About this download

There’s a dangerous group of anti-copyright activists out there who pose a clear and present danger to the future of authors and publishing. They have no respect for property or laws. What’s more, they’re powerful and organized, and have the ears of lawmakers and the press.

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

These people don’t believe in copyright law. Copyright law says that when you buy a book, you own it. You can give it away, you can lend it, you can pass it on to your descendants or donate it to the local homeless shelter. Owning books has been around for longer than publishing books has. Copyright law has always recognized your right to own your books. When copyright laws are made—by elected officials, acting for the public good—they always safeguard this right.

But ebook publishers don’t respect copyright law, and they don’t believe in your right to own property. Instead, they say that when you “buy” an ebook, you’re really only licensing that book, and that copyright law is superseded by the thousands of farcical, abusive words in the license agreement you click through on the way to sealing the deal. (Of course, the button on their website says, “Buy this book” and they talk about “Ebook sales” at conferences—no one says, “License this book for your Kindle” or “Total licenses of ebooks are up from 0.00001% of all publishing to 0.0001% of all publishing, a 100-fold increase!”)

I say to hell with them. You bought it, you own it. I believe in copyright law’s guarantee of ownership in your books.

So you own this ebook. The license agreement (see below), is from Creative Commons and it gives you even more rights than you get to a regular book. Every word of it is a gift, not a confiscation. Enjoy.

What do I want from you in return? Read the book. Tell your friends. Review it on Amazon or at your local bookseller. Bring it to your bookclub. Assign it to your students (older students, please—that sex scene is a scorcher) (now I’ve got your attention, don’t I?). As Woody Guthrie wrote:

“This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin’ it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.”

• Only one conversion per format, first come, first serve. That means that if someone’s already converted the file to a Femellhebber 3000 document, that’s the one you’re going to find here. I just don’t know enough about esoteric readers to adjudicate disputes about what the ideal format is for your favorite device.

• Make sure include a link to the reader as well. When you send me an ebook file, make sure that you include a link to the website for the reader technology as well so that I can include it below.

• No cover art. The text of this book is freely copyable, the cover, not so much. The rights to it are controlled by my publisher, so don’t include it with your file.

• No DRM. The Creative Commons license prohibits sharing the file with “DRM” (sometimes called “copy-protection”) on it, and that’s fine by me. Don’t send me the book with DRM on it. If you’re converting to a format that has a DRM option, make sure it’s switched off.

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

Every time I put a book online for free, I get emails from readers who want to send me donations for the book. I appreciate their generous spirit, but I’m not interested in cash donations, because my publishers are really important to me. They contribute immeasurably to the book, improving it, introducing it to audience I could never reach, helping me do more with my work. I have no desire to cut them out of the loop.

But there has to be some good way to turn that generosity to good use, and I think I’ve found it.

Here’s the deal: there are lots of professors and librarians who’d love to get hard-copies of this book into their students’ and patrons’ hands, but don’t have the budget for it.

There are generous people who want to send some cash my way to thank me for the free ebooks.

I’m proposing that we put them together.

If you’re a prof or librarian and you want a free copy of Makers, email freemakers@gmail.com with your name and the name and address of your school. It’ll be posted below by my fantastic helper, Olga Nunes, so that potential donors can see it.

If you enjoyed the electronic edition of Makers and you want to donate something to say thanks, check below to find a teacher or librarian you want to support. Then go to Amazon, BN.com, or your favorite electronic bookseller and order a copy to the classroom, then email a copy of the receipt (feel free to delete your address and other personal info first!) to freemakers@gmail.com so that Olga can mark that copy as sent. If you don’t want to be publicly acknowledged for your generosity, let us know and we’ll keep you anonymous, otherwise we’ll thank you on the donate page.

Check http://craphound.com/makers/donate for profs, librarians and similar people seeking donations.

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This file is licensed under a Creative Commons US Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license:

Dedication:

For “the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things.”

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PART I

Suzanne Church almost never had to bother with the blue blazer these days. Back at the height of the dot-boom, she’d put on her business journalist drag—blazer, blue sailcloth shirt, khaki trousers, loafers—just about every day, putting in her obligatory appearances at splashy press-conferences for high-flying IPOs and mergers. These days, it was mostly work at home or one day a week at the San Jose Mercury News’s office, in comfortable light sweaters with loose necks and loose cotton pants that she could wear straight to yoga after shutting her computer’s lid.

Blue blazer today, and she wasn’t the only one. There was Reedy from the NYT’s Silicon Valley office, and Tribbey from the WSJ, and that despicable rat-toothed jumped-up gossip columnist from one of the UK tech-rags, and many others besides. Old home week, blue blazers fresh from the dry-cleaning bags that had guarded them since the last time the NASDAQ broke 5,000.

The man of the hour was Landon Kettlewell—the kind of outlandish prep-school name that always seemed a little made up to her—the new CEO and front for the majority owners of Kodak/Duracell. The despicable Brit had already started calling them Kodacell. Buying the company was pure Kettlewell: shrewd, weird, and ethical in a twisted way.

“Why the hell have you done this, Landon?” Kettlewell asked himself into his tie-mic. Ties and suits for the new Kodacell execs in the room, like surfers playing dress-up. “Why buy two dinosaurs and stick ’em together? Will they mate and give birth to a new generation of less-endangered dinosaurs?”

He shook his head and walked to a different part of the stage, thumbing a PowerPoint remote that advanced his slide on the jumbotron to a picture of a couple of unhappy cartoon brontos staring desolately at an empty nest. “Probably not. But there is a good case for what we’ve just done, and with your indulgence, I’m going to lay it out for you now.”

“Let’s hope he sticks to the cartoons,” Rat-Toothed hissed beside her. His breath smelled like he’d been gargling turds. He had a not-so-secret crush on her and liked to demonstrate his alpha-maleness by making half-witticisms into her ear. “They’re about his speed.”

She twisted in her seat and pointedly hunched over her computer’s screen, to which she’d taped a thin sheet of polarized plastic that made it opaque to anyone shoulder-surfing her. Being a halfway attractive woman in Silicon Valley was more of a pain in the ass than she’d expected, back when she’d been covering rustbelt shenanigans in Detroit, back when there was an auto industry in Detroit.

The worst part was that the Brit’s reportage was just spleen-filled editorializing on the lack of ethics in the valley’s board-rooms (a favorite subject of hers, which no doubt accounted for his fellow-feeling), and it was also the crux of Kettlewell’s schtick. The spectacle of an exec who talked ethics enraged Rat-Toothed more than the vilest baby-killers. He was the kind of revolutionary who liked his firing squads arranged in a circle.

“I’m not that dumb, folks,” Kettlewell said, provoking a stagey laugh from Mr Rat-Tooth. “Here’s the thing: the market had valued these companies at less than their cash on hand. They have twenty billion in the bank and a 16 billion dollar market-cap. We just made four billion dollars, just by buying up the stock and taking control of the company. We could shut the doors, stick the money in our pockets, and retire.”

Suzanne took notes. She knew all this, but Kettlewell gave good sound-bite, and talked slow in deference to the kind of reporter who preferred a notebook to a recorder. “But we’re not gonna do that.” He hunkered down on his haunches at the edge of the stage, letting his tie dangle, staring spacily at the journalists and analysts. “Kodacell is bigger than that.” He’d read his email that morning then, and seen Rat-Toothed’s new moniker. “Kodacell has goodwill. It has infrastructure. Administrators. Physical plant. Supplier relationships. Distribution and logistics. These companies have a lot of useful plumbing and a lot of priceless reputation.

“What we don’t have is a product. There aren’t enough buyers for batteries or film—or any of the other stuff we make—to occupy or support all that infrastructure. These companies slept through the dot-boom and the dot-bust, trundling along as though none of it mattered. There are parts of these businesses that haven’t changed since the fifties.

“We’re not the only ones. Technology has challenged and killed businesses from every sector. Hell, IBM doesn’t make computers anymore! The very idea of a travel agent is inconceivably weird today! And the record labels, oy, the poor, crazy, suicidal, stupid record labels. Don’t get me started.

“Capitalism is eating itself. The market works, and when it works, it commodifies or obsoletes everything. That’s not to say that there’s no money out there to be had, but the money won’t come from a single, monolithic product line. The days of companies with names like ’General Electric’ and ’General Mills’ and ’General Motors’ are over. The money on the table is like krill: a billion little entrepreneurial opportunities that can be discovered and exploited by smart, creative people.

“We will brute-force the problem-space of capitalism in the twenty first century. Our business plan is simple: we will hire the smartest people we can find and put them in small teams. They will go into the field with funding and communications infrastructure—all that stuff we have left over from the era of batteries and film—behind them, capitalized to find a place to live and work, and a job to do. A business to start. Our company isn’t a project that we pull together on, it’s a network of like-minded, cooperating autonomous teams, all of which are empowered to do whatever they want, provided that it returns something to our coffers. We will explore and exhaust the realm of commercial opportunities, and seek constantly to refine our tactics to mine those opportunities, and fill our hungry belly. This company isn’t a company anymore: this company is a network, an approach, a sensibility.”

Suzanne’s fingers clattered over her keyboard. The Brit chuckled nastily. “Nice talk, considering he just made a hundred thousand people redundant,” he said. Suzanne tried to shut him out: yes, Kettlewell was firing a company’s worth of people, but he was also saving the company itself. The prospectus had a decent severance for all those departing workers, and the ones who’d taken advantage of the company stock-buying plan would find their pensions augmented by whatever this new scheme could rake in. If it worked.

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

“Yes, Freddy?” Freddy was Rat-Toothed’s given name, though Suzanne was hard pressed to ever retain it for more than a few minutes at a time. Kettlewell knew every business-journalist in the Valley by name, though. It was a CEO thing.

“Where will you recruit this new workforce from? And what kind of entrepreneurial things will they be doing to ’exhaust the realm of commercial activities’?”

