote, love, something for color.” [/p] [p] “Oh, I’ve got a quote for you.” She’d given the quote a lot of thought. Living with the squatters had broadened her vocabulary magnificently. [/p] [p] “And those are your good points,” she said, taking a sip of coffee. “Goodbye, Freddy.” [/p] [p] [/p][hr /] [p][/p] ]

[p] Behind the curtain, it was dim and spotlit, almost identical to Florida, and half a dozen vehicles waited. Sammy slid into one and let the spiel wash over him. [/p] [p] THERE WAS A TIME WHEN AMERICA HELD OUT THE PROMISE OF A NEW WAY OF LIVING AND WORKING. THE NEW WORK BOOM OF THE TEENS WAS A PERIOD OF UNPARALLELED INVENTION, A CAMBRIAN EXPLOSION OF CREATIVITY NOT SEEN SINCE THE TIME OF EDISON—AND UNLIKE EDISON, THE PEOPLE WHO INVENTED THE NEW WORK REVOLUTION WEREN’T RIP-OFF ARTISTS AND FRAUDS. [/p] [p] The layout was slightly different due to the support pillars, but as similar to the Florida version as geography allowed. Robots humped underfoot moving objects, keeping them in sync with the changes in Florida. He’d read on the message boards that Florida would stay open late so that the riders could collaborate with the attendees at the Boston premiere, tweeting back and forth to one another. [/p] [p] The other chairs in the ride crawled around each exhibit, reversing and turning slowly. Riders brought their chairs up alongside one another and conferred in low voices, over the narration from the scenery. He thought he saw a couple making out—a common enough occurrence in dark rides that he’d even exploited a few times when planning out rides that would be likely to attract amorous teenagers. They had a key demographic: too young to leave home, old enough to pay practically anything for a private spot to score some nookie. [/p] [p] The air smelled of three-d printer, the cheap smell of truck-stops where vending machines outputted cheap kids’ toys. Here it wasn’t cheap, though: here it smelled futuristic, like the first time someone had handed him a printed prop for one of his rides—it had been a head for an updated Small World ride. Then it had smelled like something foreign and new and exciting and frightening, like the first days of a different world. [/p] [p] Smelling that again, remembering the crowds outside waiting to get in, Sammy started to get a sick feeling, the kebab rebounding on him. Moving as if in a dream, he reached down into his lap and drew out a small utility knife. There would be infrared cameras, but he knew from experience that they couldn’t see through ride vehicles. [/p] [p] Slowly, he fingered the access panel’s underside until he found a loose corner. He snicked out the knife’s little blade—he’d brought an entire suitcase just so he could have a checked bag to store this in—and tugged at the cables inside. He sawed at them with small movements, feeling the copper wires inside the insulation give way one strand at a time. The chair moved jerkily, then not at all. He snipped a few more wires just to be sure, then tucked them all away. [/p] [p] “Hey!” he called. “My chair’s dead!” He had fetched up in a central pathway where the chairs tried to run cloverleafs around four displays. A couple chairs swerved around him. He thumped the panel dramatically, then stepped out and shook his head. He contrived to step on three robots on the way to another chair. [/p] [p] “Is yours working?” he asked the kid riding in it, all of ten years old and of indefinite gender. [/p] [p] “Yeah,” the kid said. It scooted over. “There’s room for both of us, get in.” [/p] [p] Christ, don’t they have stranger-danger in the north? He climbed in beside the kid and contrived to slide one sly hand under the panel. Teasing out the wires the second time was easier, even one-handed. He sliced through five large bundles this time before the chair ground to a halt, its gyros whining and rocking it from side-to-side. [/p] [p] The kid looked at him and frowned. “These things are shit,” it said with real vehemence, climbing down and kicking one of its tires, and then kicking a couple of the floor-level robots for good measure. They’d landed another great breakdown spot: directly in front of a ranked display of raygun-shaped appliances and objects. He remembered seeing that one in its nascent stage, back in Florida—just a couple of toy guns, which were presently joined by three more, then there were ten, then fifty, then a high wall of them, striking and charming. The chair’s breakdown position neatly blocked the way. [/p] [p] “Guess we’d better walk out,” he said. He stepped on a couple more robots, making oops noises. The kid enthusiastically kicked robots out of its way. Chairs swerved around them as other riders tried to navigate. They were approaching the exit when Sammy spotted a charge-plate for the robots. They were standard issue for robotic vacuum cleaners and other semi-autonomous appliances, and he’d had one in his old apartment. They were supposed to be safe as anything, but a friend’s toddler had crawled over to his and shoved a stack of dimes into its recessed jack and one of them had shorted it out in a smoking, fizzing fireworks display. [/p] [p] “You go on ahead, I’m going to tie my shoes.” [/p] [p] Sammy bent down beside the charge plate, his back to the kid and the imagined cameras that were capturing his every move, and slipped the stack of coins he’d taken from his pocket into the little slot where the robots inserted their charging stamen. [/p] [p] The ensuing shower of sparks was more dramatic than he’d remembered—maybe it was the darkened room. The kid shrieked and ran for the EXIT sign, and he took off too, at a good clip. They’d get the ride up and running soon enough, but maybe not tonight, not if they couldn’t get the two chairs he’d toasted out of the room. [/p] [p] There was the beginnings of chaos at the exit. There was that Tjan character, giving him an intense look. He tried to head for the down escalator, but Tjan cut him off. [/p] [p] “What’s going on in there?” [/p] [p] “Damnedest thing,” he said, trying to keep his face composed. “My chair died. Then another one—a little kid was riding in it. Then there was a lot of electrical sparks, and I walked out. Crazy.” [/p] [p] Tjan cocked his head. “I hope you’re not hurt. We could have a doctor look at you; there are a couple around tonight.” [/p] [p] It had never occurred to Sammy that professional types might turn out for a ride like this, but of course it was obvious. There were probably off-duty cops, local politicians, lawyers, and the like. [/p] [p] “I’m fine,” he said. “Don’t worry about me. Maybe you should send someone in for the people still in there, though?” [/p] [p] “That’s being taken care of. I’m just sorry you came all the way from Florida for this kind of disappointment. That’s just brutal.” Tjan’s measuring stare was even more intense. [/p] [p] “Uh, it’s OK. I had meetings here this week. This was just a cool bonus.” [/p] [p] “Who do you work for, Mickey?” [/p] [p] Shit. [/p] [p] “Insurance company,” he said. [/p] [p] “That’d be Norwich Union, then, right? They’ve got a headquarters here.” [/p] [p] Sammy knew how this went. Norwich Union didn’t have headquarters here. Or they did. He’d have to outguess Tjan with his answer. [/p] [p] “Are you going to stay open tonight?” [/p] [p] Tjan nodded, though it wasn’t clear whether he was nodding because he was answering in the affirmative or because his suspicions had been confirmed. [/p] [p] “Well then, I should be going.” [/p] [p] Tjan put out a hand. “Oh, please stay. I’m sure we’ll be running soon; you should get a whole ride through.” [/p] [p] “No, really, I have to go.” He shook off the hand and pelted down the escalator and out into the freezing night. His blood sang in his ears. They probably wouldn’t get the ride running that night at all. They probably would send that whole carnival crowd home, disappointed. He’d won some kind of little victory over something. [/p] [p] He’d felt more confident of his victory when he was concerned with the guy with the funny eyebrow—with Perry. He’d seemed little more than a bum, a vag. But this Tjan reminded him of the climbers he’d met through his career at Walt Disney World: keenly observant and fast formulators of strategies. Someone who could add two and two before you’d know that there was such a thing as four. [/p] [p] Sammy walked back to his hotel as quickly as he could, given the icy sidewalks underfoot, and by the time he got to the lobby of the old office tower his face hurt—forehead, cheeks and nose. He’d booked his return flight for a day later, thinking he’d do more reccies of the new site before writing his report and heading home, but there was no way he was facing down that Tjan guy again. [/p] [p] What had prompted him to sabotage the ride? It was something primal, something he hadn’t been in any real control of. He’d been in some kind of fugue-state. But he’d packed the little knife in his suitcase and he’d slipped it into his pocket before leaving the room. So how instinctive could it possibly have been? [/p] [p] He had a vision of the carnival atmosphere in the market stalls outside and knew that even after the ride had broken down, the crowd had lingered, laughing and browsing and enjoying a night’s respite from the world and the cold city. The Whos down in Who-ville had gone on singing even after he’d Grinched their ride. [/p] [p] That was it. The ride didn’t just make use of user-created content—it was user-created content. He could never convince his bosses in Orlando to let him build anything remotely like this, and given enough time, it would surely overtake them. That Tjan—someone like him wouldn’t be involved if there wasn’t some serious money opportunity on the line. [/p] [p] He’d seen the future that night and he had no place in it. [/p] [p] [/p][hr /] [p][/p] [p] It only took a week on the Boston ride before they had their third and fourth nodes. The third was outside of San Francisco, in a gigantic ghost-mall that was already being used as a flea-market. They had two former anchor-stores, one of which was being squatted by artists who needed studio space. The other one made a perfect location for a new ride, and the geeks who planned on building it had cut their teeth building elaborate Burning Man confectioneries together, so Perry gave them his blessing. [/p] [p] The fourth was to open in Raleigh, in the Research Triangle, where the strip malls ran one into the next. The soft-spoken, bitingly ironic southerners who proposed it were the daughters of old IBM blue-tie stalwarts who’d been running a women’s tech collective since they realized they couldn’t afford college and dropped out together. They wanted to see how much admission they could charge if they let it be known that they would plow their profits into scholarship funds for local women. [/p] [p] Perry couldn’t believe that these people wanted to open their own rides, nor that they thought they needed his permission to do so. He was reminded of the glory days of New Work, when every day there were fifty New Work sites with a hundred new gizmos, popping up on the mailing lists, looking for distributors, recruiting, competing, swarming, arguing, forming and reforming. Watching Tjan cut the deals whereby these people were granted permission to open their own editions of the ride felt like that, and weirder still. [/p] [p] “Why do they need our permission? The API’s wide open. They can just implement. Are they sheep or something?” [/p] [p] Tjan gave him an old-fashioned look. “They’re being polite, Perry—they’re giving you face for being the progenitor of the ride.” [/p] [p] “I don’t like it,” Perry said. “I didn’t get anyone’s permission to include their junk in the ride. When we get a printer to clone something that someone brings here, we don’t get their permission. Why the hell is seeking permission considered so polite? Shit, why not send me a letter asking me if I mind receiving an email? Where does it end?” [/p] [p] “They’re trying to be nice to you Perry, that’s all.” [/p] [p] “Well I don’t like it,” Perry said. “How about this: from now on when someone asks for permission we tell them no, we don’t give out or withhold permission for joining the network, but we hope that they’ll join it anyway. Maybe put up a FAQ on the site.” [/p] [p] “You’ll just confuse people.” [/p] [p] “I won’t be confusing them, man! I’ll be educating them!” [/p] [p] “How about if you add a Creative Commons license to it? Some of them are very liberal.” [/p] [p] “I don’t want to license this. You have to own something to license it. A license is a way of saying, ‘Without this license, you’re forbidden to do this.’ You don’t need a license to click a link and load a webpage—no one has to give you permission to do this and no one could take it away from you. Licensing just gives people even worse ideas about ownership and permission and property!” [/p] [p] “It’s your show,” Tjan said. [/p] [p] “No it isn’t! That’s the point!” [/p] [p] “OK, OK, it’s not your show. But we’ll do it your way. You are a lovable, cranky weirdo, you know it?” [/p] [p] They did it Perry’s way. He was scheduled to go back to Florida a few days later, but he changed his ticket to go out to San Francisco and meet with the crew who were implementing the ride there. One of them taught interaction design at SFSU and brought him in to talk to the students. He wasn’t sure what he was going to talk to them about, but when he got there, he found himself telling the story of how he and Lester and Tjan and Suzanne and Kettlebelly had built and lost the New Work movement, without even trying. It was a fun story to tell from start to finish, and they talked through the lunch break and then a group of students took him to a bar in the Mission with a big outdoor patio where he went on telling war stories until the sun had set and he’d drunk so much beer he couldn’t tell stories any longer. [/p] [p] They were all ten or fifteen years younger than him, and the girls were pretty and androgynous and the boys were also pretty and androgynous, not that he really swung that way. Still, it was fine being surrounded by the catcalling, joking, bullshitting crowd of young, pretty, flirty people. They hugged him a lot, and two of the prettier girls (who, he later realized, were a lot more interested in each other than him) took him back to a capsule hotel built across three parking-spots and poured him into bed and tucked him in. [/p] [p] He had a burrito the size of a football for breakfast, stuffed with shredded pig-parts and two kinds of sloppy beans. He washed it down with a quart of a cinnamon/rice drink called horchata that was served ice-cold and did wonders for his hangover. [/p] [p] A couple hours’ noodling on his laptop and a couple bags of Tecate later and he was feeling almost human. Early mariachis strolled the street with electric guitars that controlled little tribes of dancing, singing knee-high animatronics, belting out old Jose Alfredo Jimenez tunes. [/p] [p] It was shaping up to be a good day. His laptop rang and he screwed in his headset and started talking to Tjan. [/p] [p] “Man, this place is excellent,” he said. “I had the best night I’ve had in years last night.” [/p] [p] “Well then you’ll love this: there’s a crew in Madison that want to do the same thing and could use a little guidance. They spoke to me this morning and said they’d be happy to spring for the airfare. Can you make a six o’clock flight at SFO?” [/p] [p] They gave him cheese in Madison and introduced him to the biohackers who were the spiritual progeny of the quirky moment when Madison was one of six places where stem cells could be legally researched. The biohackers gave him the willies. One had gills. One glowed in the dark. One was orange and claimed to photosynthesize. [/p] [p] He got his hosts to bring him to the ratskeller where they sat down to comedy-sized beers and huge, suspicious steaming wursts. [/p] [p] “Where’s your site?” [/p] [p] “We were thinking of building one—there’s a lot of farmland around here.” Either the speaker was sixteen years old or Perry was getting to be such a drunken old fart that everyone seemed sixteen. He wasn’t old enough to shave, anyway. Perry tried to remember his name and couldn’t. Jet-lag or sleepdep or whatever. [/p] [p] “That’s pretty weird. Everywhere else, they’re just moving into spaces that have been left vacant.” [/p] [p] “We haven’t got many of those. All the offices and stuff are being occupied by heavily funded startups.” [/p] [p] “Heavily funded startups? In this day and age?” [/p] [p] “Superbabies,” the kid said with a shrug. “It’s all anyone here thinks about anymore. That and cancer cures. I think superbabies are crazy—imagine being a twenty-year-old superbaby, with two-decade-old technology in your genes. In your germline! Breeding other obsolete