“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get to the junkyard. Lester explains this really well.”He did, too, losing all of the shyness she remembered, his eyes glowing, his sausage-thick fingers dancing.“Have you ever alphabetized your hard drive? I mean, have you ever spent any time concerning yourself with where on your hard drive your files are stored, which sectors contain which files? Computers abstract away the tedious, physical properties of files and leave us with handles that we use to persistently refer to them, regardless of which part of the hard drive currently holds those particular bits. So I thought, with RFIDs, you could do this with the real world, just tag everything and have your furniture keep track of where it is.“One of the big barriers to roommate harmony is the correct disposition of stuff. When you leave your book on the sofa, I have to move it before I can sit down and watch TV. Then you come after me and ask me where I put your book. Then we have a fight. There’s stuff that you don’t know where it goes, and stuff that you don’t know where it’s been put, and stuff that has nowhere to put it. But with tags and a smart chest of drawers, you can just put your stuff wherever there’s room and ask the physical space to keep track of what’s where from moment to moment.“There’s still the problem of getting everything tagged and described, but that’s a service business opportunity, and where you’ve got other shared identifiers like ISBNs you could use a cameraphone to snap the bar-codes and look them up against public databases. The whole thing could be coordinated around ’spring cleaning’ events where you go through your stuff and photograph it, tag it, describe it—good for your insurance and for forensics if you get robbed, too.”He stopped and beamed, folding his fingers over his belly. “So, that’s it, basically.”Perry slapped him on the shoulder and Tjan drummed his forefingers like a heavy-metal drummer on the side of the workbench they were gathered around.They were all waiting for her. “Well, it’s very cool,” she said, at last. “But, the whole white-plastic-tub thing. It makes your apartment look like an Ikea showroom. Kind of inhumanly minimalist. We’re Americans, we like celebrating our stuff.”“Well, OK, fair enough,” Lester said, nodding. “You don’t have to put everything away, of course. And you can still have all the decor you want. This is about clutter control.”“Exactly,” Perry said. “Come check out Lester’s lab.”“OK, this is pretty perfect,” Suzanne said. The clutter was gone, disappeared into the white tubs that were stacked high on every shelf, leaving the work-surfaces clear. But Lester’s works-in-progress, his keepsakes, his sculptures and triptychs were still out, looking like venerated museum pieces in the stark tidiness that prevailed otherwise.Tjan took her through the spreadsheets. “There are ten teams that do closet-organizing in the network, and a bunch of shippers, packers, movers, and storage experts. A few furniture companies. We adopted the interface from some free software inventory-management apps that were built for illiterate service employees. Lots of big pictures and autocompletion. And we’ve bought a hundred RFID printers from a company that was so grateful for a new customer that they’re shipping us 150 of them, so we can print these things at about a million per hour. The plan is to start our sales through the consultants at the same time as we start showing at trade-shows for furniture companies. We’ve already got a huge order from a couple of local old-folks’ homes.”They walked to the IHOP to have a celebratory lunch. Being back in Florida felt just right to her. Francis, the leader of the paramilitary wing of the AARP, threw them a salute and blew her a kiss, and even Lester’s nursing junkie friend seemed to be in a good mood.When they were done, they brought take-out bags for the junkie and Francis in the shantytown.“I want to make some technology for those guys,” Perry said as they sat in front of Francis’s RV drinking cowboy coffee cooked over a banked wood-stove off to one side. “Room-mate-ware for homeless people.”Francis uncrossed his bony ankles and scratched at his mosquito bites. “A lot of people think that we don’t buy stuff, but it’s not true,” he said. “I shop hard for bargains, but there’s lots of stuff I spend more on because of my lifestyle than I would if I had a real house and steady electricity. When I had a chest-freezer, I could bulk buy ground round for about a tenth of what I pay now when I go to the grocery store and get enough for one night’s dinner. The alternative is using propane to keep the fridge going overnight, and that’s not cheap, either. So I’m a kind of premium customer. Back at Boeing, we loved the people who made small orders, because we could charge them such a premium for custom work, while the big airlines wanted stuff done so cheap that half the time we lost money on the deal.”Perry nodded. “There you have it—roommate-ware for homeless people, a great and untapped market.”Suzanne cocked her head and looked at him. “You’re sounding awfully commerce-oriented for a pure and unsullied engineer, you know?”He ducked his head and grinned and looked about twelve years old. “It’s infectious. Those little kitchen gnomes, we sold nearly a half-million of those things, not to mention all the spin-offs. That’s a half-millionlives—a half-millionhouseholds—that we changed just by thinking up something cool and making it real. These RFID things of Lester’s—we’ll sign a couple million customers with those. People will change everything about how they live from moment to moment because of something Lester thought up in my junkyard over there.”“Well, there’s thirty million of us living in what the social workers call ‘marginal housing,’” Francis said, grinning wryly. He had a funny smile that Suzanne had found adorable until he explained that he had an untreated dental abscess that he couldn’t afford to get fixed. “So that’s a lot of difference you could make.”“Yeah,” Perry said. “Yeah, it sure is.”That night, she found herself still blogging and answering emails—they always piled up when she travelled and took a couple of late nights to clear out—after nine PM, sitting alone in a pool of light in the back corner of Lester’s workshop that she had staked out as her office. She yawned and stretched and listened to her old back crackle. She hated feeling old, and late nights made her feel old—feel every extra ounce of fat on her tummy, feel the lines bracketing her mouth and the little bag of skin under her chin.She stood up and pulled on a light jacket and began to switch off lights and get ready to head home. As she poked her head in Tjan’s office, she saw that she wasn’t the only one working late.“Hey, you,” she said. “Isn’t it time you got going?”He jumped like he’d been stuck with a pin and gave a little yelp. “Sorry,” he said, “didn’t hear you.”He had a cardboard box on his desk and had been filling it with his personal effects—little one-off inventions the guys had made for him, personal fetishes and tchotchkes, a framed picture of his kids.“What’s up?”He sighed and cracked his knuckles. “Might as well tell you now as tomorrow morning. I’m resigning.”She felt a flash of anger and then forced it down and forcibly replaced it with professional distance and curiosity. Mentally she licked her pencil-tip and flipped to a blank page in her reporter’s notebook.“Oh yes?”“I’ve had another offer, in Westchester County. Westinghouse has spun out its own version of Kodacell and they’re looking for a new vice-president to run the division. That’s me.”“Good job,” she said. “Congratulations, Mr Vice-President.”He shook his head. “I emailed Kettlewell half an hour ago. I’m leaving in the morning. I’m going to say goodbye to the guys over breakfast.”“Not much notice,” she said.“Nope,” he said, a note of anger creeping into his voice. “My contract lets Kodacell fire me on one day’s notice, so I insisted on the right to quit on the same terms. Maybe Kettlewell will get his lawyers to write better boilerplate from here on in.”When she had an angry interview, she habitually changed the subject to something sensitive: angry people often say more than they intend to. She did it instinctively, not really meaning to psy-ops Tjan, whom she thought of as a friend, but not letting that get in the way of the story. “Westinghouse is doing what, exactly?”“It’ll be as big as Kodacell’s operation in a year,” he said. “George Westinghouse personally funded Tesla’s research, you know. The company understands funding individual entrepreneurs. I’m going to be training the talent scouts and mentoring the financial people, then turning them loose to sign up entrepreneurs for the Westinghouse network. There’s a competitive market for garage inventors now.” He laughed. “Go ahead and print that,” he said. “Blog it tonight. There’s competition now. We’re giving two points more equity and charging half a point less on equity than the Kodacell network.”“That’s amazing, Tjan. I hope you’ll keep in touch with me—I’d love to follow your story.”“Count on it,” he said. He laughed. “I’m getting a week off every eight weeks to scout Russia. They’ve got an incredible culture of entrepreneurship.”“Plus you’ll get to see your kids,” Suzanne said. “That’s really good.”“Plus, I’ll get to see my kids,” he admitted.“How much money is Westinghouse putting into the project?” she asked, replacing her notional notebook with a real one, pulled from her purse.“I don’t have numbers, but they’ve shut down the whole appliances division to clear the budget for it.” She nodded—she’d seen news of the layoffs on the wires. Mass demonstrations, people out of work after twenty years’ service. “So it’s a big budget.”“They must have been impressed with the quarterlies from Kodacell.”Tjan folded down the flaps on his box and drummed his fingers on it, squinting at her. “You’re joking, right?”“What do you mean?”“Suzanne, they were impressed byyou. Everyone knows that quarterly numbers are easy to cook—anything less than two annual reports is as likely to be enronning as real fortune-making. Butyourdispatches from here—they’re what sold them. It’s what’s convincingeveryone. Kettlewell said that three quarters of his new recruits come on board after reading your descriptions of this place. That’s howIended up here.”She shook her head. “That’s very flattering, Tjan, but—”He waved her off and then, surprisingly, came around the desk and hugged her. “But nothing, Suzanne. Kettlewell, Lester, Perry—they’re all basically big kids. Full of enthusiasm and invention, but they’ve got the emotional maturity and sense of scale of hyperactive five year olds. You and me, we’re grownups. People take us seriously. It’s easy to get a kid excited, but when a grownup chimes in you know there’s some there there.”Suzanne recovered herself after a second and put away her notepad. “I’m just the person who writes it all down. You people are making it happen.”“In ten years’ time, they’ll remember you and not us,” Tjan said. “You should get Kettlewell to put you on the payroll.”Kettlewell himself turned up the next day. Suzanne had developed an intuitive sense of the flight-times from the west coast and so for a second she couldn’t figure out how he could possibly be standing there—nothing in the sky could get him from San Jose to Miami for a seven AM arrival.“Private jet,” he said, and had the grace to look slightly embarrassed. “Kodak had eight of them and Duracell had five. We’ve been trying to sell them all off but no one wants a used jet these days, not even Saudi princes or Columbian drug-lords.”“So, basically, it was going to waste.”He smiled and looked eighteen—she really did feel like the only grownup sometimes—and said, “Zackly—it’s practically environmental. Where’s Tjan?”“Downstairs saying goodbye to the guys, I think.”“OK,” he said. “Are you coming?”She grabbed her notebook and a pen and beat him out the door of her rented condo.“What’s this all about,” Tjan said, looking wary. The guys were hang-dog and curious looking, slightly in awe of Kettlewell, who did little to put them at their ease—he was staring intensely at Tjan.“Exit interview,” he said. “Company policy.”Tjan rolled his eyes. “Come on,” he said. “I’ve got a flight to catch in an hour.”“I could give you a lift,” Kettlewell said.“You want to do the exit interview between here and the airport?”“I could give you a lift to JFK. I’ve got the jet warmed up and waiting.”Sometimes, Suzanne managed to forget that Kodacell was a multi-billion dollar operation and that Kettlewell was at its helm, but other times the point was very clear.“Come on,” he said, “we’ll make a day of it. We can stop on the way and pick up some barbecue to eat on the plane. I’ll even let you keep your seat in the reclining position during take-off and landing. Hell, you can turn your cell-phone on—just don’t tell the Transport Security Administration!”Tjan looked cornered, then resigned. “Sounds good to me,” he said and Kettlewell shouldered one of the two huge duffel-bags that were sitting by the door.“Hi, Kettlewell,” Perry said.Kettlewell set down the duffel. “Sorry, sorry. Lester, Perry, it’s really good to see you. I’ll bring Suzanne back tonight and we’ll all go out for dinner, OK?”Suzanne blinked. “I’m coming along?”“I sure hope so,” Kettlewell said.Perry and Lester accompanied them down in the elevator.“Private jet, huh?” Perry said. “Never been in one of those.”Kettlewell told them about his adventures trying to sell off Kodacell’s private air force.“Send one of them our way, then,” Lester said.“Do you fly?” Kettlewell said.“No,” Perry said. “Lester wants to take it apart. Right, Les?”Lester nodded. “Lots of cool junk in a private jet.”“These things are worth millions, guys,” Kettlewell said.“No, someonepaidmillions for them,” Perry said. “They’reworthwhatever you can sell them for.”Kettlewell laughed. “You’ve had an influence around here, Tjan,” he said. Tjan managed a small, tight smile.Kettlewell had a driver waiting outside of the building who loaded the duffels into the spacious trunk of a spotless dark town-car whose doors chunked shut with an expensive sound.“I want you to know that I’m really not angry at all, OK?” Kettlewell said.Tjan nodded. He had the look of a man who was steeling himself for a turn in an interrogation chamber. He’d barely said a word since Kettlewell arrived. For his part, Kettlewell appeared oblivious to all of this, though Suzanne was pretty sure that he understood exactly how uncomfortable this was making Tjan.“The thing is, six months ago, nearly everyone was convinced that I was a fucking moron, that I was about to piss away ten billion dollars of other people’s money on a stupid doomed idea. Now they’re copying me and poaching my best people. So this is good news for me, though I’m going to have to find a new business manager for those two before they get picked up for turning planes into component pieces.”Suzanne’s PDA vibrated whenever the number of online news stories mentioning her or Kodacell or Kettlewell increased or decreased sharply. She used to try to read everything, but it was impossible to keep up—now all she wanted was to keep track of whether the interestingness-index was on the uptick or downtick.It had started to buzz that morning and the pitch had increased steadily until it was actually uncomfortable in her pocket. Irritated, she yanked it out and was about to switch it off when the lead article caught her eye.KODACELL LOSES TJAN TO WESTINGHOUSEThe by-line was Freddy. Feeling like a character in a horror movie who can’t resist the compulsion to look under the bed, Suzanne thumbed the PDA’s wheel and brought up the whole article.:: Kodacell business-manager Tjan Lee Tang, whose adventures we’ve:: followed through Suzanne Church’s gushing, besotted blog postsShe looked away and reflexively reached toward the delete button. The innuendo that she was romantically involved with one or more of the guys had circulated on her blog’s message boards and around the diggdots ever since she’d started writing about them. No woman could possibly be writing about this stuff because it was important—she had to be “with the band,” a groupie or a whore.Combine that with Rat-Toothed Freddy’s sneering tone and she was instantly sent into heart-thundering rage. She deleted the post and looked out the window. Her pager buzzed some more and she looked down. The same article, being picked up on blogs, on some of the bigger diggdots, and an AP wire.She forced herself to re-open it.:: has been hired to head up a new business unit on behalf of the:: multinational giant Westinghouse. The appointment stands as more:: proof of Church’s power to cloud men’s minds with pretty empty:: words about the half-baked dot-com schemes that have oozed out of:: Silicon Valley and into every empty and dead American suburb.It was hypnotic, like staring into the eyes of a serpent. Her pulse actually thudded in her ears for a second before she took a few deep breaths and calmed down enough to finish the article, which was just more of the same: nasty personal attacks, sniping, and innuendo. Freddy even managed to imply that she was screwing all of them—and Kettlewell besides.Kettlewell leaned over her shoulder and read.