PART II

The drive from Orlando down to Hollywood got worse every time Sammy

took it. The turnpike tolls went up every year and the road surface

quality declined, and the gas prices at the clip-joints were

heart-attack-inducing. When Sammy started at Disney Imagineering a

decade before, the company had covered your actual expenses -- just

collect the receipts and turn them in for cash back. But since Parks

had been spun off into a separate company with its own shareholders,

the new austerity measures meant that the bean-counters in Burbank set

a maximum per-mile reimbursement and never mind the actual expense.

Enough of this competitive intelligence work and Sammy would go broke.

Off the turnpike, it was even worse. The shantytowns multiplied and

multiplied. Laundry lines stretched out in the parking-lots of former

strip-malls. Every traffic-light clogged with aggressive

techno-tchotchke vendors, the squeegee bums of the twenty-first

century, with their pornographic animatronic dollies and infinitely

varied robot dogs. Disney World still sucked in a fair number of

tourists (though not nearly so many as in its golden day), but they

were staying away from Miami in droves. The snowbirds had died off in

a great demographic spasm over the past decade, and their children

lacked the financial wherewithal to even think of over-wintering in

their parents' now-derelict condos.

The area around the dead Wal-Mart was particularly awful. The shanties

here rose three, even four stories into the air, clustered together to

make medieval street-mazes. Broward County had long since stopped

enforcing the property claims of the bankruptcy courts that managed

the real-estate interests of the former owners of the fields and malls

that had been turned into the new towns.

By the time he pulled into the Wal-Mart's enormous parking lot, the

day had heated up, his air-con had conked, and he'd accumulated a

comet-tail of urchins who wanted to sell him a computer-generated bust

of himself in the style of a Roman emperor -- they worked on affiliate

commission for some three-d printer jerk in the shanties, and they had

a real aggressive pitch, practically flinging their samples at him.

He pushed past them and wandered through the open-air market stalls, a

kind of cruel parody of the long-gone Florida flea-markets. These

gypsies sold fabricated parts that could be modded to make single-shot

zip guns and/or bongs and/or illegal-gain wireless antennae. They sold

fruit smoothies and suspicious "beef" jerky. They sold bootleg

hardcopies of Mexican fotonovelas and bound printouts of Japanese

fan-produced tentacle-porn comics. It was all damnably eye-catching

and intriguing, even though Sammy knew that it was all junk.

Finally, he reached the ticket-window in front of the Wal-Mart and

slapped down five bucks on the counter. The guy behind the counter was

the kind of character that kept the tourists away from Florida:

shaven-headed, with one cockeyed eyebrow that looked like a set of

hills, a three-day beard and skin tanned like wrinkled leather.

"Hi again!" Sammy said, brightly. Working at Disney taught you to talk

happy even when your stomach was crawling -- the castmember's grin.

"Back again?" the guy behind the counter laughed. He was missing a

canine tooth and it made him look even more sketchy. "Christ, dude,

we'll have to invent a season's pass for you."

"Just can't stay away," Sammy said.

"You're not the only one. You're a hell of a customer for the ride,

but you haven't got anything on some of the people I get here --

people who come practically every day. It's flattering, I tell you."

"You made this, then?"

"Yeah," he said, swelling up with a little pigeon-chested puff of

pride. "Me and Lester, over there." He gestured at a fit, greying man

sitting on a stool before a small cocktail bar built into a scavenged

Orange Julius stand -- God knew where these people got all their crap

from. He had the look of one of the fatkins, unnaturally thin and

muscled and yet somehow lazy, the combination of a ten kilocalorie

diet, zero body-fat and non-steroidal muscle enhancers. Ten years ago,

he would have been a model, but today he was just another ex-tubbalard

with a serious food habit. Time was that Disney World was

nigh-unnavigable from all the powered wheelchairs carting around

morbidly obese Americans who couldn't walk from ride to ride, but

these days it looked more like an ad for a gymnasium, full of

generically buff fatkins in tight-fitting clothes.

"Good work!" he said again in castmemberese. "You should be very

proud!"

The proprietor smiled and took a long pull off a straw hooked into the

distiller beside him. "Go on, get in there -- flatterer!"

Sammy stepped through the glass doors and found himself in an

air-conditioned cave of seemingly infinite dimension. The old Wal-Mart

had been the size of five football fields, and a cunning arrangement

of curtains and baffles managed to convey all that space without

revealing its contents. Before him was the ride vehicle, in a single

shaft of spotlight.

Gingerly, he stepped into it. The design was familiar -- there had

been a glut of these things before the fatkins movement took hold,

stair-climbing wheelchairs that used gyro-stabilizers to pitch, yaw,

stand and sit in a perpetual controlled fall. The Disney World

veterans of their heyday remembered them as failure-prone behemoths

that you needed a forklift to budge when they died, but the ride

people had done something to improve on the design. These things

performed as well as the originals, though they were certainly

knock-offs -- no*how* were these cats shelling out fifty grand a pop

for the real deal.

The upholstered seat puffed clouds of dust into the spotlight's shaft

as he settled into the chair and did up his lap-belt. The little LCD

set into the control panel lit up and started to play the standard

video spiel, narrated in grizzled voice-over.

WELCOME TO THE CABINET OF WONDERS

THERE WAS A TIME WHEN AMERICA HELD OUT THE PROMISE OF A NEW WAY OF

LIVING AND WORKING. THE NEW WORK BOOM OF THE TEENS WAS A PERIOD OF

UNPARALLELED INVENTION, A CAMBRIAN EXPLOSION OF CREATIVITY NOT SEEN

SINCE THE TIME OF EDISON -- AND UNLIKE EDISON, THE PEOPLE WHO INVENTED

THE NEW WORK REVOLUTION WEREN'T RIP-OFF ARTISTS AND FRAUDS.

THEIR MARVELOUS INVENTIONS EMERGED AT THE RATE OF FIVE OR SIX PER

WEEK. SOME DANCED, SOME SANG, SOME WERE HELPMEETS AND SOME WERE MERE

JESTERS.

TODAY, NEARLY ALL OF THESE WONDERFUL THINGS HAVE VANISHED WITH THE

COLLAPSE OF NEW WORK. THEY'VE ENDED UP BACK IN THE TRASH HEAPS THAT

INSPIRED THEM.

HERE IN THE CABINET OF WONDERS, WE ARE PRESERVING THESE LAST REMNANTS

OF THE GOLDEN AGE, A SINGLE BEACON OF LIGHT IN A TIME OF DARKNESS.

AS YOU MOVE THROUGH THE RIDESPACE, PLEASE REMAIN SEATED. HOWEVER, YOU

MAY PAUSE YOUR VEHICLE TO GET A CLOSER LOOK BY MOVING THE JOYSTICK

TOWARD YOURSELF. PULL THE JOYSTICK UP TO CUE NARRATION ABOUT ANY

OBJECT.

MOVE THE JOYSTICK TO THE LEFT, TOWARDS THE MINUS-ONE, IF YOU THINK AN

ITEM IS UGLY, UNWORTHY OR MISPLACED. MOVE THE JOYSTICK TO THE RIGHT,

TOWARD THE PLUS-ONE, IF YOU THINK AN ITEM IS PARTICULARLY

PLEASING. YOUR FEEDBACK WILL BE FACTORED INTO THE CONTINUOUS

REARRANGEMENT OF THE CABINET, WHICH TAKES PLACE ON A MINUTE-BY-MINUTE

BASIS, DRIVEN BY THE ROBOTS YOU MAY SEE CRAWLING AROUND THE FLOOR OF

THE CABINET.

THE RIDE LASTS BETWEEN TEN MINUTES AND AN HOUR, DEPENDING ON HOW OFTEN

YOU PAUSE.

PLEASE ENJOY YOURSELF, AND REMEMBER WHEN WE WERE GOLDEN.

This plus-one/minus-one business was new to him. It had been a mere

four days since he'd been up here, but like so many other of his

visits, they'd made major rehabs to their ride in the amount of time

it would have taken Imagineering to write a memo about the possibility

of holding a design-review meeting.

He velcroed his camera's wireless eye to his lapel, tapped the preset

to correct for low light and motion, and hit the joystick. The

wheelchair stood up with wobbly grace, and began to roll forward on

two wheels, heeling over precipitously as it cornered into the main

space of the ride. The gyros could take it, he knew, but it still

thrilled him the way that a fast, out-of-control go-kart did, miles

away from the safe rides back in Disney.

The chair screeched around a corner and pulled into the first scene, a

diorama littered with cross-sectioned cars. Each one was kitted out

with different crazy technologies -- dashboard gods that monitored and

transmitted traffic heuristics, parallel-parking autopilots,

peer-to-peer music-sharing boxes, even an amphibious retrofit on a

little hybrid that apparently worked, converting the little Bug into a

water-Bug.

The chair swooped around each one, pausing while the narration played

back reminisces by the inventors, or sometimes by the owners of the

old gizmos. The stories were pithy and sweet and always funny. These

were artifacts scavenged from the first days of a better nation that

had died a-borning.

Then on to the kitchen, and the bathrooms -- bathroom after bathroom,

with better toilets, better showers, better tubs, better floors and

better lights -- bedrooms, kids' rooms. One after another, a hyper

museum.

The decor was miles ahead of where it had been the last time he'd been

through. There were lots of weird grace-notes, like taxidermied

alligators, vintage tourist pennants, chintz lamps, and tiny dioramae

of action figures.

He paused in front of a fabric printer surrounded by custom tees and

knit caps and three-d video-game figurines machine-crocheted from

bright yarns, and was passed by another chair. In it was a cute woman

in her thirties, white-blond shaggy hair luminous in the spotlight

over the soft-goods. She paused her chair and lovingly reached out to

set down a pair of appliqued shorts with organic LEDs pulsing and

swirling around the waistband. "Give it a plus-one, OK? These were my

best sellers," she said, smiling a dazzling beach-bunny smile at

him. She wheeled away and paused at the next diorama to set down a

doll-house in a child's room diorama.

Wow -- they were getting user-generated content in the *ride*. Holy

crap.

He finished out the ride with a keen hand on the plus-one/minus-one

lever, carefully voting for the best stuff and against the stuff that

looked out of place -- like a pornographic ceramic bong that someone

had left in the midst of a clockwork animatronic jug-band made from

stitched-together stuffed animals.

Then it was over, and he was debarking in what had been the Wal-Mart's

garden center. The new bright sun made him tear up, and he fished out

his shades.

"Hey, mister, c'mere, I've got something better than sunglasses for

you!" The guy who beckoned him over to a market-stall had the look of

an aging bangbanger: shaved head, tattoos, ridiculous cycling shorts

with some gut hanging over them.

"See these? Polarizing contact-lenses -- prescription or optically

neutral. Everyone in India is into these things, but we make 'em right

here in Florida." He lifted a half-sphere of filmy plastic from his

case and peeled back his eyelid and popped it in. His whole iris was

tinted black, along with most of the whites of his eyes. Geometric

shapes like Maori tattoos were rendered in charcoal grey across the

lenses. "I can print you up a set in five minutes, ten bucks for

plain, twenty if you want them bit-mapped."

"I think I'll stick with my shades, thanks," Sammy said.

"C'mon, the ladies love these things. Real conversation starter. Make

you look all anime and shit, guy like you can try this kind of thing

out for twenty bucks, you know, won't hurt."

"That's all right," Sammy said.

"Just try a pair on, then, how about that. I printed an extra set last

Wednesday and they've only got a shelf-life of a week, so these'll

only be good for another day. Fresh in a sealed package. You like

'em. you buy a pair at full price, c'mon that's as good as you're

going to get."

Before Sammy knew it, he was taking receipt of a sealed plastic packet

in hot pink with a perforated strip down one side. "Uh, thanks..." he

said, as he began to tuck it into a pocket. He hated hard-sells, he

was no good at them. It was why he bought all his cars online now.

"Naw, that's not the deal, you got to try them on, otherwise how can

you buy them once you fall in love with 'em? They're safe man, go on,

it's easy, just like putting in a big contact lens."

Sammy thought about just walking away, but the other vendors were

watching him now, and the scrutiny sapped his will. "My hands are too

dirty for this," he said. The vendor silently passed him a sealed

sterile wipe, grinning.

Knowing he was had, he wiped his hands, tore open the package, took

out the lenses and popped them one at a time into his eyes. He blinked

a couple times. The world was solarized and grey, like he was seeing

it through a tinted windscreen.

"Oh man, you look bad-*ass*," the vendor said. He held up a hand

mirror.

Sammy looked. His eyes were shiny black beads, like a mouse's eyes,

solid save for a subtle tracery of Mickey Mouse heads at the

corners. The trademark infringement made him grin, hard and

spitless. He looked ten years younger, like those late-teen hipsters

whose parents dragged them to Walt Disney World, who showed up in

bangbanger threads and sneered and scratched their groins and made

loud remarks about how suckballs it all was. His conservative buzz-cut

looked more like a retro-skinhead thing, and his smooth-shaved, round

cheeks made him boyish.

"Those are good for two days tops -- your eyes start getting itchy,

you just toss 'em. You want a pair that's good for a week, twenty

dollah with the Mickeys. I got Donalds and Astro Boys and all kinds of

shit, just have a look through my flash book. Some stuff I drew

myself, even."

Playing along now, Sammy let himself be led on a tour of the

flash-book, which featured the kind of art he was accustomed to seeing

in tattoo parlor windows: skulls and snakes and scorpions and naked

ladies. Mickey Mouse giving the finger, Daisy Duck with a strap-on,

Minnie Mouse as a dominatrix. The company offered a bounty for turning

in trademark infringers, but somehow he doubted that the company

lawyers would be able to send this squatter a cease-and-desist letter.

