“Next time, we check the weather before we go to the beach,” he said.She laughed and leaned against him and he yelped as she came into contact with his hurt arm. “We got to get you to a hospital,” she said. “Get that looked at.”“You too,” he said, pointing at her thumb. It was all so weird and remote now, as they walked through the Miami streets, back toward the garage. Other shocked people wandered the streets, weirdly friendly, smiling at them like they all shared a secret.The beach-front was in shambles, covered in blown trash and mud, uprooted trees and fallen leaves, broken glass and rolled cars. Perry hit the car radio before they pulled out of the garage. An announcer reported that Tropical Storm Henry had gone about three miles inland before petering out to a mere sun-shower, along with news about the freeways and hospitals being equally jammed.“Huh,” Perry said. “Well, what do we do now?”“Let’s find a hotel room,” Hilda said. “Have showers, get something to eat.”It was a weird and funny idea, and Perry liked it. He’d never played tourist in Florida, but what better place to do so? They gathered their snacks from the back of the car and used the first aid kit in the trunk to tape themselves up.They tried to reach Lester but no one answered. “He’s probably at the ride,” Perry said. “Or balls-deep in reverse-engineering the Disney Box thing. OK, let’s find a hotel room.”Everything on the beach was fully booked, but as they continued inland for a couple blocks, they came upon coffin hotels stacked four or five capsules high, painted gay Miami deco pastels, installed in rows in old storefronts or stuck in street-parking spots, their silvered windows looking out over the deserted boulevards.“Should we?” Perry said, gesturing at them.“If we can get an empty one? Damn right—these things are going to be in serious demand in pretty short order.”Stepping into the coffin hotel transported Perry back to his days on the road, his days staying at coffin hotel after coffin hotel, to his first night with Hilda, in Madison. One look at Hilda told him she felt the same. They washed each other slowly, as though they were underwater, cleaning out one-another’s wounds, sluicing away the caked on mud and grime blown deep into their ears and the creases of their skin, nestled against their scalps.They lay down in bed, naked, together, spooned against one another. “You’re a good man, Perry Gibbons,” Hilda said, snuggling against him, hand moving in slow circles on his tummy.They slept that way and got back on the road long past dark, driving the blasted freeway slowly, moving around the broken glass and blown out tires that remained.The path of the hurricane followed the coast straight to Hollywood, a line of smashed trees and car wrecks and blown-off roofs that made the nighttime drive even more disorienting.They went straight back to the condo, but Lester wasn’t there. Worry nagged at Perry. “Take me to the ride?” he said, after he’d paced the apartment a few times.Hilda looked up from the sofa, where she had collapsed the instant they came through the door, arm flung over her face. “You’re shitting me,” she said. “It’s nearly midnight, and we’ve been in a hurricane.”Perry squirmed. “I’ve got a bad feeling, OK? And I can’t drive myself.” He flapped his busted arm at her.Hilda looked at him, her eyes narrowed. “Look, don’t be a jerk, OK? Lester’s a big boy. He’s probably just out with Suzanne. He’d have called you if there’d been a problem.”He looked at her, bewildered by the ferocity of her response. “OK, I’ll call a cab,” he said, trying for a middle ground.She jumped up from the couch. “Whatever. Fine. Let me get my keys. Jesus.”He had no idea how he’d angered her, but it was clear that he had, and the last thing he wanted was to get into a car with her, but he couldn’t think of a way of saying that without escalating things.So they drove in white-lipped silence to the ride, Hilda tense with anger, Perry tense with worry, both of them touchy as cats, neither saying a word.But when they pulled up to the ride, they both let out a gasp. It was lit with rigged floodlights and car headlights, and it was swarming with people. As they drew closer, they saw that the market stalls were strewn across the parking lot, in smashed pieces. As they drew closer still, they saw that the ride itself was staring eyeless at them, window-glass smashed.Perry was out of the car even before it stopped rolling, Hilda shouting something after him. Lester was just on the other side of the ride-entrance, wearing a paper mask and rubber boots, wading in three-inch deep, scummy water.Perry splashed to a halt. “Holy shit,” he breathed. The ride was lit with glow-sticks, waterproof lamps, and LED torches, and the lights reflected crazily from the still water that filled it as far as the eye could see, way out into the gloom.Lester looked up at him. His face was lined and exhausted, and it gleamed with sweat. “Storm broke out all the windows and trashed the roof, then flooded us out. It did a real number on the market, too.” His voice was dead.Perry was wordless. Bits of the ride-exhibits floated in the water, along with the corpses of the robots.“No drainage,” Lester said. “The code says drainage, but there’s none here. I never noticed it before. I’m going to rig a pump, but my workshop’s pretty much toast.” Lester’s workshop had been in the old garden-center at the side of the ride. It was all glass. “We had some pretty amazing winds.”Perry felt like he should be showing off his wound to prove that he hadn’t been fucking off while the disaster was underway, but he couldn’t bring himself to do so. “We got caught in it in Miami,” he said.“Wondered where you were. The kid who was minding the shop just cut and run when the storm rolled in.”“He did? Christ, what an irresponsible asshole. I’ll break his neck.”A slimy raft of kitchen gnomes—their second business venture—floated past silently in the harsh watery light. The smell was almost unbearable.“It wasn’t his job—” Lester’s voice cracked onjob, and he breathed deeply. “It wasn’t his job, Perry. It was your job. You’re running around, having a good time with your girlfriend, firing lawyers—” He stopped and breathed again. “You know that they’re going to sue us, right? They’re going to turn us into a smoking ruin because you fired them, and what the fuck are you going to do about that? Whose job is that?”“I thought you said they weren’t going to sue,” Perry said. It came out in an embarrassed mumble. Lester had never talked to him like this. Never.“Kettlewell and Tjan aren’t going to sue,” Lester said. “The lawyers you fired, the venture capitalists who backed them? They’re going to turn us into paste.”“What would you have preferred?” Hilda said. She was standing in the doorway, away from the flood, watching them intently. Her eyes were raccoon-bagged, but she was rigid with anger. Perry could hardly look at her. “Would you have preferred to have those fuckers go around destroying the lives of your supporters in order to enrich a few pig assholes?”Lester just looked at her.“Well?”“Shut up, Yoko,” he said. “We’re having a private conversation here.”Perry’s jaw dropped, and Hilda was already in motion, sloshing into the water in her sandals. She smacked Lester across the cheek, a crack that echoed back over the water and walls.Lester brought his hand up to his reddening face. “Are you done?” he said, his voice hard.Hilda looked at Perry. Lester looked at Perry. Perry looked at the water.“I’ll meet you by the car,” Perry said. It came out in a mumble. They held for a moment, the three of them, then Hilda walked out again, leaving Lester and Perry looking at one another.“I’m sorry,” Perry said.“About Hilda? About the lawsuits? About skipping out?”“About everything,” he said. “Let’s fix this up, OK?”“The ride? I don’t even know if I want to. Why bother? It’ll cost a fortune to get it online, and they’ll only shut it down again with the lawsuit. Why bother.”“So we won’t fix the ride. Let’s fix us.”“Why bother,” Lester said, and it came out in the same mumble.The watery sounds of the room and the smell and the harsh reflected rippling light made Perry want to leave. “Lester—” he began.Lester shook his head. “There’s nothing more we can do tonight, anyway. I’ll rent a pump in the morning.”“I’ll do it,” Perry said. “You work on the Disney-in-a-Box thing.”Lester laughed, a bitter sound. “Yeah, OK, buddy. Sure.”Out in the parking-lot, the hawkers were putting their stalls back together as best they could. The shantytown was lit up and Perry wondered how it had held together. Pretty good, is what he guessed—they met and exceeded county code on all of those plans.Hilda honked the horn at him. She was fuming behind the wheel and they drove in silence. He felt numb and wrung out and he didn’t know what to say to her. He lay awake in bed that night waiting to hear Lester come home, but he didn’t.Sammy loved his morning meetings. They all came to his office, all the different park execs, creatives, and emissaries from the old partner companies that had spun off to make movies and merch and educational materials. They all came each day to talk to him about the next day’s Disney-in-a-Box build. They all came to beg him to think about adding in something from their franchises and cantons to the next installment.There were over a million DiaBs in the field now, and they weren’t even trying to keep up with orders anymore. Sammy loved looking at the online auction sites to see what the boxes were going for—he knew that some of his people had siphoned off a carload or two of the things to e-tail out the back door. He loved that. Nothing was a better barometer of your success than having made something other people cared enough about to steal.He loved his morning meetings, and he conducted them with the flair of a benevolent emperor. He’d gotten a bigger office—technically it was a board-room for DiaB strategy, but Sammywasthe DiaB strategy. He’d outfitted it with fan-photos of their DiaB shrines in their homes, with kids watching enthralled as the day’s model was assembled before their eyes. The hypnotic fascination in their eyes was unmistakable. Disney was the focus of their daily lives, and all they wanted was more, more, more. He could push out five models a day, ten, and they’d go nuts for them.But he wouldn’t. He was too cunning. One model a day was all. Leave them wanting more. Never breathe a hint of what the next day’s model would be—oh, how he loved to watch the blogs and the chatter as the models self-assembled, the heated, time-bound fights over what the day’s model was going to be.“Good morning, Ron,” he said. Wiener had been lobbying to get a Main Street build into the models for weeks now, and Sammy was taking great pleasure in denying it to him without shutting down all hope. Getting Ron Wiener to grovel before him every morning was better than a cup of coffee.“I’ve been thinking about what you said, and you’re right,” Wiener said. He always started the meeting by telling Sammy how right he was to reject his last idea. “The flag-pole and marching-band scene would have too many pieces. House cats would knock it over. We need something more unitary, more visually striking. So here’s what I’ve been thinking: what about the fire-engine?”Sammy raised an indulgent eyebrow.“Kidslovefire trucks. All the colors are in the printer’s gamut—I checked. We could create a Mickey-and-Friends fire-crew to position around it, a little barn for it.”“The only thing I liked about firetrucks when I was a kid was that the word started with ’f’ and ended with ’uck’—” Sammy smiled when he said it, and waited for Wiener to fake hilarity, too. The others in the room—other park execs, some of their licensing partners, a few advertisers—laughed too. Officially, this was a “brainstorming session,” but everyone knew that it was all about getting the nod from Sammy.Wiener laughed dutifully and slunk away. More supplicants came forward.“How about this?” She was very cute—dressed in smart, dark clothes that were more Lower East Side than Orlando. She smelled good, too—one of the new colognes that hinted at free monomers, like hot plastic or a new-bought tire. Cat-slanted green eyes completed the package.“What you got there?” She was from an ad agency, someone Disney Parks had done business with at some point. Agencies had been sending their people to these meetings too, trying to get a co-branding coup for one of their clients.“It’s a series of three, telling a little story. Beginning, middle and end. The first one is a family sitting down to breakfast, and you can see, it’s the same old crap, boring microwave omelets and breakfast puddings. Mom’s bored, dad’s more bored, and sis and brother here are secretly dumping theirs onto mom’s and dad’s plates. All this stuff is run using the same printers, so it looks very realistic.”It did indeed. Sammy hadn’t thought about it, but he supposed it was only natural that the omelets were printed—how else could General Mills get that uniformity? He should talk to some of the people in food services about getting some of that tech to work at the parks.“So in part two, they’re setting up the kitchen around this mystery box—one part Easy-Bake lightbulb oven, one part Tardis. You know what that is?”Sammy grinned. “Why yes, I believe I do.” Their eyes met in a fierce look of mutual recognition. “It’s a breakfast printer, isn’t it?” The other supplicants in the room sucked in a collective breath. Some chuckled nervously.“It’s about moving the apparatus to the edge. Bridging the last mile. Why not? This one will do waffles, breakfast cereals, bagels and baked goods, small cakes. New designs every day—something for mom and dad, something for the kids, something for the sullen teens. We’re already doing this at the regional plants and distributorships, on much larger scales. But getting our stuff into consumers’ homes, getting themsubscribedto our food—”Sammy held up a hand. “I see,” he said. “And our people are already primed for home-printing experiences. They’re right in your sweet spot.”“Part three, Junior and little sis are going cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, but these things are shapedlike them, with their portraits on each sugar-lump. Mom and dad are eating tres sophistique croissants and delicate cakes. Look at Rover here, with his own cat-shaped dog-biscuit. See how happy they all are?”Sammy nodded. “Shouldn’t this all be under nondisclosure?” he said.“Probably, but what are you gonna do? You guys are pretty good at keeping secrets, and if you decide to shaft us by selling out to one of our competitors, we’re probably dead, anyway. I’ll be able to ship out half a million units in the first week, then we can ramp production if need be—lots of little parts-and-assembly subcontractors will take the work if we offer.”Sammy liked the way she talked. Like someone who didn’t need to spend a lot of time screwing around, planning, like someone who could just make it happen.“You’re launching when?”“Three days after you start running this campaign,” she said, without batting an eyelash.“My name’s Sammy,” he said. “How’s Thursday?”“Launch on Sunday?” She shook her head. “It’s tricky, Sunday launches. Gotta pay everyone scale-and-a-half.” She gave him a wink. “What the hell, it’s not my money.” She stuck out her hand. She was wearing a couple of nice chunky obsidian rings in abstract curvy shapes, looking a little porny in their suggestion of breasts and thighs. He shook her hand and it was warm and dry and strong.“Well, that’s this week taken care of,” Sammy said, and pointedly cleared the white-board surface running the length of the table. The others groaned and got up and filed out. The woman stayed behind.“Dinah,” she said. She handed him a card and he noted the agency. Dallas-based, not New York, but he could tell she was a transplant.