“You should send him an email,” he said. “That’s disgusting. That’s not reportage.”“Never get into a pissing match with a skunk,” she said. “What Freddy wants is for me to send him mail that he can publish along with more snarky commentary. When the guy you’re arguing with controls the venue you’re arguing in, you can’t possibly win.”“So blog him,” Kettlewell said. “Correct the record.”“The record is correct,” she said. “It’s never been incorrect. I’ve written an exhaustive record that is there for everyone to see. If people believe this, no amount of correction will help.”Kettlewell made a face like a little boy who’d been told he couldn’t have a toy. “That guy is poison,” he said. “Those quote-marks around blog.”“Let him add his quote-marks,” she said. “My daily readership is higher than the Merc’s paid circulation this week.” It was true. After a short uphill climb from her new URL, she’d accumulated enough readers that the advertising revenue dwarfed her old salary at the Merc, an astonishing happenstance that nevertheless kept her bank-account full. She clicked a little. “Besides, look at this, there are three dozen links pointing at this story so far and all of them are critical of him. We don’t need to stick up for ourselves—the world will.”Saying it calmed her and now they were at the airport. They cruised into a private gate, away from the militarized gulag that fronted Miami International. A courteous security guard waved them through and the driver confidently piloted the car up to a wheeled jetway beside a cute, stubby little toy jet. On the side, in cursive script, was the plane’s name: Suzanne.She looked accusatorially at Kettlewell.“It was called that when I bought the company,” he said, expressionless but somehow mirthful behind his curved surfer shades. “But I kept it because I liked the private joke.”“Just no one tell Freddy that you’ve got an airplane with my name on it or we’ll never hear the fucking end of it.”She covered her mouth, regretting her language, and Kettlewell laughed, and so did Tjan, and somehow the ice was broken between them.“Nowayflying this thing is cost-effective,” Tjan said. “Your CFO should be kicking your ass.”“It’s a little indulgence,” Kettlewell said, bounding up the steps and shaking hands with a small, neat woman pilot, an African-American with corn-rows peeking out under her smart peaked cap. “Once you’ve flown in your own bird, you never go back.”“This is amonstrosity,” Tjan said as he boarded. “What this thing eats up in hangar fees alone would be enough to bankroll three or four teams.” He settled into an oversized Barcalounger of a seat and accepted a glass of orange juice that the pilot poured for him. “Thank you, and no offense.”“None taken,” she said. “I agree one hundred percent.”“See,” Tjan said.Suzanne took her own seat and her own glass and buckled in and watched the two of them, warming up for the main event, realizing that she’d been brought along as a kind of opening act.“They paying you more?”“Yup,” Tjan said. “All on the back-end. Half a point on every dollar brought in by a team I coach or whose members I mentor.”Kettlewell whistled. “That’s a big share,” he said.“If I can make my numbers, I’ll take home a million this year.”“You’ll make those numbers. Good negotiations. Why didn’t you ask us for the same deal?”“Would you have given it to me?”“You’re a star,” Kettlewell said, nodding at Suzanne, whose invisibility to the conversation popped like a bubble. “Thanks to her.”“Thanks, Suzanne,” Tjan said.Suzanne blushed. “Come on, guys.”Tjan shook his head. “She doesn’t really understand. It’s actually kind of charming.”“We might have matched the offer.”“You guys are first to market. You’ve got a lot of procedures in place. I wanted to reinvent some wheels.”“We’re tooconservativefor you?”Tjan grinned wickedly. “Oh yes,” he said. “I’m going to do business inRussia.”Kettlewell grunted and pounded his orange juice. Around them, the jet’s windows flashed white as they broke through the clouds and the ten thousand foot bell sounded.“How the hell are you going to make anything that doesn’t collapse under its own weight in Russia?”“The corruption’s a problem, sure,” Tjan said. “But it’s offset by the entrepreneurship. Some of those cats make the Chinese look lazy and unimaginative. It’s a shame that so much of their efforts have been centered on graft, but there’s no reason they couldn’t be focused on making an honest ruble.”They fell into a discussion of the minutiae of Perry and Lester’s businesses, franker than any business discussion she’d ever heard. Tjan talked about the places where they’d screwed up, and places where they’d scored big, and about all the plans he’d made for Westinghouse, the connections he had in Russia. He even talked about his kids and his ex in St Petersburg, and Kettlewell admitted that he’d known about them already.For Kettlewell’s part, he opened the proverbial kimono wide, telling Tjan about conflicts within the board of directors, poisonous holdovers from the pre-Kodacell days who sabotaged the company from within with petty bureaucracy, even the problems he was having with his family over the long hours they were working. He opened the minibar and cracked a bottle of champagne to toast Tjan’s new job, and they mixed it with more orange juice, and then there were bagels and schmear, fresh fruit, power bars, and canned Starbucks coffees with deadly amounts of sugar and caffeine.When Kettlewell disappeared into the tiny—but marble-appointed—bathroom, Suzanne found herself sitting alone with Tjan, almost knee to knee, lightheaded from lack of sleep and champagne and altitude.“Some trip,” she said.“You’re the best,” he said, wobbling a little. “You know that? Just the best. The stuff you write about these guys, it makes me want to stand up and salute. You make us all seem so fuckingglorious. We’re going to end up taking over the world because you inspire us so. Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this, because you’re not very self-conscious about it right now, but Suzanne, you won’t believe it because you’re so goddamned modest, too. It’s what makes your writing so right, so believable—”Kettlewell stepped out of the bathroom. “Touching down soon,” he said, and patted them each on the shoulder as he took his seat. “So that’s about it, then,” he said, and leaned back and closed his eyes. Suzanne was accustomed to thinking of him as twenty-something, the boyish age of the magazine cover portraits from the start of his career. Now, eyes closed on his private jet, harsh upper atmosphere sun painting his face, his crowsfeet and the deep vertical brackets around his mouth revealed him for someone pushing a youthful forty, kept young by exercise and fun and the animation of his ideas.“Guess so,” Tjan said, slumping. “This has been one of the more memorable experiences of my life, Kettlewell, Suzanne. Not entirely pleasant, but pleasant on the whole. A magical time in the clouds.”“Once you’ve flown private, you’ll never go back to coach,” Kettlewell said, smiling, eyes still closed. “You still think my CFO should spank me for not selling this thing?”“No,” Tjan said. “In ten years, if we do our jobs, there won’t be five companies on earth that can afford this kind of thing—it’ll be like building a cathedral after the Protestant Reformation. While we have the chance, we should keep these things in the sky. But you should give one to Lester and Perry to take apart.”“I was planning to,” Kettlewell said. “Thanks.”Suzanne and Kettlewell got off the plane and Tjan didn’t look back when they’d landed at JFK. “Should we go into town and get some bialy to bring back to Miami?” Kettlewell said, squinting at the bright day on the tarmac.“Bring deli to Miami?”“Right, right,” he said. “Forget I asked. Besides, we’d have to charter a chopper to get into Manhattan and back without dying in traffic.”Something about the light through the open hatch or the sound or the smell—something indefinably New York—made her yearn for Miami. The great cities of commerce like New York and San Francisco seemed too real for her, while the suburbs of Florida were a kind of endless summer camp, a dreamtime where anything was possible.“Let’s go,” she said. The champagne buzz had crashed and she had a touch of headache. “I’m bushed.”“Me too,” Kettlewell said. “I left San Jose last night to get into Miami before Tjan left. Not much sleep. Gonna put my seat back and catch some winks, if that’s OK?”“Good plan,” Suzanne said.Embarrassingly, when they were fully reclined, their seats nearly touched, forming something like a double bed. Suzanne lay awake in the hum of the jets for a while, conscious of the breathing human beside her, the first man she’d done anything like share a bed with in at least a year. The last thing she remembered was the ten thousand foot bell going off and then she slipped away into sleep.:: Perry thought that they’d sell a million Home Awares in six:: months. Lester thought he was nuts, that number was too high.:::: “Please,” he said, “Iinventedthese things but there aren’t a:: million roommate households in all of America. We’ll sell half:: a million tops, total.Lester always complained when she quoted him directly in her blog posts, but she thought he secretly enjoyed it.:: Today the boys shipped their millionth unit. It took six weeks.They’d uncorked a bottle of champagne when unit one million shipped. They hadn’t actually shipped it, per se. The manufacturing was spread out across forty different teams all across the country, even a couple of Canadian teams. The RFID printer company had re-hired half the workers they’d laid off the year before, and had them all working overtime to meet demand.:: What’s exciting about this isn’t just the money that these guys:: have made off of it, or the money that Kodacell will return to:: its shareholders, it’s the ecosystem that these things have:: enabled. There’re at least ten competing commercial systems for:: organizing, tagging, sharing, and describing Home Aware objects.:: Parents love them for their kids. School teachers love them.:: Seniors’ homes.The seniors’ homes had been Francis’s idea. They’d brought him in to oversee some of the production engineering, along with some of the young braves who ran around the squatter camps. Francis knew which ones were biddable and he kept them to heel. In the evenings, he’d join the guys and Suzanne up on the roof of the workshop on folding chairs, with beers, watching the sweaty sunset.:: They’re not the sole supplier. That’s what an ecosystem is all:: about, creating value for a lot of players. All this competition:: is great news for you and me, because it’s already driven the:: price of Home Aware goods down by forty percent. That means that:: Lester and Perry are going to have to invent something new, soon,:: before the margin disappears altogether—and that’s also good:: news for you and me.“Are you coming?” Lester had dated a girl for a while, someone he met on Craigslist, but she’d dumped him and Perry had confided that she’d left him because he didn’t live up to the press he’d gotten in Suzanne’s column. When he got dumped, he became even touchier about Suzanne, caught at a distance from her that was defined by equal parts of desire and resentment.“Up in a minute,” she said, trying to keep her smile light and noncommittal. Lester was very nice, but there were times when she caught him staring at her like a kicked puppy and it made her uncomfortable. Naturally, this increased his discomfort as well.On the roof they already had a cooler of beers going and beside it a huge plastic tub of brightly colored machine-parts.“Jet engine,” Perry said. The months had put a couple pounds on him and new wrinkles, and given him some grey at the temples, and laugh lines inside his laugh lines. Perry was always laughing at everything around them (“They fuckingpay meto do this,” he’d told her once, before literally collapsing to the floor, rolling with uncontrollable hysteria). He laughed again.“Good old Kettlebelly,” she said. “Must have broken his heart.”Francis held up a curved piece of cowling. “This thing wasn’t going to last anyway. See the distortion here and here? This thing was designed in a virtual wind-tunnel and machine-lathed. We tried that a couple times, but the wind-tunnel sims were never detailed enough and the forms that flew well in the machine always died a premature death in the sky. Another two years and he’d have had to have it rebuilt anyway, and the Koreans who built this charge shitloads for parts.”“Too bad,” Lester said. “It’s pretty. Gorgeous, even.” He mimed its curve in the air with a pudgy hand, that elegant swoop.“Aerospace loves the virtual wind-tunnel,” Francis said, and glared at the cowling. “You can use evolutionary algorithms in the sim and come up with really efficient designs, in theory. And computers are cheaper than engineers.”“Is that why you were laid off?” Suzanne said.“I wasn’t laid off, girl,” he said. He jiggled his lame foot. “I retired at 65 and was all set up but the pension plan went bust. So I missed a month of medical and they cut me off and I ended up uninsured. When the wife took sick, bam, that was it, wiped right out. But I’m not bitter—why should the poor be allowed to live, huh?”His acolytes, three teenagers in do-rags from the shantytown, laughed and went on to pitching bottle-caps off the edge of the roof.“Stop that, now,” he said, “you’re getting the junkyard all dirty. Christ, you’d think that they grew up in some kind of zoo.” When Francis drank, he got a little mean, a little dark.“So, kids,” Perry said, wandering over to them, hands in pockets. Silhouetted against the setting sun, biceps bulging, muscular chest tapering to his narrow hips, he looked like a Greek statue. “What do you think of the stuff we’re building?”They looked at their toes. “’S OK,” one of them grunted.“Answer the man,” Francis snapped. “Complete sentences, looking up and at him, like you’ve got a shred of self-respect. Christ, what are you, five years old?”They shifted uncomfortably. “It’s fine,” one of them said.“Would you use it at home?”One of them snorted. “No, man. My dad steals anything nice we get and sells it.”“Oh,” Perry said.“Fucker broke in the other night and I caught him with my ipod. Nearly took his fucking head off with my cannon before I saw who it was. Fucking juice-head.”“You should have fucked him up,” one of the other kids said. “My ma pushed my pops in front of a bus one day to get rid of him, guy broke both his legs and never came back.”Suzanne knew it was meant to shock them, but that didn’t take away from its shockingness. In the warm fog of writing and living in Florida, it was easy to forget that these people lived in a squatter camp and were technically criminals, and received no protection from the law.Perry, though, just squinted into the sun and nodded. “Have you ever tried burglar alarms?”The kids laughed derisively and Suzanne winced, but Perry was undaunted. “You could be sure that you woke up whenever anyone entered, set up a light and siren to scare them off.”