PART I

Copyright (C) 2010 by Cory Doctorow.

Makers

Cory Doctorow

doctorow@craphound.com

186,000 words

Tor Books: 978-0765312792

HarperCollins UK/Voyager: 978-0007325221

Last modified 21 Sept 2010

$$$$

About this download

There's a dangerous group of anti-copyright activists out there who

pose a clear and present danger to the future of authors and

publishing. They have no respect for property or laws. What's more,

they're powerful and organized, and have the ears of lawmakers and the

press.

I'm speaking, of course, of the legal departments at ebook publishers.

These people don't believe in copyright law. Copyright law says that

when you buy a book, you own it. You can give it away, you can lend

it, you can pass it on to your descendants or donate it to the local

homeless shelter. Owning books has been around for longer than

publishing books has. Copyright law has *always* recognized your right

to own your books. When copyright laws are made -- by elected

officials, acting for the public good -- they always safeguard this

right.

But ebook publishers don't respect copyright law, and they don't

believe in your right to own property. Instead, they say that when you

"buy" an ebook, you're really only *licensing* that book, and that

copyright law is superseded by the thousands of farcical, abusive

words in the license agreement you click through on the way to sealing

the deal. (Of course, the button on their website says, "Buy this

book" and they talk about "Ebook sales" at conferences -- no one says,

"License this book for your Kindle" or "Total licenses of ebooks are

up from 0.00001% of all publishing to 0.0001% of all publishing, a

100-fold increase!")

I say to hell with them. You bought it, you own it. I believe in

copyright law's guarantee of ownership in your books.

So you own this ebook. The license agreement (see below), is from

Creative Commons and it gives you even *more* rights than you get to a

regular book. Every word of it is a gift, not a confiscation. Enjoy.

What do I want from you in return? Read the book. Tell your

friends. Review it on Amazon or at your local bookseller. Bring it to

your bookclub. Assign it to your students (older students, please --

that sex scene is a scorcher) (*now* I've got your attention, don't

I?). As Woody Guthrie wrote:

"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085,

for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin' it without our

permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a

dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote

it, that's all we wanted to do."

Oh yeah. Also: if you like it, buy it

http://craphound.com/makers/buy

or donate a copy to a worthy, cash-strapped institution.

http://craphound.com/makers/donate

Why am I doing this? Because my problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity

(thanks, @timoreilly for this awesome aphorism). Because free ebooks

sell print books. Because I copied my ass off when I was 17 and grew

up to spend practically every discretionary cent I have on books when

I became an adult. Because I can't stop you from sharing it (zeroes

and ones aren't ever going to get harder to copy); and because readers

have shared the books they loved forever; so I might as well enlist

you to the cause.

I have always dreamt of writing sf novels, since I was six years

old. Now I do it. It is a goddamned dream come true, like growing up

to be a cowboy or an astronaut, except that you don't get oppressed by

ranchers or stuck on the launchpad in an adult diaper for 28 hours at

a stretch. The idea that I'd get dyspeptic over people -- *readers*

celebrating what I write is goddamned *bizarre*

So, download this book.

Some rules of the road:

It's kind of a tradition around here that my readers convert my ebooks

to their favorite formats and send them to me here, and it's one that

I love! If you've converted these files to another format, send them

to me (doctorow@craphound.com, subject Makers Conversion) and I'll

host them, but before you do, make sure you read the following:

* Only one conversion per format, first come, first serve. That means

that if someone's already converted the file to a Femellhebber 3000

document, that's the one you're going to find here. I just don't

know enough about esoteric readers to adjudicate disputes about what

the ideal format is for your favorite device.

* Make sure include a link to the reader as well. When you send me an

ebook file, make sure that you include a link to the website for the

reader technology as well so that I can include it below.

* No cover art. The text of this book is freely copyable, the cover,

not so much. The rights to it are controlled by my publisher, so

don't include it with your file.

* No DRM. The Creative Commons license prohibits sharing the file with

"DRM" (sometimes called "copy-protection") on it, and that's fine by

me. Don't send me the book with DRM on it. If you're converting to a

format that has a DRM option, make sure it's switched off.

$$$$

A word to professors, librarians, and people who want to donate money

to me

Every time I put a book online for free, I get emails from readers who

want to send me donations for the book. I appreciate their generous

spirit, but I'm not interested in cash donations, because my

publishers are really important to me. They contribute immeasurably to

the book, improving it, introducing it to audience I could never

reach, helping me do more with my work. I have no desire to cut them

out of the loop.

But there has to be some good way to turn that generosity to good use,

and I think I've found it.

Here's the deal: there are lots of professors and librarians who'd

love to get hard-copies of this book into their students' and patrons'

hands, but don't have the budget for it.