“Freddy, we don’t have to recruit anyone. They’re beating a path to our door. This is a nation of manic entrepreneurs, the kind of people who’ve been inventing businesses from video arcades to photomats for centuries.” Freddy scowled skeptically, his jumble of grey tombstone teeth protruding. “Come on, Freddy, you ever hear of the Grameen Bank?”

Freddy nodded slowly. “In India, right?”

“Bangladesh. Bankers travel from village to village on foot and by bus, finding small co-ops who need tiny amounts of credit to buy a cellphone or a goat or a loom in order to grow. The bankers make the loans and advise the entrepreneurs, and the payback rate is fifty times higher than the rate at a regular lending institution. They don’t even have a written lending agreement: entrepreneurs—real, hard-working entrepreneurs—you can trust on a handshake.”

“You’re going to help Americans who lost their jobs in your factories buy goats and cellphones?”

“We’re going to give them loans and coordination to start businesses that use information, materials science, commodified software and hardware designs, and creativity to wring a profit from the air around us. Here, catch!” He dug into his suit-jacket and flung a small object toward Freddy, who fumbled it. It fell onto Suzanne’s keyboard.

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

“Switch it on, Suzanne, please, and shine it, oh, on that wall there.” Kettlewell pointed at the upholstered retractable wall that divided the hotel ballroom into two functional spaces.

Suzanne twisted the end and pointed it. A crisp rectangle of green laser-light lit up the wall.

“Now, watch this,” Kettlewell said.

NOW WATCH THIS

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

“Testing one two three,” Kettlewell said.

TESTING ONE TWO THREE

“Donde esta el bano?”

WHERE IS THE BATHROOM

“What is it?” said Suzanne. Her hand wobbled a little and the distant letters danced.

WHAT IS IT

“This is a new artifact designed and executed by five previously out-of-work engineers in Athens, Georgia. They’ve mated a tiny Linux box with some speaker-independent continuous speech recognition software, a free software translation engine that can translate between any of twelve languages, and an extremely high-resolution LCD that blocks out words in the path of the laser-pointer.

“Turn this on, point it at a wall, and start talking. Everything said shows up on the wall, in the language of your choosing, regardless of what language the speaker was speaking.”

All the while, Kettlewell’s words were scrolling by in black block caps on that distant wall: crisp, laser-edged letters.

“This thing wasn’t invented. All the parts necessary to make this go were just lying around. It was assembled. A gal in a garage, her brother the marketing guy, her husband overseeing manufacturing in Belgrade. They needed a couple grand to get it all going, and they’ll need some life-support while they find their natural market.

“They got twenty grand from Kodacell this week. Half of it a loan, half of it equity. And we put them on the payroll, with benefits. They’re part freelancer, part employee, in a team with backing and advice from across the whole business.

“It was easy to do once. We’re going to do it ten thousand times this year. We’re sending out talent scouts, like the artists and representation people the record labels used to use, and they’re going to sign up a lot of these bands for us, and help them to cut records, to start businesses that push out to the edges of business.

“So, Freddy, to answer your question, no, we’re not giving them loans to buy cellphones and goats.”

Kettlewell beamed. Suzanne twisted the laser-pointer off and made ready to toss it back to the stage, but Kettlewell waved her off.

“Keep it,” he said. It was suddenly odd to hear him speak without the text crawl on that distant wall. She put the laser pointer in her pocket and reflected that it had the authentic feel of cool, disposable technology: the kind of thing on its way from a startup’s distant supplier to the schwag bags at high-end technology conferences to blister-packs of six hanging in the impulse aisle at Fry’s.

She tried to imagine the technology conferences she’d been to with the addition of the subtitling and translation and couldn’t do it. Not conferences. Something else. A kids’ toy? A tool for Starbucks-smashing anti-globalists, planning strategy before a WTO riot? She patted her pocket.

Freddy hissed and bubbled like a teakettle beside her, fuming. “What a cock,” he muttered. “Thinks he’s going to hire ten thousand teams to replace his workforce, doesn’t say a word about what that lot is meant to be doing now he’s shitcanned them all. Utter bullshit. Irrational exuberance gone berserk.”

Suzanne had a perverse impulse to turn the wand back on and splash Freddy’s bilious words across the ceiling, and the thought made her giggle. She suppressed it and kept on piling up notes, thinking about the structure of the story she’d file that day.

Kettlewell pulled out some charts and another surfer in a suit came forward to talk money, walking them through the financials. She’d read them already and decided that they were a pretty credible bit of fiction, so she let her mind wander.

She was a hundred miles away when the ballroom doors burst open and the unionized laborers of the former Kodak and the former Duracell poured in on them, tossing literature into the air so that it snowed angry leaflets. They had a big drum and a bugle, and they shook tambourines. The hotel rent-a-cops occasionally darted forward and grabbed a protestor by the arm, but her colleagues would immediately swarm them and pry her loose and drag her back into the body of the demonstration. Freddy grinned and shouted something at Kettlewell, but it was lost in the din. The journalists took a lot of pictures.

Suzanne closed her computer’s lid and snatched a leaflet out of the air. WHAT ABOUT US? it began, and talked about the workers who’d been at Kodak and Duracell for twenty, thirty, even forty years, who had been conspicuously absent from Kettlewell’s stated plans to date.

She twisted the laser-pointer to life and pointed it back at the wall. Leaning in very close, she said, “What are your plans for your existing workforce, Mr Kettlewell?”

WHAT ARE YOUR PLANS FOR YOUR EXISTING WORKFORCE MR KETTLEWELL

She repeated the question several times, refreshing the text so that it scrolled like a stock ticker across that upholstered wall, an illuminated focus that gradually drew all the attention in the room. The protestors saw it and began to laugh, then they read it aloud in ragged unison, until it became a chant: WHAT ARE YOUR PLANS—thump of the big drum—FOR YOUR EXISTING WORKFORCE thump MR thump KETTLEWELL?

Suzanne felt her cheeks warm. Kettlewell was looking at her with something like a smile. She liked him, but that was a personal thing and this was a truth thing. She was a little embarrassed that she had let him finish his spiel without calling him on that obvious question. She felt tricked, somehow. Well, she was making up for it now.

On the stage, the surfer-boys in suits were confabbing, holding their thumbs over their tie-mics. Finally, Kettlewell stepped up and held up his own laser-pointer, painting another rectangle of light beside Suzanne’s.

“I’m glad you asked that, Suzanne,” he said, his voice barely audible.

I’M GLAD YOU ASKED THAT SUZANNE

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

“I’ll tell you, there’s a downside to living in this age of wonders: we are moving too fast and outstripping the ability of our institutions to keep pace with the changes in the world.”

Freddy leaned over her shoulder, blowing shit-breath in her ear. “Translation: you’re ass-fucked, the lot of you.”

TRANSLATION YOUR ASS FUCKED THE LOT OF YOU

Suzanne yelped as the words appeared on the wall and reflexively swung the pointer around, painting them on the ceiling, the opposite wall, and then, finally, in miniature, on her computer’s lid. She twisted the pointer off.

Freddy had the decency to look slightly embarrassed and he slunk away to the very end of the row of seats, scooting from chair to chair on his narrow butt. On stage, Kettlewell was pretending very hard that he hadn’t seen the profanity, and that he couldn’t hear the jeering from the protestors now, even though it had grown so loud that he could no longer be heard over it. He kept on talking, and the words scrolled over the far wall.

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

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

WE ARE MAKING THINGS THAT NO ONE WANTS TO BUY

THIS PLAN INCLUDES A GENEROUS SEVERANCE FOR THOSE STAFFERS WORKING IN THE PARTS OF THE BUSINESS THAT WILL CLOSE DOWN

—Suzanne admired the twisted, long-way-around way of saying, “the people we’re firing.” Pure CEO passive voice. She couldn’t type notes and read off the wall at the same time. She whipped out her little snapshot and monkeyed with it until it was in video mode and then started shooting the ticker.

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

WE NEED TO BE BRINGING IN A PROFIT SO THAT WE CAN MEET OUR OBLIGATIONS TO ALL OUR STAKEHOLDERS SHAREHOLDERS AND WORKFORCE ALIKE

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

WE ARE HIRING 50000 NEW EMPLOYEES THIS YEAR AND THERE’S NOTHING THAT SAYS THAT THOSE NEW PEOPLE CAN’T COME FROM WITHIN

CURRENT EMPLOYEES WILL BE GIVEN CONSIDERATION BY OUR SCOUTS

ENTREPRENEURSHIP IS A DEEPLY AMERICAN PRACTICE AND OUR WORKERS ARE AS CAPABLE OF ENTREPRENEURIAL ACTION AS ANYONE

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

I SAY THIS TO OUR EMPLOYEES IF YOU HAVE EVER DREAMED OF STRIKING OUT ON YOUR OWN EXECUTING ON SOME AMAZING IDEA AND NEVER FOUND THE MEANS TO DO IT NOW IS THE TIME AND WE ARE THE PEOPLE TO HELP

Suzanne couldn’t help but admire the pluck it took to keep speaking into the pointer, despite the howls and bangs.

“C’mon, I’m gonna grab some bagels before the protestors get to them,” Freddy said, plucking at her arm—apparently, this was his version of a charming pickup line. She shook him off authoritatively, with a whip-crack of her elbow.

Freddy stood there for a minute and then moved off. She waited to see if Kettlewell would say anything more, but he twisted the pointer off, shrugged, and waved at the hooting protestors and the analysts and the journalists and walked off-stage with the rest of the surfers in suits.

She got some comments from a few of the protestors, some details. Worked for Kodak or Duracell all their lives. Gave everything to the company. Took voluntary pay-cuts under the old management five times in ten years to keep the business afloat, now facing layoffs as a big fat thank-you-suckers. So many kids. Such and such a mortgage.