In the end, he bought one of each of the Disney sets.

"You like the mouse, huh?"

"Sure," he said.

"I never been. Too expensive. This is all the ride I want, right

here." He gestured at the dead Wal-Mart.

"You like that huh?"

"Man, it's cool! I go on that sometimes, just to see what it's turned

into. I like that it's always different. And I like that people add

their own stuff. It makes me feel, you know..."

"What?"

Suddenly, the vendor dropped his hard-case bangbanger facade. "Those

were the best days of my life. I was building three-d printers, making

them run. My older brother liked to fix cars, and so did my old man,

but who needs a car, where you going to go? The stuff I built, man, it

could make *anything*. I don't know why or how it ended, but while it

was going, I felt like the king of the goddamned world."

It felt less fun and ironic now. There were tears bright on the

vendor's black-bead eyes. He was in his mid-twenties, younger than

he'd seemed at first. If he'd been dressed like a suburban home-owner,

he would have looked like someone smart and accomplished, with lively

features and clever hands. Sammy felt obscurely ashamed.

"Oh," he said. "Well, I spent those years working a straight job, so

it didn't really touch me."

"That's your loss, man," the vendor said. The printer behind him was

spitting out the last of Sammy's contact-lenses, in sealed plastic

wrap. The vendor wrapped them up and put them in a brown liquor-store

bag.

Sammy plodded through the rest of the market with his paper bag. It

was all so depressing. The numbers at Disney World were down, way

down, and it was his job to figure out how to bring them up again,

without spending too much money. He'd done it before a couple of

times, with the live-action role-playing stuff, and with the rebuild

of Fantasyland as an ironic goth hangout (being a wholly separate

entity from the old Walt Disney Company had its advantages). But to do

it a third time -- Christ, he had no idea how he'd get there. These

weird-ass Wal-Mart squatters had seemed promising, but could you

possibly transplant something like this to a high-throughput,

professional location-based entertainment product?

The urchins were still in the parking lot with their Roman emperor

busts. He held his hands out to ward them off and found himself

holding onto a bust of his own head. One of the little rats had gotten

a three-d scan of his head while he was walking by and had made the

bust on spec. He looked older in Roman emperor guise than he did in

his mind's eye, old and tired, like an emperor in decline.

"Twenty dollah man, twenty, twenty," the kid said. He was about 12,

and still chubby, with long hair that frizzed away from his head in a

dandelion halo.

"Ten," Sammy said, clutching his tired head. It was smooth as epoxy

resin, and surprisingly light. There was a lot of different goop you

could run through those three-d printers, but whatever they'd used for

this, it was featherweight.

The kid looked shrewd. "Twenty dollah and I get rid of these other

kids, OK?"

Sammy laughed. He passed the kid a twenty, taking care to tuck his

wallet deep into the inside pocket of his jacket. The kid whistled

shrilly and the rest of the kids melted away. The entrepreneur made

the twenty disappear, tapped the side of his nose, and took off

running back into the market stalls.

It was hot and muggy and Sammy was tired, and the drive back to

Orlando was another five hours if the traffic was against him -- and

these days, everything was against him.

#

Perry's funny eyebrow twitched as he counted out the day's take. This

gig was all cream, all profit. His overheads amounted to a couple

hundred a month to Jason and his crew to help with the robot and

machinery maintenance in the Wal-Mart, half that to some of the

shantytown girls to dust and sweep after closing, and a retainer to a

bangbanger pack that ran security at the ride and in the market. Plus

he got the market-stall rents, and so when the day was over, only the

first hundred bucks out of the till went into overheads and the rest

split even-steven with Lester.

Lester waited impatiently, watching him count twice before splitting

the stack. Perry rolled up his take and dropped it into a hidden

pocket sewn into his cargo shorts.

"Someday you're going to get lucky and some chick is going to reach

down and freak out, buddy," Lester said.

"Better she finds my bank-roll than my prostate," Perry said. Lester

spent a lot of time thinking about getting lucky, making up for a

lifetime of bad luck with girls.

"OK, let's get changed," Lester said. As usual, he was wearing

tight-fitting jeans that owed a little debt to the bangbanger cycling

shorts, something you would have had to go to a gay bar to see when

Perry was in college. His shirt clung to his pecs and was tailored

down to his narrow waist. It was a fatkins style, the kind of thing

you couldn't wear unless you had a uniquely adversarial relationship

with your body and metabolism.

"No, Lester, no." Perry said. "I said I'd go on this double date with

you, but I didn't say anything about letting you dress me up for it."

The two girls were a pair that Lester had met at a fatkins club in

South Beach the week before, and he'd camera-phoned their pic to Perry

with a scrawled drunken note about which one was his. They were

attractive enough, but the monotonic fatkins devotion to sybartism was

so tiresome. Perry didn't see much point in hooking up with a girl he

couldn't have a good technical discussion with.

"Come *on*, it's good stuff, you'll love it."

"If I have to change clothes, I'm not interested." Perry folded his

arms. In truth, he wasn't interested, period. He liked his little

kingdom there, and he could get everything he needed from burritos to

RAM at the market. He had a chest freezer full of bankruptcy sale

organic MREs, for variety.

"Just the shirt then -- I had it printed just for you."

Perry raised his funny eyebrow. "Let's see it."

Lester turned to his latest car, a trike with huge, electric blue back

tires, and popped the trunk, rummaged, and proudly emerged holding a

bright blue Hawai'ian print shirt.

"Lester, are those . . . turds?"

"It's transgressivist moderne," Lester said, hopping from foot to

foot. "Saw it in the New York Times, brought the pic to Gabriela in

the market, she cloned it, printed it, and sent it out for stitching

-- an extra ten buck for same-day service."

"I am *not* wearing a shirt covered in steaming piles of shit,

Lester. No, no, no. A googol times no."

Lester laughed. "Christ, I had you going, didn't I? Don't worry, I

wouldn't actually have let you go out in public wearing this. But how

about *this*?" he said with a flourish, and brought out another

shirt. Something stretchy and iridescent, like an oil-slick. It was

sleeveless. "It'll really work with your biceps and pecs. Also: looks

pretty good compared to the turd shirt, doesn't it? Go on, try it on."

"Lester Banks, you are the gayest straight man I know," Perry said. He

shucked his sweaty tee and slipped into the shirt. Lester gave him a

big thumbs-up. He examined his reflection in the blacked-out glass

doors of the Wal-Mart.

"Yeah, OK," he said. "Let's get this over with."

"Your enthusiasm, your best feature," Lester said.

Their dates were two brunettes with deep tans and whole-eye cosmetic

contacts that hid their pupils in favor of featureless expanses of

white, so they looked like their eyes had rolled back into their

heads, or maybe like they were wearing cue-balls for glass eyes. Like

most of the fatkins girls Perry had met, they dressed to the nines,

ate like pigs, drank like fishes, and talked about nothing but

biotech.

"So I'm thinking, sure, mitochrondrial lengthening *sounds* like it

should work, but if that's so, why have we been screwing around with

it for thirty years without accomplishing anything?" His date, Moira,

worked at a law office, and she came up to his chest, and it was hard

to tell with those eyes, but it seemed like she was totally oblivious

to his complete indifference to mitochondria.

He nodded and tried not to look bored. South Beach wasn't what it had

once been, or maybe Perry had changed. He used to love to come here to

people-watch, but the weirdos of South Beach seemed too precious when

compared with the denizens of his own little settlement out on the

Hollywood freeway.

"Let's go for a walk on the beach," Lester said, digging out his

wallet and rubbing his card over the pay-patch on the table.

"Good idea," Perry said. Anything to get off this patio and away from

the insufferable club music thundering out of the speakers

pole-mounted directly over their table.

The beach was gorgeous, so there was that. The sunset behind them

stained the ocean bloody and the sand was fine and clean. Around their

feet, Dade County beachcombers wormed endlessly through the sand,

filtering out all the gunk, cig butts, condoms, needles, wrappers,

loose change, wedding rings, and forgotten sunglasses. Perry nudged

one with his toe and it roombaed away, following its instinct to avoid

human contact.

"How do you figure they keep the vags from busting those open for

whatever they've got in their bellies?" Perry said, looking over his

date's head at Lester, who was holding hands with his girl, carrying

her shoes in his free hand.

"Huh? Oh, those things are built like tanks. Have to be to keep the

sand out. You need about four hours with an air-hammer to bust one

open."

"You tried it?"

Lester laughed. "Who, me?"

Now it was Perry's date's turn to be bored. She wandered away toward

the boardwalk, with its strip of novelty sellers. Perry followed,

because he had a professional interest in the kind of wares they

carried. Most of them originated on one of his printers, after

all. Plus, it was the gentlemanly thing to do.

"What have we here?" he said as he pulled up alongside her. She was

trying on a bracelet of odd, bony beads.

"Ectopic fetuses," she said. "You know, like the Christian fundies use

for stem-cell research? You quicken an unfertilized egg in vitro and

you get a little ball of fur and bone and skin and stem-cells. It can

never be a human, so it has no soul, so it's not murder to harvest

them."

The vendor, a Turkish teenager with a luxurious mustache,

nodded. "Every bead made from naturally occurring foetus-bones." He

handed one to Perry.

It was dry and fragile in his hand. The bones were warm and porous,

and in tortured Elephant Man shapes that he recoiled from

atavistically.

"Good price," the Turkish kid said. He had practically no accent at

all, and was wearing a Japanese baseball-team uniform and spray-on

foot-coverings. Thoroughly Americanized. "Look here," he said, and

gestured at a little corner of his table.

It was covered in roses made from fabric -- small and crude, with

pin-backs. Perry picked one up. It had a certain naive charm. The

fabric was some kind of very delicate leather --

"It's skin," his date said. "Foetal skin."

He dropped it. His fingers tingled with the echo of the feeling of the

leather. *Jesus I hate biotech*. The rose fluttered past the table to

the sandy boardwalk, and the Turkish kid picked it up and blew it

clean.

"Sorry," Perry said, sticking his hands in his pockets. His date

bought a bracelet and a matching choker made of tiny bones and teeth,

and the Turkish kid, leering, helped her fasten the necklace. When

they returned to Lester and his date, Perry knew the evening was at a

close. The girls played a couple rounds of eye-hockey, unreadable

behind their lenses, and Perry shrugged apologetically at Lester.

"Well then," Lester said, "it sure has been a nice night." Lester got

smooched when they saw the girls off in a pedicab. In the buzz and hum

of its flywheel, Perry got a damp and unenthusiastic handshake.

"Win some, lose some," Lester said as the girls rolled away in a flash

of muscular calves from the pair of beach-perfect cabbies pedaling the

thing.

"You're not angry?" Perry said.

"Nah," Lester said. "I get laid too much as it is. Saps me of my

precious bodily fluids. Gotta keep some chi inside, you know?"

Perry raised up his funny eyebrow and made it dance.

"Oh, OK," Lester said. "You got me. I'm meeting mine later, after she

drops her friend off."

"I'll get a cab home then, shall I?"

"Take my car," Lester said. "I'll get a ride back in the morning. No

way you'll get a taxi to take you to our neighborhood at this hour."

Perry's car had been up on blocks for a month, awaiting his attention

to its failing brakes and mushy steering. So it was nice to get behind

the wheel of Lester's Big Daddy Roth trike and give it a little gas

out on the interstate, the smell of the swamp and biodiesel from the

big rigs streaming past the windscreen. The road was dark and

treacherous with potholes, but Perry got into the rhythm of it and

found he didn't want to go home, quite, so he kept driving, into the

night. He told himself that he was scouting dead malls for future

expansion, but he had kids who'd video-documented the status of all

the likely candidates in the hood, and he kept tabs on his choicest

morsels via daily sat photos that he subscribed to in his morning

feed.

What the hell was he doing with his life? The Wal-Mart ride was a lark

-- it had been Lester's idea, but Lester had lost interest and Perry

had done most of the work. They weren't quite squatting the Wal-Mart:

Perry paid rent to a state commission that collected in escrow for the

absentee landlord. It was a fine life, but the days blurred one into

the next, directionless. Building the ride had been fun, setting up

the market had been fun, but running them -- well, he might as well be

running a laundromat for all the mental acuity his current job

required.

"You miss it," he said to himself over the whistle of the wind and the

hiss of the fat contact-patches on the rear tires. "You want to be

back in the shit, inventing stuff, making it all happen."

For the hundredth time, he thought about calling Suzanne Church. He

missed her, too, and not just because she made him famous (and now he

was no longer famous). She put it all in perspective for him, and

egged him on to greater things. She'd been their audience, and they'd

all performed for her, back in the golden days.

It was, what, 5AM in Russia? Or was it two in the afternoon? He had

her number on his speed-dial, but he never rang it. He didn't know

what he'd tell her.

He could call Tjan, or even Kettlebelly, just ring them out of the

blue, veterans together shooting the shit. Maybe they could have a

Kodacell reunion, and get together to sing the company song, wearing

the company t-shirt.

He pulled the car off at a truck stop and bought an ice-cream novelty

from a vending machine with a robotic claw that scooped the ice-cream,

mushed it into the cone, then gave it a haircut so that it looked like

Astro Boy's head, then extended the cone on a robotic claw. It made

him smile. Someone had invented this thing. It could have been him. He

knew where you could download vision-system libraries, and

force-feedback libraries. He knew where you could get plans for the

robotics, and off-the-shelf motors and sensors. Christ, these days he

had a good idea where you could get the ice-cream wholesale, and which

crooked vending-machine interests he'd have to grease to get his stuff

into truck-stops.

