Hackelberg's heavy eyelids drooped a little, the corners of his eyes

going down with them. It was like staring down a gator. Sammy resisted

the urge to look away.

"The numbers don't lie. DiaB is making us a fortune, and most of it's

coming from the platform, not the goop and not the increased visitor

numbers. We're making money because other people are figuring out ways

to use our stuff. It's our fastest-growing revenue source and if it

continues, we're going to end up being a DiaB company with a

side-business in theme-parks.

"That's the good news. The bad news is that these characters in the

ghost mall have us in their crosshairs. They're prying us open faster

than we can lock ourselves down. But here's another way of looking at

it: every time they add another feature to the DiaB, they make owning

a DiaB more attractive, which makes it easier for us to sell access to

the platform to advertisers."

Hackelberg held up his hands. "Samuel, I think I've heard enough. Your

job is to figure out new businesses for us to diversify into. My job

is to contain our liability and protect our brand and investors. It

sounds a lot to me like you're saying that you want me to leave off

doing my job so that you can do yours."

Sammy squirmed. "No, that's not it at all. We both want to protect the

business. I'm not saying that you need to give these guys a free

ride. What I'm saying is, suing these guys is *not* good for our

business. It costs us money, goodwill -- it distracts us from doing

our jobs."

Hackelberg leaned back and looked coolly into Sammy's eyes. "What are

you proposing as an alternative, then?"

The idea had come to Sammy in the shower one morning, as he mentally

calculated the size of his coming quarterly bonus. A great idea. Out

of the box thinking. The right answer to the question that no one had

thought to ask. It had seemed so *perfect* then. Now, though --

"I think we should buy them out."

Hackelberg's thin, mirthless grin made his balls shrivel up.

Sammy held up his hands. "Here, look at this. I drew up some

figures. What they're earning. What we earn from them. Growth

estimates over the next five quarters. It's not just some random idea

I had in the shower. This makes *sense*." He passed over a sheaf of

papers, replete with pie-charts.

Hackelberg set it down in the center of his desk, perfectly square to

the corners. He flipped through the first five pages, then squared the

stack up again.

"You've done a lot of work here, Samuel. I can really see that."

He got up from his straight-backed chair, lifted Sammy's papers

between his thumb and forefinger, and crossed to the wall. There was a

shredder there, its maw a wide rectangle, the kind of thing that you

can stick entire hardcover books (or hard drives) into. Calmly,

Hackelberg fed Sammy's paper into the shredder, fastidiously holding

the paper-clipped corner between thumb and forefinger, then dropping

the corner in once the rest had been digested.

"I won't ask you for your computer," he said, settling back into his

chair. "But I expect that you will back up your other data and then

send the hard-drive to IT to be permanently erased. I don't want any

record of this, period. I want this done by the end of business

today."

Sammy's mouth hung open. He shut it. Then he opened it again.

Abruptly, Hackelberg stood, knocking his chair to the ground behind

him.

"Not one word, do you understand me? Not one solitary word, you

goddamned idiot! We're in the middle of being sued by these people. I

*know* you know this, since it's your fault that it's happening. I

know that you know that the stakes are the *entire* company. Now, say

a jury were to discover that we were considering buying these assholes

out? Say a jury were to decide that our litigation was a base

stratagem to lower the asking price for their, their *company* --" The

word dripped with sarcasm -- "what do you suppose would happen? If you

had the sense of a five year old, you'd have known better than to do

this. Good Christ, Page, I should have security escort you to the

gate.

"Turn on your heel and go weep in the corridor. Don't stand in my

office for one more second. Get your computer to IT by 2PM. I will

check. That goes for anyone you worked with on this, anyone who has a

copy of this information. Now, leave." Sammy stood rooted in

place. "LEAVE, you ridiculous little dog's-pizzle, get out of my

sight!"

Sammy drew in a deep breath. He thought about saying something like,

*You can't talk to me like that*, but it was very likely that

Hackelberg could talk to him just like that. He felt light-headed and

a little sick, and he backed slowly out of the office.

Standing in the corridor, he began to shake. He pounded the elevator

button, and felt the eyes of Hackelberg's severe secretary burning

into his back. Abruptly, he turned away and yanked open the staircase

door so hard it smashed into the wall with a loud bang. He took the

stairs in a rush of desperate claustrophobia, wanting more than

anything to get outside, to breathe in the fresh air.

He stumbled on the way down, falling a couple of steps and smashing

into the wall on the landing. He stood, pressed against the wall, the

cold cinder block on his cheek, which felt like it might be

bruised. The pain was enough to bring him back to his senses.

This is ridiculous. He had the right answer. Hackelberg was

wrong. Hackelberg didn't run the company. Yes, it was hard to get

anything done without his sign-off, but it wasn't impossible. Going

behind Hackelberg's back to the executive committee could cost him his

job, of course.

Of course.

Sammy realized that he didn't actually *care* if he lost his job. Oh,

the thought made his chest constrict and thoughts of living in a

refrigerator box materialize in his mind's eye, but beyond that, he

really didn't care. It was such a goddamned roller-coaster ride --

Sammy smiled grimly at the metaphor. You guess right, you end up on

top. You guess wrong, you bottom out. He spent half his career lording

it over the poor guessers and the other half panicking about a bad

guess he'd made. He thought of Perry and Lester, thought of that night

in Boston. He'd killed their ride and the party had gone on all the

same. They had something, in that crazy shantytown, something pure and

happy, some camaraderie that he'd always assumed he'd get someday, but

that had never materialized.

If this was his dream job, how much worse would unemployment really

be?

He would go to the executive committee. He would not erase his

numbers. He set off for his office, moving quickly, purposefully, head

up. A last stand, how exciting, why not?

He piloted the little golf-cart down the back road and was nearly at

his building's door when he spotted the security detail. Three of

them, in lightweight Disney cop uniforms, wearing ranger hats and

looking around alertly. Hackelberg must have sent them there to make

sure that he followed through with deleting his data.

He stopped the golf cart abruptly and reversed out of the driveway

before the guards spotted him. He needed to get his files somewhere

that Hackelberg wouldn't be able to retrieve them. He zipped down the

service roads, thinking furiously.

The answer occurred to him in the form of a road-sign for the

Polynesian hotel. He turned up its drive and parked the golf-cart. As

he stepped out, he removed his employee badge and untucked his

shirt. Now he was just another sweaty fresh-arrived tourist, Dad

coming in to rendezvous with Mom and the kids, back from some banal

meeting that delayed his arrival, hasn't even had time to change into

a t-shirt.

He headed straight for the sundries store and bought a postage-paid

Walt Disney World postcard with a little magnetic patch mounted on one

corner. You filled up the memory with a couple hours' worth of video

and as many photos as you wanted and mailed it off. The pixelated

display on the front played a slide show of the images -- at least

once a year, some honeymoon couple would miss this fact and throw a

couple racy bedroom shots in the mix, to the perennial delight of the

mail room.

He hastily wrote some banalities about the great time he and the kids

were having in Disney World, then he opened his computer and looked up

the address that the Church woman had checked in under. He addressed

it, simply, to "Suzanne," to further throw off the scent, then he

slipped it into a mail-slot with a prayer to the gods of journalist

shield laws.

He walked as calmly as he could back to his golf-cart, clipping on his

employee badge and tucking his shirt back in. Then he motored calmly

to his office building. The Disney cops were sweating under the

mid-day sun.

"Mr Page?"

"Yes," he said.

"I'm to take your computer to IT, sir."

"I don't think so," Sammy said, with perfect calm. "I think we'll GO

up to my office and call a meeting of the executive committee

instead."

The security guard was young, Latino, and skinny. His short

back-and-sides left his scalp exposed to the sun. He took his hat off

and mopped his forehead with a handkerchief, exposing a line of acne

where his hat-band irritated the skin. It made Sammy feel sorry for

the kid -- especially considering that Sammy earned more than 20 times

the kid's salary.

"This really isn't your job, I know," Sammy said, wondering where all

this sympathy for the laboring classes had come from, anyway? "I don't

want to make it hard for you. We'll go inside. You can hang on to the

computer. We'll talk to some people. If they tell you to go ahead, you

go ahead. Otherwise, we go see them, all right?"

He held his computer out to the kid, who took it.

"Let's go up to my office now," he said.

The kid shook his head. "I'm supposed to take this --"

"I know, I know. But we have a deal." The kid looked like he would

head out anyway. "And there are backups in my office, so you need to

come and get those, too."

That did it. The kid looked a little grateful as they went inside,

where the air conditioning was blowing icy cold.

"You should have waited in the lobby, Luis," Sammy said, reading the

kid's name off his badge. "You must be boiled."

"I had instructions," Luis said.

Sammy made a face. "They don't sound like very reasonable

instructions. All the more reason to sort this out, right?"

Sammy had his secretary get Luis a bottle of cold water and a little

plate of grapes and berries out of the stash he kept for his visitors,

then he called Guignol from his desk phone.

"It's Sammy. I need to call an emergency meeting of the exec

committee," he said without preamble.

"This is about Hackelberg, isn't it?"

"He's already called you?"

"He was very persuasive."

"I can be persuasive, too. Give me a chance."

"You know what will happen if you push this?"

"I might save the company."

"You might," Guignol said. "And you might --"

"I know," Sammy said. "What the hell, it's only a career."

"You can't keep your data -- Hackelberg is right about that."

"I can send all the backups and my computer to your office right now."

"I was under the impression that they were all on their way to IT for

disposal."

"Not yet. There's a security castmember in my office with me named

Luis. If you want to call dispatch and have them direct him to bring

this stuff to you instead --"

"Sammy, do you understand what you're doing here?"

Sammy suppressed a mad giggle. "I do," he said. "I understand exactly

what I'm doing. I want to help you all understand that, too."

"I'm calling security dispatch now."

A moment later, Luis's phone rang and the kid listened intently,

nodding unconsciously. Once he'd hung up, Sammy passed him his

backups, hardcopy and computer. "Let's go," he said.

"Right," Luis said, and led the way.

It was a short ride to the casting office building, where Guignol had

his office. The wind felt terrific on his face, drying his sweat. It

had been a long day.

When they pulled up, Sammy let Luis lead the way again, badging in

behind him, following him up to the seventh-floor board-room. at the

end of the Gold Coast where the most senior offices were.

Guignol met them at the door and took the materials from Luis, then

ushered Sammy in. Sammy caught Luis's eye, and Luis surprised him by

winking and slipping him a surreptitious thumbs-up, making Sammy feel

like they shared a secret.

There were eight on the executive committee, but they travelled a

lot. Sammy had expected to see no more than four. There were two. And

Hackelberg, of course. The lawyer was the picture of saurian calm.

Sammy sat down at the table and helped himself to a glass of water,

watching a ring pool on the table's polished and waxed wooden surface.

"Samuel," Hackelberg said, shaking his head. "I hoped it wouldn't come

to this."

Sammy took a deep breath, looking for that don't-give-a-shit calm that

had suffused him before. It was there still, not as potent, but

there. He drew upon it.

"Let's put this to the committee, shall we? I mean, we already know

how we feel."

"That won't be necessary," Hackelberg said. "The committee has already

voted on this."

Sammy closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He looked at

Hackelberg, who was smiling grimly, a mean grin that went all the way

to the corners of his eyes.

Sammy looked around at Guignol and the committee members. They

wouldn't meet his eye. Guignol gestured Luis into the room and handed

him Sammy's computer, papers, and backups. He leaned in and spoke

quietly to him. Luis turned and left.

Guignol cleared his throat. "There's nothing else to discuss, then,"

he said. "Thank you all for coming."

In his heart, Sammy had known this was coming. Hackelberg would beat

him to the committee -- never let him present his side. Watching the

lawyer get up stiffly and leave with slow, dignified steps, Sammy had

a moment's intuition about what it must be like to be that man --

possessed of a kind of cold, furious power that came from telling

everyone that not obeying you to the letter would put them in terrible

danger. He knew that line of reasoning: It was the same one he got

from the TSA at the airport before they bent him over and greased him

up. *You can't understand the grave danger we all face. You must obey

me, for only I can keep it at bay.*

He waited for the rest of the committee to file out. None of them

would meet his eye. Then it was just him and Guignol. Sammy raised his

eyebrows and spread out his hands, miming *What happens now?*

"You won't be able to get anything productive done until IT gets

through with your computer. Take some time off. Call up Dinah and see

if she wants to grab some holiday time."