There are generous people who want to send some cash my way to thank

me for the free ebooks.

I'm proposing that we put them together.

If you're a prof or librarian and you want a free copy of Makers,

email freemakers@gmail.com with your name and the name and address of

your school. It'll be posted below by my fantastic helper, Olga Nunes,

so that potential donors can see it.

If you enjoyed the electronic edition of Makers and you want to donate

something to say thanks, check below to find a teacher or librarian

you want to support. Then go to Amazon, BN.com, or your favorite

electronic bookseller and order a copy to the classroom, then email a

copy of the receipt (feel free to delete your address and other

personal info first!) to freemakers@gmail.com so that Olga can mark

that copy as sent. If you don't want to be publicly acknowledged for

your generosity, let us know and we'll keep you anonymous, otherwise

we'll thank you on the donate page.

Check http://craphound.com/makers/donate for profs, librarians and

similar people seeking donations.

$$$$

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You are free:

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$$$$

Dedication:

For "the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things."

$$$$

PART I

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.

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.

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.

"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?"

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."

"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."

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.

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.

"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."

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.

"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.

"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.

"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.

"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."

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.

"Mr Kettlewell?" Rat-Toothed had clambered to his hind legs.

"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.

"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'?"

"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?"

Freddy nodded slowly. "In India, right?"

"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."

"You're going to help Americans who lost their jobs in your factories

buy goats and cellphones?"

"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.

She picked it up. It looked like a keychain laser-pointer, or maybe a

novelty light-saber.

"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.

Suzanne twisted the end and pointed it. A crisp rectangle of green

laser-light lit up the wall.

"Now, watch this," Kettlewell said.

NOW WATCH THIS

The words materialized in the middle of the rectangle on the distant

wall.

"Testing one two three," Kettlewell said.

TESTING ONE TWO THREE

"Donde esta el bano?"

WHERE IS THE BATHROOM

"What is it?" said Suzanne. Her hand wobbled a little and the distant

letters danced.

WHAT IS IT

"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.

"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."

All the while, Kettlewell's words were scrolling by in black block

caps on that distant wall: crisp, laser-edged letters.

"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.

"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.

"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.

"So, Freddy, to answer your question, no, we're not giving them loans

to buy cellphones and goats."

Kettlewell beamed. Suzanne twisted the laser-pointer off and made

ready to toss it back to the stage, but Kettlewell waved her off.

"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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?"

WHAT ARE YOUR PLANS FOR YOUR EXISTING WORKFORCE MR KETTLEWELL

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?

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.

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.

"I'm glad you asked that, Suzanne," he said, his voice barely audible.

I'M GLAD YOU ASKED THAT SUZANNE

The journalists chuckled. Even the chanters laughed a little. They

quieted down.

"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."

Freddy leaned over her shoulder, blowing shit-breath in her

ear. "Translation: you're ass-fucked, the lot of you."

TRANSLATION YOUR ASS FUCKED THE LOT OF YOU

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.

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.

THERE IS NO WORLD IN WHICH KODAK AND DURACELL GO ON MAKING FILM AND

BATTERIES

THE COMPANIES HAVE MONEY IN THE BANK BUT IT HEMORRHAGES OUT THE DOOR

EVERY DAY

WE ARE MAKING THINGS THAT NO ONE WANTS TO BUY

THIS PLAN INCLUDES A GENEROUS SEVERANCE FOR THOSE STAFFERS WORKING IN

THE PARTS OF THE BUSINESS THAT WILL CLOSE DOWN

-- 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.

BUT IF WE ARE TO MAKE GOOD ON THAT SEVERANCE WE NEED TO BE IN BUSINESS

WE NEED TO BE BRINGING IN A PROFIT SO THAT WE CAN MEET OUR OBLIGATIONS

TO ALL OUR STAKEHOLDERS SHAREHOLDERS AND WORKFORCE ALIKE

WE CAN'T PAY A PENNY IN SEVERANCE IF WE'RE BANKRUPT

WE ARE HIRING 50000 NEW EMPLOYEES THIS YEAR AND THERE'S NOTHING THAT

SAYS THAT THOSE NEW PEOPLE CAN'T COME FROM WITHIN

CURRENT EMPLOYEES WILL BE GIVEN CONSIDERATION BY OUR SCOUTS

ENTREPRENEURSHIP IS A DEEPLY AMERICAN PRACTICE AND OUR WORKERS ARE AS

CAPABLE OF ENTREPRENEURIAL ACTION AS ANYONE

I AM CONFIDENT WE WILL FIND MANY OF OUR NEW HIRES FROM WITHIN OUR

EXISTING WORKFORCE

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

Suzanne couldn't help but admire the pluck it took to keep speaking

into the pointer, despite the howls and bangs.