He was thirty four years old, he was single and childless, and he was

eating an ice-cream in a deserted truck-stop at two in the morning by

the side of a freeway in south Florida. He bossed a low-budget tourist

attraction and he ran a pirate flea-market.

What the hell was he doing with his life?

Getting mugged, that's what.

They came out of the woods near the picnic tables, four bangbangers,

but young ones, in their early teens. Two had guns -- nothing fancy,

just AK-47s run off a computer-controlled mill somewhere in an

industrial park. You saw them all over the place, easy as pie to make,

but the ammo was a lot harder to come by. So maybe they were unloaded.

Speaking of unloaded. He was about to piss his pants.

"Wallet," one of them said. He had a bad mustache that reminded him of

the Turkish kid on the beach. Probably the same hormones that gave

kids mustaches gave them bad ideas like selling fetus jewelry or

sticking up people by the ice-cream machines at late night

truck-stops. "Keys," he said. "Phone," he added.

Perry slowly set down the ice-cream cone on the lid of the trash-can

beside him. He'd only eaten one spike off Astro-Boy's head.

His vision telescoped down so that he was looking at that kid, at his

mustache, at the gun in his hands. He was reaching for his wallet,

slowly. He'd need to hitch a ride back to town. Canceling the

credit-cards would be tough, since he'd stored all the identity-theft

passwords and numbers in his phone, which they were about to take off

him. And he'd have to cancel the phone, for that matter.

"Do you have an older brother named Jason?" his mouth said, while his

hands were still being mugged.

"What?"

"Works a stall by the Wal-Mart ride, selling contact lenses?"

The kid's eyes narrowed. "You don't know me, man. You don't want to

know me. Better for your health if you don't know me."

His hands were passing over his phone, his wallet, his keys --

Lester's keys. Lester would be glad to have an excuse to build a new

car.

"Only I own the Wal-Mart ride, and I've known Jason a long time. I

gave him his first job, fixing the printers. You look like him."

The kid's three buddies were beginning their slow fade into the

background. The kid was visibly on the horns of a dilemma. The gun

wavered. Perry's knees turned to water.

"You're that guy?" the kid said. He peered closer. "Shit, you are."

"Keep it all," Perry said. His mouth wasn't so smart. Knowing who

mugged you wasn't good for your health.

"Shit," the kid said. The gun wavered. Wavered.

"Come *on*," one of his buddies said. "Come on, man!"

"I'll be there in a minute," the kid said, his voice flat.

Perry knew he was a dead man.

"I'm really sorry," the kid said, once his friends were out of range.

"Me too," said Perry.

"You won't tell my brother?"

Perry froze. Time dilated. He realized that his fists were clenched so

tight that his knuckles hurt. He realized that he had a zit on the

back of his neck that was rubbing against his collar. He realized that

the kid had a paperback book stuck in the waistband of his bangbanger

shorts, which was unusual. It was a fantasy novel. A Conan novel. Wow.

Time snapped back.

"I won't tell your brother," he said. Then he surprised himself, "But

you've got to give me back the credit-cards and leave the car at the

market in the morning."

The kid nodded. Then he seemed to realize he was holding a gun on

Perry. He lowered it. "Yeah, that's fair," he said. "Can't use the

fucking cards these days anyway."

"Yeah," Perry said. "Well, there's some cash there anyway." He

realized he had five hundred bucks in a roll in a hidden pocket in his

shorts.

"You get home OK?"

"I'll thumb a ride," Perry said.

"I can call you a taxi," the kid said. "It's not safe to hang around

here."

"That's really nice of you," Perry said. "Thanks."

The kid took out a little phone and prodded it for a minute. "On the

way," he said. "The guns aren't loaded."

"Oh, well," Perry said. "Good to know."

An awkward silence spread between them. "Look, I'm really sorry," the

kid said. "We don't really do this. It's our first night. My brother

would really kill me."

"I won't tell him," Perry said. His heart was beating again, not

thundering or keeping ominously still. "But you know, this isn't

smart. You're going to stick someone up who has bullets and he's gonna

shoot you."

"We'll get ammo," the kid said.

"And shoot him? That's only a little better, you know."

"What do you want me to say?" the kid said, looking young and

petulant. "I apologized."

"Come by tomorrow with the car and let's talk, all right?"

Lester didn't even notice that his car was missing until the kid drove

up with it, and when he asked about it, Perry just raised his funny

eyebrow at him. That funny eyebrow, it had the power to cloud men's

minds.

"What's your name?" Perry asked the kid, giving him the spare stool by

the ticket-window. It was after lunch time, when the punishing heat

slowed everyone to a sticky crawl, and the crowd was thin -- one or

two customers every half hour.

"Glenn," the kid said. In full daylight, he looked older. Perry had

noticed that the shantytowners never stopped dressing like teenagers,

wearing the fashions of their youths forever, so that a walk through

the market was like a tour through the teen fashions of the last

thirty years.

"Glenn, you did me a real solid last night."

Glenn squirmed on his stool. "I'm sorry about that --"

"Me too," Perry said. "But not as sorry as I might have been. You said

it was your first night. Is that true?"

"Car-jacking, sure," the kid said.

"But you get into other shit, don't you? Mugging? Selling a little

dope? Something like that?"

"Everyone does that," Glenn said. He looked sullen.

"Maybe," Perry said. "And then a lot of them end up doing a stretch in

a work-camp. Sometimes they get bit by water-moccasins and don't come

out. Sometimes, one of the other prisoners hits them over the head

with a shovel. Sometimes you just lose three to five years of your

life to digging ditches."

Glenn said nothing.

"I'm not trying to tell you how to run your life," Perry said. "But

you seem like a decent kid, so I figure there's more in store for you

than getting killed or locked up. I know that's pretty normal around

here, but you don't have to go that way. Your brother didn't."

"What the fuck do you know about it, anyway?" The kid was up now, body

language saying he wanted to get far away, fast.

"I could ask around the market," Perry said, as though the kid hadn't

spoken. "Someone here has got to be looking for someone to help

out. You could open your own stall."

The kid said, "It's all just selling junk to idiots. What kind of job

is that for a man?"

"Selling people stuff they can't be bothered to make for themselves is

a time-honored way of making a living. There used to be professional

portrait photographers who'd take a pic of your family for money. They

were even considered artists. Besides, you don't have to sell stuff

you download. You can invent stuff and print that."

"Get over it. Those days are over. No one cares about inventions

anymore."

It nailed Perry between the eyes, like a slaughterhouse bolt. "Yeah,

yeah," he said. He didn't want to talk to this kid any more than this

kid wanted to talk to him. "Well, if I can't talk you out of it, it's

your own business. . ." He started to rearrange his ticket-desk.

The kid saw his opportunity for freedom and bolted. He was probably

headed for his brother's stall and then the long walk to wherever he

planned on spending his day. Everything was a long walk from here, or

you could wait for the busses that ran on the hour during

business-hours.

Perry checked out the car, cleaned out the empties and the roaches and

twists from the back seat, then parked it. A couple more people came

by to ride his ride, and he took their money.

Lester had just finished his largest-ever flattened-soda-can

mechanical computer, it snaked back and forth across the whole of the

old Wal-Mart solarium, sheets of pressboard with precision-cut gears

mounted on aviation bearings -- Francis had helped him with those. All

day, he'd been listening to the racket of it grinding through its

mighty 0.001KHz calculations, dumping carloads of M&Ms into its output

hopper. You programmed it with regulation baseballs, footballs,

soccer-balls, and wiffleballs: dump them in the input hopper and they

would be sorted into the correct chutes to trigger the

operations. With a whopping one kilobit of memory, the thing could

best any of the early vacuum tube computers without a single

electrical component, and Lester was ready to finally declare victory

over the cursed Univac.

Perry let himself be coaxed into the work-room, deputizing Francis to

man the ticket-desk, and watched admiringly as Lester put the machine

through its paces.

"You've done it," Perry said.

"Well, I gotta blog it," Lester said. "Run some benchmarks, really

test it out against the old monsters. I'm thinking of using it to

brute-force the old Nazi Enigma code. That'll show those dirty Nazi

bastards! We'll win the war yet!"

Perry found himself giggling. "You're the best, man," he said to

Lester. "It's good that there's at least one sane person around here."

"Don't flatter yourself, Perry."

"I was talking about *you*, Lester."

"Uh-oh," Lester said. He scooped a double handful of brown M&Ms up

from the output hopper and munched them. "It's not a good sign when

you start accusing me of being the grownup in our partnership. Have

some M&Ms and tell me about it."

Perry did, unburdening himself to his old pal, his roommate of ten

years, the guy he'd gone to war with and started businesses with and

collaborated with.

"You're restless, Perry," Lester said. He put nine golf-balls, a

ping-pong ball, and another nine golf balls in the machine's input

hopper. Two and a third seconds later, eighty one M&Ms dropped into

the output hopper. "You're just *bored*. You're a maker, and you're

running things instead of making things."

"No one cares about made things anymore, Les."

"That's sort of true," Lester said. "I'll allow you that. But it's

only sort of true. What you're missing is how much people care about

organizations still. That was the really important thing about the New

Work: the way we could all come together to execute, without a lot of

top-down management. The bangbanger arms dealers, the bio-terrorists

and fatkins suppliers -- they all run on social institutions that we

perfected back then. You've got something like that here with your

market, a fluid social institution that you couldn't have had ten or

fifteen years ago."

"If you say so," Perry said. The M&Ms were giving him heartburn. Cheap

chocolate didn't really agree with his stomach.

"I do. And so the answer is staring you right in the face: go invent

some social institutions. You've got one creeping up here in the

ride. There are little blogospheres of fans who coordinate what

they're going to bring down and where they're going to put it. Build

on that."

"No one's going to haul ass across the country to ride this ride,

Les. Get real."

"Course not." Lester beamed at him. "I've got one word for you, man:

franchise!"

"Franchise?"

"Build dupes of this thing. Print out anything that's a one of a kind,

run them as franchises."

"Won't work," Perry said. "Like you said, this thing works because of

the hardcore of volunteer curators who add their own stuff to it --

it's always different. Those franchises would all be static, or would

diverge... It'd just be boring compared to this."

"Why should they diverge? Why should they be static? You could network

them, dude! What happens in one, happens in all. The curators wouldn't

just be updating one exhibit, but all of them. Thousands of

them. Millions of them. A gigantic physical wiki. Oh, it'd be so very

very very cool, Perry. A cool *social institution.*"

"Why don't you do it?"

"I'm gonna. But I need someone to run the project. Someone who's good

at getting people all pointed in the same direction. You, pal. You're

my hero on this stuff."

"You're such a flatterer."

"You love it, baby," Lester said, and fluttered his long

eyelashes. "Like the lady said to the stamp collector, philately will

get you everywhere."

"Oy," Perry said. "You're fired."

"You can't fire me, I'm a volunteer!"

Lester dropped six golf-balls and a heavy medicine ball down the

hopper. The machine ground and chattered, then started dropping

hundred-loads of M&Ms -- 100, 200, 300, 400, 500, 600, 700 -- then

some change.

"What operation was that?" Perry said. He'd never seen Lester pull out

the medicine ball.

"Figure it out," Lester said.

Perry thought for a moment. Six squared? Six cubed? Log six? "Six

*factorial*? My God you're weird, Les."

"Genius is never appreciated." He scooped up a double-handful of brown

M&Ms. "In your face, Von Neumann! Let's see your precious ENIAC top

*this*!"

#

A month later, Perry was clearing security at Miami International,

looking awkward in long trousers, closed-sole shoes, and a denim

jacket. It was autumn in Boston, and he couldn't show up in flip-flops

and a pair of cutoffs. The security guards gave his leathery, lopsided

face a hard look. He grinned like a pirate and made his funny eyebrow

twitch, a stunt that earned him half an hour behind the screen and a

date with Doctor Jellyfinger.

"What, exactly, do you think I've got hidden up there?" he asked as he

gripped the railing and tried not to let the illegitimati carborundum.

"It's procedure, sir."

"Well, the doc said my prostate was the size of a guava about a month

ago -- in your professional opinion, has it shrunk or grown? I mean,

while you're up there."

The TSA man didn't like that at all. A minute later, Perry was

buckling up and leaving the little room with an exaggerated bowlegged

gait. He tipped an imaginary hat at the guard's retreating back and

said, "Call me!" in a stagey voice.

It was the last bit of fun he had for the next four hours, crammed in

the tin can full of recycled discount air-traveller flatulence and the

clatter of fingers on keyboards and the gabble of a hundred phone

conversations as the salarymen on the flight stole a few minutes of

cramped productivity from the dead travel time.

Touching down in Boston and getting his luggage, he felt like he'd

landed on an alien planet. The feeling of disorientation and

foreignness was new to Perry. He was used to being supremely

comfortable, in control -- confident. But he was nervous now, maybe

even scared, a little.

He dialed Tjan. "I've got my bags," he said.

"I'll be right around," Tjan said. "Really looking forward to seeing

you."

There were more cops than passengers in the arrivals area at Logan,

and they watched Tjan warily as he pulled up and swung open a door of

his little sports-car.

"What the fuck is this, a Porsche?" Perry said as he folded himself

awkwardly into the front seat, stepping in through the sun-roof,

pulling his bag down into his lap after him.

"It's a Lada. I had it imported -- they're all over

Russia. Evolutionary algorithm used to produce a

minimum-materials/maximum-strength chassis. It's nice to see you,

Perry."

"It's nice to see you, Tjan," he said. The car was so low to the

ground that it felt like he was riding luge. Tjan hammered mercilessly

on the gearbox, rocketing them to Cambridge at such speed that Perry

barely had time to admire the foliage, except at stop-lights.