“I want one that fires spears,” the one with the juice-head father said.“Blowtorches,” said the one whose mother pushed his father under a bus.“I want a force-field,” the third one said, speaking for the first time. “I want something that will keep anyone from coming in, period, so I don’t have to sleep one eye up, ’cause I’ll be safe.”The other two nodded, slowly.“Damn straight,” Francis said.That was the last time Francis’s acolytes joined them on the rooftop. Instead, when they finished work they went home, walking slowly and talking in low murmurs. With just the grownups on the roof, it was a lot more subdued.“What’s that smoke?” Lester said, pointing at the black billowing column off to the west, in the sunset’s glare.“House-fire,” Francis said. “Has to be. Or a big fucking car-wreck, maybe.”Perry ran down the stairs and came back up with a pair of high-power binox. “Francis, that’s your place,” he said after a second’s fiddling. He handed the binox to Francis. “Just hit the button and they’ll self-stabilize.”“That’s my place,” Francis said. “Oh, Christ.” He’d gone gray and seemed to have sobered up instantly. His lips were wet, his eyes bright.They drove over at speed, Suzanne wedged into Lester’s frankensmartcar, practically under his armpit, and Perry traveling with Francis. Lester still wore the same cologne as her father, and when she opened the window, its smell was replaced by the burning-tires smell of the fire.They arrived to discover a fire-truck parked on the side of the freeway nearest the shantytown. The fire-fighters were standing soberly beside it, watching the fire rage across the canal.They rushed for the footbridge and a firefighter blocked their way.“Sorry, it’s not safe,” he said. He was Latino, good looking, like a movie star, bronze skin flickering with copper highlights from the fire.“I live there,” Francis said. “That’s my home.”The firefighter looked away. “It’s not safe,” he said.“Why aren’t you fighting the fire?” Suzanne said.Francis’s head snapped around. “You’re not fighting the fire! You’re going to let our houses burn!”A couple more fire-fighters trickled over. Across the river, the fire had consumed half of the little settlement. Some of the residents were operating a slow and ponderous bucket-brigade from the canal, while others ran into the unburned buildings and emerged clutching armloads of belongings, bits of furniture, boxes of photos.“Sir,” the movie-star said, “the owner of this property has asked us not to intervene. Since there’s no imminent risk to life and no risk of the burn spreading off his property, we can’t trespass to put out the fire. Our hands are tied.”“The owner?” Francis spat. “This land is in title dispute. The court case has been underway for twenty years now. What owner?”The movie-star shrugged. “That’s all I know, sir.”Across the canal, the fire was spreading, and the bucket brigade was falling back. Suzanne could feel the heat now, like putting your face in the steam from a boiling kettle.Francis seethed, looking from the firemen and their truck back to the fire. He looked like he was going to pop something, or start shouting, or charge into the flames.Suzanne grabbed his hand and walked him over to the truck and grabbed the first firefighter she encountered.“I’m Suzanne Church, from the San Jose Mercury News, a McClatchy paper. I’d like to speak to the commanding officer on the scene, please.” She hadn’t been with the Merc for months, but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to say,I’m Suzanne Church with SuzanneChurch.org.She was pretty sure that no matter how high her readership was and how profitable her ad sales were, the fire-fighter wouldn’t have been galvanized into the action that was invoked when she mentioned the name of a real newspaper.He hopped to, quickly moving to an older man, tapping him on the shoulder, whispering in his ear. Suzanne squeezed Francis’s hand as the fire-chief approached them. She extended her hand and talked fast. “Suzanne Church,” she said, and took out her notebook, the key prop in any set piece involving a reporter. “I’m told that you are going to let those homes burn because someone representing himself as the title-holder to that property has denied you entry. However, I’m also told that the title to that land is in dispute and has been in the courts for decades. Can you resolve this for me, Chief...?”“Chief Brian Wannamaker,” he said. He was her age, with the leathery skin of a Florida native who spent a lot of time out of doors. “I’m afraid I have no comment for you at this time.”Suzanne kept her face deadpan, and gave Francis’s hand a warning squeeze to keep him quiet. He was trembling now. “I see. You can’t comment, you can’t fight the fire. Is that what you’d like me to write in tomorrow’s paper?”The Chief looked at the fire for a moment. Across the canal, the bucket-brigaders were losing worse than ever. He frowned and Suzanne saw that his hands were clenched into fists. “Let me make a call, OK?” Without waiting for an answer, he turned on his heel and stepped behind the fire-engine, reaching for his cellphone.Suzanne strained to hear his conversation, but it was inaudible over the crackle of the fire. When she turned around again, Francis was gone. She caught sight of him again in just a moment, running for the canal, then jumping in and landing badly in the shallow, swampy water. He hobbled across to the opposite bank and began to laboriously climb it.A second later, Perry followed. Then Lester.“Chief!” she said, going around the engine and pointing. The Chief had the phone clamped to his head still, but when he saw what was going on, he snapped it shut, dropped it in his pocket and started barking orders.Now the fire-fightersmoved, boiling across the bridge, uncoiling hoses, strapping on tanks and masks. They worked in easy, fluid concert, and it was only seconds before the water and foam hit the flames and the smoke changed to white steam.The shantytown residents cheered. The fire slowly receded. Perry and Lester had Francis, holding him back from charging into the fray as the fire-fighters executed their clockwork dance.The steam was hot enough to scald, and Suzanne pulled the collar of her blouse up over her face. Around her were the shantytowners, mothers with small children, old men, and a seemingly endless parade of thug-life teenagers, the boys in miniature cycling shorts and do-rags, the girls in bandeau tops, glitter makeup, and skirts made from overlapping strips of rag, like post-apocalyptic hula outfits. Their faces were tight, angry, smudged with smoke and pinkened by the heat.She saw the one whose father had reportedly been pushed under a bus by his mother, and he grimaced at her. “What we gonna do now?”“I don’t know,” she said. “Are you all right? Is your family all right?”“Don’t got nowhere to sleep, nowhere to go,” he said. “Don’t even have a change of clothes. My moms won’t stop crying.”There were tears in his eyes. He was all of fifteen, she realized. He’d seemed much older on the roof. She gathered him into her arms and gave him a hug. He was stiff and awkward at first and then he kind of melted into her, weeping on her shoulder. She stroked his back and murmured reassuringly. Some of the other shantytowners looked at the spectacle, then looked away. Even a couple of his homeboys—whom she’d have bet would have laughed and pointed at this show of weakness—only looked and then passed on. One had tears streaking the smoke smudges on his face.For someone who isn’t good at comforting people, I seem to be doing a lot of it, she thought.Francis and Lester and Perry found her and Francis gave the boy a gruff hug and told him everything would be fine.The fire was out now, the firefighter hosing down the last embers, going through the crowd and checking for injuries. A TV news crew had set up and a pretty black reporter in her twenties was doing a stand up.“The illegal squatter community has long been identified as a problem area for gang and drug activity by the Broward County Sheriff’s office. The destruction here seems total, but it’s impossible to say whether this spells the end of this encampment, or whether the denizens will rebuild and stay on.”Suzanne burned with shame. That could have been her. When she’d first seen this place, it had been like something out of a documentary on Ethiopia. As she’d come to know it, it had grown homier. The residents built piecemeal, one wall at a time, one window, one poured concrete floor, as they could afford it. None of them had mortgages, but they had neat vegetable gardens and walkways spelled out in white stones with garden gnomes standing guard.The reporter was staring at her—and naturally so; she’d been staring at the reporter. Glaring at her.“My RV,” Francis said, pointing, distracting her. It was a charred wreck. He went to the melted doors and opened them, stepping back as a puff of smoke rose from the inside. A fire-fighter spotted it and diverted a stream of water into the interior, soaking Francis and whatever hadn’t burned. He turned and shouted something at the fire-fighter, but he was already hosing down something else.Inside Francis’s trailer, they salvaged a drenched photo-album, a few tools, and a lock-box with some of his papers in it. He had backed up his laptop to his watch that morning, so his data was safe. “I kept meaning to scan these in,” he said, paging through the photos in the soaked album. “Should have done it.”Night was falling, the mosquitoes singing and buzzing. The neat little laneways and homey, patchwork buildings lay in ruins around them.The shantytowners clustered in little groups or picked through the ruins. Drivers of passing cars slowed down to rubberneck, and a few shouted filthy, vengeful things at them. Suzanne took pictures of their license plates. She’d publish them when she got home.A light drizzle fell. Children cried. The swampy sounds of cicadas and frogs and mosquitoes filled the growing dark and then the streetlights flicked on all down the river of highway, painting everything in blue-white mercury glow.“We’ve got to get tents up,” Francis said. He grabbed a couple of young men and gave them orders, things to look for—fresh water, plastic sheeting, anything with which to erect shelters.Lester started to help them, and Perry stood with his hands on his hips, next to Suzanne.“Jesus Christ,” he said. “This is a fucking disaster. I mean, these people are used to living rough, but this—” he broke off, waving his hands helplessly. He wiped his palms off on his butt, then grabbed Francis.“Get them going,” he said. “Get them to gather up their stuff and walk them down to our place. We’ve got space for everyone for now at least.”Francis looked like he was going to say something, then he stopped. He climbed precariously up on the hood of Lester’s car and shouted for people to gather round. The boys he bossed around took up the call and it wasn’t long before nearly everyone was gathered around them.“Can everyone hear? This is as loud as I go.”There were murmurs of assent. Suzanne had seen him meet with his people before in the daylight and the good times, seen the respect they afforded to him. He wasn’t the leader, per se, but when he spoke, people listened. It was a characteristic she’d encountered in the auto-trade and in technology, in the ones the others all gravitated to. Charismatics.“We’ve got a place to stay a bit up the road for tonight. It’s about a half hour walk. It’s indoors and there’s toilets, but maybe not much to make beds out of. Take what you can carry for about a mile, you can come back tomorrow for the rest. You don’t have to come, but this isn’t going to be any fun tonight.”A woman came forward. She was young, but not young enough to be a homegirl. She had long dark hair and she twisted her hands as she spoke in a soft voice to Francis. “What about our stuff? We can’t leave it here tonight. It’s all we’ve got.”Francis nodded. “We need ten people to stand guard in two shifts of five tonight. Young people. You’ll get flashlights and phones, coffee and whatever else we can give you. Just keep the rubberneckers out.” The rubberneckers were out of earshot. The account they’d get of this would come from the news-anchor who’d tell them how dangerous and dirty this place was. They’d never see what Suzanne saw, ten men and women forming up to one side of the crowd. Young braves and homegirls, people her age, their faces solemn.Francis oversaw the gathering up of belongings. Suzanne had never had a sense of how many people lived in the shantytown but now she could count them as they massed up by the roadside and began to walk: a hundred, a little more than a hundred. More if you counted the surprising number of babies.Lester conferred briefly with Francis and then Francis tapped three of the old timers and two of the mothers with babes in arms and they crammed into Lester’s car and he took off. Suzanne walked by the roadside with the long line of refugees, listening to their murmuring conversation, and in a few minutes, Lester was back to pick up more people, at Francis’s discretion.Perry was beside her now, his eyes a million miles away.“What now?” she said.“We put them in the workshop tonight, tomorrow we help them build houses.”“At your place? You’re going to let them stay?”“Why not? We don’t use half of that land. The landlord gets his check every month. Hasn’t been by in five years. He won’t care.”She took a couple more steps. “Perry, I’m going to write about this,” she said.“Oh,” he said. They walked further. A small child was crying. “Of course you are. Well, fuck the landlord. I’ll sic Kettlewell on him if he squawks.”“What do you think Kettlewell will think about all this?”“This? Look, this is what I’ve been saying all along. We need to make products for these people. They’re a huge untapped market.”What she wanted to ask wasWhat would Tjan say about this?but they didn’t talk about Tjan these days. Kettlewell had promised them a new business manager for weeks, but none had appeared. Perry had taken over more and more of the managerial roles, and was getting less and less workshop time in. She could tell it frustrated him. In her discussions with Kettlewell, he’d confided that it had turned out to be harder to find suits than it was finding wildly inventive nerds. Lots of peoplewantedto run businesses, but the number who actually seemed likely to be capable of doing so was only a small fraction.They could see the junkyard now. Perry pulled out his phone and called his server and touch-toned the codes to turn on all the lights and unlock all the doors.They lost a couple of kids in the aisles of miraculous junk, and Francis had to send out bigger kids to find them and bring them back, holding the treasures they’d found to their chests. Lester kept going back for more old-timers, more mothers, more stragglers, operating his ferry service until they were all indoors in the workshop.“This is the place,” Francis said. “We’ll stay indoors here tonight. Toilets are there and there—orderly lines, no shoving.”“What about food?” asked a man with a small boy sleeping over his shoulder.“This isn’t the Red Cross, Al,” Francis snapped. “We’ll organize food for ourselves in the morning.”Perry whispered in his ear. Francis shook his head, and Perry whispered some more.