She knew these stories from Detroit: she’d filed enough copy with varying renditions of it to last a lifetime. Silicon Valley was supposed to be different. Growth and entrepreneurship—a failed company was just a stepping-stone to a successful one, can’t win them all, dust yourself off and get back to the garage and start inventing. There’s a whole world waiting out there!

Mother of three. Dad whose bright daughter’s university fund was raided to make ends meet during the “temporary” austerity measures. This one has a Down’s Syndrome kid and that one worked through three back surgeries to help meet production deadlines.

Half an hour before she’d been full of that old Silicon Valley optimism, the sense that there was a better world a-borning around her. Now she was back in that old rustbelt funk, with the feeling that she was witness not to a beginning, but to a perpetual ending, a cycle of destruction that would tear down everything solid and reliable in the world.

She packed up her laptop and stepped out into the parking lot. Across the freeway, she could make out the bones of the Great America fun-park roller-coasters whipping around and around in the warm California sun.

These little tech-hamlets down the 101 were deceptively utopian. All the homeless people were miles north on the streets of San Francisco, where pedestrian marks for panhandling could be had, where the crack was sold on corners instead of out of the trunks of fresh-faced, friendly coke-dealers’ cars. Down here it was giant malls, purpose-built dot-com buildings, and the occasional fun-park. Palo Alto was a university-town theme-park, provided you steered clear of the wrong side of the tracks, the East Palo Alto slums that were practically shanties.

Christ, she was getting melancholy. She didn’t want to go into the office—not today. Not when she was in this kind of mood. She would go home and put her blazer back in the closet and change into yoga togs and write her column and have some good coffee.

She nailed up the copy in an hour and emailed it to her editor and poured herself a glass of Napa red (the local vintages in Michigan likewise left something to be desired) and settled onto her porch, overlooking the big reservoir off 280 near San Mateo.

The house had been worth a small fortune at the start of the dot-boom, but now, in the resurgent property boom, it was worth a large fortune and then some. She could conceivably sell this badly built little shack with its leaky hot-tub for enough money to retire on, if she wanted to live out the rest of her days in Sri Lanka or Nebraska.

“You’ve got no business feeling poorly, young lady,” she said to herself. “You are as well set-up as you could have dreamed, and you are right in the thick of the weirdest and best time the world has yet seen. And Landon Kettlewell knows your name.”

She finished the wine and opened her computer. It was dark enough now with the sun set behind the hills that she could read the screen. The Web was full of interesting things, her email full of challenging notes from her readers, and her editor had already signed off on her column.

She was getting ready to shut the lid and head for bed, so she pulled her mail once more.

From: kettlewell-l@skunkworks.kodacell.com

To: schurch@sjmercury.com

Subject: Embedded journalist?

Thanks for keeping me honest today, Suzanne. It’s the hardest question we’re facing today: what happens when all the things you’re good at are no good to anyone anymore? I hope we’re going to answer that with the new model.

You do good work, madam. I’d be honored if you’d consider joining one of our little teams for a couple months and chronicling what they do. I feel like we’re making history here and we need someone to chronicle it.

I don’t know if you can square this with the Merc, and I suppose that we should be doing this through my PR people and your editor, but there comes a time about this time every night when I’m just too goddamned hyper to bother with all that stuff and I want to just DO SOMETHING instead of ask someone else to start a process to investigate the possibility of someday possibly maybe doing something.

Will you do something with us, if we can make it work? 100 percent access, no oversight? Say you will. Please.

Your pal,

Kettlebelly

She stared at her screen. It was like a work of art; just look at that return address, “kettlewell-l@skunkworks.kodacell.com”—for kodacell.com to be live and accepting mail, it had to have been registered the day before. She had a vision of Kettlewell checking his email at midnight before his big press-conference, catching Freddy’s column, and registering kodacell.com on the spot, then waking up some sysadmin to get a mail server answering at skunkworks.kodacell.com. Last she’d heard, Lockheed-Martin was threatening to sue anyone who used their trademarked term “Skunk Works” to describe a generic R&D department. That meant that Kettlewell had moved so fast that he hadn’t even run this project by legal. She was willing to bet that he’d already ordered new business-cards with the address on them.

There was a guy she knew, an editor at a mag who’d assigned himself a plum article that he’d run on his own cover. He’d gotten a book-deal out of it. A half-million dollar book-deal. If Kettlewell was right, then the exclusive book on the inside of the first year at Kodacell could easily make that advance. And the props would be mad, as the kids said.

Kettlebelly! It was such a stupid frat-boy nickname, but it made her smile. He wasn’t taking himself seriously, or maybe he was, but he wasn’t being a pompous ass about it. He was serious about changing the world and frivolous about everything else. She’d have a hard time being an objective reporter if she said yes to this.

She couldn’t possibly decide at this hour. She needed a night’s sleep and she had to talk this over with the Merc. If she had a boyfriend, she’d have to talk it over with him, but that wasn’t a problem in her life these days.

She spread on some expensive duty-free French wrinkle-cream and brushed her teeth and put on her nightie and double-checked the door locks and did all the normal things she did of an evening. Then she folded back her sheets, plumped her pillows and stared at them.

She turned on her heel and stalked back to her computer and thumped the spacebar until the thing woke from sleep.

From: schurch@sjmercury.com

To: kettlewell-l@skunkworks.kodacell.com

Subject: Re: Embedded journalist?

Kettlebelly: that is one dumb nickname. I couldn’t possibly associate myself with a grown man who calls himself Kettlebelly.

So stop calling yourself Kettlebelly, immediately. If you can do that, we’ve got a deal.

Suzanne

There had come a day when her readers acquired email and the paper ran her address with her byline, and her readers had begun to write her and write her and write her. Some were amazing, informative, thoughtful notes. Some were the vilest, most bilious trolling. In order to deal with these notes, she had taught herself to pause, breathe, and re-read any email message before clicking send.

The reflex kicked in now and she re-read her note to Kettlebelly—Kettlewell!—and felt a crimp in her guts. Then she hit send.

She needed to pee, and apparently had done for some time, without realizing it. She was on the toilet when she heard the ping of new incoming mail.

From: kettlewell-l@skunkworks.kodacell.com

To: schurch@sjmercury.com

Subject: Re: Embedded journalist?

I will never call myself Kettlebelly again.

Your pal,

Kettledrum.

Oh-shit-oh-shit-oh-shit. She did a little two-step at her bed’s edge. Tomorrow she’d go see her editor about this, but it just felt right, and exciting, like she was on the brink of an event that would change her life forever.

It took her three hours of mindless Web-surfing, including a truly dreary Hot-Or-Not clicktrance and an hour’s worth of fiddling with tweets from the press-conference, before she was able to lull herself to sleep. As she nodded off, she thought that Kettlewell’s insomnia was as contagious as his excitement.

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Hollywood, Florida’s biggest junkyard was situated in the rubble of a half-built ghost-mall off Taft Street. Suzanne’s Miami airport rental car came with a GPS, but the little box hadn’t ever heard of the mall; it was off the map. So she took a moment in the sweltering parking-lot of her coffin hotel to call her interview subject again and get better coordinates.

“Yeah, it’s ’cause they never finished building the mall, so the address hasn’t been included in the USGS maps. The open GPSes all have these better maps made by geohackers, but the rental car companies have got a real hard-on for official map-data. Morons. Hang on, lemme get my GPS out and I’ll get you some decent lat-long.”

His voice had a pleasant, youthful, midwestern sound, like a Canadian newscaster: friendly and enthusiastic as a puppy. His name was Perry Gibbons, and if Kettlewell was to be believed, he was the most promising prospect identified by Kodacell’s talent-scouts.

The ghost-mall was just one of many along Taft Street, ranging in size from little corner plazas to gigantic palaces with broken-in atria and cracked parking lots. A lot of the malls in California had crashed, but they’d been turned into flea-markets or day-cares, or, if they’d been abandoned, they hadn’t been abandoned like this, left to go to ruin. This reminded her of Detroit before she’d left, whole swaths of the inner city emptied of people, neighborhoods condemned and bulldozed and, in a couple of weird cases, actually farmed by enterprising city-dwellers who planted crops, kept livestock, and rode their mini tractors beneath the beam of the defunct white-elephant monorail.

The other commonality this stretch of road shared with Detroit was the obesity of the people she passed. She’d felt a little self-conscious that morning, dressing in a light short-sleeved blouse and a pair of shorts—nothing else would do, the weather was so hot and drippy that even closed-toe shoes would have been intolerable. At 45, her legs had slight cellulite saddlebags and her tummy wasn’t the washboard it had been when she was 25. But here, on this stretch of road populated by people so fat they could barely walk, so fat that they were de-sexed marshmallows with faces like inflatable toys, she felt like a toothpick.

The GPS queeped when she came up on the junkyard, a sprawling, half-built discount mall whose waist-high walls had been used to parcel out different kinds of sorted waste. The mall had been planned with wide indoor boulevards between the shops wide enough for two lanes of traffic, and she cruised those lanes now in the hertzmobile, looking for a human. Once she reached the center of the mall—a dry fountain filled with dusty Christmas-tree ornaments—she stopped and leaned on the horn.

She got out of the car and called, “Hello? Perry?” She could have phoned him but it always seemed so wasteful spending money on airtime when you were trying to talk to someone within shouting range.

“Suzanne!” The voice came from her left. She shielded her eyes from the sun’s glare and peered down a spoke of mall-lane and caught her first glimpse of Perry Gibbons. He was standing in the basket of a tall cherry-picker, barechested and brown. He wore a sun-visor and big work gloves, and big, baggy shorts whose pockets jangled as he shinnied down the crane’s neck.

She started toward him tentatively. Not a lot of business-reporting assignments involved spending time with half-naked, sun-baked dudes in remote southern junkyards. Still, he sounded nice.