"We split," Sammy said. He drank his water and stood up. "I've just

got one question before I go."

Guignol winced but stood his ground. "Go ahead," he said.

"Don't you want to know what the numbers looked like?"

"It's not my job to overrule legal --"

"We'll get to that in a second. It's not the question. The question

is, don't you *want to know*?"

Guignol sighed. "You know I want to know. Of course I want to

know. This isn't about me and what I want, though. It's about making

sure we don't endanger the shareholders --"

"So ignoring this path, sticking our heads in the sand, that's *good*

for the shareholders?"

"No, of course it's not good for the shareholders. But it's better

than endangering the whole company --"

Sammy nodded. "Well, how about if we both take some time off and drive

down to Hollywood. It'd do us some good."

"Sammy, I've got a job to do --"

"Yeah, but without your computer..."

Guignol looked at him. "What did you do?"

"It's not what I did. It's what I might have done. I'm going to be a

good boy and give Hackelberg a list of everyone I might have emailed

about this. All those people are losing their computers to the big

magnet at IT."

"But you never emailed me about this --"

"You sure? I might have. It's the kind of thing I might have

done. Maybe your spam-filter ate it. You never know. That's what IT's

for."

Guignol looked angry for a moment, then laughed. "You are such a

shithead. Fuck that lawyer asshole anyway. What are you driving these

days?"

"Just bought a new Dell Luminux," Sammy said, grinning

back. "Rag-top."

"When do we leave?"

"I'll pick you up at 6AM tomorrow. Beat the morning traffic."

#

Suzanne was getting sick of breakfast in bed. It was hard to imagine

that such a thing was possible, but there it was. Lester stole out

from between the covers before 7AM every day, and then, half an hour

later, he was back with a laden tray, something new every day. She'd

had steaks, burritos, waffles, home-made granola, fruit-salad with

Greek yogurt, and today there were eggs Benedict with fresh-squeezed

grapefruit juice. The tray always came with a French press of

fresh-ground Kona coffee, a cloth napkin, and her computer, so she

could read the news.

In theory, this was a warm ritual that ensured that they had quality

time together every day, no matter what. In practice, Lester was so

anxious about the food and whether she was enjoying it that she

couldn't really enjoy it. Plus, she wasn't a fatkins, so three

thousand calorie breakfasts weren't good for her.

Most of all, it was the pressure to be a happy couple, to have

cemented over the old hurts and started anew. She felt it every

moment, when Lester climbed into the shower with her and soaped her

back, when he brought home flowers, and when he climbed into bed with

her in the morning to eat breakfast with her.

She picked at her caviar and blini glumly and poked at her

computer. Beside her, Lester hoovered up three thousand calories'

worth of fried dough and clattered one-handed on his machine.

"This is delicious, babe, thanks," she said, with as much sincerity as

she could muster. It was really generous and nice of him to do

this. She was just a bitter old woman who couldn't be happy no matter

what was going on in her life.

There was voicemail on her computer, which was unusual. Most people

sent her email. This originated from a pay phone on the Florida

Turnpike.

"Ms Church, this is -- ah, this is a person whom you recently had the

acquaintance of, while on your holidays. I have a confidential matter

to discuss with you. I'm travelling to your location with a colleague

today and should arrive mid-morning. I hope you can make some time to

meet with me."

She listened to it twice. Lester leaned over.

"What's that all about?"

"You're not going to believe it. I think it's that Disney guy, the guy

I told you about. The one Death used to work for."

"He's coming *here*?"

"Apparently."

"Woah. Don't tell Perry."

"You think?"

"He'd tear that guy's throat out with his teeth." Lester took a bite

of blini. "I might help."

Suzanne thought about Sammy. He hadn't been the sort of person she

could be friends with, but she'd known plenty of his kind in her day,

and he was hardly the worst of the lot. He barely rated above average

on the corporate psychopath meter. Somewhere in there, there was a

real personality. She'd seen it.

"Well, then I guess I'd better meet with him alone."

"It sounds like he wants a doctor-patient meeting anyway."

"Or confessor-penitent."

"You think he'll leak you something."

"That's a pretty good working theory when it comes to this kind of

call."

Lester ate thoughtfully, then reached over and hit a key on her

computer, replaying the call.

"He sounds, what, giddy?"

"That's right, he does, doesn't he. Maybe it's good news."

Lester laughed and took away her dishes, and when he came back in, he

was naked, stripped and ready for the shower. He was a very handsome

man, and he had a devilish grin as he whisked the blanket off of her.

He stopped at the foot of the bed and stared at her, his grin quirking

in a way she recognized instantly. She didn't have to look down to

know that he was getting hard. In the mirror of his eyes, she was

beautiful. She could see it plainly. When she looked into the real

mirror at the foot of the bed, draped with gauzy sun-scarves and

crusted around the edges with kitschy tourist magnets Lester brought

home, she saw a saggy, middle-aged woman with cottage-cheese cellulite

and saddle-bags.

Lester had slept with more fatkins girls than she could count, women

made into doll-like mannequins by surgery and chemical enhancements,

women who read sex manuals in public places and boasted about their

Kegel weight-lifting scores.

But when he looked at her like that, she knew that she was the most

beautiful woman he'd ever loved, that he would do anything for

her. That he loved her as much as he could ever love anyone.

*What the hell was I complaining about?* she thought as he fell on her

like a starving man.

#

She met Sammy in their favorite tea-room, the one perched up on a

crow's nest four storeys up a corkscrew building whose supplies came

up on a series of dumbwaiters and winches that shrouded its balconies

like vines.

She staked out the best table, the one with the panoramic view of the

whole shantytown, and ordered a plate of the tiny shortbread cakes

that were the house specialty, along with a gigantic mug of nonfat

decaf cappuccino.

Sammy came up the steps red-faced and sweaty, wearing a Hawai'ian

shirt and Bermuda shorts, like some kind of tourist. Or like he was on

holidays? Behind him came a younger man, with severe little designer

glasses, dressed in the conventional polo-shirt and slacks uniform of

the corporate exec on a non-suit day.

Suzanne sprinkled an ironic wave at them and gestured to the

mismatched school-room chairs at her table. The waitress -- Shayna --

came over with two glasses of water and a paper napkin dispenser. The

men thanked her and mopped their faces and drank their water.

"Good drive?"

Sammy nodded. His friend looked nervous, like he was wondering what

might have been swimming in his water glass. "This is some place."

"We like it here."

"Is there, you know, a bathroom?" the companion asked.

"Through there." Suzanne pointed.

"How do you deal with the sewage around here?"

"Sewage? Mr Page, sewage is *solved*. We feed it into our generators

and the waste heat runs our condenser purifiers. There was talk of

building one big one for the whole town, but that required way too

much coordination and anyway, Perry was convinced that having central

points of failure would be begging for a disaster. I wrote a series on

it. If you'd like I can send you the links."

The Disney exec made some noises and ate some shortbread, peered at

the chalk-board menu and ordered some Thai iced tea.

"Look, Ms Church -- Suzanne -- thank you for seeing me. I would have

understood completely if you'd told me to go fuck myself."

Suzanne smiled and made a go-on gesture.

"Before my friend comes back from the bathroom, before we meet up with

anyone from your side, I just want you to know this. What you've done,

it's changed the world. I wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for

you."

He had every appearance of being completely sincere. He was a little

road-crazed and windblown today, not like she remembered him from

Orlando. What the hell had happened to him? What was he here for?

His friend came back and Sammy said, "I ordered you a Thai iced

tea. This is Suzanne Church, the writer. Ms Church, this is Herve

Guignol, co-director of the Florida regional division of Disney

Parks."

Guignol was more put-together and stand-offish than Sammy. He shook

her hand and made executive sounding grunts at her. He was young, and

clearly into playing the role of exec. He reminded Suzanne of fresh

Silicon Valley millionaires who could go from pizza-slinging hackers

to suit-wearing biz-droids who bullshitted knowledgeably about EBITDA

overnight.

*What the hell are you two here for?*

"Mr Page --"

"Sammy, call me Sammy, please. Did you get my postcard?"

"That was from you?" She'd not been able to make heads or tails of it

when it arrived in the mail the day before and she'd chucked it out as

part of some viral marketing campaign she didn't want to get infected

by.

"You got it?"

"I threw it out."

Sammy went slightly green.

"But it'll still be in the trash," she said. "Lester never takes it

out, and I haven't."

"Um, can we go and get it now, all the same?"

"What's on it?"

Sammy and Guignol exchanged a long look. "Let's pretend that I gave

you a long run-up to this. Let's pretend that we spent a lot of time

with me impressing on you that this is confidential, and not for

publication. Let's pretend that I charmed you and made sure you

understood how much respect I have for you and your friends here --"

"I get it," Suzanne said, trying not to laugh. *Not for publication*

-- really!

"OK, let's pretend all that. Now I'll tell you: what's on that

postcard is the financials for a Disney Parks buyout of your friends'

entire operation here. DiaBolical, the ride, all of it."

Suzanne had been expecting a lot of things, but this wasn't one of

them. It was loopy. Daffy. Not just weird, but inconceivable. As

though he'd said, "I sent you our plans to carve your portrait on the

moon's surface with a green laser." But she was a pro. She kept her

face still and neutral, and calmly swallowed her cappuccino.

"I see."

"And there are -- there are people at Disney who feel like this idea

is so dangerous that it doesn't even warrant discussion. That it

should be suppressed."

Guignol cleared his throat. "That's the consensus," he said.

"And normally, I'd say, hey, sure, the consensus. That's great. But

I'll tell you, I drew up these numbers because I was curious, I'm a

curious guy. I like to think laterally, try stuff that might seem

silly at first. See where it goes. I've had pretty good instincts."

Guignol and Suzanne snorted at the same time.

"And an imperfect record," Sammy said. Suzanne didn't want to like

him, but there was something forthright about him that she couldn't

help warming to. There was no subtlety or scheming in this

guy. Whatever he wanted, you could see it right on his face. Maybe he

was a psycho, but he wasn't a sneak.

"So I ran these numbers for my own amusement, to see what they would

look like. Assume that your boys want, say, 30 times gross annual

revenue for a buyout. Say that this settles our lawsuit -- not theirs,

just ours, so we don't have to pay for the trademark suit to go

forward. Assume that they generate one DiaBolical-scale idea every six

months --" Suzanne found herself nodding along, especially at this

last one. "Well, you make those assumptions and you know what comes

out of it?"

Suzanne let the numbers dance behind her own eyelids. She'd followed

all the relevant financials closely for years, so closely that they

were as familiar as her monthly take-home and mortgage payments had

been, back when she had a straight job and a straight life.

"Well, you'd make Lester and Perry *very* wealthy," she said. "After

they vested out, they'd be able to live off the interest alone."

Sammy nodded judiciously. His sidekick looked alarmed. "Yup. And for

us?"

"Well, assuming your last quarterly statement was accurate --"

"We were a little conservative," Sammy said. The other man nodded

reflexively.

*You were very conservative,* she thought. *DiaB's making you a

fortune and you didn't want to advertise that to the competition.*

"Assuming that, well, you guys earn back your investment in, what, 18

months?"

"I figure a year. But 18 months would be good."

"If you vest the guys out over three years, that means --"

"100 percent ROI, plus or minus 200 percent," Sammy said. "For less

money than we'll end up spending on our end of the lawsuit."

Guignol was goggling at them both. Sammy drank his Thai iced-tea,

slurping noisily. He signalled for another one.

"And you sent me these financials on a postcard?"

"There was some question about whether they'd be erased before I could

show them to anyone, and I knew there was no way I'd be given the

chance to re-create them independently. It seemed prudent to have a

backup copy."

"A backup copy in my hands?"

"Well, at least I knew you wouldn't give it up without a fight." Sammy

shrugged and offered her a sunny smile.