"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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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."

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.

She was getting ready to shut the lid and head for bed, so she pulled

her mail once more.

From: kettlewell-l@skunkworks.kodacell.com

To: schurch@sjmercury.com

Subject: Embedded journalist?

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.

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.

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.

Will you do something with us, if we can make it work? 100 percent

access, no oversight? Say you will. Please.

Your pal,

Kettlebelly

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

She turned on her heel and stalked back to her computer and thumped

the spacebar until the thing woke from sleep.

From: schurch@sjmercury.com

To: kettlewell-l@skunkworks.kodacell.com

Subject: Re: Embedded journalist?

Kettlebelly: that is one dumb nickname. I couldn't possibly associate

myself with a grown man who calls himself Kettlebelly.

So stop calling yourself Kettlebelly, immediately. If you can do that,

we've got a deal.

Suzanne

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.

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.

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.

From: kettlewell-l@skunkworks.kodacell.com

To: schurch@sjmercury.com

Subject: Re: Embedded journalist?

I will never call myself Kettlebelly again.

Your pal,

Kettledrum.

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.

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.

#

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.

"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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

"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.

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."

"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."

"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.

"Meet Lester," Perry said. "My partner."

"Sidekick," Lester said with a huge wink. "Sysadmin slash hardware

hacker slash dogsbody slashdot org."

She chuckled. Nerd humor. Ar ar ar.

"Right, let's get started. You wanna see what I do, right?" Perry

said.

"That's right," Suzanne said.

"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.

She took it. It was a Sesame Street Elmo doll, labeled BOOGIE WOOGIE

ELMO.

"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.

"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.

"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.

"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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

"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.

"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.

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.

"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.

"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.

"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.

"Elmos, HALT" Perry shouted and the car stopped silently, rocking

gently. "Stand DOWN." The Elmos sat down with a series of tiny thumps.

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?"

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.

"But have a look at part two, c'mere." He lumbered off in another

direction, and Suzanne and Perry trailed along behind him.

"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.

"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."

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.

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.

"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.

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.

"Who's the Van Halen fan?"

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!"

"Get what?" Perry said, also grinning.

"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."

She laughed again. Then she frowned a little. "Look, I hate to break

this party up, but I came here because Kettlebelly -- crap,

Kettle*well* -- 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?"

"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.

"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.

"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.

"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."

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.

"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."

"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. "

"And we need an MBA," Lester said. "Kodacell's sending us a business

manager to help us turn junk into pesos."

"Yeah," Perry said, with a worried flick of his eyes. "Yeah, a

business manager."

"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."

Suzanne took all this in, jotting notes on an old-fashioned

spiral-bound shirt-pocket notebook. "When's he arriving?"

"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?"

"Crazy," Suzanne agreed.

"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?"

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.

"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."

"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.

"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."

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.

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.

"Squatters?" she asked, pointing to the shantytown.

"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.

"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."

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.

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.

"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."

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.

"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!"

She was shaking. Perry and Lester closed ranks around her. Lester

moved to confront the homeless woman.

"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."

Lester cocked his head like the RCA Victor dog. He towered over the

skinny junkie, and was five or six times wider than her.

"You all right?" he said gently.

"Oh yeah, I'm just fine," she said. "Why, you looking for a party?"

He laughed. "You're joking -- I'd crush you!"

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."

The junkie flicked her eyes back and forth. "Listen can you spare a

dollar for my baby?"

"I think she just wanted to help you. Can I get you some lunch?"

"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."

"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."

The junkie cocked her head. Then she laughed. "Yeah, OK, yeah. Sure --

thanks, thanks a lot!"

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.

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.

Tony shook his head and ducked it. "OK, be right up," he said. "You

want to sit while you're waiting?"

"We'll wait here, thanks," Lester said. "Don't want her to think we're

bailing on her." He turned and waved at her.

"She's mean, you know -- be careful."

"Thanks, Tony," Lester said.

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.

"Great!" Lester said. "You guys sit down, I'll be back in a second."

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?"

"How do you know him?" she asked, taking out her notepad.

"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."

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.

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."

"You wouldn't lose weight if you could?"

"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."

"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.

"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.

"So, you say that there's a third coming out to work with you?"

"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."

"He's moving down without ever having met you?"

"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."

"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?"

Suzanne nodded. "That's a two-way street, you know. 'Suits' don't like

being talked down to by engineers."

Lester raised a hand. "Guilty as charged."

"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.

"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."

Perry cut in. "Or we could go to South Beach and get a good meal, if

that's more your speed."

"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."

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.

#

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.

"When it's done, it will make toast."

"Make toast?"

"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."