“Hello!” she called. He was young, 22 or 23, and already had squint-creases at the corners of his eyes. He had a brace on one wrist and his steel-toed boots were the mottled grey of a grease-puddle on the floor of a muffler and brake shop.

He grinned and tugged off a glove, stuck out his hand. “A pleasure. Sorry for the trouble finding this place. It’s not easy to get to, but it’s cheap as hell.”

“I believe it.” She looked around again—the heaps of interesting trash, the fountain-dish filled with thousands of shining ornaments. The smell was a mixture of machine-oil and salt, jungle air, Florida swamp and Detroit steel. “So, this place is pretty cool. Looks like you’ve got pretty much everything you could imagine.”

“And then some.” This was spoken by another man, one who puffed heavily up from behind her. He was enormous, not just tall but fat, as big around as a barrel. His green tee-shirt read IT’S FUN TO USE LEARNING FOR EVIL! in blocky, pixelated letters. He took her hand and shook it. “I love your blog,” he said. “I read it all the time.” He had three chins, and eyes that were nearly lost in his apple cheeks.

“Meet Lester,” Perry said. “My partner.”

“Sidekick,” Lester said with a huge wink. “Sysadmin slash hardware hacker slash dogsbody slashdot org.”

She chuckled. Nerd humor. Ar ar ar.

“Right, let’s get started. You wanna see what I do, right?” Perry said.

“That’s right,” Suzanne said.

“Lead the way, Lester,” Perry said, and gestured with an arm, deep into the center of the junkpile. “All right, check this stuff out as we go.” He stuck his hand through the unglazed window of a never-built shop and plucked out a toy in a battered box. “I love these things,” he said, handing it to her.

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

“That’s from the great Elmo Crash,” Perry said, taking back the box and expertly extracting the Elmo like he was shelling a nut. “The last and greatest generation of Elmoid technology, cast into an uncaring world that bought millions of Li’l Tagger washable graffiti kits instead after Rosie gave them two thumbs up on her Christmas shopping guide.

“Poor Elmo was an orphan, and every junkyard in the world has mountains of mint-in-package BWEs, getting rained on, waiting to start their long, half-million-year decomposition.

“But check this out.” He flicked a multitool off his belt and extracted a short, sharp scalpel-blade. He slit the grinning, disco-suited Elmo open from chin to groin and shucked its furry exterior and the foam tissue that overlaid its skeleton. He slid the blade under the plastic cover on its ass and revealed a little printed circuit board.

“That’s an entire Atom processor on a chip, there,” he said. “Each limb and the head have their own subcontrollers. There’s a high-powered digital-to-analog rig for letting him sing and dance to new songs, and an analog-to-digital converter array for converting spoken and danced commands to motions. Basically, you dance and sing for Elmo and he’ll dance and sing back for you.”

Suzanne nodded. She’d missed that toy, which was a pity. She had a five year old goddaughter in Minneapolis who would have loved a Boogie Woogie Elmo.

They had come to a giant barn, set at the edge of a story-and-a-half’s worth of anchor store. “This used to be where the contractors kept their heavy equipment,” Lester rumbled, aiming a car-door remote at the door, which queeped and opened.

Inside, it was cool and bright, the chugging air-conditioners efficiently blasting purified air over the many work-surfaces. The barn was a good 25 feet tall, with a loft and a catwalk circling it halfway up. It was lined with metallic shelves stacked neatly with labeled boxes of parts scrounged from the junkyard.

Perry set Elmo down on a workbench and worked a miniature USB cable into his chest-cavity. The other end terminated with a PDA with a small rubberized photovoltaic cell on the front.

“This thing is running InstallParty—it can recognize any hardware and build and install a Linux distro on it without human intervention. They used a ton of different suppliers for the BWE, so every one is a little different, depending on who was offering the cheapest parts the day it was built. InstallParty doesn’t care, though: one-click and away it goes.” The PDA was doing all kinds of funny dances on its screen, montages of playful photoshopping of public figures matted into historical fine art.

“All done. Now, have a look—this is a Linux computer with some of the most advanced robotics ever engineered. No sweatshop stuff, either, see this? The solder is too precise to be done by hand—that’s because it’s from India. If it was from Cambodia, you’d see all kinds of wobble in the solder: that means that tiny, clever hands were used to create it, which means that somewhere in the device’s karmic history, there’s a sweatshop full of crippled children inhaling solder fumes until they keel over and are dumped in a ditch. This is the good stuff.

“So we have this karmically clean robot with infinitely malleable computation and a bunch of robotic capabilities. I’ve turned these things into wall-climbing monkeys; I’ve modded them for a woman from the University of Miami at the Jackson Memorial who used their capability to ape human motions in physiotherapy programs with nerve-damage cases. But the best thing I’ve done with them so far is the Distributed Boogie Woogie Elmo Motor Vehicle Operation Cluster. Come on,” he said, and took off deeper into the barn’s depths.

They came to a dusty, stripped-down Smart car, one of those tiny two-seat electric cars you could literally buy out of a vending machine in Europe. It was barely recognizable, having been reduced to its roll-cage, drive-train and control-panel. A gang of naked robot Elmos were piled into it.

“Wake up boys, time for a demo!” Perry shouted, and they sat up and made canned, tinny Elmo “oh boy” noises, climbing into position on the pedals, around the wheel, and on the gear-tree.

“I got the idea when I was teaching an Elmo to play Mario Brothers. I thought it’d get a decent diggdotting. I could get it to speedrun all of the first level using an old paddle I’d found and rehabilitated, and I was trying to figure out what to do next. The dead mall across the way is a drive-in theater, and I was out front watching the silent movies, and one of them showed all these cute little furry animated whatevers collectively driving a car. It’s a really old sight-gag, I mean, like racial memory old. I’d seen the Little Rascals do the same bit, with Alfalfa on the wheel and Buckwheat and Spanky on the brake and clutch and the doggy working the gearshift.

“And I thought, Shit, I could do that with Elmos. They don’t have any networking capability, but they can talk and they can parse spoken commands, so all I need is to designate one for left and one for right and one for fast and one for slow and one to be the eyes, barking orders and they should be able to do this. And it works! They even adjust their balance and centers of gravity when the car swerves to stay upright at their posts. Check it out.” He turned to the car. “Driving Elmos, ten-HUT!” They snapped upright and ticked salutes off their naked plastic noggins. “In circles, DRIVE,” he called. The Elmos scrambled into position and fired up the car and in short order they were doing donuts in the car’s little indoor pasture.

“Elmos, HALT” Perry shouted and the car stopped silently, rocking gently. “Stand DOWN.” The Elmos sat down with a series of tiny thumps.

Suzanne found herself applauding. “That was amazing,” she said. “Really impressive. So that’s what you’re going to do for Kodacell, make these things out of recycled toys?”

Lester chuckled. “Nope, not quite. That’s just for starters. The Elmos are all about the universal availability of cycles and apparatus. Everywhere you look, there’s devices for free that have everything you need to make anything do anything.

“But have a look at part two, c’mere.” He lumbered off in another direction, and Suzanne and Perry trailed along behind him.

“This is Lester’s workshop,” Perry said, as they passed through a set of swinging double doors and into a cluttered wonderland. Where Perry’s domain had been clean and neatly organized, Lester’s area was a happy shambles. His shelves weren’t orderly, but rather, crammed with looming piles of amazing junk: thrift-store wedding dresses, plaster statues of bowling monkeys, box kites, knee-high tin knights-in-armor, seashells painted with American flags, presidential action-figures, paste jewelry and antique cough-drop tins.

“You know how they say a sculptor starts with a block of marble and chips away everything that doesn’t look like a statue? Like he can see the statue in the block? I get like that with garbage: I see the pieces on the heaps and in roadside trash and I can just see how it can go together, like this.”

He reached down below a work-table and hoisted up a huge triptych made out of three hinged car-doors stood on end. Carefully, he unfolded it and stood it like a screen on the cracked concrete floor.

The inside of the car-doors had been stripped clean and polished to a high metal gleam that glowed like sterling silver. Spot-welded to it were all manner of soda tins, pounded flat and cut into gears, chutes, springs and other mechanical apparatus.

“It’s a mechanical calculator,” he said proudly. “About half as powerful as Univac. I milled all the parts using a laser-cutter. What you do is, fill this hopper with GI Joe heads, and this hopper with Barbie heads. Crank this wheel and it will drop a number of M&Ms equal to the product of the two values into this hopper, here.” He put three scuffed GI Joe heads in one hopper and four scrofulous Barbies in another and began to crank, slowly. A music-box beside the crank played a slow, irregular rendition of “Pop Goes the Weasel” while the hundreds of little coin-sized gears turned, flipping switches and adding and removing tension to springs. After the weasel popped a few times, twelve brown M&Ms fell into an outstretched rubber hand. He picked them out carefully and offered them to her. “It’s OK. They’re not from the trash,” he said. “I buy them in bulk.” He turned his broad back to her and heaved a huge galvanized tin washtub full of brown M&Ms in her direction. “See, it’s a bit-bucket!” he said.

Suzanne giggled in spite of herself. “You guys are hilarious,” she said. “This is really good, exciting nerdy stuff.” The gears on the mechanical computer were really sharp and precise; they looked like you could cut yourself on them. When they ground over the polished surfaces of the car-doors, they made a sound like a box of toothpicks falling to the floor: click-click, clickclickclick, click. She turned the crank until twelve more brown M&Ms fell out.

“Who’s the Van Halen fan?”

Lester beamed. “Might as well jump—JUMP!” He mimed heavy-metal air-guitar and thrashed his shorn head up and down as though he were headbanging with a mighty mane of hair-band locks. “You’re the first one to get the joke!” he said. “Even Perry didn’t get it!”

“Get what?” Perry said, also grinning.