superbabies. Crazy. But the Chinese are investing heavily.” [/p] [p] “So no dead malls? Christ, that’s like running out of sand or hydrogen or something. Are we still in America?” [/p] [p] The kid laughed. “The campus is building more student housing because none of us can afford the rents around here anymore. But there’s lots of farmland, like I said. Won’t be a problem to throw up a prefab and put the ride inside it. It’ll be like putting up a haunted cornfield at Halloween. Used to do that every year to raise money for the ACLU, back in Nebraska.” [/p] [p] “Wow.” He wanted to say, They have the ACLU in Nebraska? but he knew that wasn’t fair. The midwesterners he’d met had generally been kick-ass geeks and hackers, so he had no call to turn his nose up at this kid. “So why do you want to do this?” [/p] [p] The kid grinned. “Because there’s got to be a way to do something cool without moving to New York. I like it around here. Don’t want to live in some run-down defaulted shit-built condo where the mice are hunchbacked. Like the wide-open spaces. But I don’t want to be a farmer or an academic or run a student bar. All that stuff is a dead-end, I can see it from here. I mean, who drinks beer anymore? There’s much sweeter highs out there in the real world.” [/p] [p] Perry looked at his beer. It was in a themed stein with Germano-Gothic gingerbread worked into the finish. It felt like it had been printed from some kind of ceramic/epoxy hybrid. You could get them at traveling carny midways, too. [/p] [p] “I like beer,” he said. [/p] [p] “But you’re—” The kid broke off. [/p] [p] “Old,” Perry said. “’Sok. You’re what, 16?” [/p] [p] “21,” the kid said. “I’m a late bloomer. Devoting resources to more important things than puberty.” [/p] [p] Two more kids slid into their booth, a boy and a girl who actually did look 21. “Hey Luke,” the girl said, kissing him on the cheek. [/p] [p] Luke, that was his name. Perry came up with a mnemonic so he wouldn’t forget it again—Nebraska baby-faced farm boy, that was like Luke Skywalker. He pictured the kid swinging a lightsaber and knew he’d keep the name for good now. [/p] [p] “This is Perry Gibbons,” Luke said. “Perry, this is Hilda and Ernie. Guys, Perry’s the guy who built the ride I was telling you about.” [/p] [p] Ernie shook his hand. “Man, that’s the coolest shit I’ve ever seen, wow. What the hell are you doing here? I love that stuff. Wow.” [/p] [p] Hilda flicked his ear. “Stop drooling, fanboy,” she said. [/p] [p] Ernie rubbed his ear. Perry nodded uncertainly. [/p] [p] “Sorry. It’s just—well, I’m a big fan is all.” [/p] [p] “That’s really nice of you,” Perry said. He’d met a couple people in Boston and San Francisco who called themselves his fans, and he hadn’t known what to say to them, either. Back in the New Work days he’d meet reporters who called themselves fans, but that was just blowing smoke. Now he was meeting people who seemed to really mean it. Not many, thank God. [/p] [p] “He’s just like a puppy,” Hilda said, pinching Ernie’s cheek. “All enthusiasm.” [/p] [p] Ernie rubbed his cheek. Luke reached out abruptly and tousled both of their hair. “These two are going to help me build the ride,” he said. “Hilda’s an amazing fundraiser. Last year she ran the fundraising for a whole walk-in clinic.” [/p] [p] “Women’s health clinic or something?” Perry asked. He was starting to sober up a little. Hilda was one of those incredible, pneumatic midwestern girls that he’d seen at five minute intervals since getting off his flight in Madison. He didn’t think he’d ever met one like her. [/p] [p] “No,” Hilda said. “Metabolic health. Lots of people get the fatkins treatment at puberty, either because their fatkins parents talk them into it or because they hate their baby fat.” [/p] [p] Perry shook his head. “Come again?” [/p] [p] “You think eating ten thousand calories a day is easy? It’s hell on your digestive system. Not to mention you spend a fortune on food. A lot of people get to college and just switch to high-calorie powdered supplements because they can’t afford enough real food to stay healthy, so you’ve got all these kids sucking down vanilla slurry all day just to keep from starving. We provide counseling and mitigation therapies to kids who want it.” [/p] [p] “And when they get out of college—do they get the treatment again?” [/p] [p] “You can’t. The mitigation’s permanent. People who take it have to go through the rest of their lives taking supplements and eating sensibly and exercising.” [/p] [p] “Do they get fat?” [/p] [p] She looked away, then down, then back up at him. “Yes, most of them do. How could they not? Everything around them is geared at people who need to eat five times as much as they do. Even the salads all have protein powder mixed in with them. But it is possible to eat right. You’ve never had the treatment, have you?” [/p] [p] Perry shook his head. “Trick metabolism though. I can eat like a hog and not put on an ounce.” [/p] [p] Hilda reached out and squeezed his bicep. “Really—and I suppose that all that lean muscle there is part of your trick metabolism, too?” [/p] [p] She left her hand where it was. [/p] [p] “OK, I do a fair bit of physical labor too. But I’m just saying—if they get fat again after they reverse the treatment—” [/p] [p] “There are worse things than being fat.” [/p] [p] Her hand still hadn’t moved. He looked at Ernie, whom he’d assumed was her boyfriend, to see how he was taking it. Ernie was looking somewhere else, though, across the ratshkeller, at the huge TV that was showing competitive multiplayer gaming, apparently some kind of championships. It was as confusing as a hundred air-hockey games being played on the same board, with thousands of zipping, jumping, firing entities and jump-cuts so fast that Perry couldn’t imagine how you’d make sense of it. [/p] [p] The girl’s hand was still on his arm, and it was warm. His mouth was dry but more beer would be a bad idea. “How about some water?” he said, in a bit of a croak. [/p] [p] Luke jumped up to get some, and a silence fell over the table. “So this clinic, how’d you fundraise for it?” [/p] [p] “Papercraft,” she said. “I have a lot of friends who are into paper-folding and we modded a bunch of patterns. We did really big pieces, too—bed-frames, sofas, kitchen-tables, chairs—” [/p] [p] “Like actual furniture?” [/p] [p] “Like actual furniture,” she said with a solemn nod. “We used huge sheets of paper and treated them with stiffening, waterproofing and fireproofing agents. We did a frat house’s outdoor bar and sauna, with a wind-dynamo—I even made a steam engine.” [/p] [p] “You made a steam engine out of paper?” He was agog. [/p] [p] “You mean to say that you’re surprised by building stuff out of unusual materials?” [/p] [p] Perry laughed. “Point taken.” [/p] [p] “We just got a couple hundred students to do some folding in their spare time and then sold it on. Everyone on campus needs bookshelves, so we started with those—using accordion-folded arched supports under each shelf. We could paint or print designs on them, too, but a lot of people liked them all-white. Then we did chairs, desks, kitchenette sets, placemats—you name it. I called the designs ‘Multiple Origami.’” [/p] [p] Perry sprayed beer out his nose. “That’s awesome!” he said, wiping up the mess with a kleenex that she extracted from a folded paper purse. Looking closely, he realized that the white baseball cap she was wearing was also folded out of paper. [/p] [p] She laughed and rummaged some more in her handbag, coming up with a piece of stiff card. Working quickly and nimbly, she gave it a few deft folds along pre-scored lines, and a moment later she was holding a baseball hat that was the twin of the one she was wearing. She leaned over the table and popped it on his head. [/p] [p] Luke came back with the water and set it down between them, pouring out glasses for everyone. [/p] [p] “Smooth lid,” he said, touching the bill of Perry’s cap. [/p] [p] “Thanks,” Perry said, draining his water and pouring another glass. “Well, you people certainly have some pretty cool stuff going on here.” [/p] [p] “This is a great town,” Luke said expansively, as though he had travelled extensively and settled on Madison, Wisconsin as a truly international hotspot. “We’re going to build a kick-ass ride.” [/p] [p] “You going to make it all out of paper?” [/p] [p] “Some of it, anyway,” Luke said. “Hilda wouldn’t have it any other way, right?” [/p] [p] “This one’s your show, Luke,” she said. “I’m just a fundraiser.” [/p] [p] “Anyone hungry?” Hilda said. “I want to go eat something that doesn’t have unidentified organ-meat mixed in.” [/p] [p] “Go on without me,” Ernie said. “I got money on this game.” [/p] [p] “Homework,” Luke said. [/p] [p] Perry had just eaten, and had planned on spending this night in his room catching up on email. “Yeah, I’m starving,” he said. He felt like a high-school kid, but in a good way. [/p] [p] They went out for Ukrainian food, which Perry had never had before, but the crepes and the blood sausage were tasty enough. Mostly, though, he was paying attention to Hilda, who was running down her war stories from the Multiple Origami fundraiser. There were funny ones, sad ones, scary ones, triumphant ones. [/p] [p] Every one of her stories reminded him of one of his own. She was an organizer and so was he and they’d been through practically the same shit. They drank gallons of coffee afterward, getting chucked out when the restaurant closed and migrating to a cafe on the main drag where they had low tables and sofas, and they never stopped talking. [/p] [p] “You know,” Hilda said, stretching and yawning, “it’s coming up on four AM.” [/p] [p] “No way,” he said, but his watch confirmed it. “Christ.” He tried to think of a casual way of asking her to sleep with him. For all their talking, they’d hardly touched on romance—or maybe there’d been romance in every word. [/p] [p] “I’ll walk you to your hotel,” she said. [/p] [p] “Hey, that’s really nice of you,” he said. His voice sounded fakey and forced in his ears. All of a sudden, he wasn’t tired at all, instead his heart was hammering in his chest and his blood sang in his ears. [/p] [p] There was hardly any talk on the way back to the hotel, just the awareness of her steps and his in time with one another over the cold late-winter streets. No traffic at that hour, and hardly a sound from any of the windows they passed. The town was theirs. [/p] [p] At the door to his hotel—another stack of the ubiquitous capsules, these geared to visiting parents—they stopped. They were looking at one another like a couple of googly-eyed kids at the end of a date in a sitcom. [/p] [p] “Um, what’s your major?” he said. [/p] [p] “Pure math,” she said. [/p] [p] “I think I know what that is,” he said. It was freezing out on the street. “Theory, right?” [/p] [p] “Pure math as opposed to applied math,” she said. “Do you really care about this?” [/p] [p] “Um,” he said. “Well, yes. But not very much.” [/p] [p] “I’ll come into your hotel room, but we’re not having sex, OK?” [/p] [p] “OK,” he said. [/p] [p] There was room enough for the two of them in the capsule, but only just. These were prefabbed in bulk and they came in different sizes—in the Midwest they were large, the ones stacked up in San Francisco parking spots were small. Still, he and Hilda were almost in each other’s laps, and he could smell her, feel wisps of her hair tickling his ear. [/p] [p] “You’re really nice,” he said. Late at night, his ability to be flippant evaporated. He was left with simple truths, simply declared. “I like you a lot.” [/p] [p] “Well then you’ll have to come back to Madison and check in on the ride, won’t you?” [/p] [p] “Um,” he said. He had a planning meeting with Luke and the rest of his gang the next day, then he was supposed to be headed for Omaha, where Tjan had set up another crew for him to speak to. At this rate, he would get back to Florida some time in June. [/p] [p] “Perry, you’re not a career activist, are you?” [/p] [p] “Nope,” he said. “I hadn’t really imagined that there was such a thing.” [/p] [p] “My parents. Both of them. Here’s what being a career activist means: you are on the road most of the time. When you get on the road, you meet people, have intense experiences with them—like going to war or touring with a band. You fall in love a thousand times. And then you leave all those people behind. You get off a plane, turn some strangers into best friends, get on a plane and forget them until you come back into town, and then you take it all back up again. [/p] [p] “If you want to survive this, you’ve got to love that. You’ve got to get off a plane, meet people, fall in love with them, treasure every moment, and know that moments are all you have. Then you get on a plane again and you love them forever. Otherwise, every new meeting is sour because you know how soon it will end. It’s like starting to say your summer-camp goodbyes before you’ve even unpacked your duffel-bag. You’ve got to embrace—or at least forget—that every gig will end in a day or two.” [/p] [p] Perry took a moment to understand this, swallowed a couple times, then nodded. Lots of people had come in and out of his factory and his ride over the years. Lester came and went. Suzanne was gone. Tjan was gone but was back again. Kettlebelly was no longer in his life at all, a ghost of a memory with a great smile and good cologne. Already he was forgetting the faces in Boston, the faces in San Francisco. Hilda would be a memory in a month. [/p] [p] Hilda patted his hand. “I have friends in practically every city in America. My folks campaigned for stem cells up and down every red state in the country. I even met superman before he died. He knew my name. I spent ten years on the road with them, back and forth. The Bush years, a couple years afterward. You can live this way and you can be happy, but you’ve got to have right mind. [/p] [p] “What it means is you’ve got to be able to say things to people you meet, like, ‘You’re really nice,’ and mean it, really mean it. But you’ve also got to be cool with the fact that really nice people will fall out of your life every week, twice a week, and fall back into it or not. I think you’re very nice, too, but we’re not gonna be a couple, ever. Even if we slept together tonight, you’d be gone tomorrow night. What you need to ask yourself is whether you want to have friends in every city who are glad to see you when you get off the plane, or ex-girlfriends in every city who might show up with their new boyfriends, or not at all.” [/p] [p] “Are you telling me this to explain why we’re not going to sleep together? I just figured you were dating that guy, Ernie.” [/p] [p] “Ernie’s my brother,” she said. “And yeah, that’s kind of why I’m telling you this. I’ve never gone on what you might call a date. With my friends, it tends to be more like, you work together, you hang out together, you catch yourself looking into one another’s eyes a couple times, then you do a little circling around and then you end up in your bed or their bed having hard, energetic sex and then you sort out some details and then it lasts as long as it lasts. We’ve done a compressed version of that tonight, and we’re up to the sex, and so I thought we should lay some things on the table, you should forgive the expression.” [/p] [p] Perry thought back to his double-date with Lester. The girl had been pretty and intelligent and would have taken him home if he’d made the least effort. He hadn’t, though. This girl was inappropriate in so many ways: young, rooted to a city thousands of miles from home—why had he brought her back to the hotel? [/p] [p] A thought struck him. “Why do you think I’m going to be getting on and off planes for the rest of my life? I’ve got a home to get to.” [/p] [p] “You haven’t been reading the message boards, have you?” [/p] [p] “Which message boards?” [/p] [p] “For ride-builders. There are projects starting up everywhere. People like what they’ve heard and what they’ve seen, and they remember you from the old days and want to get in on the magic you’re going to bring. A lot of us know each other anyway, from other joint projects. Everyone’s passing the hat to raise your airfare and arguing about who’s sofa you’re going to stay on.” [/p] [p] He’d known that they were there. There were always message-boards. But they were just talk—he never bothered to read them. That was Lester’s job. He wanted to make stuff, not chatter. “Jesus, when the hell was someone going to tell me?” [/p] [p] “Your guy in Boston, we’ve been talking to him. He said not to bug you, that you were busy enough as it is.” [/p] [p] He did, did he? In the old days, Tjan had been in charge of planning and he’d been in charge of the ideas: in charge of what to plan. Had they come full circle without him noticing? If