"OK, that's really cool, but I have to ask the boring question,

Perry. Why? Why build a toast-robot?"

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.

"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.

"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.

"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.

"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!

"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."

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.

"Yeah, isn't it just. Remember how small and shiny this thing was when

it shipped? 'A thousand songs in your pocket!'"

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."

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 --"

"I lose those things all the time, like a set a month."

"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.

"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."

"That brings us back to the question of your relationship with

Kodacell. They want to do what, exactly, with you?"

"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?"

"But you figure that this Tjan character will handle all the customer

stuff?"

"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."

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.

"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!

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.

"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."

"Yeah?" Perry said. He asked a technical question about the printer,

something about the goop's tensile strength that Suzanne couldn't

follow. They went at it, hammer and tongs, talking through the

abstruse details faster than she could follow, walking more and more

quickly past the vast heaps of dead technology and half-built mall

stores.

She let them get ahead of her and stopped to gather her thoughts. She

turned around to take it all in and that's when she caught sight of

the kids sneaking into Perry and Lester's lab.

"Hey!" she shouted, in her loudest Detroit voice. "What are you doing

there?" There were three of them, in Miami Dolphins jerseys and shiny

bald-shaved heads and little shorts, the latest inexplicable rapper

style which made them look more like drag queens in mufti than

tough-guys.

They rounded on her. They were heavyset and their eyebrows were

bleached blond. They had been sneaking into the lab's side-door,

looking about as inconspicuous as a trio of nuns.

"Get lost!" she shouted. "Get out of here! Perry, Lester!"

They were coming closer now. They didn't move so well, puffing in the

heat, but they clearly had mayhem on their minds. She reached into her

purse for her pepper spray and held it before her dramatically, but

they didn't stop coming.

Suddenly, the air was rent by the loudest sound she'd ever heard, like

she'd put her head inside a foghorn. She flinched and misted a cloud

of aerosol capsicum ahead of her. She had the presence of mind to step

back quickly, before catching a blowback, but she wasn't quick enough,

for her eyes and nose started to burn and water. The sound wouldn't

stop, it just kept going on, a sound like her head was too small to

contain her brain, a sound that made her teeth ache. The three kids

had stopped and staggered off.

"You OK?" The voice sounded like it was coming from far, far away,

though Lester was right in front of her. She found that she'd dropped

to her knees in the teeth of that astonishing noise.

She let him help her to her feet. "Jesus," she said, putting a hand to

her ears. They rang like she'd been at a rave all night. "What the

hell?"

"Anti-personnel sonic device," Lester said. She realized that he was

shouting, but she could barely hear it. "It doesn't do any permanent

damage, but it'll scare off most anyone. Those kids probably live in

the shantytown we passed this morning. More and more of them are

joining gangs. They're our neighbors, so we don't want to shoot them

or anything."

She nodded. The ringing in her ears was subsiding a little. Lester

steadied her. She leaned on him. He was big and solid. He wore the

same cologne as her father had, she realized.

She moved away from him and smoothed out her shorts, dusting off her

knees. "Did you invent that?"

"Made it using a HOWTO I found online," he said. "Lot of kids around

here up to no good. It's pretty much a homebrew civil defense siren --

rugged and cheap."

She put a finger in each ear and scratched at the itchy buzzing. When

she removed them, her hearing was almost back to normal. "I once had

an upstairs neighbor in Cambridge who had a stereo system that loud --

never thought I'd hear it again."

Perry came and joined them. "I followed them a bit, they're way gone

now. I think I recognized one of them from the campsite. I'll talk to

Francis about it and see if he can set them right."

"Have you been broken into before?"

"A few times. Mostly what we worry about is someone trashing the

printers. Everything else is easy to replace, but when Lester's old

employer went bust we bought up about fifty of these things at the

auction and I don't know where we'd lay hands on them again. Computers

are cheap and it's not like anyone could really *steal* all this

junk." He flashed her his good-looking, confident smile again.

"What time do the movies start?"

Lester checked his watch. "About an hour after sunset. If we leave now

we can get a real dinner at a Haitian place I know and then head over

to the Thunderbird. I'll hide under a blanket in the back seat so that

we can save on admission!"

She'd done that many times as a kid, her father shushing her and her

brother as they giggled beneath the blankets. The thought of giant

Lester doing it made her chuckle. "I think we can afford to pay for

you," she said.

The dinner was good -- fiery spicy fish and good music in an old tiki

bar with peeling grass wallpaper that managed to look vaguely

Haitian. The waiters spoke Spanish, not French, though. She let

herself be talked into two bottles of beer -- about one and a half

more than she would normally take -- but she didn't get

light-headed. The heat and humidity seemed to rinse the alcohol right

out of her bloodstream.