“There will be food in the morning. This is Perry. It’s his place. He’s going to go to Costco for us when they open.”The crowd cheered and a few of the women hugged him. Some of the men shook his hand. Perry blushed. Suzanne smiled. These people were good people. They’d been through more than Suzanne could imagine. It felt right that she could help them—like making up for every panhandler she’d ignored and every passed-out drunk she’d stepped over.There were no blankets, there were no beds. The squatters slept on the concrete floor. Young couples spooned under tables. Children snuggled between their parents, or held onto their mothers. As the squatters dossed down and as Suzanne walked past them to get to her car her heart broke a hundred times. She felt like one of those Depression-era photographers walking through an Okie camp, a rending visual at each corner.Back at her rented condo, she found herself at the foot of her comfortable bed with its thick duvet—she liked keeping the AC turned up enough to snuggle under a blanket—and the four pillows. She was in her jammies, but she couldn’t climb in between those sheets.She couldn’t.And then she was back in her car with all her blankets, sheets, pillows, big towels—even the sofa cushions, which the landlord was not going to be happy about—and speeding back to the workshop.She let herself in and set about distributing the blankets and pillows and towels, picking out the families, the old people. A woman—apparently able-bodied and young, but skinny—sat up and said, “Hey, where’s one for me?” Suzanne recognized the voice. The junkie from the IHOP. Lester’s friend. The one who’d grabbed her and cursed her.She didn’t want to give the woman a blanket. She only had two left and there were old people lying on the bare floor.“Where’s one for me?” the woman said more loudly. Some of the sleepers stirred. Some of them sat up.Suzanne was shaking. Who the hell was she to decide who got a blanket? Did being rude to her at the IHOP disqualify you from getting bedding when your house burned down?Suzanne gave her a blanket, and she snatched one of the sofa cushions besides.It’s why she’s still alive,Suzanne thought.How she’s survived.She gave away the last blanket and went home to sleep on her naked bed underneath an old coat, a rolled-up sweater for a pillow. After her shower, she dried herself on tee-shirts, having given away all her towels to use as bedding.The new shantytown went up fast—faster than she’d dreamed possible. The boys helped. Lester downloaded all the information he could find on temporary shelters—building out of mud, out of sandbags, out of corrugated cardboard and sheets of plastic—and they tried them all. Some of the houses had two or more rickety-seeming stories, but they all felt solid enough as she toured them, snapping photos of proud homesteaders standing next to their handiwork.Little things went missing from the workshops—tools, easily pawned books and keepsakes, Perry’s wallet—and they all started locking their desk-drawers. There were junkies in among the squatters, and desperate people, and immoral people, them too. One day she found that her cute little gold earrings weren’t beside her desk-lamp, where she’d left them the night before and she practically burst into tears, feeling set-upon on all sides.She found the earrings later that day, at the bottom of her purse, and that only made things worse. Even though she hadn’t voiced a single accusation, she’d accused every one of the squatters in her mind that day. She found herself unable to meet their eyes for the rest of the week.“I have to write about this,” she said to Perry. “This is part of the story.” She’d stayed clear of it for a month, but she couldn’t go on writing about the successes of the Home Aware without writing about the workforce that was turning out the devices and add-ons by the thousands, all around her, in impromptu factories with impromptu workers.“Why?” Perry said. He’d been a dervish, filling orders, training people, fighting fires. By nightfall, he was hollow-eyed and snappish. Lester didn’t join them on the roof anymore. He liked to hang out with Francis and some of the young men and pitch horseshoes down in the shantytown, or tinker with the composting toilets he’d been installing at strategic crossroads through the town. “Can’t you just concentrate on the business?”“Perry, thisisthe business. Kettlewell hasn’t sent a replacement for Tjan and you’ve filled in and you’ve turned this place into something like a worker-owned co-op. That’s important news—the point of this exercise is to try all the different businesses that are possible and see what works. If you’ve found something that works, I should write about it. Especially since it’s not just solving Kodacell’s problem, it’s solving the problem for all of those people, too.”Perry drank his beer in sullen silence. “I don’t want Kettlewell to get more involved in this. It’s going good. Scrutiny could kill it.”“You’ve got nothing to be embarrassed about here,” she said. “There’s nothing here that isn’t as it should be.”Perry looked at her for a long moment. He was at the end of his fuse, trying to do too much, and she regretted having brought it up. “You do what you have to do,” he said.:: The original shantytown was astonishing. Built around a nexus of:: trailers and RVs that didn’t look in the least roadworthy, the:: settlers had added dwelling on dwelling to their little patch of:: land. They started with plastic sheeting and poles, and when they:: could afford it, they replaced the sheets, one at a time, with:: bricks or poured concrete and re-bar. They thatched their roofs:: with palm-leaves, shingles, linoleum, corrugated tin—even:: plywood with flattened beer-cans. Some walls were wood. Some had:: windows. Some were made from old car-doors, with hand-cranked:: handles to lower them in the day, then roll them up again at:: night when the mosquitoes came out. Most of the settlers slept on:: nets.:::: A second wave had moved into the settlement, just as I arrived,:: and rather than building out—and farther away from their:: neighbors’ latrines, water-pump and mysterious sources of:: electrical power—they builtup, on top of the existing:: structures, shoring up the walls where necessary. It wasn’t:: hurricane proof, but neither are the cracker-box condos that:: “property owners” occupy. They made contractual arrangements with:: the dwellers of the first stories, paid them rent. A couple with:: second-story rooms opposite one another in one of the narrow:: “streets” consummated their relationship by building a sky-bridge:: between their rooms, paying joint rent to two landlords.:::: The thing these motley houses had in common, all of them, was:: ingenuity and pride of work. They had neat vegetable gardens,:: flower-boxes, and fresh paint. They had kids’ bikes leaned up:: against their walls, and the smell of good cooking in the air.:: They were homely homes.:::: Many of the people who lived in these houses worked regular:: service jobs, walking three miles to the nearest city bus stop:: every morning and three miles back every evening. They sent:: their kids to school, faking local addresses with PO boxes. Some:: were retired. Some were just down on their luck.:::: They helped each other. When something precious was stolen, the:: community pitched in to find the thieves. When one of them:: started a little business selling sodas or sandwiches out of her:: shanty, the others patronized her. When someone needed medical:: care, they chipped in for a taxi to the free clinic, or someone:: with a working car drove them. They were like the neighbors of:: the long-lamented American town, an ideal of civic virtue that is:: so remote in our ancestry as to have become mythical. There were:: eyes on the street here, proud residents who knew what everyone:: was about and saw to it that bad behavior was curbed before it:: could get started.:::: Somehow, it burned down. The fire department won’t investigate,:: because this was an illegal homestead, so they don’t much care:: about how the fire started. It took most of the homes, and most:: of their meager possessions. The water got the rest. The fire:: department wouldn’t fight the fire at first, because someone at:: city hall said that the land’s owner wouldn’t let them on the:: property. As it turns out, the owner of that sad strip of land:: between an orange grove and the side of a four-lane highway is:: unknown—a decades-old dispute over title has left it in legal:: limbo that let the squatters settle there. It’s suspicious all:: right—various entities had tried to evict the squatters:: before, but the legal hassles left them in happy limbo. What the:: law couldn’t accomplish, the fire did.:::: The story has a happy ending. The boys have moved the squatters:: into their factory, and now they have “live-work” condos that:: look like something Dr Seuss designed [photo gallery]. Like the:: Central Park shantytown of the last century, these look like they:: were “constructed by crazy poets and distributed by a whirlwind:: that had been drinking,” as a press account of the day had it.:::: Last year, the city completed a new housing project nearby to:: here, and social workers descended on the shantytowners to get:: them to pick up and move to these low-rent high-rises. The:: shantytowners wouldn’t go: “It was too expensive,” said Mrs X,:: who doesn’t want her family back in Oklahoma to know she’s:: squatting with her husband and their young daughter. “We can’t:: affordanyrent, not if we want to put food on the table on:: what we earn.”:::: She made the right decision: the housing project is an urban:: renewal nightmare, filled with crime and junkies, the kind of:: place where little old ladies triple-chain their doors and order:: in groceries that they pay for with direct debit, unwilling to:: keep any cash around.:::: The squatter village was a shantytown, but it was no slum. It was:: a neighborhood that could be improved. And the boys are doing:: that: having relocated the village to their grounds, they’re:: inventing and remixing new techniques for building cheap and:: homey shelter fast. [profile: ten shanties and the technology:: inside them]The response was enormous and passionate. Dozens of readers wrote to tell her that she’d been taken in by these crooks who had stolen the land they squatted. She’d expected that—she’d felt that way herself, when she’d first walked past the shantytown.But what surprised her more were the message-board posts and emails from homeless people who’d been living in their cars, on the streets, in squatted houses or in shanties. To read these, you’d think that half her readership was sleeping rough and getting online at libraries, Starbuckses, and stumbled wireless networks that they accessed with antique laptops on street-corners.“Kettlewell’s coming down to see this,” Perry said.Her stomach lurched. She’d gotten the boys in trouble. “Is he mad?”“I couldn’t tell—I got voicemail at three AM.” Midnight in San Jose, the hour at which Kettlewell got his mad impulses. “He’ll be here this afternoon.”“That jet makes it too easy for him to get around,” she said, and stretched out her back. Sitting at her desk all morning answering emails and cleaning up some draft posts before blogging them had her in knots. It was practically lunch-time.“Perry,” she began, then trailed off.“It’s all right,” he said. “I know why you did it. Christ, we wouldn’t be where we are if you hadn’t written about us. I’m in no position to tell you to stop now.” He swallowed. The month since the shantytowners had moved in had put five years on him. His tan was fading, the wrinkles around his eyes deeper, grey salting his stubbly beard and short hair. “But you’ll help me with Kettlewell, right?”“I’ll come along and write down what he says,” she said. “That usually helps.”:: Kodacell is supposed to be a new way of doing business.:: Decentralized, net-savvy, really twenty-first century. The:: suck-up tech press and tech-addled bloggers have been trumpeting:: its triumph over all other modes of commerce.:::: But what does decentralization really mean? On her “blog” this:: week, former journalist Suzanne Church reports that the inmates:: running the flagship Kodacell asylum in suburban Florida have:: invited an entire village of homeless squatters to take up:: residence at their factory premises.:::: Describing their illegal homesteading as “live-work” condos that:: Dr Seuss might have designed, Kodacell shill Church goes on to:: describe how this captive, live-in audience has been converted to:: a workforce for Kodacell’s most profitable unit (“most:: profitable” is a relative term: to date, this unit has turned a:: profit of about 1.5 million, per the last quarterly report; by:: contrast the old Kodak’s most profitable unit made twenty times:: that in its last quarter of operation).:::: America has a grand tradition of this kind of indentured living::: the coal-barons’ company towns of the 19th century are the:: original model for this kind of industrial practice in the USA.:: Substandard housing and only one employer in town—that’s the:: kind of brave new world that Church’s boyfriend Kettlewell has:: created.:::: A reader writes: “I live near the shantytown that was relocated:: to the Kodacell factory in Florida. It was a dangerous slum full:: of drug dealers. None of the parents in my neighborhood let their:: kids ride their bikes along the road that passed it by—it was:: a haven for all kinds of down-and-out trash.”:::: There you have it, the future of the American workforce::: down-and-out junkie squatters working for starvation wages.“Kettlewell, you can’t let jerks like Freddy run this company. He’s just looking to sell banner-space. This is how the Brit rags write—it’s all meanspirited sniping.” Suzanne had never seen Kettlewell so frustrated. His surfer good looks were fading fast—he was getting a little paunch on him and his cheeks were sagging off his bones into the beginnings of jowls. His car had pulled up to the end of the driveway and he’d gotten out and walked through the shantytown with the air of a man in a dream. The truckers who pulled in and out all week picking up orders had occasionally had a curious word at the odd little settlement, but for Suzanne it had all but disappeared into her normal experience. Kettlewell made it strange and even a little outrageous, just by his stiff, outraged walk through its streets.“You think I’m lettingFreddydrive this decision?” He had spittle flecks on the corners of his mouth. “Christ, Suzanne, you’re supposed to be the adult around here.”Perry looked up from the floor in front of him, which he had been staring at intently. Suzanne caught his involuntary glare at Kettlewell before he dropped his eyes again. Lester put a big meaty paw on Perry’s shoulder. Kettlewell was oblivious.“Those people can’t stay, all right? The shareholders are baying for blood. The fucking liability—Christ, what if one of those places burns down? What if one of them knifes another one? We’re on the hook for everything they do. We could end up being on the hook for a fuckingcholera epidemic.”Irrationally, Suzanne burned with anger at Freddy. He had written every venal, bilious word with the hope that it would result in a scene just like this one. And not because he had any substantive objection to what was going on: simply because he had a need to deride that which others hailed. He wasn’t afflicting the mighty, though: he was taking on the very meekest, people who hadnothing, including a means of speaking up for themselves.Perry looked up. “You’ve asked me to come up with something new and incredible every three to six months. Well, this is new and incredible. We’ve built a living lab on our doorstep for exploring an enormous market opportunity to provide low-cost, sustainable technology for use by a substantial segment of the population who have no fixed address. There are millions of American squatters and billions of squatters worldwide. They have money to spend and no one else is trying to get it from them.”Kettlewell thrust his chin forward. “How many millions? How much money do they have to spend? How do you know that any of this will make us a single cent? Where’s the market research? Was there any? Or did you just invite a hundred hobos to pitch their tent out front of my factory on the strength of your half-assed guesses?”
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get to the junkyard. Lester explains this really well.”
He did, too, losing all of the shyness she remembered, his eyes glowing, his sausage-thick fingers dancing.
