"That's a *functional* market. Here's what I think the point of a good

market is. In a good market, you invent something and you charge all

the market will bear for it. Someone else figures out how to do it

cheaper, or decides they can do it for a slimmer margin -- not the

same thing, you know, in the first case someone is more efficient and

in the second they're just less greedy or less ambitious. They do it

and so you have to drop your prices to compete. Then someone comes

along who's less greedy or more efficient than both of you and

undercuts you again, and again, and again, until eventually you get

down to a kind of firmament, a baseline that you can't go lower than,

the cheapest you can produce a good and stay in business. That's why

straightpins, machine screws and reams of paper all cost basically

nothing, and make damned little profit for their manufacturers.

"So if you want to make a big profit, you've got to start over again,

invent something new, and milk it for all you can before the first

imitator shows up. The more this happens, the cheaper and better

everything gets. It's how we got here, you see. It's what the system

is *for*. We're approaching a kind of pure and perfect state now, with

competition and invention getting easier and easier -- it's producing

a kind of superabundance that's amazing to watch. My kids just surf

it, make themselves over every six months, learn a new interface, a

new entertainment, you name it. Change-surfers..." He trailed off.

"You have kids?"

"In St Petersburg, with their mother."

She could tell by his tone that it had been the wrong question to

ask. He was looking hangdog. "Well, it must be nice to be so much

closer to them than you were in Ithaca."

"What? No, no. The St Petersburg in *Russia*."

"Oh," she said.

They concentrated on their food for a while.

"You know," he said, after they'd ordered coffee and desert, "it's all

about abundance. I want my kids to grow up with abundance, and

whatever is going on right now, it's providing abundance in

abundance. The self-storage industry is bigger than the recording

industry, did you know that? All they do is provide a place to put

stuff that we own that we can't find room for -- that's

superabundance."

"I have a locker in Milpitas," she said.

"There you go. It's a growth industry." He drank his coffee. On the

way back to their cars, he said, "My daughter, Lyenitchka, is four,

and my son, Sasha, is one. I haven't lived with their mother in three

years." He made a face. "Sasha's circumstances were

complicated. They're good kids, though. It just couldn't work with

their mother. She's Russian, and connected -- that's how we met, I was

hustling for my import-export business and she had some good

connections -- so after the divorce there was no question of my taking

the kids with me. But they're good kids."

"Do you see them?"

"We videoconference. Who knew that long-distance divorce was the

killer app for videoconferencing?"

"Yeah."

That week, Suzanne tweeted constantly, filed two columns, and blogged

ten or more items a day: photos, bits of discussion between Lester,

Perry and Tjan, a couple videos of the Boogie Woogie Elmos doing

improbable things. Turned out that there was quite a cult following

for the BWE, and the news that there was a trove of some thousands of

them in a Hollywood dump sent a half-dozen pilgrims winging their way

across the nation to score some for the collectors' market. Perry

wouldn't even take their money: "Fella," he told one persistent

dealer, "I got forty *thousand* of these things. I won't miss a couple

dozen. Just call it good karma."

When Tjan found out about it he pursed his lips for a moment, then

said, "Let me know if someone wants to pay us money, please. I think

you were right, but I'd like to have a say, all right?"

Perry looked at Suzanne, who was videoing this exchange with her

keychain. Then he looked back at Tjan, "Yeah, of course. Sorry --

force of habit. No harm done, though, right?"

That footage got downloaded a couple hundred times that night, but

once it got slashdotted by a couple of high-profile headline

aggregators, she found her server hammered with a hundred thousand

requests. The Merc had the horsepower to serve them all, but you never

knew: every once in a while, the web hit another tipping point and

grew by an order of magnitude or so, and then all the

server-provisioning -- calculated to survive the old slashdottings --

shredded like wet kleenex.

From: kettlewell-l@skunkworks.kodacell.com

To: schurch@sjmercury.com

Subject: Re: Embedded journalist?

This stuff is amazing. Amazing! Christ, I should put you on the

payroll. Forget I wrote that. But i should. You've got a fantastic

eye. I have never felt as in touch with my own business as I do at

this moment. Not to mention proud! Proud -- you've made me so proud of

the work these guys are doing, proud to have some role in it.

Kettlebelly

She read it sitting up in her coffin, just one of several hundred

emails from that day's blog-posts and column. She laughed and dropped

it in her folder of correspondence to answer. It was nearly midnight,

too late to get into it with Kettlewell.

Then her computer rang -- the net-phone she forwarded her cellphone to

when her computer was live and connected. She'd started doing that a

couple years back, when soft-phones really stabilized, and her phone

bills had dropped to less than twenty bucks a month, down from several

hundred. It wasn't that she spent a lot of time within arm's reach of

a live computer, but given that calls routed through the laptop were

free, she was perfectly willing to defer her calls until she was.

"Hi Jimmy," she said -- her editor, back in San Jose. 9PM Pacific time

on a weeknight was still working hours for him.

"Suzanne," he said.

She waited. She'd half expected him to call with a little shower of

praise, an echo of Kettlewell's note. Jimmy wasn't the most effusive

editor she'd had, but it made his little moments of praise more

valuable for their rarity.

"Suzanne," he said again.

"Jimmy," she said. "It's late here. What's up?"

"So, it's like this. I love your reports but it's not Silicon Valley

news. It's Miami news. McClatchy handed me a thirty percent cut this

morning and I'm going to the bone. I am firing a third of the newsroom

today. Now, you are a stupendous writer and so I said to myself, 'I

can fire her or I can bring her home and have her write about Silicon

Valley again,' and I knew what the answer had to be. So I need you to

come home, just wrap it up and come home."

He finished speaking and she found herself staring at her computer's

screen. Her hands were gripping the laptop's edges so tightly it hurt,

and the machine made a plasticky squeak as it began to bend.

"I can't do that, Jimmy. This is stuff that Silicon Valley needs to

know about. This may not be what's happening *in* Silicon Valley, but

it sure as shit is what's happening *to* Silicon Valley." She hated

that she'd cussed -- she hadn't meant to. "I know you're in a hard

spot, but this is the story I need to cover right now."

"Suzanne, I'm cutting a third of the newsroom. We're going to be

covering stories within driving distance of this office for the

foreseeable future, and that's it. I don't disagree with a single

thing you just said, but it doesn't matter: if I leave you where you

are, I'll have to cut the guy who covers the school boards and the

city councils. I can't do that, not if I want to remain a daily

newspaper editor."

"I see," she said. "Can I think about it?"

"Think about what, Suzanne? This has not been the best day for me, I

have to tell you, but I don't see what there is to think about. This

newspaper no longer has correspondents who work in Miami and London

and Paris and New York. As of today, that stuff comes from bloggers,

or off the wire, or whatever -- but not from our payroll. You work for

this newspaper, so you need to come back here, because the job you're

doing does not exist any longer. The job you have with us is

here. You've missed the night-flight, but there's a direct flight

tomorrow morning that'll have you back by lunchtime tomorrow, and we

can sit down together then and talk about it, all right?"

"I think --" She felt that oh-shit-oh-shit feeling again, that

needing-to-pee feeling, that tension from her toes to her

nose. "Jimmy," she said. "I need a leave of absence, OK?"

"What? Suzanne, I'm sure we owe you some vacation but now isn't the

time --"

"Not a vacation, Jimmy. Six months leave of absence, without pay." Her

savings could cover it. She could put some banner ads on her

blog. Florida was cheap. She could rent out her place in

California. She was six steps into the plan and it had only taken ten

seconds and she had no doubts whatsoever. She could talk to that

book-agent who'd pinged her last year, see about getting an advance on

a book about Kodacell.

"Are you quitting?"

"No, Jimmy -- well, not unless you make me. But I need to stay here."

"The work you're doing there is fine, Suzanne, but I worked really

hard to protect your job here and this isn't going to help make that

happen."

"What are you saying?"

"If you want to work for the Merc, you need to fly back to San Jose,

where the Merc is published. I can't make it any clearer than that."

No, he couldn't. She sympathized with him. She was really well paid by

the Merc. Keeping her on would mean firing two junior writers. He'd

cut her a lot of breaks along the way, too -- let her feel out the

Valley in her own way. It had paid off for both of them, but he'd

taken the risk when a lot of people wouldn't have. She'd be a fool to

walk away from all that.

She opened her mouth to tell him that she'd be on the plane in the

morning, and what came out was, "Jimmy, I really appreciate all the

work you've done for me, but this is the story I need to write. I'm

sorry about that."

"Suzanne," he said.

"Thank you, Jimmy," she said. "I'll get back to California when I get

a lull and sort out the details -- my employee card and stuff."

"You know what you're doing, right?"

"Yeah," she said. "I do."

When she unscrewed her earpiece, she discovered that her neck was

killing her. That made her realize that she was a forty-five-year-old

woman in America without health insurance. Or regular income. She was

a journalist without a journalistic organ.

She'd have to tell Kettlewell, who would no doubt offer to put her on

the payroll. She couldn't do that, of course. Neutrality was hard

enough to maintain, never mind being financially compromised.

She stepped out of the coffin and sniffed the salty air. Living in the

coffin was expensive. She'd need to get a condo or something. A place

with a kitchen where she could prep meals. She figured that Perry's

building would probably have a vacancy or two.

#

The second business that Tjan took Perry into was even more successful

than the first, and that was saying something. It only took a week for

Tjan to get Perry and Lester cranking on a Kitchen Gnome design that

mashed together some Homeland Security gait-recognition software with

a big solid-state hard-disk and a microphone and a little camera, all

packaged together in one of a couple hundred designs of a garden-gnome

figurine that stood six inches tall. It could recognize every member

of a household by the way they walked and play back voice-memos for

each. It turned out to be a killer tool for context-sensitive

reminders to kids to do the dishes, and for husbands, wives and

roommates to nag each other without getting on each others'

nerves. Tjan was really jazzed about it, as it tied in with some

theories he had about the changing US demographic, trending towards

blended households in urban centers, with three or more adults

co-habitating.

