He followed her back to the store and he bought a tin robot made out of
a Pepsi can by some artisan in Vietnam who'd endowed it with huge tin
testicles. It made him laugh. When he got home, he scanned and filed the
receipt, took a picture, and entered it into The Inventory, and by the
time he was done, he was feeling much better.
#
They got into Kurt's car at five p.m., just as the sun was beginning to
set. The sun hung on the horizon, *right* at eye level, for an eternity,
slicing up their eyeballs and into their brains.
"Summer's coming on," Alan said.
"And we've barely got the Market covered," Kurt said. "At this rate,
it'll take ten years to cover the whole city."
Alan shrugged. "It's the journey, dude, not the destination -- the act
of organizing all these people, of putting up the APs, of advancing the
art. It's all worthwhile in and of itself."