they had, was that so bad? [/p] [p] “Man, I was really looking forward to spending a couple nights in my own bed.” [/p] [p] “Is it much more comfortable than this one?” She thumped the narrow coffin-bed, which was surprisingly comfortable, adjustable, heated, and massaging. [/p] [p] He snorted. “OK, I sleep on a futon on the floor back home, but it’s the principle of the thing. I just miss home, I guess.” [/p] [p] “So go home for a couple days after this stop, or the next one. Charge up your batteries and do your laundry. But I have a feeling that home is going to be your suitcase pretty soon, Perry my dear.” Her voice was thick with sleep, her eyes heavy-lidded and bleary. [/p] [p] “You’re probably right.” He yawned as he spoke. “Hell, I know you’re right. You’re a real smarty.” [/p] [p] “And I’m too tired to go home,” she said, “so I’m a smarty who’s staying with you.” [/p] [p] He was suddenly wide awake, his heart thumping. “Um, OK,” he said, trying to sound casual. [/p] [p] He turned back the sheets, then, standing facing into the cramped corner, took off his jeans and shoes and socks, climbing in between the sheets in his underwear and tee. There were undressing noises—exquisite ones—and then she slithered in behind him, snuggled up against him. With a jolt, he realized that her bare breasts were pressed to his back. Her arm came around him and rested on his stomach, which jumped like a spring uncoiling. He felt certain his erection was emitting a faint cherry-red glow. Her breath was on his neck. [/p] [p] He thought about casually rolling onto his back so that he could kiss her, but remembered her admonition that they would not be having sex. Her fingertips traced small circles on his stomach. Each time they grazed his navel, his stomach did a flip. [/p] [p] He was totally awake now, and when her lips very softly—so softly he barely felt it—brushed against the base of his skull, he let out a soft moan. Her lips returned, and then her teeth, worrying at the tendons at the back of his neck with increasing roughness, an exquisite pain-pleasure that was electric. He was panting, her hand was flat on his stomach now, gripping him. His erection strained toward it. [/p] [p] Her hips ground against him and she moved her mouth toward his ear, nipping at it, the tip of her tongue touching the whorls there. Her hand was on the move now, sliding over his ribs, her fingertips at his nipple, softly and then harder, giving it an abrupt hard pinch that had some fingernail in it, like a bite from little teeth. He yelped and she giggled in his ear, sending shivers up his spine. [/p] [p] He reached back behind him awkwardly and put his hand on her ass, discovering that she was bare there, too. It was wide and hard, foam rubber over steel, and he kneaded it, digging his fingers in. She groaned in his ear and tugged him onto his back. [/p] [p] As soon as his shoulders hit the narrow bed, she was on him, her elbows on his biceps, pinning him down, her breasts in his face, fragrant and soft. Her hot, bare crotch ground against his underwear. He bit at her tits, hard little bites that made her gasp. He found a stiff nipple and sucked it into his mouth, beating at it with his tongue. She pressed her crotch harder against his, hissed something that might have been yesssss. [/p] [p] She straightened up so that she was straddling him and looking imperiously down on him. Her braids swung before her. Her eyes were exultant. Her face was set in an expression of fierce concentration as she rocked on him. [/p] [p] He dug his fingers into her ass again, all the way around, so that they brushed against her labia, her asshole. He pulled at her, dragging her up her body, tugging her vagina toward his mouth. Once she saw what he was after, she knee-walked up the bed in three or four quick steps and then she was on his face. Her smell and her taste and her texture and temperature filled his senses, blotting out the room, blotting out introspection, blotting out everything except for the sweet urgency. [/p] [p] He sucked at her labia before slipping his tongue up her length, letting it tickle her ass, her opening, her clit. In response, she ground against him, planting her opening over his mouth and he tongue-fucked her in hard, fast strokes. She reached back and took hold of his cock, slipping her small, strong hand under the waistband of his boxers and curling it around his rigid shaft, pumping vigorously. [/p] [p] He moaned into her pussy and that set her shuddering. Now he had her clit sucked into his mouth and he was lapping at its engorged length with short strokes. Her thighs were clamped over his ears, but he could still make out her cries, timed with the shuddering of her thighs, the spasmodic grip on his cock. [/p] [p] Abruptly she rolled off of him and the world came back. They hadn’t kissed yet. They hadn’t said a word. She lay beside him, half on top of him, shuddering and making kittenish sounds. He kissed her softly, then more forcefully. She bit at his lips and his tongue, sucking it into her mouth and chewing at it while her fingernails raked his back. [/p] [p] Her breathing became more regular and she tugged at the waistband of his boxers. He got the message and yanked them off, his cock springing free and rocking slightly, twitching in time with his pulse. She smiled a cat-ate-the-canary grin and went to work kissing his neck, his chest—hard bites on his nipples that made him yelp and arch his back—his stomach, his hips, his pubes, his thighs. The teasing was excruciating and exquisite. Her juices dried on his face, the smell caught in his nose, refreshing his eros with every breath. [/p] [p] Her tongue lapped eagerly at his balls like a cat with a saucer of milk. Long, slow strokes, over his sack, over the skin between his balls and his thighs, over his perineum, tickling his ass as he’d tickled hers. She pulled back and spat out a pube and laughed and dove back in, sucking softly at his sack, then, in one swift motion, taking his cock to the hilt. [/p] [p] He shouted and then moaned and her head bobbed furiously along the length of his shaft, her hand squeezing his balls. It took only moments before he dug his hands hard into the mattress and groaned through clenched teeth and fired spasm after spasm down her throat, her nose in his pubes, his cock down her throat to the base. She refused to let him go, swirling her tongue over the head while he was still super-sensitive, making him grunt and twitch and buck involuntarily, all the while her hand caressing his balls, rubbing at his prostate over the spot between his balls and his ass. [/p] [p] Finally she worked her way back up his body licking her lips and kissing as she went. [/p] [p] “Hello,” she said as she buried her face in his throat. [/p] [p] “Wow,” he said. [/p] [p] “So if you’re going to be able to live in the moment and have no regrets, this is a pretty good place to start. It’d be a hell of a shock if we saw each other twice in the next year—are we going to be able to be friends when we do? Will the fact that I fucked your brains out make things awkward?” [/p] [p] “That’s why you jumped me?” [/p] [p] “No, not really. I was horny and you’re hot. But that’s a good post-facto reason.” [/p] [p] “I see. You know, you haven’t actually fucked my brains out,” he said. [/p] [p] “Yet,” she said. She retrieved her backpack from beside the bed, dug around it in, and produced a strip of condoms. “Yet.” [/p] [p] He licked his lips in anticipation, and a moment later she was unrolling the condom down his shaft with her talented mouth. He laughed and then took her by the waist and flipped her onto her back. She grabbed her ankles and pulled her legs wide and he dove between her, dragging the still-sensitive tip of his cock up and down the length of her vulva a couple times before sawing it in and out of her opening, sinking to the hilt. [/p] [p] He wanted to fuck her gently but she groaned urgent demands in his ear to pound her harder, making satisfied sounds each time his balls clapped against her ass. [/p] [p] She pushed him off her and turned over, raising her ass in the air, pulling her labia apart and looking over her shoulder at him. They fucked doggy-style then, until his legs trembled and his knees ached, and then she climbed on him and rocked back and forth, grinding her clit against his pubis, pushing him so deep inside her. He mauled her tits and felt the pressure build in his balls. He pulled her to him, thrust wildly, and she hissed dirty encouragement in his ear, begging him to fill her, ordering him to pound her harder. The stimulation in his brain and between his legs was too much to bear and he came, lifting them both off the bed with his spasms. [/p] [p] “Wow,” he said. [/p] [p] “Yum,” she said. [/p] [p] “Jesus, it’s 8AM,” he said. “I’ve got to meet with Luke in three hours.” [/p] [p] “So let’s take a shower now, and set an alarm for half an hour before he’s due,” she said. “Got anything to eat.” [/p] [p] “That’s what I like about you Hilda,” he said. “Businesslike. Vigorous. Living life to the hilt.” [/p] [p] Her dimples were pretty and luminous in the hints of light emerging from under the blinds. “Feed me,” she said, and nipped at his earlobe. [/p] [p] In the shoebox-sized fridge, he had a cow-shaped brick of Wisconsin cheddar that he’d been given when he stepped off the plane. They broke chunks off it and ate it in bed, then started in on the bag of soy crispies his hosts in San Francisco had given him. They showered slowly together, scrubbing one-another’s backs, set an alarm, and sacked out for just a few hours before the alarm roused them. [/p] [p] They dressed like strangers, not embarrassed, just too groggy to take much notice of one another. Perry’s muscles ached pleasantly, and there was another ache, dull and faint, even more pleasant, in his balls. [/p] [p] Once they were fully clothed, she grabbed him and gave him a long hug, and a warm kiss that started on his throat and moved to his mouth, with just a hint of tongue at the end. [/p] [p] “You’re a good man, Perry Gibbons,” she said. “Thanks for a lovely night. Remember what I told you, though: no regrets, no looking back. Be happy about this—don’t mope, don’t miss me. Go on to your next city and make new friends and have new conversations, and when we see each other again, be my friend without any awkwardness. All right?” [/p] [p] “I get it,” he said. He felt slightly irritated. “Only one thing. We weren’t going to sleep together.” [/p] [p] “You regret it?” [/p] [p] “Of course not,” he said. “But it’s going to make this injunction of yours hard to understand. I’m not good at anonymous one night stands.” [/p] [p] She raised one eyebrow at him. “Earth to Perry: this wasn’t anonymous, and it wasn’t a one-night stand. It was an intimate, loving relationship that happened to be compressed into a single day.” [/p] [p] “Loving?” [/p] [p] “Sure. If I’d been with you for a month or two, I would have fallen in love. You’re just my type. So I think of you as someone I love. That’s why I want to make sure you understand what this all means.” [/p] [p] “You’re a very interesting person,” he said. [/p] [p] “I’m smart,” she said, and cuddled him again. “You’re smart. So be smart about this and it’ll be forever sweet.” [/p] [p] She left him off at the spot where he was supposed to meet Luke and the rest of his planning team to go over schematics and theory and practice. All of these discussions could happen online—they did, in fact—but there was something about the face-to-face connection. The meeting ran six hours before he was finally saved by his impending flight to Nebraska. [/p] [p] Sleepdep came down on him like a hammer as he checked in for his flight and began the ritual security-clearing buck-and-wing. He missed a cue or two and ended up getting a “detailed hand search” but even that didn’t wake him up. He fell asleep in the waiting room and in the plane, in the taxi to his hotel. [/p] [p] But when he dropped down onto his hotel bed, he couldn’t sleep. The hotel was the spitting image of the one he’d left in Wisconsin, minus Hilda and the musky smell the two of them had left behind after their roll in the hay. [/p] [p] It had been years since he’d had a regular girlfriend and he’d never missed it. There had been women, high-libido fatkins girls and random strangers, some who came back for a date or two. But no one who’d meant anything or whom he’d wanted to mean anything. The closest he’d come had been—he sat up with a start and realized that the last woman he’d had any strong feelings for had been Suzanne Church. [/p] [p] [/p][hr /] [p][/p] [p] Kettlewell emerged from New Work rich. He’d taken home large bonuses every year that Kodacell had experienced growth—a better metric than turning an actual ahem profit—and he’d invested in a diverse portfolio that had everything from soybeans to software in it, along with real estate (oops) and fine art. He believed in the New Work, believed in it with every fiber of his being, but an undiverse portfolio was flat-out irresponsible. [/p] [p] The New Work crash had killed the net worth of a lot of irresponsible people. [/p] [p] Living in the Caymans got boring after a year. The kids hated the international school, scuba diving amazed him by going from endlessly, meditatively fascinating to deadly dull in less than a year. He didn’t want to sail. He didn’t want to get drunk. He didn’t want to join the creepy zillionaires on their sex tours of the Caribbean and wouldn’t have even if his wife would have stood for it. [/p] [p] A year after the New Work crash, he filed a 1040 with the IRS and paid them forty million dollars in back taxes and penalties, and repatriated his wealth to an American bank. [/p] [p] Now he lived in a renovated housing project on Potrero Hill in San Francisco, all upscale now with restored, kitschy window-bars and vintage linoleum and stucco ceilings. He had four units over two floors, with cleverly knocked-through walls and a spiral staircase. The kids freaking loved the staircase. [/p] [p] Suzanne Church called him from SFO to let him know that she was on her way in, having cleared security and customs after a scant hour. He found himself unaccountably nervous about her now, and realized with a little giggle that he had something like a crush on her. Nothing serious—nothing his wife needed to worry about—but she was smart and funny and attractive and incisive and fearless, and it was a hell of a combination. [/p] [p] The kids were away at school and his wife was having a couple of days camping with the girls in Yosemite, which facts lent a little charge to Suzanne’s impending visit. He looked up the AirBART schedule and calculated how long he had until she arrived at the 24th Street station, a brisk 20 minute walk from his place. [/p] [p] Minutes, just minutes. He checked the guest-room and then did a quick mirror check. His months in the Caymans had given him a deep tan that he’d kept up despite San Francisco’s grey skies. He still looked like a surfer, albeit with just a little daddy-paunch—he’d gained more weight through his wife’s pregnancies than she had and only hard, aneurysm-inducing cycling over and around Potrero Hill had knocked it off again. His jeans’ neat rows of pockets and Mobius seams were a little outdated, but they looked good on him, as did his Hawai’ian print shirt with its machine-screw motif. [/p] [p] Finally he plopped down to read a book and waited for Suzanne, and managed to get through a whole page in the intervening ten minutes. [/p] [p] “Kettlebelly!” she hollered as she came through the door. She took him in a hug that smelled of stale airplane and restless sleep and gave him a thorough squeezing. [/p] [p] She held him at arm’s length and they sized each other up. She’d been a well-preserved mid-forties when he’d seen her last, buttoned-down in a California-yoga-addict way. Now she was years older, and her time in Russia had given her a forest of smile-lines at the corners of her mouth and eyes. She had a sad, wise turn to her face that he’d never seen there before, like a painted Pieta. Her hands had gone a little wrinkly, her knuckles more prominent, but her fingernails were beautifully manicured and her clothes were stylish, foreign, exotic and European. [/p] [p] She laughed huskily and said, “You haven’t changed a bit.” [/p] [p] “Ouch,” he said. “I’m older and wiser, I’ll have you know.” [/p] [p] “It doesn’t show,” she said. “I’m older, but no wiser.” [/p] [p] He took her hand and looked at the simple platinum band on her finger. “But you’re married now—nothing wises you up faster in my experience.” [/p] [p] She looked at her hand. “Oh, that. No. That’s just to keep the wolves at bay. Married women aren’t the same kinds of targets that single ones are. Give me water, and then a