"We'd better go rescue that postcard from the basket before Lester

develops a domestic instinct and takes out the trash, then," Suzanne

said, pushing away from the table. Shayna brought the bill and Sammy

paid it, overtipping by a factor of ten, which endeared him further to

Suzanne. She couldn't abide rich people who stiffed on the tip.

Suzanne walked them through the shantytown, watching their reactions

closely. She liked to take new people here. She'd witnessed its birth

and growth, then gone away during its adolescence, and now she got to

enjoy its maturity. Crowds of kids ran screeching and playing through

the streets, adults nodded at them from their windows, wires and

plumbing and antennas crowded the skies above them. The walls

shimmered with murals and graffiti and mosaics.

Sammy treated it like he had his theme park, seeming to take in every

detail with a connoisseur's eye; Guignol was more nervous, clearly

feeling unsafe amid the cheerful lawlessness. They came upon Francis

and a gang of his kids, building bicycles out of stiffened fabric and

strong monofilament recycled from packing crates.

"Ms Church," Francis said gravely. He'd given up drinking, maybe for

good, and he was clear-eyed and charming in his engineer's

coveralls. The kids -- boys *and* girls, Suzanne noted approvingly --

continued to work over the bikes, but they were clearly watching what

Francis was up to.

"Francis, please meet Sammy and his colleague, Herve. They're here for

a story I'm working on. Gentlemen, Francis is the closest thing we

have to a mayor around here."

Francis shook hands all around, but Sammy's attention was riveted on

the bicycles.

Francis picked one up with two fingers and handed it to him. "Like it?

We got the design from a shop in Liberia, but we made our own local

improvements. The trick is getting the stiffener to stay liquid long

enough to get the fabric stretched out in the right proportion."

Sammy took the frame from him and spun it in one hand like a

baton. "And the wheels?"

"Mostly we do solids, which stay in true longer. We use the carbon

stiffener on a pre-cut round of canvas or denim, then fit a standard

tire. They go out of true after a while. You just apply some solvent

to them and they go soft again and you re-true them with a compass and

a pair of tailor's shears, then re-stiffen them. You get maybe five

years of hard riding out of a wheel that way."

Sammy's eyes were round as saucers. He took one of the proffered

wheels and spun it between opposing fingertips. Then, grinning, he

picked up another wheel and the bike-frame and began to *juggle* them,

one-two-three, hoop-la! Francis looked amused, rather than pissed --

giving up drink had softened his temper. His kids stopped working and

laughed. Sammy laughed too. He transferred the wheels to his left

hand, then tossed the frame high the air, spun around and caught it

and then handed it all back to Francis. The kids clapped and he took a

bow.

"I didn't know you had it in you," Guignol said, patting him on the

shoulder.

Sammy, sweating and grinning like a fool, said, "Yeah, it's not

something I get a lot of chances to do around the office. But did you

see that? It was light enough to juggle! I mean, how exciting is all

this?" He swept his arm around his head. "Between the sewage and the

manufacturing and all these kids --" He broke off. "What do you do

about education, Suzanne?"

"Lots of kids bus into the local schools, or ride. But lots more

home-school these days. We don't get a very high caliber of public

school around here."

"Might that have something to do with all the residents who don't pay

property tax?" Guignol said pointedly.

Suzanne nodded. "I'm sure it does," she said. "But it has more to do

with the overall quality of public education in this state. 47th in

the nation for funding."

They were at her and Lester's place now. She led them through the

front door and picked up the trash-can next to the little table where

she sorted the mail after picking it up from her PO box at a little

strip mall down the road.

There was the postcard. She handed it silently to Sammy, who held it

for a moment, then reluctantly passed it to Guignol. "You'd better

hang on to it," he said, and she sensed that there was something

bigger going on there.

"Now we go see Lester," Suzanne said.

He was behind the building in his little workshop, hacking

DiaBolical. There were five different DiaBs running around him,

chugging and humming. The smell of goop and fuser and heat filled the

room, and an air-conditioner like a jet-engine labored to keep things

cool. Still, it was a few degrees warmer inside than out.

"Lester," Suzanne shouted over the air-conditioner din, "we have

visitors."

Lester straightened up from his keyboard and wiped his palms and

turned to face them. He knew who they were based on his earlier

conversation with Suzanne, but he also clearly recognized Sammy.

"You!" he said. "You work for Disney?"

Sammy blushed and looked away.

Lester turned to Suzanne. "This guy used to come up, what, twice,

three times a week."

Sammy nodded and mumbled something. Lester reached out and snapped off

the AC, filling the room with eerie silence and stifling heat. "What

was that?"

"I'm a great believer in competitive intelligence."

"You work for Disney?"

"They both work for Disney, Lester," Suzanne said. "This is Sammy and

Herve." *Herve doesn't do much talking,* she mentally added, *but he

seems to be in charge*.

"That's right," Sammy said, seeming to come to himself at last. "And

it's an honor to formally meet you at last. I run the DiaB program. I

see you're a fan. I've read quite a bit about you, of course, thanks

to Ms Church here."

Lester's hands closed and opened, closed and opened. "You were, what,

you were sneaking around here?"

"Have I mentioned that I'm a great fan of *your work*? Not just the

ride, either. This DiaBolical, well, it's --"

"What are you doing here?"

Suzanne had expected something like this. Lester wasn't like Perry, he

wouldn't go off the deep-end with this guy, but he wasn't going to be

his best buddy, either. Still, someone needed to intervene before this

melted down altogether.

"Lester," she said, putting her hand on his warm shoulder. "Do you

want to show these guys what you're working on?"

He blew air through his nose a couple times, then settled down. He

even smiled.

"This one," he said, pointing to a DiaBolical, "I've got it running an

experimental firmware that lets it print out hollow

components. They're a lot lighter and they don't last as long. But

they're also way less consumptive on goop. You get about ten times as

much printing out of them."

Suzanne noted that this bit of news turned both of the Disney execs a

little green. They made a lot of money selling goop, she knew.

"This one," Lester continued, patting a DiaB that was open to the

elements, its imps lounging in its guts, "we mix some serious epoxy in

with it, some carbon fibers. The printouts are practically

indestructible. There are some kids around here who've been using it

to print parts for bicycles --"

"Those were printed on *this*?" Sammy said.

"We ran into Francis and his gang," Suzanne explained.

Lester nodded. "Yeah, it's not perfect, though. The epoxy clogs up the

works and the imps really don't like it. I only get two or three days

out of a printer after I convert it. I'm working on changing the mix

to fix that, though."

"After all," Guignol noted sourly, "it's not as if you have to pay for

new DiaBs when you break one."

Lester smiled nastily at him. "Exactly," he said. "We've got a great

research subsidy around here."

Guignol looked away, lips pursed.

"This one," Lester said, choosing not to notice, "this one is the

realization of an age-old project." He pointed to the table next to

it, where its imps were carefully fitting together some very fine

parts.

Sammy leaned in close, inspecting their work. After a second, he

hissed like a teakettle, then slapped his knee.

Now Lester's smile was more genuine. He loved it when people

appreciated his work. "You figured it out?"

"You're printing DiaBs!"

"Not the whole thing," Lester said. "A lot of the logic needs an FPGA

burner. And we can't do some of the conductive elements, either. But

yeah, about 90 percent of the DiaB can be printed in a DiaB."

Suzanne hadn't heard about this one, though she remembered earlier

attempts, back in the golden New Work days, the dream of

self-replicating machines. Now she looked close, leaning in next to

Sammy, so close she could feel his warm breath. There was something,

well, *spooky* about the imps building a machine using another one of

the machines.

"It's, what, it's like it's alive, and reproducing itself," Sammy

said.

"Don't tell me this never occurred to you," Lester said.

"Honestly? No. It never did. Mr Banks, you have a uniquely twisted,

fucked up imagination, and I say that with the warmest admiration."

Guignol leaned in, too, staring at it.

"It's so obvious now that I see it," he said.

"Yeah, all the really great ideas are like that," Lester said.

Sammy straightened up and shook Lester's hand. "Thank you for the

tour, Lester. You have managed to simultaneously impress and depress

me. You are one sharp motherfucker."

Lester preened and Suzanne suppressed a giggle.

Sammy held his hand up like he was being sworn in. "I'm dead serious,

man. This is amazing. I mean, we manage some pretty out-of-the-box

thinking at Disney, right? We may not be as nimble as some little

whacked out co-op, but for who we are -- I think we do a good job.

"But you, man, you blow us out of the water. This stuff is just

*crazy*, like it came down from Mars. Like it's from the future." He

shook his head. "It's humbling, you know."

Guignol looked more thoughtful than he had to this point. He and

Lester stared at Sammy, wearing similar expressions of bemusement.

"Let's go into the apartment," Suzanne said. "We can sit down and have

a chat."

They trooped up the stairs together. Guignol expressed admiration for

the weird junk-sculptures that adorned each landing, made by a local

craftswoman and installed by the landlord. They sat around the living

room and Lester poured iced coffee out of a pitcher in the fridge,

dropping in ice-cubes molded to look like legos.

They rattled their drinks and looked uncomfortably at one

another. Suzanne longed to whip out her computer and take notes, or at

least a pad, or a camera, but she restrained himself. Guignol looked

significantly at Sammy.

"Lester, I'm just going to say it. Would you sell your business to us?

The ride, DiaBolical, all of it? We could make you a very, very rich

man. You and Perry. You would have the freedom to go on doing what

you're doing, but we'd put it in our production chain, mass-market the

hell out of it, get it into places you've never seen. At its peak, New

Work -- which you were only a small part of, remember -- touched 20

percent of Americans. *90 percent* of Americans have been to a Disney

park. We're a bigger tourist draw than *all of Great Britain.* We can

give your ideas legs."

Lester began to chuckle, then laugh, then he was doubled over,

thumping his thighs. Suzanne shook her head. In just a few short

moments, she'd gotten used to the idea, and it was growing on her.

Guignol looked grim. "It's not a firm offer -- it's a chance to open a

dialogue, a negotiation. Talk the possibility over. A good negotiation

is one where we both start by saying what we want and work it over

until we get to the point where we're left with what we both need."

Lester wiped tears from his eyes. "I don't think that you grasp the

absurdity of this situation, fellas. For starters, Perry will never go

for it. I mean *never.*" Suzanne wondered about that. And wondered

whether it mattered. The two had hardly said a word to each other in

months.

"What's more, the rest of the rides will never, never, *never* go in

for it. That's also for sure.

"Finally, what the fuck are you talking about? Me go to work for you?

Us go to work for you? What will you do, stick Mickey in the ride?

He's already in the ride, every now and again, as you well know. You

going to move me up to Orlando?"

Sammy waggled his head from side to side. "I have a deep appreciation

for how weird this is, Lester. To tell you the truth, I haven't

thought much about your ride or this little town. As far as I'm

concerned, we could just buy it and then turn around and sell it back

to the residents for one dollar -- we wouldn't want to own or operate

any of this stuff, the liability is too huge. Likewise the other

rides. We don't care about what you did *yesterday* -- we care about

what you're going to do tomorrow.

"Listen, you're a smart guy. You make stuff that we can't dream of,

that we lack the institutional imagination to dream of. We need

*that*. What the hell is the point of fighting you, suing you, when we

can put you on the payroll? And you know what? Even if we throw an

idiotic sum of money at you, even if you never make anything for us,

we're still ahead of the game if you stop making stuff *against* us.

"I'm putting my cards on the table here. I know your partner is going

to be even harder to convince, too. None of this is going to be

easy. I don't care about easy. I care about what's right. I'm sick of

being in charge of sabotaging people who make awesome stuff. Aren't

you sick of being sabotaged? Wouldn't you like to come work some place

where we'll shovel money and resources at your projects and keep the

wolves at bay?"

Suzanne was impressed. This wasn't the same guy whom Rat-Toothed

Freddy had savaged. It wasn't the same guy that Death Waits had

described. He had come a long way. Even Guignol -- whom, she

suspected, needed to be sold on the idea almost as much as Lester --

was nodding along by the end of it.