They got to the movies just at dusk. It was just like she remembered

from being a little girl and coming with her parents. Children in

pajamas climbed over a jungle-gym to one side of the lot. Ranked rows

of cars faced the huge, grubby white projection walls. They even

showed one of those scratchy old "Let's all go to the lobby and get

ourselves a treat" cartoon shorts with the dancing hot-dogs before the

movie.

The nostalgia filled her up like a balloon expanding in her chest. She

hadn't ever seen a computer until she was ten years old, and that had

been the size of a chest-freezer, with less capability than one of the

active printed-computer cards that came in glossy fashion magazines

with come-ons for perfume and weight-loss.

The world had been stood on its head so many times in the intervening

thirty-plus years that it was literally dizzying -- or was that the

beer having a delayed effect? Suddenly all the certainties she rested

on -- her 401k, her house, her ability to navigate the professional

world in a competent manner -- seemed to be built on shifting sands.

They'd come in Lester's car, a homemade auto built around two electric

Smart cars joined together to form a kind of mini-sedan with room

enough for Lester to slide into the driver's perch with room to

spare. Once they arrived, they unpacked clever folding chairs and sat

them beside the car, rolled down the windows, and turned up the

speakers. It was a warm night, but not sticky the way it had been that

day, and the kiss of the wind that rustled the leaves of the tall

palms ringing the theater was like balm.

The movie was something forgettable about bumbling detectives on the

moon, one of those trendy new things acted entirely by animated dead

actors who combined the virtues of box-office draw and cheap

labor. There might have been a couple of fictional actors in there

too, it was hard to say, she'd never really followed the movies except

as a place to escape to. There was real magic and escape in a

drive-in, though, with the palpable evidence of all those other

breathing humans in the darkened night watching the magic story

flicker past on the screen, something that went right into her

hindbrain. Before she knew it, her eyelids were drooping and then she

found herself jerking awake. This happened a couple times before

Lester slipped a pillow under her head and she sank into it and fell

into sleep.

She woke at the closing credits and realized that she'd managed to

prop the pillow on Lester's barrel-chest. She snapped her head up and

then smiled embarrassedly at him. "Hey, sleepyhead," he said. "You

snore like a bandsaw, you know it?"

She blushed. "I don't!"

"You do," he said.

"I do?"

Perry, on her other side nodded. "You do."

"God," she said.

"Don't worry, you haven't got anything on Lester," Perry said. "I've

gone into his room some mornings and found all the pictures lying on

the floor, vibrated off their hooks."

It seemed to her that Lester was blushing now.

"I'm sorry if I spoiled the movie," she said.

"Don't sweat it," Lester said, clearly grateful for the change of

subject. "It was a lousy movie anyway. You drowned out some truly foul

dialogue."

"Well, there's that."

"C'mon, let's go back to the office and get you your car. It's an hour

to Miami from here."

She was wide awake by the time she parked the rent-a-car in the

coffin-hotel's parking lot and crawled into her room, slapping the

air-con buttons up to full to clear out the stifling air that had

baked into the interior during the day.

She lay on her back in the dark coffin for a long time, eyes open and

slowly adjusting to the idiot lights on the control panel, until it

seemed that she was lying in a space capsule hurtling through the

universe at relativistic speeds, leaving behind history, the world,

everything she knew. She sat up, wide awake, on West Coast time

suddenly, and there was no way she would fall asleep now, but she lay

back down and then she did, finally.

The alarm woke her seemingly five minutes later. She did a couple laps

around the parking lot, padding around, stretching her legs, trying to

clear her head -- her internal clock thought that it was 4AM, but at

7AM on the east coast, the sun was up and the heat had begun to sizzle

all the available moisture into the air. She left the hotel and drove

around Miami for a while. She needed to find some toiletries and then

a cafe where she could sit down and file some copy. She'd tweeted a

bunch of working notes and posted a few things to her blog the day

before, but her editor expected something more coherent for those who

preferred their news a little more digested.

By the time she arrived at Perry's junkyard, the day had tipped for

afternoon, the sun no longer straight overhead, the heat a little

softer than it had been the day before. She settled in for another day

of watching the guys work, asking the occasional question. The column

she'd ended up filing had been a kind of wait-and-see piece,

describing the cool culture these two had going between them, and

asking if it could survive scaling up to mass production. Now she

experimented with their works-in-progress, sculptures and machines

that almost worked, or didn't work at all, but that showed the scope

of their creativity. Kettlewell thought that there were a thousand,

ten thousand people as creative as these two out there, waiting to be

discovered. Could it be true?

"Sure," Perry said, "why not? We're just here because someone dropped

the barrier to entry, made it possible for a couple of tinkerers to

get a lot of materials and to assemble them without knowing a whole

lot about advanced materials science. Wasn't it like this when the

Internet was starting out?"