beer, please.” [/p] [p] Glad to have something to do, he busied himself in the kitchen while she prowled the place. “I remember when these places were bombed-out, real ghettos.” [/p] [p] “What did you mean about being a target?” [/p] [p] “St Pete’s, you know. Lawless state. Everyone’s on the make. I had a bodyguard most of the time, but if I wanted to go to a restaurant, I didn’t want to have to fend off the dating-service mafiyeh who wanted to offer me the deal of a lifetime on a green-card marriage.” [/p] [p] “Jeez.” [/p] [p] “It’s another world, Landon. You know what the big panic there is this week? A cult of ecstatic evangelical Christians who ’hypnotize’ women in the shopping malls and steal their babies to raise as soldiers to the Lord. God knows how much of it is true. These guys don’t bathe, and dress in heavy coats with big beards all year round. I mean, freaky, really freaky.” [/p] [p] “They hypnotize women?” [/p] [p] “Weird, yeah? And the driving! Anyone over the age of fifty who knows how to drive got there by being an apparat in the Soviet days, which means that they learned to drive when the roads were empty. They don’t signal, they straddle lanes, they can’t park—I mean, they really can’t park. And drunk! Everyone, all the time! You’ve never seen the like. Imagine a frat party the next day, with a lot of innocent bystanders, hookers, muggers and pickpockets.” [/p] [p] Landon looked at her. She was animated and vivid, thin—age had brought out her cheekbones and her eyes. Had she had a chin-tuck? It was common enough—all the medical tourists loved Russia. Maybe she was just well-preserved. [/p] [p] She made a show of sniffing herself. “Phew! I need a shower! Can I borrow your facilities?” [/p] [p] “Sure,” he said. “I put clean towels out in the kids’ bathroom—upstairs and second on the right.” [/p] [p] She came down with her fine hair slicked back over her ears, her face scrubbed and shining. “I’m a new woman,” she said. “Let’s go somewhere and eat something, OK?” [/p] [p] He took her for pupusas at a Salvadoran place on Goat Hill. They slogged up and down the hills and valleys, taking the steps cut into the steep sides, walking past the Painted Ladies—grand, gaudy Victorian wood-frames—and the wobbly, heavy canvas bubble-houses that had sprung up where the big quake and landslides had washed away parts of the hills. [/p] [p] “I’d forgotten that they had hills like that,” she said, greedily guzzling an horchata. Her face was streaked with sweat and flushed—it made her look prettier, younger. [/p] [p] “My son and I walk them every day.” [/p] [p] “You drag a little kid up and down that every day? Christ, that’s child abuse!” [/p] [p] “Well, he poops out after a couple of peaks and I end up carrying him.” [/p] [p] “You carry him? You must be some kind of superman.” She gave his bicep a squeeze, then his thigh, then slapped his butt. “A fine specimen. Your wife’s a lucky woman.” [/p] [p] He grinned. Having his wife in the conversation made him feel less at risk. That’s right, I’m married and we both know it. This is just fun flirting. Nothing more. [/p] [p] They bit into their pupusas—stuffed cornmeal dumplings filled with grilled pork and topped with shredded cabbage and hot sauce—and grunted and ate and ordered more. [/p] [p] “What are these called again?” [/p] [p] “Pupusas, from El Salvador.” [/p] [p] “Humph. In my day, we ate Mexican burritos the size of a football, and we were grateful.” [/p] [p] “No one eats burritos anymore,” he said, then covered his mouth, aware of how pretentious that sounded. [/p] [p] “Dahling,” she said, “burritos are so 2005. You must try a pupusa—it’s what all the most charming Central American peasants are eating now.” [/p] [p] They both laughed and stuffed their faces more. “Well, it was either here or one of the fatkins places with the triple-decker stuffed pizzas, and I figured—” [/p] [p] “They really do that?” [/p] [p] “The fatkins? Yeah—anything to get that magical 10,000 calories any day. It must be the same in Russia, right? I mean, they invented it.” [/p] [p] “Maybe for fifteen minutes. But most of them don’t bother—they get a little metabolic tweak, not a wide-open throttle like that. Christ, what it must do to your digestive system to process 10,000 calories a day!” [/p] [p] “Chacun a son gout,” he said, essaying a Gallic shrug. [/p] [p] She laughed again and they ate some more. “I’m starting to feel human at last.” [/p] [p] “Me too.” [/p] [p] “It’s still mid-afternoon, but my circadian thinks it’s 2AM. I need to do something to stay awake or I’ll be up at four tomorrow morning.” [/p] [p] “I have some modafinil,” he said. [/p] [p] “Swore ’em off. Let’s go for a walk.” [/p] [p] They did a little more hill-climbing and then headed into the Mission and window-shopped the North African tchotchke emporia that were crowding out the Mexican rodeo shops and hairdressers. The skin drums and rattles were laser-etched with intricate designs—Coca Cola logos, the UN Access to Essential Medicines Charter, Disney characters. It put them both in mind of the old days of the New Work, and the subject came up again, hesitant at first and then a full-bore reminisce. [/p] [p] Suzanne told him stories of the things that Perry and Lester had done that she’d never dared report on, the ways they’d skirted the law and his orders. He told her a few stories of his own, and they rocked with laughter in the street, staggering like drunks, pounding each other on the backs, gripping their knees and stomachs and doubling over to the curious glances of the passers-by. [/p] [p] It was fine, that day, Landon thought. Some kind of great sorrow that he’d forgotten he’d carried lifted from him and his chest and shoulders expanded and he breathed easy. What was the sorrow? The death of the New Work. The death of the dot-coms. The death of everything he’d considered important and worthy, its fading into tawdry, cheap nostalgia. [/p] [p] They were sitting in the grass in Dolores Park now, watching the dogs and their people romp among the robot pooper-scoopers. He had his arm around her shoulders, like war-buddies on a bender (he told himself) and not like a middle-aged man flirting with a woman he hadn’t seen in years. [/p] [p] And then they were lying down, the ache of laughter in their bellies, the sun on their faces, the barks and happy shouts around them. Their hands twined together (but that was friendly too, Arab men held hands walking down the street as a way of showing friendship). [/p] [p] Now their talk had banked down to coals, throwing off an occasional spark when one or the other would remember some funny anecdote and grunt out a word or two that would set them both to gingerly chuckling. But their hands were tied and their breathing was in sync, and their flanks were touching and it wasn’t just friendly. [/p] [p] Abruptly, she shook her hand free and rolled on her side. “Listen, married man, I think that’s enough of that.” [/p] [p] He felt his face go red. His ears rang. “Suzanne—what—” He was sputtering. [/p] [p] “No harm no foul, but let’s keep it friendly, all right.” [/p] [p] The spell was broken, and the sorrow came back. He looked for the right thing to say. “God I miss it,” he said. “Oh, Suzanne, God, I miss it so much, every day.” [/p] [p] Her face fell, too. “Yeah.” She looked away. “I really thought we were changing the world.” [/p] [p] “We were,” he said. “We did.” [/p] [p] “Yeah,” she said again. “But it didn’t matter in the end, did it? Now we’re older and our work is forgotten and it’s all come to nothing. Petersburg is nice, but who gives a shit? Is that what I’m going to do with the rest of my life, hang around Petersburg blogging about the mafiyeh and medical tourism? Just shoot me now.” [/p] [p] “I miss the people. I’d meet ten amazing creative geniuses every day—at least! Then I’d give them money and they’d make amazing stuff happen with it. The closest I come to that now is my kids, watching them learn and build stuff, which is really great, don’t get me wrong, but it’s nothing like the old days.” [/p] [p] “I miss Lester. And Perry. Tjan. The whole gang of them, really.” She propped herself up on one elbow and then shocked him by kissing him hard on the cheek. “Thanks, Kettlebelly. Thank you so much for putting me in the middle of all that. You changed my life, that’s for sure.” [/p] [p] He felt the imprint of her lips glowing on his cheek and grinned. “OK, here’s an idea: let’s go buy a couple bottles of wine, sit on my patio, get a glow on, and then call Perry and see what he’s up to.” [/p] [p] “Oh, that’s a good one,” she said. “That’s a very good one.” [/p] [p] A few hours later, they sat on the horsehair club-sofa in Kettlewell’s living room and hit a number he’d never taken out of his speed-dial. “Hi, this is Perry. Leave a message.” [/p] [p] “Perry!” they chorused. They looked at each other, at a loss for what to say next, then dissolved in peals of laughter. [/p] [p] “Perry, it’s Suzanne and Kettlebelly. What the hell are you up to? Call us!” [/p] [p] They looked at the phone with renewed hilarity and laughed some more. But by the time the sun was setting over Potrero Hill and Suzanne’s jet-lag was beating her up again, they’d both descended into their own personal funks. Suzanne went up to the guest room and put herself to bed, not bothering to brush her teeth or even change into her nightie. [/p] [p] [/p][hr /] [p][/p] [p] Perry touched down in Miami in a near-coma, his eyes gummed shut by several days’ worth of hangovers chased by drink. Sleep deprivation made him uncoordinated, so he tripped twice deplaning, and his voice was a barely audible rasp, his throat sore with a cold he’d picked up in Texas or maybe it was Oklahoma. [/p] [p] Lester was waiting beyond the luggage carousels, grinning like a holy fool, tall and broad-shouldered and tanned, dressed in fatkins pimped-out finery, all tight stretch-fabrics and glitter. [/p] [p] “Oh man, you look like shit,” he said, breaking off from the fatkins girl he’d been chatting up. Perry noticed that he was holding his phone, a sure sign that he’d gotten her number. [/p] [p] “Ten,” Perry said, grinning through the snotty rheum of his cold. “Ten rides.” [/p] [p] “Ten rides?” Lester said. [/p] [p] “Ten. San Francisco, Austin, Minneapolis, Omaha, Oklahoma City, Madison, Bellingham, Chapel Hill and—” He faltered. “And—Shit. I forget. It’s all written down.” [/p] [p] Lester took his bag from him and set it down, then crushed him in an enormous, muscular hug that whiffed slightly of the ketosis fumes that all the fatkins exuded. [/p] [p] “You did good, cowboy,” he said. “Let’s mosey back to the ranch, feed you and put you to bed, s’awright?” [/p] [p] “Can I sleep in?” [/p] [p] “Of course.” [/p] [p] “Until April?” [/p] [p] Lester laughed and slipped one of Perry’s arms over his shoulders and picked up his suitcase and walked them back through the parking lot to his latest hotrod. [/p] [p] Perry breathed in the hot, wet air as they went, feeling it open his chest and nasal passages. His eyes were at half mast, but the sight of the sickly roadside palms, the wandering vendors on the traffic islands with their net bags full of ipods and vpods—he was home, and his body knew it. [/p] [p] Lester cooked him a huge plate of scrambled eggs with corned beef, pastrami, salami and cheese, with a mountain of sauerkraut on top. “There you go, fatten you up. You’re all skinny and haggard, buddy.” Lester was an expert at throwing together high-calorie meals on short order. [/p] [p] Perry stuffed away as much as he could, then collapsed on his old bed with his old sheets and his old pillows, and in seconds he was sleeping the best sleep he’d had in months. [/p] [p] When he woke the next day, his cold had turned into a horrible, wet, crusty thing that practically had his face glued to his pillow. Lester came in, took a good look at him, and came back with a quart of fresh orange juice, a pot of tea, and a stack of dry toast, along with a pack of cold pills. [/p] [p] “Take all of this and then come down to the ride when you’re ready. I’ll hold down the fort for another couple days if that’s what it takes.” [/p] [p] Perry spent the day in his bathrobe, shuttling between the living room and the sun-chairs on the patio, letting the heat bake some of the snot out of his head. Lester’s kindness and his cold made him nostalgic for his youth, when his father doted on his illnesses. [/p] [p] Perry’s father was a little man. Perry—no giant himself—was taller than the old man by the time he turned 13. His father had always reminded him of some clever furry animal, a raccoon or badger. He had tiny hands and his movements were small and precise and careful. [/p] [p] They were mostly cordial and friendly, but distant. His father worked as a CAD/CAM manager in a machine shop, though he’d started out his career as a plain old machinist. Of all the machinists he’d started with at the shop, only he had weathered the transition to the new computerized devices. The others had all lost their jobs or taken early retirement or just quit, but his father had taken to CAD/CAM with total abandon, losing himself in the screens and staggering home bleary after ten or fifteen hours in front of the screen. [/p] [p] But that all changed when Perry took ill. Perry’s father loved to play nurse. He’d book off from work and stay home, ferrying up gallons of tea and beef broth, flat ginger-ale and dry toast, cold tablets and cough syrup. He’d open the windows when it was warm and then run around the house shutting them at the first sign of a cool breeze. [/p] [p] Best of all was what his father would do when Perry got restless: he and Perry would go down to the living-room, where the upright piano stood. It had been Perry’s grandfather’s, and the old man—who’d died before Perry was born—had been a jazz pianist who’d played sessions with everyone from Cab Calloway to Duke Ellington. [/p] [p] “You ready, P?” his father would ask. [/p] [p] Perry always nodded, watching his father sit down at the bench and try a few notes. [/p] [p] Then his father would play, tinkling and then pounding, running up and down the keyboard in an improvised jazz recital that could go for hours, sometimes only ending once Perry’s mom came home from work at the framing shop. [/p] [p] Nothing in Perry’s life since had the power to capture him the way his father’s music did. His fingers danced, literally danced on the keys, walking up and down them like a pair of high-kicking legs, making little comedy movements. The little stubby fingers with their tufts of hair on the knuckles, like goat’s legs, nimbly prancing and turning. [/p] [p] And then there was the music. Perry sometimes played with the piano and he’d figured out that if you hit every other key with three fingers, you got a chord. But Perry’s dad almost never made chords: he made anti-chords, sounds that involved those mysterious black keys and clashed in a way that was precisely not a chord, that jangled and jarred. [/p] [p] The anti-chords made up anti-tunes. Somewhere in the music there’d be one or more melodies, often the stuff that Perry listened to in his room, but sometimes old jazz and blues standards. [/p] [p] The music would settle into long runs of improvisational noise that wasn’t quite noise. That was the best stuff, because Perry could never tell if there was a melody in there. Sometimes he’d be sure that he had the know of it, could tell what was coming next, a segue into “Here Comes the Sun” or “Let the Good Times Roll” or “Merrily We Roll Along,” but then his father would get to that spot and he’d move into something else, some other latent pattern that was unmistakable in hindsight. [/p] [p] There was a joke his dad liked, “Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.” This was funny in just that way: you expected one thing, you got something else, and when your expectations fell apart like that, it was pure hilarity. You wanted to clutch your sides and roll on the floor sometimes, it was so funny. [/p] [p] His dad usually closed his eyes while he played, squeezing them shut, letting his mouth hang open slightly. Sometimes he grunted or scatted along with his playing but more often he grunted out something that was kind of the opposite of what he was playing, just like sometimes the melody and rhythms he played on the piano were sometimes the opposite of the song he was playing, something that was exactly and perfectly opposite, so you couldn’t hear it without hearing the thing it was the opposite of. [/p] [p] The game would end when his dad began to improvise on parts of the piano besides the keys, knocking on it, reaching in to pluck its strings like a harp, rattling Perry’s teacup on its saucer just so. [/p] [p] Nothing made him feel better faster. It was a tonic, a fine one, better than pills and tea and toast, daytime TV and flat ginger-ale. [/p] [p] As Perry got older, he and the old man had their share of fights over the normal things: girls, partying, school... But every time Perry took ill, he was transported back to his boyhood and those amazing piano recitals, his father’s stubby fingers doing their comic high-kicks and pratfalls on the keys, the grunting anti-song in the back of his throat, those crazy finales with teacups and piano strings. [/p] ]