Lester wasn't though: "You're wasting your time, mister. That's all

there is to it. I am not going to go and work for --" a giggle escaped

his lips "-- Disney. It's just --"

Sammy held his hands up in partial surrender. "OK, OK. I won't push

you today. Think about it. Talk it over with your buddy. I'm a patient

guy." Guignol snorted. "I don't want to lean on you here."

They took their leave, though Suzanne found out later that they'd

taken a spin around the ride before leaving. Everyone went on the

ride.

Lester shook his head at the door behind them.

"Can you believe that?"

Suzanne smiled and squeezed his hand. "You're funny about this, you

know that? Normally, when you encounter a new idea, you like to play

with it, think it through, see what you can make of it. With this,

you're not even willing to noodle with it."

"You can't seriously think that this is a good idea --"

"I don't know. It's not the dumbest idea I've ever heard. Become a

millionaire, get to do whatever you want? It'll sure make an

interesting story."

He goggled at her.

"Kidding," she said, thinking, *It would indeed make an interesting

story, though.* "But where are you going from here? Are you going to

stay here forever?"

"Perry would never go for it --" Lester said, then stopped.

"You and Perry, Lester, how long do you think that's going to last."

"Don't you go all Yoko on me, Suzanne. We've got one of those around

here already --"

"I don't like this Yoko joke, Lester. I never did. Hilda doesn't want

to drive Perry away from you. She wants to make the rides work. And it

sounds like that's what Perry wants, too. What's wrong with them doing

that? Especially if you can get them a ton of money to support it?"

Lester stared at her, open-mouthed. "Honey --"

"Think about it, Lester. Your most important virtue is your expansive

imagination. Use it."

She watched this sink in. It did sink in. Lester listened to her,

which surprised her every now and again. Most relationships seemed to

be negotiations or possibly competitions. With Lester it was a

conversation.

She gave him a hug that seemed to go on forever.

#

Sammy was glad he was driving. The mood Guignol was in, he'd have

wrecked the car. "That was *not* the plan, Sammy," he said. "The plan

was to get the data, talk it over --"

"The first casualty of any battle is the battle-plan," Sammy said,

threading them through the press of tourist busses and commuter cars.

"I thought the first casualty was the truth."

They'd spent too long at the ride, then gotten stuck in the afternoon

rush hour out of Miami. "That too. Look, I'm proposing to spend a

tenth of the profits from the DiaB on this venture. In any other

circumstance, I would do it with a *purchase order*. The only reason

it's a big deal is --"

"That it carries enough legal liability to destroy the company. Sammy,

didn't you listen to Hackelberg?"

"The reason I still work at Disney is that it's the kind of company

where the lawyers don't *always* set the agenda."

Guignol drummed his hands on the dashboard. Sammy pulled over and

gassed up. At the next pump was a minivan with Kansas plates. Dad was

a dumpy Korean guy, Mom was a dumpy white midwesterner with a

country-and-western denim jacket, and the back seat was filled with

vibrating children, two girls and a boy. The kids were screaming and

fighting, the girls trying to draw on the boy's face with

candy-flavored lipstick and kiddie mascara, the boy squirming mightily

and lashing out at them with his gameboy.

Dad and Mom were having their own heated discussion as Dad gassed up,

Sammy eavesdropped enough to hear that they were fighting over Dad's

choice of taking the toll roads instead of the cheaper, slower

alternative route. The kids were shouting so loud, though --

"You keep that up and we're not going to Disney World!"

It was the magic sentence, the litmus test for Disney's currency. As

it rose and fell, so did the efficacy of the threat. If Sammy could,

he'd take a video of the result every time this was uttered.

The kids looked at Dad and shrugged. "Who cares?" the eldest sister

said, and grabbed the boy again.

Sammy turned to Guignol and waggled his eyebrows. Once he was back in

the car, he said, "You know, it's risky doing anything. But riskiest

of all is doing nothing."

Guignol shook his head and pulled out his computer.

He spent a lot of time looking at the numbers while Sammy fought

traffic. Finally he closed his computer, put his head back and shut

his eyes. Sammy drove on.

"You think this'll work?" Guignol said.

"Which part?

"You think if you buy these guys out --"

"Oh, that part. Sure, yeah, slam dunk. They're cheap. Like I say, we

could make back the whole nut just by settling the lawsuit. The hard

part is going to be convincing them to sell."

"And Hackelberg."

"That's your job, not mine."

Guignol slid the seat back so it was flat as a bed. "Wake me when we

hit Orlando."

#

It took IT three days to get Sammy his computer back. His secretary

managed as best as she could, but he wasn't able to do much without

it.

When he got it back at last, he eagerly downloaded his backlog of

mail. It beggared the imagination. Even after auto-filtering it, there

were hundreds of new messages, things he had to pay real attention

to. When he was dealing with this stuff in little spurts every few

minutes all day long, it didn't seem like much, but it sure piled up.

He enlisted his secretary to help him with sorting and

responding. After an hour she forwarded one back to him with a bold

red flag.

It was from Freddy. He got an instant headache, the feeling halfway

between a migraine and the feeling after you bang your head against

the corner of a table.

:: Sammy, I'm disappointed in you. I thought we were friends. Why do I

have to learn about your bizarre plan to buy out Gibbons and Banks

from strangers. I do hope you'll give me a comment on the story?

He'd left the financials with Guignol, who had been discreetly showing

them around to the rest of the executive committee in closed door,

off-site meetings. One of them must have blabbed, though -- or maybe

it was a leak at Lester's end.

He tasted his lunch and bile as his stomach twisted. It wasn't

fair. He had a real chance of making this happen -- and it would be a

source of genuine good for all concerned.

He got halfway through calling Guignol's number, then put the phone

down. He didn't know who to call. He'd put himself in an unwinnable

position. As he contemplated the article that Freddy would probably

write, he realized that he would almost certainly lose his job over

this, too. Maybe end up on the wrong end of a lawsuit. Man, that

seemed to be his natural state at Disney. Maybe he was in the wrong

job.

He groaned and thumped himself on the forehead. All he wanted to do

was have good ideas and make them happen.

Basically, he wanted to be Lester.

Then he knew who he had to call.

"Ms Church?"

"We're back to that, huh? That's probably not a good sign."

"Suzanne then."

"Sammy, you sound like you're about to pop a testicle. Spit it out."

"Do you think I could get a job with Lester?"

"You're not joking, are you?"

"Freddy found out about the buyout offer."

"Oh."

"Yeah."

"So I'm gonna be in search of employment. All I ever wanted to do was

come up with cool ideas and execute them --"

"Shush now. Freddy found out about this, huh? Not surprising. He's got

a knack for it. It's just about his only virtue."

"Urgh."

"However, it's also his greatest failing. I've given this a lot of

thought, since my last run in with Rat-Toothed Freddy."

"You call him that to his face?"

"Not yet. But I look forward to it. Tell you what, give me an hour to

talk to some people here, and I'll get back to you."

An hour? "An hour?"

"He'll keep you squirming for at least that long. He loves to make

people squirm. It's good journalism -- shakes loose some new

developments."

"An hour?"

"Have you got a choice?"

"An hour, then."

#

Suzanne didn't knock on Lester's door. Lester would fall into place,

once Perry was in.

She found him working the ride, Hilda back in the maintenance bay,

tweaking some of the robots. His arm was out of the cast, but it was

noticeably thinner than his good left arm, weak and pale and flabby.

"Hello, Suzanne." He was formal, like he always was these days, and it

saddened her, but she pressed on.

"Perry, we need to shut down for a while, it's urgent."

"Suzanne, this is a busy time, we just can't shut down --"

She thumped her hand on his lemonade-stand counter. "Cut it out,

Perry. I have never been an alarmist, you know that. I understand

intimately what it means to shut this place down. Look, I know that

things haven't been so good between us, between *any* of us, for a

long time. But I am your dear friend, and you are mine, no matter

what's going on at this second, and I'm telling you that you need to

shut this down and we need to talk. Do it, Perry."

He gave her a long, considering look.

"Please?"

He looked at the little queue of four or five people, pretending not

to eavesdrop, waiting their turn.

"Sorry, folks, you heard the lady. Family emergency. Um, here --" He

rummaged under the counter, came up with scraps of paper. "Mrs

Torrence's tearoom across the street -- they make the best cappuccino

in the hood, and the pastries are all baked fresh. On me, OK?"

"Come on," Suzanne said. "Time's short."

She accompanied him to the maintenance bay and they pulled the doors

shut behind them. Hilda looked up from her robot, wiping her hands on

her shorts. She was really lovely, and the look on her face when she

saw Perry was pure adoration. Suzanne's heart welled up for the two of

them, such a perfect picture of young love.

Then Hilda saw Suzanne, and her expression grew guarded, tense. Perry

took Hilda's hand.

"What's this about, Suzanne?" he said.

"Let me give this to you in one shot, OK?" They nodded. She ran it

down for them. Sammy and Guignol, the postcard and the funny

circumstances of their visit -- the phone call.

"So here's the thing. He wants to buy you guys out. He doesn't want

the ride or the town. He just wants -- I don't know -- the

*creativity*. The PR win. He wants peace. And the real news is, he's

over a barrel. Freddy's forcing his hand. If we can make that problem

go away, we can ask for *anything*."

Hilda's jaw hung slack. "You have to be kidding --"

Perry shushed her. "Suzanne, why are you here? Why aren't you talking

to Lester about this? Why hasn't Lester talked to me about this. I

mean, just what the fuck is going on?"

She winced. "I didn't talk to Lester because I thought he'd be easier

to sell on this than you are. This is a golden opportunity and I

thought that you would be conflicted as hell about it and I thought if

I talked to you first, we could get past that. I don't really have a

dog in this fight, except that I want all parties to end up not hating

each other. That's where you're headed now -- you're melting down in

slow motion. How long since you and Lester had a conversation

together, let alone a real meal? How long since we all sat around and

laughed? Every good thing comes to some kind of end, and then the

really good things come to a beginning again.

"You two *were* the New Work. Lots of people got blisteringly rich off

of New Work, but not you. Here's a chance for you to get what you

deserve for a change. You solve this -- and you *can* solve it, and

not just for you, but for that Death kid, you can get him justice that

the courts will take fifteen years to deliver."

Perry scowled. "I don't care about money --"

"Yes, that's admirable. I have one other thing; I've been saving it

for last, waiting to see if you'd come up with it on your own."

"What?"

"Why is time of the essence?"

"Because Freddy's going to out this dirtball --"

"And how do we solve that?"

Hilda grinned. "Oh, this part I like."

Suzanne laughed. "Yeah."

"What?" Perry said.

"Freddy's good at intelligence gathering, but he's not so good at

distinguishing truth from fiction. In my view, this presents a

fascinating opportunity. Depending on what we leak to him and how, we

can turn him into --"

"A laughing stock?"

"A puddle of deliquesced organ meat."

Perry began to laugh. "You're saying that you think that we should do

this deal for *spite*?"

"Yeah, that's the size of it," Suzanne said.

"I love it," he said.

Hilda laughed too. Suzanne extended her hand to Perry and he shook

it. Then she shook with Hilda.

"Let's go find Lester."

#

By the time the call came, Sammy was ready to explode. He got in a

golf cart and headed to the Animal Kingdom Lodge, which backed onto

the safari park portion of the Animal Kingdom. He snuck himself onto

the roof of the grand hotel, which had a commanding view of the

artificial savanna. He watched a family of giraffes graze, using the

zoom on his phone to resolve the hypnotic patterns of the little

calf. It calmed him. But the sound of his phone ringing startled him

so much he nearly did a half-gainer off the roof. Heart hammering, he

answered it.

"Is this Sammy?"

"Yes," he said.

"Landon Kettlewell," the voice on the other side said. Sammy knew the

name, of course. But he hadn't been expecting a call from him.

"Hello, Mr Kettlewell."

"The boys have asked me to negotiate this deal for them. It makes

sense -- it'll be hard to make this happen without my contributions. I

hope you agree."

"It does make sense," Sammy said noncommittally. This wasn't the best

day of his life. The giraffes were moving off, but a flock of cranes

was wheeling overhead in quiet splendor.