“You got any breakfast plans?” It was hardly gone 9AM—Sammy liked to get these meetings started early. “I normally get something sent in, but your little prototypes there...”She laughed. It was a pretty laugh. She was a couple years older than him, and she wore it well. “Do I have breakfast plans? Sammy my boy, I’m nothingbutbreakfast plans! I have a launch on Sunday, remember?”“Heh. Oh yeah.”“I’m on the next flight to DFW,” she said. “I’ve got a cab waiting to take me to the airport.”“I wonder if you and I need to talk over some details,” Sammy said.“Only if you want to do it in the taxi.”“I was thinking we could do it on the plane,” he said.“You’re going to buy a ticket?”“On my plane,” he said. They’d given him use of one of the company jets when he started really ramping production on the DiaBs.“Oh yes, I think that can be arranged,” she said. “It’s Sammy, right?”“Right,” he said. They left the building and had an altogether lovely flight to Dallas. Very productive.Lester hadn’t left Suzanne’s apartment in days. She’d rented a place in the shantytown—bemused at the idea of paying rent to a squatter, but pleased to have a place of her own now that Lester and Perry’s apartment had become so tense.Technically, he was working on the Disney printers, which she found interesting in an abstract way. They had a working one and a couple of disassembled ones, and watching the working one do its thing was fascinating for a day or two, but then it was just a three-d TV with one channel, broadcasting one frame per day.She dutifully wrote about it, though, and about Perry’s ongoing efforts to re-open the ride. She got the sense from him that he was heading for flat-ass broke. Lester and he had always been casual about money, but buying all new robots, more printers, replacement windows, fixing the roof—none of it was cheap. And with the market in pieces, he wasn’t getting any rent.She looked over Lester’s shoulder for the fiftieth time. “How’s it going?”“Don’t write about this, OK?”He’d never said that to her.“I’ll embargo it until you ship.”He grunted. “Fine, I guess. OK, well, I’ve got it running on generic goop, that part was easy. I can also load my own designs, but that requires physical access to the thing, in order to load new firmware. They don’t make it easy, which is weird. It’s like they don’t plan on updating it once it’s in the field—maybe they just plan on replacing them at regular intervals.”“Why’s the firmware matter to you?”“Well, that’s where it stores information about where to get the day’s designs. If we’re going to push our own designs to it, we need to give people an easy way to tell it to tune in to our feed, and the best way to do that is to change the firmware. The alternative would be, oh, I don’t know, putting another machine upstream of it to trick it into thinking that it’s accessing their site when it’s really going to ours. That means getting people to configure another machine—no one but a few hardcore geeks will want to do that.”Suzanne nodded. She wondered if “a few hardcore geeks” summed up the total audience for this project in any event. She didn’t mention it, though. Lester’s brow was so furrowed you could lose a dime in the crease above his nose.“Well, I’m sure you’ll get it,” she said.“Yeah. It’s just a matter of getting at the boot-loader. I could totally do this if I could get at the boot-loader.”Suzanne knew what a boot-loader was, just barely. The thing that chose which OS to load when you turned it on. She wondered if every daring, sexy technology project started like this, a cranky hacker muttering angrily about boot-loaders.Suzanne missed Russia. She’d had a good life there, covering the biotech scene. Those hackers were a lot scarier than Lester and Perry, but they were still lovable and fascinating in their own way. Better than the Ford and GM execs she used to have to cozy up to.She’d liked the manic hustle of Russia, the glamour and the squalor. She’d bought a time-share dacha that she could spend weekends at, and the ex-pats in Petersburg had rollicking parties and dinners where they took apart the day’s experiences on Planet Petrograd.“I’m going out, Lester,” she said. Lester looked up from the DiaB and blinked a few times, then seemed to rewind the conversation.“Hey,” he said. “Oh, hey. Sorry, Suzanne. I’m just—I’m trying to work instead of think these days. Thinking just makes me angry. I don’t know what to do—” He broke off and thumped the side of the printer.“How’s Perry getting on with rebuilding?”“He’s getting on,” Lester said. “As far as I know. I read that the Death Waits kid and his people had come by to help. Whatever that means.”“He freaks me out,” Suzanne said. “I mean, I feel terrible for him, and he seemed nice enough in the hospital. But all those people—the way they follow him around. It’s just weird. Like the charismatic cults back home.” She realized she’d just called Russia “home” and it made her frown. Just how long was she going to stay here with these people, anyway?Lester hadn’t noticed. “I guess they all feel sorry for him. And they like what he has to say about stories. I just can’t get a lot of spit in my mouth over the ride these days, though. It feels like something we did and completed and should move on from.”Suzanne didn’t have anything to say, and Lester wasn’t particularly expecting anything, he was giving off a palpable let-me-work vibe, so she let herself out of the apartment—her apartment!—and headed out into the shantytown. On the way to the ride, she passed the little tea-house where Kettlewell and Tjan had done their scheming and she suddenly felt very, very old. The only grownup on-site.She was about to cross the freeway to the ride when her phone rang. She looked at the face and then nearly dropped it. Freddy was calling her.“Hello, Suzanne,” he said. The gloat in his voice was unmistakable. He had something really slimy up his sleeve.“How can I help you?”“I’m calling for comment on a story,” he said. “It’s my understanding that your lad, Perry, pitched a tantie and fired the business-managers of the ride, and has told the lawyers representing him against Disney that he intends to drop the suit.”“Is there a question in there?”“Oh, there are many questions in there, my darling. For starters, I wondered how it could possibly be true if you haven’t written about it on your little ’blog’—” even over the phone, she could hear the sarcastic quotes. “—You seem to be quite comprehensive in documenting the undertakings of your friends down there in Florida.”“Are you asking me to comment on why I haven’t commented?”“For starters.”“Have you approached Perry for a comment?”“I’m afraid he was rather abrupt. And I couldn’t reach his Valkyrie of the Midwest, either. So I’m left calling on you, Suzanne. Any comment?”Suzanne stared across the road at the ride. She’d been gassed there, chased by armed men, watched a war there.“The ride doesn’t have much formal decision-making process,” she said finally. “That means that words like ’fired’ don’t really apply here. The boys might have a disagreement about the best way to proceed, but if that’s the case, you’ll have to talk to them about it.”“Are you saying that you don’t know if your boyfriend’s best friend is fighting with his business partners? Don’t you all live together?”“I’m saying that if you want to find out what Lester and Perry are doing, you’ll have to ask Lester and Perry.”“And the living together thing?”“We don’t live together,” she said. It was technically true.“Really?” Freddy said.“Do we have a bad connection?”“You don’t live together?”“No.”“Where do you live then?”“My place,” she said. “Have your informants been misinforming you? I hope you haven’t been paying for your information, Freddy. I suppose you don’t, though. I suppose there’s no end of cranks who really enjoy spiteful gossip and are more than happy to email you whatever fantasies they concoct.”Freddy tsked. “And you don’t know what’s happened to Kettlewell and Tjan?”“Have you asked them?”“I will,” he said. “But since you’re the ranking reporter on the scene.”“I’m just a blogger, Freddy. A busy blogger. Good afternoon.”The call left her shaking, though she was proud of how calm she’d kept her voice. What a goddamned troll. And she was going to have to write about this now.There were ladders leaned up against the edge of the ride, and a motley crew of roofers and glaziers on them and on the roof, working to replace the gaping holes the storm had left. The workers mostly wore black and had dyed hair and lots of metal flashing from their ears and faces as they worked. A couple had stripped to the waist, revealing full-back tattoos or even more piercings and subcutaneous implants, like armor running over their spines and shoulder-blades. A couple of boom-boxes blasted out grinding, incoherent music with a lot of electronic screams.Around the ride, the market-stalls were coming back, rebuilt from a tower of fresh-sawed lumber stacked in the parking-lot. This was a lot more efficient, with gangs of vendors quickly sawing the lumber to standard sizes, slapping each one with a positional sensor, then watching the sensor’s lights to tell them when it was properly lined up with its mates, and then slipping on corner-clips that held it all together. Suzanne watched as a whole market stall came together this way, in the space of five minutes, before the vendors moved on to their next stall. It was like a high-tech version of an Amish barn-raising, performed by bandanna-clad sketchy hawkers instead of bearded technophobes.She found Perry inside, leaning over a printer, tinkering with its guts, LED torches clipped to the temples of his glasses. He was hampered by having only one good arm, and he pressed her into service passing him tools for a good fifteen minutes before he straightened up and really looked at her.“You come down to help out?”“To write about it, actually.”The room was a hive of activity. A lot of goth kids of various ages and degrees of freakiness, a few of the squatter kids, some people she recognized from the second coming of Death Waits. She couldn’t see Death Waits, though.“Well, that’s good.” He powered up the printer and the air filled with the familiar smell of Saran-Wrap-in-a-microwave. She had an eerie flashback to her first visit to this place, when they’d showed her how they could print mutated, Warhol-ized Barbie heads. “How’s Lester getting on with cracking that printer?”Why don’t you ask him yourself?She didn’t say it. She didn’t know why Lester had come to her place after the flood instead of going home, why he stiffened up and sniffed when she mentioned Perry’s name, why he looked away when she mentioned Hilda.“Something about firmware.”He straightened his back more, making it pop and gave her his devilish grin, the one where his wonky eyebrow went up and down. “It’s always firmware,” he said, and laughed a little. Maybe they were both remembering those old days, the Boogie Woogie Elmos.“Looks like you’ve got a lot of help,” Suzanne said, getting out a little steno pad and a pen.Perry nodded at it, and she was struck by how many times they’d stood like this, a few feet apart, her pen poised over her pad. She’d chronicled so much of this man’s life.“They’re good people, these folks. Some of them have some carpentry or electronics experience, the rest are willing to learn. It’s going faster than I thought it would. Lots of support from out in the world, too—people sending in cash to help with replacement parts.”“Have you heard from Kettlewell or Tjan?”The light went out of his face. “No,” he said.“How about from the lawyers?”“No comment,” he said. It didn’t sound like a joke.“Come on, Perry. People are starting to ask questions. Someone’s going to write about this. Do you want your side told or not?”“Not,” he said, and disappeared back into the guts of the printer.She stared at his back for a long while before turning on her heel, muttering, “Fuck,” and walking back out into the sunshine. There’d been a musty smell in the ride, but out here it was the Florida smell of citrus and car-fumes, and sweat from the people around her, working hard, trying to wrest a living from the world.She walked back across the freeway to the shantytown and ran into Hilda coming the other way. The younger woman gave her a cool look and then looked away, and crossed.That was just about enough, Suzanne thought. Enough playtime with the kids. Time to go find some grownups. She wasn’t here for her health. If Lester didn’t want to hang out with her, if Perry had had enough of her, it was time to go do something else.She went back to her room, where Lester was still working on his DiaB project. She took out her suitcase and packed with the efficiency of long experience. Lester didn’t notice, not even when she took the blouse she’d hand-washed and hung to dry on the back of his chair, folded it and put it in her suitcase and zipped it shut.She looked at his back working over the bench for a long time. He had a six-pack of chocolate pudding beside him, and a wastebasket overflowing with food wrappers and boxes. He shifted in his seat and let out a soft fart.She left. She paid the landlady through the end of the week. She could send Lester an email later.The cab took her to Miami. It wasn’t until she got to the airport that she realized she had no idea where she was going. Boston? San Francisco? Petersburg? She opened her laptop and began to price out last minute tickets. The rush of travelers moved around her and she was jostled many times.The standby sites gave her a thousand options—Miami to JFK to Heathrow to Petersburg, Miami to Frankfurt to Moscow to Petersburg, Miami to Dallas to San Francisco.... The permutations were overwhelming, especially since she wasn’t sure where she wanted to be.Then she heard something homey and familiar: a large group of Russian tourists walking past, talking loudly in Russian, complaining about the long flight, the bad food, and the incompetence of their tour operator. She smiled to see the old men with their high-waisted pants and the old women with their bouffant hair.She couldn’t help but eavesdrop—at their volume, she would have been hard-pressednotto listen in. A little boy and girl tore ass around the airport, under the disapproving glares from DHS goons, and they screamed as they ran, “Disney World! Disney World! Disney World!”She’d never been—she’d been to a couple of the kitschy Gulag parks in Russia, and she’d grown up with Six Flags coaster parks and Ontario Place and the CNE in Toronto, not far from Detroit. But she’d never been to The Big One, the place that even now managed to dominate the world’s consciousness of theme-parks.She asked her standby sites to find her a room in a Disney hotel instead, looking for an inclusive rate that would get her onto the rides and pay for her meals. These were advertised at roadside kiosks at 100-yard intervals on every freeway in Florida, so she suspected they were the best deal going.A moment of browsing showed her that she’d guessed wrong. A week in Disney cost a heart-stopping sum of money—the equivalent of six months’ rent in Petersburg. How did all these Russians afford this trip? What the hell compelled people to part with these sums?She was going to have to find out. It was research. Plus she needed a vacation.She booked in, bought a bullet-train ticket, and grabbed the handle of her suitcase. She examined her welcome package as she waited for the train. She was staying at something called the Polynesian Resort hotel, and the brochure showed a ticky-tacky tiki-themed set of longhouses set on an ersatz white-sand beach, with a crew of Mexican and Cuban domestic workers in leis, Hawai’ian shirts, and lava-lavas waving and smiling. Her package included a complimentary luau—the pictures made it clear this was nothing like the tourist luaus she’d attended in Maui. On top of that, she was entitled to a “character breakfast” with a wage-slave in an overheated plush costume, and an hour with a “resort counsellor” who’d help her plan her trip for maximal fun.The bullet-train came and took on the passengers, families bouncing with anticipation, joking and laughing in every language spoken. These people had just come through a US Customs checkpoint and they were acting like the world was a fine place. She decided there must be something to this Disney business.Death Waits waited, and waited and waited for the ride to come back online. He split his days between hanging out at home, writing about the story, running the fly-throughs from the other rides, watching what was happening in Brazil, answering his fan-mail; the rest of the time he spent with his new friends down at the site of the ride, encouraging them to pitch in and help Perry and Lester to get the thing back up and running. Fast, please. It was driving him bonkers not to be able to ride any longer. After everything he’d been through, he deserved a ride.His friends were wonderful. Wonderful! Lacey especially. She was a nurse and a goddess of mercy. The money that flooded into his paypals whenever his friends let it be known that he needed more covered all his expenses. He never wanted for companionship, conversation, helpmeets, or respect. It was a wonderful life.If only the ride would come online.He woke next to Lacey, she asleep still, her hair spread out across the pillow in a fall of shiny black with blue highlights—she’d given him a matching dye-job a few days before and they looked like a matched set now. He let his hands lazily trace her soft skin, the outlines of her tattoos, her implants and piercings. He felt a stirring between his legs.Lacey yawned and woke and kissed him. “Good morning, my handsome man,” she said.