"This is a rich vein," he said, rubbing his hands together. "Living

communally is hard, and technology can make it easier. Roommate

ware. It's the wave of the future."

There was another Kodacell group in San Francisco, a design outfit

with a bunch of stringers who could design the gnomes for them and

they did great work. The gnomes were slightly lewd-looking, and they

were the product of a generative algorithm that varied each one. Some

of the designs that fell out of the algorithm were jaw-droppingly

weird -- Perry kept a three-eyed, six-armed version on his desk. They

tooled up to make them by the hundred, then the thousand,then the tens

of thousand. The fact that each one was different kept their margins

up, but as the Gnomes gained popularity their sales were steadily

eroded by knock-offs, mostly from Eastern Europe.

The knockoffs weren't as cool-looking -- though they were certainly

weirder looking, like the offspring of a Norwegian troll and an anime

robot -- but they were more feature-rich. Some smart hacker in Russia

was packing all kinds of functionality onto a single chip, so that

their trolls cost less and did more: burglar alarms, baby-monitors,

streaming Internet radio source, and low-reliability medical

diagnostic that relied on quack analysis of eye pigment, tongue

coating and other newage (rhymes with sewage) indicators.

Lester came back from the Dollar Store with a big bag of trolls, a

dozen different models, and dumped them out on Tjan's desk, up in old

foreman's offices on the catwalk above the workspaces. "Christ, would

you look at these? They're selling them for less than our cost to

manufacture. How do we compete with this?"

"We don't," Tjan said, and rubbed his belly. "Now we do the next

thing."

"What's the next thing?" Perry said.

"Well, the first one delivered a return-on-investment at about twenty

times the rate of any Kodak or Duracell business unit in the history

of either company. But I'd like to shoot for thirty to forty times

next, if that's all right with you. So let's go see what you've

invented this week and how we can commercialize it."

Perry and Lester just looked at each other. Finally, Lester said, "Can

you repeat that?"

"The typical ROI for a Kodacell unit in the old days was about four

percent. If you put a hundred dollars in, you'd get a hundred and four

dollars out, and it would take about a year to realize. Of course, in

the old days, they wouldn't have touched a new business unless they

could put a hundred million in and get a hundred and four million

out. Four million bucks is four million bucks.

"But here, the company put fifty thousand into these dolls and three

months later, they took seventy thousand out, after paying our

salaries and bonuses. That's a forty percent ROI. Seventy thousand

bucks isn't four million bucks, but forty percent is forty

percent. Not to mention that our business drove similar margins in

three other business units."

"I thought we'd screwed up by letting these guys eat our lunch,"

Lester said, indicating the dollar-store trolls.

"Nope, we got in while the margins were high, made a good return, and

now we'll get out as the margins drop. That's not screwing up, that's

doing the right thing. The next time around, we'll do something more

capital intensive and we'll take out an even higher margin: so show me

something that'll cost two hundred grand to get going and that we can

pull a hundred and sixty thou's worth of profit out of for Kodacell in

three months. Let's do something ambitious this time around."

Suzanne took copious notes. There'd been a couple weeks' awkwardness

early on about her scribbling as they talked, or videoing with her

keychain. But once she'd moved into the building with the guys, taking

a condo on the next floor up, she'd become just a member of the team,

albeit a member who tweeted nearly every word they uttered to a feed

that was adding new subscribers by the tens of thousands.

"So, Perry, what have you got for Tjan?" she asked.

"I came up with the last one," he said, grinning -- they always ended

up grinning when Tjan ran down economics for them. "Let Lester take

this one."

Lester looked shy -- he'd never fully recovered from Suzanne turning

him down and when she was in the room, he always looked like he'd

rather be somewhere else. He participated in the message boards on her

blog though, the most prolific poster in a field with thousands of

very prolific posters. When he posted, others listened: he was witty,

charming and always right.

"Well, I've been thinking a lot about roommate-ware, 'cause I know

that Tjan's just crazy for that stuff. I've been handicapped by the

fact that you guys are such excellent roomies, so I have to think back

to my college days to remember what a bad roommate is like, where the

friction is. Mostly, it comes down to resource contention, though: I

wanna cook, but your dishes are in the sink; I wanna do laundry but

your boxers are in the dryer; I wanna watch TV, but your crap is all

over the living room sofa."

Living upstairs from the guys gave her fresh insight into how the

Kodacell philosophy would work out. Kettlewell was really big on

communal living, putting these people into each other's pockets like

the old-time geek houses of pizza-eating hackers, getting that

in-the-trenches camaraderie. It had taken a weekend to put the most

precious stuff in her California house into storage and then turn over

the keys to a realtor who'd sort out leasing it for her. The monthly

check from the realtor left more than enough for her to pay the rent

in Florida and then some, and once the UPS man dropped off the five

boxes of personal effects she'd chosen, she was practically at home.

She sat alone over the guys' apartments in the evenings, windows open

so that their muffled conversations could drift in and form the

soundtrack as she wrote her columns. It made her feel curiously with,

but not of, their movement -- a reasonable proxy for journalistic

objectivity in this age of relativism.

"Resource contention readily decomposes into a bunch of smaller

problems, with distinctive solutions. Take dishes: every dishwasher

should be designed with a 'clean' and a 'dirty' compartment --

basically, two logical dishwashers. You take clean dishes out of the

clean side, use them, and put them into the dirty side. When the dirty

side is full, the clean side is empty, so you cycle the dishwasher and

the clean side becomes dirty and vice-versa. I had some sketches for

designs that would make this happen, but it didn't feel right: making

dishwashers is too industrial for us. I either like making big chunks

of art or little silver things you can carry in your pocket."

She smiled despite herself. She was drawing a half-million readers a

day by doing near-to-nothing besides repeating the mind-blowing

conversations around her. It had taken her a month to consider putting

ads on the site -- lots of feelers from blog "micro-labels" who wanted

to get her under management and into their banner networks, and she

broke down when one of them showed her a little spreadsheet detailing

the kind of long green she could expect to bring in from a couple of

little banners, with her getting the right to personally approve every

advertiser in the network. The first month, she'd made more money than

all but the most senior writers on the Merc. The next month, she'd

outstripped her own old salary. She'd covered commercial blogs, the

flamboyant attention-whores who'd bought stupid cars and ridiculous

bimbos with the money, but she'd always assumed they were in a

different league from a newspaper scribbler. Now she supposed all the

money meant that she should make it official and phone in a

resignation to Jimmy, but they'd left it pretty ambiguous as to

whether she was retiring or taking a leave of absence and she was

reluctant to collapse that waveform into the certainty of saying

goodbye to her old life.

"So I got to thinking about snitch-tags, radio frequency ID

gizmos. Remember those? When we started talking about them a decade

ago, all the privacy people went crazy, totally sure that these things

would be bad news. The geeks dismissed them as not understanding the

technology. Supposedly, an RFID can only be read from a couple inches

away -- if someone wanted to find out what RFIDs you had on your

person, they'd have to wand you, and you'd know about it."

"Yeah, that was bull," Perry said. "I mean, sure you can't read an

RFID unless it's been excited with electromagnetic radiation, and

*sure* you can't do that from a hundred yards without frying

everything between you and the target. But if you had a subway

turnstile with an exciter built into it, you could snipe all the tag

numbers from a distant roof with a directional antenna. If those

things had caught on, there'd be exciters everywhere and you'd be able

to track anyone you wanted -- Christ, they even put RFIDs in the

hundred-dollar bill for a while! Pickpockets could have figured out

whose purse was worth snatching from half a mile a way!"

"All true," Lester said. "But that didn't stop these guys. There are

still a couple of them around, limping along without many

customers. They print the tags with inkjets, sized down to about a

third the size of a grain of rice. Mostly used in supply-chain

management and such. They can supply them on the cheap.

"Which brings me to my idea: why not tag everything in a group

household, and use the tags to figure out who left the dishes in the

sink, who took the hammer out and didn't put it back, who put the

empty milk-carton back in the fridge, and who's got the TV remote? It

won't solve resource contention, but it will limit the social factors

that contribute to it." He looked around at them. "We can make it fun,

you know, make cool RFID sticker designs, mod the little gnome dolls

to act as terminals for getting reports."

Suzanne found herself nodding along. She could use this kind of thing,

even though she lived alone, just to help her find out where she left

her glasses and the TV remote.

Perry shook his head, though. "When I was a kid, I had a really bad

relationship with my mom. She was really smart, but she didn't have a

lot of time to reason things out with me, so often as not she'd get

out of arguing with me by just changing her story. So I'd say, 'Ma,

can I go to the mall this aft?' and she'd say, 'Sure, no problem.'

Then when I was getting ready to leave the house, she'd ask me where I

thought I was going. I'd say, 'To the mall, you said!' and she'd just

deny it. Just deny it, point blank.

"I don't think she even knew she was doing it. I think when I asked

her if I could go, she'd just absentmindedly say yes, but when it

actually came time to go out, she'd suddenly remember all my

unfinished chores, my homework, all the reasons I should stay home. I

think every kid gets this from their folks, but it made me fucking

crazy. So I got a mini tape recorder and I started to *tape* her when

she gave me permission. I thought I'd really nail her the next time

she changed her tune, play her own words back in her ear.

"So I tried it, and you know what happened? She gave me nine kinds of

holy hell for wearing a wire and then she said it didn't matter what

she'd said that morning, she was my mother and I had chores to do and

no *how* was I going *anywhere* now that I'd started sneaking around

the house with a hidden recorder. She took it away and threw it in the

trash. And to top it off, she called me 'J. Edgar' for a month.