"I'll tell you where we're at. We're going to do a deal with you, a

fair one. But a condition of the deal is that we are going to destroy

Freddy."

"What?"

"We're going to leak him bad intel on the deal. Lots of it. Give him a

whole story. Wait until he publishes it, and then --"

Sammy sat down on the roof. This was going to be a long conversation.

#

Perry ground his teeth and squeezed his beer. The idea of doing this

in a big group had seemed like a good idea. Dirty Max's was certainly

full of camaraderie, the smell of roasting meat and the chatter of

nearly a hundred voices. He heard Hilda laughing at something Lester

said to her, and there were Kettlewell and his kids, fingers and faces

sticky with sauce.

Lester had set up the projector and they'd hung sheets over one of the

murals for a screen, and brought out a bunch of wireless speakers that

they'd scattered around the courtyard. It looked, smelled, sounded,

and tasted like a carnival.

But Perry couldn't meet anyone's eye. He just wanted to go home and

get under the covers. They were about to destroy Freddy, which had

also seemed like a hell of a lark at the time, but now --

"Perry." It was Sammy, up from Orlando, wearing the classic

Mickey-gives-the-finger bootleg tee.

"Can you get fired for that?" Perry pointed.

Sammy shook his head. "Actually, it's official. I had them produced

last year -- they're a big seller. If you can't beat 'em... Here --"

He dug in the backpack he carried and pulled out another. "You look

like a large, right?"

Perry took it from him, held it up. Shrugging, he put down his beer

and skinned his tee, then pulled on the Mickey-flips-the-bird. He

looked down at his chest. "It's a statement."

"Have you and Lester given any thought to where you're going to

relocate, after?"

Perry drew in a deep breath. "I think Lester wants to come to

Orlando. But I'm going to go to Wisconsin. Madison."

"You're what now?"

Perry hadn't said anything about this to anyone except

Hilda. Something about this Disney exec, it made him want to spill the

beans. "I can't go along with this. I'm going to bow out. Do something

new. I've been in this shithole for what feels like my whole life

now."

Sammy looked poleaxed. "Perry, that wasn't the deal --"

"Yeah, I know. But think about this: do you want me there if I hate

it, resent it? Besides, it's a little late in the day to back out."

Sammy reeled. "Christ almighty. Well, at least you're not going to end

up my employee."

Francis -- who had an uncanny knack for figuring out the right moment

to step into a conversation -- sidled over. "Nice shirt, Perry."

"Francis, this is Sammy." Francis had a bottle of water and a plate of

ribs, so he extended a friendly elbow.

"We've met -- showed him the bicycle factory."

Sammy visibly calmed himself. "That's right, you did. Amazing, just

amazing."

"All this is on Sammy," Perry said, pointing at the huge barbecue

smoker, the crowds of sticky-fingered gorgers. "He's the Disney guy."

"Hence the shirts, huh?"

"Exactly."

"So what's the rumpus, exactly?" Francis asked. "It's all been

hush-hush around here for a solid week."

"I think we're about to find out," Perry said, nodding at the gigantic

screen, which rippled in the sultry Florida night-breeze, obscured by

blowing clouds of fragrant smoke. It was lit up now, showing CNNfn,

two pan-racial anchors talking silently into the night.

The speakers popped to life and gradually the crowd noises

dimmed. People moved toward the screen, all except Francis and Perry

and Sammy, who hung back, silently watching the screen.

"-- guest on the show is Freddy Niedbalski, a technology reporter for

the notorious British technology publication *Tech Stink*. Freddy has

agreed to come on *Countdown* to break a story that will go live on

*Tech Stink*'s website in about ten minutes." The camera zoomed out to

show Freddy, sitting beside the anchor desk in an armchair. His paunch

was more pronounced than it had been when Perry had seen him in

Madison, and there was something wrong with his makeup, a color

mismatch that made him look like he'd slathered himself with

Man-Tan. Still, he was grinning evilly and looking like he could

barely contain himself.

"Thank you, Tania-Luz, it's a pleasure."

"Now, take us through the story. You've been covering it for a long

time, haven't you?"

"Oh yes. This is about the so-called 'New Work' cult, and its

aftermath. I've broken a series of scandals involving these characters

over the years -- weird sex, funny money, sweatshop labor. These are

the people who spent all that money in the New Work bubble, and then

went on to found an honest-to-God slum that they characterized as a

'living laboratory.'" -- out came the sarcastic finger-quotes -- "but,

as near as anyone can work out was more of a human subject experiment

gone mad. They pulled off these bizarre stunts with the help of some

of the largest investment funds on the planet."

Perry looked around at the revellers. They were chortling, pointing at

each other, mugging for the camera. Freddy's words made Perry

uncomfortable -- maybe there was something to what he said. But there

was Francis, unofficial mayor of the shantytown, smiling along with

the rest. They hadn't been perfect, but they'd left the world a better

place than they'd found it.

"There are many personalities in this story, but tonight's installment

has two main players: a venture capitalist named Landon Kettlewell and

a Disney Parks senior vice president called Sammy Page. Technically,

these two hate each others' guts --" Sammy and Kettlewell toasted each

other through the barbecue smoke. "But they've been chumming up to one

another lately as they brokered an improbable deal to shaft everyone

else in the sordid mess."

"A deal that you've got details on for us tonight?"

"Exactly. My sources have turned up reliable memos and other

intelligence indicating that the investors behind the shantytown are

about to *take over Disney Parks*. It all stems from a lawsuit that

was brought on behalf of a syndicate of operators of bizarre,

trademark infringing rides that were raided off the backs of

complaints from Disney Parks. These raids, and a subsequent and very

suspicious beating of an ex-Disney Park employee, led to the creation

of an investment syndicate to fund a monster lawsuit against Disney

Parks, one that could take the company down.

"The investment syndicate found an unlikely ally in the person of

Sammy Page, the senior VP from Disney Parks, who worked with them to

push through a plan where they would settle the lawsuit in exchange

for a controlling interest in Disney Parks."

The anchors looked suitably impressed. Around the screen, the partiers

had gone quiet, even the kids, mesmerized by Freddy's giant head, eyes

rolling with irony and mean humor.

"And that's just for starters. The deal required securing the

cooperation of the beaten-up ex-Disney employee, who goes by the name

of 'Death Waits' -- no, really! -- and *he* required that he be made a

vice president of the new company as well, running the 'Fantasyland'

section of the Florida park. In the new structure, the two founders of

the New Work scam, Perry Gibbons and Lester Banks are to oversee the

Disneyfication of the activist rides around the country, selling out

their comrades, who signed over control of their volunteer-built

enterprises as part of the earlier lawsuit."

The male anchor shook his head. "If this is true, it's the strangest

turn in American corporate history."

"Oh yes," Freddy said. "These people are like some kind of poison, a

disease that affects the judgement of all those around them --"

"If it's true," the male anchor continued, as if Freddy hadn't

spoken. "But is it? Our next guest denies all of this, and claims that

Mr Niedbalski has his facts all wrong. Tjan Lee Tang is the chairman

of Massachusetts Ride Theorists, a nonprofit that operates three of

the spin-off rides in New England. He is in our Boston

studios. Welcome, Mr Tang."

Freddy's expression was priceless: a mixture of raw terror and

contempt. He tried to cover it, but only succeeded in looking

constipated. On the other half of the split-screen, Tjan beamed

sunnily at them.

"Hi there!" he said. "Greetings from the blustery Northeast."

"Mr Tang, you've heard what our guest has to say about the latest

developments in the extraordinary story of the rides you helped

create. Do you have any comment?"

"I certainly do. Freddy, old buddy, you've been had. Whomever your

leak was in Disney, he was putting you on. There is not one single

word of truth to anything you had to say." He grinned wickedly. "So

what else is new?"

Freddy opened his mouth and Tjan held up one hand. "No, wait, let me

finish. I know it's your schtick to come after us this way, you've

been at it for years. I think it's because you have an unrequited

crush on Suzanne Church.

"Here's what's really happening. Lester Banks and Perry Gibbons have

taken jobs with Disney Parks as part of a straightforward

deal. They're going to do research and development there, and Disney

is settling its ongoing lawsuit with us with a seventy million dollar

cash settlement. Half goes to the investors. Some of the remainder

will go to buy the underlying titles to the shantytown and put them in

a trust to be managed by a co-operative of residents. The rest is

going into another trust that will be disbursed in grants to people

operating rides around the country. There's a non-monetary part of the

deal, too: all rides get a perpetual, worldwide license on all Disney

trademarks for use in the rides."

The announcers smiled and nodded.

"We think this is a pretty good win. The rides go on. The shantytown

goes on. Lester and Perry get to do great work in a heavily resourced

lab environment."

Tania-Luz turned to Freddy. "It seems that your story is in

dispute. Do you have further comment?"

Freddy squirmed. A streak of sweat cut through his pancake makeup as

the camera came in for a closeup. "Well, if this is true, I'd want to

know why Disney would make such a generous offer --"

"Generous?" Tjan said. He snorted. "We were asking for *eight billion*

in punitive damages. They got off easy!"

Freddy acted like he hadn't heard. "Unless the terms of this so-called

deal are published and subject to scrutiny --"

"We posted them about five minutes ago. You could have just asked us,

you know."

Freddy's eyes bugged out. "We have no way of knowing whether what this

man is saying is true --"

"Actually, you do. Like I say, it's all online. The deals are

signed. Securities filings and everything."

Freddy got up out of his seat. "*Would you shut up and let me

finish?*" he screamed.

"Sorry, sorry," Tjan said with a chuckle. He was enjoying this way too

much. "Go on."

"And what about Death Waits? He's been a pawn all along in this game

you've played with other people's lives. What happens to him as you

all get rich?"

Tjan shrugged. "He got a large cash settlement too. He seemed pretty

happy about it --"

Freddy was shaking. "You can't just sell off your lawsuit --"

"We were looking to get compensated for bad acts. We got compensated

for them, and we did it without tying up the public courts. Everybody

wins." He cocked his head. "Except you, of course."

"This was a fucking ambush," Freddy said, pointing his fingers at the

two coiffed and groomed anchors, who shied away dramatically, making

him look even crazier. He stormed off the stage, cursing, every word

transmitted by his still-running wireless mic. He shouted at an

invisible security guard to get out of his way. Then they heard him

make a phone-call, presumably to his editor, shouting at him to kill

the article, nearly weeping in frustration. The anchors and Tjan

pasted on unconvincing poker-faces, but around the BBQ pit, it was all

howls of laughter, which turned to shrieks when Freddy finally figured

out that he was still on a live mic.

Perry and Sammy locked eyes and grinned. Perry ticked a little salute

off his forehead at Sammy and hefted his tee. Then he turned on his

heel and walked off into the night, the fragrant smell of the barbecue

smoke and the sound of the party behind him.

He parked his car at home and trudged up the stairs. Hilda had packed

her suitcase that morning. He had a lot more than a suitcase's worth

of stuff around the apartment, but as he threw a few t-shirts --

including his new fake bootleg Mickey tee -- and some underwear in a

bag, he suddenly realized that he didn't care about any of it.

Then he happened upon the baseball glove. The cloud of old leather

smell it emitted when he picked it up made tears spring into his

eyes. He hadn't cried through any of this process, though, and he

wasn't about to start now. He wiped his eyes with his forearm and

reverently set the glove into his bag and shut it. He carried both

bags downstairs and put them in the trunk, then he drove to just a

little ways north of the ride and called Hilda to let her know he was

ready to go.

She didn't say a word when she got in the car, and neither did he, all

the way to Miami airport. He took his frisking and secondary screening

in stoic silence, and once they were seated on the Chicago flight, he

put his head down on Hilda's shoulder and she stroked his hair until

he fell asleep.

#

Epilogue

Lester was in his workshop when Perry came to see him. He had the yoga

mat out and he was going through the slow exercises that his

physiotherapist had assigned to him, stretching his crumbling bones

and shrinking muscles, trying to keep it all together. He'd fired

three physios, but Suzanne kept finding him new ones, and (because she

loved him) prettier ones.