“Good morning, my beautiful woman. What’s the plan for today?”“Whatever you want,” she said.“Breakfast, then down to the ride,” he said. “I’ll do my email and writing there today.”“Something before breakfast?” she asked, with a lopsided smile that was adorable.“Oh yes, please,” he said, his voice breathy.The smell at the Wal-Mart was overpowering. It was one part sharp mold, one part industrial disinfectant, a citrus smell that made your eyes water and your sinuses burn.“I’ve rented some big blowers,” Perry said. “They’ll help air the place out. If that doesn’t work, I might have to resurface the floor, which would be rough—it could take a week to get that done properly.”“A week?” Death said. Jesus. No way. Not another week. He didn’t know it for sure, but he had a feeling that a lot of these people would stop showing up eventually if there was no ride for them to geek out over. He sure would.“You smell that? We can’t close the doors and the windows and leave it like this.”Death’s people, standing around them, listening in, nodded. It was true. You’d melt people’s lungs if you shut them up with these fumes.“How can I help?” Death said. It was his constant mantra with Perry. Sometimes he didn’t think Perry liked him very much, and it was good to keep on reminding him that Death and his buddies were here to be part of the solution. That Perry needed them.“The roof is just about done, the robots are back online. The dividers should be done today. I’ve got the chairs stripped down for routine maintenance, I could use a couple people for that.”“What’s Lester working on?” Death said.“You’d have to ask him.”Death hadn’t seen Lester in days, which was weird. He hoped Lester didn’t dislike him. He worried a lot about whether people liked him these days. He’d thought that Sammy liked him, after all.“Where is he?”“Don’t know.”Perry put dark glasses on.Death Waits took the hint. “Come on,” he said to Lacey, who patted him on the hand as he lifted up in his chair and rolled out to the van. “Let’s just call him.”“Lo?”“It’s Death Waits. We’re down at the ride, but there’s not much to do around here. I thought maybe we could help you with whatever you were working on?”“What do you know about what I’m working on?” Lester said.“Um. Nothing.”“So how do you know you want to help?”Death Waits closed his eyes. He wanted to help these two. They’d made something important, didn’t they know that?“What are you working on?”“Nothing,” Lester said.“Come on,” Death said. “Come on. We just want to pitch in. I love you guys. You changed my life. Let me contribute.”Lester snorted. “Cross the road, go straight for two hundred yards, turn left at the house with the Cesar Chavez mural, and I’ll meet you there.”“You mean go into the—” Death didn’t know what it was called. He always tried not to look at it when he came to the ride. That slum across the road. He knew it was somehow connected with the ride, but in the same way that the administrative buildings at Disney were connected with the parks. The big difference was that Disney’s extraneous buildings were shielded from view by berms and painted go-away green. The weird town across the road wasright there.“Yeah, across the road into the shantytown.”“OK,” Death said. “See you soon.” He hung up and patted Lacey’s hand. “We’re going over there,” he said, pointing into the shantytown.“Is it safe?”He shrugged. “I guess so.” He loved his chair, loved how tall it made him, loved how it turned him into a half-ton cyborg who could raise up on his rear wheels and rock back and forth like a triffid. Now he felt very vulnerable—a crippled cyborg whose apparatus cost a small fortune, about to go into a neighborhood full of people who were technically homeless.“Should we drive?”“I think we can make it across,” he said. Traffic was light, though the cars that bombed past were doing 90 or more. He started to gather up a few more of his people, but reconsidered. It was a little scary to be going into the town, but he couldn’t afford to freak out Lester by showing up with an entourage.The guardrail shielding the town had been bent down and flattened and the chair wheeled over it easily, with hardly a bump. As they crossed this border, they crossed over to another world. There were cooking smells—barbecue and Cuban spices—and a little hint of septic tank or compost heap. The buildings didn’t make any sense to Death’s eye, they curved or sloped or twisted or leaned and seemed to be made of equal parts pre-fab cement and aluminum and scrap lumber, laundry lines, power lines, and graffiti.Death was used to drawing stares, even before he became a cyborg with a beautiful woman beside him, but this was different. There were eyes everywhere. Little kids playing in the street—hadn’t these people heard of stranger danger—stopped to stare at him with big shoe-button eyes. Faces peered out of windows from the ground on up to the third storey. Voices whispered and called.Lacey gave them her sunniest smile and even waved at the little kids, and Death tried nodding at some of the homeys staring at him from the window of what looked like a little diner.Death hadn’t known what to expect from this little town, but he certainly hadn’t pictured so many little shops. He realized that he thought of shops as being somehow civilized—tax paying, license-bearing entities with commercial relationships with suppliers, with cash-registers and employees. Not lawless and wild.But every ground-floor seemed to have at least a small shop, advertised with bright OLED pixel-boards that showed rotating enticements—Productos de Dominica, Beautiful for Ladies, OFERTA!!!, Fantasy Nails. He passed twenty different shops in as many steps, some of them seemingly nothing more than a counter recessed into the wall with a young man sitting behind it, grinning at them.Lacey stopped at one and bought them cans of coffee and small Mexican pastries dusted with cinnamon. He watched a hundred pairs of eyes watch Lacey as she drew out her purse and paid. At first he thought of the danger, but then he realized that if anyone was to mug them, it would be in full sight of all these people.It was a funny thought. He’d grown up in sparse suburbs where you’d never see anyone walking or standing on the sidewalks or their porches. Even though it was a “nice” neighborhood, there were muggings and even killings at regular, horrific intervals. Walking there felt like taking your life into your hands.Here, in this crowded place with a human density like a Disney park, it felt somehow safer. Weird.They came to what had to be the Cesar Chavez mural—a Mexican in a cowboy hat standing like a preacher on the tailgate of a truck, surrounded by more Mexicans, farmer-types in cotton shirts and blue-jeans and cowboy hats. They turned left and rounded a corner into a little cul-de-sac with a confusion of hopscotches chalked onto the ground, ringed by parked bicycles and scooters. Lester stood among them, eating a churro in a piece of wax-paper.“You seem to be recovering quickly,” he said, sizing up Death in his chair. “Good to see it.” He seemed a little distant, which Death chalked up to being interrupted.“It’s great to see you again,” Death said. “My friends and I have been coming by the ride every day, helping out however we can, but we never see you there, so I thought I’d call you.”“You’d call me.”“To see if we could help,” Death said. “With whatever you’re doing.”“Come in,” Lester said. He gestured behind him and Death noticed for the first time the small sign that saidHOTEL ROTHSCHILD,with a stately peacock behind it.The door was a little narrow for his rolling chair, but he managed to get it in with a little back-and-forth, but once inside, he was stymied by the narrow staircase leading up to the upper floors. The lobby—such as it was—was completely filled by him, Lacey and Lester, and even if the chair could have squeezed up the stairs, it couldn’t have cornered to get there.Lester looked embarrassed. “Sorry, I didn’t think of that. Um. OK, I could rig a winch and hoist the chair up if you want. We’d have to belt you in, but it’s do-able. There are masts for pulleys on the top floor—it’s how they get the beds into the upper stories.”“I can get up on canes,” Death Waits said. “Is it safe to leave my chair outside, though?”Lester’s eyebrows went up. “Well of course—sure it is.” Death felt weird for having asked. He backed the chair out and locked the transmission, feeling silly. Who was going to hot-wire a wheelchair? He was such a dork. Lacey handed him his canes and he stood gingerly. He’d been making his way to the bathroom and back on canes all week, but he hadn’t tried stairs yet. He hoped Lester wasn’t too many floors up.Lester turned out to be on the third floor, and by the time they reached it, Death Waits was dripping sweat and his eyeliner had run into his eyes. Lacey dabbed at him with her gauzy scarf and fussed over him. Death caught Lester looking at the two of them with a little smirk, so he pushed Lacey away and steadied his breathing with an effort.“OK,” he said. “All done.”“Great,” Lester said. “This is what I’m working on. You talked to Perry about it before, right? The Disney-in-a-Box printers. Well, I’ve cracked it. We can load our own firmware onto it—just stick it on a network with a PC, and the PC will find it and update it. Then it becomes an open box—it’ll accept anyone’s goop. You can send it your own plans.”Death hadn’t seen a DiaB in person yet. Beholding it and knowing that he was the reason that Lester and Perry were experimenting with it in the first place made him feel a sense of excitement he hadn’t felt since the goth rehab of Fantasyland began.“So how does this tie in to the ride?” Death asked. “I was thinking of building rides in miniature, but at that scale, will it really impress people? No, I don’t think so.“So instead I was thinking that we could just push out details from the ride, little tabletop-sized miniatures showing a piece every day. Maybe whatever was newest. And you could have multiple feeds, you know, like an experimental trunk for objects that people in one region liked—”Lester was shaking his head and holding up his hands. “Woah, wait a second. No, no, no—” Death was used to having his friends hang on his every word when he was talking about ideas for the ride and the story, so this brought him up short. He reminded himself who he was talking to.“Sorry,” he said. “Got ahead of myself.”“Look,” Lester said, prodding at the printer. “This thing is its own thing. We’re about more than the ride here. I know you really like it, and that’s very cool, but there’s no way that everything I do from now on is going to be about that fucking thing. It was a lark, it’s cool, it’s got its own momentum. But these boxes are going to be their own thing. I want to show people how to take control of the stuff in their living rooms, not advertise my little commercial project to them.”Death couldn’t make sense out of this. It sounded like Lester didn’tlikethe ride. How was that possible? “I don’t get it,” he said at last. Lester was making him look like an idiot in front of Lacey, too. He didn’t like how this was going at all.Lester picked up a screwdriver. “You see this? It’s a tool. You can pick it up and you can unscrew stuff or screw stuff in. You can use the handle for a hammer. You can use the blade to open paint cans. You can throw it away, loan it out, or paint it purple and frame it.” He thumped the printer. “This thing is a tool, too, but it’s notyourtool. It belongs to someone else—Disney. It isn’t interested in listening to you or obeying you. It doesn’t want to give you more control over your life.“This thing reminds me of life before fatkins. It was my very own personal body, but it wasn’t under my control. What’s the word the academics use? ‘Agency.’ I didn’t have any agency. It didn’t matter what I did, I was just this fat thing that my brain had to lug around behind it, listening to its never-ending complaints and aches and pains.“If you don’t control your life, you’re miserable. Think of the people who don’t get to run their own lives: prisoners, reform-school kids, mental patients. There’s something inherently awful about living like that. Autonomy makes us happy.”He thumped the top of the printer again. “So here’s this stupid thing, which Disney gives you for free. It looks like a tool, like a thing that you use to better your life, but in reality, it’s a tool that Disney uses to control your life. You can’t program it. You can’t change the channel. It doesn’t even have anoff switch. That’s what gets me exercised. I want to redesign this thing so it gets converted from something that controls to something that gives you control.”Lester’s eyes shone. Death hurt from head to toe, from the climb and the aftermath of the beating, and the life he’d lived. Lester was telling him that the ride wasn’t important to him anymore, that he’d be doing this other thing with the printer next, and then something else, and then something else. He felt a great, unexpected upwelling of bitterness at the thought.“So what about the ride?”“The ride? I told you. I’m done with it. It’s time to do the next thing. You said you wanted to help out, right?”“With the ride,” Death said patiently, with the manner of someone talking to a child.Lester turned his back on Death.