“Have you ever alphabetized your hard drive? I mean, have you ever spent any time concerning yourself with where on your hard drive your files are stored, which sectors contain which files? Computers abstract away the tedious, physical properties of files and leave us with handles that we use to persistently refer to them, regardless of which part of the hard drive currently holds those particular bits. So I thought, with RFIDs, you could do this with the real world, just tag everything and have your furniture keep track of where it is.
“One of the big barriers to roommate harmony is the correct disposition of stuff. When you leave your book on the sofa, I have to move it before I can sit down and watch TV. Then you come after me and ask me where I put your book. Then we have a fight. There’s stuff that you don’t know where it goes, and stuff that you don’t know where it’s been put, and stuff that has nowhere to put it. But with tags and a smart chest of drawers, you can just put your stuff wherever there’s room and ask the physical space to keep track of what’s where from moment to moment.
“There’s still the problem of getting everything tagged and described, but that’s a service business opportunity, and where you’ve got other shared identifiers like ISBNs you could use a cameraphone to snap the bar-codes and look them up against public databases. The whole thing could be coordinated around ’spring cleaning’ events where you go through your stuff and photograph it, tag it, describe it—good for your insurance and for forensics if you get robbed, too.”
He stopped and beamed, folding his fingers over his belly. “So, that’s it, basically.”
Perry slapped him on the shoulder and Tjan drummed his forefingers like a heavy-metal drummer on the side of the workbench they were gathered around.
They were all waiting for her. “Well, it’s very cool,” she said, at last. “But, the whole white-plastic-tub thing. It makes your apartment look like an Ikea showroom. Kind of inhumanly minimalist. We’re Americans, we like celebrating our stuff.”
“Well, OK, fair enough,” Lester said, nodding. “You don’t have to put everything away, of course. And you can still have all the decor you want. This is about clutter control.”
“Exactly,” Perry said. “Come check out Lester’s lab.”
“OK, this is pretty perfect,” Suzanne said. The clutter was gone, disappeared into the white tubs that were stacked high on every shelf, leaving the work-surfaces clear. But Lester’s works-in-progress, his keepsakes, his sculptures and triptychs were still out, looking like venerated museum pieces in the stark tidiness that prevailed otherwise.
Tjan took her through the spreadsheets. “There are ten teams that do closet-organizing in the network, and a bunch of shippers, packers, movers, and storage experts. A few furniture companies. We adopted the interface from some free software inventory-management apps that were built for illiterate service employees. Lots of big pictures and autocompletion. And we’ve bought a hundred RFID printers from a company that was so grateful for a new customer that they’re shipping us 150 of them, so we can print these things at about a million per hour. The plan is to start our sales through the consultants at the same time as we start showing at trade-shows for furniture companies. We’ve already got a huge order from a couple of local old-folks’ homes.”
They walked to the IHOP to have a celebratory lunch. Being back in Florida felt just right to her. Francis, the leader of the paramilitary wing of the AARP, threw them a salute and blew her a kiss, and even Lester’s nursing junkie friend seemed to be in a good mood.
When they were done, they brought take-out bags for the junkie and Francis in the shantytown.
“I want to make some technology for those guys,” Perry said as they sat in front of Francis’s RV drinking cowboy coffee cooked over a banked wood-stove off to one side. “Room-mate-ware for homeless people.”
Francis uncrossed his bony ankles and scratched at his mosquito bites. “A lot of people think that we don’t buy stuff, but it’s not true,” he said. “I shop hard for bargains, but there’s lots of stuff I spend more on because of my lifestyle than I would if I had a real house and steady electricity. When I had a chest-freezer, I could bulk buy ground round for about a tenth of what I pay now when I go to the grocery store and get enough for one night’s dinner. The alternative is using propane to keep the fridge going overnight, and that’s not cheap, either. So I’m a kind of premium customer. Back at Boeing, we loved the people who made small orders, because we could charge them such a premium for custom work, while the big airlines wanted stuff done so cheap that half the time we lost money on the deal.”
Perry nodded. “There you have it—roommate-ware for homeless people, a great and untapped market.”
Suzanne cocked her head and looked at him. “You’re sounding awfully commerce-oriented for a pure and unsullied engineer, you know?”
He ducked his head and grinned and looked about twelve years old. “It’s infectious. Those little kitchen gnomes, we sold nearly a half-million of those things, not to mention all the spin-offs. That’s a half-millionlives—a half-millionhouseholds—that we changed just by thinking up something cool and making it real. These RFID things of Lester’s—we’ll sign a couple million customers with those. People will change everything about how they live from moment to moment because of something Lester thought up in my junkyard over there.”
“Well, there’s thirty million of us living in what the social workers call ‘marginal housing,’” Francis said, grinning wryly. He had a funny smile that Suzanne had found adorable until he explained that he had an untreated dental abscess that he couldn’t afford to get fixed. “So that’s a lot of difference you could make.”
“Yeah,” Perry said. “Yeah, it sure is.”
That night, she found herself still blogging and answering emails—they always piled up when she travelled and took a couple of late nights to clear out—after nine PM, sitting alone in a pool of light in the back corner of Lester’s workshop that she had staked out as her office. She yawned and stretched and listened to her old back crackle. She hated feeling old, and late nights made her feel old—feel every extra ounce of fat on her tummy, feel the lines bracketing her mouth and the little bag of skin under her chin.
She stood up and pulled on a light jacket and began to switch off lights and get ready to head home. As she poked her head in Tjan’s office, she saw that she wasn’t the only one working late.
“Hey, you,” she said. “Isn’t it time you got going?”
He jumped like he’d been stuck with a pin and gave a little yelp. “Sorry,” he said, “didn’t hear you.”
He had a cardboard box on his desk and had been filling it with his personal effects—little one-off inventions the guys had made for him, personal fetishes and tchotchkes, a framed picture of his kids.
“What’s up?”
He sighed and cracked his knuckles. “Might as well tell you now as tomorrow morning. I’m resigning.”
She felt a flash of anger and then forced it down and forcibly replaced it with professional distance and curiosity. Mentally she licked her pencil-tip and flipped to a blank page in her reporter’s notebook.
“Oh yes?”
“I’ve had another offer, in Westchester County. Westinghouse has spun out its own version of Kodacell and they’re looking for a new vice-president to run the division. That’s me.”
“Good job,” she said. “Congratulations, Mr Vice-President.”
He shook his head. “I emailed Kettlewell half an hour ago. I’m leaving in the morning. I’m going to say goodbye to the guys over breakfast.”
“Not much notice,” she said.
“Nope,” he said, a note of anger creeping into his voice. “My contract lets Kodacell fire me on one day’s notice, so I insisted on the right to quit on the same terms. Maybe Kettlewell will get his lawyers to write better boilerplate from here on in.”
When she had an angry interview, she habitually changed the subject to something sensitive: angry people often say more than they intend to. She did it instinctively, not really meaning to psy-ops Tjan, whom she thought of as a friend, but not letting that get in the way of the story. “Westinghouse is doing what, exactly?”
“It’ll be as big as Kodacell’s operation in a year,” he said. “George Westinghouse personally funded Tesla’s research, you know. The company understands funding individual entrepreneurs. I’m going to be training the talent scouts and mentoring the financial people, then turning them loose to sign up entrepreneurs for the Westinghouse network. There’s a competitive market for garage inventors now.” He laughed. “Go ahead and print that,” he said. “Blog it tonight. There’s competition now. We’re giving two points more equity and charging half a point less on equity than the Kodacell network.”
“That’s amazing, Tjan. I hope you’ll keep in touch with me—I’d love to follow your story.”
“Count on it,” he said. He laughed. “I’m getting a week off every eight weeks to scout Russia. They’ve got an incredible culture of entrepreneurship.”
“Plus you’ll get to see your kids,” Suzanne said. “That’s really good.”
“Plus, I’ll get to see my kids,” he admitted.
“How much money is Westinghouse putting into the project?” she asked, replacing her notional notebook with a real one, pulled from her purse.
“I don’t have numbers, but they’ve shut down the whole appliances division to clear the budget for it.” She nodded—she’d seen news of the layoffs on the wires. Mass demonstrations, people out of work after twenty years’ service. “So it’s a big budget.”
“They must have been impressed with the quarterlies from Kodacell.”
Tjan folded down the flaps on his box and drummed his fingers on it, squinting at her. “You’re joking, right?”
“What do you mean?”
“Suzanne, they were impressed byyou. Everyone knows that quarterly numbers are easy to cook—anything less than two annual reports is as likely to be enronning as real fortune-making. Butyourdispatches from here—they’re what sold them. It’s what’s convincingeveryone. Kettlewell said that three quarters of his new recruits come on board after reading your descriptions of this place. That’s howIended up here.”
She shook her head. “That’s very flattering, Tjan, but—”
He waved her off and then, surprisingly, came around the desk and hugged her. “But nothing, Suzanne. Kettlewell, Lester, Perry—they’re all basically big kids. Full of enthusiasm and invention, but they’ve got the emotional maturity and sense of scale of hyperactive five year olds. You and me, we’re grownups. People take us seriously. It’s easy to get a kid excited, but when a grownup chimes in you know there’s some there there.”
Suzanne recovered herself after a second and put away her notepad. “I’m just the person who writes it all down. You people are making it happen.”
“In ten years’ time, they’ll remember you and not us,” Tjan said. “You should get Kettlewell to put you on the payroll.”
Kettlewell himself turned up the next day. Suzanne had developed an intuitive sense of the flight-times from the west coast and so for a second she couldn’t figure out how he could possibly be standing there—nothing in the sky could get him from San Jose to Miami for a seven AM arrival.
“Private jet,” he said, and had the grace to look slightly embarrassed. “Kodak had eight of them and Duracell had five. We’ve been trying to sell them all off but no one wants a used jet these days, not even Saudi princes or Columbian drug-lords.”
“So, basically, it was going to waste.”
He smiled and looked eighteen—she really did feel like the only grownup sometimes—and said, “Zackly—it’s practically environmental. Where’s Tjan?”
“Downstairs saying goodbye to the guys, I think.”
“OK,” he said. “Are you coming?”
She grabbed her notebook and a pen and beat him out the door of her rented condo.
“What’s this all about,” Tjan said, looking wary. The guys were hang-dog and curious looking, slightly in awe of Kettlewell, who did little to put them at their ease—he was staring intensely at Tjan.
“Exit interview,” he said. “Company policy.”
Tjan rolled his eyes. “Come on,” he said. “I’ve got a flight to catch in an hour.”
“I could give you a lift,” Kettlewell said.
“You want to do the exit interview between here and the airport?”
“I could give you a lift to JFK. I’ve got the jet warmed up and waiting.”
Sometimes, Suzanne managed to forget that Kodacell was a multi-billion dollar operation and that Kettlewell was at its helm, but other times the point was very clear.
“Come on,” he said, “we’ll make a day of it. We can stop on the way and pick up some barbecue to eat on the plane. I’ll even let you keep your seat in the reclining position during take-off and landing. Hell, you can turn your cell-phone on—just don’t tell the Transport Security Administration!”
Tjan looked cornered, then resigned. “Sounds good to me,” he said and Kettlewell shouldered one of the two huge duffel-bags that were sitting by the door.
“Hi, Kettlewell,” Perry said.
Kettlewell set down the duffel. “Sorry, sorry. Lester, Perry, it’s really good to see you. I’ll bring Suzanne back tonight and we’ll all go out for dinner, OK?”
Suzanne blinked. “I’m coming along?”
“I sure hope so,” Kettlewell said.
Perry and Lester accompanied them down in the elevator.
“Private jet, huh?” Perry said. “Never been in one of those.”
Kettlewell told them about his adventures trying to sell off Kodacell’s private air force.
“Send one of them our way, then,” Lester said.
“Do you fly?” Kettlewell said.
“No,” Perry said. “Lester wants to take it apart. Right, Les?”
Lester nodded. “Lots of cool junk in a private jet.”
“These things are worth millions, guys,” Kettlewell said.
“No, someonepaidmillions for them,” Perry said. “They’reworthwhatever you can sell them for.”
Kettlewell laughed. “You’ve had an influence around here, Tjan,” he said. Tjan managed a small, tight smile.
Kettlewell had a driver waiting outside of the building who loaded the duffels into the spacious trunk of a spotless dark town-car whose doors chunked shut with an expensive sound.
“I want you to know that I’m really not angry at all, OK?” Kettlewell said.
Tjan nodded. He had the look of a man who was steeling himself for a turn in an interrogation chamber. He’d barely said a word since Kettlewell arrived. For his part, Kettlewell appeared oblivious to all of this, though Suzanne was pretty sure that he understood exactly how uncomfortable this was making Tjan.
“The thing is, six months ago, nearly everyone was convinced that I was a fucking moron, that I was about to piss away ten billion dollars of other people’s money on a stupid doomed idea. Now they’re copying me and poaching my best people. So this is good news for me, though I’m going to have to find a new business manager for those two before they get picked up for turning planes into component pieces.”
Suzanne’s PDA vibrated whenever the number of online news stories mentioning her or Kodacell or Kettlewell increased or decreased sharply. She used to try to read everything, but it was impossible to keep up—now all she wanted was to keep track of whether the interestingness-index was on the uptick or downtick.
It had started to buzz that morning and the pitch had increased steadily until it was actually uncomfortable in her pocket. Irritated, she yanked it out and was about to switch it off when the lead article caught her eye.
KODACELL LOSES TJAN TO WESTINGHOUSE
The by-line was Freddy. Feeling like a character in a horror movie who can’t resist the compulsion to look under the bed, Suzanne thumbed the PDA’s wheel and brought up the whole article.
:: Kodacell business-manager Tjan Lee Tang, whose adventures we’ve:: followed through Suzanne Church’s gushing, besotted blog posts
She looked away and reflexively reached toward the delete button. The innuendo that she was romantically involved with one or more of the guys had circulated on her blog’s message boards and around the diggdots ever since she’d started writing about them. No woman could possibly be writing about this stuff because it was important—she had to be “with the band,” a groupie or a whore.