He was down on all fours, his ass stuck way up in the air, when Perry

came through the door. He looked back through his ankles and squinted

at the upside-down world. Perry's expression was carefully neutral,

the same upside-down as it would be right-side-up. He grunted and went

down to his knees, which crackled like popcorn.

"That doesn't sound good," Perry remarked mildly.

"Funny man," Lester said. "Get over here and help me up, will you?"

Perry went down in a crouch before him. There was something funny

about his eye, the whole side of his head. He smelled a little sweaty

and a little gamy, but the face was the one Lester knew so well. Perry

held out his strong, leathery hands, and after a moment, Lester

grasped them and let Perry drag him to his feet.

They stood facing one another for an uncomfortable moment, hands

clasped together. Then Perry flung his arms wide and shouted, "Here I

am!"

Lester laughed and embraced his old friend, not seen or heard from

these last 15 years.

#

Lester's workshop had a sofa where he entertained visitors and took

his afternoon nap. Normally, he'd use his cane to cross from his

workbench to the sofa, but seeing Perry threw him for such a loop that

he completely forgot until he was a pace or two away from it and then

he found himself flailing for support as his hips started to give

way. Perry caught him under the shoulders and propped him up. Lester

felt a rush of shame color his cheeks.

"Steady there, cowboy," Perry said.

"Sorry, sorry," Lester muttered.

Perry lowered him to the sofa, then looked around. "You got anything

to drink? Water? I didn't really expect the bus would take as long as

it did."

"You're taking the bus around Burbank?" Lester said. "Christ, Perry,

this is Los Angeles. Even homeless people drive cars."

Perry looked away and shook his head. "The bus is cheaper." Lester

pursed his lips. "You got anything to drink?"

"In the fridge," Lester said, pointing to a set of nested clay pot

evaporative coolers. Perry grinned at the jury-rigged cooler and

rummaged around in its mouth for a while. "Anything, you know, buzzy?

Guarana? Caffeine, even?"

Lester gave an apologetic shrug. "Not me, not anymore. Nothing goes

into my body without oversight by a team of very expensive

nutritionists."

"You don't look so bad," Perry said. "Maybe a little skinny --"

Lester cut him off. "Not bad like the people you see on TV, huh? Not

bad like the dying ones." The fatkins had overwhelmed the nation's

hospitals in successive waves of sickened disintegrating skeletons

whose brittle bones and ruined joints had outstripped anyone's ability

to cope with them. The only thing that kept the crisis from boiling

over entirely was the fast mortality that followed on the first

symptoms -- difficulty digesting, persistent stiffness. Once you

couldn't keep down high-calorie slurry, you just starved to death.

"Not like them," Perry agreed. He had a bit of limp, Lester saw, and

his old broken arm hung slightly stiff at his side.

"I'm doing OK," Lester said. "You wouldn't believe the medical bills,

of course."

"Don't let Freddy know you've got the sickness," Perry said. "He'd

love that story -- 'fatkins pioneer pays the price --'"

"Freddy! Man, I haven't thought of that shitheel in -- Christ, a

decade, at least. Is he still alive?"

Perry shrugged. "Might be. I'd think that if he'd keeled over someone

would have asked me to pitch in to charter a bus to go piss on his

grave."

Lester laughed hard, so hard he hurt his chest and had to sag back

into the sofa, doing deep yoga breathing until his ribs felt better.

Perry sat down opposite him on the sofa with a bottle of Lester's

special thrice-distilled flat water in a torpedo-shaped

bottle. "Suzanne?" he asked.

"Good," Lester said. "Spends about half her time here and half on the

road. Writing, still."

"What's she on to now?"

"Cooking, if you can believe it. Molecular gastronomy -- food hackers

who use centrifuges to clarify their consomme. She says she's never

eaten better. Last week it was some kid who'd written a genetic

algorithm to evolve custom printable molecules that can bridge two

unharmonius flavors to make them taste good together -- like, what do

you need to add to chocolate and sardines to make them freakin'

delicious?"

"Is there such a molecule?"

"Suzanne says there is. She said that they misted it into her face

with a vaporizer while she ate a sardine on a slab of dark chocolate

and it tasted better than anything she'd ever had before."

"OK, that's just wrong," Perry said. The two of them were grinning at

each other like fools.

Lester couldn't believe how good it felt to be in the same room as

Perry again after all these years. His old friend was much older than

the last time they'd seen each other. There was a lot of grey in his

short hair, and his hairline was a lot higher up his forehead. His

knuckles were swollen and wrinkled, and his face had deep lines,

making him look carved. He had the leathery skin of a roadside

homeless person, and there were little scars all over his arms and a

few on his throat.

"How's Hilda?" Lester asked.

Perry looked away. "That's a name I haven't heard in a while," he

said.

"Yowch. Sorry."

"No, that's OK. I get email blasts from her every now and again. She's

chipper and scrappy as always. Fighting the good fight. Fatkins stuff

again -- same as when I met her. Funny how that fight never gets old."

"Hardy har har," Lester said.

"OK, we're even," Perry said. "One-one on the faux-pas master's

tournament."

They chatted about inconsequentialities for a while, stories about

Lester's life as the closeted genius at Disney Labs, Perry's life on

the road, getting itinerant and seasonal work at little

micro-factories.

"Don't they recognize you?"

"Me? Naw, it's been a long time since I got recognized. I'm just the

guy, you know, he's handy, keeps to himself. Probably going to be

moving on soon. Good with money, always has a quiet suggestion for

tweaking an idea to make it return a little higher on the investment."

"That's you, all right. All except the 'keeps to himself' part."

"A little older, a little wiser. Better to keep your mouth shut and be

thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."

"Thank you, Mister Twain. You and Huck been on the river a while

then?"

"No Huck," he said. His smile got sad, heartbreakingly sad. This

wasn't the Perry Lester knew. Lester wasn't the same person,

either. They were both broken. Perry was alone, though -- gregarious

Perry, always making friends. Alone.

"So, how long are you staying?"

"I'm just passing through, buddy. I woke up in Burbank this morning

and I thought, 'Shit, Lester's in Burbank, I should say hello.' But I

got places to go."

"Come on, man, stay a while. We've got a guest-cottage out back, a

little mother-in-law apartment. There are fruit trees, too."

"Living the dream, huh?" He sounded unexpectedly bitter.

Lester was embarrassed for his wealth. Disney had thrown so much stock

at him in the beginning and Suzanne had sold most of it and wisely

invested it in a bunch of micro-funds; add to that the money she was

raking in from the affiliate sites her Junior Woodchucks --

kid-reporters she'd trained and set up in business -- ran, and they

never had to worry about a thing.

"Well, apart from dying. And working here." As soon as the words were

out of his mouth, he wished he could take them back. He never let on

that he wasn't happy at the Mouse, and the dying thing -- well,

Suzanne and he liked to pretend that medical science would cure what

it had brought.

Perry, though, he just nodded as if his suspicions were

confirmed. "Must be hard on Suzanne."

Now that was hitting the nail on the head. "You always were a

perceptive son of a bitch."

"She never said fatkins was good for you. She just reported the

story. The people who blame her --"

This was the elephant in the room whenever Lester and Suzanne talked

about his health. Between the two of them, they'd popularized fatkins,

sent millions winging to Russia for the clinics, fuelled the creation

of the clinics in the US and Mexico.

But they never spoke of it. Never. Now Perry was talking about it,

still talking:

"-- the FDA, the doctors. That's what we pay them for. The way I see

it, you're a victim, their victim."

Lester couldn't say anything. Words stoppered themselves up in his

mouth like a cork. Finally, he managed to choke out, "Change the

subject, OK?"

Perry looked down. "Sorry. I'm out of practice with people."

"I hope you'll stay with us," he said, thinking *I hope you leave soon

and never come back*.

"You miss it, huh?"

"Sometimes."

"You said working here --"

"Working here. They said that they wanted me to come in and help them

turn the place around, help them reinvent themselves. Be nimble. Shake

things up. But it's like wrestling a tar-baby. You push, you get

stuck. You argue for something better and they tell you to write a

report, then no one reads the report. You try to get an experimental

service running and no one will reconfigure the firewall. Turn the

place around?" He snorted. "It's like turning around a battleship by

tapping it on the nose with a toothpick."

"I hate working with assholes."

"They're not assholes, that's the thing, Perry. They're some really

smart people. They're nice. We have them over for dinner. They're fun

to eat lunch with. The thing is, *every single one of them feels the

same way I do*. They *all* have cool shit they want to do, but they

can't do it."

"Why?"

"It's like an emergent property. Once you get a lot of people under

one roof, the emergent property seems to be crap. No matter how great

the people are, no matter how wonderful their individual ideas are,

the net effect is shit."

"Reminds me of reliability calculation. Like if you take two

components that are 90 percent reliable and use them in a design, the

outcome is 90 percent of 90 percent -- 81 percent. Keep adding 90

percent reliable components and you'll have something that explodes

before you get it out of the factory.

"Maybe people are like that. If you're 90 percent non-bogus and ten

percent bogus, and you work with someone else who's 90 percent

non-bogus, you end up with a team that's 81 percent non-bogus."

"I like that model. It makes intuitive sense. But fuck me, it's

depressing. It says that all we do is magnify each others' flaws."

"Well, maybe that's the case. Maybe flaws are multiplicative."

"So what are virtues?"

"Additive, maybe. A shallower curve."

"That'd be an interesting research project, if you could come up with

some quantitative measurements."

"So what do you do around here all day?"

Lester blushed.

"What?"

"I'm building bigger mechanical computers, mostly. I print them out

using the new volumetrics and have research assistants assemble

them. There's something soothing about them. I have an Apple ][+ clone

running entirely on physical gates made out of extruded plastic

skulls. It takes up an entire building out on one of the lots and when

you play Pong on it, the sound of the jaws clacking is like listening

to corpse beetles skeletonizing an elephant."

"I think I'd like to see that," Perry said, laughing a little.

"That can be arranged," Lester said.

They were like gears that had once emerged from a mill with perfectly

precise teeth, gears that could mesh and spin against each other,

transferring energy.

They were like gears that had been ill-used in machines, apart from

each other, until their precise teeth had been chipped and bent, so

that they no longer meshed.

They were like gears, connected to one another and mismatched,

clunking and skipping, but running still, running still.

#

Perry and Lester rode in the back of the company car, the driver an

old Armenian who'd fled Azerbaijan, whom Lester introduced as

Kapriel. It seemed that Lester and Kapriel were old friends, which

made sense, since Lester couldn't drive himself, and in Los Angeles,

you didn't go anywhere except by car. The relationship between a man

and his driver would be necessarily intimate.

Perry couldn't bring himself to feel envious of Lester having a

chauffeured car, though it was clear that Lester was embarrassed by

the luxury. It was too much like an invalid's subsidy to feel

excessive.

"Kap," Lester said, stirring in the nest of paper and parts and empty

health-food packages that he'd made of the back-seat.

Kapriel looked over his shoulder at them. "Home now?" He barely had an

accent, but when he turned his head, Perry saw that one ear had been

badly mangled, leaving behind a misshapen fist of scar.

"No," Lester said. "Let's eat out tonight. How about Musso and Frank?"

"Ms Suzanne says --"

"We don't need to tell her," Lester said.

Perry spoke in a low voice, "Lester, I don't need anything

special. Don't make yourself sick --"

"Perry, buddy, shut the fuck up, OK? I can have a steak and a beer and

a big-ass dessert every now and again. Purified medicated fatkins-chow

gets old. My colon isn't going to fall out of my asshole in terror if

I send a cheeseburger down there."

They parked behind Musso and Frank and let the valet park the town

car. Kapriel went over to the Walk of Fame to take pictures of the

robotic movie stars doing acrobatic busking acts, and they went into

the dark cave of the restaurant, all dark wood, dark carpets, pictures

of movie stars on the walls. The maitre d' gave them a look, tilted

his head, looked again. Calmly, Lester produced a hundred-dollar bill

and slid it across the podium.

"We'd like Orson Welles's table, please," he said.