They were around the campus now, taking a screeching right off Mass

Ave onto a tree-lined street of homely two-storey brick houses. Tjan

pulled up in front of one and popped the sun-roof. The cold air that

rushed in was as crisp as an apple, unlike any breath of air to be had

in Florida, where there was always a mushiness, a feeling of air that

had been filtered through the moist lungs of Florida's teeming fauna.

Perry climbed out of the little Russian sports-car and twisted his

back and raised his arms over his head until his spine gave and popped

and crackled.

Tjan followed, and then he shut down the car with a remote that made

it go through an impressive and stylish series of clicks, clunks and

chirps before settling down over its wheels, dropping the chassis to a

muffler-scraping centimeter off the ground.

"Come on," he said. "I'll show you your room."

Tjan's porch sagged, with a couple kids' bikes triple-locked to it and

an all-covering chalk mosaic over every inch of it. The wood creaked

and gave beneath their feet.

The door sprang open and revealed a pretty little girl, nine or ten

years old, in blue-jeans and a hoodie sweater that went nearly to her

ankles, the long sleeves bunched up like beach-balls on her

forearms. The hood hung down to her butt -- it was East Coast

bangbanger, as reinterpreted through the malls.

"Daddy!" she said, and put her arms around Tjan's waist, squeezing

hard.

He pried her loose and then hoisted her by the armpits up to

eye-height. "What have you done to your brother?"

"Nothing he didn't deserve," she said, with a smile that showed

dimples and made her little nose wrinkle.

Tjan looked over at Perry. "This is my daughter, Lyenitchka, who is

about to be locked in the coal cellar until she learns to stop

torturing her younger brother. Lyenitchka, this is Perry Gibbons, upon

whom you have already made an irreparably bad first impression." He

shook her gently Perrywards.

"Hello, Perry," she said, giggling, holding out one hand. She had a

faint accent, which made her sound like a tiny, skinny Bond

villainess.

He shook gravely. "Nice to meet you," he said.

"You got your kids," Perry said, once she was gone.

"For the school year. Me and the ex, we had a heart-to-heart about the

Russian education system and ended up here: I get the kids from

September to June, but not Christmases or Easter holidays. She gets

them the rest of the time, and takes them to a family dacha in

Ukraine, where she assures me there are hardly any mafiyeh kids to

influence my darling daughter."

"You must be loving this," Perry said.

Tjan's face went serious. "This is the best thing that's ever happened

to me."

"I'm really happy for you, buddy."

They had burgers in the back-yard, cooking on an electric grill that

was caked with the smoking grease of a summer's worth of outdoor

meals. The plastic table-cloth was weighed down with painted rocks and

the corners blew up in the freshening autumn winds. Lyenitchka's

little brother appeared when the burgers began to spit and smoke on

the grill, a seven-year-old in metallic mesh trousers and shirt

wrought with the logo of a cartoon Cossack holding a laser-sword

aloft.

"Sasha, meet Perry." Sasha looked away, then went off to swing on a

tire-swing hanging from the big tree.

"You've got good kids," Perry said, handing Tjan a beer from the

cooler under the picnic table.

"Yup," Tjan said. He flipped the burgers and then looked at both of

them. Lyenitchka was pushing her brother on the swing, a little too

hard. Tjan smiled and looked back down at his burgers.

Tjan cut the burgers in half and dressed them to his kids' exacting

standards. They picked at them, pushed them onto each other's plates

and got some into their mouths.

"I've read your briefing on the ride," Tjan said, once his kids had

finished and eaten half a package of Chutney Oreos for dessert. "It's

pretty weird stuff."

Perry nodded and cracked another beer. The cool air was weirding him

out, awakening some atavistic instinct to seek a cave. "Yup, weird as

hell. But they love it. Not just the geeks, either, though they eat it

up, you should see it. Obsessive doesn't begin to cover it. But the

civilians come by the hundreds, too. You should hear them when they

come out: 'Jee-zus, I'd forgotten about those dishwasher-stackers,

they were wicked! Where can I get one of those these days you figger?'

The nostalgia's thick enough to cut with a knife."

Tjan nodded. "I've been going over your books, but I can't figure out

if you're profitable."

"Sorry, that's me. I'm pretty good at keeping track of numbers, but

getting them massaged into a coherent picture --"

"Yeah, I know." Tjan got a far-away look. "How'd you make out on

Kodacell, Perry? Finance-wise?"

"Enough to open the ride, buy a car. Didn't lose anything."

"Ah." Tjan fiddled with his beer. "Listen, I got rich off of

Westinghouse. Not fuck-the-service-here-I'm-buying-this-restaurant

rich, but rich enough that I never have to work again. I can spend the

rest of my life in this yard, flipping burgers, taking care of my

kids, and looking at porn."

"Well, you were the suit. Getting rich is what suits do. I'm just a

grunt.""

Tjan had the good grace to look slightly embarrassed. "Now here's the

thing. I don't *have* to work, but, Perry, I have *no idea* what I'm

going to do if I don't work. The kids are at school all day. Do you

have any idea how much daytime TV sucks? Playing the stock market is

completely nuts, it's all gone sideways and upside down. I got an

education so I wouldn't *have* to flip burgers for the rest of my

life."

"What are you saying, Tjan?"

"I'm saying yes," Tjan said, grinning piratically. "I'm saying that

I'll join your little weird-ass hobby business and I'll open another

ride here for the Massholes. I'll help you run the franchising op,

collect fees, make it profitable."

Perry felt his face tighten.

"What? I thought you'd be happy about this."

"I am," Perry said. "But you're misunderstanding something. These

aren't meant to be profitable businesses. I'm done with that. These

are art, or community, or something. They're museums. Lester calls

them *wunderkammers* -- cabinets of wonders. There's no franchising op

the way you're talking about it. It's ad hoc. It's a protocol we all

agree on, not a business arrangement."

Tjan grunted. "I don't think I understand the difference between a

agreed-upon protocol and a business arrangement." He held up his hand

to fend off Perry's next remark. "But it doesn't matter. You can let

people have the franchise for free. You can claim that you're not

letting anyone have anything, that they're letting themselves in for

their franchise. It doesn't matter to me.

"But Perry, here's something you're going to have to understand: it's

going to be nearly impossible *not to* make a business out of

this. Businesses are great structures for managing big projects. It's

like trying to develop the ability to walk without developing a

skeleton. Once in a blue moon, you get an octopus, but for the most

part, you get skeletons. Skeletons are good shit."

"Tjan, I want you to come on board to help me create an octopus,"

Perry said.

"I can try," Tjan said, "but it won't be easy. When you do cool stuff,

you end up making money."

"Fine," Perry said. "Make money. But keep it to a minimum, OK?"

#

The next time Perry turned up at Logan, it was colder than the inside

of an icebox and shitting down grey snow with the consistency of

frozen custard.

"Great weather for an opening," he said, once he'd climbed through the

roof of Tjan's car and gotten snow all over the leather

upholstery. "Sorry about the car."

"Don't sweat it, the kids are murder on leather. I should trade this

thing in on something that's less of a deathtrap anyway."

Tjan was balder than he'd been in September, and skinnier. He had a

three-day beard that further hollowed out his normally round

cheeks. The Lada sports-car fishtailed a little as they navigated the

tunnels back toward Cambridge, the roads slick and icy.

"We scored an excellent location," Tjan said. "I told you that, but

check this out." They were right in the middle of a built-up area of

Boston, something that felt like a banking district, with impressive

towers. It took Perry a minute to figure out what Tjan was pointing

at.

"That's the site?" There was a mall on the corner, with a boarded up

derelict Hyatt overtopping it, rising high into the sky. "But it's

right in the middle of town!"

"Boston's not Florida," Tjan said. "Lots of people here don't have

cars. There were some dead malls out in Worcester and the like, but I

got this place for nothing. The owners haven't paid taxes in the ten

years since the hotel folded, and the only shops that were left open

were a couple of Azerbaijani import-export guys, selling junky stuff

from India.

"We gutted the whole second floor and turned the ground-floor

food-court into a flea-market. There's an old tunnel connecting this

to the T and I managed to get it re-opened, so I expect we'll get some

walk-in."

Perry marveled. Tjan had a suit's knack for pulling off the

ambitious. Perry had never tried to even rent an apartment in a big

city, figuring that any place where land was at a premium was a place

where people willing to spend more than him could be found. Give him a

ghost-mall that was off the GPS grid anytime.

"Have you managed to fill the flea market?" It had taken Perry a long

time to fill his, and still he had a couple of dogs -- a tarot reader

and a bong stall, a guy selling high-pressure spray-paint cans and a

discount porn stall that sold naked shovelware by the petabyte.

"Yeah, I got proteges up and down New England. A lot of them settled

here after the crash. One place is as good as another, and the housing

was wicked-cheap once the economy disappeared. They upped stakes and

came to Boston as soon as I put the word out. I think everyone's

waiting for the next big thing."

"You think?"

"Perry, New Work is the most important thing that ever happened to

some of those people. It was the high-point of their lives. It was the

only time they ever felt useful."

Perry shook his head. "Don't you think that's sad?"

Tjan negotiated a tricky tunnel interchange and got the car pointed to

Cambridge. "No, Perry, I don't think it's sad. Jesus Christ, you can't

believe that. Why do you think I'm helping you? You and me and all the

rest of them, we did something *important*. The world changed. It's

continuing to change. Have you stopped to think that one in five

American workers picked up and moved somewhere else to do New Work

projects? That's one of the largest American resettlements since the

dustbowl. The average New Work collective shipped more inventions per

year than Edison Labs at its peak. In a hundred years, when they

remember the centuries that were America's, they'll count this one

among them, because of what we made.

"So no, Perry, I don't think it's sad."

"I'm sorry. Sorry, OK? I didn't mean it that way. But it's tragic,

isn't it, that the dream ended? That they're all living out there in

the boonies, thinking of their glory days?"

"Yes, that *is* sad. But that's why I agreed to do the ride -- not to

freeze the old projects in amber, but to create a new project that we

can all participate in again. These people uprooted their lives to

follow us, it's the least we can do to give them something back for

that."

Perry stewed on that the rest of the way to Tjan's, staring at the

sleet, hand resting against the icy window-glass.

#

Sammy checked in to a Comfort Inn tucked into the thirty-seventh

storey of the Bank of America building in downtown Boston. The lobby

was empty, the security-guard's desk unmanned. B of A was in

receivership, and not doing so hot at that, as the fact that they had

let out their executive floors to a discount business-hotel testified.

The room was fine, though -- small and windowless, but fine: power,

shower, toilet and bed, all he demanded in a hotel room. He ate the

packet of nuts he'd bought at the airport before jumping on the T and

then checked his email. He had more of it than he could possibly

answer -- he didn't think he'd ever had an empty in-box.

But he picked off anything that looked important, including a note

from his ex-, who was now living in the Keys on a squatter beach and

wanted to know if he could loan her a hundred bucks. No sense of how

she'd pay him back without work. But Michelle was resourceful and

probably good for it. He paypalled it to her, feeling like a sucker

for hoping that she might repay it in person. He'd been single since

she'd left him the year before and he was lonely and hard-up.

He'd landed at two and by the time he was done with all the bullshit,

it was after dinner time and he was hungry as hell. Boston was full of

taco-wagons and kebab stands that he'd passed on the walk in, and he

hustled out onto the street to see if any were still open. He got a

huge garlicky kebab and ate it in the lee of a frozen ATM shelter,

wolfing it without tasting it.

He went and scouted the location of the new ride. He'd gotten wind of

it online -- none of his idiot colleagues could be bothered to read

the public email lists of the competitors they were supposedly in

charge of oppo researching. Shaking loose the budget to get a discount

flight to Boston had been a major coup, requiring horse-trading,

blackmail, and passive-aggressive gaming of the system. With the

ridiculously low per-diem and hotel allowance he'd still go home a

couple hundred bucks out-of-pocket. Why did he even do his job? He

should just play by the rules and get nothing done.

And get fired. Or passed up for promotion, which was practically the

same thing.

The new ride was in an impressive urban mall. He'd spent his college

years in Philly and had passed many a happy day in malls like this

one, cruising for girls or camping out on a bench with his books and a

smoothie. Unlike the crappy roadside malls of Florida, there had been

nothing but the best stores in them, the property values too high to

make anything but high-margin, high-turnover, high-ticket shops

viable.

So it was especially sad to see this mall turned over to the junky

stalls and junkier ride -- like a fat, washed-up supermodel sentenced

to a talk-show appearance for her shoplifting arrests. He approached

the doors with trepidation. He was resolved not to buy anything from

the market -- no busts or contact lenses -- and had stuck his wallet

in his front pocket on the way over.

The mall was like a sauna. He shucked his jacket and sweater and hung

them over one arm. The whole ground floor had been given over to

flimsy market-stalls. He skulked among them, trying to simultaneously

take note of their contents and avoid their owners' notice.

He came to realize that he needn't skulk. It seemed like half of

Boston had turned out -- not just young people, either. There were

plenty of tweedy academics, big working-class Southie boys with thick

accents, recent immigrants with Scandie-chic clothes. They chattered

and laughed and mixed freely and ate hot food out of huge cauldrons or

off of clever electric grills. The smells made his stomach growl, even

though he'd just polished off a kebab the size of his head.

The buzz of the crowd reminded him of something, what was it? A

premiere, that was it. When they opened a new ride or area at the

Park, there was the same sense of thrilling anticipation, of

excitement and eagerness. That made it worse -- these people had no

business being this excited about something so. . . lowbrow? Cheap?

Whatever it was, it wasn't worthy.

They were shopping like fiends. A mother with a baby on her hip pushed

past him, her stroller piled high with shopping bags screened with

giant, pixellated Belgian pastries. She was laughing and the baby on

her hip was laughing too.