Combine that with Rat-Toothed Freddy’s sneering tone and she was instantly sent into heart-thundering rage. She deleted the post and looked out the window. Her pager buzzed some more and she looked down. The same article, being picked up on blogs, on some of the bigger diggdots, and an AP wire.
She forced herself to re-open it.
:: has been hired to head up a new business unit on behalf of the:: multinational giant Westinghouse. The appointment stands as more:: proof of Church’s power to cloud men’s minds with pretty empty:: words about the half-baked dot-com schemes that have oozed out of:: Silicon Valley and into every empty and dead American suburb.
It was hypnotic, like staring into the eyes of a serpent. Her pulse actually thudded in her ears for a second before she took a few deep breaths and calmed down enough to finish the article, which was just more of the same: nasty personal attacks, sniping, and innuendo. Freddy even managed to imply that she was screwing all of them—and Kettlewell besides.
Kettlewell leaned over her shoulder and read.
“You should send him an email,” he said. “That’s disgusting. That’s not reportage.”
“Never get into a pissing match with a skunk,” she said. “What Freddy wants is for me to send him mail that he can publish along with more snarky commentary. When the guy you’re arguing with controls the venue you’re arguing in, you can’t possibly win.”
“So blog him,” Kettlewell said. “Correct the record.”
“The record is correct,” she said. “It’s never been incorrect. I’ve written an exhaustive record that is there for everyone to see. If people believe this, no amount of correction will help.”
Kettlewell made a face like a little boy who’d been told he couldn’t have a toy. “That guy is poison,” he said. “Those quote-marks around blog.”
“Let him add his quote-marks,” she said. “My daily readership is higher than the Merc’s paid circulation this week.” It was true. After a short uphill climb from her new URL, she’d accumulated enough readers that the advertising revenue dwarfed her old salary at the Merc, an astonishing happenstance that nevertheless kept her bank-account full. She clicked a little. “Besides, look at this, there are three dozen links pointing at this story so far and all of them are critical of him. We don’t need to stick up for ourselves—the world will.”
Saying it calmed her and now they were at the airport. They cruised into a private gate, away from the militarized gulag that fronted Miami International. A courteous security guard waved them through and the driver confidently piloted the car up to a wheeled jetway beside a cute, stubby little toy jet. On the side, in cursive script, was the plane’s name: Suzanne.
She looked accusatorially at Kettlewell.
“It was called that when I bought the company,” he said, expressionless but somehow mirthful behind his curved surfer shades. “But I kept it because I liked the private joke.”
“Just no one tell Freddy that you’ve got an airplane with my name on it or we’ll never hear the fucking end of it.”
She covered her mouth, regretting her language, and Kettlewell laughed, and so did Tjan, and somehow the ice was broken between them.
“Nowayflying this thing is cost-effective,” Tjan said. “Your CFO should be kicking your ass.”
“It’s a little indulgence,” Kettlewell said, bounding up the steps and shaking hands with a small, neat woman pilot, an African-American with corn-rows peeking out under her smart peaked cap. “Once you’ve flown in your own bird, you never go back.”
“This is amonstrosity,” Tjan said as he boarded. “What this thing eats up in hangar fees alone would be enough to bankroll three or four teams.” He settled into an oversized Barcalounger of a seat and accepted a glass of orange juice that the pilot poured for him. “Thank you, and no offense.”
“None taken,” she said. “I agree one hundred percent.”
“See,” Tjan said.
Suzanne took her own seat and her own glass and buckled in and watched the two of them, warming up for the main event, realizing that she’d been brought along as a kind of opening act.
“They paying you more?”
“Yup,” Tjan said. “All on the back-end. Half a point on every dollar brought in by a team I coach or whose members I mentor.”
Kettlewell whistled. “That’s a big share,” he said.
“If I can make my numbers, I’ll take home a million this year.”
“You’ll make those numbers. Good negotiations. Why didn’t you ask us for the same deal?”
“Would you have given it to me?”
“You’re a star,” Kettlewell said, nodding at Suzanne, whose invisibility to the conversation popped like a bubble. “Thanks to her.”
“Thanks, Suzanne,” Tjan said.
Suzanne blushed. “Come on, guys.”
Tjan shook his head. “She doesn’t really understand. It’s actually kind of charming.”
“We might have matched the offer.”
“You guys are first to market. You’ve got a lot of procedures in place. I wanted to reinvent some wheels.”
“We’re tooconservativefor you?”
Tjan grinned wickedly. “Oh yes,” he said. “I’m going to do business inRussia.”
Kettlewell grunted and pounded his orange juice. Around them, the jet’s windows flashed white as they broke through the clouds and the ten thousand foot bell sounded.
“How the hell are you going to make anything that doesn’t collapse under its own weight in Russia?”
“The corruption’s a problem, sure,” Tjan said. “But it’s offset by the entrepreneurship. Some of those cats make the Chinese look lazy and unimaginative. It’s a shame that so much of their efforts have been centered on graft, but there’s no reason they couldn’t be focused on making an honest ruble.”
They fell into a discussion of the minutiae of Perry and Lester’s businesses, franker than any business discussion she’d ever heard. Tjan talked about the places where they’d screwed up, and places where they’d scored big, and about all the plans he’d made for Westinghouse, the connections he had in Russia. He even talked about his kids and his ex in St Petersburg, and Kettlewell admitted that he’d known about them already.
For Kettlewell’s part, he opened the proverbial kimono wide, telling Tjan about conflicts within the board of directors, poisonous holdovers from the pre-Kodacell days who sabotaged the company from within with petty bureaucracy, even the problems he was having with his family over the long hours they were working. He opened the minibar and cracked a bottle of champagne to toast Tjan’s new job, and they mixed it with more orange juice, and then there were bagels and schmear, fresh fruit, power bars, and canned Starbucks coffees with deadly amounts of sugar and caffeine.
When Kettlewell disappeared into the tiny—but marble-appointed—bathroom, Suzanne found herself sitting alone with Tjan, almost knee to knee, lightheaded from lack of sleep and champagne and altitude.
“Some trip,” she said.
“You’re the best,” he said, wobbling a little. “You know that? Just the best. The stuff you write about these guys, it makes me want to stand up and salute. You make us all seem so fuckingglorious. We’re going to end up taking over the world because you inspire us so. Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this, because you’re not very self-conscious about it right now, but Suzanne, you won’t believe it because you’re so goddamned modest, too. It’s what makes your writing so right, so believable—”
Kettlewell stepped out of the bathroom. “Touching down soon,” he said, and patted them each on the shoulder as he took his seat. “So that’s about it, then,” he said, and leaned back and closed his eyes. Suzanne was accustomed to thinking of him as twenty-something, the boyish age of the magazine cover portraits from the start of his career. Now, eyes closed on his private jet, harsh upper atmosphere sun painting his face, his crowsfeet and the deep vertical brackets around his mouth revealed him for someone pushing a youthful forty, kept young by exercise and fun and the animation of his ideas.
“Guess so,” Tjan said, slumping. “This has been one of the more memorable experiences of my life, Kettlewell, Suzanne. Not entirely pleasant, but pleasant on the whole. A magical time in the clouds.”
“Once you’ve flown private, you’ll never go back to coach,” Kettlewell said, smiling, eyes still closed. “You still think my CFO should spank me for not selling this thing?”
“No,” Tjan said. “In ten years, if we do our jobs, there won’t be five companies on earth that can afford this kind of thing—it’ll be like building a cathedral after the Protestant Reformation. While we have the chance, we should keep these things in the sky. But you should give one to Lester and Perry to take apart.”
“I was planning to,” Kettlewell said. “Thanks.”
Suzanne and Kettlewell got off the plane and Tjan didn’t look back when they’d landed at JFK. “Should we go into town and get some bialy to bring back to Miami?” Kettlewell said, squinting at the bright day on the tarmac.
“Bring deli to Miami?”
“Right, right,” he said. “Forget I asked. Besides, we’d have to charter a chopper to get into Manhattan and back without dying in traffic.”
Something about the light through the open hatch or the sound or the smell—something indefinably New York—made her yearn for Miami. The great cities of commerce like New York and San Francisco seemed too real for her, while the suburbs of Florida were a kind of endless summer camp, a dreamtime where anything was possible.
“Let’s go,” she said. The champagne buzz had crashed and she had a touch of headache. “I’m bushed.”
“Me too,” Kettlewell said. “I left San Jose last night to get into Miami before Tjan left. Not much sleep. Gonna put my seat back and catch some winks, if that’s OK?”
“Good plan,” Suzanne said.
Embarrassingly, when they were fully reclined, their seats nearly touched, forming something like a double bed. Suzanne lay awake in the hum of the jets for a while, conscious of the breathing human beside her, the first man she’d done anything like share a bed with in at least a year. The last thing she remembered was the ten thousand foot bell going off and then she slipped away into sleep.
:: Perry thought that they’d sell a million Home Awares in six:: months. Lester thought he was nuts, that number was too high.:::: “Please,” he said, “Iinventedthese things but there aren’t a:: million roommate households in all of America. We’ll sell half:: a million tops, total.
Lester always complained when she quoted him directly in her blog posts, but she thought he secretly enjoyed it.
:: Today the boys shipped their millionth unit. It took six weeks.
They’d uncorked a bottle of champagne when unit one million shipped. They hadn’t actually shipped it, per se. The manufacturing was spread out across forty different teams all across the country, even a couple of Canadian teams. The RFID printer company had re-hired half the workers they’d laid off the year before, and had them all working overtime to meet demand.
:: What’s exciting about this isn’t just the money that these guys:: have made off of it, or the money that Kodacell will return to:: its shareholders, it’s the ecosystem that these things have:: enabled. There’re at least ten competing commercial systems for:: organizing, tagging, sharing, and describing Home Aware objects.:: Parents love them for their kids. School teachers love them.:: Seniors’ homes.
The seniors’ homes had been Francis’s idea. They’d brought him in to oversee some of the production engineering, along with some of the young braves who ran around the squatter camps. Francis knew which ones were biddable and he kept them to heel. In the evenings, he’d join the guys and Suzanne up on the roof of the workshop on folding chairs, with beers, watching the sweaty sunset.
:: They’re not the sole supplier. That’s what an ecosystem is all:: about, creating value for a lot of players. All this competition:: is great news for you and me, because it’s already driven the:: price of Home Aware goods down by forty percent. That means that:: Lester and Perry are going to have to invent something new, soon,:: before the margin disappears altogether—and that’s also good:: news for you and me.
“Are you coming?” Lester had dated a girl for a while, someone he met on Craigslist, but she’d dumped him and Perry had confided that she’d left him because he didn’t live up to the press he’d gotten in Suzanne’s column. When he got dumped, he became even touchier about Suzanne, caught at a distance from her that was defined by equal parts of desire and resentment.
“Up in a minute,” she said, trying to keep her smile light and noncommittal. Lester was very nice, but there were times when she caught him staring at her like a kicked puppy and it made her uncomfortable. Naturally, this increased his discomfort as well.
On the roof they already had a cooler of beers going and beside it a huge plastic tub of brightly colored machine-parts.
“Jet engine,” Perry said. The months had put a couple pounds on him and new wrinkles, and given him some grey at the temples, and laugh lines inside his laugh lines. Perry was always laughing at everything around them (“They fuckingpay meto do this,” he’d told her once, before literally collapsing to the floor, rolling with uncontrollable hysteria). He laughed again.
“Good old Kettlebelly,” she said. “Must have broken his heart.”
Francis held up a curved piece of cowling. “This thing wasn’t going to last anyway. See the distortion here and here? This thing was designed in a virtual wind-tunnel and machine-lathed. We tried that a couple times, but the wind-tunnel sims were never detailed enough and the forms that flew well in the machine always died a premature death in the sky. Another two years and he’d have had to have it rebuilt anyway, and the Koreans who built this charge shitloads for parts.”
“Too bad,” Lester said. “It’s pretty. Gorgeous, even.” He mimed its curve in the air with a pudgy hand, that elegant swoop.
“Aerospace loves the virtual wind-tunnel,” Francis said, and glared at the cowling. “You can use evolutionary algorithms in the sim and come up with really efficient designs, in theory. And computers are cheaper than engineers.”
“Is that why you were laid off?” Suzanne said.
“I wasn’t laid off, girl,” he said. He jiggled his lame foot. “I retired at 65 and was all set up but the pension plan went bust. So I missed a month of medical and they cut me off and I ended up uninsured. When the wife took sick, bam, that was it, wiped right out. But I’m not bitter—why should the poor be allowed to live, huh?”
His acolytes, three teenagers in do-rags from the shantytown, laughed and went on to pitching bottle-caps off the edge of the roof.
“Stop that, now,” he said, “you’re getting the junkyard all dirty. Christ, you’d think that they grew up in some kind of zoo.” When Francis drank, he got a little mean, a little dark.
“So, kids,” Perry said, wandering over to them, hands in pockets. Silhouetted against the setting sun, biceps bulging, muscular chest tapering to his narrow hips, he looked like a Greek statue. “What do you think of the stuff we’re building?”
They looked at their toes. “’S OK,” one of them grunted.
“Answer the man,” Francis snapped. “Complete sentences, looking up and at him, like you’ve got a shred of self-respect. Christ, what are you, five years old?”
They shifted uncomfortably. “It’s fine,” one of them said.
“Would you use it at home?”
One of them snorted. “No, man. My dad steals anything nice we get and sells it.”
“Oh,” Perry said.