"Woah," Suzanne said. "I just realized that you wouldn't really

remember those days, back in the early nineties."

"Sure I remember them. I was a kid, but I remember them fine!"

She felt very old. "The thing was that no one really suspected that

there were so many liberal arts majors lurking in the nation's

universities, dying to drop out and learn perl and HTML."

Perry cocked his head. "Yeah, I guess that's analogous. The legacy of

the dotcom years for me is all this free infrastructure, very cheap

network connections and hosting companies and so on. That, I guess,

combined with people willing to use it. I never really thought of it,

but there must have been a lot of people hanging around in the old

days who thought email and the net were pretty sketchy, right?"

She waved her hands at him. "Perry, lad, you don't know the half of

it. There are *still* executives in the rustbelt who spend bailout

money on secretaries to print out their email and then dictate replies

into tape recorders to be typed and sent."

He furrowed his thick eyebrows. "You're joking," he said.

She put her hand on her heart. "I kid you not. I knew people in the

newsroom at the Detroit Free Press. There are whole industries in this

country that are living in the last century.'

"Well, for me, all that dotcommie stuff was like putting down a good

base, making it easy for people like me to get parts and build-logs

and to find hardware hackers to jam with."

Perry got engrossed in a tricky bit of engine-in-seashell then and she

wandered over to Lester, who was printing out more Barbie heads for a

much larger version of his mechanical computer. "It'll be able to add,

subtract, and multiply any two numbers up to 99," he said. "It took

decades to build a vacuum-tube machine that could do that much -- I'm

doing it with *switches* in just three revs. In your face, UNIVAC!"

She laughed. He had a huge bag of laser-cut soda-can switches that he

was soldering onto a variety of substrates from polished car-doors to

a bamboo tiki-bar. She looked closely at the solder. "Is this what

sweatshop solder looks like?"

He looked confused, then said, "Oh! Right, Perry's thing. Yeah,

anything not done by a robot has this artisanal quality of blobbiness,

which I quite like, it's aesthetic, like a painting with visible

brushstrokes. But Perry's right: if you see solder like this on

anything that there are a million of, then you know that it was laid

down by kids and women working for slave wages. There's no way it's

cheaper to make a million solders by hand than by robot unless your

labor force is locked in, force-fed amphetamine, and destroyed for

anything except prostitution inside of five years. But here, in

something like this, so handmade and one of a kind, I think it gives

it a nice cargo-cult neoprimitive feel. Like a field of hand-tilled

furrows."

She nodded. Today she was keeping her computer out, writing down

quotes and tweeting thoughts as they came. They worked side by side in

companionable silence for a while as she killed a couple thousand

spams and he laid down a couple dozen blobs of solder.

"How do you like Florida?" he said, after straightening up and

cracking his back.

She barely stopped typing, deep into some email: "It's all right, I

suppose."

"There's great stuff here if you know where to look. Want me to show

you around a little tonight? It's Friday, after all."

"Sounds good. Is Perry free?"

It took her a second to register that he hadn't answered. She looked

up and saw he was blushing to the tips of his ears. "I thought we

could go out just the two of us. Dinner and a walk around the deco

stuff on Miami Beach?"

"Oh," she said. And the weird thing was, she took it seriously for a

second. She hadn't been on a date in something like a year, and he was

a really nice guy and so forth. But professional ethics made that

impossible, and besides.

And besides. He was huge. He'd told her he weighed nearly 400

pounds. So fat, he was, essentially, sexless. Round and unshaped,

doughy.

All of these thoughts in an instant and then she said, "Oh,

well. Listen, Lester, it's about professional ethics. I'm here on a

story and you guys are really swell, but I'm here to be

objective. That means no dating. Sorry." She said it in the same firm

tones as she'd used to turn down their offer to treat her at the IHOP:

a fact of life, something she just didn't do. Like turning down a

glass of beer by saying, "No thanks, I don't drink." No value

judgment.

But she could see that she had let her thinking show on her face, if

only for the briefest moment. Lester stiffened and his nostrils

flared. He wiped his hands on his thighs, then said, in a light tone,

"Sure, no problem. I understand completely. Should have thought of

that. Sorry!"

"No problem," she said. She pretended to work on her email a while

longer, then said, "Well, I think I'll call it a day. See you Monday

for Tjan's arrival, right?"

"Right!" he said, too brightly, and she slunk away to her car.