He headed for the escalator, whose treads had been anodized in bright

colors, something he'd never seen before. He let it carry him

upstairs, but looked down, and so he was nearly at the top before he

realized that the guy from the Florida ride was standing there,

handing out fliers and staring at Sammy like he knew him from

somewhere.

It was too late to avoid him. Sammy put on his best castmember

smile. "Hello there!"

The guy grinned and wiggled his eyebrow. "I know you from somewhere,"

he said slowly.

"From Florida," Sammy said, with an apologetic shrug. "I came up to

see the opening."

"No *way*!" The guy had a huge smile now, looked like was going to hug

him. "You're shitting me!"

"What can I say? I'm a fan."

"That's *incredible.* Hey, Tjan, come here and meet this guy. What's

your name?"

Sammy tried to think of another name, but drew a blank. "Mickey," he

said at last, kicking himself.

"Tjan, this is Mickey. He's a regular on the ride in Florida and he's

come up here just to see the opening."

Tjan had short hair and sallow skin, and dressed like an accountant,

but his eyes were bright and sharp as they took Sammy in, looking him

up and down quickly. "Well that's certainly flattering." He reached

into his creased blazer and pulled out a slip of paper. "Have a couple

comp tickets then -- the least we can do for your loyalty." The paper

was festooned with holograms and smart-cards and raised bumps

containing RFIDs, but Sammy knew that you could buy standard

anti-counterfeiting stock like it from a mail-order catalog.

"That's mighty generous of you," he said, shaking Tjan's dry, firm

hand.

"Our pleasure," the other guy said. "Better get in line, though, or

you're gonna be waiting a long, long time." He had a satisfied

expression. Sammy saw that what he'd mistaken for a crowd of people

was in fact a long, jostling queue stretching all the way around the

escalator mezzanine and off one of the mall's side corridors.

Feeling like he'd averted a disaster, Sammy followed the length of the

queue until he came to its end. He popped in a headphone and set up

his headline reader to text-to-speech his day's news. He'd fallen

behind, what with the air travel and all. Most of the stuff in his

cache came in from his co-workers, and it was the most insipid crap

anyway, but he had to listen to it or he'd be odd man out at the

watercooler when he got back.

He listened with half an ear and considered the gigantic crowd

stretching away as far as the eye could see. Compared with the

re-opening of Fantasyland, it was nothing -- goths from all over the

world had flocked to central Florida for that, Germans and Greeks and

Japanese and even some from Mumbai and Russia. They'd filled the park

to capacity, thrilled with the delightful perversity of chirpy old

Disney World remade as a goth theme park.

But a line this long in Boston, in the dead of winter, for something

whose sole attraction was that there was another one like it by a

shitty forgotten b-road outside of Miami? Christ on an Omnimover.

The line moved, just a little surge, and there was a cheer all down

the mall's length. People poured past him headed for the line's tail,

vibrating with excitement. But the line didn't move again for five

minutes, then ten. Then another surge, but maybe that was just people

crowding together more. Some of the people in line were drinking beers

out of paper bags and getting raucous.

"What's going on?" someone hollered from behind him. The cry was taken

up, and then the line shuddered and moved forward some. Then nothing.

Thinking, *screw this*, Sammy got out of line and walked to the

front. Tjan was there, working the velvet rope, letting people through

in dribs and drabs. He caught sight of Sammy and gave him a solemn

nod. "They're all taking too long to ride," he said. "I tell them

fifteen minutes max, get back in line if you want to see more, but

what can you do?"

Sammy nodded sympathetically. The guy with the funny eyebrow put in an

appearance from behind the heavy black curtains. "Send through two

more," he said, and grabbed Sammy, tugging him in.

Behind the curtain, it was dim and spotlit, almost identical to

Florida, and half a dozen vehicles waited. Sammy slid into one and let

the spiel wash over him.

THERE WAS A TIME WHEN AMERICA HELD OUT THE PROMISE OF A NEW WAY OF

LIVING AND WORKING. THE NEW WORK BOOM OF THE TEENS WAS A PERIOD OF

UNPARALLELED INVENTION, A CAMBRIAN EXPLOSION OF CREATIVITY NOT SEEN

SINCE THE TIME OF EDISON -- AND UNLIKE EDISON, THE PEOPLE WHO INVENTED

THE NEW WORK REVOLUTION WEREN'T RIP-OFF ARTISTS AND FRAUDS.

The layout was slightly different due to the support pillars, but as

similar to the Florida version as geography allowed. Robots humped

underfoot moving objects, keeping them in sync with the changes in

Florida. He'd read on the message boards that Florida would stay open

late so that the riders could collaborate with the attendees at the

Boston premiere, tweeting back and forth to one another.

The other chairs in the ride crawled around each exhibit, reversing

and turning slowly. Riders brought their chairs up alongside one

another and conferred in low voices, over the narration from the

scenery. He thought he saw a couple making out -- a common enough

occurrence in dark rides that he'd even exploited a few times when

planning out rides that would be likely to attract amorous

teenagers. They had a key demographic: too young to leave home, old

enough to pay practically anything for a private spot to score some

nookie.

The air smelled of three-d printer, the cheap smell of truck-stops

where vending machines outputted cheap kids' toys. Here it wasn't

cheap, though: here it smelled futuristic, like the first time someone

had handed him a printed prop for one of his rides -- it had been a

head for an updated Small World ride. Then it had smelled like

something foreign and new and exciting and frightening, like the first

days of a different world.

Smelling that again, remembering the crowds outside waiting to get in,

Sammy started to get a sick feeling, the kebab rebounding on

him. Moving as if in a dream, he reached down into his lap and drew

out a small utility knife. There would be infrared cameras, but he

knew from experience that they couldn't see through ride vehicles.

Slowly, he fingered the access panel's underside until he found a

loose corner. He snicked out the knife's little blade -- he'd brought

an entire suitcase just so he could have a checked bag to store this

in -- and tugged at the cables inside. He sawed at them with small

movements, feeling the copper wires inside the insulation give way one

strand at a time. The chair moved jerkily, then not at all. He snipped

a few more wires just to be sure, then tucked them all away.

"Hey!" he called. "My chair's dead!" He had fetched up in a central

pathway where the chairs tried to run cloverleafs around four

displays. A couple chairs swerved around him. He thumped the panel

dramatically, then stepped out and shook his head. He contrived to

step on three robots on the way to another chair.

"Is yours working?" he asked the kid riding in it, all of ten years

old and of indefinite gender.

"Yeah," the kid said. It scooted over. "There's room for both of us,

get in."

*Christ, don't they have stranger-danger in the north?* He climbed in

beside the kid and contrived to slide one sly hand under the

panel. Teasing out the wires the second time was easier, even

one-handed. He sliced through five large bundles this time before the

chair ground to a halt, its gyros whining and rocking it from

side-to-side.

The kid looked at him and frowned. "These things are shit," it said

with real vehemence, climbing down and kicking one of its tires, and

then kicking a couple of the floor-level robots for good

measure. They'd landed another great breakdown spot: directly in front

of a ranked display of raygun-shaped appliances and objects. He

remembered seeing that one in its nascent stage, back in Florida --

just a couple of toy guns, which were presently joined by three more,

then there were ten, then fifty, then a high wall of them, striking

and charming. The chair's breakdown position neatly blocked the way.

"Guess we'd better walk out," he said. He stepped on a couple more

robots, making oops noises. The kid enthusiastically kicked robots out

of its way. Chairs swerved around them as other riders tried to

navigate. They were approaching the exit when Sammy spotted a

charge-plate for the robots. They were standard issue for robotic

vacuum cleaners and other semi-autonomous appliances, and he'd had one

in his old apartment. They were supposed to be safe as anything, but a

friend's toddler had crawled over to his and shoved a stack of dimes

into its recessed jack and one of them had shorted it out in a

smoking, fizzing fireworks display.

"You go on ahead, I'm going to tie my shoes."

Sammy bent down beside the charge plate, his back to the kid and the

imagined cameras that were capturing his every move, and slipped the

stack of coins he'd taken from his pocket into the little slot where

the robots inserted their charging stamen.

The ensuing shower of sparks was more dramatic than he'd remembered --

maybe it was the darkened room. The kid shrieked and ran for the EXIT

sign, and he took off too, at a good clip. They'd get the ride up and

running soon enough, but maybe not tonight, not if they couldn't get

the two chairs he'd toasted out of the room.

There was the beginnings of chaos at the exit. There was that Tjan

character, giving him an intense look. He tried to head for the down

escalator, but Tjan cut him off.

"What's going on in there?"

"Damnedest thing," he said, trying to keep his face composed. "My

chair died. Then another one -- a little kid was riding in it. Then

there was a lot of electrical sparks, and I walked out. Crazy."

Tjan cocked his head. "I hope you're not hurt. We could have a doctor

look at you; there are a couple around tonight."

It had never occurred to Sammy that professional types might turn out

for a ride like this, but of course it was obvious. There were

probably off-duty cops, local politicians, lawyers, and the like.

"I'm fine," he said. "Don't worry about me. Maybe you should send

someone in for the people still in there, though?"

"That's being taken care of. I'm just sorry you came all the way from

Florida for this kind of disappointment. That's just brutal." Tjan's

measuring stare was even more intense.

"Uh, it's OK. I had meetings here this week. This was just a cool

bonus."

"Who do you work for, Mickey?"

Shit.

"Insurance company," he said.

"That'd be Norwich Union, then, right? They've got a headquarters

here."

Sammy knew how this went. Norwich Union didn't have headquarters

here. Or they did. He'd have to outguess Tjan with his answer.

"Are you going to stay open tonight?"

Tjan nodded, though it wasn't clear whether he was nodding because he

was answering in the affirmative or because his suspicions had been

confirmed.

"Well then, I should be going."

Tjan put out a hand. "Oh, please stay. I'm sure we'll be running soon;

you should get a whole ride through."

"No, really, I have to go." He shook off the hand and pelted down the

escalator and out into the freezing night. His blood sang in his

ears. They probably wouldn't get the ride running that night at

all. They probably would send that whole carnival crowd home,

disappointed. He'd won some kind of little victory over something.

He'd felt more confident of his victory when he was concerned with the

guy with the funny eyebrow -- with Perry. He'd seemed little more than

a bum, a vag. But this Tjan reminded him of the climbers he'd met

through his career at Walt Disney World: keenly observant and fast

formulators of strategies. Someone who could add two and two before

you'd know that there was such a thing as four.

Sammy walked back to his hotel as quickly as he could, given the icy

sidewalks underfoot, and by the time he got to the lobby of the old

office tower his face hurt -- forehead, cheeks and nose. He'd booked

his return flight for a day later, thinking he'd do more reccies of

the new site before writing his report and heading home, but there was

no way he was facing down that Tjan guy again.

What had prompted him to sabotage the ride? It was something primal,

something he hadn't been in any real control of. He'd been in some

kind of fugue-state. But he'd packed the little knife in his suitcase

and he'd slipped it into his pocket before leaving the room. So how

instinctive could it possibly have been?

He had a vision of the carnival atmosphere in the market stalls

outside and knew that even after the ride had broken down, the crowd

had lingered, laughing and browsing and enjoying a night's respite

from the world and the cold city. The Whos down in Who-ville had gone

on singing even after he'd Grinched their ride.

That was it. The ride didn't just make use of user-created content --

it *was* user-created content. He could never convince his bosses in

Orlando to let him build anything remotely like this, and given enough

time, it would surely overtake them. That Tjan -- someone like him

wouldn't be involved if there wasn't some serious money opportunity on

the line.

He'd seen the future that night and he had no place in it.

#

It only took a week on the Boston ride before they had their third and

fourth nodes. The third was outside of San Francisco, in a gigantic

ghost-mall that was already being used as a flea-market. They had two

former anchor-stores, one of which was being squatted by artists who

needed studio space. The other one made a perfect location for a new

ride, and the geeks who planned on building it had cut their teeth

building elaborate Burning Man confectioneries together, so Perry gave

them his blessing.

The fourth was to open in Raleigh, in the Research Triangle, where the

strip malls ran one into the next. The soft-spoken, bitingly ironic

southerners who proposed it were the daughters of old IBM blue-tie

stalwarts who'd been running a women's tech collective since they

realized they couldn't afford college and dropped out together. They

wanted to see how much admission they could charge if they let it be

known that they would plow their profits into scholarship funds for

local women.

Perry couldn't believe that these people wanted to open their own

rides, nor that they thought they needed his permission to do so. He

was reminded of the glory days of New Work, when every day there were

fifty New Work sites with a hundred new gizmos, popping up on the

mailing lists, looking for distributors, recruiting, competing,

swarming, arguing, forming and reforming. Watching Tjan cut the deals

whereby these people were granted permission to open their own

editions of the ride felt like that, and weirder still.

"Why do they need our permission? The API's wide open. They can just

implement. Are they sheep or something?"

Tjan gave him an old-fashioned look. "They're being polite, Perry --

they're giving you face for being the progenitor of the ride."

"I don't like it," Perry said. "I didn't get anyone's permission to

include their junk in the ride. When we get a printer to clone

something that someone brings here, we don't get their permission. Why

the hell is seeking permission considered so polite? Shit, why not

send me a letter asking me if I mind receiving an email? Where does it

end?"

"They're trying to be nice to you Perry, that's all."

"Well I don't like it," Perry said. "How about this: from now on when

someone asks for permission we tell them no, we don't give out *or*

withhold permission for joining the network, but we hope that they'll

join it anyway. Maybe put up a FAQ on the site."

"You'll just confuse people."

"I won't be confusing them, man! I'll be educating them!"

"How about if you add a Creative Commons license to it? Some of them

are very liberal."

