“What have we here?” Alan said, as he wandered into Kurt’s shop, which had devolved into joyous bedlam. The shelves had been pushed up against the wall, clearing a large open space that was lined with long trestle tables. Crusty-punks, goth kids, hippie kids, geeks with vintage video-game shirts, and even a couple of older, hard-done-by street people crowded around the tables, performing a conglomeration of arcane tasks. The air hummed with conversation and coffee smells, the latter emanating from a catering-sized urn in the corner.
He was roundly ignored—and before he could speak again, one of the PCs on the floor started booming out fuzzy, grungy rockabilly music that made him think of Elvis cassettes that had been submerged in salt water. Half of the assembled mass started bobbing their heads and singing along while the other half rolled their eyes and groaned.
Kurt came out of the back and hunkered down with the PC, turning down the volume a little. “Howdy!” he said, spreading his arms and taking in the whole of his dominion.
“Howdy yourself,” Alan said. “What do we have here?”
“We have a glut of volunteers,” Kurt said, watching as an old rummy carefully shot a picture of a flat-panel LCD that was minus its housing. “I can’t figure out if those laptop screens are worth anything,” he said, cocking his head. “But they’ve been taking up space for far too long. Time we moved them.”
Alan looked around and realized that the workers he’d taken to be at work building access points were, in the main, shooting digital pictures of junk from Kurt’s diving runs and researching them for eBay listings. It made him feel good—great, even. It was like watching an Inventory being assembled from out of chaos.
“Where’d they all come from?”
Kurt shrugged. “I dunno. I guess we hit critical mass. You recruit a few people, they recruit a few people. It’s a good way to make a couple bucks, you get to play with boss crap, you get paid in cash, and you have colorful co-workers.” He shrugged again. “I guess they came from wherever the trash came from. The city provides.”
The homeless guy they were standing near squinted up at them. “If either of you says something like, Ah, these people were discarded by society, but just as with the junk we rescue from landfills, we have seen the worth of these poor folks and rescued them from the scrapheap of society, I’m gonna puke.”