“I’m done with the ride,” Lester said. “I don’t want to waste your time.” It was clear he meant,You’re wasting my time.He bent over the printer.Lacey looked daggers at his shoulders, then turned to help Death down the stairs. His canes clattered on the narrow staircase, and it was all he could do to keep from crying.Suzanne rode the bullet-train from Miami airport in air-conditioned amusement, watching the Mickey-shaped hang-straps rock back and forth. She’d bought herself a Mickey waffle and a bucket-sized Diet Coke in the dining car and fended off the offers of plush animatronic toys that were clearly descended from Boogie-Woogie Elmo.Now she watched the kids tear ass up and down the train, or sit mesmerized by the videos and interactives set up at the ends of the cars. The train was really slick, and judging from the brochure she found in the seat-pocket, there was another one from the Orlando airport. These things were like chutes leading from the luggage carousel straight into the parks. Disney had figured out how to make sure that every penny spent by its tourists went straight into its coffers.The voice-over announcements as they pulled into the station were in English, Chinese, Spanish, Farsi and Russian—in that order—and displayed on the porters’ red coats with brass buttons were name-badges with the flags of many nations, denoting the languages they spoke. They wore mouse-ears, and Suzanne—a veteran of innumerable hotels—could not dissuade one from taking her suitcase.He brought her to a coach-station and saw her aboard a bus marked for the Polynesian, decorated with tiki-lamps, bamboo, and palm-fronds (she touched one and discovered that it was vinyl). He refused her tip as they saw her aboard, and then stood and waved her off with his white gloves and giant white smile. She had to chuckle as she pulled away, amazed at how effective these little touches were. She felt her muscles loosening, little involuntary chuckles rising in her throat. The coach was full of parents and children from all over the world, grinning and laughing and hugging and talking excitedly about the day ahead of them.The coach let them off to a group of Hawai’ian-shirt-clad staff who shouted “Aloha!” at them as they debarked, and picked up their luggage with swift, cheerful, relentless efficiency. Her check-in was so painless she wasn’t sure it was over until a nice young lady who looked Chechen picked up her bag for her and urged her out to the grounds, which were green and lush, like nothing she’d seen since landing in Florida. She was surrounded by the hotel structures, long-houses decorated with Polynesian masks and stalked by leggy ibises and chirping tropical birds. Before her was a white-sand beach fronting onto an artificial lake ringed with other luxury hotels: a gigantic 1970s Soviet A-frame building and a gingerbread-choked Victorian hotel. The lake was ringed with a monorail track and plied by handsome paddle-wheeler ferry-boats.She stared gape-jawed at this until the bellhop gently tugged at her elbow, giving her a dazzling smile.Her room was the kind of thing you’d see Lucy and Ricky checking into on honeymoon in an oldI Love Lucyepisode—wicker ceiling fans, bamboo furniture, a huge hot-tub shaped like a seashell. Outside, a little terrace looking over the lake, with a pair of cockatoos looking quizzically at her. The bellhop waved at them and they cawed at her and flew off. Suzanne must have made a disappointed noise, because the bellhop patted her on the arm and said, “Don’t worry, we feed them here, they come back all the time. Greedy birdies!”She tipped the bellhop five bucks once she’d been given the grand tour of the room—a tame Internet connection that was “kid-friendly” and a likewise censored video-on-demand service, delivery pizza or sushi, information on park hours, including the dazzling array of extras she could purchase. It turned out that resort guests were eligible to purchase priority passes for boarding rides ahead of the plebes, and for entering parks early and staying late. This made Suzanne feel right at home—it was very Russian in its approach: the more you spent, the better your time was.She bought it all: all the fast-passes and priority cards, all of it loaded into a grinning Mickey on a lanyard, a wireless pendant that would take care of her everywhere she went in the park, letting her spend money like water.Thus girded, she consulted with her bellhop some more and laid out an itinerary. Once she’d showered she found she didn’t want to wear any of her European tailored shorts and blouses. She wanted to disappear into the Great American Mass. The hotel gift shop provided her with a barkcloth Hawai’ian shirt decorated with tessellated Disney trademarks and a big pair of loose shorts, and once she donned them, she saw that she could be anyone now, any tourist in the park. A pair of cheap sunglasses completed the look and she paid for it all by waving her Mickey necklace at the register, spending money like water.She passed the rest of the day at the Magic Kingdom, taking a ferry from the hotel’s pier to the Victorian wrought-iron docks on the other side of the little artificial lake. As she cleared the turnstiles into Main Street, USA, her heart quickened. Kids rushed past her, chased by their parents’ laughing calls to slow down. Balloon sellers and old-fashioned popcorn machines jostled for space in the crowd, and a brass band was marching down the street in straw boaters and red striped jackets, playing a Sousa march.She ambled up the road, peering in the adorable little shop windows, like the shops in a fancy casino, all themed artificial facades that were, in back, all one shop, linked through the length of the street.She reached the castle before she realized it, and saw that it was shorter than it had appeared. Turning around and looking back down Main Street, she saw that the trees lining the sides of the street had been trimmed so they got progressively smaller from the gates to the castle, creating a kind of false perspective line. She laughed now, amused by the accomplishment of the little trompe l’oeil.She squeezed past the hordes of Asian tourists taking precisely the same picture of the castle, one after another, a phenomenon she’d observed at other famous landmarks. For some Japanese shutterbugs, the holiday photo experience was as formal as the Stations of the Cross, with each picture of each landmark rigidly prescribed by custom and unwritten law.Now she was under the castle and headed for what her map assured her was Fantasyland. Just as she cleared the archway, she remembered her conversations with that Death Waits kid about Fantasyland: this was the part that had been made over as a goth area, and then remade as the Happiest Construction Site on Earth.And so it was. The contrast was stark. From fairy castle to green-painted construction sidings. From smiling, well-turned out “castmembers” to construction workers with butt-crack-itis and grouchy expressions. Fantasyland was like an ugly scar on the blemish-free face of a Barbie doll.She liked it.Something about all that artifice, all that cunning work to cover up all the bodies a company like Disney would have buried under its manicured Main Street—it had given her a low-level, tooth-grinding headache, a kind of anger at the falseness of it all. Here, she could see the bodies as they buried them.Out came her camera and she went on the prowl, photographing and photographing, seeking high ground from which to catch snaps over the siding. She’d look at the satellite pics of this spot later.Now she knew what her next project would be: she would document this scar. She’d dig up the bodies.Just for completeness’ sake, she went on some of the rides. Her super-fancy pass let her sail past the long lines of bored kids, angry dads, exhausted moms. She captured their expressions with her camera.The rides were all right. She was sick of rides, truth be told. As an art-form, they were wildly overrated. Some of them made her sick and some of them were like mildly interesting trips through someone’s collection of action-figures in a dark room. The Disney rides didn’t even let you drive, like Lester’s ride did, and you didn’t get to vote on them.By the time the sun had gone down, she was ready to go back to the room and start writing. She wanted to get all this down, the beauty and the terror, the commerce lurking underneath the friendly facade. As the day lengthened into night, there were more and more screaming children, more angry parents. She caught parents smacking kids, once, twice, got her camera out, caught three more.They sent a big pupu platter up to her room with a dish of poi and a hollow pineapple filled with rum. She took her computer out onto her lanai and looked out over the lake. An ibis came by and demanded some of her dinner scraps. She obliged it and it gave her a cold look, as if determining whether she’d be good for dessert, then flew off.She began to write.Something had changed between Kettlewell and Eva since they’d left Florida with the kids. It wasn’t just the legal hassles, though there were plenty of those. They’d gone to Florida with a second chance—a chance for him to be a mover again, a chance for her to have a husband who was happy with his life again.Now he found himself sneaking past her when she was in the living room and they slept back to back in bed with as much room between them as possible.Ada missed Lyenitchka and spent all her time in her bedroom IMing her friend or going questing with her in their favorite game, which involved Barbies, balrogs, and buying outfits. Pascal missed all the attention he had received as the designated mascot of the two little girls.It was not a high point in the history of the Kettlewell clan.“Hello?”“Landon Kettlewell?”“Hello, Freddy,” he said.“My fame precedes me,” the journalist said. Kettlewell could hear the grin in his voice. That voice was unmistakable—Kettlewell had heard it in the occassional harassing voicemail that Suzanne forwarded on.“How are you?”“Oh, I’m very well sir, and kind of you to ask, yes indeed. I hear you’re not doing so well, though?”“I can’t complain.”“I wish you would, though.” You could tell, Freddy thought he was a funny son of a bitch. “Seriously, Mr Kettlewell. I’m calling to follow up on the story of the litigation that Perry Gibbons and Lester Banks are facing for unilaterally canceling the arrangement you’d made to finance their litigation. I’m hoping that you’ll give me a quote that might put this into perspective. Is the defense off? Will Gibbons and Banks be sued? Are you a party to the suit?”“Freddy?”“Yes, Mr Kettlewell.”“I am not a child, nor am I a fool, nor am I a sucker. I’m also not a hothead. You can’t goad me into saying something. You can’t trick me into saying something. I haven’t hung up on you yet, but I will unless you can give me a single good reason to believe that any good could possibly come out of talking to you.”“I’m going to write this story and publish it today. I can either write that you declined to comment or I can write down whatever comment you might have on the matter. You tell me which is fairer?”“Goodbye, Freddy.”“Wait, wait! Just wait.”Kettlewell liked the pleading note in Freddy’s voice.“What is it, Freddy?”“Can I get you to comment on the general idea of litigation investment? A lot of people followed your lead in seeking out litigation investment opportunities. There’s lots of money tied up in it these days. Do incidents like the one in Florida mean that litigation investment is a dead strategy?”“Of course not,” Kettlewell snapped. He shouldn’t be talking to this man, but the question drove him bonkers. He’d invented litigation investment. “Those big old companies have two common characteristics: they’ve accumulated more assets than they know what to do with, and they’ve got poisonous, monopolistic cultures that reward executives who break the law to help the company turn a buck. None of that’s changed, and so long as that’s all true, there will be little companies with legit gripes against big companies that can be used as investment vehicles for unlocking all that dead Fortune 100 capital and putting it to work.”“But aren’t Fortune 100 companies investing in litigation funds?”Kettlewell suppressed a nasty laugh. “Yeah, so what?”“Well, if this is about destroying Fortune 100 companies—”“It’s about wringing positive social value out of the courts and out of investment. The way it used to work, there were only two possible outcomes when a big company did something rotten: either they’d get away scot-free or they’d make some lawyers very, very rich. Litigation funds fix that. They socialize the cost of bringing big companies to heel, and they free up the capital that these big companies have accumulated.”“But when a big company invests in destroying another big company—”“Sometimes you get a forest where a few trees end up winning, they form a canopy that keeps all the sunlight from reaching the floor. Now, this is stable for forests, but stability is thelastthing you want in a market. Just look at what happens when one of those big trees falls over: whoosh! A million kinds of life are spawned on the floor, fighting for the light that tree had hogged for itself. In a market, when you topple a company that’s come to complacently control some part of the ecosystem, you free up that niche for new innovators.”“And why is that better than stability? Don’t the workers at these companies deserve the security that comes from their employers’ survival?”“Oh come on, Freddy. Stop beating that drum. If you’re an employee and you want to get a good deal out of an employer, you’re better off if you’ve got fifty companies you could work for than just one.”“So you’re saying that if you destroy Disney with your lawsuit, the fifty thousand people who work at Walt Disney World will be able to, what, work for those little rides like your friends have built?”“They’ll find lots of work, Freddy. If we make it possible for anyone to open an innovative little ride without worrying about getting clobbered by a big old monopolist. You like big corporations so much?”“Yes, but it’s not little innovative startups that invest in these funds, is it?”“It’s they who benefit once the fund takes up their cause.”“And how’s that working out for the ride people you’re meant to be helping out? They rejected you, didn’t they?”Kettlewell really hated Freddy, he realized. Not just a little—he had a deep and genuine loathing. “Oh, for fuck’s sake. You don’t like little companies. You don’t like big companies. You don’t like workers’ co-ops. What do you want us to do, Freddy? You want us to just curl up under a rock and die? You sit there and make up your funny names for things; you make your snarky little commentaries, but how much good haveyoudone for the world, you complaining, sniping little troll?”The line got very quiet. “Can I quote you?”“You certainly can,” Kettlewell huffed. In for a penny, in for a pound. “You can print that, and you can kiss my ass.”“Thank you, Mr Kettlewell,” Freddy said. “I’ll certainly take the suggestion under advisement.”Kettlewell stood in his home office and stared at the four walls. Upstairs, Pascal was crying. He did that a lot lately. Kettlewell breathed deeply and tried to chill out.Someone was knocking at his door, though. He answered it tentatively. The kid he found there was well-scrubbed, black, in his twenties, and smiling amiably.“Landon Kettlewell?”“Who’s suing me?” Kettlewell could spot a process server a mile away.The guy shrugged and made a little you-got-me smile. “Couldn’t say, sir,” he said, and handed Kettlewell the envelope, holding it so that the header was clearly visible to the camera set into the lapel of his shirt.“You want me to sign something?” Kettlewell said.“It’s all right, sir,” the kid said and pointed at the camera. “It’s all caught on video.”“Oh, right,” Kettlewell said. “Want a cup of water? Coffee?”“I expect you’re going to be too busy to entertain, sir,” the kid said, and ticked a little salute off his forehead. “But you seem like a nice guy. Good luck with it all.”
“Next time, we check the weather before we go to the beach,” he said.
She laughed and leaned against him and he yelped as she came into contact with his hurt arm. “We got to get you to a hospital,” she said. “Get that looked at.”
“You too,” he said, pointing at her thumb. It was all so weird and remote now, as they walked through the Miami streets, back toward the garage. Other shocked people wandered the streets, weirdly friendly, smiling at them like they all shared a secret.