"So here's my question: how would you feel if the next time you left

the dishes in the sink, I showed up with the audit trail for the

dishes and waved it in your face? How would we get from that point to

a happy, harmonious household? I think you've mistaken the cause for

the effect. The problem with dishes in the sink isn't just that it's a

pain when I want to cook a meal: it's that when you leave them in the

sink, you're being inconsiderate. And the *reason* you've left them in

the sink, as you've pointed out, is that putting dishes in the

dishwasher is a pain in the ass: you have to bend over, you have to

empty it out, and so on. If we moved the dishwasher into the kitchen

cupboards and turned half of them into a dirty side and half into a

clean side, then disposing of dishes would be as easy as getting them

out."

Lester laughed, and so did Tjan. "Yeah, yeah -- OK. Point taken. But

these RFID things, they're so frigging cheap and potentially useful. I

just can't believe that they've never found a single really compelling

use in all this time. It just seems like an opportunity that's going

to waste."

"Maybe it's a dead end. Maybe it's an ornithopter. Inventors spent

hundreds of years trying to build an airplane that flew by flapping

its wings, and it was all a rat-hole."

"I guess," Lester said. "But I don't like the idea."

"Like it or don't, " Perry said, "doesn't affect whether it's true or

not."

But Lester had a sparkle in his eye, and he disappeared into his

workshop for a week, and wouldn't let them in, which was unheard of

for the big, gregarious giant. He liked to drag the others in whenever

he accomplished anything of note, show it off to them like a big kid.

That was Sunday. Monday, Suzanne got a call from her realtor. "Your

tenants have vanished," she said.

"Vanished?" The couple who'd rented her place had been as reliable as

anyone she'd ever met in the Valley. He worked at a PR agency, she

worked in marketing at Google. Or maybe he worked in marketing and she

was in PR at Google -- whatever, they were affluent, well-spoken, and

had paid the extortionate rent she'd charged without batting an eye.

"They normally paypal the rent to me on the first, but not this

month. I called and left voicemail the next day, then followed up with

an email. Yesterday I went by the house and it was empty. All their

stuff was gone. No food in the fridge. I think they might have taken

your home theater stuff, too."

"You're fucking kidding me," Suzanne said. It was 11AM in Florida and

she was into her second glass of lemonade as the sun began to

superheat the air. Back in California, it was 8AM. Her realtor was

pulling long hours, and it wasn't her fault. "Sorry. Right. OK, what

about the deposit?"

"You waived it."

She had. It hadn't seemed like a big deal at the time. The distant

owner of the condo she was renting in Florida hadn't asked for

one. "So I did. Now what?"

"You want to swear out a complaint against them?"

"With the police?"

"Yeah. Breach of contract. Theft, if they took the home theater. We

can take them to collections, too."

Goddamned marketing people had the collective morals of a snake. All

of them useless, conniving, shallow -- she never should have...

"Yeah, OK. And what about the house?"

"We can find you another tenant by the end of the month, I'm

sure. Maybe a little earlier. Have you thought any more about selling

it?"

She hadn't, though the realtor brought it up every time they

spoke. "Is now a good time?"

"Lot of new millionaires in the Valley shopping for houses,

Suzanne. More than I've seen in years." She named a sum that was a

third higher than the last time they'd talked it over.

"Is it peaking?"

"Who knows? It might go up, it might collapse again. But now is the

best time to sell in the past ten years. You'd be smart to do it."

She took a deep breath. The Valley was dead, full of venal marketing

people and buck-chasers. Here in Florida, she was on the cusp of the

next thing, and it wasn't happening in the Valley: it was happening

everywhere *except* the Valley, in the cheap places where innovation

could happen at low rents. Leaky hot tub, incredible property taxes,

and the crazy roller-coaster ride -- up 20 percent this month, down

forty next. The bubble was going to burst some day and she should sell

out now.

"Sell it," she said.

"You're going to be a wealthy lady," the realtor said.

"Right," Suzanne said.

"I have a buyer, Suzanne. I didn't want to pressure you. But I can

sell it by Friday. Close escrow next week. Cash in hand by the

fifteenth."

"Jesus," she said. "You're joking."

"No joke," the realtor said. "I've got a waiting list for houses on

your block."

And so Suzanne got on an airplane that night and flew back to San Jose

and took a pricey taxi back to her place. The marketdroids had left it

in pretty good shape, clean and tidy, clean sheets in the linen

cupboard. She made up her bed and reflected that this would be the

last time she made this bed -- the next time she stripped the sheets,

they'd go into a long-term storage box. She'd done this before, on her

way out of Detroit, packing up a life into boxes and shoving it into

storage. What had Tjan said? "The self-storage industry is bigger than

the recording industry, did you know that? All they do is provide a

place to put stuff that we own that we can't find room for -- that's

superabundance."

Before bed she posted a classified on Craigslist for a couple helpers

to work on boxing stuff, emailed Jimmy to see if he wanted lunch, and

looked up the address for the central police station to swear out her

complaint. The amp, speakers, and A/V switcher were all missing from

her home theater.

She had a dozen helpers to choose from the next morning. She picked

two who came with decent references, marveling that it was suddenly

possible in Silicon Valley to get anyone to show up anywhere for ten

bucks an hour. The police sergeant who took the complaint was

sympathetic and agreed with her choice to get out of town. "I've had

it with this place, too. Soon as my kids are out of high-school I'm

moving back to Montana. I miss the weather."

She didn't think of the marketdroids again until the next day, when

she and her helpers were boxing up the last of her things and loading

them into her U-Haul. Then a BMW convertible screeched around the

corner and burned rubber up to her door.

The woman marketdroid was driving, looking crazy and disheveled, eyes

red-rimmed, one heel broken off of her shoes.

"What the FUCK is your problem, lady?" she said, as she leapt out of

her car and stalked toward Suzanne.

Instinctively, Suzanne shrank back and dropped the box of books she

was holding. It spilled out over her lawn.

"Fiona?" she said. "What's happened?"

"I was *arrested.* They came to my workplace and led me out in

handcuffs. I had to make *bail*."

Suzanne's stomach shrank to a little pebble, impossibly heavy. "What

was I supposed to do? You two took off with my home theater!"

"What home theater? Everything was right where you left it when I

went. I haven't lived here in *weeks*. Tom left me last month and I

moved out."

"You moved out?"

"Yeah, bitch, I *moved out*. Tom was your tenant, not me. If he ripped

something off, that's between you and him."

"Look, Fiona, wait, hold up a second. I tried to call you, I sent you

email. No one was paying the rent, no one told me that you'd moved

out, and no one answered when I tried to find out what had happened."

"That sounds like an *explanation,* she said, hissing. "I'm waiting

for a fucking *apology.* They took me to *prison*."

Suzanne knew that the local lockup was a long way from prison. "I

apologize," she said. "Can I get you a cup of coffee? Would you like

to use the shower or anything?"

The woman glared at her a moment longer, then slowly folded in on

herself, collapsing, coughing and sobbing on the lawn.

Suzanne stood with her arms at her sides for a moment. Her Craigslist

helpers had gone home, so she was all alone, and this woman, whom

she'd met only once before, in passing, was clearly having some real

problems. Not the kind of thing she dealt with a lot -- her life

didn't include much person-to-person hand-holding.

But what can you do? She knelt beside Fiona in the grass and took her

hand. "Let's get you inside, OK?"

At first it was as though she hadn't heard, but slowly she

straightened up and let Suzanne lead her into the house. She was

twenty-two, twenty-three, young enough to be Suzanne's daughter if

Suzanne had gone in for that sort of thing. Suzanne helped her to the

sofa and sat her down amid the boxes still waiting to go into the

U-Haul. The kitchen was packed up, but she had a couple bottles of

Diet Coke in the cooler and she handed one to the girl.

"I'm really sorry, Fiona. Why didn't you answer my calls or email?"

She looked at Suzanne, her eyes lost in streaks of mascara. "I don't

know. I didn't want to talk about it. He lost his job last month and

kind of went crazy, told me he didn't want the responsibility

anymore. What responsibility? But he told me to go, told me it would

be best for both of us if we were apart. I thought it was another

girl, but I don't know. Maybe it was just craziness. Everyone I know

out here is crazy. They all work a hundred hours a week, they get

fired or quit their jobs every five months. Everything is so

expensive. My rent is three quarters of my salary."

"It's really hard," Suzanne said, thinking of the easy, lazy days in

Florida, the hackers' idyll that Perry and Lester enjoyed in their

workshops.

"Tom was on antidepressants, but he didn't like taking them. When he

was on them, he was pretty good, but when he went off, he turned

into... I don't know. He'd cry a lot, and shout. It wasn't a good

relationship, but we moved out here from Oregon together, and I'd

known him all my life. He was a little moody before, but not like he

was here."

"When did you speak to him last?" Suzanne had found a couple of

blister-packs of anti-depressants in the medicine chest. She hoped

that wasn't Tom's only supply.

"We haven't spoken since I moved out."

An hour later, the mystery was solved. The police went to Tom's

workplace and discovered that he'd been fired the week before. They

tried the GPS in his car and it finked him out as being in a ghost

mall's parking lot near his old office. He was dead behind the wheel,

a gun in his hand, shot through the heart.

Suzanne took the call and though she tried to keep her end of the

conversation quiet and neutral, Fiona -- still on the sofa, drinking

the warm, flat Coke -- knew. She let out a moan like a dog that's been

kicked, and then a scream. For Suzanne, it was all unreal,

senseless. The cops told her that her home theater components were

found in the trunk of the car. No note.

"God, oh God, Jesus, you selfish shit fucking bastard," Fiona

sobbed. Awkwardly, Suzanne sat down beside her and took her into a

one-armed hug. Her helpers were meeting her at the self-storage the

next day to help her unload the U-Haul.