"I don't *want* to license this. You have to *own* something to

license it. A license is a way of saying, 'Without this license,

you're forbidden to do this.' You don't need a license to click a link

and load a webpage -- no one has to give you permission to do this and

no one could take it away from you. Licensing just gives people even

worse ideas about ownership and permission and property!"

"It's your show," Tjan said.

"No it *isn't*! That's the *point*!"

"OK, OK, it's not your show. But we'll do it your way. You are a

lovable, cranky weirdo, you know it?"

They did it Perry's way. He was scheduled to go back to Florida a few

days later, but he changed his ticket to go out to San Francisco and

meet with the crew who were implementing the ride there. One of them

taught interaction design at SFSU and brought him in to talk to the

students. He wasn't sure what he was going to talk to them about, but

when he got there, he found himself telling the story of how he and

Lester and Tjan and Suzanne and Kettlebelly had built and lost the New

Work movement, without even trying. It was a fun story to tell from

start to finish, and they talked through the lunch break and then a

group of students took him to a bar in the Mission with a big outdoor

patio where he went on telling war stories until the sun had set and

he'd drunk so much beer he couldn't tell stories any longer.

They were all ten or fifteen years younger than him, and the girls

were pretty and androgynous and the boys were also pretty and

androgynous, not that he really swung that way. Still, it was fine

being surrounded by the catcalling, joking, bullshitting crowd of

young, pretty, flirty people. They hugged him a lot, and two of the

prettier girls (who, he later realized, were a lot more interested in

each other than him) took him back to a capsule hotel built across

three parking-spots and poured him into bed and tucked him in.

He had a burrito the size of a football for breakfast, stuffed with

shredded pig-parts and two kinds of sloppy beans. He washed it down

with a quart of a cinnamon/rice drink called horchata that was served

ice-cold and did wonders for his hangover.

A couple hours' noodling on his laptop and a couple bags of Tecate

later and he was feeling almost human. Early mariachis strolled the

street with electric guitars that controlled little tribes of dancing,

singing knee-high animatronics, belting out old Jose Alfredo Jimenez

tunes.

It was shaping up to be a good day. His laptop rang and he screwed in

his headset and started talking to Tjan.

"Man, this place is excellent," he said. "I had the best night I've

had in years last night."

"Well then you'll love this: there's a crew in Madison that want to do

the same thing and could use a little guidance. They spoke to me this

morning and said they'd be happy to spring for the airfare. Can you

make a six o'clock flight at SFO?"

They gave him cheese in Madison and introduced him to the biohackers

who were the spiritual progeny of the quirky moment when Madison was

one of six places where stem cells could be legally researched. The

biohackers gave him the willies. One had gills. One glowed in the

dark. One was orange and claimed to photosynthesize.

He got his hosts to bring him to the ratskeller where they sat down to

comedy-sized beers and huge, suspicious steaming wursts.

"Where's your site?"

"We were thinking of building one -- there's a lot of farmland around

here." Either the speaker was sixteen years old or Perry was getting

to be such a drunken old fart that everyone seemed sixteen. He wasn't

old enough to shave, anyway. Perry tried to remember his name and

couldn't. Jet-lag or sleepdep or whatever.

"That's pretty weird. Everywhere else, they're just moving into spaces

that have been left vacant."

"We haven't got many of those. All the offices and stuff are being

occupied by heavily funded startups."

"Heavily funded startups? In this day and age?"

"Superbabies," the kid said with a shrug. "It's all anyone here thinks

about anymore. That and cancer cures. I think superbabies are crazy --

imagine being a twenty-year-old superbaby, with two-decade-old

technology in your genes. In your germline! Breeding other obsolete

superbabies. Crazy. But the Chinese are investing heavily."

"So no dead malls? Christ, that's like running out of sand or hydrogen

or something. Are we still in America?"

The kid laughed. "The campus is building more student housing because

none of us can afford the rents around here anymore. But there's lots

of farmland, like I said. Won't be a problem to throw up a prefab and

put the ride inside it. It'll be like putting up a haunted cornfield

at Halloween. Used to do that every year to raise money for the ACLU,

back in Nebraska."

"Wow." He wanted to say, *They have the ACLU in Nebraska?* but he knew

that wasn't fair. The midwesterners he'd met had generally been

kick-ass geeks and hackers, so he had no call to turn his nose up at

this kid. "So why do you want to do this?"

The kid grinned. "Because there's got to be a way to do something cool

without moving to New York. I like it around here. Don't want to live

in some run-down defaulted shit-built condo where the mice are

hunchbacked. Like the wide-open spaces. But I don't want to be a

farmer or an academic or run a student bar. All that stuff is a

dead-end, I can see it from here. I mean, who drinks beer anymore?

There's much sweeter highs out there in the real world."

Perry looked at his beer. It was in a themed stein with Germano-Gothic

gingerbread worked into the finish. It felt like it had been printed

from some kind of ceramic/epoxy hybrid. You could get them at

traveling carny midways, too.

"I like beer," he said.

"But you're --" The kid broke off.

"Old," Perry said. "'Sok. You're what, 16?"

"21," the kid said. "I'm a late bloomer. Devoting resources to more

important things than puberty."

Two more kids slid into their booth, a boy and a girl who actually did

look 21. "Hey Luke," the girl said, kissing him on the cheek.

Luke, that was his name. Perry came up with a mnemonic so he wouldn't

forget it again -- Nebraska baby-faced farm boy, that was like Luke

Skywalker. He pictured the kid swinging a lightsaber and knew he'd

keep the name for good now.

"This is Perry Gibbons," Luke said. "Perry, this is Hilda and

Ernie. Guys, Perry's the guy who built the ride I was telling you

about."

Ernie shook his hand. "Man, that's the coolest shit I've ever seen,

wow. What the hell are you doing here? I love that stuff. Wow."

Hilda flicked his ear. "Stop drooling, fanboy," she said.

Ernie rubbed his ear. Perry nodded uncertainly.

"Sorry. It's just -- well, I'm a big fan is all."

"That's really nice of you," Perry said. He'd met a couple people in

Boston and San Francisco who called themselves his fans, and he hadn't

known what to say to them, either. Back in the New Work days he'd meet

reporters who called themselves fans, but that was just blowing

smoke. Now he was meeting people who seemed to really mean it. Not

many, thank God.

"He's just like a puppy," Hilda said, pinching Ernie's cheek. "All

enthusiasm."

Ernie rubbed his cheek. Luke reached out abruptly and tousled both of

their hair. "These two are going to help me build the ride," he

said. "Hilda's an amazing fundraiser. Last year she ran the

fundraising for a whole walk-in clinic."

"Women's health clinic or something?" Perry asked. He was starting to

sober up a little. Hilda was one of those incredible, pneumatic

midwestern girls that he'd seen at five minute intervals since getting

off his flight in Madison. He didn't think he'd ever met one like her.

"No," Hilda said. "Metabolic health. Lots of people get the fatkins

treatment at puberty, either because their fatkins parents talk them

into it or because they hate their baby fat."

Perry shook his head. "Come again?"

"You think eating ten thousand calories a day is easy? It's hell on

your digestive system. Not to mention you spend a fortune on food. A

lot of people get to college and just switch to high-calorie powdered

supplements because they can't afford enough real food to stay

healthy, so you've got all these kids sucking down vanilla slurry all

day just to keep from starving. We provide counseling and mitigation

therapies to kids who want it."

"And when they get out of college -- do they get the treatment again?"

"You can't. The mitigation's permanent. People who take it have to go

through the rest of their lives taking supplements and eating sensibly

and exercising."

"Do they get fat?"

She looked away, then down, then back up at him. "Yes, most of them

do. How could they not? Everything around them is geared at people who

need to eat five times as much as they do. Even the salads all have

protein powder mixed in with them. But it is *possible* to eat

right. You've never had the treatment, have you?"

Perry shook his head. "Trick metabolism though. I can eat like a hog

and not put on an ounce."

Hilda reached out and squeezed his bicep. "Really -- and I suppose

that all that lean muscle there is part of your trick metabolism,

too?"

She left her hand where it was.

"OK, I do a fair bit of physical labor too. But I'm just saying -- if

they get fat again after they reverse the treatment --"

"There are worse things than being fat."

Her hand still hadn't moved. He looked at Ernie, whom he'd assumed was

her boyfriend, to see how he was taking it. Ernie was looking

somewhere else, though, across the ratshkeller, at the huge TV that

was showing competitive multiplayer gaming, apparently some kind of

championships. It was as confusing as a hundred air-hockey games being

played on the same board, with thousands of zipping, jumping, firing

entities and jump-cuts so fast that Perry couldn't imagine how you'd

make sense of it.

The girl's hand was still on his arm, and it was warm. His mouth was

dry but more beer would be a bad idea. "How about some water?" he

said, in a bit of a croak.

Luke jumped up to get some, and a silence fell over the table. "So

this clinic, how'd you fundraise for it?"

"Papercraft," she said. "I have a lot of friends who are into

paper-folding and we modded a bunch of patterns. We did really big

pieces, too -- bed-frames, sofas, kitchen-tables, chairs --"

"Like actual furniture?"

"Like actual furniture," she said with a solemn nod. "We used huge

sheets of paper and treated them with stiffening, waterproofing and

fireproofing agents. We did a frat house's outdoor bar and sauna, with

a wind-dynamo -- I even made a steam engine."

"You made a steam engine out of paper?" He was agog.

"You mean to say that *you're* surprised by building stuff out of

unusual materials?"

Perry laughed. "Point taken."

"We just got a couple hundred students to do some folding in their

spare time and then sold it on. Everyone on campus needs bookshelves,

so we started with those -- using accordion-folded arched supports

under each shelf. We could paint or print designs on them, too, but a

lot of people liked them all-white. Then we did chairs, desks,

kitchenette sets, placemats -- you name it. I called the designs

'Multiple Origami.'"

Perry sprayed beer out his nose. "That's awesome!" he said, wiping up

the mess with a kleenex that she extracted from a folded paper

purse. Looking closely, he realized that the white baseball cap she

was wearing was also folded out of paper.

She laughed and rummaged some more in her handbag, coming up with a

piece of stiff card. Working quickly and nimbly, she gave it a few

deft folds along pre-scored lines, and a moment later she was holding

a baseball hat that was the twin of the one she was wearing. She

leaned over the table and popped it on his head.

Luke came back with the water and set it down between them, pouring

out glasses for everyone.

"Smooth lid," he said, touching the bill of Perry's cap.

"Thanks," Perry said, draining his water and pouring another

glass. "Well, you people certainly have some pretty cool stuff going

on here."

"This is a great town," Luke said expansively, as though he had

travelled extensively and settled on Madison, Wisconsin as a truly

international hotspot. "We're going to build a kick-ass ride."

"You going to make it all out of paper?"

"Some of it, anyway," Luke said. "Hilda wouldn't have it any other

way, right?"

"This one's your show, Luke," she said. "I'm just a fundraiser."

"Anyone hungry?" Hilda said. "I want to go eat something that doesn't

have unidentified organ-meat mixed in."

"Go on without me," Ernie said. "I got money on this game."

"Homework," Luke said.

Perry had just eaten, and had planned on spending this night in his

room catching up on email. "Yeah, I'm starving," he said. He felt like

a high-school kid, but in a good way.

They went out for Ukrainian food, which Perry had never had before,

but the crepes and the blood sausage were tasty enough. Mostly,

though, he was paying attention to Hilda, who was running down her war

stories from the Multiple Origami fundraiser. There were funny ones,

sad ones, scary ones, triumphant ones.

Every one of her stories reminded him of one of his own. She was an

organizer and so was he and they'd been through practically the same

shit. They drank gallons of coffee afterward, getting chucked out when

the restaurant closed and migrating to a cafe on the main drag where

they had low tables and sofas, and they never stopped talking.

"You know," Hilda said, stretching and yawning, "it's coming up on

four AM."

"No way," he said, but his watch confirmed it. "Christ." He tried to

think of a casual way of asking her to sleep with him. For all their

talking, they'd hardly touched on romance -- or maybe there'd been

romance in every word.

"I'll walk you to your hotel," she said.

"Hey, that's really nice of you," he said. His voice sounded fakey and

forced in his ears. All of a sudden, he wasn't tired at all, instead

his heart was hammering in his chest and his blood sang in his ears.

There was hardly any talk on the way back to the hotel, just the

awareness of her steps and his in time with one another over the cold

late-winter streets. No traffic at that hour, and hardly a sound from

any of the windows they passed. The town was theirs.

At the door to his hotel -- another stack of the ubiquitous capsules,

these geared to visiting parents -- they stopped. They were looking at

one another like a couple of googly-eyed kids at the end of a date in

a sitcom.

"Um, what's your major?" he said.

"Pure math," she said.

"I think I know what that is," he said. It was freezing out on the

street. "Theory, right?"

"Pure math as opposed to applied math," she said. "Do you really care

about this?"

"Um," he said. "Well, yes. But not very much."

"I'll come into your hotel room, but we're not having sex, OK?"

"OK," he said.

There was room enough for the two of them in the capsule, but only

just. These were prefabbed in bulk and they came in different sizes --

in the Midwest they were large, the ones stacked up in San Francisco

parking spots were small. Still, he and Hilda were almost in each

other's laps, and he could smell her, feel wisps of her hair tickling

his ear.

"You're really nice," he said. Late at night, his ability to be

flippant evaporated. He was left with simple truths, simply

declared. "I like you a lot."

"Well then you'll have to come back to Madison and check in on the

ride, won't you?"

"Um," he said. He had a planning meeting with Luke and the rest of his

gang the next day, then he was supposed to be headed for Omaha, where

Tjan had set up another crew for him to speak to. At this rate, he

would get back to Florida some time in June.