“Van Halen had this thing where if there were any brown M&Ms in their dressing room they’d trash it and refuse to play. When I was a kid, I used to dream about being so famous that I could act like that much of a prick. Ever since, I’ve afforded a great personal significance to brown M&Ms.”

She laughed again. Then she frowned a little. “Look, I hate to break this party up, but I came here because Kettlebelly—crap, Kettlewell—said that you guys exemplified everything that he wanted to do with Kodacell. This stuff you’ve done is all very interesting, it’s killer art, but I don’t see the business-angle. So, can you help me out here?”

“That’s step three,” Perry said. “C’mere.” He led her back to his workspace, to a platform surrounded by articulated arms terminated in webcams, like a grocery scale in the embrace of a metal spider. “three-d scanner,” he said, producing a Barbie head from Lester’s machine and dropping it on the scales. He prodded a button and a nearby screen filled with a three-dimensional model of the head, flattened on the side where it touched the surface. He turned the head over and scanned again and now there were two digital versions of the head on the screen. He moused one over the other until they lined up, right-clicked a drop-down menu, selected an option and then they were merged, rotating.

“Once we’ve got the three-d scan, it’s basically Plasticine.” He distorted the Barbie head, stretching it and squeezing it with the mouse. “So we can take a real object and make this kind of protean hyper-object out of it, or drop it down to a wireframe and skin it with any bitmap, like this.” More fast mousing—Barbie’s head turned into a gridded mesh, fine filaments stretching off along each mussed strand of plastic hair. Then a Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup label wrapped around her like a stocking being pulled over her head. There was something stupendously weird and simultaneously very comic about the sight, the kind of inherent comedy in a cartoon stretched out on a blob of Silly Putty.

“So we can build anything out of interesting junk, with any shape, and then we can digitize the shape. Then we can do anything we like with the shape. Then we can output the shape.” He typed quickly and another machine, sealed and mammoth like an outsized photocopier, started to grunt and churn. The air filled with a smell like Saran Wrap in a microwave.

“The goop we use in this thing is epoxy-based. You wouldn’t want to build a car out of it, but it makes a mean doll-house. The last stage of the output switches to inks, so you get whatever bitmap you’ve skinned your object with baked right in. It does about one cubic inch per minute, so this job should be almost done now.”

He drummed his fingers on top of the machine for a moment and then it stopped chunking and something inside it went clunk. He lifted a lid and reached inside and plucked out the barbie head, stretched and distorted, skinned with a Campbell’s Soup label. He handed it to Suzanne. She expected it to be warm, like a squashed penny from a machine on Fisherman’s Wharf, but it was cool and had the seamless texture of a plastic margarine tub and the heft of a paperweight.

“So, that’s the business,” Lester said. “Or so we’re told. We’ve been making cool stuff and selling it to collectors on the web for you know, gigantic bucks. We move one or two pieces a month at about ten grand per. But Kettlebelly says he’s going to industrialize us, alienate us from the product of our labor, and turn us into an assembly line.”

“He didn’t say any such thing,” Perry said. Suzanne was aware that her ears had grown points. Perry gave Lester an affectionate slug in the shoulder. “Lester’s only kidding. What we need is a couple of dogsbodies and some bigger printers and we’ll be able to turn out more modest devices by the hundred or possibly the thousand. We can tweak the designs really easily because nothing is coming off a mold, so there’s no setup charge, so we can do limited runs of a hundred, redesign, do another hundred. We can make ’em to order. “

“And we need an MBA,” Lester said. “Kodacell’s sending us a business manager to help us turn junk into pesos.”

“Yeah,” Perry said, with a worried flick of his eyes. “Yeah, a business manager.”

“So, I’ve known some business geeks who aren’t total assholes,” Lester said. “Who care about what they’re doing and the people they’re doing it with. Respectful and mindful. It’s like lawyers—they’re not all scumbags. Some of them are totally awesome and save your ass.”

Suzanne took all this in, jotting notes on an old-fashioned spiral-bound shirt-pocket notebook. “When’s he arriving?”

“Next week,” Lester said. “We’ve cleared him a space to work and everything. He’s someone that Kettlewell’s people recruited up in Ithaca and he’s going to move here to work with us, sight unseen. Crazy, huh?”

“Crazy,” Suzanne agreed.

“Right,” Perry said. “That’s next week, and this aft we’ve got some work to do, but now I’m ready for lunch. You guys ready for lunch?”

Something about food and really fat guys, it seemed like an awkward question to Suzanne, like asking someone who’d been horribly disfigured by burns if he wanted to toast a marshmallow. But Lester didn’t react to the question—of course not, he had to eat, everyone had to eat.

“Yeah, let’s do the IHOP.” Lester trundled back to his half of the workspace, then came back with a cane in one hand. “There’s like three places to eat within walking distance of here if you don’t count the mobile Mexican burrito wagon, which I don’t, since it’s a rolling advertisement for dysentery. The IHOP is the least objectionable of those.”

“We could drive somewhere,” Suzanne said. It was coming up on noon and the heat once they got outside into the mall’s ruins was like the steam off a dishwasher. She plucked at her blouse a couple of times.

“It’s the only chance to exercise we get,” Perry said. “It’s pretty much impossible to live or work within walking distance of anything down here. You end up living in your car.”

And so they hiked along the side of the road. The sidewalk was a curious mix of old and new, the concrete unworn but still overgrown by tall sawgrass thriving in the Florida heat. It brushed up against her ankles, hard and sharp, unlike the grass back home.

They were walking parallel to a ditch filled with sluggish, brackish water and populated by singing frogs, ducks, ibises, and mosquitoes in great number. Across the way were empty lots, ghost-plazas, dead filling stations. Behind one of the filling stations, a cluster of tents and shacks.

“Squatters?” she asked, pointing to the shantytown.

“Yeah,” Perry said. “Lots of that down here. Some of them are the paramilitary wing of the AARP, old trailer-home retirees who’ve run out of money and just set up camp here. Some are bums and junkies, some are runaways. It’s not as bad as it looks—they’re pretty comfy in there. We bring ’em furniture and other good pickings that show up at the junkyard. The homeless with the wherewithal to build shantytowns, they haven’t gone all animal like the shopping cart people and the scary beachcombers.” He waved across the malarial ditch to an old man in a pair of pressed khaki shorts and a crisp Bermuda shirt. “Hey Francis!” he called. The old man waved back. “We’ll have some IHOP for you ’bout an hour!” The old man ticked a salute off his creased forehead.

“Francis is a good guy. Used to be an aerospace engineer if you can believe it. Wife had medical problems and he went bust taking care of her. When she died, he ended up here in his double-wide and never left. Kind of the unofficial mayor of this little patch.”

Suzanne stared after Francis. He had a bit of a gimpy leg, a limp she could spot even from here. Beside her, Lester was puffing. No one was comfortable walking in Florida, it seemed.

It took another half hour to reach the IHOP, the International House of Pancakes, which sat opposite a mini-mall with only one still-breathing store, a place that advertised 99-cent t-shirts, which struck Suzanne as profoundly depressing. There was a junkie out front of 99-Cent Tees, a woman with a leathery tan and a tiny tank-top and shorts that made her look a little like a Tenderloin hooker, but not with that rat’s-nest hair, not even in the ’Loin. She wobbled uncertainly across the parking lot to them.

“Excuse me,” she said, with an improbable Valley Girl accent. “Excuse me? I’m hoping to get something to eat, it’s for my kid, she’s nursing, gotta keep my strength up.” Her naked arms and legs were badly tracked out, and Suzanne had a horrified realization that among the stains on her tank-top were a pair of spreading pools of breast milk, dampening old white, crusted patches over her sagging breasts. “For my baby. A dollar would help, a dollar.”

There were homeless like this in San Francisco, too. In San Jose as well, she supposed, but she didn’t know where they hid. But something about this woman, cracked out and tracked out, it freaked her out. She dug into her purse and got out a five dollar bill and handed it to the homeless woman. The woman smiled a snaggletoothed stumpy grin and reached for it, then, abruptly, grabbed hold of Suzanne’s wrist. Her grip was damp and weak.

“Don’t you fucking look at me like that. You’re not better than me, bitch!” Suzanne tugged free and stepped back quickly. “That’s right, run away! Bitch! Fuck you! Enjoy your lunch!”

She was shaking. Perry and Lester closed ranks around her. Lester moved to confront the homeless woman.

“The fuck you want lard ass? You wanna fuck with me? I got a knife, you know, cut your ears off and feed ’em to ya.”

Lester cocked his head like the RCA Victor dog. He towered over the skinny junkie, and was five or six times wider than her.

“You all right?” he said gently.

“Oh yeah, I’m just fine,” she said. “Why, you looking for a party?”

He laughed. “You’re joking—I’d crush you!”

She laughed too, a less crazy, more relaxed sound. Lester’s voice was a low, soothing rumble. “I don’t think my friend thinks she’s any better than you. I think she just wanted to help you out.”

The junkie flicked her eyes back and forth. “Listen can you spare a dollar for my baby?”

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

“Fuckers won’t let me in—won’t let me use the toilet even. It’s not humane. Don’t want to go in the bushes. Not dignified to go in the bushes.”

“That’s true,” he said. “What if I get you some take out, you got a shady place you could eat it? Nursing’s hungry work.”

The junkie cocked her head. Then she laughed. “Yeah, OK, yeah. Sure—thanks, thanks a lot!”

Lester motioned her over to the menu in the IHOP window and waited with her while she picked out a helping of caramel-apple waffles, sausage links, fried eggs, hash browns, coffee, orange juice and a chocolate malted. “Is that all?” he said, laughing, laughing, both of them laughing, all of them laughing at the incredible, outrageous meal.

They went in and waited by the podium. The greeter, a black guy with corn-rows, nodded at Lester and Perry like an old friend. “Hey Tony,” Lester said. “Can you get us a go-bag with some take-out for the lady outside before we sit down?” He recited the astounding order.