"Do you have someone who can stay with you tonight?" Suzanne asked,

praying the answer was yes. She had a house to move out of. Christ,

she felt so cold-blooded, but she was on a goddamned schedule.

"Yes, I guess." Fiona scrubbed at her eyes with her fists. "Sure."

Suzanne sighed. The lie was plain. "Who?"

Fiona stood up and smoothed out her skirt. "I'm sorry," she said, and

started for the door.

Groaning inwardly, Suzanne blocked her. "You'll stay on the sofa," she

said. "You're not driving in this state. I'll order in

pizza. Pepperoni mushroom OK?"

Looking defeated, Fiona turned on her heel and went back to the sofa.

Over pizza, Suzanne pulled a few details out of her. Tom had fallen

into a funk when the layoffs had started in his office -- they were

endemic across the Valley, another bust was upon them. His behavior

had grown worse and worse, and she'd finally left, or been thrown out,

it wasn't clear. She was on thin ice at Google, and they were laying

people off too, and she was convinced that being led out in handcuffs

would be the straw that broke the camel's back.

"I should move back to Oregon," she said, dropping her slice back on

the box-top.

Suzanne had heard a lot of people talk about giving up on the Valley

since she'd moved there. It was a common thing, being beaten down by

life in the Bay Area. You were supposed to insert a pep talk here,

something about hanging in, about the opportunities here.

"Yes," she said, "that's a good idea. You're young, and there's a life

for you there. You can start something up, or go to work for someone

else's startup." It felt weird coming out of her mouth, like a

betrayal of the Valley, of some tribal loyalty to this tech-Mecca. But

after all, wasn't she selling up and moving east?

"There's nothing in Oregon," Fiona said, snuffling.

"There's something everywhere. Let me tell you about some friends of

mine in Florida," and she told her, and as she told her, she told

herself. Hearing it spoken aloud, even after having written about it

and written about it, and been there and DONE it, it was

different. She came to understand how fucking *cool* it all was, this

new, entrepreneurial, inventive, amazing thing she was engaged

in. She'd loved the contrast of nimble software companies when

compared with gigantic, brutal auto companies, but what her boys were

doing, it made the software companies look like lumbering lummoxes,

crashing around with their fifty employees and their big purpose-built

offices.

Fiona was disbelieving, then interested, then excited. "They just make

this stuff, do it, then make something else?"

"Exactly -- no permanence except for the team, and they support each

other, live and work together. You'd think that because they live and

work together that they don't have any balance, but it's the opposite:

they book off work at four or sometimes earlier, go to movies, go out

and have fun, read books, play catch. It's amazing. I'm never coming

back here."

And she never would.

She told her editor about this. She told her friends who came to a

send-off party at a bar she used to go to when she went into the

office a lot. She told her cab driver who picked her up to take her to

the airport and she told the bemused engineer who sat next to her all

the way back to Miami. She had the presence of mind not to tell the

couple who bought her house for a sum of money that seemed to have at

least one extra zero at the end -- maybe two.

And so when she got back to Miami, she hardly noticed the incredible

obesity of the man who took the money for the gas in her leased car --

now that she was here for the long haul she'd have to look into

getting Lester to help her buy a used Smart-car from a junker lot --

and the tin roofs of the shantytowns she passed looked tropical and

quaint. The smell of swamp and salt, the pea-soup humidity, the bass

thunder of the boom-cars in the traffic around her -- it was like some

kind of sweet homecoming for her.

Tjan was in the condo when she got home and he spotted her from the

balcony, where he'd been sunning himself and helped her bring up her

suitcases of things she couldn't bear to put in storage.

"Come down to our place for a cup of coffee once you're settled in,"

he said, leaving her. She sluiced off the airplane grease that had

filled her pores on the long flight from San Jose to Miami and changed

into a cheap sun-dress and a pair of flip-flops that she'd bought at

the Thunderbird Flea Market and headed down to their place.

Tjan opened the door with a flourish and she stepped in and stopped

short. When she'd left, the place had been a reflection of their

jumbled lives: gizmos, dishes, parts, tools and clothes strewn

everywhere in a kind of joyful, eye-watering hyper-mess, like an

enormous kitchen junk-drawer.

Now the place was *spotless* -- and what's more, it was

*minimalist*. The floor was not only clean, it was visible. Lining the

walls were translucent white plastic tubs stacked to the ceiling.

"You like it?"

"It's amazing," she said. "Like Ikea meets *Barbarella*. What happened

here?"

Tjan did a little two-step. "It was Lester's idea. Have a look in the

boxes."

She pulled a couple of the tubs out. They were jam-packed with books,

tools, cruft and crud -- all the crap that had previously cluttered

the shelves and the floor and the sofa and the coffee table.

"Watch this," he said. He unvelcroed a wireless keyboard from the side

of the TV and began to type: T-H-E C-O. . . The field autocompleted

itself: THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO, and brought up a picture of a

beaten-up paperback along with links to web-stores, reviews, and the

full text. Tjan gestured with his chin and she saw that the front of

one of the tubs was pulsing with a soft blue glow. Tjan went and

pulled open the tub and fished for a second before producing the book.

"Try it," he said, handing her the keyboard. She began to type

experimentally: U-N and up came UNDERWEAR (14). "No way," she said.

"Way," Tjan said, and hit return, bringing up a thumbnail gallery of

fourteen pairs of underwear. He tabbed over each, picked out a pair of

Simpsons boxers, and hit return. A different tub started glowing.

"Lester finally found a socially beneficial use for RFIDs. We're going

to get rich!"

"I don't think I understand," she said.

"Come on," he said. "Let's get to the junkyard. Lester explains this

really well."

He did, too, losing all of the shyness she remembered, his eyes

glowing, his sausage-thick fingers dancing.

"Have you ever alphabetized your hard drive? I mean, have you ever

spent any time concerning yourself with where on your hard drive your

files are stored, which sectors contain which files? Computers

abstract away the tedious, physical properties of files and leave us

with handles that we use to persistently refer to them, regardless of

which part of the hard drive currently holds those particular bits. So

I thought, with RFIDs, you could do this with the real world, just tag

everything and have your furniture keep track of where it is.

"One of the big barriers to roommate harmony is the correct

disposition of stuff. When you leave your book on the sofa, I have to

move it before I can sit down and watch TV. Then you come after me and

ask me where I put your book. Then we have a fight. There's stuff that

you don't know where it goes, and stuff that you don't know where it's

been put, and stuff that has nowhere to put it. But with tags and a

smart chest of drawers, you can just put your stuff wherever there's

room and ask the physical space to keep track of what's where from

moment to moment.

"There's still the problem of getting everything tagged and described,

but that's a service business opportunity, and where you've got other

shared identifiers like ISBNs you could use a cameraphone to snap the

bar-codes and look them up against public databases. The whole thing

could be coordinated around 'spring cleaning' events where you go

through your stuff and photograph it, tag it, describe it -- good for

your insurance and for forensics if you get robbed, too."

He stopped and beamed, folding his fingers over his belly. "So, that's

it, basically."

Perry slapped him on the shoulder and Tjan drummed his forefingers

like a heavy-metal drummer on the side of the workbench they were

gathered around.

They were all waiting for her. "Well, it's very cool," she said, at

last. "But, the whole white-plastic-tub thing. It makes your apartment

look like an Ikea showroom. Kind of inhumanly minimalist. We're

Americans, we like celebrating our stuff."

"Well, OK, fair enough," Lester said, nodding. "You don't have to put

everything away, of course. And you can still have all the decor you

want. This is about clutter control."

"Exactly," Perry said. "Come check out Lester's lab."

"OK, this is pretty perfect," Suzanne said. The clutter was gone,

disappeared into the white tubs that were stacked high on every shelf,

leaving the work-surfaces clear. But Lester's works-in-progress, his

keepsakes, his sculptures and triptychs were still out, looking like

venerated museum pieces in the stark tidiness that prevailed

otherwise.

Tjan took her through the spreadsheets. "There are ten teams that do

closet-organizing in the network, and a bunch of shippers, packers,

movers, and storage experts. A few furniture companies. We adopted the

interface from some free software inventory-management apps that were

built for illiterate service employees. Lots of big pictures and

autocompletion. And we've bought a hundred RFID printers from a

company that was so grateful for a new customer that they're shipping

us 150 of them, so we can print these things at about a million per

hour. The plan is to start our sales through the consultants at the

same time as we start showing at trade-shows for furniture

companies. We've already got a huge order from a couple of local

old-folks' homes."

They walked to the IHOP to have a celebratory lunch. Being back in

Florida felt just right to her. Francis, the leader of the

paramilitary wing of the AARP, threw them a salute and blew her a

kiss, and even Lester's nursing junkie friend seemed to be in a good

mood.

When they were done, they brought take-out bags for the junkie and

Francis in the shantytown.

"I want to make some technology for those guys," Perry said as they

sat in front of Francis's RV drinking cowboy coffee cooked over a

banked wood-stove off to one side. "Room-mate-ware for homeless

people."

Francis uncrossed his bony ankles and scratched at his mosquito

bites. "A lot of people think that we don't buy stuff, but it's not

true," he said. "I shop hard for bargains, but there's lots of stuff I

spend more on because of my lifestyle than I would if I had a real

house and steady electricity. When I had a chest-freezer, I could bulk

buy ground round for about a tenth of what I pay now when I go to the

grocery store and get enough for one night's dinner. The alternative

is using propane to keep the fridge going overnight, and that's not

cheap, either. So I'm a kind of premium customer. Back at Boeing, we

loved the people who made small orders, because we could charge them

such a premium for custom work, while the big airlines wanted stuff

done so cheap that half the time we lost money on the deal."