The maitre d' -- an elderly, elegant Mexican with a precise spade

beard -- nodded affably. "Give me five minutes, gentlemen. Would you

care to have a drink in the bar?"

They sat at the long counter and Perry ordered a Scotch and

soda. Lester ordered water, then switched his order to beer, then

non-alcoholic beer, then beer again. "Sorry," he said to the

waitress. "Just having an indecisive kind of night, I guess."

Perry tried to figure out if Lester had been showing off with the

c-note, and decided that he hadn't been. He'd just gone native in LA,

and a hundred for the maitre d' when you're in a hurry can't be much

for a senior exec.

Lester sipped gingerly at his beer. "I like this place," he said,

waving the bottle at the celebrity caricatures lining the walls. "It's

perfect Hollyweird kitsch. Celebrities who usually eat out in some

ultra-modern place come here. They come because they've always come --

to sit in Orson Welles's booth."

"How's the food?"

"Depends on what you order. The good stuff is great. You down for

steaks?"

"I'm down for whatever," Perry said. Lester was in his medium here,

letting the waiter unfold his napkin and lay it over his lap without

taking any special notice of the old man.

The food was delicious, and they even got to glimpse a celebrity,

though neither Perry nor Lester knew who the young woman was, nor what

she was famous for. She was surrounded by children who came over from

other tables seeking autographs, and more than one patron snapped a

semi-subtle photo of her.

"Poor girl," Perry said with feeling.

"It's a career decision here. You decide to become famous because you

want that kind of life. Sometimes you even kid yourself that it'll

last forever -- that in thirty years, they'll come into Musso and

Frank and ask for Miss Whatshername's table. Anyone who wants to know

what stardom looks like can find out -- and no one becomes a star by

accident."

"You think?" Perry said. "I mean, we were celebs, kind of, for a while

there --"

"Are you saying that that happened by accident?"

"I never set out to get famous --"

"You took part in a national movement, Perry. You practically

*founded* it. What did you think was going to happen --"

"You're saying that we were just attention whores --"

"No, Perry, no. We weren't *just* attention whores. We were attention

whores *and* we built and ran cool shit. There's nothing wrong with

being an attention whore. It's an attention economy. If you're going

to be a working stiff, you should pick a decent currency to get paid

in. But you can't sit there and tell me that it didn't feel good,

didn't feel *great* to have all those people looking up to us,

following us into battle, throwing themselves at us --"

Perry held up his hands. His friend was looking more alive than he had

at any time since Perry had been ushered into his workshop. He sat up

straight, and the old glint of mischief and good humor was in his eye.

"I surrender, buddy, you're right." They ordered desserts, heavy

"diplomat puddings" -- bread pudding made with cake and cherries, and

Lester dug in, after making Perry swear not to breathe a word of it to

Suzanne. He ate with such visible pleasure that Perry felt like a

voyeur.

"How long did you say you were in town for?"

"I'm just passing through," Perry said. He had only planned on maybe

seeing Lester long enough for lunch or something. Now it seemed a

foregone conclusion that he'd be put up in the "guest cottage." He

thought about getting back on the road. There was a little gang in

Oregon that made novelty school supplies, they were always ramping up

for their busy season at this time of year. They were good people to

work for.

"Come on, where you got to be? Stay a week. I'll put you on the

payroll as a consultant. You can give lunch-hour talks to the R&D

team, whatever you want."

"Lester, you just got through telling me how much you hate your job

--"

"That's the beauty of contracting -- you don't stick around long

enough to hate it, and you never have to worry about the org

chart. Come on, pal --"

"I'll think about it."

Lester fell asleep on the car ride home, and Kapriel didn't mind if

Perry didn't want to chat, so he just rolled his windows down and

watched the LA lights scream past as they hit the premium lanes on the

crosstown freeways, heading to Lester's place in Topanga Canyon. When

they arrived, Lester roused himself heavily, clutched his stomach,

then raced for the house. Kapriel shook his head and rolled his eyes,

then showed Perry to the front door and shook his hand.

#

In the morning, he prowled Lester and Suzanne's place like a

burglar. The guesthouse had once served as Lester's workshop and it

had the telltale leavings of a busy inventor -- drawers and tubs of

parts, a moldy coffee-cup in a desk-drawer, pens and toys and unread

postal spam in piles. What it didn't have was a kitchen, so Perry

helped himself to the key that Lester had left him with the night

before and wandered around the big house, looking for the kitchen.

It turned out to be on the second floor, a bit of weird architectural

design that was characteristic of the place, which had started as a

shack in the hills on several acres of land and then grown and grown

as successive generations of owners had added extensions, seismic

retrofitting, and new floors.

Perry found the pantries filled with high-tech MREs, each

nutritionally balanced and fortified in ways calculated to make Lester

as healthy as possible. Finally, he found a small cupboard clearly

devoted to Suzanne's eating, with boxes of breakfast cereal and, way

in the back, a little bag of Oreos. He munched thoughtfully on the

cookies while drinking more of the flat, thrice-distilled water.

He heard Lester totter into a bathroom on the floor above, and called

"Good morning," up a narrow, winding staircase.

Lester groaned back at him, a sound that Perry hadn't heard in years,

that theatrical oh-my-shit-it's-another-day sound.

He clomped down the stairs with his cane, wearing a pair of

boxer-shorts and rubber slippers. He was gaunt, the hair on his sunken

chest gone wiry grey, and the skin around his torso sagged. From the

neck down, he looked a hundred years old. Perry looked away.

"Morning, bro," Lester said, and took a vacuum-sealed pouch out of a

medical white box over the sink, tore it open, added purified water,

and put it in the microwave. The smell was like wet cardboard in a

dumpster. Perry wrinkled his nose.

"Tastes better than it smells. Or looks," Lester said. "Very easy on

the digestion. Which I need. Never let me pig out like that again,

OK?"

He collapsed heavily into a stool and closed his sunken eyes. Without

opening them, he said, "So, are you in?"

"Am I in?"

"You going to come on board as my consultant?"

"You were serious about that, huh?"

"Perry, they can't fire me. If I quit, I lose my health bennies, which

means I'll be broke in a month. Which puts us at an impasse. I'm past

feeling guilty about doing nothing much all day long, but that doesn't

mean I'm not bored."

"You make it sound so attractive."

"You got something better to do?"

"I'm in."

#

Suzanne came home a week later and found them sitting up in the living

room. They'd pushed all the furniture up against the walls and covered

the floor with board-game boards, laid edge-to-edge or

overlapping. They had tokens, cards and money from several of the

games laid out around the rims of the games.

"What the blistering fuck?" she said good naturedly. Lester had told

her that Perry was around, so she'd been prepared for something odd,

but this was pretty amazing, even so. Lester held up a hand for

silence and rolled two dice. They skittered across the floor, one of

them slipping through the heating-grating.

"Three points," Perry said. "One for not going into the grating, two

for going into the grating."

"I thought we said it was two points for not going into the grating,

and one for dropping it?"

"Let's call it 1.5 points for each."

"Gentlemen," Suzanne said, "I believe I asked a question? To wit,

'What the blistering fuck --'"

"Calvinball," Lester said. "Like in the old Calvin and Hobbes

strips. The rules are, the rules can never be the same twice."

"And you're supposed to wear a mask," Perry said. "But we kept

stepping on the pieces."

"No peripheral vision," Lester said.

"Caucus race!" Perry yelled, and took a lap around the world. Lester

struggled to his feet, then flopped back down.

"I disbelieve," he said, taking up two ten-sided dice and rolling

them. "87," he said.

"Fine," Perry said. He picked up a Battleship board and said, "B7,"

and then he said, "What's the score, anyway?"

"Orange to seven," Lester said.

"Who's orange?"

"You are."

"Shit. OK, let's take a break."

Suzanne tried to hold in her laughter, but she couldn't. She ended up

doubled over, tears streaming down her face. When she straightened up,

Lester hobbled to her and gave her a surprisingly strong welcome-home

hug. He smelled like Lester, like the man she'd shared her bed with

all these years.

Perry held out his hand to her and she yanked him into a long, hard

hug.

"It's good to have you back, Perry," she said, once she'd kissed both

his cheeks.

"It's fantastic to see you, Suzanne," he said. He was thinner than she

remembered, with snow on the roof, but he was still handsome as a

pirate.

"We missed you. Tell me everything you've been up to."

"It's not interesting," he said. "Really."

"I find that difficult to believe."

So he told them stories from the road, and they were interesting in a

kind of microcosm sort of way. Stories about interesting characters

he'd met, improbable meals he'd eaten, bad working conditions,

memorable rides hitched.

"So that's it?" Suzanne said. "That's what you've done?"

"It's what I do," he said.

"And you're happy?"

"I'm not sad," he said.

She shook her head involuntarily. Perry stiffened.

"What's wrong with not sad?"

"There's nothing wrong with it, Perry. I'm --" she faltered, searched

for the words. "Remember when I first met you, met both of you, in

that ghost mall? You weren't just happy, you were hysterical. Remember

the Boogie-Woogie Elmos? The car they drove?"

Perry looked away. "Yeah," he said softly. There was a hitch in his

voice.

"All I'm saying is, it doesn't have to be this way. You could --"

"Could what?" he said. He sounded angry, but she thought that he was

just upset. "I could go work for Disney, sit in a workshop all day

making crap no one cares about? Be the wage-slave for the end of my

days, a caged monkey for some corporate sultan's zoo?" The phrase was

Lester's, and Suzanne knew then that Perry and Lester had been talking

about it.

Lester, leaning heavily against her on the sofa (they'd pushed it back

into the room, moving aside pieces of the Calvinball game), made a

warning sound and gave her knee a squeeze. Aha, definitely territory

they'd covered before then.

"You two have some of the finest entrepreneurial instincts I've ever

encountered," she said. Perry snorted.

"What's more, I've never seen you happier than you were back when I

first met you, making stuff for the sheer joy of it and selling it to

collectors. Do you know how many collectors would pony up for an

original Gibbons/Banks today? You two could just do that forever --"

"Lester's medical --"

"Lester's medical nothing. You two get together on this, you could

make so much money, we could buy Lester his own hospital." *Besides,

Lester won't last long no matter what happens*. She didn't say it, but

there it was. She'd come to grips with the reality years ago, when his

symptoms first appeared -- when *all* the fatkins' symptoms began to

appear. Now she could think of it without getting that hitch in her

chest that she'd gotten at first. Now she could go away for a week to

work on a story without weeping every night, then drying her eyes and

calling Lester to make sure he was still alive.

"I'm not saying you need to do this to the exclusion of everything

else, or forever --" *there is no forever for Lester* "-- but you two

would have to be insane not to try it. Look at this board-game thing

you've done --"

"Calvinball," Perry said.

"Calvinball. Right. You were made for this. You two make each other

better. Perry, let's be honest here. You don't have anything better to

do."

She held her breath. It had been years since she'd spoken to Perry,

years since she'd had the right to say things like that to him. Once

upon a time, she wouldn't have thought twice, but now --

"Let me sleep on it," Perry said.

Which meant no, of course. Perry didn't sleep on things. He decided to

do things. Sometimes he decided wrong, but he'd never had trouble

deciding.

That night, Lester rubbed her back, the way he always did when she

came back from the road, using the hand-cream she kept on her

end-table. His hands had once been so *strong*, mechanic's hands,

stubby-fingered pistons he could drive tirelessly into the knots in

her back. Now they smoothed and petted, a rub, not a massage. Every

time she came home, it was gentler, somehow more loving. But she

missed her massages. Sometimes she thought she should tell him not to

bother anymore, but she was afraid of what it would mean to end this

ritual -- and how many more rituals would end in its wake.

It was the briefest backrub yet and then he slid under the covers with

her. She held him for a long time, spooning him from behind, her face

in the nape of his neck, kissing his collar bone the way he liked, and

he moaned softly.

"I love you, Suzanne," he said.

"What brought that on?"

"It's just good to have you home," he said.

"You seem to have been taking pretty good care of yourself while I was

away, getting in some Perry time."

"I took him to Musso and Frank," he said. "I ate like a pig."

"And you paid the price, didn't you?"

"Yeah. For days."