She spent the weekend blogging and seeing the beach. The people on the

beach seemed to be of another species from the ones she saw walking

the streets of Hollywood and Miami and Lauderdale. They had freakishly

perfect bodies, the kind of thing you saw in an anatomical drawing or

a comic-book -- so much muscular definition that they were practically

cross-hatched. She even tried out the nude beach, intrigued to see

these perfect specimens in the all-together, but she chickened out

when she realized that she'd need a substantial wax-job before her

body hair was brought down to norms for that strip of sand.

She did get an eyeful of several anatomically correct drawings before

taking off again. It made her uncomfortably horny and aware of how

long it had been since her last date. That got her thinking of poor

Lester, buried underneath all that flesh, and that got her thinking

about the life she'd chosen for herself, covering the weird world of

tech where the ground never stood still long enough for her to get her

balance.

So she retreated to blog in a cafe, posting snippets and impressions

from her days with the boys, along with photos. Her readers were all

over it, commenting like mad. Half of them thought it was disgusting

-- so much suffering and waste in the world and these guys were

inventing $10,000 toys out of garbage. The other half wanted to know

where to go to buy one for themselves. Halfway through Sunday, her

laptop battery finally died, needing a fresh weekly charge, so she

retreated again, to the coffin, to wait for Monday and the new day

that would dawn for Perry and Lester and Kodacell -- and her.

Tjan turned out to be a lot older than she'd expected. She'd pictured

him as about 28, smart and preppie like they all were when they were

fresh out of B-school and full of Management Wisdom. Instead, he was

about forty, balding, with a little pot-belly and thinning hair. He

dressed like an English professor, blue-jeans and a checked shirt and

a tweedy sports-coat that he'd shucked within seconds of leaving the

terminal at Miami airport and stepping into the blast-furnace heat.

They'd all come in Lester's big, crazy car, and squishing back in with

Tjan's suitcases was like a geometry trick. She found herself half on

Perry's lap, hugging half a big duffel-bag that seemed to be full of

bricks.

"Books," Tjan said. "Just a little personal library. It's a bad habit,

moving the physical objects around, but I'm addicted." He had a calm

voice that might in fact be a little dull, a prof's monotone.

They brought him to Perry and Lester's place, which was three condos

with the dividing walls knocked out in a complex that had long

rust-streaks down its sides and rickety balconies that had been eaten

away by salt air. There was a guardhouse at the front of the complex,

but it was shuttered, abandoned, and graffiti tagged.

Tjan stepped out of the car and put his hands on his hips and

considered the building. "It could use a coat of paint," he

said. Suzanne looked closely at him -- he was so deadpan, it was hard

to tell what was on his mind. But he slipped her a wink.

"Yeah," Perry said. "It could at that. On the bright side: spacious,

cheap and there's a pool. There's a lot of this down here since the

housing market crashed. The condo association here dissolved about

four years ago, so there's not really anyone who's in charge of all

the common spaces and stuff, just a few condo owners and speculators

who own the apartments. Suckers, I'm thinking. Our rent has gone down

twice this year, just for asking. I'm thinking we could probably get

them to pay us to live here and just keep out the bums and stuff."

The living quarters were nearly indistinguishable from the workshop at

the junkyard: strewn with cool devices in various stages of

disassembly, detritus and art. The plates and dishes and glasses all

had IHOP and Cracker Barrel logos on them. "From thrift shops," Lester

explained. "Old people steal them when they get their earlybird

specials, and then when they die their kids give them to

Goodwill. Cheapest way to get a matched set around here."

Tjan circled the three adjoined cracker-box condos like a dog circling

his basket. Finally, he picked an unoccupied master bedroom with moldy

lace curtains and a motel-art painting of an abstract landscape over

the headboard. He set his suitcase down on the faux-Chinoise chest of

drawers and said, "Right, I'm done. Let's get to work."

They took him to the workshop next and his expression hardly changed

as they showed him around, showed him their cabinets of wonders. When

they were done, he let them walk him to the IHOP and he ordered the

most austere thing on the menu, a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich

that was technically on the kids' menu -- a kids' menu at a place

where the grownups could order a plate of candy!

"So," Perry said. "So, Tjan, come on buddy, give it to me straight --

you hate it? Love it? Can't understand it?"

Tjan set down his sandwich. "You boys are very talented," he

said. "They're very good inventions. There are lots of opportunities

for synergy within Kodacell: marketing, logistics, even packing

materials. There's a little aerogel startup in Oregon that Kodacell is

underwriting that you could use for padding when you ship."

Perry and Lester looked at him expectantly. Suzanne broke the

silence. "Tjan, did you have any artistic or design ideas about the

things that these guys are making?"

Tjan took another bite of sandwich and sipped at his milk. "Well,

you'll have to come up with a name for them, something that identifies

them. Also, I think you should be careful with trademarked

objects. Any time you need to bring in an IP lawyer, you're going to

run into huge costs and time delays."