[p] Now he stared morosely at the empty swimming pool six stories below his balcony, filled with blowing garbage, leaves, and a huge wasps’ nest. His father’s music was in his ears, distantly now and fading with his cold. He should call the old man, back home in Westchester County, retired now. They talked only rarely these days, three or four times a year on birthdays and anniversaries. No fight had started their silence, only busy lives grown apart. [/p] [p] He should call the old man, but instead he got dressed and went for a jog around the block, trying to get the wet sick wheeze out of his whistling breath, stopping a couple times to blow his nose. The sun was like a blowtorch on his hair, which had grown out of his normal duckling fuzz into something much shaggier. His head baked, the cold baked with it, and by the time he got home and chugged a quart of orange juice, he was feeling fully human again and ready for a shower, street clothes and a turn at the old ticket-window at work. [/p] [p] The queue snaked all the way through the market and out to the street, where the line had a casual, party kind of atmosphere. The market kids were doing a brisk business in popsicles, homemade colas, and clever origami stools and sun-beds made from recycled cardboard. Some of the kids recognized him and waved, then returned to their hustle. [/p] [p] He followed the queue through the stalls. The vendors were happier than the kids, if that was possible, selling stuff as fast as they could set it out. The queue had every conceivable kind of person in it: old and young, hipsters and conservative rawboned southerners, Latina moms with their babies, stone-faced urban homeboys, crackers, and Miami Beach queers in pastel shorts. There were old Jewish couples and smartly turned out European tourists with their funny two-tone shag cuts and the filter masks that they smoked around. There was a no-fooling Korean tour group, of the sort he’d seen now and again in Disney World, led by a smart lady in a sweltering little suit, holding an umbrella over her head. [/p] [p] “Lester, what the fuck?” he said, grinning and laughing as he clapped Lester on the shoulder, taking a young mall-goth’s five bucks out of a hand whose fingernails were painted with chipped black polish. “What the hell is going on here?” [/p] [p] Lester laughed. “I was saving this for a surprise, buddy. Record crowds—growing every day. There’s a line up in the morning no matter how early I open and no matter what time I close, I turn people away.” [/p] [p] “How’d they all find out about it?” [/p] [p] Lester shrugged. “Word of mouth,” he said. “Best advertising you can have. Shit, Perry, you just got back from ten cities where they want to clone this thing—how did they find out about it?” [/p] [p] Perry shook his head and marveled at the queue some more. The Korean tour group was coming up on them, and Perry nudged Lester aside and got out his ticket-roll, the familiar movements lovely after all that time on the road. [/p] [p] The tour guide put a stack of twenties down on the counter. “I got fifty of ’em,” she said. “That’s two hundred and fifty bucks.” She had an American accent, somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon line. Perry had been expecting a Korean accent, broken English. [/p] [p] Perry riffled the bills. “I’ll take your word for it.” [/p] [p] She winked at him. “They got off the plane and they were all like, ’Screw Disney, we have one of those in Seoul, what’s new, what’s American?’ So I took them here. You guys totally rock.” [/p] [p] He could have kissed her. His heart took wing. “In you go,” he said. “Lester will get you the extra ride vehicles.” [/p] [p] “They’re all in there already,” he said. “I’ve been running the whole fleet for two weeks and I’ve got ten more on order.” [/p] [p] Perry whistled. “You shoulda said,” he said, then turned back to the tour guide. “It might be a little bit of a wait.” [/p] [p] “Ten, fifteen minutes,” Lester said. [/p] [p] “No problem,” she said. “They’ll wait till kingdom come, provided there’s good shopping to be had.” Indeed the tour group was at the center of a pack of vendor-kids, hawking busts and tattoos, contacts and action-figures, kitchenware and cigarette lighters. [/p] [p] Once she was gone, Lester gave his shoulder another squeeze. “I hired two more kids to bring the ride cars back around to the entrance.” When Perry had left, that had been a once-daily chore, something you did before shutting down for the night. [/p] [p] “Holy crap,” Perry said, watching the tour group edge toward the entrance, slip inside in ones and twos. [/p] [p] “It’s amazing, isn’t it?” Lester said. “And wait till you see the ride!” [/p] [p] Perry didn’t get a chance to ride until much later that day, once the sun had set and the last market-stall had been shut and the last rider had been chased home, when he and Lester slugged back bottles of flat distilled water from their humidity-still and sat on the ticket counter to get the weight off their tired feet. [/p] [p] “Now we ride,” Lester said. “You’re going to love this.” [/p] [p] The first thing he noticed was that the ride had become a lot less open. When he’d left, there’d been the sense that you were in a giant room—all that dead Wal-Mart—with little exhibits spread around it, like the trade-floor at a monster-car show. But now the exhibits had been arranged out of one another’s sight-lines, and some of the taller pieces had been upended to form baffles. It was much more like a carny haunted house trade-show floor now. [/p] [p] The car circled slowly in the first “room,” which had accumulated a lot of junk that wasn’t mad inventions from the heyday of New Work. There was a chipped doll-cradle, and a small collection of girls’ dolls, a purse spilled on the floor with photos of young girls clowning at a birthday party. He reached for the joystick with irritation and slammed it toward minus one—what the hell was this crap? [/p] [p] Next was a room full of boys’ tanks and cars and trading cards, some in careful packages and frames, some lovingly scuffed and beaten up. They were from all eras, and he recognized some of his beloved toys from his own boyhood among the mix. The items were arranged in concentric rings—one of the robots’ default patterns for displaying materials—around a writhing tower of juddering, shuddering domestic robots that had piled one atop the other. The vogue for these had been mercifully brief, but it had been intense, and for Perry, the juxtaposition of the cars and the cards, the tanks and the robots made something catch in his throat. There was a statement here about the drive to automate household chores and the simple pleasure of rolling an imaginary tank over the imaginary armies of your imaginary enemies. So, too, something about the collecting urge, the need to get every card in a set, and then to get each in perfect condition, and then to arrange them in perfect order, and then to forget them altogether. [/p] [p] His hand had been jerking the joystick to plus one all this time and now he became consciously aware of this. [/p] [p] The next room had many of the old inventions he remembered, but they were arranged not on gleaming silver tables, but were mixed in with heaps of clothing, mountains of the brightly colored ubiquitous t-shirts that had gone hand in hand with every New Work invention and crew. Mixed in among them were some vintage tees from the dotcom era, and perched on top of the mountain, staring glassily at him, was a little girl-doll that looked familiar; he was almost certain that he’d seen her in the first doll room. [/p] [p] The next room was built out of pieces of the old “kitchen” display, but there was disarray now, dishes in the sink and a plate on the counter with a cigarette butted out in the middle of it. Another plate lay in three pieces on the linoleum before it. [/p] [p] The next room was carpeted with flattened soda tins that crunched under the chair’s wheels. In the center of them, a neat workbench with ranked tools. [/p] [p] The ride went on and on, each room utterly different from how he’d left it, but somehow familiar too. The ride he’d left had celebrated the New Work and the people who’d made it happen, and so did this ride, but this ride was less linear, less about display more— [/p] [p] “It’s a story,” he said when he got off. [/p] [p] “I think so too,” Lester said. “It’s been getting more and more story-like. The way that doll keeps reappearing. I think that someone had like ten of them and just tossed them out at regular intervals and then the plus-oneing snuck one into every scene.” [/p] [p] “It’s got scenes! That’s what they are, scenes. It’s like a Disney ride, one of those dark rides in Fantasyland.” [/p] [p] “Except those suck and our ride rocks. It’s more like Pirates of the Caribbean.” [/p] [p] “Have it your way. Whatever, how freaking weird is that?” [/p] [p] “Not so weird. People see stories like they see faces in clouds. Once we gave them the ability to subtract the stuff that felt wrong and reinforce the stuff that felt right, it was only natural that they’d anthropomorphize the world into a story.” [/p] [p] Perry shook his head. “You think?” [/p] [p] “We have this guy, a cultural studies prof, who comes practically every day. He’s been telling me all about it. Stories are how we understand the world, and technology is how we choose our stories. [/p] [p] “Check out the Greeks. All those Greek plays, they end with the deus ex machina—the playwright gets tired of writing, so he trots a god out on stage to simply point a finger at the players and make it all better. You can’t do that in a story today, but back then, they didn’t have the tools to help them observe and record the world, so as far as they could tell, that’s how stuff worked! [/p] [p] “Today we understand a little more about the world, so our stories are about people figuring out what’s causing their troubles and changing stuff so that those causes go away. Causal stories for a causal universe. Thinking about the world in terms of causes and effects makes you seek out causes and effects—even where there are none. Watch how gamblers play, that weird cargo-cult feeling that the roulette wheel came up black a third time in a row so the next spin will make it red. It’s not superstition, it’s kind of the opposite—it’s causality run amok.” [/p] [p] “So this is the story that has emerged from our collective unconscious?” [/p] [p] Lester laughed. “That’s a little pretentious, I think. It’s more like those Japanese crabs.” [/p] [p] “Which Japanese crabs?” [/p] [p] “Weren’t you there when Tjan was talking about this? Or was that in Russia? Anyway. There are these crabs in Japan, and if they have anything that looks like a face on the backs of their shells, the fishermen throw them back because it’s bad luck to eat a crab with a face on its shell. So the crabs with face-like shells have more babies. Which means that gradually, the crabs’ shells get more face-like, since all non-face-like shells are eliminated from the gene-pool. This leads the fishermen to raise the bar on their selection criteria, so they will eat crabs with shells that are a little face-like, but not very face-like. So all the slightly face-like crab-shells are eliminated, leaving behind moderately face-like shells. This gets repeated over several generations, and now you’ve got these crabs that have vivid faces on their shells. [/p] [p] “We let our riders eliminate all the non-story-like elements from the ride, and so what’s left behind is more and more story-like.” [/p] [p] “But the plus-one/minus-one lever is too crude for this, right? We should give them a pointer or something so they can specify individual elements they don’t like.” [/p] [p] “You want to encourage this?” [/p] [p] “Don’t you?” [/p] [p] Lester nodded vigorously. “Of course I do. I just thought that you’d be a little less enthusiastic about it, you know, because so much of the New Work stuff is being de-emphasized.” [/p] [p] “You kidding? This is what the New Work was all about: group creation! I couldn’t be happier about it. Seriously—this is so much cooler than anything that I could have built. And now with the network coming online soon—wow. Imagine it. It’s going to be so fucking weird, bro.” [/p] [p] “Amen,” Lester said. He looked at his watch and yelped. “Shit, late for a date! Can you get yourself home?” [/p] [p] “Sure,” Perry said. “Brought my wheels. See you later—have a good one.” [/p] [p] “She’s amazing,” Lester said. “Used to weigh 900 pounds and was shut in for ten years. Man has she got an imagination on her. She can do this thing—” [/p] [p] Perry put his hands over his ears. “La la la I’m not listening to you. TMI, Lester. Seriously. Way way TMI.” [/p] [p] Lester shook his head. “You are such a prude, dude.” [/p] [p] Perry thought about Hilda for a fleeting moment, and then grinned. “That’s me, a total puritan. Go. Be safe.” [/p] [p] “Safe, sound, and slippery,” Lester said, and got in his car. [/p] [p] Perry looked around at the shuttered market, rooftops glinting in the rosy tropical sunset. Man he’d missed those sunsets. He snorted up damp lungsful of the tropical air and smelled dinners cooking at the shantytown across the street. It was different and bigger and more elaborate every time he visited it, which was always less often than he wished. [/p] [p] There was a good barbecue place there, Dirty Max’s, just a hole in the wall with a pit out back and the friendliest people. There was always a mob scene around there, locals greasy from the ribs in their hands, a big bucket overflowing with discarded bones. [/p] [p] Wandering towards it, he was amazed by how much bigger it had grown since his last visit. Most buildings had had two stories, though a few had three. Now almost all had four, leaning drunkenly toward each other across the streets. Power cables, network cables and clotheslines gave the overhead spaces the look of a carelessly spun spider’s web. The new stories were most remarkable because of what Francis had explained to him about the way that additional stories got added: most people rented out or sold the right to build on top of their buildings, and then the new upstairs neighbors in turn sold their rights on. Sometimes you’d get a third-storey dweller who’d want to build atop two adjacent buildings to make an extra-wide apartment for a big family, and that required negotiating with all of the “owners” of each floor of both buildings. [/p] [p] Just looking at it made his head hurt with all the tangled property and ownership relationships embodied in the high spaces. He heard the easy chatter out the open windows and music and crying babies. Kids ran through the streets, laughing and chasing each other or bouncing balls or playing some kind of networked RPG with their phones that had them peeking around corners, seeing another player and shrieking and running off. [/p] [p] The grill-woman at the barbecue joint greeted him by name and the men and women around it made space for him. It was friendly and companionable, and after a moment Francis wandered up with a couple of his proteges. They carried boxes of beer. [/p] [p] “Hey hey,” Francis said. “Home again, huh?” [/p] [p] “Home again,” Perry said. He wiped rib-sauce off his fingers and shook Francis’s hand warmly. “God, I’ve missed this place.” [/p] [p] “We missed having you,” Francis said. “Big crowds across the way, too. Seems like you hit on something.” [/p] [p] Perry shook his head and smiled and ate his ribs. “What’s the story around here?” [/p] [p] “Lots and lots,” Francis said. “There’s a whole net-community thing happening. Lots of traffic on the AARP message-boards from other people setting these up around the country.” [/p] [p] “So you’ve hit on something, too.” [/p] [p] “Naw. When it’s railroading time, you get railroads. When it’s squatter time, you get squats. You know they want to open a 7-Eleven here?” [/p] [p] “No!” Perry laughed and choked on ribs and then guzzled some beer to wash it all down. [/p] [p] Francis put a wrinkled hand over his heart. He still wore his wedding band, Perry saw, despite his wife’s being gone for decades. “I swear it. Just there.” He pointed to one of the busier corners. [/p] [p] “And?” [/p] [p] “We told them to fuck off,” Francis said. “We’ve got lots of community-owned businesses