"Serves you right. That Perry is *such* a bad influence on my boy."

"I'll miss him."

"You think he'll go, then?"

"You know he will."

"Oh, honey."

"Some wounds don't heal," he said. "I guess."

"I'm sure it's not that," Suzanne said. "He loves you. I bet this is

the best week he's had in years."

"So why wouldn't he want to stay?" Lester's voice came out in the

petulant near-sob she had only ever heard when he was in extreme

physical pain. It was a voice she heard more and more often lately.

"Maybe he's just afraid of himself. He's been on the run for a long

time. You have to ask yourself, what's he running from? It seems to me

that he's spent his whole life trying to avoid having to look himself

in the eye."

Lester sighed and she squeezed him tight. "How'd we get so screwed

up?"

"Oh, baby," she said, "we're not screwed up. We're just people who

want to do things, big things. Any time you want to make a difference,

you face the possibility that you'll, you know, make a

difference. It's a consequence of doing things with consequences."

"Gak," he said. "You always get so Zen-koan when you're on the road."

"Gives me time to reflect. Were you reading?"

"Was I reading? Suzanne, I read your posts whenever I feel

lonely. It's kind of like having you home with me."

"You're sweet."

"Did you really eat sardines on sorbet toast?"

"Don't knock it. It's better than it sounds. Lots better."

"You can keep it."

"Listen to Mr Musso and Frank -- boy, you've got no business

criticizing anyone else's food choices."

He heaved a happy sigh. "I love you, Suzanne Church."

"You're a good man, Lester Banks."

#

Perry met them at the breakfast table the next morning as Suzanne was

fiddling with the espresso machine, steaming soy milk for her

latte. He wore a pair of Lester's sloppy drawstring pants and a

t-shirt for a motorcycle shop in Kansas City that was spotted with old

motor-oil stains.

"Bom dia," he said, and chucked Lester on the shoulder. He was

carrying himself with a certain stiffness, and Suzanne thought, *Here

it comes; he's going to say goodbye. Perry Gibbons, you bastard.*

"Morning," Lester said, brittle and chipper.

Perry dug around on Suzanne's non-medicated food-shelf for a while and

came up with a bagel for the toaster and a jar of peanut butter. No

one said anything while he dug around for the big bread knife, found

the cutting board, toasted the bagel, spread peanut butter, and took a

bite. Suzanne and Lester just continued to eat, in uncomfortable

silence. *Tell him,* Suzanne urged silently. *Get it over with, damn

you.*

"I'm in," Perry said, around a mouthful of bagel, looking away.

Suzanne saw that he had purple bags under his eyes, like he hadn't

slept a wink all night.

"I'm staying. If you'll have me. Let's make some stuff."

He put the bagel down and swallowed. He looked back at Lester and the

two old comrades locked eyes for a long moment.

Lester smiled. "All right!" He danced a shuffling step, mindful of his

sore hips. "All right, buddy, *fuckin' A*! Yeah!"

Suzanne tried to fade then, to back out of the room and let them do

their thing, but Lester caught her arm and drew her into an embrace,

tugging on her arm with a strength she'd forgotten he had.

He gave her a hard kiss. "I love you, Suzanne Church," he

said. "You're my savior."

Perry made a happy sound behind her.

"I love you, too, Lester," she said, squeezing his skinny, brittle

back.

Lester let go of her and she turned to face Perry. Tears pricked his

eyes, and she found that she was crying too. She gave him a hug, and

felt the ways that his body had changed since she'd held him back in

Florida, back in some forgotten time. He was thicker, but still solid,

and he smelled the same. She put her lips close to his ear and

whispered, "You're a good man, Perry Gibbons."

#

Lester gave his notice that morning. Though it was 8PM in Tehran when

Lester called, Sammy was at his desk.

"Why are you telling me this, Lester?"

"It says in my contract that I have to give my notice to you,

specifically."

"Why the hell did I put that there?" Sammy's voice sounded far away --

not just in Iran. It sounded like he had travelled through time, too.

"Politics, I think," he said.

"Hard to remember. Probably wanted to be sure that someone like Wiener

wouldn't convince you to quit, switch companies, and hire you again."

"Not much risk of that now," Lester said. "Let's face it, Sammy, I

don't actually do anything for the company."

"Nope. That's right. We're not very good at making use of people like

you."

"Nope."

"Well, email me your paperwork and I'll shove it around. How much

notice are you supposed to give?"

"Three months'."

"Yowch. Whatever. Just pack up and go home. Gardening leave."

It had been two years since Lester'd had any contact with Sammy, but

it was clear that running Iranian ops had mellowed him out. Harder to

get into trouble with women there, anyway.

"How's Iran treating you?"

"The Middle East operation is something else, boy. You'd like it

here. The post-war towns all look like your squatter city -- the

craziest buildings you ever saw. They love the DiaBs though -- we get

the most fantastic designs through the fan channels...." He trailed

off. Then, with a note of suspicion: "What are you going to do now?"

Ah. No sense in faking it. "Perry and I are going to go into business

together. Making kinetic sculptures. Like the old days."

"No *way*! Perry *Gibbons*? You two are back together? Christ, we're

all doomed." He was laughing. "Sculptures -- like that toast robot?

And he wants to go into *business*? I thought he was some kind of

Commie."

Lester had a rush of remembrance, the emotional memory of how much

he'd hated this man and everything he stood for. What had happened to

him over the years that he counted this sneak, this thug, as his

colleague? What had he sold when he sold out?

"Perry Gibbons," Lester said, and drew in a breath. "Perry Gibbons is

the sharpest entrepreneur I've ever met. He can't *help* but make

businesses. He's an artist who anticipates the market a year ahead of

the curve. He could be a rich man a hundred times over if he

chose. Commie? Page, you're not fit to keep his books."

The line went quiet, the eerie silence of a net-connection with no

packets routing on it. "Goodbye, Lester," Sammy said at length.

Lester wanted to apologize. He wanted *not* to want to apologize. He

swallowed the apology and disconnected the line.

#

When it was time for bed, Suzanne shut her lid and put the computer

down beside the sofa. She stepped carefully around the pieces of the

Calvinball game that still covered the living room floor and stepped

into a pair of slippers. She slid open the back door and hit the

switch for the yard's flood-light. The last thing she wanted to do was

trip into the pool.

She picked her way carefully down the flagstones that led to the

workshop, where the lights burned merrily in the night. There was no

moon tonight, and the stars were laid out like a bag of synthetic

diamonds arrayed on a piece of black velour in a street market stall.

She peered through the window before she went around to the door, the

journalist in her wanting to fix an image of the moment in her mind

before she moved in and disturbed it. That was the problem with being

a reporter -- everything changed the instant you started reporting on

it. By now, there wasn't a person alive who didn't know what it means

to be in the presence of a reporter. She was a roving Panopticon.

The scene inside the workshop was eerie. Perry and Lester stood next

to each other, cheek by jowl, hunched over something on the

workbench. Perry had a computer open in front of him, and he was

typing, Lester holding something out of sight.

How many times had she seen this tableau? How many afternoons had she

spent in the workshop in Florida, watching them hack a robot, build a

sculpture, turn out the latest toy for Tjan's amusement, Kettlewell's

enrichment? The postures were identical -- though their bodies had

changed, the hair thinner and grayer. Like someone had frozen one of

those innocent moments in time for a decade, then retouched it with

wizening makeup and hair-dye.

She must have made a noise, because Lester looked up -- or maybe it

was just the uncanny, semi-psychic bond between an old married

couple. He grinned at her like he was ten years old and she grinned

back and went around to the door.

"Hello, boys," she said. They straightened up, both of them

unconsciously cradling their low backs, and she suppressed a grin. *My

little boys, all grown up*.

"Darling!" Lester said. "Come here, have a look!"

He put his arm over her shoulders and walked her to the bench, leaning

on her a little.

It was in pieces, but she could see where it was going: a pair of

familiar boxy shapes, two of Lester's mechanical computers, their

cola-can registers spilling away in a long daisy-chain of worm-gears

and rotating shafts. One figure was big and round-shouldered like a

vintage refrigerator. The other was cockeyed, half its gears set

higher than the other half. Each had a single, stark mechanical arm

extended before it, and at the end of each arm was a familiar cracked

and fragrant baseball glove.

Lester put a ball into one of the gloves and Perry hammered away at

the keyboard. Very, very slowly, the slope-shouldered robot drew its

mechanical arm back -- "We used one of the open-source prosthestic

plans," Lester whispered in the tense moment. Then it lobbed a soft

underhand toss to the lopsided one.

The ball arced through the air and the other bot repositioned its arm

in a series of clattering jerks. It seemed to Suzanne that the ball

would miss the glove and bounce off of the robot's carapace, and she

winced. Then, at the very last second, the robot repositioned its arm

with one more fast jerk, and the ball fell into the pocket.

A moment later, the lopsided bot -- Perry, it was Perry, that was easy

to see -- tossed the ball to the round-shouldered one, who was clearly

her Lester, as she'd first known him. Lester-bot caught the ball with

a similar series of jerks and returned the volley.

It was magic to watch the robots play their game of catch. Suzanne was

mesmerized, mouth open. Lester squeezed her shoulder with uncontained

excitement.

The Lester-bot lobbed one to Perry-bot, but Perry-bot flubbed the

toss. The ball made a resounding gong sound as it bounced off of

Perry-bot's carapace, and Perry-bot wobbled.

Suzanne winced, but Lester and Perry both dissolved in gales of

laughter. She watched the Perry-bot try to get itself re-oriented,

aligning its torso to face Lester-bot and she saw that it *was* funny,

very funny, like a particularly great cartoon.

"They do that on purpose?"

"Not exactly -- but there's no way they're going to be perfect, so we

built in a bunch of stuff that would make it funnier when it

happened. It is now officially a feature, not a bug." Perry glowed

with pride.

"Isn't it bad for them to get beaned with a baseball?" she asked as

Lester carefully handed the ball to Perry-bot, who lobbed it to

Lester-bot again.

"Well, yeah. But it's kind of an artistic statement," Perry said,

looking away from them both. "About the way that friendships always

wear you down, like upper and lower molars grinding away at each

other."

Lester squeezed her again. "Over time, they'll knock each other

apart."

Tears pricked at Suzanne's eyes. She blinked them away. "Guys, this is

great." Her voice cracked, but she didn't care. Lester squeezed her

tighter.

"Come to bed soon, hon," she said to Lester. "I'm going away again

tomorrow afternoon -- New York, a restaurant opening."

"I'll be right up," Lester said, and kissed the top of her head. She'd

forgotten that he was that tall. He didn't stand all the way up.

She went to bed, but she couldn't sleep. She crossed to the window and

drew back the curtain and looked out at the backyard -- the scummy

swimming pool she kept forgetting to do something about, the heavy

grapefruit and lemon trees, the shed. Perry stood on the shed's stoop,

looking up at the night sky. She pulled the curtains around herself an

instant before he looked up at her.

Their eyes met and he nodded slowly.

"Thank you," she mouthed silently.

He blew her a kiss, stuck out a foot, and then bowed slightly over his

outstretched leg.

She let the curtain fall back into place and went back to bed. Lester

climbed into bed with her a few minutes later and spooned up against

her back, his face buried in her neck.

She fell asleep almost instantly.

$$$$

Acknowledgements:

Thanks to Andrew Leonard and Salon for publishing this when it was

*Themepunks*.

Thanks to Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Irene Gallo, Pablo Defendini, Justin

Golenbock, Liz Gorinksy, Tom Doherty and the many wonderful people at

Tor for their good work putting this book into the world.

Likewise thanks to Sarah Hodgson, Alice Moss and Victoria Barnsley at

HarperCollins for making this book happen in the UK.

Thanks to my agents, Russell Galen, Danny Baror and Justin Manask.

Thanks to my mother, Dr Roslyn Doctorow, who remains the sharpest

proofer in the business.

Thanks to my business partners at Boing Boing, the staff of MAKE:

Magazine, and to all the makers who let me hold their skateboards

while they welded the killer robots.

And thanks, of course, to Alice and Poesy, who are the reason for all

of it.

$$$$