The beach-front was in shambles, covered in blown trash and mud, uprooted trees and fallen leaves, broken glass and rolled cars. Perry hit the car radio before they pulled out of the garage. An announcer reported that Tropical Storm Henry had gone about three miles inland before petering out to a mere sun-shower, along with news about the freeways and hospitals being equally jammed.
“Huh,” Perry said. “Well, what do we do now?”
“Let’s find a hotel room,” Hilda said. “Have showers, get something to eat.”
It was a weird and funny idea, and Perry liked it. He’d never played tourist in Florida, but what better place to do so? They gathered their snacks from the back of the car and used the first aid kit in the trunk to tape themselves up.
They tried to reach Lester but no one answered. “He’s probably at the ride,” Perry said. “Or balls-deep in reverse-engineering the Disney Box thing. OK, let’s find a hotel room.”
Everything on the beach was fully booked, but as they continued inland for a couple blocks, they came upon coffin hotels stacked four or five capsules high, painted gay Miami deco pastels, installed in rows in old storefronts or stuck in street-parking spots, their silvered windows looking out over the deserted boulevards.
“Should we?” Perry said, gesturing at them.
“If we can get an empty one? Damn right—these things are going to be in serious demand in pretty short order.”
Stepping into the coffin hotel transported Perry back to his days on the road, his days staying at coffin hotel after coffin hotel, to his first night with Hilda, in Madison. One look at Hilda told him she felt the same. They washed each other slowly, as though they were underwater, cleaning out one-another’s wounds, sluicing away the caked on mud and grime blown deep into their ears and the creases of their skin, nestled against their scalps.
They lay down in bed, naked, together, spooned against one another. “You’re a good man, Perry Gibbons,” Hilda said, snuggling against him, hand moving in slow circles on his tummy.
They slept that way and got back on the road long past dark, driving the blasted freeway slowly, moving around the broken glass and blown out tires that remained.
The path of the hurricane followed the coast straight to Hollywood, a line of smashed trees and car wrecks and blown-off roofs that made the nighttime drive even more disorienting.
They went straight back to the condo, but Lester wasn’t there. Worry nagged at Perry. “Take me to the ride?” he said, after he’d paced the apartment a few times.
Hilda looked up from the sofa, where she had collapsed the instant they came through the door, arm flung over her face. “You’re shitting me,” she said. “It’s nearly midnight, and we’ve been in a hurricane.”
Perry squirmed. “I’ve got a bad feeling, OK? And I can’t drive myself.” He flapped his busted arm at her.
Hilda looked at him, her eyes narrowed. “Look, don’t be a jerk, OK? Lester’s a big boy. He’s probably just out with Suzanne. He’d have called you if there’d been a problem.”
He looked at her, bewildered by the ferocity of her response. “OK, I’ll call a cab,” he said, trying for a middle ground.
She jumped up from the couch. “Whatever. Fine. Let me get my keys. Jesus.”
He had no idea how he’d angered her, but it was clear that he had, and the last thing he wanted was to get into a car with her, but he couldn’t think of a way of saying that without escalating things.
So they drove in white-lipped silence to the ride, Hilda tense with anger, Perry tense with worry, both of them touchy as cats, neither saying a word.
But when they pulled up to the ride, they both let out a gasp. It was lit with rigged floodlights and car headlights, and it was swarming with people. As they drew closer, they saw that the market stalls were strewn across the parking lot, in smashed pieces. As they drew closer still, they saw that the ride itself was staring eyeless at them, window-glass smashed.
Perry was out of the car even before it stopped rolling, Hilda shouting something after him. Lester was just on the other side of the ride-entrance, wearing a paper mask and rubber boots, wading in three-inch deep, scummy water.
Perry splashed to a halt. “Holy shit,” he breathed. The ride was lit with glow-sticks, waterproof lamps, and LED torches, and the lights reflected crazily from the still water that filled it as far as the eye could see, way out into the gloom.
Lester looked up at him. His face was lined and exhausted, and it gleamed with sweat. “Storm broke out all the windows and trashed the roof, then flooded us out. It did a real number on the market, too.” His voice was dead.
Perry was wordless. Bits of the ride-exhibits floated in the water, along with the corpses of the robots.
“No drainage,” Lester said. “The code says drainage, but there’s none here. I never noticed it before. I’m going to rig a pump, but my workshop’s pretty much toast.” Lester’s workshop had been in the old garden-center at the side of the ride. It was all glass. “We had some pretty amazing winds.”
Perry felt like he should be showing off his wound to prove that he hadn’t been fucking off while the disaster was underway, but he couldn’t bring himself to do so. “We got caught in it in Miami,” he said.
“Wondered where you were. The kid who was minding the shop just cut and run when the storm rolled in.”
“He did? Christ, what an irresponsible asshole. I’ll break his neck.”
A slimy raft of kitchen gnomes—their second business venture—floated past silently in the harsh watery light. The smell was almost unbearable.
“It wasn’t his job—” Lester’s voice cracked onjob, and he breathed deeply. “It wasn’t his job, Perry. It was your job. You’re running around, having a good time with your girlfriend, firing lawyers—” He stopped and breathed again. “You know that they’re going to sue us, right? They’re going to turn us into a smoking ruin because you fired them, and what the fuck are you going to do about that? Whose job is that?”
“I thought you said they weren’t going to sue,” Perry said. It came out in an embarrassed mumble. Lester had never talked to him like this. Never.
“Kettlewell and Tjan aren’t going to sue,” Lester said. “The lawyers you fired, the venture capitalists who backed them? They’re going to turn us into paste.”
“What would you have preferred?” Hilda said. She was standing in the doorway, away from the flood, watching them intently. Her eyes were raccoon-bagged, but she was rigid with anger. Perry could hardly look at her. “Would you have preferred to have those fuckers go around destroying the lives of your supporters in order to enrich a few pig assholes?”
Lester just looked at her.
“Well?”
“Shut up, Yoko,” he said. “We’re having a private conversation here.”
Perry’s jaw dropped, and Hilda was already in motion, sloshing into the water in her sandals. She smacked Lester across the cheek, a crack that echoed back over the water and walls.
Lester brought his hand up to his reddening face. “Are you done?” he said, his voice hard.
Hilda looked at Perry. Lester looked at Perry. Perry looked at the water.
“I’ll meet you by the car,” Perry said. It came out in a mumble. They held for a moment, the three of them, then Hilda walked out again, leaving Lester and Perry looking at one another.
“I’m sorry,” Perry said.
“About Hilda? About the lawsuits? About skipping out?”
“About everything,” he said. “Let’s fix this up, OK?”
“The ride? I don’t even know if I want to. Why bother? It’ll cost a fortune to get it online, and they’ll only shut it down again with the lawsuit. Why bother.”
“So we won’t fix the ride. Let’s fix us.”
“Why bother,” Lester said, and it came out in the same mumble.
The watery sounds of the room and the smell and the harsh reflected rippling light made Perry want to leave. “Lester—” he began.
Lester shook his head. “There’s nothing more we can do tonight, anyway. I’ll rent a pump in the morning.”
“I’ll do it,” Perry said. “You work on the Disney-in-a-Box thing.”
Lester laughed, a bitter sound. “Yeah, OK, buddy. Sure.”
Out in the parking-lot, the hawkers were putting their stalls back together as best they could. The shantytown was lit up and Perry wondered how it had held together. Pretty good, is what he guessed—they met and exceeded county code on all of those plans.
Hilda honked the horn at him. She was fuming behind the wheel and they drove in silence. He felt numb and wrung out and he didn’t know what to say to her. He lay awake in bed that night waiting to hear Lester come home, but he didn’t.
Sammy loved his morning meetings. They all came to his office, all the different park execs, creatives, and emissaries from the old partner companies that had spun off to make movies and merch and educational materials. They all came each day to talk to him about the next day’s Disney-in-a-Box build. They all came to beg him to think about adding in something from their franchises and cantons to the next installment.
There were over a million DiaBs in the field now, and they weren’t even trying to keep up with orders anymore. Sammy loved looking at the online auction sites to see what the boxes were going for—he knew that some of his people had siphoned off a carload or two of the things to e-tail out the back door. He loved that. Nothing was a better barometer of your success than having made something other people cared enough about to steal.
He loved his morning meetings, and he conducted them with the flair of a benevolent emperor. He’d gotten a bigger office—technically it was a board-room for DiaB strategy, but Sammywasthe DiaB strategy. He’d outfitted it with fan-photos of their DiaB shrines in their homes, with kids watching enthralled as the day’s model was assembled before their eyes. The hypnotic fascination in their eyes was unmistakable. Disney was the focus of their daily lives, and all they wanted was more, more, more. He could push out five models a day, ten, and they’d go nuts for them.
But he wouldn’t. He was too cunning. One model a day was all. Leave them wanting more. Never breathe a hint of what the next day’s model would be—oh, how he loved to watch the blogs and the chatter as the models self-assembled, the heated, time-bound fights over what the day’s model was going to be.
“Good morning, Ron,” he said. Wiener had been lobbying to get a Main Street build into the models for weeks now, and Sammy was taking great pleasure in denying it to him without shutting down all hope. Getting Ron Wiener to grovel before him every morning was better than a cup of coffee.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said, and you’re right,” Wiener said. He always started the meeting by telling Sammy how right he was to reject his last idea. “The flag-pole and marching-band scene would have too many pieces. House cats would knock it over. We need something more unitary, more visually striking. So here’s what I’ve been thinking: what about the fire-engine?”
Sammy raised an indulgent eyebrow.
“Kidslovefire trucks. All the colors are in the printer’s gamut—I checked. We could create a Mickey-and-Friends fire-crew to position around it, a little barn for it.”
“The only thing I liked about firetrucks when I was a kid was that the word started with ’f’ and ended with ’uck’—” Sammy smiled when he said it, and waited for Wiener to fake hilarity, too. The others in the room—other park execs, some of their licensing partners, a few advertisers—laughed too. Officially, this was a “brainstorming session,” but everyone knew that it was all about getting the nod from Sammy.
Wiener laughed dutifully and slunk away. More supplicants came forward.
“How about this?” She was very cute—dressed in smart, dark clothes that were more Lower East Side than Orlando. She smelled good, too—one of the new colognes that hinted at free monomers, like hot plastic or a new-bought tire. Cat-slanted green eyes completed the package.
“What you got there?” She was from an ad agency, someone Disney Parks had done business with at some point. Agencies had been sending their people to these meetings too, trying to get a co-branding coup for one of their clients.
“It’s a series of three, telling a little story. Beginning, middle and end. The first one is a family sitting down to breakfast, and you can see, it’s the same old crap, boring microwave omelets and breakfast puddings. Mom’s bored, dad’s more bored, and sis and brother here are secretly dumping theirs onto mom’s and dad’s plates. All this stuff is run using the same printers, so it looks very realistic.”
It did indeed. Sammy hadn’t thought about it, but he supposed it was only natural that the omelets were printed—how else could General Mills get that uniformity? He should talk to some of the people in food services about getting some of that tech to work at the parks.
“So in part two, they’re setting up the kitchen around this mystery box—one part Easy-Bake lightbulb oven, one part Tardis. You know what that is?”
Sammy grinned. “Why yes, I believe I do.” Their eyes met in a fierce look of mutual recognition. “It’s a breakfast printer, isn’t it?” The other supplicants in the room sucked in a collective breath. Some chuckled nervously.
“It’s about moving the apparatus to the edge. Bridging the last mile. Why not? This one will do waffles, breakfast cereals, bagels and baked goods, small cakes. New designs every day—something for mom and dad, something for the kids, something for the sullen teens. We’re already doing this at the regional plants and distributorships, on much larger scales. But getting our stuff into consumers’ homes, getting themsubscribedto our food—”
Sammy held up a hand. “I see,” he said. “And our people are already primed for home-printing experiences. They’re right in your sweet spot.”
“Part three, Junior and little sis are going cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, but these things are shapedlike them, with their portraits on each sugar-lump. Mom and dad are eating tres sophistique croissants and delicate cakes. Look at Rover here, with his own cat-shaped dog-biscuit. See how happy they all are?”
Sammy nodded. “Shouldn’t this all be under nondisclosure?” he said.
“Probably, but what are you gonna do? You guys are pretty good at keeping secrets, and if you decide to shaft us by selling out to one of our competitors, we’re probably dead, anyway. I’ll be able to ship out half a million units in the first week, then we can ramp production if need be—lots of little parts-and-assembly subcontractors will take the work if we offer.”
Sammy liked the way she talked. Like someone who didn’t need to spend a lot of time screwing around, planning, like someone who could just make it happen.
“You’re launching when?”
“Three days after you start running this campaign,” she said, without batting an eyelash.
“My name’s Sammy,” he said. “How’s Thursday?”
“Launch on Sunday?” She shook her head. “It’s tricky, Sunday launches. Gotta pay everyone scale-and-a-half.” She gave him a wink. “What the hell, it’s not my money.” She stuck out her hand. She was wearing a couple of nice chunky obsidian rings in abstract curvy shapes, looking a little porny in their suggestion of breasts and thighs. He shook her hand and it was warm and dry and strong.
“Well, that’s this week taken care of,” Sammy said, and pointedly cleared the white-board surface running the length of the table. The others groaned and got up and filed out. The woman stayed behind.
“Dinah,” she said. She handed him a card and he noted the agency. Dallas-based, not New York, but he could tell she was a transplant.