Tony shook his head and ducked it. “OK, be right up,” he said. “You want to sit while you’re waiting?”

“We’ll wait here, thanks,” Lester said. “Don’t want her to think we’re bailing on her.” He turned and waved at her.

“She’s mean, you know—be careful.”

“Thanks, Tony,” Lester said.

Suzanne marveled at Lester’s equanimity. Nothing got his goat. The doggie bag arrived. “I put some extra napkins and a couple of wet-naps in there,” Tony said, handing it to him.

“Great!” Lester said. “You guys sit down, I’ll be back in a second.”

Perry motioned for Suzanne to follow him to a booth. He laughed. “Lester’s a good guy,” he said. “The best guy I know, you know?”

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

“He was the sysadmin at a company that was making three-d printers, and I was a tech at a company that was buying them, and the products didn’t work, and I spent a lot of time on the phone with him troubleshooting them. We’d get together in our off-hours and hack around with neat little workbench projects, stuff we’d come up with at work. When both companies went under, we got a bunch of their equipment at bankruptcy auctions. Lester’s uncle owned the junkyard and he offered us space to set up our workshops and the rest is history.”

Lester joined them again. He was laughing. “She is funny,” he said. “Kept hefting the sack and saying, ’Christ what those bastards put on a plate, no wonder this country’s so goddamned fat!’” Perry laughed, too. Suzanne chuckled nervously and looked away.

He slid into the booth next to her and put a hand on her shoulder. “It’s OK. I’m a guy who weighs nearly 400 pounds. I know I’m a big, fat guy. If I was sensitive about it, I couldn’t last ten minutes. I’m not proud of being as big as I am, but I’m not ashamed either. I’m OK with it.”

“You wouldn’t lose weight if you could?”

“Sure, why not? But I’ve concluded it’s not an option anymore. I was always a fat kid, and so I never got good at sports, never got that habit. Now I’ve got this huge deficit when I sit down to exercise, because I’m lugging around all this lard. Can’t run more than a few steps. Walking’s about it. Couldn’t join a pick-up game of baseball or get out on the tennis court. I never learned to cook, either, though I suppose I could. But mostly I eat out, and I try to order sensibly, but just look at the crap they feed us at the places we can get to—there aren’t any health food restaurants in the strip malls. Look at this menu,” he said, tapping a pornographic glossy picture of a stack of glistening waffles oozing with some kind of high-fructose lube. “Caramel pancakes with whipped cream, maple syrup and canned strawberries. When I was a kid, we called that candy. These people will sell you an eight dollar, 18 ounce plate of candy with a side of sausage, eggs, biscuits, bacon and a pint of orange juice. Even if you order this stuff and eat a third of it, a quarter of it, that’s probably too much, and when you’ve got a lot of food in front of you, it’s pretty hard to know when to stop.”

“Sure, will-power. Will-power nothing. The thing is, when three quarters of America are obese, when half are dangerously obese, like me, years off our lives from all the fat—that tells you that this isn’t a will-power problem. We didn’t get less willful in the last fifty years. Might as well say that all those people who died of the plague lacked the will-power to keep their houses free of rats. Fat isn’t moral, it’s epidemiological. There are a small number of people, a tiny minority, whose genes are short-circuited in a way that makes them less prone to retaining nutrients. That’s a maladaptive trait through most of human history—burning unnecessary calories when you’ve got to chase down an antelope to get more, that’s no way to live long enough to pass on your genes! So you and Perry over here with your little skinny selves, able to pack away transfats and high-fructose corn-syrup and a pound of candy for breakfast at the IHOP, you’re not doing this on will-power—you’re doing it by expressing the somatotype of a recessive, counter-survival gene.

“Would I like to be thinner? Sure. But I’m not gonna let the fact that I’m genetically better suited to famine than feast get to me. Speaking of, let’s eat. Tony, c’mere, buddy. I want a plate of candy!” He was smiling, and brave, and at that moment, Suzanne thought that she could get a crush on this guy, this big, smart, talented, funny, lovable guy. Then reality snapped back and she saw him as he was, sexless, lumpy, almost grotesque. The overlay of his, what, his inner beauty on that exterior, it disoriented her. She looked back over her notes.

“So, you say that there’s a third coming out to work with you?”

“To live with us,” Perry said. “That’s part of the deal. Geek houses, like in the old college days. We’re going to be a power-trio: two geeks and a suit, lean and mean. The suit’s name is Tjan, and he’s Singaporean by way of London by way of Ithaca, where Kettlebelly found him. We’ve talked on the phone a couple times and he’s moving down next week.”

“He’s moving down without ever having met you?”

“Yeah, that’s the way it goes. It’s like the army or something for us: once you’re in you get dispatched here or there. It was in the contract. We already had a place down here with room for Tjan, so we put some fresh linen on the guest-bed and laid in an extra toothbrush.”

“It’s a little nervous-making,” Lester said. “Perry and I get along great, but I haven’t had such good luck with business-types. It’s not that I’m some kind of idealist who doesn’t get the need to make money, but they can be so condescending, you know?”

Suzanne nodded. “That’s a two-way street, you know. ’Suits’ don’t like being talked down to by engineers.”

Lester raised a hand. “Guilty as charged.”

“So what’re you planning to do for the rest of the week?” It was Wednesday, and she’d counted on getting this part of the story by Saturday, but here she was going to have to wait, clearly, until this Tjan arrived.

“Same stuff as we always do. We build crazy stuff out of junk, sell it to collectors, and have fun. We could go to the Thunderbird Drive In tonight if you want, it’s a real classic, flea-market by day and drive in by night, practically the last one standing.”

Perry cut in. “Or we could go to South Beach and get a good meal, if that’s more your speed.”

“Naw,” Suzanne said. “Drive in sounds great, especially if it’s such a dying breed. Better get a visit in while there’s still time.”

They tried to treat her but she wouldn’t let them. She never let anyone buy her so much as a cup of coffee. It was an old journalism-school drill, and she was practically the only scribbler she knew who hewed to it: some of the whores on the Silicon Valley papers took in free computers, trips, even spa days!—but she had never wavered.

---

The afternoon passed quickly and enchantingly. Perry was working on a knee-high, articulated Frankenstein monster built out of hand-painted seashells from a beach-side kitsch market. They said GOD BLESS AMERICA and SOUVENIR OF FLORIDA and CONCH REPUBLIC and each had to be fitted out for a motor custom built to conform to its contours.

“When it’s done, it will make toast.”

“Make toast?”

“Yeah, separate a single slice off a loaf, load it into a top-loading slice-toaster, depress the lever, time the toast-cycle, retrieve the toast and butter it. I got the idea from old-time backup-tape loaders. This plus a toaster will function as a loosely coupled single system.”

“OK, that’s really cool, but I have to ask the boring question, Perry. Why? Why build a toast-robot?”

Perry stopped working and dusted his hands off. He was really built, and his shaggy hair made him look younger than his crows-feet suggested. He turned a seashell with a half-built motor in it over and spun it like a top on the hand-painted WEATHER IS HERE/WISH YOU WERE BEAUTIFUL legend.

“Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? The simple answer: people buy them. Collectors. So it’s a good hobby business, but that’s not really it.

“It’s like this: engineering is all about constraint. Given a span of foo feet and materials of tensile strength of bar, build a bridge that doesn’t go all fubared. Write a fun video-game for an eight-bit console that’ll fit in 32K. Build the fastest airplane, or the one with the largest carrying capacity... But these days, there’s not much traditional constraint. I’ve got the engineer’s most dangerous luxury: plenty. All the computational cycles I’ll ever need. Easy and rapid prototyping. Precision tools.

“Now, it may be that there is a suite of tasks lurking in potentia that demand all this resource and more—maybe I’m like some locomotive engineer declaring that 60 miles per hour is the pinnacle of machine velocity, that speed is cracked. But I don’t see many of those problems—none that interest me.

“What I’ve got here are my own constraints. I’m challenging myself, using found objects and making stuff that throws all this computational capacity at, you know, these trivial problems, like car-driving Elmo clusters and seashell toaster-robots. We have so much capacity that the trivia expands to fill it. And all that capacity is junk-capacity, it’s leftovers. There’s enough computational capacity in a junkyard to launch a space-program, and that’s by design. Remember the iPod? Why do you think it was so prone to scratching and going all gunky after a year in your pocket? Why would Apple build a handheld technology out of materials that turned to shit if you looked at them cross-eyed? It’s because the iPod was only meant to last a year!

“It’s like tailfins—they were cool in the Tailfin Cretaceous, but wouldn’t it have been better if they could have disappeared from view when they became aesthetically obsolete, when the space age withered up and blew away? Oh, not really, obviously, because it’s nice to see a well-maintained land-yacht on the highway every now and again, if only for variety’s sake, but if you’re going to design something that is meant to be au fait then presumably you should have some planned obsolescence in there, some end-of-lifing strategy for the aesthetic crash that follows any couture movement. Here, check this out.”

He handed her a white brick, the size of a deck of cards. It took her a moment to recognize it as an iPod. “Christ, it’s huge,” she said.

“Yeah, isn’t it just. Remember how small and shiny this thing was when it shipped? ’A thousand songs in your pocket!’”

That made her actually laugh out loud. She fished in her pocket for her earbuds and dropped them on the table where they clattered like M&Ms. “I think I’ve got about 40,000 songs on those. Haven’t run out of space yet, either.”