around here that do everything a 7-Eleven could do for us, without taking the wealth out of our community and sending it to some corporate jack-off. Some soreheads wanted to see how much money we could get out of them, but I just kept telling them—whatever 7-Eleven gives us, it’ll only be because they think they can get more out of us. They saw reason. Besides, I’m in charge—I always win my arguments.” [/p] [p] “You are the most benevolent of dictators,” Perry said. He began to work on another beer. Beer tasted better outside in the heat and the barbecue smoke. [/p] [p] “I’m glad someone thinks so,” Francis said. [/p] [p] “Oh?” [/p] [p] “The 7-Eleven thing left a lot of people pissed at me. There’s plenty around here that don’t remember the way it started off. To them, I’m just some alter kocker who’s keeping them down.” [/p] [p] “Is it serious?” Perry knew that there was the potential for serious, major lawlessness from his little settlement. It wasn’t a failing condo complex rented out to Filipina domestics and weird entrepreneurs like him. It was a place where the cops would love an excuse to come in with riot batons (his funny eyebrow twitched) and gas, the kind of place where there almost certainly were a few very bad people living their lives. Miami had bad people, too, but the bad people in Miami weren’t his problem. [/p] [p] And the bad people and the potential chaos were what he loved about the place, too. He’d grown up in the kind of place where everything was predictable and safe and he’d hated every minute of it. The glorious chaos around him was just as he liked it. The wood-smoke curled up his nose, fragrant and all-consuming. [/p] [p] “I don’t know anymore. I thought I’d retire and settle down and take up painting. Now I’m basically a mob boss. Not the bad kind, but still. It’s a lot of work.” [/p] [p] “Pimpin’ ain’t easy.” Perry saw the shocked look on Francis’s face and added hastily, “Sorry—not calling you a pimp. It’s a song lyric is all.” [/p] [p] “We got pimps here now. Whores, too. You name it, we got it. It’s still a good place to live—better than Miami, if you ask me—but it could go real animal. Bad, bad animal.” [/p] [p] Hard to believe, standing there in the wood-smoke, licking his fingers, drinking his beer. His cold seemed to have been baked out by the steamy swampy heat. [/p] [p] “Well, Francis, if anyone knows how to keep peace, it’s you.” [/p] [p] “Social workers come around, say the same thing. But there’s people around here with little kids, they worry that the social workers could force them out, take away their children.” [/p] [p] It wasn’t like Francis to complain like this, it wasn’t in his nature, but here it was. The strain of running things was showing on him. Perry wondered if his own strain was showing that way. Did he complain more these days? Maybe he did. [/p] [p] An uncomfortable silence descended upon them. Perry drank his beer, morosely. He thought of how ridiculous it was to be morose about the possibility that he was being morose, but there you had it. [/p] [p] Finally his phone rang and saved him from further conversation. He looked at the display and shook his head. It was Kettlewell again. That first voicemail had made him laugh aloud, but when they hadn’t called back for a couple days, he’d figured that they had just had a little too much wine and placed the call. [/p] [p] Now they were calling back, and it was still pretty early on the West Coast. Too early for them to have had too much wine, unless they’d really changed. [/p] [p] “Perry Perry Perry!” It was Kettlebelly. He sounded like he might be drunk, or merely punch-drunk with excitement. Perry remembered that he got that way sometimes. [/p] [p] “Kettlewell, how are you doing?” [/p] [p] “I’m here too, Perry. I cashed in my return ticket.” [/p] [p] “Suzanne?” [/p] [p] “Yeah,” she said. She too sounded punchy, like they’d been having a fit of the giggles just before calling. “Kettlewell’s family have taken me in, wayward wanderer that I am.” [/p] [p] “You two sound pretty, um, happy.” [/p] [p] “We’ve been having an amazing time,” Kettlewell said. His speakerphone made him sound like he was at the bottom of a well. “Mostly reminiscing about you guys. What the hell are you up to? We tried to follow it on the net, but it’s all jumbled. What’s this about a story?” [/p] [p] “Story?” [/p] [p] “I keep reading about this ride of yours and its story. I couldn’t make any sense of it.” [/p] [p] “I haven’t read any of this, but Lester and I were talking about some stuff to do with stories tonight. I didn’t know anyone else was talking about this, though. Where’d you see it?” [/p] [p] “I’ll email it to you,” Suzanne said. “I was going to blog it tonight anyway.” [/p] [p] “So you two are just hanging around San Francisco giggling and walking down memory lane?” [/p] [p] “Well, yeah! It’s about time, too. We’ve all been separated for too long. We want a reunion, Perry.” [/p] [p] “A reunion?” [/p] [p] “We want to come down for a visit and see what you’re doing and hang out. You wouldn’t believe how much fun we’ve been having, Perry, seriously.” Kettlewell sounded like he’d been huffing nitrous or something. “Have you been having fun?” [/p] [p] He thought about the question. “Um, kind of?” He told them about his travels, a quick thumbnail sketch, struggling to remember which city he’d been to when, leaving out the crazy sex—which came back to him in a rush, that night with Hilda in the coffin, like a warm hallucination. “On balance, yes. It’s been fun.” [/p] [p] “Right, so we want to come down and have fun with you and Lester. He’s still hanging around, right?” [/p] [p] Lester had told him about the history he had with Suzanne, and there was something in the way she asked after Lester that suggested to Perry that there was still something there. [/p] [p] “You kidding? You’d have to pry us apart with a crowbar.” [/p] [p] “See, I told you so,” Suzanne said. “This guy thought that Lester might have gotten bored and wandered off.” [/p] [p] “Never! Plus anyone who follows his message board traffic and blogs would know that he was right here, minding the shop.” And you’re reading his blog, aren’t you, Suzanne? He didn’t need to say it. He could almost hear her blush over the line. [/p] [p] “So how about tomorrow?” [/p] [p] “For what?” [/p] [p] “For us coming to town. I’ll bring the wife and kids. We’ll rent out a couple hotel rooms and spend a week there. It’ll be a blast.” [/p] [p] “Tomorrow?” [/p] [p] “We could get the morning flight and be there for breakfast. You got a good hotel? Not a coffin hotel, not with the kids.” [/p] [p] Perry’s heart beat faster. He did miss these two, and they were so punchy, so gleeful. He’d love to see them. He muted his phone. [/p] [p] “Hey, Francis? That guesthouse down the road, is it still running?” [/p] [p] “Lulu’s? Sure. They just built another storey and took over the top floor of the place next door.” [/p] [p] “Perfect.” He unmuted. “How’d you like to stay in a squatter guesthouse in the shantytown?” [/p] [p] “Um,” Kettlewell said, but Suzanne laughed. [/p] [p] “Oh hell yes,” she said. “Get that look off your face, Kettlewell, this is an adventure.” [/p] [p] “We’d love it,” Kettlewell said. [/p] [p] “Great, I’ll make you a reservation. How long are you staying?” [/p] [p] “Until we leave,” Suzanne said. [/p] [p] “Right,” Perry said and laughed himself. They were different people, these two, from the people he remembered, but they were also old friends. And they were coming to see him tomorrow. “OK, lemme go make your reservations.” [/p] [p] Francis walked him over and the landlord fussed over the two of them like they were visiting dignitaries. Perry looked the place over and it was completely charming. He spotted what he thought was probably a hooker and a trick taking a room for the night, but you got that at the Hilton, too. [/p] [p] By the time he got home he was sure that he’d sleep like a log. He could barely keep his eyes open on the drive. But after he climbed into bed and closed his eyes, he found that he couldn’t sleep at all. Something about being back in his own room in his own bed felt alien and exciting. He got up and paced the apartment and then Lester came home from his date with the fatkins nympho, full of improbable stories and covered in little hickeys. [/p] [p] “You won’t believe who’s coming for a visit,” Perry said. [/p] [p] “Steve Jobs. He’s come down from the lamasery and renounced Buddhism. He wants to give a free computer to every visitor.” [/p] [p] “Close,” Perry said. “Kettlebelly and Suzanne Church. Coming tomorrow for a stay of unspecified duration. It’s a reunion. It’s a reunion you big sonofabitch! Woot! Woot!” Perry did a little two-step. “A reunion!” [/p] [p] Lester looked confused for a second, and then for another second he looked, what, upset? and then he was grinning and jumping up and down with Perry. “Reunion!” [/p] [p] He felt like he’d barely gotten to sleep when his phone rang. The clock showed six AM, and it was Kettlebelly and Suzanne, bleary, jet-lagged and grouchy from their one-hour post-flight security processing. [/p] [p] “We want breakfast,” Suzanne said. [/p] [p] “We’ve gotta open the ride, Suzanne.” [/p] [p] “At six in the morning? Come on, you’ve got hours yet before you have to be at work. How about you and Lester meet us at the IHOP?” [/p] [p] “Jesus,” he said. [/p] [p] “Come on! Kettlebelly’s kids are dying for something to eat and his wife looks like she’s ready to eat him. It’s been years, dude! Get your ass in the shower and down to the International House of Pancakes!” [/p] [p] Lester didn’t rouse easy, but Perry knew all the tricks for getting his old pal out of bed, they were practically married after all. [/p] [p] They arrived just in time for the morning rush but Tony greeted them with a smile and sent them straight to the front of the line. Lester ordered his usual (“Bring me three pounds of candy with a side of ground animal parts and potatoes”) and they waited nervously for Suzanne and the clan Kettlewell to turn up. [/p] [p] They arrived in a huge bustle of taxis and luggage and two wide-eyed, jet-lagged children hanging off of Kettlewell and Mrs Kettlewell, whom neither of them had ever met. She was a small, youthful woman in her mid-forties with artfully styled hair and big, abstract chunky silver jewelry. Suzanne had gone all Eurochic, rail-thin and smoking, with quiet, understated dark clothes. Kettlewell had a real daddy belly on him now, a little pot that his daughter thumped rhythmically from her perch on his hip. [/p] [p] “Sit, sit,” Perry said to them, getting up to help them stack their luggage at either end of the long table down the middle of the IHOP. Big family groups with tons of luggage were par for the course in Florida, so they didn’t really draw much attention beyond mild irritation from the patrons they jostled as they got everyone seated. [/p] [p] Perry was mildly amused to see that Lester and Suzanne ended up sitting next to one another and were already chatting avidly and close up, in soft voices that they had to lean in very tight to hear. [/p] [p] He was next to Mrs Kettlewell, whose name, it transpired, was Eva—“As in Extra-Vehicular Activity,” she said, geeking out with him. Kettlewell was in the bathroom with his daughter and son, and Mrs Kettlewell—Eva—seemed relieved at the chance for a little adult conversation. [/p] [p] “You must be a very patient woman,” Perry said, laughing at all the ticklish noise and motion of their group. [/p] [p] “Oh, that’s me all right,” Eva said. “Patience is my virtue. And you?” [/p] [p] “Oh, patience is something I value very much in other people.” Perry said. It made Eva laugh, which showed off her pretty laugh-lines and dimples. He could see how this woman and Kettlewell must complement each other. [/p] [p] She rocked her head from side to side and took a long swig of the coffee that their waiter had distributed around the table, topping up from the carafe he’d left behind. “Thank God for legal stimulants.” [/p] [p] “Long flight?” [/p] [p] “Traveling with larvae is always a challenge,” she said. “But they dug it hard. You should have seen them at the windows.” [/p] [p] “They’d never been on a plane before?” [/p] [p] “I like to go camping,” she said with a shrug. “Landon’s always on me to take the kids to Hawaii or whatever, but I’m always like, ‘Man, you spend half your fucking life in a tin can—why do you want to start your holidays in one? Let’s go to Yosemite and get muddy.’ I haven’t even taken them to Disneyland!” [/p] [p] Perry put the back of his hand to his forehead. “That’s heresy around here,” he said. “You going to take them to Disney World while you’re in Florida? It’s a lot bigger, you know—and it’s a different division. Really different feel, or so I’m told.” [/p] [p] “You kidding? Perry, we came here for your ride. It’s famous, you know.” [/p] [p] “Net.famous, maybe. A little.” He felt his cheeks burning. “Well, there will be one in your neck of the woods soon enough.” He told her about the Burning Man collective and the plan to build one down the 101, south of San Francisco International. [/p] [p] Kettlebelly returned then with the kids, and he managed to get them into their seats while sucking back a coffee and eating a biscuit from the basket in the center of the table, breaking off bits to shove in the kids’ mouths whenever they protested. [/p] [p] “These are some way tired kids,” he said, leaning over to give his wife a kiss. Perry thought he saw Suzanne flick a look at them then, but it might have been his imagination. Suzanne and Lester were off in their own world, after all. [/p] [p] “The plane almost crashed,” said the little girl next to Perry. She had a halo of curly hair like a dandelion clock and big solemn dark eyes and a big wet mouth set between apple-round cheeks. [/p] [p] “Did it really?” Perry said. She was seven or eight he thought, the bossy big sister who’d been giving orders to her little brother from the moment they came through the door. [/p] [p] She nodded solemnly. He looked at Eva, who shrugged. [/p] [p] “Really?” he said. [/p] [p] “Really,” she said, nodding vigorously now. “There were terrists on the plane who wanted to blow it up, but the sky marshas stopped them.” [/p] [p] “How could you tell they were ’terrists’?” [/p] [p] She clicked her tongue and rolled her eyes. “They were whispering,” she said. “Just like on Captain President and the Freedom Fighters.” He knew something of this cartoon, mostly because of all the knock-off merch for sale in the market stalls in front of the ride. [/p] [p] “I see,” he said. “Well, I’m glad the Sky Marshas stopped them. Do you want pancakes?” [/p] [p] “I want caramel apple chocolate pancakes with blueberry banana sauce,” she said, rolling one pudgy finger along the description in the glossy menu, beneath an oozing food-porn photo. “And my brother wants a chocolate milkshake and a short stack of happy face clown waffles with strawberry sauce, but not too many because he’s still a baby and can’t eat much.” [/p] [p] “You’ll become as fat as your daddy if you eat like that,” Perry said. Eva snorted beside him. [/p] [p] “No,” she said. “I’m gonna be a fatkins.” [/p] [p] “I see,” he said. Eva shook her head. [/p] [p] “It’s the goddamned fatkins agitprop games,” Eva said. “They come free with everything now—digital cameras, phones, even in cereal boxes. You have to eat a minimum number of calories per level or you starve to death. This one is a champeen.” [/p] [p] “I’m nationally ranked,” the little girl said, not looking up from the menu. [/p] [p] Perry looked across the table and discovered that Suzanne had covered Lester’s hand with hers and that Lester was laughing along with her at something funny. Something about that made him a little freaked out, like Lester was making time with his sister or their mom. [/p] [p] “Suzanne,” he said. “What’s happening with you these days, anyway?” [/p] [p] “Petersburg is what’s happening with me,” she said, with a hoarse little chuckle. “Petersburg is like Detroit crossed with Paris. Completely decrepit and decadent. There’s a serial killer who’s been working the streets for five years there and the biggest obstacle to catching him is that the first cops on the scene let rubberneckers bribe them to take home evidence as souvenirs.” [/p] [p] “No way!” Lester said. [/p] [p] “Oh, da, big vay,” she said, dropping into a comical Boris and Natasha accent. “Bolshoi vay.” [/p] [p] “So why are you there?” [/p] [p] “It’s like home for me. It’s got enough of Detroit’s old brutal, earthy feel, plus enough of Silicon Valley’s manic hustle, it just feels right.” [/p] [p] “You going to settle in there?” [/p] [p] “Well, put that way, no. I couldn’t hack it for the long term. But at this time in my life, it’s been just right. But it’s good