“You got any breakfast plans?” It was hardly gone 9AM—Sammy liked to get these meetings started early. “I normally get something sent in, but your little prototypes there...”
She laughed. It was a pretty laugh. She was a couple years older than him, and she wore it well. “Do I have breakfast plans? Sammy my boy, I’m nothingbutbreakfast plans! I have a launch on Sunday, remember?”
“Heh. Oh yeah.”
“I’m on the next flight to DFW,” she said. “I’ve got a cab waiting to take me to the airport.”
“I wonder if you and I need to talk over some details,” Sammy said.
“Only if you want to do it in the taxi.”
“I was thinking we could do it on the plane,” he said.
“You’re going to buy a ticket?”
“On my plane,” he said. They’d given him use of one of the company jets when he started really ramping production on the DiaBs.
“Oh yes, I think that can be arranged,” she said. “It’s Sammy, right?”
“Right,” he said. They left the building and had an altogether lovely flight to Dallas. Very productive.
Lester hadn’t left Suzanne’s apartment in days. She’d rented a place in the shantytown—bemused at the idea of paying rent to a squatter, but pleased to have a place of her own now that Lester and Perry’s apartment had become so tense.
Technically, he was working on the Disney printers, which she found interesting in an abstract way. They had a working one and a couple of disassembled ones, and watching the working one do its thing was fascinating for a day or two, but then it was just a three-d TV with one channel, broadcasting one frame per day.
She dutifully wrote about it, though, and about Perry’s ongoing efforts to re-open the ride. She got the sense from him that he was heading for flat-ass broke. Lester and he had always been casual about money, but buying all new robots, more printers, replacement windows, fixing the roof—none of it was cheap. And with the market in pieces, he wasn’t getting any rent.
She looked over Lester’s shoulder for the fiftieth time. “How’s it going?”
“Don’t write about this, OK?”
He’d never said that to her.
“I’ll embargo it until you ship.”
He grunted. “Fine, I guess. OK, well, I’ve got it running on generic goop, that part was easy. I can also load my own designs, but that requires physical access to the thing, in order to load new firmware. They don’t make it easy, which is weird. It’s like they don’t plan on updating it once it’s in the field—maybe they just plan on replacing them at regular intervals.”
“Why’s the firmware matter to you?”
“Well, that’s where it stores information about where to get the day’s designs. If we’re going to push our own designs to it, we need to give people an easy way to tell it to tune in to our feed, and the best way to do that is to change the firmware. The alternative would be, oh, I don’t know, putting another machine upstream of it to trick it into thinking that it’s accessing their site when it’s really going to ours. That means getting people to configure another machine—no one but a few hardcore geeks will want to do that.”
Suzanne nodded. She wondered if “a few hardcore geeks” summed up the total audience for this project in any event. She didn’t mention it, though. Lester’s brow was so furrowed you could lose a dime in the crease above his nose.
“Well, I’m sure you’ll get it,” she said.
“Yeah. It’s just a matter of getting at the boot-loader. I could totally do this if I could get at the boot-loader.”
Suzanne knew what a boot-loader was, just barely. The thing that chose which OS to load when you turned it on. She wondered if every daring, sexy technology project started like this, a cranky hacker muttering angrily about boot-loaders.
Suzanne missed Russia. She’d had a good life there, covering the biotech scene. Those hackers were a lot scarier than Lester and Perry, but they were still lovable and fascinating in their own way. Better than the Ford and GM execs she used to have to cozy up to.
She’d liked the manic hustle of Russia, the glamour and the squalor. She’d bought a time-share dacha that she could spend weekends at, and the ex-pats in Petersburg had rollicking parties and dinners where they took apart the day’s experiences on Planet Petrograd.
“I’m going out, Lester,” she said. Lester looked up from the DiaB and blinked a few times, then seemed to rewind the conversation.
“Hey,” he said. “Oh, hey. Sorry, Suzanne. I’m just—I’m trying to work instead of think these days. Thinking just makes me angry. I don’t know what to do—” He broke off and thumped the side of the printer.
“How’s Perry getting on with rebuilding?”
“He’s getting on,” Lester said. “As far as I know. I read that the Death Waits kid and his people had come by to help. Whatever that means.”
“He freaks me out,” Suzanne said. “I mean, I feel terrible for him, and he seemed nice enough in the hospital. But all those people—the way they follow him around. It’s just weird. Like the charismatic cults back home.” She realized she’d just called Russia “home” and it made her frown. Just how long was she going to stay here with these people, anyway?
Lester hadn’t noticed. “I guess they all feel sorry for him. And they like what he has to say about stories. I just can’t get a lot of spit in my mouth over the ride these days, though. It feels like something we did and completed and should move on from.”
Suzanne didn’t have anything to say, and Lester wasn’t particularly expecting anything, he was giving off a palpable let-me-work vibe, so she let herself out of the apartment—her apartment!—and headed out into the shantytown. On the way to the ride, she passed the little tea-house where Kettlewell and Tjan had done their scheming and she suddenly felt very, very old. The only grownup on-site.
She was about to cross the freeway to the ride when her phone rang. She looked at the face and then nearly dropped it. Freddy was calling her.
“Hello, Suzanne,” he said. The gloat in his voice was unmistakable. He had something really slimy up his sleeve.
“How can I help you?”
“I’m calling for comment on a story,” he said. “It’s my understanding that your lad, Perry, pitched a tantie and fired the business-managers of the ride, and has told the lawyers representing him against Disney that he intends to drop the suit.”
“Is there a question in there?”
“Oh, there are many questions in there, my darling. For starters, I wondered how it could possibly be true if you haven’t written about it on your little ’blog’—” even over the phone, she could hear the sarcastic quotes. “—You seem to be quite comprehensive in documenting the undertakings of your friends down there in Florida.”
“Are you asking me to comment on why I haven’t commented?”
“For starters.”
“Have you approached Perry for a comment?”
“I’m afraid he was rather abrupt. And I couldn’t reach his Valkyrie of the Midwest, either. So I’m left calling on you, Suzanne. Any comment?”
Suzanne stared across the road at the ride. She’d been gassed there, chased by armed men, watched a war there.
“The ride doesn’t have much formal decision-making process,” she said finally. “That means that words like ’fired’ don’t really apply here. The boys might have a disagreement about the best way to proceed, but if that’s the case, you’ll have to talk to them about it.”
“Are you saying that you don’t know if your boyfriend’s best friend is fighting with his business partners? Don’t you all live together?”
“I’m saying that if you want to find out what Lester and Perry are doing, you’ll have to ask Lester and Perry.”
“And the living together thing?”
“We don’t live together,” she said. It was technically true.
“Really?” Freddy said.
“Do we have a bad connection?”
“You don’t live together?”
“No.”
“Where do you live then?”
“My place,” she said. “Have your informants been misinforming you? I hope you haven’t been paying for your information, Freddy. I suppose you don’t, though. I suppose there’s no end of cranks who really enjoy spiteful gossip and are more than happy to email you whatever fantasies they concoct.”
Freddy tsked. “And you don’t know what’s happened to Kettlewell and Tjan?”
“Have you asked them?”
“I will,” he said. “But since you’re the ranking reporter on the scene.”
“I’m just a blogger, Freddy. A busy blogger. Good afternoon.”
The call left her shaking, though she was proud of how calm she’d kept her voice. What a goddamned troll. And she was going to have to write about this now.
There were ladders leaned up against the edge of the ride, and a motley crew of roofers and glaziers on them and on the roof, working to replace the gaping holes the storm had left. The workers mostly wore black and had dyed hair and lots of metal flashing from their ears and faces as they worked. A couple had stripped to the waist, revealing full-back tattoos or even more piercings and subcutaneous implants, like armor running over their spines and shoulder-blades. A couple of boom-boxes blasted out grinding, incoherent music with a lot of electronic screams.
Around the ride, the market-stalls were coming back, rebuilt from a tower of fresh-sawed lumber stacked in the parking-lot. This was a lot more efficient, with gangs of vendors quickly sawing the lumber to standard sizes, slapping each one with a positional sensor, then watching the sensor’s lights to tell them when it was properly lined up with its mates, and then slipping on corner-clips that held it all together. Suzanne watched as a whole market stall came together this way, in the space of five minutes, before the vendors moved on to their next stall. It was like a high-tech version of an Amish barn-raising, performed by bandanna-clad sketchy hawkers instead of bearded technophobes.
She found Perry inside, leaning over a printer, tinkering with its guts, LED torches clipped to the temples of his glasses. He was hampered by having only one good arm, and he pressed her into service passing him tools for a good fifteen minutes before he straightened up and really looked at her.
“You come down to help out?”
“To write about it, actually.”
The room was a hive of activity. A lot of goth kids of various ages and degrees of freakiness, a few of the squatter kids, some people she recognized from the second coming of Death Waits. She couldn’t see Death Waits, though.
“Well, that’s good.” He powered up the printer and the air filled with the familiar smell of Saran-Wrap-in-a-microwave. She had an eerie flashback to her first visit to this place, when they’d showed her how they could print mutated, Warhol-ized Barbie heads. “How’s Lester getting on with cracking that printer?”
Why don’t you ask him yourself?She didn’t say it. She didn’t know why Lester had come to her place after the flood instead of going home, why he stiffened up and sniffed when she mentioned Perry’s name, why he looked away when she mentioned Hilda.
“Something about firmware.”
He straightened his back more, making it pop and gave her his devilish grin, the one where his wonky eyebrow went up and down. “It’s always firmware,” he said, and laughed a little. Maybe they were both remembering those old days, the Boogie Woogie Elmos.
“Looks like you’ve got a lot of help,” Suzanne said, getting out a little steno pad and a pen.
Perry nodded at it, and she was struck by how many times they’d stood like this, a few feet apart, her pen poised over her pad. She’d chronicled so much of this man’s life.
“They’re good people, these folks. Some of them have some carpentry or electronics experience, the rest are willing to learn. It’s going faster than I thought it would. Lots of support from out in the world, too—people sending in cash to help with replacement parts.”
“Have you heard from Kettlewell or Tjan?”
The light went out of his face. “No,” he said.
“How about from the lawyers?”
“No comment,” he said. It didn’t sound like a joke.
“Come on, Perry. People are starting to ask questions. Someone’s going to write about this. Do you want your side told or not?”
“Not,” he said, and disappeared back into the guts of the printer.
She stared at his back for a long while before turning on her heel, muttering, “Fuck,” and walking back out into the sunshine. There’d been a musty smell in the ride, but out here it was the Florida smell of citrus and car-fumes, and sweat from the people around her, working hard, trying to wrest a living from the world.
She walked back across the freeway to the shantytown and ran into Hilda coming the other way. The younger woman gave her a cool look and then looked away, and crossed.
That was just about enough, Suzanne thought. Enough playtime with the kids. Time to go find some grownups. She wasn’t here for her health. If Lester didn’t want to hang out with her, if Perry had had enough of her, it was time to go do something else.
She went back to her room, where Lester was still working on his DiaB project. She took out her suitcase and packed with the efficiency of long experience. Lester didn’t notice, not even when she took the blouse she’d hand-washed and hung to dry on the back of his chair, folded it and put it in her suitcase and zipped it shut.
She looked at his back working over the bench for a long time. He had a six-pack of chocolate pudding beside him, and a wastebasket overflowing with food wrappers and boxes. He shifted in his seat and let out a soft fart.
She left. She paid the landlady through the end of the week. She could send Lester an email later.
The cab took her to Miami. It wasn’t until she got to the airport that she realized she had no idea where she was going. Boston? San Francisco? Petersburg? She opened her laptop and began to price out last minute tickets. The rush of travelers moved around her and she was jostled many times.
The standby sites gave her a thousand options—Miami to JFK to Heathrow to Petersburg, Miami to Frankfurt to Moscow to Petersburg, Miami to Dallas to San Francisco.... The permutations were overwhelming, especially since she wasn’t sure where she wanted to be.
Then she heard something homey and familiar: a large group of Russian tourists walking past, talking loudly in Russian, complaining about the long flight, the bad food, and the incompetence of their tour operator. She smiled to see the old men with their high-waisted pants and the old women with their bouffant hair.
She couldn’t help but eavesdrop—at their volume, she would have been hard-pressednotto listen in. A little boy and girl tore ass around the airport, under the disapproving glares from DHS goons, and they screamed as they ran, “Disney World! Disney World! Disney World!”
She’d never been—she’d been to a couple of the kitschy Gulag parks in Russia, and she’d grown up with Six Flags coaster parks and Ontario Place and the CNE in Toronto, not far from Detroit. But she’d never been to The Big One, the place that even now managed to dominate the world’s consciousness of theme-parks.
She asked her standby sites to find her a room in a Disney hotel instead, looking for an inclusive rate that would get her onto the rides and pay for her meals. These were advertised at roadside kiosks at 100-yard intervals on every freeway in Florida, so she suspected they were the best deal going.
A moment of browsing showed her that she’d guessed wrong. A week in Disney cost a heart-stopping sum of money—the equivalent of six months’ rent in Petersburg. How did all these Russians afford this trip? What the hell compelled people to part with these sums?
She was going to have to find out. It was research. Plus she needed a vacation.