He rolled the buds around in his palm like a pair of dice. “You won’t—I stopped keeping track of mine after I added my hundred-thousandth audiobook. I’ve got a bunch of the Library of Congress in mine as high-rez scans, too. A copy of the Internet Archive, every post ever made on Usenet... Basically, these things are infinitely capacious, given the size of the media we work with today.” He rolled the buds out on the workbench and laughed. “And that’s just the point! Tomorrow, we’ll have some new extra fat kind of media and some new task to perform with it and some new storage medium that will make these things look like an old iPod. Before that happens, you want this to wear out and scuff up or get lost—”

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

“There you go then! The iPods were too big to lose like that, but just look at them.” The iPod’s chrome was scratched to the point of being fogged, like the mirror in a gas-station toilet. The screen was almost unreadable for all the scratches. “They had scratch-proof materials and hard plastics back then. They chose to build these things out of Saran Wrap and tin-foil so that by the time they doubled in capacity next year, you’d have already worn yours out and wouldn’t feel bad about junking them.

“So I’m building a tape-loading seashell robot toaster out of discarded obsolete technology because the world is full of capacious, capable, disposable junk and it cries out to be used again. It’s a potlatch: I have so much material and computational wealth that I can afford to waste it on frivolous junk. I think that’s why the collectors buy it, anyway.”

“That brings us back to the question of your relationship with Kodacell. They want to do what, exactly, with you?”

“Well, we’ve been playing with some mass-production techniques, the three-d printer and so on. When Kettlebelly called me, he said that he wanted to see about using the scanner and so on to make a lot of these things, at a low price-point. It’s pretty perverse when you think about it: using modern technology to build replicas of obsolete technology rescued from the dump, when these replicas are bound to end up back here at the dump!” He laughed. He had nice laugh-lines around his eyes. “Anyway, it’s something that Lester and I had talked about for a long time, but never really got around to. Too much like retail. It’s bad enough dealing with a couple dozen collectors who’ll pay ten grand for a sculpture: who wants to deal with ten thousand customers who’ll go a dollar each for the same thing?”

“But you figure that this Tjan character will handle all the customer stuff?”

“That’s the idea: he’ll run the business side, we’ll get more time to hack; everyone gets paid. Kodacell’s got some micro-sized marketing agencies, specialized PR firms, creative shippers, all kinds of little three-person outfits that they’ve promised to hook us up with. Tjan interfaces with them, we do our thing, enrich the shareholders, get stock ourselves. It’s supposed to be all upside. Hell, if it doesn’t work we can just walk away and find another dump and go back into the collectors’ market.”

He picked up his half-finished shell and swung a lamp with a magnifying lens built into it over his workspace. “Hey, just a sec, OK? I’ve just figured out what I was doing wrong before.” He took up a little tweezers and a plastic rod and probed for a moment, then daubed some solder down inside the shell’s guts. He tweezed a wire to a contact and the shell made a motorized sound, a peg sticking out of it began to move rhythmically.

“Got it,” he said. He set it down. “I don’t expect I’m going to be doing many more of these projects after next week. This kind of design, we could never mass-produce it.” He looked a little wistful, and Suzanne suppressed a smile. What a tortured artiste this Florida junkyard engineer was!

As the long day drew to a close, they went out for a walk in the twilight’s cool in the yard. The sopping humidity of the day settled around them as the sun set in a long summer blaze that turned the dry fountain full of Christmas ornaments into a luminescent bowl of jewels.

“I got some real progress today,” Lester said. He had a cane with him and he was limping heavily. “Got the printer to output complete mechanical logical gates, all in one piece, Almost no assembly, just daisy-chain them on a board. And I’ve been working on a standard snap-on system for lego-bricking each gate to the next. It’s going to make it a lot easier to ramp up production.”

“Yeah?” Perry said. He asked a technical question about the printer, something about the goop’s tensile strength that Suzanne couldn’t follow. They went at it, hammer and tongs, talking through the abstruse details faster than she could follow, walking more and more quickly past the vast heaps of dead technology and half-built mall stores.

She let them get ahead of her and stopped to gather her thoughts. She turned around to take it all in and that’s when she caught sight of the kids sneaking into Perry and Lester’s lab.

“Hey!” she shouted, in her loudest Detroit voice. “What are you doing there?” There were three of them, in Miami Dolphins jerseys and shiny bald-shaved heads and little shorts, the latest inexplicable rapper style which made them look more like drag queens in mufti than tough-guys.

They rounded on her. They were heavyset and their eyebrows were bleached blond. They had been sneaking into the lab’s side-door, looking about as inconspicuous as a trio of nuns.

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

They were coming closer now. They didn’t move so well, puffing in the heat, but they clearly had mayhem on their minds. She reached into her purse for her pepper spray and held it before her dramatically, but they didn’t stop coming.

Suddenly, the air was rent by the loudest sound she’d ever heard, like she’d put her head inside a foghorn. She flinched and misted a cloud of aerosol capsicum ahead of her. She had the presence of mind to step back quickly, before catching a blowback, but she wasn’t quick enough, for her eyes and nose started to burn and water. The sound wouldn’t stop, it just kept going on, a sound like her head was too small to contain her brain, a sound that made her teeth ache. The three kids had stopped and staggered off.

“You OK?” The voice sounded like it was coming from far, far away, though Lester was right in front of her. She found that she’d dropped to her knees in the teeth of that astonishing noise.

She let him help her to her feet. “Jesus,” she said, putting a hand to her ears. They rang like she’d been at a rave all night. “What the hell?”

“Anti-personnel sonic device,” Lester said. She realized that he was shouting, but she could barely hear it. “It doesn’t do any permanent damage, but it’ll scare off most anyone. Those kids probably live in the shantytown we passed this morning. More and more of them are joining gangs. They’re our neighbors, so we don’t want to shoot them or anything.”

She nodded. The ringing in her ears was subsiding a little. Lester steadied her. She leaned on him. He was big and solid. He wore the same cologne as her father had, she realized.

She moved away from him and smoothed out her shorts, dusting off her knees. “Did you invent that?”

“Made it using a HOWTO I found online,” he said. “Lot of kids around here up to no good. It’s pretty much a homebrew civil defense siren—rugged and cheap.”

She put a finger in each ear and scratched at the itchy buzzing. When she removed them, her hearing was almost back to normal. “I once had an upstairs neighbor in Cambridge who had a stereo system that loud—never thought I’d hear it again.”

Perry came and joined them. “I followed them a bit, they’re way gone now. I think I recognized one of them from the campsite. I’ll talk to Francis about it and see if he can set them right.”

“Have you been broken into before?”

“A few times. Mostly what we worry about is someone trashing the printers. Everything else is easy to replace, but when Lester’s old employer went bust we bought up about fifty of these things at the auction and I don’t know where we’d lay hands on them again. Computers are cheap and it’s not like anyone could really steal all this junk.” He flashed her his good-looking, confident smile again.

“What time do the movies start?”

Lester checked his watch. “About an hour after sunset. If we leave now we can get a real dinner at a Haitian place I know and then head over to the Thunderbird. I’ll hide under a blanket in the back seat so that we can save on admission!”

She’d done that many times as a kid, her father shushing her and her brother as they giggled beneath the blankets. The thought of giant Lester doing it made her chuckle. “I think we can afford to pay for you,” she said.

The dinner was good—fiery spicy fish and good music in an old tiki bar with peeling grass wallpaper that managed to look vaguely Haitian. The waiters spoke Spanish, not French, though. She let herself be talked into two bottles of beer—about one and a half more than she would normally take—but she didn’t get light-headed. The heat and humidity seemed to rinse the alcohol right out of her bloodstream.

They got to the movies just at dusk. It was just like she remembered from being a little girl and coming with her parents. Children in pajamas climbed over a jungle-gym to one side of the lot. Ranked rows of cars faced the huge, grubby white projection walls. They even showed one of those scratchy old “Let’s all go to the lobby and get ourselves a treat” cartoon shorts with the dancing hot-dogs before the movie.

The nostalgia filled her up like a balloon expanding in her chest. She hadn’t ever seen a computer until she was ten years old, and that had been the size of a chest-freezer, with less capability than one of the active printed-computer cards that came in glossy fashion magazines with come-ons for perfume and weight-loss.

The world had been stood on its head so many times in the intervening thirty-plus years that it was literally dizzying—or was that the beer having a delayed effect? Suddenly all the certainties she rested on—her 401k, her house, her ability to navigate the professional world in a competent manner—seemed to be built on shifting sands.

They’d come in Lester’s car, a homemade auto built around two electric Smart cars joined together to form a kind of mini-sedan with room enough for Lester to slide into the driver’s perch with room to spare. Once they arrived, they unpacked clever folding chairs and sat them beside the car, rolled down the windows, and turned up the speakers. It was a warm night, but not sticky the way it had been that day, and the kiss of the wind that rustled the leaves of the tall palms ringing the theater was like balm.

The movie was something forgettable about bumbling detectives on the moon, one of those trendy new things acted entirely by animated dead actors who combined the virtues of box-office draw and cheap labor. There might have been a couple of fictional actors in there too, it was hard to say, she’d never really followed the movies except as a place to escape to. There was real magic and escape in a drive-in, though, with the palpable evidence of all those other breathing humans in the darkened night watching the magic story flicker past on the screen, something that went right into her hindbrain. Before she knew it, her eyelids were drooping and then she found herself jerking awake. This happened a couple times before Lester slipped a pillow under her head and she sank into it and fell into sleep.

She woke at the closing credits and realized that she’d managed to prop the pillow on Lester’s barrel-chest. She snapped her head up and then smiled embarrassedly at him. “Hey, sleepyhead,” he said. “You snore like a bandsaw, you know it?”

She blushed. “I don’t!”

“You do,” he said.

“I do?”

Perry, on her other side nodded. “You do.”

“God,” she said.

“Don’t worry, you haven’t got anything on Lester,” Perry said. “I’ve gone into his room some mornings and found all the pictures lying on the floor, vibrated off their hooks.”

It seemed to her that Lester was blushing now.

“I’m sorry if I spoiled the movie,” she said.

“Don’t sweat it,” Lester said, clearly grateful for the change of subject. “It was a lousy movie anyway. You drowned out some truly foul dialogue.”