Perry nodded. "There you have it -- roommate-ware for homeless people,

a great and untapped market."

Suzanne cocked her head and looked at him. "You're sounding awfully

commerce-oriented for a pure and unsullied engineer, you know?"

He ducked his head and grinned and looked about twelve years

old. "It's infectious. Those little kitchen gnomes, we sold nearly a

half-million of those things, not to mention all the spin-offs. That's

a half-million *lives* -- a half-million *households* -- that we

changed just by thinking up something cool and making it real. These

RFID things of Lester's -- we'll sign a couple million customers with

those. People will change everything about how they live from moment

to moment because of something Lester thought up in my junkyard over

there."

"Well, there's thirty million of us living in what the social workers

call 'marginal housing,'" Francis said, grinning wryly. He had a funny

smile that Suzanne had found adorable until he explained that he had

an untreated dental abscess that he couldn't afford to get fixed. "So

that's a lot of difference you could make."

"Yeah," Perry said. "Yeah, it sure is."

That night, she found herself still blogging and answering emails --

they always piled up when she travelled and took a couple of late

nights to clear out -- after nine PM, sitting alone in a pool of light

in the back corner of Lester's workshop that she had staked out as her

office. She yawned and stretched and listened to her old back

crackle. She hated feeling old, and late nights made her feel old --

feel every extra ounce of fat on her tummy, feel the lines bracketing

her mouth and the little bag of skin under her chin.

She stood up and pulled on a light jacket and began to switch off

lights and get ready to head home. As she poked her head in Tjan's

office, she saw that she wasn't the only one working late.

"Hey, you," she said. "Isn't it time you got going?"

He jumped like he'd been stuck with a pin and gave a little

yelp. "Sorry," he said, "didn't hear you."

He had a cardboard box on his desk and had been filling it with his

personal effects -- little one-off inventions the guys had made for

him, personal fetishes and tchotchkes, a framed picture of his kids.

"What's up?"

He sighed and cracked his knuckles. "Might as well tell you now as

tomorrow morning. I'm resigning."

She felt a flash of anger and then forced it down and forcibly

replaced it with professional distance and curiosity. Mentally she

licked her pencil-tip and flipped to a blank page in her reporter's

notebook.

"Oh yes?"

"I've had another offer, in Westchester County. Westinghouse has spun

out its own version of Kodacell and they're looking for a new

vice-president to run the division. That's me."

"Good job," she said. "Congratulations, Mr Vice-President."

He shook his head. "I emailed Kettlewell half an hour ago. I'm leaving

in the morning. I'm going to say goodbye to the guys over breakfast."

"Not much notice," she said.

"Nope," he said, a note of anger creeping into his voice. "My contract

lets Kodacell fire me on one day's notice, so I insisted on the right

to quit on the same terms. Maybe Kettlewell will get his lawyers to

write better boilerplate from here on in."

When she had an angry interview, she habitually changed the subject to

something sensitive: angry people often say more than they intend

to. She did it instinctively, not really meaning to psy-ops Tjan, whom

she thought of as a friend, but not letting that get in the way of the

story. "Westinghouse is doing what, exactly?"

"It'll be as big as Kodacell's operation in a year," he said. "George

Westinghouse personally funded Tesla's research, you know. The company

understands funding individual entrepreneurs. I'm going to be training

the talent scouts and mentoring the financial people, then turning

them loose to sign up entrepreneurs for the Westinghouse

network. There's a competitive market for garage inventors now." He

laughed. "Go ahead and print that," he said. "Blog it tonight. There's

competition now. We're giving two points more equity and charging half

a point less on equity than the Kodacell network."

"That's amazing, Tjan. I hope you'll keep in touch with me -- I'd love

to follow your story."

"Count on it," he said. He laughed. "I'm getting a week off every

eight weeks to scout Russia. They've got an incredible culture of

entrepreneurship."

"Plus you'll get to see your kids," Suzanne said. "That's really

good."

"Plus, I'll get to see my kids," he admitted.

"How much money is Westinghouse putting into the project?" she asked,

replacing her notional notebook with a real one, pulled from her

purse.

"I don't have numbers, but they've shut down the whole appliances

division to clear the budget for it." She nodded -- she'd seen news of

the layoffs on the wires. Mass demonstrations, people out of work

after twenty years' service. "So it's a big budget."

"They must have been impressed with the quarterlies from Kodacell."

Tjan folded down the flaps on his box and drummed his fingers on it,

squinting at her. "You're joking, right?"

"What do you mean?"

"Suzanne, they were impressed by *you*. Everyone knows that quarterly

numbers are easy to cook -- anything less than two annual reports is

as likely to be enronning as real fortune-making. But *your*

dispatches from here -- they're what sold them. It's what's convincing

*everyone*. Kettlewell said that three quarters of his new recruits

come on board after reading your descriptions of this place. That's

how *I* ended up here."

She shook her head. "That's very flattering, Tjan, but --"

He waved her off and then, surprisingly, came around the desk and

hugged her. "But nothing, Suzanne. Kettlewell, Lester, Perry --

they're all basically big kids. Full of enthusiasm and invention, but

they've got the emotional maturity and sense of scale of hyperactive

five year olds. You and me, we're grownups. People take us

seriously. It's easy to get a kid excited, but when a grownup chimes

in you know there's some there there."

Suzanne recovered herself after a second and put away her

notepad. "I'm just the person who writes it all down. You people are

making it happen."

"In ten years' time, they'll remember you and not us," Tjan said. "You

should get Kettlewell to put you on the payroll."

Kettlewell himself turned up the next day. Suzanne had developed an

intuitive sense of the flight-times from the west coast and so for a

second she couldn't figure out how he could possibly be standing there

-- nothing in the sky could get him from San Jose to Miami for a seven

AM arrival.

"Private jet," he said, and had the grace to look slightly

embarrassed. "Kodak had eight of them and Duracell had five. We've

been trying to sell them all off but no one wants a used jet these

days, not even Saudi princes or Columbian drug-lords."

"So, basically, it was going to waste."

He smiled and looked eighteen -- she really did feel like the only

grownup sometimes -- and said, "Zackly -- it's practically

environmental. Where's Tjan?"

"Downstairs saying goodbye to the guys, I think."

"OK," he said. "Are you coming?"

She grabbed her notebook and a pen and beat him out the door of her

rented condo.

"What's this all about," Tjan said, looking wary. The guys were

hang-dog and curious looking, slightly in awe of Kettlewell, who did

little to put them at their ease -- he was staring intensely at Tjan.

"Exit interview," he said. "Company policy."

Tjan rolled his eyes. "Come on," he said. "I've got a flight to catch

in an hour."

"I could give you a lift," Kettlewell said.

"You want to do the exit interview between here and the airport?"

"I could give you a lift to JFK. I've got the jet warmed up and

waiting."

Sometimes, Suzanne managed to forget that Kodacell was a multi-billion

dollar operation and that Kettlewell was at its helm, but other times

the point was very clear.

"Come on," he said, "we'll make a day of it. We can stop on the way

and pick up some barbecue to eat on the plane. I'll even let you keep

your seat in the reclining position during take-off and landing. Hell,

you can turn your cell-phone on -- just don't tell the Transport

Security Administration!"

Tjan looked cornered, then resigned. "Sounds good to me," he said and

Kettlewell shouldered one of the two huge duffel-bags that were

sitting by the door.

"Hi, Kettlewell," Perry said.

Kettlewell set down the duffel. "Sorry, sorry. Lester, Perry, it's

really good to see you. I'll bring Suzanne back tonight and we'll all

go out for dinner, OK?"

Suzanne blinked. "I'm coming along?"

"I sure hope so," Kettlewell said.

Perry and Lester accompanied them down in the elevator.

"Private jet, huh?" Perry said. "Never been in one of those."

Kettlewell told them about his adventures trying to sell off

Kodacell's private air force.

"Send one of them our way, then," Lester said.

"Do you fly?" Kettlewell said.

"No," Perry said. "Lester wants to take it apart. Right, Les?"

Lester nodded. "Lots of cool junk in a private jet."

"These things are worth millions, guys," Kettlewell said.

"No, someone *paid* millions for them," Perry said. "They're *worth*

whatever you can sell them for."

Kettlewell laughed. "You've had an influence around here, Tjan," he

said. Tjan managed a small, tight smile.

Kettlewell had a driver waiting outside of the building who loaded the

duffels into the spacious trunk of a spotless dark town-car whose

doors chunked shut with an expensive sound.

"I want you to know that I'm really not angry at all, OK?" Kettlewell

said.

Tjan nodded. He had the look of a man who was steeling himself for a

turn in an interrogation chamber. He'd barely said a word since

Kettlewell arrived. For his part, Kettlewell appeared oblivious to all

of this, though Suzanne was pretty sure that he understood exactly how

uncomfortable this was making Tjan.

"The thing is, six months ago, nearly everyone was convinced that I

was a fucking moron, that I was about to piss away ten billion dollars

of other people's money on a stupid doomed idea. Now they're copying

me and poaching my best people. So this is good news for me, though

I'm going to have to find a new business manager for those two before

they get picked up for turning planes into component pieces."

Suzanne's PDA vibrated whenever the number of online news stories

mentioning her or Kodacell or Kettlewell increased or decreased

sharply. She used to try to read everything, but it was impossible to

keep up -- now all she wanted was to keep track of whether the

interestingness-index was on the uptick or downtick.

It had started to buzz that morning and the pitch had increased

steadily until it was actually uncomfortable in her pocket. Irritated,

she yanked it out and was about to switch it off when the lead article

caught her eye.

KODACELL LOSES TJAN TO WESTINGHOUSE

The by-line was Freddy. Feeling like a character in a horror movie who

can't resist the compulsion to look under the bed, Suzanne thumbed the

PDA's wheel and brought up the whole article.