to get back to the States, too. I’m thinking of hanging out here for a couple months. Russia’s so cheap, I’ve got a ton saved up. Might as well blow it before inflation kills it.” [/p] [p] “You keep your money in rubles?” [/p] [p] “Hell no—no one uses rubles except tourists. I’m worried about another run of US inflation. I mean, have you looked around lately? You’re living in a third world country, buddy.” [/p] [p] A waiter came between them, handing out heaping, steaming plates of food. Lester, who’d finished his first breakfast while they waited, had ordered a second breakfast, which arrived along with the rest of them. Mountains of food stacked up on the table, side-plates crowding jugs of apple juice and carafes of coffee. [/p] [p] Incredibly, the food kept coming—multiple syrup-jugs, plates of hash-browns, baskets of biscuits and bowls of white sausage gravy. Perry hadn’t paid much attention when orders were being taken, but from the looks of things, he was eating with a bunch of IHOP virgins, unaccustomed to the astonishing portions to be had there. [/p] [p] He cocked his funny eyebrow at Suzanne, who laughed. “OK, not quite a third-world country. But not a real industrial nation anymore, either. Maybe more like the end-days of Rome or something. Drowning in wealth and wallowing in poverty.” She forked up a mouthful of hash browns and chased them with coffee. Perry attacked his own plate. [/p] [p] Kettlewell fed the kids, sneaking bites in-between, while Eva looked on approvingly. “You’re a good man, Landon Kettlewell,” she said, slicing up her steak and eggs into small, precise cubes, wielding the knife like an artist. [/p] [p] “You just enjoy your breakfast, my queen,” he said, spooning oatmeal with raisins, bananas, granola and boysenberry jam into the little boy’s mouth. [/p] [p] “We got you presents,” the little girl said, taking a break from shoveling banana-chocolate caramel apples into her mouth. [/p] [p] “Really?” Perry raised his funny eyebrow and she giggled. He did it again, making it writhe like a snake. She snarfed choco-banana across the table, then scooped it up and put it back in her mouth. [/p] [p] She nodded vigorously. “Dad, give them their presents!” [/p] [p] Kettlewell said, “Someone has to feed your brother, you know.” [/p] [p] “I’ll do it,” she said. She forked up some of his oatmeal and attempted to get it into the little boy’s face. “Presents!” [/p] [p] Kettlewell dug through the luggage-cluster under the table and came up with an overstuffed diaper bag, then pawed through it for a long time, urged on by his daughter who kept chanting “Presents! Presents! Presents!” while attempting to feed her little brother. Eva and Lester and Suzanne took up the chant. They were drawing stares from nearby tables, but Perry didn’t mind. He was laughing so hard his sides hurt. [/p] [p] Finally Kettlewell held a paper bag aloft triumphantly, then clapped a hand over his daughter’s mouth and shushed the rest. [/p] [p] “You guys are really hard to shop for,” he said. “What the hell do you get for two guys who not only have everything, but make everything?” [/p] [p] Suzanne nodded. “Damned right. We spent a whole day looking for something.” [/p] [p] “What is it?” [/p] [p] “Well,” Kettlewell said. “We figured that it should be something useful, not decorative. You guys have decorative coming out of your asses. So that left us with tools. We wanted to find you a tool that you didn’t have, and that you would appreciate.” [/p] [p] Suzanne picked up the story. “I thought we should get you an antique tool, something so well-made that it was still usable. But to be useful, it had to be something no one had improved on, and that had in fact been degraded by modern manufacturing techniques. [/p] [p] “At first we looked at old tape-measures, but I remembered that you guys were mostly using keychain laser range-finders these days. Screwdrivers, pliers, and hammers were all out—I couldn’t find a damned thing that looked any better than what you had around here. The state of the art is genuinely progressing. [/p] [p] “There were a lot of nice old brass spirit-levels and hand-lathed plumb-bobs but they were more decorative than useful by a damned sight. Great old steel work-helmets looked cool, but they weighed about a hundred times what the safety helmets around here weigh. [/p] [p] “We were going to give in and try to bring you guys a big goddamned tube-amp, or maybe some Inuit glass knives, but I didn’t see you having much of a use for either. [/p] [p] “Which is how we came to give up on tools per se and switched over to leisure—sports tools. There was a much richer vein. Wooden bats, oh yes, and real pigskin footballs that had nice idiosyncratic spin that you’d have to learn to compensate for. But when we found these, we knew we’d hit pay-dirt.” [/p] [p] She picked up Kettlewell’s paper sack with a flourish and unzipped it. A moment later she presented them with two identical packages wrapped in coarse linen paper hand-stamped with Victorian woodcuts of sporting men swinging bats and charging the line with pigskins under their arms. [/p] [p] “Ta-dah!” [/p] [p] The kids echoed it. “These are the best presents,” the little girl confided in Perry as he picked delicately at the exquisite paper. [/p] [p] The paper gave way in folds and curls, and then he and Lester both held their treasures aloft. [/p] [p] “Baseball gloves!” Perry said. [/p] [p] “A catcher’s mitt and a fielder’s glove,” Kettlewell said. “You look at that catcher’s mitt. 1910!” It was black and bulbous, the leather soft and yielding, with a patina of fine cracks like an old painting. It smelled like oil and leather, an old rich smell like a gentleman’s club or an expensive briefcase. Perry tried it on and it molded itself to his hand, snug and comfortable. It practically cried out to have a ball thrown at it. [/p] [p] “And this fielder’s glove,” Kettlewell went on, pointing at the glove Lester held. It was the more traditional tan color, comically large like the glove of a cartoon character. It too had the look of ancient, well-loved leather, the same mysterious smell of hide and oil. Perry touched it with a finger and it felt like a woman’s cheek, smooth and soft. “Rawlings XPG6. The Mickey Mantle. Early 1960s—the ultimate glove.” [/p] [p] “You got the whole sales pitch, huh, darling?” Eva said, not unkindly, but Kettlewell flushed and glared at her for a moment. [/p] [p] Perry broke in. “Guys, these are—wow. Incredible.” [/p] [p] “They’re better than the modern product,” Suzanne said. “That’s the point. You can’t print these or fab these. They’re wonderful because they’re so well made and so well-used! The only way to make a glove this good would be to fab it and then give it to several generations of baseball players to love and use for fifty to a hundred years.” [/p] [p] Perry turned over the catcher’s mitt. Over a hundred years old. This wasn’t something to go in a glass case. Suzanne was right: this was a great glove because people had played with it, all the time. It needed to be played with or it would get out of practice. [/p] [p] “I guess we’re going to have to buy a baseball,” Perry said. [/p] [p] The little girl beside him started bouncing up and down. [/p] [p] “Show him,” Suzanne said, and the girl dove under the table and came up with two white, fresh hard balls. Once he fitted one to the pocket of his glove, it felt so perfectly right—like a key in a lock. This pocket had held a lot of balls over the years. [/p] [p] Lester had put a ball in the pocket of his glove, too. He tossed it lightly in the air and caught it, then repeated the trick. The look of visceral satisfaction on his face was unmistakable. [/p] [p] “These are great presents, guys,” Perry said. “Seriously. Well done.” [/p] [p] They all beamed and murmured and then the ball Lester was tossing crashed to the table and broke a pitcher of blueberry syrup, upset a carafe of orange juice, and rolled to a stop in the chocolate mess in front of the little girl, who laughed and laughed and laughed. [/p] [p] “And that is why we don’t play with balls indoors,” Suzanne said, looking as stern as she could while obviously trying very hard not to bust out laughing. [/p] [p] The waiters were accustomed to wiping up spills and Lester was awkwardly helpful. While they were getting everything set to rights again, Perry looked at Eva and saw her lips tightly pursed as she considered her husband. He followed Kettlebelly’s gaze and saw that he was watching Suzanne (who was laughingly restraining Lester from doing any more “cleaning”) intently. In a flash, Perry thought he had come to understanding. Oh dear, he thought. [/p] [p] The kids loved the shantytown. The little girl—Ada, “like the programming language,” Eva said—insisted on being set down so she could tread the cracked cement walkways herself, head whipping back and forth to take the crazy-leaning buildings in, eyes following the zipping motor-bikes and bicycles as they wove in and out of the busy streets. The shantytowners were used to tourists in their midst. A few yardies gave them the hairy eyeball, but then they saw Perry was along and they found something else to pay attention to. That made Perry feel obscurely proud. He’d been absent for months, but even the corner boys knew who he was and didn’t want to screw with him. [/p] [p] The guesthouse’s landlady greeted them at the door, alerted to their coming by the jungle telegraph. She shook Perry’s hand warmly, gave Ada a lollipop, and chucked the little boy (Pascal, “like the programming language,” said Eva, with an eye-roll) under the chin. Check-in was a lot simpler than at a coffin-hotel or a Hilton: just a brief discussion of the available rooms and a quick tour. The Kettlewells opted for the lofty attic, which could fit two three-quarter width beds and a crib, and overlooked the curving streets from a high vantage; Suzanne took a more quotidian room just below, with lovely tile mosaics made from snipped-out sections of plastic fruit and smashed novelty soda bottles. (The landlady privately assured Perry that her euphemistic “hourly trade” was in a different part of the guesthouse altogether, with its own staircase). [/p] [p] A few hours later, Perry was alone again, working his ticket counter. The Kettlewells were having naps, Lester and Suzanne had gone off to see some sights, and the crowd for the ride was already large, snaking through the market, thick with vendors and hustling kids trying to pry the visitors loose of their bankrolls. [/p] [p] He felt like doing a carny barker spiel, Step right up, step right up, this way to the great egress! But the morning’s visitors didn’t seem all that frivolous—they were serious-faced and sober. [/p] [p] “Everything OK?” he asked a girl who was riding for at least the second time. She was a midwestern-looking giantess in her early twenties with big white front teeth and broad shoulders, wearing a faded Hoosiers ball-cap and a lot of coral jewelry. “I mean, you don’t look like you’re having a fun time.” [/p] [p] “It’s the story,” she said. “I read about it online and I didn’t really believe it, but now I totally see it. But you made it, right? It didn’t just... happen, did it?” [/p] [p] “No, it just happened,” Perry said. This girl was a little spooky-looking. He put his hand over his heart. “On my honor.” [/p] [p] “It can’t be,” she said. “I mean, the story is like right there. Someone must have made it.” [/p] [p] “Maybe they did,” Perry said. “Maybe a bunch of people thought it would be fun to make a story out of the ride and came by to do it.” [/p] [p] “That’s probably it,” the girl said. “The other thing, that’s just ridiculous.” [/p] [p] She was gone and on the ride before he could ask her what this meant, and the three bangbangers behind her just wanted tickets, not conversation. [/p] [p] An hour later, she was back. [/p] [p] “I mean the message boards,” she said. “Don’t you follow your referers? There’s a guy in Osceola who says that this is, I don’t know, like the story that’s inside our collective unconsciousness.” Perry restrained a smile at the malapropism. “Anyway a lot of people agree. I don’t think so, though. No offense, mister, but I think that this is just a prank or something.” [/p] [p] “Something,” Perry said. But she rode twice more that day, and she wasn’t the only one. It was a day of many repeat riders, and the market-stall people came by to complain that the visitors weren’t buying much besides the occasional ice-cream or pork cracklin. [/p] [p] Perry shrugged and told them to find something that these people wanted to buy, then. One or two of the miniatures guys got gleams in their eyes and bought tickets for the ride (Perry charged them half price) and Perry knew that by the time the day was out, there’d be souvenir ride-replicas to be had. [/p] [p] Lester and Suzanne came by after lunchtime and Lester relieved him, leaving him to escort Suzanne back to the shantytown and the Kettlewells. [/p] [p] “You two seem to be getting on well,” Perry said, jerking his head back at Lester as they walked through the market. [/p] [p] Suzanne looked away. “This is amazing, Perry,” she said, waving her hand at the market stalls, a gesture that took in the spires of the shantytown and the ride, too. “You have done something...stupendous, you know it? I mean, if you had a slightly different temperament, I’d call this a cult. But it seems like you’re not in charge of anything—” [/p] [p] “That’s for sure!” [/p] [p] “—even though you’re still definitely leading things.” [/p] [p] “No way—I just go where I’m told. Tjan’s leading.” [/p] [p] “I spoke to Tjan before we came out, and he points the finger at you. ‘I’m just keeping the books and closing the contracts.’ That’s a direct quote.” [/p] [p] “Well maybe no one’s leading. Not everything needs a leader, right?” [/p] [p] Suzanne shook her head at him. “There’s a leader, sweetie, and it’s you. Have a look around. Last I checked, there were three more rides going operational this week, and five more in the next month. Just looking at your speaking calendar gave me a headache—” [/p] [p] “I have a speaking calendar?” [/p] [p] “You do indeed, and it’s a busy one. You knew that though, right?” [/p] [p] Tjan sent him email all the time telling him about this group or that, where he was supposed to go and give a talk, but he’d never seen a calendar. But who had time to look at the website anymore? [/p] [p] “I suppose. I knew I was supposed to get on a plane again in a couple weeks.” [/p] [p] “So that’s what a leader is—someone who gets people mobilized and moving.” [/p] [p] “I met a girl in Madison, Wisconsin, you’d probably get along with.” Thinking of Hilda made him smile and feel a little horny, a little wistful. He hadn’t gotten fucked in mind and body like that since his twenties. [/p] [p] “Maybe I’ll meet her. Is she working on a local ride?” [/p] [p] “You’re going to go to the other rides?” [/p] [p] “I got to write about something, Perry. Otherwise my pageviews fall off and I can’t pay my rent. This is a story—a big one, and no one else has noticed it yet. That kind of story can turn into the kind of money you buy a house with. I’m speaking from experience here.” [/p] [p] “You think?” [/p] [p] She put her hand over her heart. “I’m good at spotting these. Man, you’ve got a cult on your hands here.” [/p] [p] “What?” [/p] [p] “The story people. I’ve been reading the message boards and blogs. It’s where I get all my best tips.” [/p] [p] Perry shook his head. Everyone else was more on top of this stuff than him. He was going to have to spend less time hacking the ride and more time reading the interweb, clearly. [/p] [p] “It was all Lester’s idea, anyway,” he said. [/p] [p] She looked down with an unreadable expression. He hazarded a guess as to what that was about. [/p] [p] “Things are getting tight between you two, huh?” [/p] [p] “Christ it doesn’t show that much does it?” [/p] [p] “No,” he lied. “I just know Lester is all.” [/p] [p] “He’s something else,” she said. [/p] [p] Suzanne needed some sundries, so he directed her to a little bodega in the back room of one of the houses. He told her he’d meet her at the guesthouse and took a seat in the lobby. He was still beat from the cold and the jet-lag, the work and the sheer exhaustion. [/p] [p] On the road he’d had momentum dragging him from one thing to the next, flights to catch, speeches to make. Back at home, confronted with routine, it was like his inertia was disappearing. [/p] [p] Eva Kettlewell thundered down the stairs three at a time with a sound like a barely controlled fall, burst into the lobby and headed for the door, her back rigid, her arms swinging, her face a picture of rage. [/p] [p] She went out the door like a flash and then stood in the street for a moment before striking out, seemingly