“Well, there’s that.”

“C’mon, let’s go back to the office and get you your car. It’s an hour to Miami from here.”

She was wide awake by the time she parked the rent-a-car in the coffin-hotel’s parking lot and crawled into her room, slapping the air-con buttons up to full to clear out the stifling air that had baked into the interior during the day.

She lay on her back in the dark coffin for a long time, eyes open and slowly adjusting to the idiot lights on the control panel, until it seemed that she was lying in a space capsule hurtling through the universe at relativistic speeds, leaving behind history, the world, everything she knew. She sat up, wide awake, on West Coast time suddenly, and there was no way she would fall asleep now, but she lay back down and then she did, finally.

The alarm woke her seemingly five minutes later. She did a couple laps around the parking lot, padding around, stretching her legs, trying to clear her head—her internal clock thought that it was 4AM, but at 7AM on the east coast, the sun was up and the heat had begun to sizzle all the available moisture into the air. She left the hotel and drove around Miami for a while. She needed to find some toiletries and then a cafe where she could sit down and file some copy. She’d tweeted a bunch of working notes and posted a few things to her blog the day before, but her editor expected something more coherent for those who preferred their news a little more digested.

By the time she arrived at Perry’s junkyard, the day had tipped for afternoon, the sun no longer straight overhead, the heat a little softer than it had been the day before. She settled in for another day of watching the guys work, asking the occasional question. The column she’d ended up filing had been a kind of wait-and-see piece, describing the cool culture these two had going between them, and asking if it could survive scaling up to mass production. Now she experimented with their works-in-progress, sculptures and machines that almost worked, or didn’t work at all, but that showed the scope of their creativity. Kettlewell thought that there were a thousand, ten thousand people as creative as these two out there, waiting to be discovered. Could it be true?

“Sure,” Perry said, “why not? We’re just here because someone dropped the barrier to entry, made it possible for a couple of tinkerers to get a lot of materials and to assemble them without knowing a whole lot about advanced materials science. Wasn’t it like this when the Internet was starting out?”

“Woah,” Suzanne said. “I just realized that you wouldn’t really remember those days, back in the early nineties.”

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

She felt very old. “The thing was that no one really suspected that there were so many liberal arts majors lurking in the nation’s universities, dying to drop out and learn perl and HTML.”

Perry cocked his head. “Yeah, I guess that’s analogous. The legacy of the dotcom years for me is all this free infrastructure, very cheap network connections and hosting companies and so on. That, I guess, combined with people willing to use it. I never really thought of it, but there must have been a lot of people hanging around in the old days who thought email and the net were pretty sketchy, right?”

She waved her hands at him. “Perry, lad, you don’t know the half of it. There are still executives in the rustbelt who spend bailout money on secretaries to print out their email and then dictate replies into tape recorders to be typed and sent.”

He furrowed his thick eyebrows. “You’re joking,” he said

She put her hand on her heart. “I kid you not. I knew people in the newsroom at the Detroit Free Press. There are whole industries in this country that are living in the last century.

“Well, for me, all that dotcommie stuff was like putting down a good base, making it easy for people like me to get parts and build-logs and to find hardware hackers to jam with.”

Perry got engrossed in a tricky bit of engine-in-seashell then and she wandered over to Lester, who was printing out more Barbie heads for a much larger version of his mechanical computer. “It’ll be able to add, subtract, and multiply any two numbers up to 99,” he said. “It took decades to build a vacuum-tube machine that could do that much—I’m doing it with switches in just three revs. In your face, UNIVAC!”

She laughed. He had a huge bag of laser-cut soda-can switches that he was soldering onto a variety of substrates from polished car-doors to a bamboo tiki-bar. She looked closely at the solder. “Is this what sweatshop solder looks like?”

He looked confused, then said, “Oh! Right, Perry’s thing. Yeah, anything not done by a robot has this artisanal quality of blobbiness, which I quite like, it’s aesthetic, like a painting with visible brushstrokes. But Perry’s right: if you see solder like this on anything that there are a million of, then you know that it was laid down by kids and women working for slave wages. There’s no way it’s cheaper to make a million solders by hand than by robot unless your labor force is locked in, force-fed amphetamine, and destroyed for anything except prostitution inside of five years. But here, in something like this, so handmade and one of a kind, I think it gives it a nice cargo-cult neoprimitive feel. Like a field of hand-tilled furrows.”

She nodded. Today she was keeping her computer out, writing down quotes and tweeting thoughts as they came. They worked side by side in companionable silence for a while as she killed a couple thousand spams and he laid down a couple dozen blobs of solder.

“How do you like Florida?” he said, after straightening up and cracking his back.

She barely stopped typing, deep into some email: “It’s all right, I suppose.”

“There’s great stuff here if you know where to look. Want me to show you around a little tonight? It’s Friday, after all.”

“Sounds good. Is Perry free?”

It took her a second to register that he hadn’t answered. She looked up and saw he was blushing to the tips of his ears. “I thought we could go out just the two of us. Dinner and a walk around the deco stuff on Miami Beach?”

“Oh,” she said. And the weird thing was, she took it seriously for a second. She hadn’t been on a date in something like a year, and he was a really nice guy and so forth. But professional ethics made that impossible, and besides.

And besides. He was huge. He’d told her he weighed nearly 400 pounds. So fat, he was, essentially, sexless. Round and unshaped, doughy.

All of these thoughts in an instant and then she said, “Oh, well. Listen, Lester, it’s about professional ethics. I’m here on a story and you guys are really swell, but I’m here to be objective. That means no dating. Sorry.” She said it in the same firm tones as she’d used to turn down their offer to treat her at the IHOP: a fact of life, something she just didn’t do. Like turning down a glass of beer by saying, “No thanks, I don’t drink.” No value judgment.

But she could see that she had let her thinking show on her face, if only for the briefest moment. Lester stiffened and his nostrils flared. He wiped his hands on his thighs, then said, in a light tone, “Sure, no problem. I understand completely. Should have thought of that. Sorry!”

“No problem,” she said. She pretended to work on her email a while longer, then said, “Well, I think I’ll call it a day. See you Monday for Tjan’s arrival, right?”

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

She spent the weekend blogging and seeing the beach. The people on the beach seemed to be of another species from the ones she saw walking the streets of Hollywood and Miami and Lauderdale. They had freakishly perfect bodies, the kind of thing you saw in an anatomical drawing or a comic-book—so much muscular definition that they were practically cross-hatched. She even tried out the nude beach, intrigued to see these perfect specimens in the all-together, but she chickened out when she realized that she’d need a substantial wax-job before her body hair was brought down to norms for that strip of sand.

She did get an eyeful of several anatomically correct drawings before taking off again. It made her uncomfortably horny and aware of how long it had been since her last date. That got her thinking of poor Lester, buried underneath all that flesh, and that got her thinking about the life she’d chosen for herself, covering the weird world of tech where the ground never stood still long enough for her to get her balance.

So she retreated to blog in a cafe, posting snippets and impressions from her days with the boys, along with photos. Her readers were all over it, commenting like mad. Half of them thought it was disgusting—so much suffering and waste in the world and these guys were inventing $10,000 toys out of garbage. The other half wanted to know where to go to buy one for themselves. Halfway through Sunday, her laptop battery finally died, needing a fresh weekly charge, so she retreated again, to the coffin, to wait for Monday and the new day that would dawn for Perry and Lester and Kodacell—and her.

Tjan turned out to be a lot older than she’d expected. She’d pictured him as about 28, smart and preppie like they all were when they were fresh out of B-school and full of Management Wisdom. Instead, he was about forty, balding, with a little pot-belly and thinning hair. He dressed like an English professor, blue-jeans and a checked shirt and a tweedy sports-coat that he’d shucked within seconds of leaving the terminal at Miami airport and stepping into the blast-furnace heat.

They’d all come in Lester’s big, crazy car, and squishing back in with Tjan’s suitcases was like a geometry trick. She found herself half on Perry’s lap, hugging half a big duffel-bag that seemed to be full of bricks.

“Books,” Tjan said. “Just a little personal library. It’s a bad habit, moving the physical objects around, but I’m addicted.” He had a calm voice that might in fact be a little dull, a prof’s monotone.

They brought him to Perry and Lester’s place, which was three condos with the dividing walls knocked out in a complex that had long rust-streaks down its sides and rickety balconies that had been eaten away by salt air. There was a guardhouse at the front of the complex, but it was shuttered, abandoned, and graffiti tagged.

Tjan stepped out of the car and put his hands on his hips and considered the building. “It could use a coat of paint,” he said. Suzanne looked closely at him—he was so deadpan, it was hard to tell what was on his mind. But he slipped her a wink.

“Yeah,” Perry said. “It could at that. On the bright side: spacious, cheap and there’s a pool. There’s a lot of this down here since the housing market crashed. The condo association here dissolved about four years ago, so there’s not really anyone who’s in charge of all the common spaces and stuff, just a few condo owners and speculators who own the apartments. Suckers, I’m thinking. Our rent has gone down twice this year, just for asking. I’m thinking we could probably get them to pay us to live here and just keep out the bums and stuff.”

The living quarters were nearly indistinguishable from the workshop at the junkyard: strewn with cool devices in various stages of disassembly, detritus and art. The plates and dishes and glasses all had IHOP and Cracker Barrel logos on them. “From thrift shops,” Lester explained. “Old people steal them when they get their earlybird specials, and then when they die their kids give them to Goodwill. Cheapest way to get a matched set around here.”

Tjan circled the three adjoined cracker-box condos like a dog circling his basket. Finally, he picked an unoccupied master bedroom with moldy lace curtains and a motel-art painting of an abstract landscape over the headboard. He set his suitcase down on the faux-Chinoise chest of drawers and said, “Right, I’m done. Let’s get to work.”