:: Kodacell business-manager Tjan Lee Tang, whose adventures we've ::

followed through Suzanne Church's gushing, besotted blog posts

She looked away and reflexively reached toward the delete button. The

innuendo that she was romantically involved with one or more of the

guys had circulated on her blog's message boards and around the

diggdots ever since she'd started writing about them. No woman could

possibly be writing about this stuff because it was important -- she

had to be "with the band," a groupie or a whore.

Combine that with Rat-Toothed Freddy's sneering tone and she was

instantly sent into heart-thundering rage. She deleted the post and

looked out the window. Her pager buzzed some more and she looked

down. The same article, being picked up on blogs, on some of the

bigger diggdots, and an AP wire.

She forced herself to re-open it.

:: has been hired to head up a new business unit on behalf of the ::

multinational giant Westinghouse. The appointment stands as more ::

proof of Church's power to cloud men's minds with pretty empty ::

words about the half-baked dot-com schemes that have oozed out of ::

Silicon Valley and into every empty and dead American suburb.

It was hypnotic, like staring into the eyes of a serpent. Her pulse

actually thudded in her ears for a second before she took a few deep

breaths and calmed down enough to finish the article, which was just

more of the same: nasty personal attacks, sniping, and

innuendo. Freddy even managed to imply that she was screwing all of

them -- and Kettlewell besides.

Kettlewell leaned over her shoulder and read.

"You should send him an email," he said. "That's disgusting. That's

not reportage."

"Never get into a pissing match with a skunk," she said. "What Freddy

wants is for me to send him mail that he can publish along with more

snarky commentary. When the guy you're arguing with controls the venue

you're arguing in, you can't possibly win."

"So blog him," Kettlewell said. "Correct the record."

"The record is correct," she said. "It's never been incorrect. I've

written an exhaustive record that is there for everyone to see. If

people believe this, no amount of correction will help."

Kettlewell made a face like a little boy who'd been told he couldn't

have a toy. "That guy is poison," he said. "Those quote-marks around

blog."

"Let him add his quote-marks," she said. "My daily readership is

higher than the Merc's paid circulation this week." It was true. After

a short uphill climb from her new URL, she'd accumulated enough

readers that the advertising revenue dwarfed her old salary at the

Merc, an astonishing happenstance that nevertheless kept her

bank-account full. She clicked a little. "Besides, look at this, there

are three dozen links pointing at this story so far and all of them

are critical of him. We don't need to stick up for ourselves -- the

world will."

Saying it calmed her and now they were at the airport. They cruised

into a private gate, away from the militarized gulag that fronted

Miami International. A courteous security guard waved them through and

the driver confidently piloted the car up to a wheeled jetway beside a

cute, stubby little toy jet. On the side, in cursive script, was the

plane's name: Suzanne.

She looked accusatorially at Kettlewell.

"It was called that when I bought the company," he said,

expressionless but somehow mirthful behind his curved surfer

shades. "But I kept it because I liked the private joke."

"Just no one tell Freddy that you've got an airplane with my name on

it or we'll never hear the fucking end of it."

She covered her mouth, regretting her language, and Kettlewell

laughed, and so did Tjan, and somehow the ice was broken between them.

"No *way* flying this thing is cost-effective," Tjan said. "Your CFO

should be kicking your ass."

"It's a little indulgence," Kettlewell said, bounding up the steps and

shaking hands with a small, neat woman pilot, an African-American with

corn-rows peeking out under her smart peaked cap. "Once you've flown

in your own bird, you never go back."

"This is a *monstrosity*," Tjan said as he boarded. "What this thing

eats up in hangar fees alone would be enough to bankroll three or four

teams." He settled into an oversized Barcalounger of a seat and

accepted a glass of orange juice that the pilot poured for him. "Thank

you, and no offense."

"None taken," she said. "I agree one hundred percent."

"See," Tjan said.

Suzanne took her own seat and her own glass and buckled in and watched

the two of them, warming up for the main event, realizing that she'd

been brought along as a kind of opening act.

"They paying you more?"

"Yup," Tjan said. "All on the back-end. Half a point on every dollar

brought in by a team I coach or whose members I mentor."

Kettlewell whistled. "That's a big share," he said.

"If I can make my numbers, I'll take home a million this year."

"You'll make those numbers. Good negotiations. Why didn't you ask us

for the same deal?"

"Would you have given it to me?"

"You're a star," Kettlewell said, nodding at Suzanne, whose

invisibility to the conversation popped like a bubble. "Thanks to

her."

"Thanks, Suzanne," Tjan said.

Suzanne blushed. "Come on, guys."

Tjan shook his head. "She doesn't really understand. It's actually

kind of charming."

"We might have matched the offer."

"You guys are first to market. You've got a lot of procedures in

place. I wanted to reinvent some wheels."

"We're too *conservative* for you?"

Tjan grinned wickedly. "Oh yes," he said. "I'm going to do business in

*Russia*."

Kettlewell grunted and pounded his orange juice. Around them, the

jet's windows flashed white as they broke through the clouds and the

ten thousand foot bell sounded.

"How the hell are you going to make anything that doesn't collapse

under its own weight in Russia?"

"The corruption's a problem, sure," Tjan said. "But it's offset by the

entrepreneurship. Some of those cats make the Chinese look lazy and

unimaginative. It's a shame that so much of their efforts have been

centered on graft, but there's no reason they couldn't be focused on

making an honest ruble."

They fell into a discussion of the minutiae of Perry and Lester's

businesses, franker than any business discussion she'd ever

heard. Tjan talked about the places where they'd screwed up, and

places where they'd scored big, and about all the plans he'd made for

Westinghouse, the connections he had in Russia. He even talked about

his kids and his ex in St Petersburg, and Kettlewell admitted that

he'd known about them already.

For Kettlewell's part, he opened the proverbial kimono wide, telling

Tjan about conflicts within the board of directors, poisonous

holdovers from the pre-Kodacell days who sabotaged the company from

within with petty bureaucracy, even the problems he was having with

his family over the long hours they were working. He opened the

minibar and cracked a bottle of champagne to toast Tjan's new job, and

they mixed it with more orange juice, and then there were bagels and

schmear, fresh fruit, power bars, and canned Starbucks coffees with

deadly amounts of sugar and caffeine.

When Kettlewell disappeared into the tiny -- but marble-appointed --

bathroom, Suzanne found herself sitting alone with Tjan, almost knee

to knee, lightheaded from lack of sleep and champagne and altitude.

"Some trip," she said.

"You're the best," he said, wobbling a little. "You know that? Just

the best. The stuff you write about these guys, it makes me want to

stand up and salute. You make us all seem so fucking *glorious*. We're

going to end up taking over the world because you inspire us so. Maybe

I shouldn't tell you this, because you're not very self-conscious

about it right now, but Suzanne, you won't believe it because you're

so goddamned modest, too. It's what makes your writing so right, so

believable --"

Kettlewell stepped out of the bathroom. "Touching down soon," he said,

and patted them each on the shoulder as he took his seat. "So that's

about it, then," he said, and leaned back and closed his eyes. Suzanne

was accustomed to thinking of him as twenty-something, the boyish age

of the magazine cover portraits from the start of his career. Now,

eyes closed on his private jet, harsh upper atmosphere sun painting

his face, his crowsfeet and the deep vertical brackets around his

mouth revealed him for someone pushing a youthful forty, kept young by

exercise and fun and the animation of his ideas.

"Guess so," Tjan said, slumping. "This has been one of the more

memorable experiences of my life, Kettlewell, Suzanne. Not entirely

pleasant, but pleasant on the whole. A magical time in the clouds."

"Once you've flown private, you'll never go back to coach," Kettlewell

said, smiling, eyes still closed. "You still think my CFO should spank

me for not selling this thing?"

"No," Tjan said. "In ten years, if we do our jobs, there won't be five

companies on earth that can afford this kind of thing -- it'll be like

building a cathedral after the Protestant Reformation. While we have

the chance, we should keep these things in the sky. But you should

give one to Lester and Perry to take apart."

"I was planning to," Kettlewell said. "Thanks."

Suzanne and Kettlewell got off the plane and Tjan didn't look back

when they'd landed at JFK. "Should we go into town and get some bialy

to bring back to Miami?" Kettlewell said, squinting at the bright day

on the tarmac.

"Bring deli to Miami?"

"Right, right," he said. "Forget I asked. Besides, we'd have to

charter a chopper to get into Manhattan and back without dying in

traffic."

Something about the light through the open hatch or the sound or the

smell -- something indefinably New York -- made her yearn for

Miami. The great cities of commerce like New York and San Francisco

seemed too real for her, while the suburbs of Florida were a kind of

endless summer camp, a dreamtime where anything was possible.

"Let's go," she said. The champagne buzz had crashed and she had a

touch of headache. "I'm bushed."

"Me too," Kettlewell said. "I left San Jose last night to get into

Miami before Tjan left. Not much sleep. Gonna put my seat back and

catch some winks, if that's OK?"

"Good plan," Suzanne said.

Embarrassingly, when they were fully reclined, their seats nearly

touched, forming something like a double bed. Suzanne lay awake in the

hum of the jets for a while, conscious of the breathing human beside

her, the first man she'd done anything like share a bed with in at

least a year. The last thing she remembered was the ten thousand foot

bell going off and then she slipped away into sleep.

#

:: Perry thought that they'd sell a million Home Awares in six ::

months. Lester thought he was nuts, that number was too high. :: ::

"Please," he said, "I *invented* these things but there aren't a ::

million roommate households in all of America. We'll sell half :: a

million tops, total.

Lester always complained when she quoted him directly in her blog

posts, but she thought he secretly enjoyed it.