at random. [/p] [p] Uh-oh, Perry thought. [/p] [p] [/p][hr /] [p][/p] [p] Sammy didn’t dare go back to the ride for weeks after the debacle in Boston. He’d been spotted by the Chinese guy and the bummy-looking guy who said he’d designed the ride, that much was sure. They probably suspected him of having sabotaged the Boston ride. [/p] [p] But he couldn’t stay away. Work was dismal. The other execs at Disney World were all amazingly petty, and always worse before the quarterly numbers came out. Management liked to chase any kind of bad numbers with a few ritual beheadings. [/p] [p] The new Fantasyland had been a feather in Sammy’s cap that had kept him safe from politics for a long time, but not anymore. Now it was getting run down: cigarette burns, graffiti, and every now and again someone would find a couple having pervy eyeliner sex in the bushes. [/p] [p] He’d loved to work openings in Fantasyland’s heyday. He’d stand just past the castle-gate and watch the flocking crowds of black-clad, lightly sweating, white-faced goth kids pour through it, blinking in the unnatural light of the morning. A lot of them took drugs and partied all night and then capped it off with an early morning at Fantasyland—Disney had done focus groups, and they’d started selling the chewy things that soothed the clenched jaws brought on by dance-drugs. [/p] [p] But now he hated the raven-garbed customers who sallied into his park like they owned the joint. A girl—maybe 16—walked past on vinyl platform heels with two gigantic men in their thirties behind her, led on thin black leather leashes. A group of whippet-thin boys in grey dusters with impossibly high sprays of teased electric blue hair followed. Then a group of heavily pierced older women, their faces rattling. [/p] [p] Then it was a river of black, kids in chains and leather, leathery grownups who dressed like surly kids. They formed neat queues by their favorite rides—the haunted houses, the graveyard walk-through, the coffin coaster, the river of blood—and puffed cloves through smokeless hookahs. At least he hoped it was cloves. [/p] [p] The castmembers in Sammy’s Fantasyland were no better than the guests. They were pierced, dyed, teased, and branded to within an inch of their lives, even gothier than the goths who made the long pilgrimages to ride his unwholesome rides. [/p] [p] The worst of it was that there weren’t enough of them anymore. The goth scene, which had shown every sign of surging and re-surging every five years, seemed finally to be dying. Numbers were down. A couple of goth-themed parks in the area had shuttered, as had the marshy one in New Orleans (admittedly that might have been more to do with the cholera outbreak). [/p] [p] Last month, he’d shut down the goth toddler-clothing shop and put its wares on deep online discount. All his little nieces and nephews were getting bat-wing onesies, skull platform-booties and temporary hair-dye and tattoos for Christmas. Now he just had to get rid of the other ten million bucks’ worth of merch. [/p] [p] “Morning, Death,” he said. The kid’s real name was Darren Weinberger, but he insisted on being called Death Waits, which given his pudgy round cheeks and generally eager-to-please demeanor, was funny enough that it had taken Sammy a full year to learn to control his grin when he said it. [/p] [p] “Sammy! Good morning—how’re you doing?” [/p] [p] “The numbers stink,” Sammy said. “You must have noticed.” [/p] [p] Death’s grin vanished. “I noticed. Time for a new ride, maybe.” No one called them “attractions” anymore—all that old Orwellian Disneyspeak had been abolished. “They love the coaster and the free-fall. Thrill rides are always crowd-pleasers.” [/p] [p] Death Waits had worked at Disney for three years now, since the age of 16, and he had grown up coming to the park, one of the rare Orlando locals. Sammy had come to rely on him for what he thought of as insight into the “goth street.” He never said that aloud, because he knew how much it sounded like “whatever you crazy kids are into these days.” [/p] [p] But this wasn’t helpful. “I know that everyone likes thrill rides, but how the hell can you compete with the gypsy coasters?” They set up their coasters by the road and ran them until there was an injury serious enough to draw the law—a week or two at best. You could order the DIY coaster kits from a number of suppliers across the US and Mexico, put them up with cranes and semi-skilled labor and wishful thinking, start taking tickets, and when the inevitable catastrophe ensued, you could be packed and on the lam in a couple hours. [/p] [p] “Gypsy coasters? They suck. We’ve got theming. Our rides are art. That stuff is just engineering.” Death Waits was a good kid, but he was a serious imbiber of the kool-aid. “Maybe try dance parties again?” They’d tried a string of all-night raves, but the fights, drugs, and sex were just too much for the upper management, no matter how much money they brought in. [/p] [p] Sammy shook his head morosely. “I’ve told you that a company this size can’t afford the risks from that sort of thing.” A few more goths straggled in. They headed for the walk-through, which probably meant they planned to get high or make out, something he’d given up on trying to prevent. Anything to get the numbers up. He and the security staff had come to an understanding on this and no one was telling his boss or his colleagues. [/p] [p] “I should just bulldoze the whole fucking thing and start over. What comes after goth, anyway? Are ravers back? Hippies? Punks? Chavs?” [/p] [p] Death Waits was staring at him with round eyes. “You wouldn’t really—” [/p] [p] He waved at the kid. This was his whole life. “No, Death, no. We’re not going to bulldoze this place. You’ve got a job for life here.” It was a lie of such amazing callousness that Sammy felt a twinge of remorse while saying it. Those twinges didn’t come often. But Death Waits looked a lot happier once the words were out of his mouth—goths with big candy-apple cheeks were pretty unconvincing gloom-meisters. [/p] [p] Sammy stalked back to the nearest utilidor entrance, over by what had been the Pinocchio Village Haus. He’d turned the redesign over to a designer who’d started out as a lit major and whose admiration for the dark and twisted elements of the original Pinocchio tale by Carlo Collodi shone through. Now it featured murals of donkeys being flensed by fish, hectic Pleasure Island. Hanged Pinocchio on his gibbet dangled over the condiment bar, twitching and thrashing. The smell of stale grease rose from it like a miasma, clashing with the patchouli they pumped out from the underground misters. [/p] [p] Down into the tunnels and then into a golf cart and out to his office. He had time to paw desultorily at the mountain of merchandise samples that had come in over the week since he’d last tackled it—every plaster-skull vendor and silver cross-maker in the world saw him as a ticket to easy street. None had twigged to the fact that they were reducing their goth-themed merch these days. Still, going through merch had been his task for three years now and it was a hard habit to break. He liked the lick-and-stick wounds with dancing maggots that were activated by body-heat. The skeletal bikers with flocking algorithms that led them into noisy demolition derbies were a great idea, too, since you’d have to buy another set after a couple hours’ play. [/p] [p] His desk was throbbing pink, which meant that he was late for something. He slapped at it, read the message that came up, remembered that there was a weekly status meeting for theme-leaders that he’d been specifically instructed to attend. He didn’t go to these things if he could help it. The time-markers who ran Adventureland and Tomorrowland and so on were all boring curatorial types who thought that change was what you gave a sucker back from a ten at a frozen-banana wagon. [/p] [p] The theme-leaders met in a sumptuous board-room that had been themed in the glory years of the unified Walt Disney Company. It had renewable tropical hardwood panelling, a beautiful garden and a koi pond, and an aviary that teemed with chirruping bright birds borrowed from the Animal Kingdom menagerie. The table was a slab of slate with a brushed finish over its pits and shelves, the chairs were so ergonomic that they had zero adjustment controls, because they knew much better than you ever could how to arrange themselves for your maximum comfort. [/p] [p] He was the last one through the door, and they all turned to stare at him. They all dressed for shit, in old fashioned slacks and high-tech walking shoes, company pocket-tees or baseball jerseys. None of them had a haircut that was worth a damn, not even the two women execs who co-ran Main Street. They dressed like the Middle Americans they catered to, or maybe a little better. [/p] [p] Sammy had always been a sharp dresser. He liked shirts that looked like good cotton but had a little stretch built into them so they rested tight at his chest, which was big, and tight at his waist, which was small. He liked jeans in whatever style jeans were being worn in Barcelona that year, which meant black jeans cut very square and wide-legged, ironed stiff without a crease. He had shades that had been designed to make his face look a little vulpine, a trait that he’d always known he had. It put people on edge if you looked a little wolfy. [/p] [p] He stopped outside the door of the board-room and squared up his shoulders. He was the youngest person on the board, and he’d always been the biggest, cockiest bastard in the room. He had to remember that if he was going to survive this next hour. [/p] [p] He came through the door and stopped and looked at the people around the table and waited for everyone to notice him. They looked so midwestern and goofy, and he gave them his wolfy smile—hello, little piggies, here to blow your house down. [/p] [p] “Hey, kids,” he said, and grabbed the coffee carafe and a mug off the sideboard. He filled his cup, then passed the carafe off, as though every meeting began with the passing-around of the low-grade stimulants. He settled into his seat and looked around expectantly. [/p] [p] “Glad you could make it, Sammy.” That was Wiener, who generally chaired the meetings. Theoretically, it was a rotating chairship, but there’s a certain kind of person who naturally ends up running every meeting, and Ron Wiener was that kind of person. He co-ran Tomorrowland with three faceless nonentities who had been promoted above their competence due to his inexplicable loyalty to them, and between the four of them, they’d managed to keep Tomorrowland the most embarrassingly badly themed part of the park. “We were just talking about you.” [/p] [p] “I love being the subject of conversation,” Sammy said. He slurped loudly at his coffee. [/p] [p] “What we were talking about was the utilization numbers from Fantasyland.” [/p] [p] Which sucked, Sammy knew. They’d been in free-fall for months now, and looking around at those cow-like midwestern faces, Sammy understood that it was time for the knives to come out. [/p] [p] “They suck,” Sammy said brightly. “That’s why we’re about to change things up.” [/p] [p] That preempted them. “Can you explain that some?” Wiener said, clicking his pen and squaring up his notepad. These jerks and their paper-fetish. [/p] [p] Sammy did his best thinking on his feet and on the move. Confident. Wolfy. You’re better than these jerks with their pads and their corn-fed notions. He sucked in a breath and began to pace and use his hands. [/p] [p] “We’re going to take out every under-utilized ride in the land, effective immediately. Lay off the dead-wood employees. We’re going to get a couple off-the-shelf thrill rides and give them a solid working-over for theming—build our own ride vehicles, queue areas and enclosures, big ones, weenies that will draw your eye from outside the main gate. But that’s just a stopgap. [/p] [p] “Next I’m going to start focus-grouping the fatkins. They’re ready-made for this stuff. All about having fun. Most of those ex-fatties used to pack this place when they were stuck in electric wheelchairs, but now they’re too busy—” he stopped himself from saying “fucking”—“Having more adult fun to come back, but anyone who can afford fatkins has discretionary income and we should have a piece of it. [/p] [p] “It’s hard to say without research, but I’m willing to bet that these guys will respond strongly to nostalgia. I’m thinking of reinstating the old Fantasyland dark-rides, digging parts out of storage, whatever we haven’t auctioned off on the collectibles market, anyway, and cloning the rest, but remaking them with a little, you know, darkness. Like the Pinocchio thing, but more so. Captain Hook’s grisly death. Tinker Bell’s inherent porniness. What kind of friendship did Snow White have with the dwarfs? You see where I’m going. Ironic—we haven’t done ironic in a long time. It’s probably due for a comeback.” [/p] [p] They stared at him in shocked silence. [/p] [p] “You say you’re going to do this when?” Wiener said. He’d want to know so he could get someone senior to intervene. [/p] [p] “You know, research first. We’ll shut down the crap rides next week and can the dead-wood. Want to commission the research today if I can. Start work on the filler thrill-rides next week too.” [/p] [p] He sat down. They continued to boggle. [/p] [p] “You’re serious about this?” [/p] [p] “About what? Getting rid of unprofitable stuff? Researching profitable directions? Yes and yes.” [/p] [p] There were other routine agenda items, which reminded Sammy of why he didn’t come to these meetings. He spent the time surfing readymade coasters and checking the intranet for engineer availability. He was just getting into the HR records to see who he’d have to lay off when they finally wound down and he sauntered out, giving his wolfy grin to all, with a special flash of it for Wiener. [/p] [p] [/p][hr /] [p][/p] [p] “Death, I’d like a word, please?” [/p] [p] “I’d be delighted.” Death talked like someone who’d learned to talk by being a precocious reader. He over-pronounced his words, spoke in complete sentences, and paused at the commas. Sammy knew that speech pattern well, since he’d worked hard to train himself out of it. It was a geek accent, and it made you sound like a smart-ass instead of a sharp operator. You got that way if you grew up trying to talk with a grown-up vocabulary and a child’s control of your speech-muscles; you learned to hold your chin and cheeks still while you spoke to give you a little precision-boost. That was the geek accent. [/p] [p] “Remember what we talked about this morning?” [/p] [p] “Building a thrill ride?” [/p] [p] “Yes,” Sammy said. He’d forgotten that Death Waits had suggested that in the first place. Good—that was a good spin. “I’ve decided to take your suggestion. Of course, we need to make room for it, so I’m going to shut down some of the crap—you know which ones I mean.” [/p] [p] Death Waits was green under his white makeup. “You mean—” [/p] [p] “All the walk-throughs. The coffin coaster, of course. The flying bats. Maybe one or two others. And I’m going to need to make some layoffs, of course. Gotta make room.” [/p] [p] “You’re going to lay people off? How many people? We’re already barely staffed.” Death was the official arbiter of shift-changing, schedule-swapping and cross-scheduling. If you wanted to take an afternoon off to get your mom out of the hospital or your dad out of jail, he was the one to talk to. [/p] [p] “That’s why I’m coming to you. If I shut down six of the rides—” Death gasped. Fantasyland had 10 rides in total. “Six of the rides. How many of the senior staffers can I get rid of and still have the warm bodies to keep everything running?” Senior people cost a lot more than the teenagers who came through. He could hire six juniors for what Death cost him. Frigging Florida labor laws meant that you had to give cost-of-living raises every year, and it added up. [/p] [p] Death looked like he was going to cry. [/p] [p] “I’ve got my own estimates,” Sammy said. “But I wanted to get a reality check from you, since you’re right there, on the ground. I’d hate to leave too much fat on the bone.” [/p] [p] He knew what effect this would have on the kid. Death blinked back his tears, put his fist under his chin and pulled out his phone and started scribbling on it. He had a list of every employee in there and he began to transfer names from it to another place. [/p] [p] “They’ll be back, right? To operate the new rides?” [/p] [p] “The ones we don’t bring back, we’ll get them unemployment counseling. Enroll them in a networking club for the jobless, one of the really good ones. We can get a group rate. A job reference from this place goes a long way, too. They’ll be OK.” [/p] ]