She booked in, bought a bullet-train ticket, and grabbed the handle of her suitcase. She examined her welcome package as she waited for the train. She was staying at something called the Polynesian Resort hotel, and the brochure showed a ticky-tacky tiki-themed set of longhouses set on an ersatz white-sand beach, with a crew of Mexican and Cuban domestic workers in leis, Hawai’ian shirts, and lava-lavas waving and smiling. Her package included a complimentary luau—the pictures made it clear this was nothing like the tourist luaus she’d attended in Maui. On top of that, she was entitled to a “character breakfast” with a wage-slave in an overheated plush costume, and an hour with a “resort counsellor” who’d help her plan her trip for maximal fun.
The bullet-train came and took on the passengers, families bouncing with anticipation, joking and laughing in every language spoken. These people had just come through a US Customs checkpoint and they were acting like the world was a fine place. She decided there must be something to this Disney business.
Death Waits waited, and waited and waited for the ride to come back online. He split his days between hanging out at home, writing about the story, running the fly-throughs from the other rides, watching what was happening in Brazil, answering his fan-mail; the rest of the time he spent with his new friends down at the site of the ride, encouraging them to pitch in and help Perry and Lester to get the thing back up and running. Fast, please. It was driving him bonkers not to be able to ride any longer. After everything he’d been through, he deserved a ride.
His friends were wonderful. Wonderful! Lacey especially. She was a nurse and a goddess of mercy. The money that flooded into his paypals whenever his friends let it be known that he needed more covered all his expenses. He never wanted for companionship, conversation, helpmeets, or respect. It was a wonderful life.
If only the ride would come online.
He woke next to Lacey, she asleep still, her hair spread out across the pillow in a fall of shiny black with blue highlights—she’d given him a matching dye-job a few days before and they looked like a matched set now. He let his hands lazily trace her soft skin, the outlines of her tattoos, her implants and piercings. He felt a stirring between his legs.
Lacey yawned and woke and kissed him. “Good morning, my handsome man,” she said.
“Good morning, my beautiful woman. What’s the plan for today?”
“Whatever you want,” she said.
“Breakfast, then down to the ride,” he said. “I’ll do my email and writing there today.”
“Something before breakfast?” she asked, with a lopsided smile that was adorable.
“Oh yes, please,” he said, his voice breathy.
The smell at the Wal-Mart was overpowering. It was one part sharp mold, one part industrial disinfectant, a citrus smell that made your eyes water and your sinuses burn.
“I’ve rented some big blowers,” Perry said. “They’ll help air the place out. If that doesn’t work, I might have to resurface the floor, which would be rough—it could take a week to get that done properly.”
“A week?” Death said. Jesus. No way. Not another week. He didn’t know it for sure, but he had a feeling that a lot of these people would stop showing up eventually if there was no ride for them to geek out over. He sure would.
“You smell that? We can’t close the doors and the windows and leave it like this.”
Death’s people, standing around them, listening in, nodded. It was true. You’d melt people’s lungs if you shut them up with these fumes.
“How can I help?” Death said. It was his constant mantra with Perry. Sometimes he didn’t think Perry liked him very much, and it was good to keep on reminding him that Death and his buddies were here to be part of the solution. That Perry needed them.
“The roof is just about done, the robots are back online. The dividers should be done today. I’ve got the chairs stripped down for routine maintenance, I could use a couple people for that.”
“What’s Lester working on?” Death said.
“You’d have to ask him.”
Death hadn’t seen Lester in days, which was weird. He hoped Lester didn’t dislike him. He worried a lot about whether people liked him these days. He’d thought that Sammy liked him, after all.
“Where is he?”
“Don’t know.”
Perry put dark glasses on.
Death Waits took the hint. “Come on,” he said to Lacey, who patted him on the hand as he lifted up in his chair and rolled out to the van. “Let’s just call him.”
“Lo?”
“It’s Death Waits. We’re down at the ride, but there’s not much to do around here. I thought maybe we could help you with whatever you were working on?”
“What do you know about what I’m working on?” Lester said.
“Um. Nothing.”
“So how do you know you want to help?”
Death Waits closed his eyes. He wanted to help these two. They’d made something important, didn’t they know that?
“What are you working on?”
“Nothing,” Lester said.
“Come on,” Death said. “Come on. We just want to pitch in. I love you guys. You changed my life. Let me contribute.”
Lester snorted. “Cross the road, go straight for two hundred yards, turn left at the house with the Cesar Chavez mural, and I’ll meet you there.”
“You mean go into the—” Death didn’t know what it was called. He always tried not to look at it when he came to the ride. That slum across the road. He knew it was somehow connected with the ride, but in the same way that the administrative buildings at Disney were connected with the parks. The big difference was that Disney’s extraneous buildings were shielded from view by berms and painted go-away green. The weird town across the road wasright there.
“Yeah, across the road into the shantytown.”
“OK,” Death said. “See you soon.” He hung up and patted Lacey’s hand. “We’re going over there,” he said, pointing into the shantytown.
“Is it safe?”
He shrugged. “I guess so.” He loved his chair, loved how tall it made him, loved how it turned him into a half-ton cyborg who could raise up on his rear wheels and rock back and forth like a triffid. Now he felt very vulnerable—a crippled cyborg whose apparatus cost a small fortune, about to go into a neighborhood full of people who were technically homeless.
“Should we drive?”
“I think we can make it across,” he said. Traffic was light, though the cars that bombed past were doing 90 or more. He started to gather up a few more of his people, but reconsidered. It was a little scary to be going into the town, but he couldn’t afford to freak out Lester by showing up with an entourage.
The guardrail shielding the town had been bent down and flattened and the chair wheeled over it easily, with hardly a bump. As they crossed this border, they crossed over to another world. There were cooking smells—barbecue and Cuban spices—and a little hint of septic tank or compost heap. The buildings didn’t make any sense to Death’s eye, they curved or sloped or twisted or leaned and seemed to be made of equal parts pre-fab cement and aluminum and scrap lumber, laundry lines, power lines, and graffiti.
Death was used to drawing stares, even before he became a cyborg with a beautiful woman beside him, but this was different. There were eyes everywhere. Little kids playing in the street—hadn’t these people heard of stranger danger—stopped to stare at him with big shoe-button eyes. Faces peered out of windows from the ground on up to the third storey. Voices whispered and called.
Lacey gave them her sunniest smile and even waved at the little kids, and Death tried nodding at some of the homeys staring at him from the window of what looked like a little diner.
Death hadn’t known what to expect from this little town, but he certainly hadn’t pictured so many little shops. He realized that he thought of shops as being somehow civilized—tax paying, license-bearing entities with commercial relationships with suppliers, with cash-registers and employees. Not lawless and wild.
But every ground-floor seemed to have at least a small shop, advertised with bright OLED pixel-boards that showed rotating enticements—Productos de Dominica, Beautiful for Ladies, OFERTA!!!, Fantasy Nails. He passed twenty different shops in as many steps, some of them seemingly nothing more than a counter recessed into the wall with a young man sitting behind it, grinning at them.
Lacey stopped at one and bought them cans of coffee and small Mexican pastries dusted with cinnamon. He watched a hundred pairs of eyes watch Lacey as she drew out her purse and paid. At first he thought of the danger, but then he realized that if anyone was to mug them, it would be in full sight of all these people.
It was a funny thought. He’d grown up in sparse suburbs where you’d never see anyone walking or standing on the sidewalks or their porches. Even though it was a “nice” neighborhood, there were muggings and even killings at regular, horrific intervals. Walking there felt like taking your life into your hands.
Here, in this crowded place with a human density like a Disney park, it felt somehow safer. Weird.
They came to what had to be the Cesar Chavez mural—a Mexican in a cowboy hat standing like a preacher on the tailgate of a truck, surrounded by more Mexicans, farmer-types in cotton shirts and blue-jeans and cowboy hats. They turned left and rounded a corner into a little cul-de-sac with a confusion of hopscotches chalked onto the ground, ringed by parked bicycles and scooters. Lester stood among them, eating a churro in a piece of wax-paper.
“You seem to be recovering quickly,” he said, sizing up Death in his chair. “Good to see it.” He seemed a little distant, which Death chalked up to being interrupted.
“It’s great to see you again,” Death said. “My friends and I have been coming by the ride every day, helping out however we can, but we never see you there, so I thought I’d call you.”
“You’d call me.”
“To see if we could help,” Death said. “With whatever you’re doing.”
“Come in,” Lester said. He gestured behind him and Death noticed for the first time the small sign that saidHOTEL ROTHSCHILD,with a stately peacock behind it.
The door was a little narrow for his rolling chair, but he managed to get it in with a little back-and-forth, but once inside, he was stymied by the narrow staircase leading up to the upper floors. The lobby—such as it was—was completely filled by him, Lacey and Lester, and even if the chair could have squeezed up the stairs, it couldn’t have cornered to get there.
Lester looked embarrassed. “Sorry, I didn’t think of that. Um. OK, I could rig a winch and hoist the chair up if you want. We’d have to belt you in, but it’s do-able. There are masts for pulleys on the top floor—it’s how they get the beds into the upper stories.”
“I can get up on canes,” Death Waits said. “Is it safe to leave my chair outside, though?”
Lester’s eyebrows went up. “Well of course—sure it is.” Death felt weird for having asked. He backed the chair out and locked the transmission, feeling silly. Who was going to hot-wire a wheelchair? He was such a dork. Lacey handed him his canes and he stood gingerly. He’d been making his way to the bathroom and back on canes all week, but he hadn’t tried stairs yet. He hoped Lester wasn’t too many floors up.
Lester turned out to be on the third floor, and by the time they reached it, Death Waits was dripping sweat and his eyeliner had run into his eyes. Lacey dabbed at him with her gauzy scarf and fussed over him. Death caught Lester looking at the two of them with a little smirk, so he pushed Lacey away and steadied his breathing with an effort.
“OK,” he said. “All done.”
“Great,” Lester said. “This is what I’m working on. You talked to Perry about it before, right? The Disney-in-a-Box printers. Well, I’ve cracked it. We can load our own firmware onto it—just stick it on a network with a PC, and the PC will find it and update it. Then it becomes an open box—it’ll accept anyone’s goop. You can send it your own plans.”
Death hadn’t seen a DiaB in person yet. Beholding it and knowing that he was the reason that Lester and Perry were experimenting with it in the first place made him feel a sense of excitement he hadn’t felt since the goth rehab of Fantasyland began.
“So how does this tie in to the ride?” Death asked. “I was thinking of building rides in miniature, but at that scale, will it really impress people? No, I don’t think so.
“So instead I was thinking that we could just push out details from the ride, little tabletop-sized miniatures showing a piece every day. Maybe whatever was newest. And you could have multiple feeds, you know, like an experimental trunk for objects that people in one region liked—”
Lester was shaking his head and holding up his hands. “Woah, wait a second. No, no, no—” Death was used to having his friends hang on his every word when he was talking about ideas for the ride and the story, so this brought him up short. He reminded himself who he was talking to.
“Sorry,” he said. “Got ahead of myself.”
“Look,” Lester said, prodding at the printer. “This thing is its own thing. We’re about more than the ride here. I know you really like it, and that’s very cool, but there’s no way that everything I do from now on is going to be about that fucking thing. It was a lark, it’s cool, it’s got its own momentum. But these boxes are going to be their own thing. I want to show people how to take control of the stuff in their living rooms, not advertise my little commercial project to them.”
Death couldn’t make sense out of this. It sounded like Lester didn’tlikethe ride. How was that possible? “I don’t get it,” he said at last. Lester was making him look like an idiot in front of Lacey, too. He didn’t like how this was going at all.
Lester picked up a screwdriver. “You see this? It’s a tool. You can pick it up and you can unscrew stuff or screw stuff in. You can use the handle for a hammer. You can use the blade to open paint cans. You can throw it away, loan it out, or paint it purple and frame it.” He thumped the printer. “This thing is a tool, too, but it’s notyourtool. It belongs to someone else—Disney. It isn’t interested in listening to you or obeying you. It doesn’t want to give you more control over your life.
“This thing reminds me of life before fatkins. It was my very own personal body, but it wasn’t under my control. What’s the word the academics use? ‘Agency.’ I didn’t have any agency. It didn’t matter what I did, I was just this fat thing that my brain had to lug around behind it, listening to its never-ending complaints and aches and pains.
“If you don’t control your life, you’re miserable. Think of the people who don’t get to run their own lives: prisoners, reform-school kids, mental patients. There’s something inherently awful about living like that. Autonomy makes us happy.”
He thumped the top of the printer again. “So here’s this stupid thing, which Disney gives you for free. It looks like a tool, like a thing that you use to better your life, but in reality, it’s a tool that Disney uses to control your life. You can’t program it. You can’t change the channel. It doesn’t even have anoff switch. That’s what gets me exercised. I want to redesign this thing so it gets converted from something that controls to something that gives you control.”
Lester’s eyes shone. Death hurt from head to toe, from the climb and the aftermath of the beating, and the life he’d lived. Lester was telling him that the ride wasn’t important to him anymore, that he’d be doing this other thing with the printer next, and then something else, and then something else. He felt a great, unexpected upwelling of bitterness at the thought.
“So what about the ride?”
“The ride? I told you. I’m done with it. It’s time to do the next thing. You said you wanted to help out, right?”
“With the ride,” Death said patiently, with the manner of someone talking to a child.
Lester turned his back on Death.
“I’m done with the ride,” Lester said. “I don’t want to waste your time.” It was clear he meant,You’re wasting my time.He bent over the printer.
Lacey looked daggers at his shoulders, then turned to help Death down the stairs. His canes clattered on the narrow staircase, and it was all he could do to keep from crying.