"Perry, you're not a career activist, are you?"

"Nope," he said. "I hadn't really imagined that there was such a

thing."

"My parents. Both of them. Here's what being a career activist means:

you are on the road most of the time. When you get on the road, you

meet people, have intense experiences with them -- like going to war

or touring with a band. You fall in love a thousand times. And then

you leave all those people behind. You get off a plane, turn some

strangers into best friends, get on a plane and forget them until you

come back into town, and then you take it all back up again.

"If you want to survive this, you've got to love that. You've got to

get off a plane, meet people, fall in love with them, treasure every

moment, and know that moments are all you have. Then you get on a

plane again and you love them forever. Otherwise, every new meeting is

sour because you know how soon it will end. It's like starting to say

your summer-camp goodbyes before you've even unpacked your

duffel-bag. You've got to embrace -- or at least forget -- that every

gig will end in a day or two."

Perry took a moment to understand this, swallowed a couple times, then

nodded. Lots of people had come in and out of his factory and his ride

over the years. Lester came and went. Suzanne was gone. Tjan was gone

but was back again. Kettlebelly was no longer in his life at all, a

ghost of a memory with a great smile and good cologne. Already he was

forgetting the faces in Boston, the faces in San Francisco. Hilda

would be a memory in a month.

Hilda patted his hand. "I have friends in practically every city in

America. My folks campaigned for stem cells up and down every red

state in the country. I even met superman before he died. He knew my

name. I spent ten years on the road with them, back and forth. The

Bush years, a couple years afterward. You can live this way and you

can be happy, but you've got to have right mind.

"What it means is you've got to be able to say things to people you

meet, like, 'You're really nice,' and mean it, really mean it. But

you've also got to be cool with the fact that really nice people will

fall out of your life every week, twice a week, and fall back into it

or not. I think you're very nice, too, but we're not gonna be a

couple, ever. Even if we slept together tonight, you'd be gone

tomorrow night. What you need to ask yourself is whether you want to

have friends in every city who are glad to see you when you get off

the plane, or ex-girlfriends in every city who might show up with

their new boyfriends, or not at all."

"Are you telling me this to explain why we're not going to sleep

together? I just figured you were dating that guy, Ernie."

"Ernie's my brother," she said. "And yeah, that's kind of why I'm

telling you this. I've never gone on what you might call a date. With

my friends, it tends to be more like, you work together, you hang out

together, you catch yourself looking into one another's eyes a couple

times, then you do a little circling around and then you end up in

your bed or their bed having hard, energetic sex and then you sort out

some details and then it lasts as long as it lasts. We've done a

compressed version of that tonight, and we're up to the sex, and so I

thought we should lay some things on the table, you should forgive the

expression."

Perry thought back to his double-date with Lester. The girl had been

pretty and intelligent and would have taken him home if he'd made the

least effort. He hadn't, though. This girl was inappropriate in so

many ways: young, rooted to a city thousands of miles from home -- why

had he brought her back to the hotel?

A thought struck him. "Why do you think I'm going to be getting on and

off planes for the rest of my life? I've got a home to get to."

"You haven't been reading the message boards, have you?"

"Which message boards?"

"For ride-builders. There are projects starting up everywhere. People

like what they've heard and what they've seen, and they remember you

from the old days and want to get in on the magic you're going to

bring. A lot of us know each other anyway, from other joint

projects. Everyone's passing the hat to raise your airfare and arguing

about who's sofa you're going to stay on."

He'd known that they were there. There were always message-boards. But

they were just talk -- he never bothered to read them. That was

Lester's job. He wanted to make stuff, not chatter. "Jesus, when the

hell was someone going to tell me?"

"Your guy in Boston, we've been talking to him. He said not to bug

you, that you were busy enough as it is."

He did, did he? In the old days, Tjan had been in charge of planning

and he'd been in charge of the ideas: in charge of what to plan. Had

they come full circle without him noticing? If they had, was that so

bad?

"Man, I was really looking forward to spending a couple nights in my

own bed."

"Is it much more comfortable than this one?" She thumped the narrow

coffin-bed, which was surprisingly comfortable, adjustable, heated,

and massaging.

He snorted. "OK, I sleep on a futon on the floor back home, but it's

the principle of the thing. I just miss home, I guess."

"So go home for a couple days after this stop, or the next one. Charge

up your batteries and do your laundry. But I have a feeling that home

is going to be your suitcase pretty soon, Perry my dear." Her voice

was thick with sleep, her eyes heavy-lidded and bleary.

"You're probably right." He yawned as he spoke. "Hell, I know you're

right. You're a real smarty."

"And I'm too tired to go home," she said, "so I'm a smarty who's

staying with you."

He was suddenly wide awake, his heart thumping. "Um, OK," he said,

trying to sound casual.

He turned back the sheets, then, standing facing into the cramped

corner, took off his jeans and shoes and socks, climbing in between

the sheets in his underwear and tee. There were undressing noises --

exquisite ones -- and then she slithered in behind him, snuggled up

against him. With a jolt, he realized that her bare breasts were

pressed to his back. Her arm came around him and rested on his

stomach, which jumped like a spring uncoiling. He felt certain his

erection was emitting a faint cherry-red glow. Her breath was on his

neck.

He thought about casually rolling onto his back so that he could kiss

her, but remembered her admonition that they would not be having

sex. Her fingertips traced small circles on his stomach. Each time

they grazed his navel, his stomach did a flip.

He was totally awake now, and when her lips very softly -- so softly

he barely felt it -- brushed against the base of his skull, he let out

a soft moan. Her lips returned, and then her teeth, worrying at the

tendons at the back of his neck with increasing roughness, an

exquisite pain-pleasure that was electric. He was panting, her hand

was flat on his stomach now, gripping him. His erection strained

toward it.

Her hips ground against him and she moved her mouth toward his ear,

nipping at it, the tip of her tongue touching the whorls there. Her

hand was on the move now, sliding over his ribs, her fingertips at his

nipple, softly and then harder, giving it an abrupt hard pinch that

had some fingernail in it, like a bite from little teeth. He yelped

and she giggled in his ear, sending shivers up his spine.

He reached back behind him awkwardly and put his hand on her ass,

discovering that she was bare there, too. It was wide and hard, foam

rubber over steel, and he kneaded it, digging his fingers in. She

groaned in his ear and tugged him onto his back.

As soon as his shoulders hit the narrow bed, she was on him, her

elbows on his biceps, pinning him down, her breasts in his face,

fragrant and soft. Her hot, bare crotch ground against his

underwear. He bit at her tits, hard little bites that made her

gasp. He found a stiff nipple and sucked it into his mouth, beating at

it with his tongue. She pressed her crotch harder against his, hissed

something that might have been *yesssss*.

She straightened up so that she was straddling him and looking

imperiously down on him. Her braids swung before her. Her eyes were

exultant. Her face was set in an expression of fierce concentration as

she rocked on him.

He dug his fingers into her ass again, all the way around, so that

they brushed against her labia, her asshole. He pulled at her,

dragging her up her body, tugging her vagina toward his mouth. Once

she saw what he was after, she knee-walked up the bed in three or four

quick steps and then she was on his face. Her smell and her taste and

her texture and temperature filled his senses, blotting out the room,

blotting out introspection, blotting out everything except for the

sweet urgency.

He sucked at her labia before slipping his tongue up her length,

letting it tickle her ass, her opening, her clit. In response, she

ground against him, planting her opening over his mouth and he

tongue-fucked her in hard, fast strokes. She reached back and took

hold of his cock, slipping her small, strong hand under the waistband

of his boxers and curling it around his rigid shaft, pumping

vigorously.

He moaned into her pussy and that set her shuddering. Now he had her

clit sucked into his mouth and he was lapping at its engorged length

with short strokes. Her thighs were clamped over his ears, but he

could still make out her cries, timed with the shuddering of her

thighs, the spasmodic grip on his cock.

Abruptly she rolled off of him and the world came back. They hadn't

kissed yet. They hadn't said a word. She lay beside him, half on top

of him, shuddering and making kittenish sounds. He kissed her softly,

then more forcefully. She bit at his lips and his tongue, sucking it

into her mouth and chewing at it while her fingernails raked his back.

Her breathing became more regular and she tugged at the waistband of

his boxers. He got the message and yanked them off, his cock springing

free and rocking slightly, twitching in time with his pulse. She

smiled a cat-ate-the-canary grin and went to work kissing his neck,

his chest -- hard bites on his nipples that made him yelp and arch his

back -- his stomach, his hips, his pubes, his thighs. The teasing was

excruciating and exquisite. Her juices dried on his face, the smell

caught in his nose, refreshing his eros with every breath.

Her tongue lapped eagerly at his balls like a cat with a saucer of

milk. Long, slow strokes, over his sack, over the skin between his

balls and his thighs, over his perineum, tickling his ass as he'd

tickled hers. She pulled back and spat out a pube and laughed and dove

back in, sucking softly at his sack, then, in one swift motion, taking

his cock to the hilt.

He shouted and then moaned and her head bobbed furiously along the

length of his shaft, her hand squeezing his balls. It took only

moments before he dug his hands hard into the mattress and groaned

through clenched teeth and fired spasm after spasm down her throat,

her nose in his pubes, his cock down her throat to the base. She

refused to let him go, swirling her tongue over the head while he was

still super-sensitive, making him grunt and twitch and buck

involuntarily, all the while her hand caressing his balls, rubbing at

his prostate over the spot between his balls and his ass.

Finally she worked her way back up his body licking her lips and

kissing as she went.

"Hello," she said as she buried her face in his throat.

"Wow," he said.

"So if you're going to be able to live in the moment and have no

regrets, this is a pretty good place to start. It'd be a hell of a

shock if we saw each other twice in the next year -- are we going to

be able to be friends when we do? Will the fact that I fucked your

brains out make things awkward?"

"That's why you jumped me?"

"No, not really. I was horny and you're hot. But that's a good

post-facto reason."

"I see. You know, you haven't actually fucked my brains out," he said.

"Yet," she said. She retrieved her backpack from beside the bed, dug

around it in, and produced a strip of condoms. "Yet."

He licked his lips in anticipation, and a moment later she was

unrolling the condom down his shaft with her talented mouth. He

laughed and then took her by the waist and flipped her onto her

back. She grabbed her ankles and pulled her legs wide and he dove

between her, dragging the still-sensitive tip of his cock up and down

the length of her vulva a couple times before sawing it in and out of

her opening, sinking to the hilt.

He wanted to fuck her gently but she groaned urgent demands in his ear

to pound her harder, making satisfied sounds each time his balls

clapped against her ass.

She pushed him off her and turned over, raising her ass in the air,

pulling her labia apart and looking over her shoulder at him. They

fucked doggy-style then, until his legs trembled and his knees ached,

and then she climbed on him and rocked back and forth, grinding her

clit against his pubis, pushing him so deep inside her. He mauled her

tits and felt the pressure build in his balls. He pulled her to him,

thrust wildly, and she hissed dirty encouragement in his ear, begging

him to fill her, ordering him to pound her harder. The stimulation in

his brain and between his legs was too much to bear and he came,

lifting them both off the bed with his spasms.

"Wow," he said.

"Yum," she said.

"Jesus, it's 8AM," he said. "I've got to meet with Luke in three

hours."

"So let's take a shower now, and set an alarm for half an hour before

he's due," she said. "Got anything to eat."

"That's what I like about you Hilda," he

said. "Businesslike. Vigorous. Living life to the hilt."

Her dimples were pretty and luminous in the hints of light emerging

from under the blinds. "Feed me," she said, and nipped at his earlobe.

In the shoebox-sized fridge, he had a cow-shaped brick of Wisconsin

cheddar that he'd been given when he stepped off the plane. They broke

chunks off it and ate it in bed, then started in on the bag of soy

crispies his hosts in San Francisco had given him. They showered

slowly together, scrubbing one-another's backs, set an alarm, and

sacked out for just a few hours before the alarm roused them.

They dressed like strangers, not embarrassed, just too groggy to take

much notice of one another. Perry's muscles ached pleasantly, and

there was another ache, dull and faint, even more pleasant, in his

balls.

Once they were fully clothed, she grabbed him and gave him a long hug,

and a warm kiss that started on his throat and moved to his mouth,

with just a hint of tongue at the end.

"You're a good man, Perry Gibbons," she said. "Thanks for a lovely

night. Remember what I told you, though: no regrets, no looking

back. Be happy about this -- don't mope, don't miss me. Go on to your

next city and make new friends and have new conversations, and when we

see each other again, be my friend without any awkwardness. All

right?"

"I get it," he said. He felt slightly irritated. "Only one thing. We

weren't going to sleep together."

"You regret it?"

"Of course not," he said. "But it's going to make this injunction of

yours hard to understand. I'm not good at anonymous one night stands."

She raised one eyebrow at him. "Earth to Perry: this wasn't anonymous,

and it wasn't a one-night stand. It was an intimate, loving

relationship that happened to be compressed into a single day."

"Loving?"

"Sure. If I'd been with you for a month or two, I would have fallen in

love. You're just my type. So I think of you as someone I love. That's

why I want to make sure you understand what this all means."

"You're a very interesting person," he said.

"I'm smart," she said, and cuddled him again. "You're smart. So be

smart about this and it'll be forever sweet."

She left him off at the spot where he was supposed to meet Luke and

the rest of his planning team to go over schematics and theory and

practice. All of these discussions could happen online -- they did, in

fact -- but there was something about the face-to-face connection. The

meeting ran six hours before he was finally saved by his impending

flight to Nebraska.