“Fucker broke in the other night and I caught him with my ipod. Nearly took his fucking head off with my cannon before I saw who it was. Fucking juice-head.”
“You should have fucked him up,” one of the other kids said. “My ma pushed my pops in front of a bus one day to get rid of him, guy broke both his legs and never came back.”
Suzanne knew it was meant to shock them, but that didn’t take away from its shockingness. In the warm fog of writing and living in Florida, it was easy to forget that these people lived in a squatter camp and were technically criminals, and received no protection from the law.
Perry, though, just squinted into the sun and nodded. “Have you ever tried burglar alarms?”
The kids laughed derisively and Suzanne winced, but Perry was undaunted. “You could be sure that you woke up whenever anyone entered, set up a light and siren to scare them off.”
“I want one that fires spears,” the one with the juice-head father said.
“Blowtorches,” said the one whose mother pushed his father under a bus.
“I want a force-field,” the third one said, speaking for the first time. “I want something that will keep anyone from coming in, period, so I don’t have to sleep one eye up, ’cause I’ll be safe.”
The other two nodded, slowly.
“Damn straight,” Francis said.
That was the last time Francis’s acolytes joined them on the rooftop. Instead, when they finished work they went home, walking slowly and talking in low murmurs. With just the grownups on the roof, it was a lot more subdued.
“What’s that smoke?” Lester said, pointing at the black billowing column off to the west, in the sunset’s glare.
“House-fire,” Francis said. “Has to be. Or a big fucking car-wreck, maybe.”
Perry ran down the stairs and came back up with a pair of high-power binox. “Francis, that’s your place,” he said after a second’s fiddling. He handed the binox to Francis. “Just hit the button and they’ll self-stabilize.”
“That’s my place,” Francis said. “Oh, Christ.” He’d gone gray and seemed to have sobered up instantly. His lips were wet, his eyes bright.
They drove over at speed, Suzanne wedged into Lester’s frankensmartcar, practically under his armpit, and Perry traveling with Francis. Lester still wore the same cologne as her father, and when she opened the window, its smell was replaced by the burning-tires smell of the fire.
They arrived to discover a fire-truck parked on the side of the freeway nearest the shantytown. The fire-fighters were standing soberly beside it, watching the fire rage across the canal.
They rushed for the footbridge and a firefighter blocked their way.
“Sorry, it’s not safe,” he said. He was Latino, good looking, like a movie star, bronze skin flickering with copper highlights from the fire.
“I live there,” Francis said. “That’s my home.”
The firefighter looked away. “It’s not safe,” he said.
“Why aren’t you fighting the fire?” Suzanne said.
Francis’s head snapped around. “You’re not fighting the fire! You’re going to let our houses burn!”
A couple more fire-fighters trickled over. Across the river, the fire had consumed half of the little settlement. Some of the residents were operating a slow and ponderous bucket-brigade from the canal, while others ran into the unburned buildings and emerged clutching armloads of belongings, bits of furniture, boxes of photos.
“Sir,” the movie-star said, “the owner of this property has asked us not to intervene. Since there’s no imminent risk to life and no risk of the burn spreading off his property, we can’t trespass to put out the fire. Our hands are tied.”
“The owner?” Francis spat. “This land is in title dispute. The court case has been underway for twenty years now. What owner?”
The movie-star shrugged. “That’s all I know, sir.”
Across the canal, the fire was spreading, and the bucket brigade was falling back. Suzanne could feel the heat now, like putting your face in the steam from a boiling kettle.
Francis seethed, looking from the firemen and their truck back to the fire. He looked like he was going to pop something, or start shouting, or charge into the flames.
Suzanne grabbed his hand and walked him over to the truck and grabbed the first firefighter she encountered.
“I’m Suzanne Church, from the San Jose Mercury News, a McClatchy paper. I’d like to speak to the commanding officer on the scene, please.” She hadn’t been with the Merc for months, but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to say,I’m Suzanne Church with SuzanneChurch.org.She was pretty sure that no matter how high her readership was and how profitable her ad sales were, the fire-fighter wouldn’t have been galvanized into the action that was invoked when she mentioned the name of a real newspaper.
He hopped to, quickly moving to an older man, tapping him on the shoulder, whispering in his ear. Suzanne squeezed Francis’s hand as the fire-chief approached them. She extended her hand and talked fast. “Suzanne Church,” she said, and took out her notebook, the key prop in any set piece involving a reporter. “I’m told that you are going to let those homes burn because someone representing himself as the title-holder to that property has denied you entry. However, I’m also told that the title to that land is in dispute and has been in the courts for decades. Can you resolve this for me, Chief...?”
“Chief Brian Wannamaker,” he said. He was her age, with the leathery skin of a Florida native who spent a lot of time out of doors. “I’m afraid I have no comment for you at this time.”
Suzanne kept her face deadpan, and gave Francis’s hand a warning squeeze to keep him quiet. He was trembling now. “I see. You can’t comment, you can’t fight the fire. Is that what you’d like me to write in tomorrow’s paper?”
The Chief looked at the fire for a moment. Across the canal, the bucket-brigaders were losing worse than ever. He frowned and Suzanne saw that his hands were clenched into fists. “Let me make a call, OK?” Without waiting for an answer, he turned on his heel and stepped behind the fire-engine, reaching for his cellphone.
Suzanne strained to hear his conversation, but it was inaudible over the crackle of the fire. When she turned around again, Francis was gone. She caught sight of him again in just a moment, running for the canal, then jumping in and landing badly in the shallow, swampy water. He hobbled across to the opposite bank and began to laboriously climb it.
A second later, Perry followed. Then Lester.
“Chief!” she said, going around the engine and pointing. The Chief had the phone clamped to his head still, but when he saw what was going on, he snapped it shut, dropped it in his pocket and started barking orders.
Now the fire-fightersmoved, boiling across the bridge, uncoiling hoses, strapping on tanks and masks. They worked in easy, fluid concert, and it was only seconds before the water and foam hit the flames and the smoke changed to white steam.
The shantytown residents cheered. The fire slowly receded. Perry and Lester had Francis, holding him back from charging into the fray as the fire-fighters executed their clockwork dance.
The steam was hot enough to scald, and Suzanne pulled the collar of her blouse up over her face. Around her were the shantytowners, mothers with small children, old men, and a seemingly endless parade of thug-life teenagers, the boys in miniature cycling shorts and do-rags, the girls in bandeau tops, glitter makeup, and skirts made from overlapping strips of rag, like post-apocalyptic hula outfits. Their faces were tight, angry, smudged with smoke and pinkened by the heat.
She saw the one whose father had reportedly been pushed under a bus by his mother, and he grimaced at her. “What we gonna do now?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Are you all right? Is your family all right?”
“Don’t got nowhere to sleep, nowhere to go,” he said. “Don’t even have a change of clothes. My moms won’t stop crying.”
There were tears in his eyes. He was all of fifteen, she realized. He’d seemed much older on the roof. She gathered him into her arms and gave him a hug. He was stiff and awkward at first and then he kind of melted into her, weeping on her shoulder. She stroked his back and murmured reassuringly. Some of the other shantytowners looked at the spectacle, then looked away. Even a couple of his homeboys—whom she’d have bet would have laughed and pointed at this show of weakness—only looked and then passed on. One had tears streaking the smoke smudges on his face.
For someone who isn’t good at comforting people, I seem to be doing a lot of it, she thought.
Francis and Lester and Perry found her and Francis gave the boy a gruff hug and told him everything would be fine.
The fire was out now, the firefighter hosing down the last embers, going through the crowd and checking for injuries. A TV news crew had set up and a pretty black reporter in her twenties was doing a stand up.
“The illegal squatter community has long been identified as a problem area for gang and drug activity by the Broward County Sheriff’s office. The destruction here seems total, but it’s impossible to say whether this spells the end of this encampment, or whether the denizens will rebuild and stay on.”
Suzanne burned with shame. That could have been her. When she’d first seen this place, it had been like something out of a documentary on Ethiopia. As she’d come to know it, it had grown homier. The residents built piecemeal, one wall at a time, one window, one poured concrete floor, as they could afford it. None of them had mortgages, but they had neat vegetable gardens and walkways spelled out in white stones with garden gnomes standing guard.
The reporter was staring at her—and naturally so; she’d been staring at the reporter. Glaring at her.
“My RV,” Francis said, pointing, distracting her. It was a charred wreck. He went to the melted doors and opened them, stepping back as a puff of smoke rose from the inside. A fire-fighter spotted it and diverted a stream of water into the interior, soaking Francis and whatever hadn’t burned. He turned and shouted something at the fire-fighter, but he was already hosing down something else.
Inside Francis’s trailer, they salvaged a drenched photo-album, a few tools, and a lock-box with some of his papers in it. He had backed up his laptop to his watch that morning, so his data was safe. “I kept meaning to scan these in,” he said, paging through the photos in the soaked album. “Should have done it.”
Night was falling, the mosquitoes singing and buzzing. The neat little laneways and homey, patchwork buildings lay in ruins around them.
The shantytowners clustered in little groups or picked through the ruins. Drivers of passing cars slowed down to rubberneck, and a few shouted filthy, vengeful things at them. Suzanne took pictures of their license plates. She’d publish them when she got home.
A light drizzle fell. Children cried. The swampy sounds of cicadas and frogs and mosquitoes filled the growing dark and then the streetlights flicked on all down the river of highway, painting everything in blue-white mercury glow.
“We’ve got to get tents up,” Francis said. He grabbed a couple of young men and gave them orders, things to look for—fresh water, plastic sheeting, anything with which to erect shelters.
Lester started to help them, and Perry stood with his hands on his hips, next to Suzanne.
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “This is a fucking disaster. I mean, these people are used to living rough, but this—” he broke off, waving his hands helplessly. He wiped his palms off on his butt, then grabbed Francis.
“Get them going,” he said. “Get them to gather up their stuff and walk them down to our place. We’ve got space for everyone for now at least.”
Francis looked like he was going to say something, then he stopped. He climbed precariously up on the hood of Lester’s car and shouted for people to gather round. The boys he bossed around took up the call and it wasn’t long before nearly everyone was gathered around them.
“Can everyone hear? This is as loud as I go.”
There were murmurs of assent. Suzanne had seen him meet with his people before in the daylight and the good times, seen the respect they afforded to him. He wasn’t the leader, per se, but when he spoke, people listened. It was a characteristic she’d encountered in the auto-trade and in technology, in the ones the others all gravitated to. Charismatics.
“We’ve got a place to stay a bit up the road for tonight. It’s about a half hour walk. It’s indoors and there’s toilets, but maybe not much to make beds out of. Take what you can carry for about a mile, you can come back tomorrow for the rest. You don’t have to come, but this isn’t going to be any fun tonight.”
A woman came forward. She was young, but not young enough to be a homegirl. She had long dark hair and she twisted her hands as she spoke in a soft voice to Francis. “What about our stuff? We can’t leave it here tonight. It’s all we’ve got.”
Francis nodded. “We need ten people to stand guard in two shifts of five tonight. Young people. You’ll get flashlights and phones, coffee and whatever else we can give you. Just keep the rubberneckers out.” The rubberneckers were out of earshot. The account they’d get of this would come from the news-anchor who’d tell them how dangerous and dirty this place was. They’d never see what Suzanne saw, ten men and women forming up to one side of the crowd. Young braves and homegirls, people her age, their faces solemn.
Francis oversaw the gathering up of belongings. Suzanne had never had a sense of how many people lived in the shantytown but now she could count them as they massed up by the roadside and began to walk: a hundred, a little more than a hundred. More if you counted the surprising number of babies.
Lester conferred briefly with Francis and then Francis tapped three of the old timers and two of the mothers with babes in arms and they crammed into Lester’s car and he took off. Suzanne walked by the roadside with the long line of refugees, listening to their murmuring conversation, and in a few minutes, Lester was back to pick up more people, at Francis’s discretion.
Perry was beside her now, his eyes a million miles away.
“What now?” she said.
“We put them in the workshop tonight, tomorrow we help them build houses.”
“At your place? You’re going to let them stay?”
“Why not? We don’t use half of that land. The landlord gets his check every month. Hasn’t been by in five years. He won’t care.”
She took a couple more steps. “Perry, I’m going to write about this,” she said.
“Oh,” he said. They walked further. A small child was crying. “Of course you are. Well, fuck the landlord. I’ll sic Kettlewell on him if he squawks.”
“What do you think Kettlewell will think about all this?”
“This? Look, this is what I’ve been saying all along. We need to make products for these people. They’re a huge untapped market.”
What she wanted to ask wasWhat would Tjan say about this?but they didn’t talk about Tjan these days. Kettlewell had promised them a new business manager for weeks, but none had appeared. Perry had taken over more and more of the managerial roles, and was getting less and less workshop time in. She could tell it frustrated him. In her discussions with Kettlewell, he’d confided that it had turned out to be harder to find suits than it was finding wildly inventive nerds. Lots of peoplewantedto run businesses, but the number who actually seemed likely to be capable of doing so was only a small fraction.
They could see the junkyard now. Perry pulled out his phone and called his server and touch-toned the codes to turn on all the lights and unlock all the doors.
They lost a couple of kids in the aisles of miraculous junk, and Francis had to send out bigger kids to find them and bring them back, holding the treasures they’d found to their chests. Lester kept going back for more old-timers, more mothers, more stragglers, operating his ferry service until they were all indoors in the workshop.
“This is the place,” Francis said. “We’ll stay indoors here tonight. Toilets are there and there—orderly lines, no shoving.”
“What about food?” asked a man with a small boy sleeping over his shoulder.
“This isn’t the Red Cross, Al,” Francis snapped. “We’ll organize food for ourselves in the morning.”