:: Today the boys shipped their millionth unit. It took six weeks.

They'd uncorked a bottle of champagne when unit one million

shipped. They hadn't actually shipped it, per se. The manufacturing

was spread out across forty different teams all across the country,

even a couple of Canadian teams. The RFID printer company had re-hired

half the workers they'd laid off the year before, and had them all

working overtime to meet demand.

:: What's exciting about this isn't just the money that these guys ::

have made off of it, or the money that Kodacell will return to :: its

shareholders, it's the ecosystem that these things have ::

enabled. There're at least ten competing commercial systems for ::

organizing, tagging, sharing, and describing Home Aware objects. ::

Parents love them for their kids. School teachers love them. ::

Seniors' homes.

The seniors' homes had been Francis's idea. They'd brought him in to

oversee some of the production engineering, along with some of the

young braves who ran around the squatter camps. Francis knew which

ones were biddable and he kept them to heel. In the evenings, he'd

join the guys and Suzanne up on the roof of the workshop on folding

chairs, with beers, watching the sweaty sunset.

:: They're not the sole supplier. That's what an ecosystem is all ::

about, creating value for a lot of players. All this competition :: is

great news for you and me, because it's already driven the :: price of

Home Aware goods down by forty percent. That means that :: Lester and

Perry are going to have to invent something new, soon, :: before the

margin disappears altogether -- and that's also good :: news for you

and me.

"Are you coming?" Lester had dated a girl for a while, someone he met

on Craigslist, but she'd dumped him and Perry had confided that she'd

left him because he didn't live up to the press he'd gotten in

Suzanne's column. When he got dumped, he became even touchier about

Suzanne, caught at a distance from her that was defined by equal parts

of desire and resentment.

"Up in a minute," she said, trying to keep her smile light and

noncommittal. Lester was very nice, but there were times when she

caught him staring at her like a kicked puppy and it made her

uncomfortable. Naturally, this increased his discomfort as well.

On the roof they already had a cooler of beers going and beside it a

huge plastic tub of brightly colored machine-parts.

"Jet engine," Perry said. The months had put a couple pounds on him

and new wrinkles, and given him some grey at the temples, and laugh

lines inside his laugh lines. Perry was always laughing at everything

around them ("They fucking *pay me* to do this," he'd told her once,

before literally collapsing to the floor, rolling with uncontrollable

hysteria). He laughed again.

"Good old Kettlebelly," she said. "Must have broken his heart."

Francis held up a curved piece of cowling. "This thing wasn't going to

last anyway. See the distortion here and here? This thing was designed

in a virtual wind-tunnel and machine-lathed. We tried that a couple

times, but the wind-tunnel sims were never detailed enough and the

forms that flew well in the machine always died a premature death in

the sky. Another two years and he'd have had to have it rebuilt

anyway, and the Koreans who built this charge shitloads for parts."

"Too bad," Lester said. "It's pretty. Gorgeous, even." He mimed its

curve in the air with a pudgy hand, that elegant swoop.

"Aerospace loves the virtual wind-tunnel," Francis said, and glared at

the cowling. "You can use evolutionary algorithms in the sim and come

up with really efficient designs, in theory. And computers are cheaper

than engineers."

"Is that why you were laid off?" Suzanne said.

"I wasn't laid off, girl," he said. He jiggled his lame foot. "I

retired at 65 and was all set up but the pension plan went bust. So I

missed a month of medical and they cut me off and I ended up

uninsured. When the wife took sick, bam, that was it, wiped right

out. But I'm not bitter -- why should the poor be allowed to live,

huh?"

His acolytes, three teenagers in do-rags from the shantytown, laughed

and went on to pitching bottle-caps off the edge of the roof.

"Stop that, now," he said, "you're getting the junkyard all

dirty. Christ, you'd think that they grew up in some kind of zoo."

When Francis drank, he got a little mean, a little dark.

"So, kids," Perry said, wandering over to them, hands in

pockets. Silhouetted against the setting sun, biceps bulging, muscular

chest tapering to his narrow hips, he looked like a Greek

statue. "What do you think of the stuff we're building?"

They looked at their toes. "'S OK," one of them grunted.

"Answer the man," Francis snapped. "Complete sentences, looking up and

at him, like you've got a shred of self-respect. Christ, what are you,

five years old?"

They shifted uncomfortably. "It's fine," one of them said.

"Would you use it at home?"

One of them snorted. "No, man. My dad steals anything nice we get and

sells it."

"Oh," Perry said.

"Fucker broke in the other night and I caught him with my ipod. Nearly

took his fucking head off with my cannon before I saw who it

was. Fucking juice-head."

"You should have fucked him up," one of the other kids said. "My ma

pushed my pops in front of a bus one day to get rid of him, guy broke

both his legs and never came back."

Suzanne knew it was meant to shock them, but that didn't take away

from its shockingness. In the warm fog of writing and living in

Florida, it was easy to forget that these people lived in a squatter

camp and were technically criminals, and received no protection from

the law.

Perry, though, just squinted into the sun and nodded. "Have you ever

tried burglar alarms?"

The kids laughed derisively and Suzanne winced, but Perry was

undaunted. "You could be sure that you woke up whenever anyone

entered, set up a light and siren to scare them off."

"I want one that fires spears," the one with the juice-head father

said.

"Blowtorches," said the one whose mother pushed his father under a

bus.

"I want a force-field," the third one said, speaking for the first

time. "I want something that will keep anyone from coming in, period,

so I don't have to sleep one eye up, 'cause I'll be safe."

The other two nodded, slowly.

"Damn straight," Francis said.

That was the last time Francis's acolytes joined them on the

rooftop. Instead, when they finished work they went home, walking

slowly and talking in low murmurs. With just the grownups on the roof,

it was a lot more subdued.

"What's that smoke?" Lester said, pointing at the black billowing

column off to the west, in the sunset's glare.

"House-fire," Francis said. "Has to be. Or a big fucking car-wreck,

maybe."

Perry ran down the stairs and came back up with a pair of high-power

binox. "Francis, that's your place," he said after a second's

fiddling. He handed the binox to Francis. "Just hit the button and

they'll self-stabilize."

"That's my place," Francis said. "Oh, Christ." He'd gone gray and

seemed to have sobered up instantly. His lips were wet, his eyes

bright.

They drove over at speed, Suzanne wedged into Lester's

frankensmartcar, practically under his armpit, and Perry traveling

with Francis. Lester still wore the same cologne as her father, and

when she opened the window, its smell was replaced by the

burning-tires smell of the fire.

They arrived to discover a fire-truck parked on the side of the

freeway nearest the shantytown. The fire-fighters were standing

soberly beside it, watching the fire rage across the canal.

They rushed for the footbridge and a firefighter blocked their way.

"Sorry, it's not safe," he said. He was Latino, good looking, like a

movie star, bronze skin flickering with copper highlights from the

fire.

"I live there," Francis said. "That's my home."

The firefighter looked away. "It's not safe," he said.

"Why aren't you fighting the fire?" Suzanne said.

Francis's head snapped around. "You're not fighting the fire! You're

going to let our houses burn!"

A couple more fire-fighters trickled over. Across the river, the fire

had consumed half of the little settlement. Some of the residents were

operating a slow and ponderous bucket-brigade from the canal, while

others ran into the unburned buildings and emerged clutching armloads

of belongings, bits of furniture, boxes of photos.

"Sir," the movie-star said, "the owner of this property has asked us

not to intervene. Since there's no imminent risk to life and no risk

of the burn spreading off his property, we can't trespass to put out

the fire. Our hands are tied."

"The owner?" Francis spat. "This land is in title dispute. The court

case has been underway for twenty years now. What owner?"

The movie-star shrugged. "That's all I know, sir."

Across the canal, the fire was spreading, and the bucket brigade was

falling back. Suzanne could feel the heat now, like putting your face

in the steam from a boiling kettle.

Francis seethed, looking from the firemen and their truck back to the

fire. He looked like he was going to pop something, or start shouting,

or charge into the flames.

Suzanne grabbed his hand and walked him over to the truck and grabbed

the first firefighter she encountered.

"I'm Suzanne Church, from the San Jose Mercury News, a McClatchy

paper. I'd like to speak to the commanding officer on the scene,

please." She hadn't been with the Merc for months, but she hadn't been

able to bring herself to say, *I'm Suzanne Church with

SuzanneChurch.org.* She was pretty sure that no matter how high her

readership was and how profitable her ad sales were, the fire-fighter

wouldn't have been galvanized into the action that was invoked when

she mentioned the name of a real newspaper.

He hopped to, quickly moving to an older man, tapping him on the

shoulder, whispering in his ear. Suzanne squeezed Francis's hand as

the fire-chief approached them. She extended her hand and talked

fast. "Suzanne Church," she said, and took out her notebook, the key

prop in any set piece involving a reporter. "I'm told that you are

going to let those homes burn because someone representing himself as

the title-holder to that property has denied you entry. However, I'm

also told that the title to that land is in dispute and has been in

the courts for decades. Can you resolve this for me, Chief...?"

"Chief Brian Wannamaker," he said. He was her age, with the leathery

skin of a Florida native who spent a lot of time out of doors. "I'm

afraid I have no comment for you at this time."

Suzanne kept her face deadpan, and gave Francis's hand a warning

squeeze to keep him quiet. He was trembling now. "I see. You can't

comment, you can't fight the fire. Is that what you'd like me to write

in tomorrow's paper?"

The Chief looked at the fire for a moment. Across the canal, the

bucket-brigaders were losing worse than ever. He frowned and Suzanne

saw that his hands were clenched into fists. "Let me make a call, OK?"

Without waiting for an answer, he turned on his heel and stepped

behind the fire-engine, reaching for his cellphone.