Sleepdep came down on him like a hammer as he checked in for his

flight and began the ritual security-clearing buck-and-wing. He missed

a cue or two and ended up getting a "detailed hand search" but even

that didn't wake him up. He fell asleep in the waiting room and in the

plane, in the taxi to his hotel.

But when he dropped down onto his hotel bed, he couldn't sleep. The

hotel was the spitting image of the one he'd left in Wisconsin, minus

Hilda and the musky smell the two of them had left behind after their

roll in the hay.

It had been years since he'd had a regular girlfriend and he'd never

missed it. There had been women, high-libido fatkins girls and random

strangers, some who came back for a date or two. But no one who'd

meant anything or whom he'd wanted to mean anything. The closest he'd

come had been -- he sat up with a start and realized that the last

woman he'd had any strong feelings for had been Suzanne Church.

#

Kettlewell emerged from New Work rich. He'd taken home large bonuses

every year that Kodacell had experienced growth -- a better metric

than turning an actual ahem profit -- and he'd invested in a diverse

portfolio that had everything from soybeans to software in it, along

with real estate (oops) and fine art. He believed in the New Work,

believed in it with every fiber of his being, but an undiverse

portfolio was flat-out irresponsible.

The New Work crash had killed the net worth of a lot of irresponsible

people.

Living in the Caymans got boring after a year. The kids hated the

international school, scuba diving amazed him by going from endlessly,

meditatively fascinating to deadly dull in less than a year. He didn't

want to sail. He didn't want to get drunk. He didn't want to join the

creepy zillionaires on their sex tours of the Caribbean and wouldn't

have even if his wife would have stood for it.

A year after the New Work crash, he filed a 1040 with the IRS and paid

them forty million dollars in back taxes and penalties, and

repatriated his wealth to an American bank.

Now he lived in a renovated housing project on Potrero Hill in San

Francisco, all upscale now with restored, kitschy window-bars and

vintage linoleum and stucco ceilings. He had four units over two

floors, with cleverly knocked-through walls and a spiral

staircase. The kids freaking loved the staircase.

Suzanne Church called him from SFO to let him know that she was on her

way in, having cleared security and customs after a scant hour. He

found himself unaccountably nervous about her now, and realized with a

little giggle that he had something like a crush on her. Nothing

serious -- nothing his wife needed to worry about -- but she was smart

and funny and attractive and incisive and fearless, and it was a hell

of a combination.

The kids were away at school and his wife was having a couple of days

camping with the girls in Yosemite, which facts lent a little charge

to Suzanne's impending visit. He looked up the AirBART schedule and

calculated how long he had until she arrived at the 24th Street

station, a brisk 20 minute walk from his place.

Minutes, just minutes. He checked the guest-room and then did a quick

mirror check. His months in the Caymans had given him a deep tan that

he'd kept up despite San Francisco's grey skies. He still looked like

a surfer, albeit with just a little daddy-paunch -- he'd gained more

weight through his wife's pregnancies than she had and only hard,

aneurysm-inducing cycling over and around Potrero Hill had knocked it

off again. His jeans' neat rows of pockets and Mobius seams were a

little outdated, but they looked good on him, as did his Hawai'ian

print shirt with its machine-screw motif.

Finally he plopped down to read a book and waited for Suzanne, and

managed to get through a whole page in the intervening ten minutes.

"Kettlebelly!" she hollered as she came through the door. She took him

in a hug that smelled of stale airplane and restless sleep and gave

him a thorough squeezing.

She held him at arm's length and they sized each other up. She'd been

a well-preserved mid-forties when he'd seen her last, buttoned-down in

a California-yoga-addict way. Now she was years older, and her time in

Russia had given her a forest of smile-lines at the corners of her

mouth and eyes. She had a sad, wise turn to her face that he'd never

seen there before, like a painted Pieta. Her hands had gone a little

wrinkly, her knuckles more prominent, but her fingernails were

beautifully manicured and her clothes were stylish, foreign, exotic

and European.

She laughed huskily and said, "You haven't changed a bit."

"Ouch," he said. "I'm older and wiser, I'll have you know."

"It doesn't show," she said. "I'm older, but no wiser."

He took her hand and looked at the simple platinum band on her

finger. "But you're married now -- nothing wises you up faster in my

experience."

She looked at her hand. "Oh, that. No. That's just to keep the wolves

at bay. Married women aren't the same kinds of targets that single

ones are. Give me water, and then a beer, please."

Glad to have something to do, he busied himself in the kitchen while

she prowled the place. "I remember when these places were bombed-out,

real ghettos."

"What did you mean about being a target?"

"St Pete's, you know. Lawless state. Everyone's on the make. I had a

bodyguard most of the time, but if I wanted to go to a restaurant, I

didn't want to have to fend off the dating-service mafiyeh who wanted

to offer me the deal of a lifetime on a green-card marriage."

"Jeez."

"It's another world, Landon. You know what the big panic there is this

week? A cult of ecstatic evangelical Christians who 'hypnotize' women

in the shopping malls and steal their babies to raise as soldiers to

the Lord. God knows how much of it is true. These guys don't bathe,

and dress in heavy coats with big beards all year round. I mean,

freaky, really freaky."

"They hypnotize women?"

"Weird, yeah? And the *driving*! Anyone over the age of fifty who

knows how to drive got there by being an apparat in the Soviet days,

which means that they learned to drive when the roads were empty. They

don't signal, they straddle lanes, they can't park -- I mean, they

*really* can't park. And drunk! Everyone, all the time! You've never

seen the like. Imagine a frat party the next day, with a lot of

innocent bystanders, hookers, muggers and pickpockets."

Landon looked at her. She was animated and vivid, thin -- age had

brought out her cheekbones and her eyes. Had she had a chin-tuck? It

was common enough -- all the medical tourists loved Russia. Maybe she

was just well-preserved.

She made a show of sniffing herself. "Phew! I need a shower! Can I

borrow your facilities?"

"Sure," he said. "I put clean towels out in the kids' bathroom --

upstairs and second on the right."

She came down with her fine hair slicked back over her ears, her face

scrubbed and shining. "I'm a new woman," she said. "Let's go somewhere

and eat something, OK?"

He took her for pupusas at a Salvadoran place on Goat Hill. They

slogged up and down the hills and valleys, taking the steps cut into

the steep sides, walking past the Painted Ladies -- grand, gaudy

Victorian wood-frames -- and the wobbly, heavy canvas bubble-houses

that had sprung up where the big quake and landslides had washed away

parts of the hills.

"I'd forgotten that they had hills like that," she said, greedily

guzzling an horchata. Her face was streaked with sweat and flushed --

it made her look prettier, younger.

"My son and I walk them every day."

"You drag a little kid up and down that every *day*? Christ, that's

child abuse!"

"Well, he poops out after a couple of peaks and I end up carrying

him."

"You *carry* him? You must be some kind of superman." She gave his

bicep a squeeze, then his thigh, then slapped his butt. "A fine

specimen. Your wife's a lucky woman."

He grinned. Having his wife in the conversation made him feel less at

risk. *That's right, I'm married and we both know it. This is just fun

flirting. Nothing more.*

They bit into their pupusas -- stuffed cornmeal dumplings filled with

grilled pork and topped with shredded cabbage and hot sauce -- and

grunted and ate and ordered more.

"What are these called again?"

"Pupusas, from El Salvador."

"Humph. In my day, we ate Mexican burritos the size of a football, and

we were grateful."

"No one eats burritos anymore," he said, then covered his mouth, aware

of how pretentious that sounded.

"Dahling," she said, "burritos are *so* 2005. You *must* try a pupusa

-- it's what all the most charming Central American peasants are

eating now."

They both laughed and stuffed their faces more. "Well, it was either

here or one of the fatkins places with the triple-decker stuffed

pizzas, and I figured --"

"They really do that?"

"The fatkins? Yeah -- anything to get that magical 10,000 calories any

day. It must be the same in Russia, right? I mean, they invented it."

"Maybe for fifteen minutes. But most of them don't bother -- they get

a little metabolic tweak, not a wide-open throttle like that. Christ,

what it must do to your digestive system to process 10,000 calories a

day!"

"Chacun a son gout," he said, essaying a Gallic shrug.

She laughed again and they ate some more. "I'm starting to feel human

at last."

"Me too."

"It's still mid-afternoon, but my circadian thinks it's 2AM. I need to

do something to stay awake or I'll be up at four tomorrow morning."

"I have some modafinil," he said.

"Swore 'em off. Let's go for a walk."

They did a little more hill-climbing and then headed into the Mission

and window-shopped the North African tchotchke emporia that were

crowding out the Mexican rodeo shops and hairdressers. The skin drums

and rattles were laser-etched with intricate designs -- Coca Cola

logos, the UN Access to Essential Medicines Charter, Disney

characters. It put them both in mind of the old days of the New Work,

and the subject came up again, hesitant at first and then a full-bore

reminisce.

Suzanne told him stories of the things that Perry and Lester had done

that she'd never dared report on, the ways they'd skirted the law and

his orders. He told her a few stories of his own, and they rocked with

laughter in the street, staggering like drunks, pounding each other on

the backs, gripping their knees and stomachs and doubling over to the

curious glances of the passers-by.

It was fine, that day, Landon thought. Some kind of great sorrow that

he'd forgotten he'd carried lifted from him and his chest and

shoulders expanded and he breathed easy. What was the sorrow? The

death of the New Work. The death of the dot-coms. The death of

everything he'd considered important and worthy, its fading into

tawdry, cheap nostalgia.

They were sitting in the grass in Dolores Park now, watching the dogs

and their people romp among the robot pooper-scoopers. He had his arm

around her shoulders, like war-buddies on a bender (he told himself)

and not like a middle-aged man flirting with a woman he hadn't seen in

years.

And then they were lying down, the ache of laughter in their bellies,

the sun on their faces, the barks and happy shouts around them. Their

hands twined together (but that was friendly too, Arab men held hands

walking down the street as a way of showing friendship).

Now their talk had banked down to coals, throwing off an occasional

spark when one or the other would remember some funny anecdote and

grunt out a word or two that would set them both to gingerly

chuckling. But their hands were tied and their breathing was in sync,

and their flanks were touching and it wasn't just friendly.

Abruptly, she shook her hand free and rolled on her side. "Listen,

married man, I think that's enough of that."

He felt his face go red. His ears rang. "Suzanne -- what --" He was

sputtering.

"No harm no foul, but let's keep it friendly, all right."

The spell was broken, and the sorrow came back. He looked for the

right thing to say. "God I miss it," he said. "Oh, Suzanne, God, I

miss it so much, every day."

Her face fell, too. "Yeah." She looked away. "I really thought we were

changing the world."

"We were," he said. "We did."

"Yeah," she said again. "But it didn't matter in the end, did it? Now

we're older and our work is forgotten and it's all come to

nothing. Petersburg is nice, but who gives a shit? Is that what I'm

going to do with the rest of my life, hang around Petersburg blogging

about the mafiyeh and medical tourism? Just shoot me now."

"I miss the people. I'd meet ten amazing creative geniuses every day

-- at least! Then I'd give them money and they'd make amazing stuff

happen with it. The closest I come to that now is my kids, watching

them learn and build stuff, which is really great, don't get me wrong,

but it's nothing like the old days."

"I miss Lester. And Perry. Tjan. The whole gang of them, really." She

propped herself up on one elbow and then shocked him by kissing him

hard on the cheek. "Thanks, Kettlebelly. Thank you so much for putting

me in the middle of all that. You changed my life, that's for sure."

He felt the imprint of her lips glowing on his cheek and grinned. "OK,

here's an idea: let's go buy a couple bottles of wine, sit on my

patio, get a glow on, and then call Perry and see what he's up to."

"Oh, that's a good one," she said. "That's a *very* good one."

A few hours later, they sat on the horsehair club-sofa in Kettlewell's

living room and hit a number he'd never taken out of his

speed-dial. "Hi, this is Perry. Leave a message."

"Perry!" they chorused. They looked at each other, at a loss for what

to say next, then dissolved in peals of laughter.

"Perry, it's Suzanne and Kettlebelly. What the hell are you up to?

Call us!"

They looked at the phone with renewed hilarity and laughed some

more. But by the time the sun was setting over Potrero Hill and

Suzanne's jet-lag was beating her up again, they'd both descended into

their own personal funks. Suzanne went up to the guest room and put

herself to bed, not bothering to brush her teeth or even change into

her nightie.

#

Perry touched down in Miami in a near-coma, his eyes gummed shut by

several days' worth of hangovers chased by drink. Sleep deprivation

made him uncoordinated, so he tripped twice deplaning, and his voice

was a barely audible rasp, his throat sore with a cold he'd picked up

in Texas or maybe it was Oklahoma.

Lester was waiting beyond the luggage carousels, grinning like a holy

fool, tall and broad-shouldered and tanned, dressed in fatkins

pimped-out finery, all tight stretch-fabrics and glitter.

"Oh man, you look like shit," he said, breaking off from the fatkins

girl he'd been chatting up. Perry noticed that he was holding his

phone, a sure sign that he'd gotten her number.

"Ten," Perry said, grinning through the snotty rheum of his cold. "Ten

rides."

"Ten rides?" Lester said.

"Ten. San Francisco, Austin, Minneapolis, Omaha, Oklahoma City,

Madison, Bellingham, Chapel Hill and --" He faltered. "And -- Shit. I

forget. It's all written down."

Lester took his bag from him and set it down, then crushed him in an

enormous, muscular hug that whiffed slightly of the ketosis fumes that

all the fatkins exuded.

"You did good, cowboy," he said. "Let's mosey back to the ranch, feed

you and put you to bed, s'awright?"

"Can I sleep in?"

"Of course."

"Until April?"