They waited again. "That's it?" Perry said. "Nothing about the designs

themselves?"

"I'm the business-manager. That's editorial. I'm artistically

autistic. Not my job to help you design things. It's my job to sell

the things you design."

"Would it matter what it was we were making? Would you feel the same

if it was toothbrushes or staplers?"

Tjan smiled. "If you were making staplers I wouldn't be here, because

there's no profit in staplers. Too many competitors. Toothbrushes are

a possibility, if you were making something really

revolutionary. People buy about 1.6 toothbrushes a year, so there's

lots of opportunity to come up with an innovative design that sells at

a good profit over marginal cost for a couple seasons before it gets

cloned or out-innovated. What you people are making has an edge

because it's you making it, very bespoke and distinctive. I think it

will take some time for the world to emerge an effective competitor to

these goods, provided that you can build an initial marketplace

mass-interest in them. There aren't enough people out there who know

how to combine all the things you've combined here. The system makes

it hard to sell anything above the marginal cost of goods, unless you

have a really innovative idea, which can't stay innovative for long,

so you need continuous invention and re-invention too. You two fellows

appear to be doing that. I don't know anything definitive about the

aesthetic qualities of your gadgets, nor how useful they'll be, but I

*do* understand their distinctiveness, so that's why I'm here."

It was longer than all the speeches he'd delivered since arriving, put

together. Suzanne nodded and made some notes. Perry looked him up and

down.

"You're, what, an ex-B-school prof from Cornell, right?"

"Yes, for a few years. And I ran a company for a while, doing

import-export from emerging economy states in the former Soviet bloc."

"I see," Perry said. "So you're into what, a new company every 18

months or something?"

"Oh no," Tjan said, and he had a little twinkle in his eye and the

tiniest hint of a smile. "Oh no. Every six months. A year at the

outside. That's my deal. I'm the business guy with the short attention

span."

"I see," Perry said. "Kettlewell didn't mention this."

At the junkyard, Tjan wandered around the Elmo-propelled Smart car and

peered at its innards, watched the Elmos negotiate their balance and

position with minute movements and acoustic signals. "I wouldn't worry

about it if I were you," he said. "You guys aren't temperamentally

suited to doing just one thing."

Lester laughed. "He's got you there, dude," he said, slapping Perry on

the shoulder.

Suzanne got Tjan out for dinner that night. "My dad was in

import-export and we travelled a lot, all over Asia and then the

former Soviets. He sent me away when I was 16 to finish school in the

States, and there was no question but that I would go to Stanford for

business school."

"Nice to meet a fellow Californian," she said, and sipped her

wine. They'd gone to one of the famed Miami deco restaurants and the

fish in front of her was practically a sculpture, so thoroughly plated

it was.

"Well, I'm as Californian as..."

"...as possible, under the circumstances," she said and laughed. "It's

a Canadian joke, but it applies equally well to Californians. So you

were in B-school when?"

"Ninety eight to 2001. Interesting times to be in the Valley. I read

your column, you know."

She looked down at her plate. A lot of people had read the column back

then. Women columnists were rare in tech, and she supposed she was

good at it, too. "I hope I get remembered as more than the chronicler

of the dot-com boom, though," she said.

"Oh, you will," he said. "You'll be remembered as the chronicler of

this -- what Kettlewell and Perry and Lester are doing."

"What you're doing, too, right?"

"Oh, yes, what I'm doing too."

A robot rollerbladed past on the boardwalk, turning the occasional

somersault. "I should have them build some of those," Tjan said,

watching the crowd turn to regard it. It hopped onto and off of the

curb, expertly steered around the wandering couples and the occasional

homeless person. It had a banner it streamed out behind it: CAP'N

JACKS PAINTBALL AND FANBOAT TOURS GET SHOT AND GET WET MIAMI KEY WEST

LAUDERDALE.

"You think they can?"

"Sure," Tjan said. "Those two can build anything. That's the point:

any moderately skilled practitioner can build anything these days, for

practically nothing. Back in the old days, the blacksmith just made

every bit of ironmongery everyone needed, one piece at a time, at his

forge. That's where we're at. Every industry that required a factory

yesterday only needs a garage today. It's a real return to

fundamentals. What no one ever could do was join up all the smithies

and all the smiths and make them into a single logical network with a

single set of objectives. That's new and it's what I plan on making

hay out of. This will be much bigger than dot-com. It will be much

harder, too -- bigger crests, deeper troughs. This is something to

chronicle all right: it will make dot-com look like a warm up for the

main show.

"We're going to create a new class of artisans who can change careers

every 10 months, inventing new jobs that hadn't been imagined a year

before."

"That's a pretty unstable market," Suzanne said, and ate some fish.