Suzanne strained to hear his conversation, but it was inaudible over

the crackle of the fire. When she turned around again, Francis was

gone. She caught sight of him again in just a moment, running for the

canal, then jumping in and landing badly in the shallow, swampy

water. He hobbled across to the opposite bank and began to laboriously

climb it.

A second later, Perry followed. Then Lester.

"Chief!" she said, going around the engine and pointing. The Chief had

the phone clamped to his head still, but when he saw what was going

on, he snapped it shut, dropped it in his pocket and started barking

orders.

Now the fire-fighters *moved*, boiling across the bridge, uncoiling

hoses, strapping on tanks and masks. They worked in easy, fluid

concert, and it was only seconds before the water and foam hit the

flames and the smoke changed to white steam.

The shantytown residents cheered. The fire slowly receded. Perry and

Lester had Francis, holding him back from charging into the fray as

the fire-fighters executed their clockwork dance.

The steam was hot enough to scald, and Suzanne pulled the collar of

her blouse up over her face. Around her were the shantytowners,

mothers with small children, old men, and a seemingly endless parade

of thug-life teenagers, the boys in miniature cycling shorts and

do-rags, the girls in bandeau tops, glitter makeup, and skirts made

from overlapping strips of rag, like post-apocalyptic hula

outfits. Their faces were tight, angry, smudged with smoke and

pinkened by the heat.

She saw the one whose father had reportedly been pushed under a bus by

his mother, and he grimaced at her. "What we gonna do now?"

"I don't know," she said. "Are you all right? Is your family all

right?"

"Don't got nowhere to sleep, nowhere to go," he said. "Don't even have

a change of clothes. My moms won't stop crying."

There were tears in his eyes. He was all of fifteen, she

realized. He'd seemed much older on the roof. She gathered him into

her arms and gave him a hug. He was stiff and awkward at first and

then he kind of melted into her, weeping on her shoulder. She stroked

his back and murmured reassuringly. Some of the other shantytowners

looked at the spectacle, then looked away. Even a couple of his

homeboys -- whom she'd have bet would have laughed and pointed at this

show of weakness -- only looked and then passed on. One had tears

streaking the smoke smudges on his face.

*For someone who isn't good at comforting people, I seem to be doing a

lot of it*, she thought.

Francis and Lester and Perry found her and Francis gave the boy a

gruff hug and told him everything would be fine.

The fire was out now, the firefighter hosing down the last embers,

going through the crowd and checking for injuries. A TV news crew had

set up and a pretty black reporter in her twenties was doing a stand

up.

"The illegal squatter community has long been identified as a problem

area for gang and drug activity by the Broward County Sheriff's

office. The destruction here seems total, but it's impossible to say

whether this spells the end of this encampment, or whether the

denizens will rebuild and stay on."

Suzanne burned with shame. That could have been her. When she'd first

seen this place, it had been like something out of a documentary on

Ethiopia. As she'd come to know it, it had grown homier. The residents

built piecemeal, one wall at a time, one window, one poured concrete

floor, as they could afford it. None of them had mortgages, but they

had neat vegetable gardens and walkways spelled out in white stones

with garden gnomes standing guard.

The reporter was staring at her -- and naturally so; she'd been

staring at the reporter. Glaring at her.

"My RV," Francis said, pointing, distracting her. It was a charred

wreck. He went to the melted doors and opened them, stepping back as a

puff of smoke rose from the inside. A fire-fighter spotted it and

diverted a stream of water into the interior, soaking Francis and

whatever hadn't burned. He turned and shouted something at the

fire-fighter, but he was already hosing down something else.

Inside Francis's trailer, they salvaged a drenched photo-album, a few

tools, and a lock-box with some of his papers in it. He had backed up

his laptop to his watch that morning, so his data was safe. "I kept

meaning to scan these in," he said, paging through the photos in the

soaked album. "Should have done it."

Night was falling, the mosquitoes singing and buzzing. The neat little

laneways and homey, patchwork buildings lay in ruins around them.

The shantytowners clustered in little groups or picked through the

ruins. Drivers of passing cars slowed down to rubberneck, and a few

shouted filthy, vengeful things at them. Suzanne took pictures of

their license plates. She'd publish them when she got home.

A light drizzle fell. Children cried. The swampy sounds of cicadas and

frogs and mosquitoes filled the growing dark and then the streetlights

flicked on all down the river of highway, painting everything in

blue-white mercury glow.

"We've got to get tents up," Francis said. He grabbed a couple of

young men and gave them orders, things to look for -- fresh water,

plastic sheeting, anything with which to erect shelters.

Lester started to help them, and Perry stood with his hands on his

hips, next to Suzanne.

"Jesus Christ," he said. "This is a fucking disaster. I mean, these

people are used to living rough, but this --" he broke off, waving his

hands helplessly. He wiped his palms off on his butt, then grabbed

Francis.

"Get them going," he said. "Get them to gather up their stuff and walk

them down to our place. We've got space for everyone for now at

least."

Francis looked like he was going to say something, then he stopped. He

climbed precariously up on the hood of Lester's car and shouted for

people to gather round. The boys he bossed around took up the call and

it wasn't long before nearly everyone was gathered around them.

"Can everyone hear? This is as loud as I go."

There were murmurs of assent. Suzanne had seen him meet with his

people before in the daylight and the good times, seen the respect

they afforded to him. He wasn't the leader, per se, but when he spoke,

people listened. It was a characteristic she'd encountered in the

auto-trade and in technology, in the ones the others all gravitated

to. Charismatics.

"We've got a place to stay a bit up the road for tonight. It's about a

half hour walk. It's indoors and there's toilets, but maybe not much

to make beds out of. Take what you can carry for about a mile, you can

come back tomorrow for the rest. You don't have to come, but this

isn't going to be any fun tonight."

A woman came forward. She was young, but not young enough to be a

homegirl. She had long dark hair and she twisted her hands as she

spoke in a soft voice to Francis. "What about our stuff? We can't

leave it here tonight. It's all we've got."

Francis nodded. "We need ten people to stand guard in two shifts of

five tonight. Young people. You'll get flashlights and phones, coffee

and whatever else we can give you. Just keep the rubberneckers out."

The rubberneckers were out of earshot. The account they'd get of this

would come from the news-anchor who'd tell them how dangerous and

dirty this place was. They'd never see what Suzanne saw, ten men and

women forming up to one side of the crowd. Young braves and homegirls,

people her age, their faces solemn.

Francis oversaw the gathering up of belongings. Suzanne had never had

a sense of how many people lived in the shantytown but now she could

count them as they massed up by the roadside and began to walk: a

hundred, a little more than a hundred. More if you counted the

surprising number of babies.

Lester conferred briefly with Francis and then Francis tapped three of

the old timers and two of the mothers with babes in arms and they

crammed into Lester's car and he took off. Suzanne walked by the

roadside with the long line of refugees, listening to their murmuring

conversation, and in a few minutes, Lester was back to pick up more

people, at Francis's discretion.

Perry was beside her now, his eyes a million miles away.

"What now?" she said.

"We put them in the workshop tonight, tomorrow we help them build

houses."

"At your place? You're going to let them stay?"

"Why not? We don't use half of that land. The landlord gets his check

every month. Hasn't been by in five years. He won't care."

She took a couple more steps. "Perry, I'm going to write about this,"

she said.

"Oh," he said. They walked further. A small child was crying. "Of

course you are. Well, fuck the landlord. I'll sic Kettlewell on him if

he squawks."

"What do you think Kettlewell will think about all this?"

"This? Look, this is what I've been saying all along. We need to make

products for these people. They're a huge untapped market."

What she wanted to ask was *What would Tjan say about this?* but they

didn't talk about Tjan these days. Kettlewell had promised them a new

business manager for weeks, but none had appeared. Perry had taken

over more and more of the managerial roles, and was getting less and

less workshop time in. She could tell it frustrated him. In her

discussions with Kettlewell, he'd confided that it had turned out to

be harder to find suits than it was finding wildly inventive

nerds. Lots of people *wanted* to run businesses, but the number who

actually seemed likely to be capable of doing so was only a small

fraction.

They could see the junkyard now. Perry pulled out his phone and called

his server and touch-toned the codes to turn on all the lights and

unlock all the doors.

They lost a couple of kids in the aisles of miraculous junk, and

Francis had to send out bigger kids to find them and bring them back,

holding the treasures they'd found to their chests. Lester kept going

back for more old-timers, more mothers, more stragglers, operating his

ferry service until they were all indoors in the workshop.

"This is the place," Francis said. "We'll stay indoors here

tonight. Toilets are there and there -- orderly lines, no shoving."

"What about food?" asked a man with a small boy sleeping over his

shoulder.

"This isn't the Red Cross, Al," Francis snapped. "We'll organize food

for ourselves in the morning."

Perry whispered in his ear. Francis shook his head, and Perry

whispered some more.

"There will be food in the morning. This is Perry. It's his

place. He's going to go to Costco for us when they open."

The crowd cheered and a few of the women hugged him. Some of the men

shook his hand. Perry blushed. Suzanne smiled. These people were good

people. They'd been through more than Suzanne could imagine. It felt

right that she could help them -- like making up for every panhandler

she'd ignored and every passed-out drunk she'd stepped over.

There were no blankets, there were no beds. The squatters slept on the

concrete floor. Young couples spooned under tables. Children snuggled

between their parents, or held onto their mothers. As the squatters

dossed down and as Suzanne walked past them to get to her car her

heart broke a hundred times. She felt like one of those Depression-era

photographers walking through an Okie camp, a rending visual at each

corner.

Back at her rented condo, she found herself at the foot of her

comfortable bed with its thick duvet -- she liked keeping the AC

turned up enough to snuggle under a blanket -- and the four

pillows. She was in her jammies, but she couldn't climb in between

those sheets.

She couldn't.