Perry whispered in his ear. Francis shook his head, and Perry whispered some more.
“There will be food in the morning. This is Perry. It’s his place. He’s going to go to Costco for us when they open.”
The crowd cheered and a few of the women hugged him. Some of the men shook his hand. Perry blushed. Suzanne smiled. These people were good people. They’d been through more than Suzanne could imagine. It felt right that she could help them—like making up for every panhandler she’d ignored and every passed-out drunk she’d stepped over.
There were no blankets, there were no beds. The squatters slept on the concrete floor. Young couples spooned under tables. Children snuggled between their parents, or held onto their mothers. As the squatters dossed down and as Suzanne walked past them to get to her car her heart broke a hundred times. She felt like one of those Depression-era photographers walking through an Okie camp, a rending visual at each corner.
Back at her rented condo, she found herself at the foot of her comfortable bed with its thick duvet—she liked keeping the AC turned up enough to snuggle under a blanket—and the four pillows. She was in her jammies, but she couldn’t climb in between those sheets.
She couldn’t.
And then she was back in her car with all her blankets, sheets, pillows, big towels—even the sofa cushions, which the landlord was not going to be happy about—and speeding back to the workshop.
She let herself in and set about distributing the blankets and pillows and towels, picking out the families, the old people. A woman—apparently able-bodied and young, but skinny—sat up and said, “Hey, where’s one for me?” Suzanne recognized the voice. The junkie from the IHOP. Lester’s friend. The one who’d grabbed her and cursed her.
She didn’t want to give the woman a blanket. She only had two left and there were old people lying on the bare floor.
“Where’s one for me?” the woman said more loudly. Some of the sleepers stirred. Some of them sat up.
Suzanne was shaking. Who the hell was she to decide who got a blanket? Did being rude to her at the IHOP disqualify you from getting bedding when your house burned down?
Suzanne gave her a blanket, and she snatched one of the sofa cushions besides.
It’s why she’s still alive,Suzanne thought.How she’s survived.
She gave away the last blanket and went home to sleep on her naked bed underneath an old coat, a rolled-up sweater for a pillow. After her shower, she dried herself on tee-shirts, having given away all her towels to use as bedding.
The new shantytown went up fast—faster than she’d dreamed possible. The boys helped. Lester downloaded all the information he could find on temporary shelters—building out of mud, out of sandbags, out of corrugated cardboard and sheets of plastic—and they tried them all. Some of the houses had two or more rickety-seeming stories, but they all felt solid enough as she toured them, snapping photos of proud homesteaders standing next to their handiwork.
Little things went missing from the workshops—tools, easily pawned books and keepsakes, Perry’s wallet—and they all started locking their desk-drawers. There were junkies in among the squatters, and desperate people, and immoral people, them too. One day she found that her cute little gold earrings weren’t beside her desk-lamp, where she’d left them the night before and she practically burst into tears, feeling set-upon on all sides.
She found the earrings later that day, at the bottom of her purse, and that only made things worse. Even though she hadn’t voiced a single accusation, she’d accused every one of the squatters in her mind that day. She found herself unable to meet their eyes for the rest of the week.
“I have to write about this,” she said to Perry. “This is part of the story.” She’d stayed clear of it for a month, but she couldn’t go on writing about the successes of the Home Aware without writing about the workforce that was turning out the devices and add-ons by the thousands, all around her, in impromptu factories with impromptu workers.
“Why?” Perry said. He’d been a dervish, filling orders, training people, fighting fires. By nightfall, he was hollow-eyed and snappish. Lester didn’t join them on the roof anymore. He liked to hang out with Francis and some of the young men and pitch horseshoes down in the shantytown, or tinker with the composting toilets he’d been installing at strategic crossroads through the town. “Can’t you just concentrate on the business?”
“Perry, thisisthe business. Kettlewell hasn’t sent a replacement for Tjan and you’ve filled in and you’ve turned this place into something like a worker-owned co-op. That’s important news—the point of this exercise is to try all the different businesses that are possible and see what works. If you’ve found something that works, I should write about it. Especially since it’s not just solving Kodacell’s problem, it’s solving the problem for all of those people, too.”
Perry drank his beer in sullen silence. “I don’t want Kettlewell to get more involved in this. It’s going good. Scrutiny could kill it.”
“You’ve got nothing to be embarrassed about here,” she said. “There’s nothing here that isn’t as it should be.”
Perry looked at her for a long moment. He was at the end of his fuse, trying to do too much, and she regretted having brought it up. “You do what you have to do,” he said.
:: The original shantytown was astonishing. Built around a nexus of:: trailers and RVs that didn’t look in the least roadworthy, the:: settlers had added dwelling on dwelling to their little patch of:: land. They started with plastic sheeting and poles, and when they:: could afford it, they replaced the sheets, one at a time, with:: bricks or poured concrete and re-bar. They thatched their roofs:: with palm-leaves, shingles, linoleum, corrugated tin—even:: plywood with flattened beer-cans. Some walls were wood. Some had:: windows. Some were made from old car-doors, with hand-cranked:: handles to lower them in the day, then roll them up again at:: night when the mosquitoes came out. Most of the settlers slept on:: nets.:::: A second wave had moved into the settlement, just as I arrived,:: and rather than building out—and farther away from their:: neighbors’ latrines, water-pump and mysterious sources of:: electrical power—they builtup, on top of the existing:: structures, shoring up the walls where necessary. It wasn’t:: hurricane proof, but neither are the cracker-box condos that:: “property owners” occupy. They made contractual arrangements with:: the dwellers of the first stories, paid them rent. A couple with:: second-story rooms opposite one another in one of the narrow:: “streets” consummated their relationship by building a sky-bridge:: between their rooms, paying joint rent to two landlords.:::: The thing these motley houses had in common, all of them, was:: ingenuity and pride of work. They had neat vegetable gardens,:: flower-boxes, and fresh paint. They had kids’ bikes leaned up:: against their walls, and the smell of good cooking in the air.:: They were homely homes.:::: Many of the people who lived in these houses worked regular:: service jobs, walking three miles to the nearest city bus stop:: every morning and three miles back every evening. They sent:: their kids to school, faking local addresses with PO boxes. Some:: were retired. Some were just down on their luck.:::: They helped each other. When something precious was stolen, the:: community pitched in to find the thieves. When one of them:: started a little business selling sodas or sandwiches out of her:: shanty, the others patronized her. When someone needed medical:: care, they chipped in for a taxi to the free clinic, or someone:: with a working car drove them. They were like the neighbors of:: the long-lamented American town, an ideal of civic virtue that is:: so remote in our ancestry as to have become mythical. There were:: eyes on the street here, proud residents who knew what everyone:: was about and saw to it that bad behavior was curbed before it:: could get started.:::: Somehow, it burned down. The fire department won’t investigate,:: because this was an illegal homestead, so they don’t much care:: about how the fire started. It took most of the homes, and most:: of their meager possessions. The water got the rest. The fire:: department wouldn’t fight the fire at first, because someone at:: city hall said that the land’s owner wouldn’t let them on the:: property. As it turns out, the owner of that sad strip of land:: between an orange grove and the side of a four-lane highway is:: unknown—a decades-old dispute over title has left it in legal:: limbo that let the squatters settle there. It’s suspicious all:: right—various entities had tried to evict the squatters:: before, but the legal hassles left them in happy limbo. What the:: law couldn’t accomplish, the fire did.:::: The story has a happy ending. The boys have moved the squatters:: into their factory, and now they have “live-work” condos that:: look like something Dr Seuss designed [photo gallery]. Like the:: Central Park shantytown of the last century, these look like they:: were “constructed by crazy poets and distributed by a whirlwind:: that had been drinking,” as a press account of the day had it.:::: Last year, the city completed a new housing project nearby to:: here, and social workers descended on the shantytowners to get:: them to pick up and move to these low-rent high-rises. The:: shantytowners wouldn’t go: “It was too expensive,” said Mrs X,:: who doesn’t want her family back in Oklahoma to know she’s:: squatting with her husband and their young daughter. “We can’t:: affordanyrent, not if we want to put food on the table on:: what we earn.”:::: She made the right decision: the housing project is an urban:: renewal nightmare, filled with crime and junkies, the kind of:: place where little old ladies triple-chain their doors and order:: in groceries that they pay for with direct debit, unwilling to:: keep any cash around.:::: The squatter village was a shantytown, but it was no slum. It was:: a neighborhood that could be improved. And the boys are doing:: that: having relocated the village to their grounds, they’re:: inventing and remixing new techniques for building cheap and:: homey shelter fast. [profile: ten shanties and the technology:: inside them]
The response was enormous and passionate. Dozens of readers wrote to tell her that she’d been taken in by these crooks who had stolen the land they squatted. She’d expected that—she’d felt that way herself, when she’d first walked past the shantytown.
But what surprised her more were the message-board posts and emails from homeless people who’d been living in their cars, on the streets, in squatted houses or in shanties. To read these, you’d think that half her readership was sleeping rough and getting online at libraries, Starbuckses, and stumbled wireless networks that they accessed with antique laptops on street-corners.
“Kettlewell’s coming down to see this,” Perry said.
Her stomach lurched. She’d gotten the boys in trouble. “Is he mad?”
“I couldn’t tell—I got voicemail at three AM.” Midnight in San Jose, the hour at which Kettlewell got his mad impulses. “He’ll be here this afternoon.”
“That jet makes it too easy for him to get around,” she said, and stretched out her back. Sitting at her desk all morning answering emails and cleaning up some draft posts before blogging them had her in knots. It was practically lunch-time.
“Perry,” she began, then trailed off.
“It’s all right,” he said. “I know why you did it. Christ, we wouldn’t be where we are if you hadn’t written about us. I’m in no position to tell you to stop now.” He swallowed. The month since the shantytowners had moved in had put five years on him. His tan was fading, the wrinkles around his eyes deeper, grey salting his stubbly beard and short hair. “But you’ll help me with Kettlewell, right?”
“I’ll come along and write down what he says,” she said. “That usually helps.”
:: Kodacell is supposed to be a new way of doing business.:: Decentralized, net-savvy, really twenty-first century. The:: suck-up tech press and tech-addled bloggers have been trumpeting:: its triumph over all other modes of commerce.:::: But what does decentralization really mean? On her “blog” this:: week, former journalist Suzanne Church reports that the inmates:: running the flagship Kodacell asylum in suburban Florida have:: invited an entire village of homeless squatters to take up:: residence at their factory premises.:::: Describing their illegal homesteading as “live-work” condos that:: Dr Seuss might have designed, Kodacell shill Church goes on to:: describe how this captive, live-in audience has been converted to:: a workforce for Kodacell’s most profitable unit (“most:: profitable” is a relative term: to date, this unit has turned a:: profit of about 1.5 million, per the last quarterly report; by:: contrast the old Kodak’s most profitable unit made twenty times:: that in its last quarter of operation).:::: America has a grand tradition of this kind of indentured living::: the coal-barons’ company towns of the 19th century are the:: original model for this kind of industrial practice in the USA.:: Substandard housing and only one employer in town—that’s the:: kind of brave new world that Church’s boyfriend Kettlewell has:: created.:::: A reader writes: “I live near the shantytown that was relocated:: to the Kodacell factory in Florida. It was a dangerous slum full:: of drug dealers. None of the parents in my neighborhood let their:: kids ride their bikes along the road that passed it by—it was:: a haven for all kinds of down-and-out trash.”:::: There you have it, the future of the American workforce::: down-and-out junkie squatters working for starvation wages.
“Kettlewell, you can’t let jerks like Freddy run this company. He’s just looking to sell banner-space. This is how the Brit rags write—it’s all meanspirited sniping.” Suzanne had never seen Kettlewell so frustrated. His surfer good looks were fading fast—he was getting a little paunch on him and his cheeks were sagging off his bones into the beginnings of jowls. His car had pulled up to the end of the driveway and he’d gotten out and walked through the shantytown with the air of a man in a dream. The truckers who pulled in and out all week picking up orders had occasionally had a curious word at the odd little settlement, but for Suzanne it had all but disappeared into her normal experience. Kettlewell made it strange and even a little outrageous, just by his stiff, outraged walk through its streets.
“You think I’m lettingFreddydrive this decision?” He had spittle flecks on the corners of his mouth. “Christ, Suzanne, you’re supposed to be the adult around here.”
Perry looked up from the floor in front of him, which he had been staring at intently. Suzanne caught his involuntary glare at Kettlewell before he dropped his eyes again. Lester put a big meaty paw on Perry’s shoulder. Kettlewell was oblivious.
“Those people can’t stay, all right? The shareholders are baying for blood. The fucking liability—Christ, what if one of those places burns down? What if one of them knifes another one? We’re on the hook for everything they do. We could end up being on the hook for a fuckingcholera epidemic.”
Irrationally, Suzanne burned with anger at Freddy. He had written every venal, bilious word with the hope that it would result in a scene just like this one. And not because he had any substantive objection to what was going on: simply because he had a need to deride that which others hailed. He wasn’t afflicting the mighty, though: he was taking on the very meekest, people who hadnothing, including a means of speaking up for themselves.
Perry looked up. “You’ve asked me to come up with something new and incredible every three to six months. Well, this is new and incredible. We’ve built a living lab on our doorstep for exploring an enormous market opportunity to provide low-cost, sustainable technology for use by a substantial segment of the population who have no fixed address. There are millions of American squatters and billions of squatters worldwide. They have money to spend and no one else is trying to get it from them.”
Kettlewell thrust his chin forward. “How many millions? How much money do they have to spend? How do you know that any of this will make us a single cent? Where’s the market research? Was there any? Or did you just invite a hundred hobos to pitch their tent out front of my factory on the strength of your half-assed guesses?”