Suzanne rode the bullet-train from Miami airport in air-conditioned amusement, watching the Mickey-shaped hang-straps rock back and forth. She’d bought herself a Mickey waffle and a bucket-sized Diet Coke in the dining car and fended off the offers of plush animatronic toys that were clearly descended from Boogie-Woogie Elmo.
Now she watched the kids tear ass up and down the train, or sit mesmerized by the videos and interactives set up at the ends of the cars. The train was really slick, and judging from the brochure she found in the seat-pocket, there was another one from the Orlando airport. These things were like chutes leading from the luggage carousel straight into the parks. Disney had figured out how to make sure that every penny spent by its tourists went straight into its coffers.
The voice-over announcements as they pulled into the station were in English, Chinese, Spanish, Farsi and Russian—in that order—and displayed on the porters’ red coats with brass buttons were name-badges with the flags of many nations, denoting the languages they spoke. They wore mouse-ears, and Suzanne—a veteran of innumerable hotels—could not dissuade one from taking her suitcase.
He brought her to a coach-station and saw her aboard a bus marked for the Polynesian, decorated with tiki-lamps, bamboo, and palm-fronds (she touched one and discovered that it was vinyl). He refused her tip as they saw her aboard, and then stood and waved her off with his white gloves and giant white smile. She had to chuckle as she pulled away, amazed at how effective these little touches were. She felt her muscles loosening, little involuntary chuckles rising in her throat. The coach was full of parents and children from all over the world, grinning and laughing and hugging and talking excitedly about the day ahead of them.
The coach let them off to a group of Hawai’ian-shirt-clad staff who shouted “Aloha!” at them as they debarked, and picked up their luggage with swift, cheerful, relentless efficiency. Her check-in was so painless she wasn’t sure it was over until a nice young lady who looked Chechen picked up her bag for her and urged her out to the grounds, which were green and lush, like nothing she’d seen since landing in Florida. She was surrounded by the hotel structures, long-houses decorated with Polynesian masks and stalked by leggy ibises and chirping tropical birds. Before her was a white-sand beach fronting onto an artificial lake ringed with other luxury hotels: a gigantic 1970s Soviet A-frame building and a gingerbread-choked Victorian hotel. The lake was ringed with a monorail track and plied by handsome paddle-wheeler ferry-boats.
She stared gape-jawed at this until the bellhop gently tugged at her elbow, giving her a dazzling smile.
Her room was the kind of thing you’d see Lucy and Ricky checking into on honeymoon in an oldI Love Lucyepisode—wicker ceiling fans, bamboo furniture, a huge hot-tub shaped like a seashell. Outside, a little terrace looking over the lake, with a pair of cockatoos looking quizzically at her. The bellhop waved at them and they cawed at her and flew off. Suzanne must have made a disappointed noise, because the bellhop patted her on the arm and said, “Don’t worry, we feed them here, they come back all the time. Greedy birdies!”
She tipped the bellhop five bucks once she’d been given the grand tour of the room—a tame Internet connection that was “kid-friendly” and a likewise censored video-on-demand service, delivery pizza or sushi, information on park hours, including the dazzling array of extras she could purchase. It turned out that resort guests were eligible to purchase priority passes for boarding rides ahead of the plebes, and for entering parks early and staying late. This made Suzanne feel right at home—it was very Russian in its approach: the more you spent, the better your time was.
She bought it all: all the fast-passes and priority cards, all of it loaded into a grinning Mickey on a lanyard, a wireless pendant that would take care of her everywhere she went in the park, letting her spend money like water.
Thus girded, she consulted with her bellhop some more and laid out an itinerary. Once she’d showered she found she didn’t want to wear any of her European tailored shorts and blouses. She wanted to disappear into the Great American Mass. The hotel gift shop provided her with a barkcloth Hawai’ian shirt decorated with tessellated Disney trademarks and a big pair of loose shorts, and once she donned them, she saw that she could be anyone now, any tourist in the park. A pair of cheap sunglasses completed the look and she paid for it all by waving her Mickey necklace at the register, spending money like water.
She passed the rest of the day at the Magic Kingdom, taking a ferry from the hotel’s pier to the Victorian wrought-iron docks on the other side of the little artificial lake. As she cleared the turnstiles into Main Street, USA, her heart quickened. Kids rushed past her, chased by their parents’ laughing calls to slow down. Balloon sellers and old-fashioned popcorn machines jostled for space in the crowd, and a brass band was marching down the street in straw boaters and red striped jackets, playing a Sousa march.
She ambled up the road, peering in the adorable little shop windows, like the shops in a fancy casino, all themed artificial facades that were, in back, all one shop, linked through the length of the street.
She reached the castle before she realized it, and saw that it was shorter than it had appeared. Turning around and looking back down Main Street, she saw that the trees lining the sides of the street had been trimmed so they got progressively smaller from the gates to the castle, creating a kind of false perspective line. She laughed now, amused by the accomplishment of the little trompe l’oeil.
She squeezed past the hordes of Asian tourists taking precisely the same picture of the castle, one after another, a phenomenon she’d observed at other famous landmarks. For some Japanese shutterbugs, the holiday photo experience was as formal as the Stations of the Cross, with each picture of each landmark rigidly prescribed by custom and unwritten law.
Now she was under the castle and headed for what her map assured her was Fantasyland. Just as she cleared the archway, she remembered her conversations with that Death Waits kid about Fantasyland: this was the part that had been made over as a goth area, and then remade as the Happiest Construction Site on Earth.
And so it was. The contrast was stark. From fairy castle to green-painted construction sidings. From smiling, well-turned out “castmembers” to construction workers with butt-crack-itis and grouchy expressions. Fantasyland was like an ugly scar on the blemish-free face of a Barbie doll.
She liked it.
Something about all that artifice, all that cunning work to cover up all the bodies a company like Disney would have buried under its manicured Main Street—it had given her a low-level, tooth-grinding headache, a kind of anger at the falseness of it all. Here, she could see the bodies as they buried them.
Out came her camera and she went on the prowl, photographing and photographing, seeking high ground from which to catch snaps over the siding. She’d look at the satellite pics of this spot later.
Now she knew what her next project would be: she would document this scar. She’d dig up the bodies.
Just for completeness’ sake, she went on some of the rides. Her super-fancy pass let her sail past the long lines of bored kids, angry dads, exhausted moms. She captured their expressions with her camera.
The rides were all right. She was sick of rides, truth be told. As an art-form, they were wildly overrated. Some of them made her sick and some of them were like mildly interesting trips through someone’s collection of action-figures in a dark room. The Disney rides didn’t even let you drive, like Lester’s ride did, and you didn’t get to vote on them.
By the time the sun had gone down, she was ready to go back to the room and start writing. She wanted to get all this down, the beauty and the terror, the commerce lurking underneath the friendly facade. As the day lengthened into night, there were more and more screaming children, more angry parents. She caught parents smacking kids, once, twice, got her camera out, caught three more.
They sent a big pupu platter up to her room with a dish of poi and a hollow pineapple filled with rum. She took her computer out onto her lanai and looked out over the lake. An ibis came by and demanded some of her dinner scraps. She obliged it and it gave her a cold look, as if determining whether she’d be good for dessert, then flew off.
She began to write.
Something had changed between Kettlewell and Eva since they’d left Florida with the kids. It wasn’t just the legal hassles, though there were plenty of those. They’d gone to Florida with a second chance—a chance for him to be a mover again, a chance for her to have a husband who was happy with his life again.
Now he found himself sneaking past her when she was in the living room and they slept back to back in bed with as much room between them as possible.
Ada missed Lyenitchka and spent all her time in her bedroom IMing her friend or going questing with her in their favorite game, which involved Barbies, balrogs, and buying outfits. Pascal missed all the attention he had received as the designated mascot of the two little girls.
It was not a high point in the history of the Kettlewell clan.
“Hello?”
“Landon Kettlewell?”
“Hello, Freddy,” he said.
“My fame precedes me,” the journalist said. Kettlewell could hear the grin in his voice. That voice was unmistakable—Kettlewell had heard it in the occassional harassing voicemail that Suzanne forwarded on.
“How are you?”
“Oh, I’m very well sir, and kind of you to ask, yes indeed. I hear you’re not doing so well, though?”
“I can’t complain.”
“I wish you would, though.” You could tell, Freddy thought he was a funny son of a bitch. “Seriously, Mr Kettlewell. I’m calling to follow up on the story of the litigation that Perry Gibbons and Lester Banks are facing for unilaterally canceling the arrangement you’d made to finance their litigation. I’m hoping that you’ll give me a quote that might put this into perspective. Is the defense off? Will Gibbons and Banks be sued? Are you a party to the suit?”
“Freddy?”
“Yes, Mr Kettlewell.”
“I am not a child, nor am I a fool, nor am I a sucker. I’m also not a hothead. You can’t goad me into saying something. You can’t trick me into saying something. I haven’t hung up on you yet, but I will unless you can give me a single good reason to believe that any good could possibly come out of talking to you.”
“I’m going to write this story and publish it today. I can either write that you declined to comment or I can write down whatever comment you might have on the matter. You tell me which is fairer?”
“Goodbye, Freddy.”
“Wait, wait! Just wait.”
Kettlewell liked the pleading note in Freddy’s voice.
“What is it, Freddy?”
“Can I get you to comment on the general idea of litigation investment? A lot of people followed your lead in seeking out litigation investment opportunities. There’s lots of money tied up in it these days. Do incidents like the one in Florida mean that litigation investment is a dead strategy?”
“Of course not,” Kettlewell snapped. He shouldn’t be talking to this man, but the question drove him bonkers. He’d invented litigation investment. “Those big old companies have two common characteristics: they’ve accumulated more assets than they know what to do with, and they’ve got poisonous, monopolistic cultures that reward executives who break the law to help the company turn a buck. None of that’s changed, and so long as that’s all true, there will be little companies with legit gripes against big companies that can be used as investment vehicles for unlocking all that dead Fortune 100 capital and putting it to work.”
“But aren’t Fortune 100 companies investing in litigation funds?”
Kettlewell suppressed a nasty laugh. “Yeah, so what?”
“Well, if this is about destroying Fortune 100 companies—”
“It’s about wringing positive social value out of the courts and out of investment. The way it used to work, there were only two possible outcomes when a big company did something rotten: either they’d get away scot-free or they’d make some lawyers very, very rich. Litigation funds fix that. They socialize the cost of bringing big companies to heel, and they free up the capital that these big companies have accumulated.”
“But when a big company invests in destroying another big company—”
“Sometimes you get a forest where a few trees end up winning, they form a canopy that keeps all the sunlight from reaching the floor. Now, this is stable for forests, but stability is thelastthing you want in a market. Just look at what happens when one of those big trees falls over: whoosh! A million kinds of life are spawned on the floor, fighting for the light that tree had hogged for itself. In a market, when you topple a company that’s come to complacently control some part of the ecosystem, you free up that niche for new innovators.”
“And why is that better than stability? Don’t the workers at these companies deserve the security that comes from their employers’ survival?”
“Oh come on, Freddy. Stop beating that drum. If you’re an employee and you want to get a good deal out of an employer, you’re better off if you’ve got fifty companies you could work for than just one.”
“So you’re saying that if you destroy Disney with your lawsuit, the fifty thousand people who work at Walt Disney World will be able to, what, work for those little rides like your friends have built?”
“They’ll find lots of work, Freddy. If we make it possible for anyone to open an innovative little ride without worrying about getting clobbered by a big old monopolist. You like big corporations so much?”
“Yes, but it’s not little innovative startups that invest in these funds, is it?”
“It’s they who benefit once the fund takes up their cause.”
“And how’s that working out for the ride people you’re meant to be helping out? They rejected you, didn’t they?”
Kettlewell really hated Freddy, he realized. Not just a little—he had a deep and genuine loathing. “Oh, for fuck’s sake. You don’t like little companies. You don’t like big companies. You don’t like workers’ co-ops. What do you want us to do, Freddy? You want us to just curl up under a rock and die? You sit there and make up your funny names for things; you make your snarky little commentaries, but how much good haveyoudone for the world, you complaining, sniping little troll?”
The line got very quiet. “Can I quote you?”
“You certainly can,” Kettlewell huffed. In for a penny, in for a pound. “You can print that, and you can kiss my ass.”
“Thank you, Mr Kettlewell,” Freddy said. “I’ll certainly take the suggestion under advisement.”
Kettlewell stood in his home office and stared at the four walls. Upstairs, Pascal was crying. He did that a lot lately. Kettlewell breathed deeply and tried to chill out.
Someone was knocking at his door, though. He answered it tentatively. The kid he found there was well-scrubbed, black, in his twenties, and smiling amiably.
“Landon Kettlewell?”
“Who’s suing me?” Kettlewell could spot a process server a mile away.
The guy shrugged and made a little you-got-me smile. “Couldn’t say, sir,” he said, and handed Kettlewell the envelope, holding it so that the header was clearly visible to the camera set into the lapel of his shirt.
“You want me to sign something?” Kettlewell said.
“It’s all right, sir,” the kid said and pointed at the camera. “It’s all caught on video.”
“Oh, right,” Kettlewell said. “Want a cup of water? Coffee?”
“I expect you’re going to be too busy to entertain, sir,” the kid said, and ticked a little salute off his forehead. “But you seem like a nice guy. Good luck with it all.”